Uncle Albert – A short story by George Lockyer

Mr Thistlewaite was like a monolith, immovable, and seemingly indestructible, at least in the eyes of an impressionable ten-year-old. He was our next-door neighbour when we moved to Oakland Way in 1970, a laughingly named street of run-down council houses on ‘Devil’s Island’ the estate behind the sewage works. I’d once overheard the butcher telling a customer as he wrapped her sausages, that Old Man Thistlewaite had been a boxer back in the day and had been quite a handful.

I discovered years later that his first name was Albert, but I always addressed him as Mr Thistlewaite. He had a bit of a limp, and a funny accent and mum said he was from ‘up north’. He was a huge man, even at his advanced age – I guessed well into his seventies – by which time most other old people had started to shrink, unless of course he used to be even bigger, and had already shrunk. His wife on the other hand (“my Dot”) was rake thin, with barely enough strength to shuffle up the shops dragging her shopping trolley behind her. Come rain or shine, Dot wore a headscarf over her blue rinse, a grey mac and sensible black shoes, and would occasionally offer up a shy smile and a nod if I caught her eye.

Mr Thistlewaite wore old grey trousers with turn-ups and braces, and a white string vest, topped with a battered trilby hat. In the winter a long black duffel coat and woollen scarf was added to the ensemble. I always meant to ask him if his turn-ups got filled with dirt when he had been digging and if so, did Dot tell him off when he brought it into the kitchen. He’d spend most of his time in his beloved and generously proportioned back garden, lovingly tending to his vegetables. When he did venture out up the shops, and it wasn’t raining, he favoured a brown knitted cardigan that Dot had patched in places with a slightly darker wool.

Sometimes I followed him at a discreet distance and noticed that when he ducked down the alley to take a short cut, the Stevens’ mad dogs didn’t even bark at him as he passed through their territory, but eyed me hungrily, fur standing up in a ridge along their backs, causing me to detour around another back alley and catch Mr Thistlewaite up on the other side of the polluted creek that encircled our estate.

His hands used to mesmerise me; they were like big, gnarled tree roots, with square, busted fingernails permanently blackened with soil. I used to love to chat to him over the fence, his big sunburnt face smiling down at me benignly. He reminded me of that wise old monk out of Kung Fu, the blind one with the ping-pong-ball eyes who used to say to David Carradine, “When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.” I used to imagine that one day he’d admit to me that he really was a Shaolin priest and impart upon me all the wisdom of the ages. Skill in martial arts with a few handy kung-fu kicks wouldn’t have gone amiss either back then! He never did. He did however tell me the best time to plant spuds and how to bank up the soil in rows, when to pick cauli and sprouts and how to thin the carrots. Our veggies never looked as good as his. “You want to try some of this on your cabbages,” he’d say, drawing on a slim panatella, “keep them old slugs away.” I didn’t mind the smell of those little cigars, the kind that Clint Eastwood smoked in his spaghetti westerns. It made a nice change from the Benson and Hedges fug that hung around our house. The ceiling was a darker shade of cream above the sofa where the old man spent most of his time. Mr Thistlewaite would hand an old soup tin over the fence with some evil-smelling concoction in it which I would carefully brush onto the cabbage leaves as though it were nitro-glycerine. When I say, ‘our veggies,’ what I mean is, my mum’s veggies. The old man never ventured into the backyard unless it was to swing a drunken kick at the dog, and my poor mum was often too busy holding down half a dozen cleaning jobs to make ends meet. So, I took it upon myself to look after them, making sure I scrubbed the dirt off my hands, or I’d get another smack around the ear from the old man.

I remember once, he took a swing at me when he was three sheets to wind after his usual session down the Red Lion and missed, smashing his hand on the frame of the door. I legged it before he could have another swing and didn’t return home until bedtime, hoping that he’d thought it had been a drunken dream. The old man wasn’t averse to giving my mum a backhander either and she occasionally sported a black eye. Mum read him like a book, often anticipating his violent moods. When I was really little, she’d shepherd us boys over the park and we’d spend hours on the swings while he slept off his beer-fuelled temper on the sofa. He was often out of work, ‘on the social’, doing a bit of ducking and diving on the side.

I used to make Mr Thistlewaite laugh. He had a deep chuckle that started way down in his boots and didn’t know when to end. There was always another little unexpected chuckle tacked on after the chuckling, by rights, should have been finished. “You’ve got some imagination on you, you have young Mark!” he’d say. He often had tidbits for our dog Skip, who I thought of as my dog as I was the only one who took him over the park or played with him. My mum did so occasionally but she didn’t really have the time to spare, what with us three boys and the old man to wait on hand and foot. I loved Skip and knew that that love was returned unconditionally and in spades. He was a ginger cross between something that looked like a small German Shepherd and something that looked like a Golden Retriever. We got him from the Battersea Dog’s Home before we moved to Devil’s Island. It broke my heart to tell Skip off and send him home when he tried to follow me to school, as though I had betrayed a special understanding between us.

Mr Thistlewaite kept goldfish in a 100-gallon tank near his back door. I’d often climb the fence and watch them. A couple of them were huge white things, greedily coming to the surface for breadcrumbs. Sometimes he’d treat them to a plastic bag full of tiny midge-like critters he bought from the pet shop on St Johns Road and there’d be a feeding frenzy in there. I can’t remember how I came to possess my own 100-gallon tank. Actually, I think my older brother Ron may have nicked it from the nearby industrial estate, or as he put it, “got it the right way.” I scrubbed it and hosed it out and collected weed from the creek up the road that used to hang in long tendrils off the dumped shopping trolleys. I remember almost running home in my eagerness and anticipation with my first goldfish in a plastic bag. I even made a rock island in the middle and put a frog in there that I’d caught by the creek with a little net. I think Dot’s cat ate it in the end. He laughed when I told him, and he was still chuckling as he took his boots off and went inside for his morning cuppa.

Mr Thistlewaite used to paint vivid pictures for me over the garden fence of what the area was like when he was a lad. Try as I might, I simply could not imagine him as a young lad, nicking apples from an orchard which was now a housing estate by the motorway. He used to go shooting on the heath for rabbits and, he winked, “anything else that would go into the pot.” At moments like that, I longed to be him. To live in his old bones for a day and taste the world from his perspective. How different it would have been from mine! “I hear they’re turning the heath into a golf course now,” he said and raised his eyebrows, took a drag of his panatella and turned over another clod of earth.

He had a lead slug embedded in the fleshy folds of his neck, which he let me touch once. He had various yarns to explain it ranging from “a Hun slug ricocheting off my mates rifle barrel when I was in the trenches,” to “a gamekeeper’s shotgun blast when I was caught tickling a trout.” I’d conjure up various images of a what ‘tickling’ a trout actually meant and finally came to the conclusion that he must be winding me up. But didn’t mind one bit. There were some kids on the estate who made fun of Mr Thistlewaite or ‘old man Fissel,’ as they called him. I felt terrible when I witnessed this, but he took it in his stride with a chuckle. “Hey, he fought in World War One!” I’d tell them. Idiots!

Then one Saturday afternoon; I must have been about 13, Mr Thistlewaite and I were chatting over the fence when we heard the old man yelling and saw mum come out the back door in tears. She was in bare feet, her blouse was ripped, and she had a split lip. Mr Thistlewaite, calm as you like, climbed over the fence like a man half his age and suddenly minus his limp, went through our back door. Mum’s eyes were like saucers as she stopped me from following. Five minutes later we heard the old man’s clapped-out Vauxhall Viva take off down the road with a squeal of tires. Mr Thistlewaite came back out and put his hand on mum’s shoulder. I noticed a vein in his right temple throbbing. “If he ever touches any of you again love, you let me know.” He tousled my hair, as Dot, who had heard the commotion, led us all into their house for a cuppa. It was the first time I’d been in their house. It was the same layout as ours but had older furniture. In the front room where we drank our tea and ate our digestives, were lots of knick-knacks, as well rows of books and old framed photos. On the mantlepiece above the fire was a photo of a young man wearing an Air Force uniform with one of those little hats they wore at a jaunty angle on Thunderbirds. Dot, who had her arm around mum, saw me looking at it. “That’s our Peter,” she said.

“We lost ‘im in the war,” added Mr Thistlewaite, clearing his throat. “Battle of Britain.” A pause, then, “come with me young Mark, I’ve got something to show you,” and after putting his boots back on at the back door, he led me into his garden shed. At the back, padlocked to the workbench and buried beneath a box of seed potatoes, beneath a couple of dust sheets and blankets was a drop-dead gorgeous BSA motorbike, which he unveiled as if pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It was a thing of beauty, chrome shining where a shaft of sunlight speared through the spiderwebbed shed window. “This was Peter’s bike,” he said with a chuckle, tears in his old eyes, “he loved things that went fast did our Peter.”

“Did you ever ride it Mr Thistlewaite?”

“No lad, you wouldn’t catch me on one. And for Gawd’s sake call me Albert!”

From that day on the old man never laid a finger on us again. Dot and Uncle Albert, as we started to refer to him, took mum under their collective wing and I think gave her the courage to get a restraining order and finally kick the old man out, a development I discovered when I came home from school one day. And one I took in my stride.

The sepia tinged 70’s rolled on. My two elder brothers moved out (actually Gary did a stretch in Wormwood Scrubs, but I was told to keep that under my hat and tell people he’d joined the Merchant Navy). I left school with two ‘O’ Level (Mark was a quiet boy and didn’t participate in group activities, my final report said, He excelled in history and metalwork but failed to live up to his potential. We wish him all the best.) And I became a motorcycle despatch rider, a job I loved.

I often call up in my mind’s eye, the video of Uncle Albert windmilling backwards as the car hit him, as if in slow motion. I was sitting at the wheel of mum’s old Cortina parked on St John’s Road at the time. Mum was in the fish’n’chip shop getting our usual Thursday night dinner and I was waiting for her to emerge when the accident caught my eye up by the corner of Church Street. I could only sit, stunned and glued to my seat as a crowd gathered, and an ambulance appeared as if by magic. Mum got in and we drove home numb and silent. Mum went next door to tell Dot, while I sat dazed, watching the fish’n’chips go cold. I always feel a sense of tremendous guilt that I didn’t do something at the time, no matter how many times the other voice in my head, the logical one, told me that there was nothing I could have done. Uncle Albert passed away on the way to hospital. After the funeral, a sad affair with only eight of us in the church including the vicar, there was talk of Dot moving in with my mum and me.

Next day Dot was at the front door holding a key to a padlock “Albert wanted you to have Peter’s motorbike dear,” she said with tight lipped smile, handing me the key. “He said he knew you’d look after it.” Mum asked her to come in for a cuppa, but she said she had some more things to sort out.

I was speechless. After a couple of days of cleaning and fettling I finally got the single cylinder 500cc 1938 BSA Empire Star running. I remember what a proud but nervous moment it was as I kicked the immaculate old thumper into life and rode up the London Road for the first time. Dot and mum waved me off at the kerb in the spring sunshine, as I soon got used to the gear shifter on the right instead of the left as I was accustomed to with my Honda. A 747 Jumbo passed low overhead on its way to land at Heathrow, and I thought of Peter, who was about my age and the last man to ride this bike. And of him climbing into the cockpit of his Hurricane on that fateful day 38 years ago. I soon had to pull over as tears were steaming up my goggles. As the traffic roared past me, all I could think of - ridiculous really - was Uncle Albert’s goldfish and who was going to feed them.

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