Tidy and the Magic Man

By John Gardner

Tidy Rawlins was blessed with the kind of looks that got her noticed in a crowded room. She saw herself in a fancy office with a boss who called her “his girl” and bought her chocolates for her birthday. But the war with Germany brought her face to face with reality when she was sent to Chadderton near Manchester to build Lancaster bombers. The work was noisy and dirty but Tidy had a dream and she was an entrepreneurial girl. The near-by airbase and parachute school gave her opportunities to supplement her wages and start, what was to become, a very lucrative business.
A round little man, Sergeant Ernest Neville DSM, an ex tank driver, was adrift in the post-war world of 1956. A man bobbing on the surface of life, slowly drowning in misery. His future looked bleak but thanks to Tidy and the strange chemistry they discover between them his life takes a series of surprising turns that brings two unlikely soul mates into close partnership. And, eventually, love.
But, like tourists on a bus, their destinations are different. Tidy tries to rekindle the love she had had with an American pilot in 1944 and goes to America to be with him, leaving a distraught Ernie to pursue a new life. Tidy flees America after only two weeks, chased out by the hatred and prejudice she meets every day. Back in Manchester at the head of her very lucrative and growing business empire she finally finds love in the arms of a loving friend. Ernie rebuilds his life far from Manchester and in the process finds his love and his totally unexpected destiny. He is a man more to the manor born than he ever imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Gardner
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215165416

John Gardner

Writing is a passion, as are photography and music, they have defined much of my life.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Tidy stood near the window in her bedroom lit by a single low-wattage bulb from her Tiffany bedside light, goose bumps on her arms. She stood, her slender back bathed in the cold neon light that flashed over her from the seedy billiard parlour across the street. Through the partially open venetian blinds the light cast pink then blue slashes across her well-proportioned body, her long dark hair cascading over her shoulders covering a scar from an angry trick’s knife. A wound inflicted when he felt she should have tried harder to satisfy his psychopathic lusts. Many men had been changed by the war. Calm, peaceful, family men who now acted as violent thugs when their demons called out to them.

To Tidy it was now an every day risk of the trade. An occupational hazard.

Tidy Rawlins wasn’t the kind of woman who got in your face, she was the kind of woman you’d walk over hot coals to be with. She had a body men wanted to stare at all day long. The kind they put on a pedestal to compare to Venus de Milo. In truth her breasts were average sized but still firm and her nipples were large and dark; her belly was no longer perfectly flat and tight and her bum, previously a jewel in her toolbox, was beginning to sag – just a little. The bloom was going off her rose just enough for a girl to notice in front of a mirror. She had no tattoos. In 1956 only sailors and the lower working girls, those who worked the streets, had tattoos. Some got to be known by their tattoos, Rose, Dolphin Girl, Daddy’s Girl. Tidy was no sailor and she was classy. The only piercings on her entire body were in her ears. She liked earrings, particularly the type with expensive, sparking stones that someone else paid for.

She was the product of strikingly handsome Barbadian mother and a tall, English waster of a father. A freewheeling man who believed other people’s money and women were his for the taking. He had been warned more than once that an appointment was being made for him with the man who made the wooden overcoats. At warning three, when Tidy was eight, he realised, after a savage beating, his luck was about to run out and slipped out of the family home in the dead of night like an injured rat scurrying down a sewer.

Born in 1922, the year of political turmoil, the Irish Civil war and the birth of the middle class voice box, the BBC, she was an only child in a mean, but clean, little flat with cold water and a toilet on the landing. Her mother was determined to stay away from Manchester’s notorious slums, whatever it took, and if she had to spend time on her knees or her back to afford this half-way decent little hovel then that’s what she’d do. And, like many women, she did. Manchester’s mean streets were unforgiving to the poor.

Tidy was not dark, sort of light chocolate coloured, and aged seventeen, the year war broke out in Europe, she was a stunning beauty. She had gained her general education certificate and enrolled in one of the new secretarial colleges that had been springing up. However, work, despite having looks that would later be of great benefit to her, was hard to come by. This was a bitter blow to an ambitious young woman who saw herself working in a nice clean, fancy office for some senior company executive who would greet her in the morning and refer to her as his girl. He’d flirt with her and buy her chocolates for her birthday and she’d meet a handsome sales director and they would get married and have three children. That was her dream. But life, that capricious thing we have to go through before our rendezvous with the Grim Reaper, had other plans.

Two days after her mother died of tuberculosis, the Ministry of Labour contacted her and told her she was needed for the war effort at the Avro aircraft plant in Chadderton near Manchester where she would build Lancaster bombers. No cosy office to turn up to in a nice skirt and blouse with a bit of lippy and a spritz of perfume. She was forced to swap her dream for an industrial fashion item: a pair of poorly-fitting overalls in which she sashayed around a noisy, busy factory floor, clocking in and out, every minute of her day controlled. Days when she could barely hear herself think. Hardly a young girl’s dream but she had no choice, she had to go. She was now part of the rich man’s war effort. No chocolates offered.

End of her dreams.

The war ended so many dreams. Dreams blown to hell and scattered over fields and plains all around the globe; in the depths of the sea and vaporised in the air. But it was only man’s nature. Women were different. Women built nests and made families. Men built war machines and made corpses. It’s just how it had always been. Human nature. And it was human nature that made her money, real money, which she started to earn two days after her eighteenth birthday.

She gave up the tiny flat she had shared with her mother and moved her meagre possessions into a bed-sitter in Chadderton at the top of a large house owned by a Russian woman who had a different grasp of life than the locals. The locals seemed to suffer through life, pasting on a smile and pretending to themselves it would all be better tomorrow. Backs-to-the-wall-Brits at their best. Whereas Yelena, a victim of the murderous Stalin’s many pogroms, had learned to appreciate the wonder of life and enjoy every minute. The Jews, she would say, know nothing of suffering! To know suffering you must be Russian! Then she would drink vodka, laugh and pull Tidy’s head onto a big, bare nipple saying, suck my little sluzhanka, suck it dry, as her hand slid inside Tidy’s knickers.

Tidy found it strangely comforting.

Yelena understood Tidy’s need to be comforted and private. Tidy had to find her place in life and Yelenka had no desire to interfere. Her view was that a girl has to do what she has to do to survive and men did not have all the answers. Yelena knew about the brutality of survival. Knew how to run, how to hide. How to kill. And she knew men. She was a good tutor.

It had started for Tidy with the usual lewd canteen banter among the men, which her work mates told her to ignore, remarks that struck Tidy as the worst advice she had ever had. Men noticed her, wanted her, desired her so she gave those she chose, the management type, their wish but only if they gave her her wish. It wasn’t difficult to start. At first it was stockings and perfume but a girl can’t live on perfume, she had told her many suitors. And that meant money on the table. She was never coy about it. She would say, ‘Ye go te the shop for a tin o’ Spam ye pay, ye don’t argue. Ye want a beer ye pay, ye don’t argue. So if ye want filet mignon, which is what yer looking at, ye pay ye don’t argue.’ And they didn’t. Before Tidy laid on the bed money was laid on the table and not funny army money but real American dollars and British pounds sterling.

In the beginning, when she wasn’t pleasuring a man, she would spend time with Yelena drinking cocoa or vodka as Yelena told her many stories of her life and survival in Russia. Survival that included killing – more than once. She taught her the rudiments of birth control and one or two other tricks she had learned. Get your money quick, had been her advice to Tidy. Men are stupid, they see only one thing in a woman. Sex. All they want, she had said while in the process of demolishing half a bottle of vodka, and chain smoking Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes, is to unload their spunk into any willing female. So you make sure they give you what you want, had been her advice.

Tidy knew what she wanted. Money, lots of it. She never, ever wanted to go back to living in a mean little flat with a toilet on the landing where men stared at her through the hole they had made in the door. But was she good enough? Yelena had laughed when Tidy had asked her.

‘Nay bud smeshnoy devushkoy!’ she had said with her gruff vodka-cigarette voice. ‘S ethym thelom vy zarabotaete tseloye sostoyaniye!’ (Don’t be ridiculous girl! With that body you’ll earn a fortune!)

Then her huge bosom heaved with laughter, enough to open her robe and release a large, round tit and a big willing nipple that had given Tidy and literally hundreds of men pleasure. Tidy stared at it and Yelena bounced it to embarrass her.

‘Oh stop it ya Russian tart!’

Yelena laughed even more. They had a good relationship.

Tidy need not have worried. Her looks got her plenty of interest from men drafted to go to war and maybe killed. They wanted a last fling before they went and all she had to do was bat her eyelids and name a price and the men queued up to pay. It was a simple, uncomplicated transaction. One of them, a tall Texan air force lieutenant, told her as he was plundering her inner recess, ‘Honey, no one gets out of life alive, so best to live it up while ya can.’ This statement was followed by a grunt of coital release. Another happy customer.

She often thought about those words. Rich men’s lust for money and blood took Tidy’s dreams away so, as compensation, she took money from the pocket of every suitable man who wanted sex. She certainly intended to live it up - as she piled it up.

Now aged thirty-four with sixteen years experience, including six weary but highly lucrative war years and rationing under her belt, she knew she might still scrape by in a local village beauty contest but the edges were definitely showing signs of wear. She turned and looked down at the man on the bed; the sad, lonely vacuum cleaner salesman from Derby plying his wares in Manchester. How had this pathetic little man slipped under her radar? Common sense and logic did not provide an answer. She guessed he was the exception that proved the rule.

‘Right luv, are we doing this or what?’ her Manchester accent as dull as the weather.

‘I’m sorry ducks,’ said the small, rotund man who wore an air of permanent sadness like a coat of dull, grey paint to match the Manchester weather. He was still wearing his almost-white vest and his trousers.

Ernest Neville was a door-to-door tout. Sales at the sharp end, just the last in a string of dead-end jobs he had tried after being discharged from the army. He had charged across the desert with Monty, as a tank driver with the 6th Armoured Division, fought his way tooth and nail up through Italy supporting the Eighth Army and landed in his home town of Derby two years after it was all over. Partially disabled, discharged, jobless and, apparently, useless. Just another piece of wartime detritus washed up on the shores of a land fit for heroes.

His uncle had promised him a job in his garage but he went bust. His nerves were shot during the blitz, which led the man to believe his safety lay inside a bottle, which in short order and, to no one’s surprise, led to his financial ruin. Ernie had been looking forward to the job but he understood. It was the war. He tried for a job at the Rolls Royce factory in Derby sighting his extensive experience of keeping an unreliable hunk of metal called a Crusader tank in working order, it’s big American aircraft engine needing constant fettling to keep it running in the muck and filth of battle. But they weren’t impressed. An American aircraft engine was not a Rolls Royce! And he cut the wrong type of figure to these men with moustaches and suits. They wanted their heroes to be the proven managers of men with Clarke Gable looks, not fat little medal winners. He then tried his luck in Birmingham as the Longbridge Plant of BMC was hiring but, again, he had the wrong skill set.

Being a tank driver capable of maintaining a tank’s fighting power didn’t readily lend itself to any other type of employment and certainly not to standing all day bolting wheels to a car as it moved at a snail’s pace though an assembly plant. Factories such as these required slaves, not individuals with brains and a high degree of mechanical skill. In 1949 the land fit for heroes and presided over by a very privileged member of the British upper-crust society was not ready to make way for the Ernest Nevilles of this world. They were not gentlemen. They were, as they had so handsomely proved, merely cannon fodder.

‘Oi! What are we doin’ here? Ye’ve been unconscious for the past twenty minutes fartin’ an’ ye’ve stunk the place up.’

The pink and blue neon lights continued to flash streaks across the walls, the image interrupted by Tidy’s silhouette on the wall behind the bedhead.

‘Ah’m not fartin’!’ he protested, although he had been and he knew it. It was the beer. His guts couldn’t take it any more but he kept at it anyway.

‘Ye bloody well are! Yer fartin’ an’ stinkin’ the place up.’

She stood in her black lace knickers, back to the window, the rain battering it with a steady rhythm. She had opened it a bit to let the stink out. The knickers weren’t new. They had been given to her by an American pilot who acquired them in Paris and stopped by on his way to pick up a flight home. He’d stayed on after the war as a liaison between the American and allied air force but now he was being sent home. Flown home to the wife and three kids in Iowa. Officers flew home, the enlisted men went on boats.

Flight Lieutenant Jimmy Salvino had been a good customer. ‘Take these, honey,’ he had said to her, ‘they’ll be more use to you than my wife.’ She smiled as she remembered him giving her a tool of the trade like the matching lacy bra she had discarded earlier. The sad little man on the bed had wanted to play with her tits. It was part of the contract. He paid, he got to play. But Tidy never entertained men like Ernie. He was an exception.

She walked to the edge of the bed. ‘So what’s it to be Ernie?’

‘Look, ye got yer money, ducks,’ he said, his Black Country accent not particularly strong. Mixing with so many others during the war had rubbed the edges off but it was different enough to mark him as a foreigner in Manchester.

He wanted it, he wanted her to do the trick for him but the beer had put the brakes on his ardour. It had been like that since the forest in Italy where he ran into the nightmare that was to change his life.

From day one in Italy it had been a bitter, bloody struggle against a people he had never met nor disliked. The Germans just didn’t seem to understand the jig was up. They were beat. Stop shooting and live! But they had been brainwashed by Hitler and the constant propaganda of Dr Joseph Goebbels, not to mention the daily dose of uppers to keep them fighting. The prisoners he had encountered were strung out and no longer in touch with reality. Brain-dead zombies. Working stiffs caught up in a game that made no sense to any of them. War-damaged walking dead.

Now here he was. A man having difficulty getting it up.

‘Last time Ernie, ye want servicing or what?’ It was a tart question.

A row broke out in the street and she looked out the window to see two men slugging it out in the middle of the road in the pouring rain, knocking lumps out of each other. They looked odd out there in the rain with their sleeves rolled up battering each other about the head with their fists. A giant of a man came out from the billiard parlour and grabbed them both by the scruff of the neck and violently bashed their heads together. Both men collapse holding their heads and moaning. The giant went back inside and emerged a minute later with their jackets which he threw at them as he told them to fuck off. They crawled away, struggling to put their jackets on while the rain soaked them through. Tidy tutted and turned back to look at the sad little vacuum cleaner salesman.

‘So what’s it to be Ernie? Ah don’t ’ave all bloody night.’

Time was money and she had been stacking it up, thanks to the war bringing so many randy American pilots and Polish paratroopers to her doorstep. The Poles liked British women. Their officers at the near-by training base couldn’t get enough. They were there to learn how to jump out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft and not break their legs, or neck, on landing. They also learned how to jump into perfectly serviceable British women who had never before experienced the level of passion the Polish officers brought to the bedroom. And they were very gentlemanly. There were also a few ferry pilots to pick up a special Avro Lancaster bomber from the factory at Chadderton. They were all good customers and trade had been brisk, lucrative and fun, which attracted the attentions of one Micky Malone, ‘Mad Mickey’. A shifty, little low-grade gangster from Liverpool who fancied himself as an Al Capone type complete with a silly little that he thought made him look like Clark Gable. It looked like a cat droppings on his top lip. This human dreg thought Tidy should work for him and hand over twenty percent of her income, with a smile. The day he barged his way into her flat was the day he stopped breathing.

He arrived like a snake in the company of two rats to make his business proposal. He threatened her, laughed at her and told her her future if she did not agree to his proposal. Both rats, he informed her with a snidey little sneer, would rape her, disfigure her and take every penny she had in the place. Normally this would have had a girl’s sphincter dancing the light fantastic but not Tidy’s. Mickey had, unfortunately, failed to perform the first basic principle of business: know your supplier.

She offered to pay him off, which raised a cruel little laugh like a snake choking on its own vomit, as she went to a drawer, opened it and pulled out the loaded Walther pistol a Polish paratrooper had given her. The snake was expecting to see a wad of cash in a trembling hand so this came as something of a surprise to him and his rat companions. He stared at the gun and sneered, confident in the knowledge that he knew women. It was a bluff and he’d have his fun with her, which would involve cigarette burns on her nipples, his favourite torture on women. What Mickey didn’t know was that Tidy’s Polish teacher, Captain Jedrick Włosiński, was a very no-nonsense, highly trained killer. His advice, when he taught her to shoot, was shoot to put your man down and ask questions afterwards. If you had nothing to ask him, finish him. She had been a quick learner, as Mickey found out when pieces of his left kneecap flew off his leg, followed by the back of his skull. She had nothing to ask him. Each terrified rat then received their ration of rat poison. A bullet a-piece in the leg. She ordered them to scrape the snake’s brains off her wall then pick him up and drag his lifeless remains off her property. With some difficulty they succeeded, scared to death of being shot dead and hoping, for the first time in their miserable lives, to see a policeman who, at that point, they would have welcomed like a long lost brother carrying a crate of beer.

Mickey ended up face down in a canal and the two rats at a friendly nurse to be patched up, never more to set foot anywhere in Manchester.

The encounter had not upset Tidy in any way. She was surprised at how calm and rational she had been. She aimed to put him down then finish him, as she had been taught. No remorse, no mercy, just – finish. She hadn’t killed a man, she had gotten rid of a problem. That’s how she saw it. When she told Jedrick he laughed heartily and told her he would welcome her into his team, as he undressed her. Tidy had then laid back, the adrenalin coursing through her, while Jedrick laid into her for several hours. The man had amazing stamina, like an animal but was also very gentle. She enjoyed being with him.

Tidy, as was now known by everyone, made all the decisions about her future and prospered. However, things had become noticeably slower when the boys returned home to wives and sweethearts. But there was always trade. Not as dashing, not as handsome maybe but a trick was a trick. And Ernie, despite his looks and lowly status, had become one of them.

‘Oh Ah… don’t know ducks, Ah’m not feelin’ right,’ groaned Ernie. And he wasn’t.

Ever since demob nine years earlier he had been feeling bad. No routine, no camaraderie. No point to his existence. Sort of lost. Bobbing along like a piece of detritus in a dirty river.

After his crew had been killed in Italy he was allowed just enough R&R to recover from his wounds then he was reassigned to another group and another tank but he was never the same. He couldn’t focus, he made mistakes, dangerous mistakes, and was finally relieved of his duties as a tank driver, which, given his arm injury, was a seat he should never have filled again. But Ernie had a reputation, he was good, damned good – before. Not now. He got booted out of his driver’s seat just before war’s end and into a Centurion tank-instructor’s seat with a promotion to sergeant and reassigned to teach new recruits how to drive a forty-two-ton killing machine. It had saved him. To his surprise he enjoyed teaching and he was good at it. He stayed on after the war as an instructor but come 1947 he was told tanks were obsolete. Hundreds of them were being cut up for scrap or turned into tractors. It’s over, they told him as they gave him his marching orders and a demob suit. Travel voucher in hand and kit bag over his shoulder he wound his weary way home to Derby because he had nowhere else to go. It was a lonely, miserable trudge home.

Home. Home to what? His mother had been killed in an air raid when the Luftwaffe had attempted to obliterate the Rolls Royce factory on that drizzly morning of July 27, 1942. She had been standing at the kitchen sink washing a few potatoes from the garden for dinner, listening to, Music While You Work on the radio when the bomb obliterated her house – and her. They never found enough bits to bury. His younger brother Robert, one of life’s wasters, had been drafted into the navy and consigned to a watery grave a year later in the Med when his ammunition supply ship was blown to smithereens by two German torpedoes fired from one of the few U Boats the Germans had managed to sneak into the Mediterranean Sea. Ernie had always thought that watery grave had saved his brother from a lifetime of misery. And his elder sister, a woman who had found God and a balding insurance salesman to sire, God’s little angels, had never liked him.

Ernie could never have played happy families.

All Ernie now had were his vacuum cleaners and the road, which he travelled in a five-year-old Austin A40 Devon company car that had seen better days. The car was a far cry from a Crusader battle tank and there was no crew that was like family jammed inside. It was a lonely existence in a car that smelled of chips and farts.

His American trained bosses weren’t like family. They wanted everything to be done their way and they expected results. ‘Get results,’ they had said to him during his training, ‘and the Kirby world is your oyster! Be a Kirby man! Be a success!’ It was all new to him. Before the war he had been a butcher’s boy but now all he knew was how to drive a tank till the enemy was destroyed. Was that success? He didn’t know. Everything was different in civvy street. He had a medal, a Distinguished Service Medal, but in civvy street it was worthless. But he had it.

‘Well piss off then and don’t interfere wi’ me,’ said Tidy with a sting in her voice. She took pride in her work and if she couldn’t get a man erect she took that as her failure, not his.

‘Ach, yer a hard bitch so ye are Tidy.’ And she was – in a way.

‘Am I? Am Ah really? Right, what’s it to be? Blow job or out the fuckin’ door.’

‘Oh well, go on then.’

Ernie wasn’t her type and would never normally have been allowed through her door but one wet Wednesday he had saved her from a brute. He was different and he had made her laugh. He had a childish innocence about him and, despite her rules of who could and who could not be a client, she had given him her business card never expecting to hear from him again. But the following Friday he was back with money in his pocket and lust in his loins.

***

It had been another miserably damp Wednesday in Manchester with Ernie ploughing his way back to his smelly little b&b through the pouring rain, the windscreen of his car badly smeared making forward progress slow and uncertain. Up ahead in the gloom he saw a lit sign and slowed to a crawl to read it. Fish ‘n Chips it read. Ideal. He’d buy some and tuck in when he got back to his b&b. As he passed a junction on his left, just 50 yards down from the chip shop, through the gloom he saw a woman trying to untangle herself from a burly man in a navvy’s coat and flat cap. He was clearly agitated. Ernie was never one to get in the middle of a domestic and drove on to the chip shop. He dashed in, shaking the rain off and looked at the menu board while sticking his hand in his pocket to pull out some coins, which he counted. He fancied a bit of halibut and large chips but it was beyond his meagre means. He settled for a small cod supper.

‘Salt ‘n vinegar luv?’ asked the woman.

‘Aye.’

Outside the door of the chip shop the woman he had seen on the corner was shouting at the man to leave her the fuck alone! But the man wasn’t having it. He grabbed her roughly and put his face with bared teeth right into hers. Ernie heard him say something about a fucking whore so give it up. He had seen this kind of thing before in Italy, where they were told not to interfere. But this was England.

Ernie stepped outside in the cover of the doorway and addressed the woman. ‘Ye alright ducks?’

‘No I’m bloody not!’ She turned to the man. ‘I told ye, get yer bloody hands off me!’

The man was not inclined to let go.

‘De ye know this man?’ Ernie asked the woman.

‘No Ah bloody don’t! Never clapped eyes on ‘im!’

The man turned to Ernie. ‘You,’ he said pointing a finger in Ernie’s direction, ‘keep yer fuckin’ neb out o’ it!’

‘Hey, no need fer that. Ah’m just askin’ what’s goin’ on.’

‘Like Ah said, mind yer fuckin’ business, ya fat little fucker. Now you, ya fuckin’ whore,’ he spat at Tidy, ‘will fuckin’ do it for me. I ‘ave the money!’

‘For the last time,’ said the woman, ‘get yer fuckin’ ‘ands off me!’ She struggled to get free.

‘Hey chum, Ah think the woman wants ye te leave ‘er be.’

The angry man turned to Ernie. ‘You still ‘ere? Ah told ye te fuck off ya fat little fucker afore Ah plant ye!’ were the last words he remembered saying for several minutes. Ernie only hit him once, which was generally enough, although he occasionally needed a rapid one-two combination to put someone’s lights out. The man toppled over sideways into a puddle. Lights out, flat cap floating in the puddle.

Ernie took the woman by the arm and pulled her into the steamy heat of the chip shop.

‘Bloody ‘ell, who said gallantry were dead?’ said Tidy shaking off the rain.

The woman behind the counter was peering over Ernie’s shoulder at the man lying in the puddle. ‘Ten pence luv.’

Ernie fished in his pocket for the money but Tidy stepped up and slapped a two shilling piece on the counter as she scanned the board for the price. It was a small cod supper.

‘Best gi’ us some extra chips luv,’ said Tidy to the woman.

The woman gave the man lying in the rain another look as she took back the fish supper and changed it for a large halibut and large chips. ‘Nice te see chivalry’s not dead. That man deserved what yi did te ‘im.’ Ernie nodded. ‘Ten pence, as before.’

‘Oh, thanks luv,’ said Tidy pushing the two shilling piece across the counter.

Ernie interrupted. ‘Eh no, no that’s not necessary, ducks.’

‘Ye done me a favour, Ah’m doin’ ye one back.’

The woman behind the counter treated Ernie to a wide, crooked-toothed smile as she handed him his fish supper, wrapped up in two sheets of a three-day old newspaper. She handed the change to Tidy.

‘Well right nice o’ ye,’ said Ernie a little embarrassed by this kind gesture. ‘Ye fe around ‘ere?’ he said to Tidy who, although clearly sodden, looked radiant.

‘Aye, up the road a bit.’

This wet woman standing in front of him who had just bought him a fish supper was way out of his league and he knew it but she had done him a kindness and he felt obliged to return the favour. ‘Come on, Ah’ll gi’ ye a lift.’

Tidy eyed him for a second. He seemed alright, sort of decent and honest. She decided to risk it.

‘Oh bloody marvellous, me feet’s soaked!’

They rushed out into the rain, passing the man Ernie had hit. He was just coming to and looked completely confused by the fact he was sitting in a puddle beside his cap. Ernie opened the passenger door first for Tidy to get in then he got himself in.

A gentleman, thought Tidy.

Ernie put his fish supper in a shoe box on the floor near the barely effective heater.

Ah, lives out of his car. Probably no little woman at home te cook for ‘im.

‘By bloody Christ, this weather!’ he said wiping his face with his hands.

‘Aye, it’s a bad ‘un,’ Tidy agreed.

‘So gi’ me directions.’ And off they set.

When they got to Tidy’s building she turned to look at Ernie. What she saw was a sad, fat, little man in a worn demob suit who had acted as her knight in shining armour. There was a story here, she told herself but she was sure it was nothing she wanted to know. Ernie turned and smiled at her. It was a nice smile. A genuine smile.

‘So, ye from around ‘ere?’ asked Tidy.

‘No ducks. Ah live a bit over te the other side.’

‘Well out o’ yer way over ‘ere then?’

‘Aye. It’s me territory ye see.’

She didn’t but she knew the fish supper lying in the shoe box at Ernie’s feet was likely to be cold before he got there.

‘Fancy a cuppa te go wi’ that?’ she asked.

‘Eh… ye what?’

‘Come on up, I’ll make ye a cuppa te go wi’ yer fish supper. It’ll be cold afore ever ye get where yer goin’.’

‘Oh… eh… aye! Right kind o’ ye luv.’

‘Come on!’ Tidy was out of the car and opening her front door before Ernie had time to retrieve his fish supper from the shoe box. She stood in the door. ‘Come on!’ she shouted to him.

He dashed into the brightly-lit hall and faced a flight of red-carpeted, wooden stairs, which she climbed ahead of him. Ernie’s eyes could only imagine what was swaying under her coat. Tidy opened the front door to her spacious flat and the first though that went through Ernie’s head as he stepped in was, By bloody ‘eck! This is bloody posh!

And it was posh. Very posh.

Ernie stepped into its warmth and a wonderful smell of lavender. He felt a wave of cosy relief flow over him. He was out of the damp, cold misery.

Tidy closed the door with a firm push and pulled her sodden coat and hat off in the hall then led him into the large kitchen and told him to sit as she filled the kettle to make a pot of tea. She pulled a plate out of a cupboard and put it on the table. Ernie dumped his fish supper on it a bit uncertain whether he should just tuck in straight away or wait for the tea. Tidy threw a look at the two puddles gathering around Ernie’s feet.

‘Yer bloody soakin’ man! What the ‘eck ‘ave ye been doin’?’

‘Trampin’ the bloody streets!’

‘In this? Are ye mad?’

‘No! Well aye, Ah suppose Ah am. It’s me job ye see. Vacuum cleaner sales. Door te door.’

‘In this?’

‘Aye well…It’s me new territory ye see. Ah’ve got te get sales.’

Tidy tutted loudly. ‘All ye’ll get is yer bloody death!’ She tutted loudly. ‘Follow me.’ Ernie hesitated. ‘Come on, up! Follow me.’

He did as he was bid and she led him into a spare bedroom. ‘Right, get yer kit off, put that on,’ she said throwing a robe on the bed which she pulled out of a wardrobe, ‘an’ I’ll run ye a hot bath. Ye’ll catch yer bloody death man!’

‘What?’ said Ernie staring round the beautifully decorated room. He had never seen anything like it. Flowers in a vase and real pictures on the walls.

‘Ye heard me. Kit off! Yer drippin’ on me bloody rug!’ And he was, dripping on a silk and wool rug that had made its way all the way from China. ‘Leave yer things on the chair there an’ Ah’ll dry them in front o’ the range. Ah’ll put yer tea in the oven.’

Tea in the north was dinner and tea was also a hot drink. Lunch was referred to as dinner. This was something that confused people from the south.

She ran Ernie a hot bath and ordered him into it with the words, ‘Ye’ll catch bloody pneumonia! Ya silly bugger.’ She tutted and shook her head. ‘Trampin’ about in this!’

She left him to get into the bath and gathered up his shirt, tie, trousers and jacket and put them on a drier in front of the range. His underwear he had taken into the bathroom with him. She picked up his socks with holes in the heels and his sodden, down-at-the-heel brown shoes, which she turned over with a shake of her head. The man was obviously skint. She stuffed the shoes with newspaper before putting them in front of the range, which she stoked up.

Twenty minutes later Ernie appeared, hot-bath pink and looking a little abashed in the big, red terry robe he’d wrapped himself in.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Come an’ sit down. I’ve made ye up a bit o’ bread an’ butter te go wi’ yer fish supper,’ which she pulled out of the oven and put on the plate. She poured him a cup of tea while Ernie sat like a man in a trance. ‘Yer not from around ‘ere are ye?’

Ernie shook his head. ‘No ducks. Ah’m fe Derby,’ he said, unwrapping his fish supper.

‘So what ye doin’ in Manchester?’

‘Like Ah said, tryin’ te flog cleaners.’

Tidy nodded. Obviously not havin’ much success are yi, Mister Knight in shining armour?

‘Got a wife?’ Tidy asked casually. Ernie shook his head as he popped a bit of the fish into his mouth. ‘Girlfriend?’ He shook his head again. ‘Ah. My name’s Tidy by the way.’

He nodded. ‘Ernie.’

‘Nice te meet ye Ernie.’

As he tucked in he felt easy, at peace and regaled Tidy with some of his sales stories and had her in stitches. She couldn’t remember when she’d last laughed as much.

‘Ye have a right good knack o’ tellin’ a story,’ laughed Tidy.

‘Ah learned in the army.’ He sat back drinking his tea and remarked on the range. ‘Ye don’t see many o’ them these days.’

‘No ye don’t, more’s the pity.’

‘Aye. We ‘ad one. Me mam would get it goin’ in the morning’ an’ it kept the ‘ouse warm all day an’ she cooked on it. Made bread in the side ovens. It were a grand thing.’

‘Aye they are, which is why I kept it. Who needs these fancy new cookers an’ fires when this does it all?’

‘Aye.’

After ten minutes easy chatter Tidy gave Ernie a prompt. ‘Ah’ve got someone comin’ round luv so I’m afraid ye’ll have te…’ She nodded her head in the direction of the door.

‘Oh aye, right. Sorry ducks, Ah’m bletherin’ on.’

‘No luv, yer fine but Ah do have someone comin’ round.’

‘Right well,’ he said standing up, ‘Ah best bobby off.’ He collected his clothes from the drier and went into the bedroom to dress, re-appearing five minutes later. Tidy had unstuffed his nearly dry shoes and handed them to him. He sat, put them on, tied the laces then stood as if he had just donned a Savile Row suit.

The man has pride, thought Tidy. Skint but proud.

Now all she had to do was lead him to the door and wave him adios and farewell. But no. For no reason she could think of she handed him a small card with her name and telephone number on it. ‘Listen luv, if ye ever get, ye know, lonely. Give us a ring.’

‘Ye what?’

‘If yer ever feelin’ in need o’ a bit o’ female company, give us a ring.’

‘Oh, oh aye. Ah see. Well, aye… Ah best bobby off.’ He gave a self-conscious little smile and Tidy led him down to the front door where she waved him a cheery goodbye as he drove off in what was now a smirry drizzle.

When she got into the flat she shut the door and leaned her back on it while words rampaged through her head.

What the fuck Tidy! What the fuck! So he made ye laugh. So what? An’ ee saved ye! So what? If ye need a bit o’ female company? The man’s bloody skint! Not-your-type! Ya dozy cow! Ye better bloody pray ee dun’t call ye. Ya silly bloody cow! Goin’ soft in the bloody ‘ead you are!

Since then she had let him use her services four times, never with any great enthusiasm on his part, but he was a customer who tipped. Never a lot because it was clear he didn’t have a lot and he was grateful for Tidy’s ministrations although he was, at times, difficult. Ernie had nightmares that affected his performance but she knew how to get him up. Today, though, it had been unusually difficult. He was more detached than normal but she wasn’t being paid to be his psychologist or his mother. She was his whore and all that was on the menu was sex. Take it or leave it.

‘You know,’ Ernie said lying back on the bed, his organ having been expertly drained, ‘If Ah could get me figures up Ah could be up for a manager’s position. Get a Morris Oxford,’ he said with some pride while squeezing Tidy’s tits.

‘Chuffed te the nuts for ye Ernie but ye have te go. Time’s up.’

‘No. Give us another ten minutes, it’s bloody lashin’ down out there.’

‘Would if Ah could Ernie but me six-thirty’ll be here in five minutes so clothes on an’ see ye... whenever.’

He stared at her for a few seconds, sighed, then got off the bed to put on his shirt, shoes and the jacket of his brown demob suit. ‘This is supposed te be bloody summer,’ he said as he dressed. ‘It’s May an’ it’s like bloody October.’

‘I know luv. It’s just one o’ them years.’ She opened the door.

Ernie pulled up his jacket collar and slipped out with a small nod leaving the money but not so much as a tiny stain on the white linen sheets.

Chapter 2

The unseasonal downpour had spent it’s fury and reduced itself to a light drizzle as Ernie walked to the Austin whose normally dull green paintwork had gained a shiny patina thanks to the rain. The pavement was awash and the gutters ran like small rivers, which was unusual this time of year - even for Manchester. But it was an unusually miserable start to the summer everywhere. He stopped and stared at the car’s old-fashioned lines, a poxy little proletarian tin box doing a bad imitation of a bigger, older American car. And neither was it a Crusader tank, which was, according to common consent, an unreliable piece of scrap iron. But not Ernie’s. His had been sorted.

The Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers, the REME boys, had sweated blood and worked wonders on The Pig to get the damned thing right, fixing things that should have been sorted at the factory where it was made. Still his worked because, as it turned out, Ernie had a way with machinery. He had proved himself to be a real spanner monkey. He kept the twenty-seven litre V12 engine fitted in, The Pig, as he had christened, in fighting condition come rain, hail, snow or desert. But he didn’t have it any more. Now he had a green Austin A40 Devon which, like himself, was a solid, unexciting plodder. He would never sneak up behind a Panzer in it and blow its turret off. Never again. It was over. The excitement of the chase, the engagement, the destruction of the enemy. Gone. The camaraderie, the laughter, the blood and the ever-present death. Gone. The feeling of being alive. Gone. Now he had sales targets, dim-witted housewives and a pathetically underpowered car, which needed a strong wind up its chuff to get any kind of speed out of it.

And Tidy. He had Tidy. But not really. She wasn’t his. She belonged to no man but was used by many. An angel of relaxation, like a lifebelt, in a sea of stress, tension and murder because that’s what it had been. State sanctioned murder that poured blood on the ground and fortunes into the coffers of the money men. The owners of capital. His capital. Everyone’s capital. Tax payers’ capital shelled out by the bucketful by moronic politicians into the bloodless hands of the rich, so a French communist pamphlet had read. Ernie didn’t much like the French, nobody did, they were a miserable and ungrateful bunch but he had kept the pamphlet.

Murder. A funny word. But Ernie didn’t care. He wasn’t built with that kind of conscience. He loved what he did during the war, every minute of it. To blow someone up, someone you cannot see, is no big deal. The thrill of the hunt was the thing. To sneak up behind a Panzer and put an armour piercing round at the joint between the tank body and turret and watch it pop off like a top flipped off a bottle. Anonymous death. Who cared? No one. Blow them to fuck and get home. Refuel, rearm and do it all again. Champions flying across the desert chasing Rommel out of North Africa. A battle, which despite earlier near catastrophic equipment decisions and terrible losses, they had won because of men like Ernie. Men who turned up every day and stepped onto the killing fields to spill blood. Buckets of it.

The Egyptian battle won, his tank and crew were shipped to Italy where they could at least enjoy decent food and wine. They were ordered to pick up a new tank but Westy fought hard to keep The Pig because it was fast and manoeuvrable, better suited to the terrain than the bigger Cromwell tank he was ordered to collect. The brass finally gave up and told him to keep the damned Pig! Then they joined in the long, bitter slog up spaghetti-land where they had to fight for every square foot of ground. It had been a bloody and, what some had called at the time, unnecessary waste of life and resources. And the terrain was useless for tanks. At times they wondered why they were there when it was clear half-tracks and jeeps would have been more effective. But Ernie had not been paid to think about political or strategic military decisions. He had been paid to drive a tank and support the troops or hunt for German convoys and tanks then render them scrap metal. The men inside these vehicles were never given a thought.

The Germans had the same problems with their tanks but they were smarter, they had entire columns of half-tracks fitted with devastating Howitzers and they fought like lions to stop the British and American advance up through the country. Their bitter determination and a string of serious errors made by the Allied commanders had the Grim Reaper dancing from side to side working overtime.

And on that terrible day the Reaper danced his jig with glee.

No one called him Ernest. He was Ernie. Ernie Dodgems. He got his name for his ability to throw a twenty-ton Crusader tank around as if it was a fairground dodgem. Everyone had their nickname. Danny, Eagle Eye Boyle, their gunner and as Irish as they come was the tank’s clown. A Derry man who could smell whisky from 10 miles away and always had a bottle or two on board. His loader, skinny, nimble-fingered Duncan Hands Rowan was a Glaswegian from Maryhill with a strong accent. He was not a man to pick a fight with if you wished to remain conscious, in possession of all your teeth and retain the use of both arms. Not to mention retaining the ability to sire children. He and Eagle Eye made a good team with their constant banter and impressively slick ability. The group commander, Captain Charles Westy Westfall-Glanville, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a lion’s mane of blonde hair had built the crew. And it was a good crew. They had survived longer than any other crew but no one was under any illusion about their life expectancy. They lived for the minute, the excitement of the chase.

Then came that night, the night that shattered their world.

Westy had ordered the group back to base while he reconnoitred a forest, which is where he figured there might be German half-tracks lurking. He poured over his maps and told the crew that if there were any that’s where they’d be. It’s where he’d park up so he wanted a quick look-see, a sneaky peak, as he called it. They gently crested a slight hill with a fairly large hill immediately off to their right and enormous boulders scattered all around. They were edging towards the forest dead ahead when they suddenly found themselves staring at the guns of a row of Panzers, which were too big to get in among the trees. They were on the edge of the woodland, very well camouflaged. Half-tracks they could destroy easy as popping balloons at a fairground but Panzers were a whole different ball game.

The shock of the discovery and the sudden realisation that their chances of getting away unseen were virtually nil brought out the best in Dodgems. Without a second’s hesitation he braked very gently and backed up like a cat, keeping the revs and noise to a minimum. Ernie suggested he back them up over the ridge and escape the way they had come but Westy ordered him to park their twenty-ton Crusader in an incredibly tight space in the rocky outcrop they had just passed. Somewhere no one would look for a tank. Westy had a cats sense of danger and no one argued. Ernie, with great finesse, parked up. Had they been in a Cromwell they would have had no chance. The next few seconds were what they called, white-knuckle time. They waited, ready to fight their way out but as no high explosive shell came hurtling their way they knew they hadn’t been seen. The sweating crew gave Ernie a thumbs up for a job well done. That’s what they did with each other. They acknowledged each others skills and ability.

Within a minute a loud rumbling was heard coming up the road they had been on. Three German half-tracks with mounted Howitzers suddenly appeared and drove past them into the forest. Had they met those on the way down their fate would have been sealed. Westy’s instincts had never failed them. A few minutes later a heavily-laden truck chugged its way up the hill and it too drove into the forest. This was clearly a depot. And no one knew about it. Westy called it in but was told operations were suspended while the British and American commanders worked out their next move.

‘They are sitting fucking ducks!’ Westy whispered with some intensity down the microphone. ‘Get an airstrike in!’

‘Sorry old boy, no can do. Good luck.’ Then the line went dead.

Westy asked for the fuel status, which was sufficient to get back to base but low. He told Ernie to keep the engine at idle in case they had to make a break for it. Hands and Eagle Eye slipped out quiet as spiders climbing a wall and spread the camouflage nets Westy had designed to blend in with the terrain. The crew had made the nets while officially on R&R, which effectively made the tank blend into grey rocks. Their desert camouflage was useless in this terrain. They were a well-oiled team who sat silent as mice in their now camouflaged tank waiting for the Panzers to leave. Or, come daylight, and before the Panzers fired up their big engines they would make a run for it. A cold Panzer was next to useless and the Crusader was fast. They had a chance.

But the Germans did not sleep and after a quick fuel calculation Ernie switched off their engine. There was activity all night, which meant only one thing. At three in the morning the idyllic peace of the Italian countryside was shattered by the roar of the huge Maybach V12 engines as they fired up to sit for the mandatory half hour to get up to temperature. Ernie’s crew hadn’t expected this. Too late to run. The minute they fired up their own monster engine the jig would be up. Tension inside the tank was back to sweat level. Nobody noticed the smell anymore. Finally, in full moonlight, six Panzers lumbered past their hidey hole. This was a hunting group clearly intent on showing the British army the business end of their devastating 75mm cannons. Westy signalled it in, only to be ignored because HQ told them there were no tanks in that area. He informed them as clearly as he could he was staring at the fucking things! Again he requested an airstrike. Too dark and your Intel needs to be confirmed, was the reply. ‘Too dark?’ Westy yelled at them. ‘It’s a fucking full moon!’ There were operational priorities he was then told by the officer on the end of the radio. This was a typical response in the world of British operations management, a misnomer of gigantic proportions. Westy’s next