Yet more Troon Tales - Charlie Pascoe

Chris and I usually meet up once in a while, have a meal, a few drinks, and drag up something from yesteryear to discuss and to remember with much affection and great nostalgia. We go back a long way, spent all our schooldays and teenage years together in a small depressed ex-mining village in Cornwall, forming a bond of true friendship. Chris now lives abroad, and we have our get-togethers, looked forward to immensely by both of us, when personal business, usually financial, forces him to leave his home in the sun for a few days, and come to the UK.

This particular evening was going well, as it always does when old friends get together. We had talked about our families over the first course, and we discussed sport rather heatedly, as I remember, over the main course, which was one of our favourites. It was a scrumptious steak pie with a flaky pastry top that would melt in your mouth.

We had drank a couple of bottles, or was it three, of very good red wine (a beautiful fruity merlot), and all of a sudden there we were with our cheese and port, with not a mention of the past. It couldn't stay that way, it never did. Deep down, perhaps the only reason we get together are the trips down memory lane.

'The good old days'. This was a phrase so often heard, but were they really good? Somehow I think not, only seemingly full of memorable things about family and friends who are sadly no longer with us. Did so much happen then? Was everyday an adventure? Were all our days, free from the ever present T.V. in the corner, lived to the very utmost? I very much doubt it. It's because we mostly remember only the good times, and sadly, as I recall, there weren't too many of those.

Perhaps it was the War. Things happened in a war, even in small isolated villages, and over the years we recall them, we tell them over and over again, adding on a bit each time, and gradually change ourselves into heroes. This allows us to give grand-sounding lionhearted replies to the seemingly age-old question: 'What did you do in the War, Grandpa?'.

There suddenly, quite out of the blue, as if somehow he was reading my mind, old Chris, dear old Chris said,

"Casting your mind back, like you do, have you ever given much thought to charlipasco?"

The word threw me. I was certain that I'd never heard it before, and I presumed it's origins lay in Chris's much travelled life. But I didn't want to be beaten, so I racked and racked my brain until my head spun, while he sat there enjoying his port with an amused grin on his face. To this day I'll never know why I came up with the answer that I did, probably it was the wine, or that quirky desire that I've always had to come up with some sort of answer whatever the question. And so, quite almost matter of factly, I said,

"Haven't I read recently that some well known botanist has found a plant in Peru, on the lower slopes of the Andes. A quite undistinguished, very ordinary loooking bush, whose fruit encased in a hard prickly shell have almost magical qualities, inasmuch as it could relieve even the most deep-seated anxieties and depression"

I elaborated on this totally imaginary theme by saying,

"It's thought that the discoverer could become fabulously wealthy if a way could be found to convert this into a drug for the Western world".

Chris looked at me and burst out laughing. His mirth was so infectious that I couldn't help joining in, and the restaurant echoed to our merriment, much to the bewilderment of the other diners. When eventually we paused for breath, he managed to stop laughing long enough to say,

"I meant Charlie Pascoe, the bloke who used to run the fish and chip shop in Troon, just before the War. Surely you remember him?"

My answer to the question Chris posed seemed to be all the more ridiculous, but it was a wild guess, a really wild guess, and I had the grace to admit it. But I did remember Charlie Pascoe and his little shop - I could visualise them just as if I saw them yesterday.

"Yes, I can remember him, of course I can", I told my companion.

"Good old days, weren't they?"

I looked at Chris and Chris looked at me, the tone of the evening changing from bonhomie to remembering, and to those of us who had lived in the thirties, remembering wasn't funny at all. No, funny was about the last word to describe it. Remembering Charlie Pascoe - what a taciturn person he was!

He worked so hard, I suppose, he was a one-man band and his business was a success. He must have been doing very well, for he had a car, almost unheard of in those days, and which made him much admired by half the village and positively envied by the other. It was Lanchester as I recall, shiny chrome, that really leathery smell inside, and a rich walnut dashboard that I was never tired of looking at whenever I had the chance of peering inside. I touched that car once, ran my grubby little hand along it's polished mudguard, revelled for a brief moment in the richness of it. It brought Charlie Pascoe literally roaring out of his chip shop, waving his hands all covered with batter paste, threatening me with all sorts of punishments, questioning my parentage, but worst of all banning me from the shop.

The car was one of the mysteries that surrounded Charlie Pascoe. For instance, how did his shop prosper that well, for there was little money in that village at all. If you had lived there as Chris and I did, you would never, never, forget the unremitting poverty, the constant battle to make ends meet, the tins on the mantlepiece, one for the rent, one for the doctor, one for 'the Club', one for the Insurance man, and one for Christmas.

And you were always hungry, not desperately starving hungry, not that sort at all, but the sort of leaving the table and never having got quite enough to eat.

That's when the village chip shop came into it's own. The smell of frying fish drew every boy and girl as if by magic to congregate outside the shop, and always by some miracle one of us would have a penny. It usually bought enough chips, heaped into one of Charlie's newspaper containers, and liberally sprinkled with salt and vinegar for everyone to have perhaps two each. A willingness to share what little we had was the only decent thing that came out of those lean and hard times. It helped us during the War years - years that we didn't know then were just around the corner.

Chris broke in,

"Do you remember the screeds?"

How could anyone forget them. If you haven't eaten a bag of hot screeds on a cold winter's evening, then you haven't lived. Screeds were bits of cooked batter which had fallen off the fish, but to hungry boys, and there were a lot of them in that village, they were far better than caviar.

Every so often Charlie scraped them out of his fryer with a little tin scoop, and if you happened to be around at the time, that magical moment, and you were not currently in his bad books, you got a bag of them - for free! Even so, we all thought him to be hard,mean, man.

Apart from the screeds, he had a tight-fisted tariff. For cleaning his car, a task allotted to the special few - a large bag of chips. For sweeping his forecourt or putting a bag of potatoes through the peeler - a small bag of chips. He dispensed his favours in that cold and depressed village like a feudal landlord.

That wasn't the sort of nostalgia that we cared for, and it had a sobering effect on the evening. We much preferred the happy-ever-after sort, the long summer days in the woods and fields sort, the flying of home-made kites on the moors sort. Who really wanted to be reminded of those austere penny-pinching days?

To lift the gloom, I said to Chris,

"For heaven's sake, let's have another bottle of wine!", and whilst we were waiting for it to arrive, something made me say,

"Was Charlie Pascoe really so bad as we've painted him?"

I rememeber him once shouting at me at the top of his voice for standing too near his precious car. But I also recall standing scared, cold and hungry, and asking in a quivery sort of voice for a bag of screeds. And when I got them, funnily, I found the bag half full of succulent chips, and a small piece if fish thrown in.

"Perhaps you could be right", Chris added thoughtfully.

"There was that day when I actually saw him hand over, free of charge, enough fish and chips to feed a whole family - that family who used to live in the main street and who had lost their Dad at sea."

As we sat there under the influence of that third bottle of wine, we began to recall the softer side of the much-maligned Charlie Pascoe. The side that, for some reason best known to himself, he tried so desperately to hide from his customers. We recalled the scores of free meals given over the years to the old people in the village. We remembered the readily handed out donations to the local church and other charities, which he so seriously tried to keep secret. And as for that precious car...............

I was one of the boys he took to Portreath in it, to bathe and play cricket on one of those stifling days of high summer. We piled into the Lanchester at the end of a perfect day, one that none of us ever forgot, made even more perfect by Charlie providing piles of sandwiches and buying all of us the largest ice-creams we ever saw. Amazingly, he didn't seem to mind all that much that the back seats and carpets were covered in sand. I think, looking back, he felt the injustice that the beautiful beaches all around were denied to the local kids, who had neither the cash or the means to get to them.

We loked at each other, saying nothing. Each with his own thoughts about that complicated little man of days gone by. The little man in a stained apron who worked like a demon, and had a temper to match. The little man who we watched in wonder as he scooped a golden chip from the bubbling fat of his fryer and squeezed it between thumb and finger to see if it was cooked, seemingly quite impervious to pain. Perhaps after all those years it was time we realised he had a heart of gold as well.

Chris broke the silence -- it was time to go anyway.

"You were right of course - about that South American drug", he said.

"I'm not sure what you are getting at", I replied, "it was only a guess"

He reached across the table and caught hold of my hand, warmly, like old friends do.

"Then it was a very inspired one. Any plant that's very hard and prickly on the outside, has a soft centre, and can produce a drug that can make people's lives a little better by lifting their worries and depression, if only for a short while, just had to be called 'charlipasco'.

I had to have the last word,

Trevor Andrews has also written a short story about a distant ancestor - 'Abednego Uren'

This poem or story may not be reprinted or distributed in any way without the permission of the author.

Email: trevorandrews@eircom.net

Kathryn Garrod: http://www.simplycornwall.graphyx.co.uk

Troon Tales 1 - Rosemary Pooley Chaffe - 'Grans's Story'

Troon Tales 2 - David Scantlebury - 'Three beats on Hark'

Troon Tales 4 - David Oates - 'Sound, sound your instruments of joy!'

Troon Tales 5 - David Oates - 'Tryphena'

Cornish interest contributions - Trevor Andrews -'Abednego Uren'