Read The North of England Home Service for Free Online

cabinet’ who included Alan Walters, her trusty guru; the old intriguer, Alf Sherman; Ralph ‘Rolf Harris, the founding father of the Institute of Economic Affairs; her Chelsea neighbour, Sir Laurens van der Post, the traveller and semi-mystic; and the self-made computer millionaire, John Hoskyns, who always seemed to back Charmian into a corner on these occasions and start banging on about Britain ‘going down the tube’. The wife of the educationalist Sir John Vaizey, a canny American in a kaftan dress, once confided to Charmian that they had a cat at home that they called ‘Lady Daisy Vaizey’, and she dined out on that for years in the bungalows and light-drenched villas of the South Hams.
    It was the passing of these times, following Mrs Thatcher’s fall from power in November 1990, that Charmian had especially mourned: the after-hours washing-up at the sink in the little flat under the eaves of Number 10 with Margaret – who Charmian always addressed as ‘Prime Minister’ even when she was only asking whether she would prefer to wash or wipe – while the men shared a joke against a background of light-orchestral music over their single malts in the next room.
    One of the first things Charmian packed when she gave up the ghost and went to live with Gavin, the flippered golf-ball retriever, was a letter that Mrs T. had written to Ray in the middle of a particularly bad spell when she knew he was struggling, and that Charmian had had framed and hung over the tallboy in their bedroom. It quoted four lines of an inspirational poem:
    Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
        Yes, to the very end.
    Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
        From morn to night, my friend.
    Charmian had gone out and found the book it had come from – it was a collection by Christina Rossetti – and the book from that day forward had become her solace and her constant companion.
    Looking around him at Mighty’s regulars, the lame ducks and lost causes who gathered round her daily at the tea van – men for the most part who had never owned a car or a passport, all of them products of the old industries – the heavy industries – that had created the character and culture of that part of the world, who didn’t really own anything other than the clothes they stood in – Ray occasionally allowed himself to see it from Charmian’s perspective, and inwardly grinned when he thought how his former wife, happening across him now, would feel vindicated in seeing what she had always said would happen come to pass: she had kept on telling him that (once a Geordie, always a Geordie) he was going to end up without a pot to piss in, living in the gutter.
    Except that, in the matter of their appearance at least, the Scran Van regulars didn’t conform to the street-corner-dole-wallah, flat-cap-and-rag-muffler stereotype of the old North East. They were a colourful bunch, kitted out in synthetic animal-pelt fleeces and comfortable sweatpants and the big padded training coats and replica team shirts with iridescent watermark patterns that strobed when they caught the light. It’s something Ray had particularly noticed since he’d gone back there to live: that everybody dressed sportily younger than their years – or sportily older in the case of the nursery-age children in their cropped tops and bare midriffs and hip-hugging jeans. People of all ages and both sexes seemed to have decided that the best age was around seventeen. A disco dolly with glossy long hair and chiffon bell-bottom trousers could easily turn out, when she turned around, to be a grandmother of seventy. At Mighty’s, steel toe-caps andheavy work boots had mostly been replaced by trainers with Velcro fastenings and reflectors, fat laces and fashionable signature logos. A group of four men who regularly used the table closest to the van’s counter looked like a boy band persevering well into their sixties. Their shoes, and virtually everything else they