I don't know if I should tell you about
this, as it's a scandalous tale with all sorts of dark corners and
innuendoes. Oh sod it, there's nothing on the telly and it's still
raining.
In the list of Hadley's shops there is
Bert Rummins's Ladies Dress Shop. I can vaguely remember him as a
dapper well-dressed man with popping eyes and protruding ears that
made him look like the picture of a robot that I had in a science
book. I was too young to know it at the time but, although he was a
married man, he was a real philanderer too. At the time his shop
burned down (many of the shops in Hadley were wooden buildings), he
was shagging a lady in a fur coat. Wait, I don't mean she was wearing
a fur coat when he was shagging her, though she may have been (people
can be very kinky - think of Sacher-Masoch), but that was what I heard
people saying: things like "That Bert Rummins is having it away
with that (supply a noun like "hussy"), you know, the hoity-toity one in the fur
coat."
It wasn't the sex or the fur coat that
excited me - at eight, you have other priorities - it was the fact
that one night his shop caught fire and burned to the ground. The
smouldering ruins were a spectacular sight in the days that followed.
And then the rumours started, the obvious one being that his business
was failing, so he had deliberately set fire to his own shop for the
insurance. I knew better. He was a German spy (what else could he be
with those robot eyes and ears?) and the secret service had got on to
him. I did wonder fleetingly if the hoity-toity one in the fur coat
was married and her husband had taken his revenge, but dismissed that
on the grounds that he would have waited till Bert Rummins was in the
shop before setting fire to it. At least that's what I would have
done.
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