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| David! This lady likes this bag but do you have it in black? |
Tom loved everyone and everyone loved Tom! He smiled and he laughed and he joshed with his grandchildren, cheating dreadfully if he played them at table tennis or snooker.
He loved them and as he lived at the house that stood at the end of my garden, they were constantly in and out at all times to see him or their grandma and eat his perpetual fry-ups!
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| TOM WITH JONATHAN AT ALNMOUTH 1976 |
His love didn't extend to wiping their noses!
Mind you, Gemma's nose required a very brave person to wipe it as emanating from it for much of her babyhood were two avocado green snakes! If Tom took her to the beach in her buggy, she returned with her snakes encrusted with sand, like an egg-laying turtle returning to the sea after a strenuous night.
Tom travelled to Blyth on his bike. Well actually, my bike. An old-fashioned solid metal-brake-levered one that I'd bought from a retired miner.
He, Tom and not the miner, weighed the best part of twenty stone and with an inside leg measuement of only twenty two inches and measuring five foot four in his socks, he was massive with a barrel of a torso. His stomach would press against my car's dashboard.
He was a tough Glaswegian whose father had died of peritonitis whilst working in the Govan shipyards aged thirty three in 1929, when Tom was eight and whose mother had had to bring up three kids in hard times, herself becoming a French-polisher in Edinburgh and living to one hundred and three years of age.
Although the bike's brakes burnt out rapidly and gave up any attempt to stop him, he could still be seen charging off to the bookies, using his heels on the road surface to slow himself down. He had a brilliant brain that could work out odds at lightning speed but unfortunately, for the most part, couldn't pick a winner.....like most punters and that's why there aren't many poor bookies!
That bike spent a lot of time upside down having it's chain adjusted for some reason!
Tom loved coming to market but he did drive me mad over one thing.
Every few minutes and for once I'm not exaggerating, he would call out, whether I was serving someone or not, " David! This lady loves this bag but do you have it in black?"
Well, my leather comes as offcuts from furniture makers and almost no one wants black furniture and therefore I get very little black leather!
Then or now.
I would have told Tom this at the start of each show he did with me but still the question came in!
My first reply would be reasonably calm and polite...." I'm sorry Tom, could you tell the lady what I've told you about where the leather comes from and why there's no black?"
"O.K. there son! It had slipped my mind but I remember the noo!"
And then a few minutes later, "David! This lady loves this bag but do you have it in black?"
My second reply would be just as polite but I can't really say the same for the following twenty!
There was a fair amount of bad-tempered swearing by the end of the day!
I left Tom to cope on his own at one summer show, making sure that there was a tarpaulin for him to throw over everything if it rained.
When I returned to pack up and it had been a hot dry day, I was struck by a nasty smell coming from the cover which he hadn't had to use and when I lifted it there were six broken fresh eggs in a squashed paper bag!
"Tom! What's this?" holding up the dripping bag.
"Are they yours Davey boy?"
"No Tom! I haven't been here all day have I?"
"Ah Well! They could be mine but did you tread on them?"
"No Tom! I smelt them as soon as I got out the car and the heat from the sun has obviously partly cooked them hasn't it?"
"If you say so Davey boy. So they must be mine I suppose. But I can still use them so I'll put them in a wee carrier and take them home."
"Would Shirley like them?" This a genuine question that I remember ignoring.
Now Davey I've taken down several phone numbers of ladies who liked your bags but were wondering if you did them in black......................"!
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