The Coal Dealer

Thursday March 4th 2004 we got a visit from the coal dealer: A certain Mr. Hayley delivered coal on that day. It turned out that he had been brought up in Harley and had only left in 1961. He used to live, he said ‘at Domas.’ This was where Margaret and Price Brown now lived.

He had known Cyril and his mother well and had things to say about his mother which I have mostly not recorded. She did sound though like a bit of a tyrant. Physically, he said, she was small, always wore an apron and had her hair pulled back severely in a bun. I have more later on Cyril and his mother.

Mr. Hayley (I never got his first name) also knew the Brookshaws, Jim, Mary, Leonard and his wife whose name I also haven’t got. Jim, he said, was ’a big shooting man.’ 

One day in 1958, or thereabouts, it had been a hard winter, he recalled, Mary’s magnificent crop of cabbages were being eaten by a flock of pigeons. So Jim got out his 410s and said ’lets blast’em.’ So blast ‘em they did, very effectively. Unfortunately, at the same time, they blasted a washing line full of underwear, I leave you to guess what, hung out carefully by Mary. She was, Mr. Hayley said, normally a placid sort of person, but that day….!

He also said to look at The Old Pound, just to the right of the gate entrance (or where the gate would have been had it existed). He was of course referring to the original, not the restored Pound. ‘There’s a metal pipe in the wall. As schoolboys, Jim and I used to walk past it on the way back home from school and watch the tits building their nests in the stone wall. To help the birds, a German POW, staying with the Brookshaws, inserted a metal pipe in the wall. ‘I’ll bet it’s still there’ he said.

Mary Brookshaw told me that the pound used to have a wooden picket gate and that one day, long gone, a wandering cow was put into the Pound until the owner could be found. Disaster struck when the cow escaped and was killed by a passing car. The old and modern worlds do not easily mix.