A Single Storey

By Bill Hart.

Chapter 1

Beginnings

December 1920.

        ‘Naomi McClain sat bolt upright in her father’s office as he announced the yearly profits of The Royal Northern Wine’s Export Company Limited (Est. 1905) for the financial year 1918-19.   

     “People like a good wine, sure enough, but you have to look a which people like wine as best, and which wine they’ll pay up to sup up. We have find new ways, new wines, new trends that the mass of local people will follow, not just the local upper classes,” his slight Scottish accent betraying his northern roots.

      “Europe is flooded with cheap excellent wines just now, but the cost of transportation to get it up here to the north, is a bloody scandal. By the time I’ve paid the railways their cut, bottled it, labeled it, transported it to the to pubs and shops I’m barely making three-farthings a bottle!”

Naomi had heard his mantra a hundred times, but today…

     “…Pa, if you’ll sell twice as many bottles and with less wine in them, how much would that make in a year?”

       ‘Less wine in the bottle, we’d never get away with it!’ Put the wine into smaller bottles and advertise on the label its far superior quality and fruity taste. Sell the bottles at a lower cost than your rivals and sell twice as many of them.

      “Never get away with it, you wouldn’t.” His thoughts were running riot.  

      “Would we? Well, what ever we do, we can’t sit here and do nothing. I need to make a full penny a bottle on each. Nothing less.”

       ‘Pa, If you make a half penny on twice as many bottles you sell already, then that’s a whole farthing more per bottle than you were making before. That’s twenty five percent increase in profit for selling less wine per bottle.

       “How then, are we going to sell twice as many bottles, with less in them?       

        ‘Because, we will buy our wine from the vineyards ourselves, we will renegotiate our transport costs and we will use green glass.’

        “Green glass?”

         ‘Yes, bright green bottles finished off with a crisp white label.’

Pa looked skyward and swayed gently back on his captain’s chair.

         “And pray, what will the label say, I say?”

         ‘It will say Madame San Angel in bold gold letters, a tribute to mother, and beneath this, Vin de Pays la Loire. We will sell only French wine from now on and we will sell it to… Women.’

~

Naomi Elizabeth McClain was born on the 4 August 1901, the very same day as an extremely significant member of the Royal family was also born, and of the same middle name.

She grew up as the only child of Maurice and Angela McClain and was educated at ChorleyIndependentPrepatorySchool (CHIPS) until she was sixteen, the year her mother was interned with crippling arthritis. With his wife unable to work as the Company’s main administrator, it seemed only natural for Naomi to join her father on the metaphorical shop floor. Meanwhile, her mother Angela’s twin sister Gloria opened up new Off-Licence premises on Chorley’s thriving High Street, adjacent to the new Flat Iron open market. Angela however was a born fighter, and each day, despite her obvious pain, she would join her sister at the ‘Offy’ to lend her some limited moral support, fine tuned expertise and well-organized businesswomen’s skills.

 

  Naomi joined the family wine import-exporting business and soon set about learning all about it from the bluntest knot to the sharpest end. By the age of eighteen, she had developed her mother’s keen sense of self-awareness, in that she knew her gifted intelligence and her understated sexuality would to get her almost anything in this world, that she would ever possibly want. From her earliest days she was a naturally happy child and this rubbed off in all aspects of her working, social and awakening political life.

 The 1914 -1918 Great War was barely just over. In the three year since, life for millions in Britain and Europe, in all its variety, shapes and forms, had changed irrevocably and forever. Victorian women were meant to be subserviant’s to the family cause, whether it was as daughter, mother, wife, niece, aunt, grandmother or even a great grandmother. But Queen Victoria had been buried nearly twenty years before and with her demise, a new century with new boundary’s and a fresh new era was born. Some women like the young Naomi, felt that they should be doing something more worthwhile with themselves and also most importantly, doing things, which had a little more of societies values attached to it, particularly when women where treated as some form of lower form of human existence, after all, ‘women didn’t even have the right yet, to cast a political Vote.’

 

Men had all the power and control in the Government and many high seated places, but she and others like her, felt that they weren’t doing a very good job for their country, but that they were doing a brilliant job for themselves.

 

      “Pa,” she said, “ This is what we have to do.” She held a letter in both hands addressed to her father as the Company head. She held it high and aloft as though it was Moses and the tablets of stone on Mount Sinai. “Pa, Pa, she spluttered. “We are going to France.”

The Lancashire District of the Commercial Travelers Association were encouraging and inviting local businesses of all types to set up visitations and meetings with overseas organizations of all kinds. This was a trial of sorts, to see what interest there might be locally and if sufficient numbers respond, then initially:- ‘We’ll contact the highest Authorities in your preferred country.’

  “France,” said Naomi, twirling a circle formed on the office floor by a shining sun, beaming through the porthole window in the outside door.

         “France, France, Fra…….nce. Let us dance, dance, da…….nce.”

Catching a brief glimpse of his daughter’s bare ankle below her dress hemline as she danced so beautifully in front of him, Maurice McClain was both nonplussed and agitated.

         ‘Naomi?’ he said sternly, ‘please explain.’

        “Pa, you must go to France as soon as possible and meet wine lovers like ourselves. You must taste as many as you can and barter with them and promise them… promise them the Earth. And I will go to the Railway Company’s and barter also and meanwhile we’ll get small green glass bottles made and the printer can typeset the labels for us and I will even drive the horses and cart to deliver our….

       ‘Naomi, Naomi, you cannot get too carried away too soon with all of this. Yes, I will go to France and I will go with your song in my heart. But how will I know what to say to them, if they know no English and I know of no French? It is you Naomi, who should go, not I. You have your command of the French language from your school days at CHIPS and I am not so educated. “So”, raising his bowler hat and scratching his head,      

        ”I have not really had time to think this through to a proper business conclusion. I really need more time for things like this. So if you like, here it is then, my final decision on your preposterous and outrageous proposal, Naomi McClain, of selling little green bottles of French wine to young, up-start English women.”

Naomi was holding her breath so tightly she was ready to burst.

     “We will all go…your mother too…

     To…France, France, France.

     We shall dance, dance, dance?

     Into France, France, France,

     We will dance, dance, da……..nce

      “Father, father, I love you and mother so much. So much, so much…”

And she threw her arms around him and both of them cried.

~

  Across, on the other side of the Village at the bottom-end, Bob and Mary Storey were sitting comfortably in the front parlor of their neat and tiny terraced home in the middle of Chapel Street. They were discussing and preparing themselves for the birth of their forth child in August the following year. Bob was about to leave home to do his first permanent afternoon, two-ten shift at the Springs Branch Railway Sheds; A brand new job.

  Robert James Storey was born on Christmas day 1892. From leaving ‘Two-DaySchool’ at fourteen in 1906, my Granddad was apprenticed at the Horwich Railway Mechanics Institute (RMI) for six years. In 1912, he married 18-year-old Mary Harriet Langley of Heath Charnock at St John’s C of E.

Having worked for several years after, at a variety of different jobs, he applied to his Railway Company for an ‘unusually demanding’ new one. Having shown a flare for medical types of training, he became the new Assistant First Aid Officer at thirty years old. Eventually he was made Chief Officer at forty.

During this time, his medical talents flourished and a soaring reputation grew like wildfire within his immediate neighbourhood. Subsequent good news like this traveled quickly, and soon it was common knowledge in the Village and up and around to the surrounding districts too. Treatments from a qualified Doctor’s were only available to those who had the means to pay.  This of course disadvantaged many poor people and discouraged them from seeking relief from anything but the pain of near death. Soon Bob developed an unofficial but trusted practice in his own Chapel Street home. After a full shift he would have people queuing at his door, right down his tiny garden path and along the street they queued, in the hope of him finding some precious time to see some of them. To these people, he was a godsend and, he never refused ’treatment’ to anyone.

          “Come back tomorrow and I will see you then,” he would say. And he would make a mental note of who was who in the queue, and whose turn it was to be seen after his next shift, the following day.

 From the general community and his loyal ‘patients’, he deservedly earned his unofficial title of ‘Doctor’ Bob ---

           “he should have gone to university and become a real qualified, doctor, should Dr Bob” --- such were the accolades and in such high esteem, he was regarded. In addition, Dr Bob made his name by chance of mixing together a concoction of secret ingredients, which was highly regarded as something of a ‘mythical’, near-miracle-cure-all --- the ‘Ointment’. It would be applied to almost anywhere on the body where the patient arguably required it. No one but Bob knew what it was made from or what it was really meant to do --- but it seemed to ‘work’ in the majority of his cases --- but then again, allegedly, so did Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls! He took the secret of the Ointment to his grave and I will forever remember overhearing my dad say more than once; “If only he had left the recipe in his will, the Storey’s could have been millionaires.”

He entered the white door with a large red cross painted on it.                    

      “Hello Bob,” said a voice from the back of the gloomy room. “Welcome to the first day of school.” It was Jim Doyle his new boss and mentor. Bob’s eyes were still adjusting to the bad light. The twin gas mantle high overhead was fully lit, as was a similar wall mounted one, situated over the shroud-covered bed. A dozing coal fire mulled lethargically in the grate. It was ready for bulking up, but nobody, at this moment cared a fig.

          “Do you recognize this fella, eh? Bob?”

Walking over to the table, he pulled the murky full-length sheet from above the man’s mouth to reveal a contorted face. He was breathing but unconscious.

        ‘That’s Fred Schofield, early morning shift, six-two, Wheel Tapper, isn’t it. Yeh, lives a few doors from me --- a good worker --- never late for his shift, eh?

          “Well, he’ll not be doing much more wheel tapping from now on, that’s for sure. D’you know his wife?”

             ‘His wife? Err… Mary knows her. Chat over the backyard wall for hours they do, with that Mrs. Berry from number 17. They can go at it, I can tell you. Six kids he’s got, all lads under ten.’

An ambulance arrived just as Bob placed his ear on Fred’s chest to check for a heartbeat.                

             ‘Hey up…he…he’s not breathing… he’s not. He’s going into shock… Jim…he’s…he’s having a heart attack.’ When he saw life draining away, Bob weighed in with all the natural instincts of a well-seasoned medic. But he lacked the finer skills and real experience that only time can gift to a willing and eager new recruit.

Jim took immediate control and heaved on Bob’s arm to pull him away. 

       “Bob…Bob…Bob,” said Jim. “Let him go…let him go…you have to know Bob, you see, just when to let them go. Let go.”

The ambulance crew moved forward as Jim and Bob backed away.

         ‘He’s dead,’ said the Paramedic, ‘we’ll have take him to the infirmary for a post mortem, anyway, was it an accident?’

      “Yeh, well more of an occupational health hazard you might say,”

 Jim sat down looking young Bob in the eye. Bob sat down too --- mesmerized.

        “You may as well take him straight next door to the Crem. Or what’s left of him. He was fast on that line, they tell me, but today he wasn’t fast enough. It was his birthday today too. Twenty-nine he was.” He shook his head disbelievingly.

         “Them…there, them shunter’s and their bosses and their bonuses. Sat up in their cozy engine cabs, smoking their pipes. Them wearing suits with bow ties in their offices in London and looking down their noses at our ‘tappers’,”

  He tailed off before he said something he might regret. 

 “Before you move him,” rasped Jim, rolling a fag. “Put that trunk, that one in the corner where Bob’s sitting, the one with the lose wooden lid. You’ll need to take it with you. Put that in the back of your Ambulance van first.“

The paramedic team looked at Jim and were puzzled by this bazaar request---

“Inside it, you’ll find both of his legs!”

Bob was safely at work and now Mary could entertain her three daughters as they had finished their school half-day. They chatted excitedly at the prospect of some important news about Christmas from their parents.

         “Now girls, hush, hush. You know that we only use the parlor for very special reasons and special occasions. I know you are thinking of Christmas and your dad and I are all looking forward to it all too. But before we can get started with the decorations and things, we have something we have to tell you all.”

Mary slowly scanned their tiny faces and beaming blue eyes. Blonde Alice was 10; dark brunette Ellen was 8 and Margaret with pure gold coloured hair, just 6.

     “For all the tea in China” said Alice. “A baby! It couldn’t have been a better present from God to all of us.  Wheeee……..” and they danced with their mum in a circle, all around the parlor settee.

  On his bike, he rode to the sheds for years, before he retired in 1956. Come winter and high summer, all along the canal bank to Wigan top lock, down seven locks, left onto the road through lower Ince, right at the Manley Hotel and just before the Cemetery and Crematorium gate, a quick left before he intersected the West Coast Main Railway Line connecting London to Edinburgh. He always caught the mail trains back to the Village on their way up to Carlyle via Preston at nighttime, or whenever his bad back gave in and he could no longer cycle home. He received a gold medal on his retirement and a letter from the Queen to commemorate fifty years dedicated service to the ‘British Railways.’ In 1957 he died of natural causes --- a year after Mary had died from a brain tumor. He left behind three daughters and his son, William James. He was 65.

~

  A small rusted steam packet ship pushed its way unnoticeably from its mooring at Preston’s Eastern Dock. Moving imperceptibly along the Ribble Estuary, turning gently south, it headed into a Midday August sun.

      “The cabins are adequate if you also enjoy prolonged Chinese water torture,” she said.

Naomi was trying to make the best of it and as usual she made her Pa smile. Fourteen people had to make the best of the scheduled trip in from a Village in middle the north of England to Cholet, a small rustic town nestling just as snugly, in the LoireValley in the middle of France.

          “From Chorley to Cholet by the Lancashire District of the Commercial…

          ’Get on with it Frank. I’m gasping here,’ said the young man rudely interrupting his flow.   

         “The Industrial Revolution was never needed in such a place as this,” they were told.

         “Wine is the life-blood of all that lives here, nothing less, nothing more.”

 Councilor Francis Yates, who happened to be the McClain’s biggest local rival, relayed the ‘translated message’ to the enthralled group. “Ms Richard Peltier, Mayor Of Cholet, has signed the letter.”

       ‘Thank you Frank, thank you! Can we all now go to the bar and get us selves a well-earned drink, do you think? Come on you lot let’s find the bar,’ he slurred, as he emptied the last of the liquor from his stainless steel hip flask into his dribbling mouth.

        “A drink here,” said Frank. “Well er, Mr. Threlfall is it? With respect sir, this is not the Top Spinners at home you know, this is the good ship ‘Abstinence,’ she is run by the Temperance Society of Great Britain exclusively for French cheese exports. You didn’t know? No alcohol on board here.”

Everybody laughed at the young man. He was a pretending old-fashioned Victorian dandy throwback --- all frilly shirts, spats, contrived aristocratic accent, and obviously inebriated.  Mocking himself and almost accidentally throwing himself overboard he raised his hat to Naomi and, overacting, gave her a majestic regal bow.

         “Well, bye gum lass,” he slurred, “then I will just have to get drunk on your love and French cheese.”

Naomi replied in kind, ‘I’m afraid young man --- what is your name?‘ 

“Victor Threlfall, Madam, at your service.”

 ‘--- Then, you will have to manage with just the cheese.’

One could imagine the sounds of roars of laughter being carried over the calm, splashing waves and across the Irish Sea, and over and beyond the seashores of Southport and Liverpool, and on and over the countryside and back and into the Village, in the heart of lushest Lancashire.

  Having an uneventful sailing trip to France was all that this good ship and any others could ever hope for. Lucky charms, prayers and alcohol had all played their parts over countless years of safely sailing these hostile seas. Enlightened passengers and experienced crew alike knew how fickle the Atlantic Ocean could be. Some entered the Bay of Biscay with white knuckle clenched fists and found that this was sufficient to survive these pending trials of natures wraths. Others soon found that they heaved with the swell of the sea and gradually and gratefully, they relieved their bloated stomachs, thankfully and mercifully, over the ships sides. The MN Abstinence gleefully steamed quickly in and out of the mighty rollers and on into the relative shelters of the sanctuary of the Loire Estuary. She ambled west along the picturesque river and into the bustling City of Nantes. She was berthed after some 750 miles and 42 hours. Spot-on it’s scheduled time of arrival.

~

William James Storey was born on the 15^th August 1922.

  Where as most young men when leaving school, followed their father’s honorable professions, Willy didn’t. He worked as an apprentice butcher in the Chorley abattoir and hated it. He was offered a job in a Butcher’s shop in the small town of Lymm on the outskirts of Warrington, which he eagerly accepted despite the traveling distance between the village and the shop. It was a port in a storm for my dad, however the beneficial spin-off from such a displacement; Lancashire into Cheshire, were profoundly displayed after only a few short weeks. He began speaking in a strange ‘new’ accent and carefully he pronounced his ‘aches properly. His sisters and friends were in tucks at this novelty and they all incessantly and relentlessly mocked him. But back at the shop, he was regarded as a proud, courteous, upstanding man, a major asset for meat sales and an irresistible attraction for Lymm’s single young women, and for that matter, the Villager’s females too.

  Notwithstanding his handsome looks and his tall frame, his literal crowning glory was on the top of his head. His hair was gold, not just fair or even blond; it was as a colour of pure gold just like his sister Margaret’s. And again like Margaret, but obviously worn in the fashionable short-back-and-sides style of the era, it was naturally waved. This was an irresistible combination for any women to deny. And resistance became futile for so many; he could have his pick of the proverbial bunch. So when he wore his uniform at the local community center Saturday Night Dance on Railway Road on his first return leave from the Army’s Aldershot Training Barracks, he was virtually mobbed.

However, Willy had spotted a special shy retiring smile, which beamed out its stunning face from the back of the room. Her eyes were sad and deep but they danced to the tune of the music. This mellow distant music was seeping into him, was wrapping around him and surrounding him, enveloping him. With unexpected bravado, he aimed his Cupids Arrow towards this mysterious target. A luxurious warmth flowed around of his heart and offering her his gentle hand to dance, he said to her; 

       ”Yes?”

       ‘Yes.’ She replied.

And stars fell from the sky and spun around them. Two lovers stepped out together and breathlessly they fell into the shining brilliance of the Village, and it’s deep, dark, welcoming night.

  Marian was the youngest child of Coal Miner Alfred (Father) Shireburn and Seamstress Martha Whitehall. She had six elder brothers and sisters and they all lived at number 167, Hardybutts, Wigan. Father was a wiry, raw-boned man, shaped and hardened by countless hours of pick axing at the coalface. His face was craggy, his skin was pitted with coal dust and each premature wrinkle blatantly revealed a harshly toiled existence. There was a deep innate need for almighty grateful release from this relentless graft and he found it at the end of each week, in drinking and getting very drunk. Many of our immigrant Irish men now living here did the same.

          “It was what God had invented the weekends for”, they said.

 Manliness, macho and madness all rolled into one. 

When Father’s two eldest sons were old enough, they too went down the pit, and at weekends, they would join in with him, encouraging his ‘almighty binges’. ‘Short in stature and short in temper,’ the Shireburn’s became known. Tom was the exception of the notorious trio; he was a six-footer, whilst Father and Alf were 5 foot 4 and looked as like, identical twins. They terrorized the Scholes District and its dozens of pubs and clubs, looking and finding trouble with anybody who caught the eye of their mindless shenanigans. Nobody understands why these men felt the need to add violence to their weekend rituals. It was a sad and reprehensible repertoire, but to all working Irish men it seemed, there was a well-known reason why?

         ‘The Irishman needs to fight a war --- and if they can’t fight a war --- then they’ll fight each other!’

Money was scarce, ‘peed up against the wall’ it was said, but the ‘men’ were canny types too. They would pawn their suits on Mondays and make sure there was food on the table each day for the rest of the week. On Fridays, payday, they would be re-collected and the weekend scenario would begin all over again.

  My grandmother mother died aged 57 from a stroke when my mother was fifteen. The funeral was memorable as she was interned for burial in a churchyard and transported there by a horse drawn carriage as opposed to a possible paupers grave and poor mans horse and cart.

My mother’s conscious years thereafter, contained only the memories of a plethora of natural sisterly love, particularly from Emily, Gladys and from cousin Tom Connelly. Tom was the Eldest son of sister Emily and husband Laurence, a Shot Blaster of high reputation in the Colliery’s class ridden pecking orders. Tom was born to them the same year as Martha, my grandmother, gave birth to my mother. They were brought up, near enough together, as to be brother and sister.

It was Tom who recommended a night out to the Village, as a gentle starting point for Marian to explore the complex rules of the current wartime mating rituals. She was a great lover of dancing and very soon she found that she needed the brighter lights of the ballrooms, and the glitz and the glamour, which she saw at the Hollywood films’ of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astair at the Picture Houses she frequently visited, around Wigan and Lancashire’s many mill towns.

She found employment in a sewing factory and she began to learn from the older girls too, that competition for a good man was ferocious and that conscripting young men to the armed forces, to fight Hitler, would considerably reduce every woman’s sweet dreams of married bliss and deny them many flirting encounters and future romantic opportunities.        

She was sixteen years old when a boyish Soldier aged 20, wearing an ill-fitting Army uniform had asked her to dance, and four long weary war years later, at the Empress Ballroom in Station Road, Wigan, when he asked for her tender hand in marriage. R.E.M.E. Army Corporal William James Storey married Marian Shireburn, Seamstress, on the 3^rd March 1945.

~

           Nathaniel Jacques parked his rusty old bicyclette against the same part of the vinery walled house, as his adopted ‘father’ always did. He was well versed in routine. It was 7.00am and there was lots of work to be done before breakfast. His ‘mother’ was packing his midday meal in a hinged tin, whilst at the same time she cooked his first meal of the day. Natte’ carried the heavy weekly washing load, the five minutes walk, to the lavorie. His plans for the day were well mapped out and as the sole male in the business he tended to all the meticulous processes that all fine, cultured wines must be in expectance of. An inspection of sample vines are made today and a new oak barrel would be delivered from across the river from Angers, for a new idea he had in mind that is father, he hoped, would have been proud of. But first, a small matter of soap and water. He would look ahead to seeing some familiar faces amongst splashing and tittering of the local launderer’s, as he would again, be the only male in the district to perform this essential domestic chore.

  Natte’ had been adopted from the Orphanage on the banks of the LoireRiver in SaumurTown twenty-four years ago. His Mother, Annette, and Father Philippe doted on this precious gift from God. The Nuns at the convent raised this baby until a good home was found. A small vinery outside Cholet, the Nuns and the childless Jacques’s were ecstatic.

Rene died a happy but financially poor and frustrated man. He was the old school wine maker.

        “I have the finest grape in the LoireValley, I have the best soil and on the sloping hillside, the sun kisses the vines. Yet my grape, the Champigny grape, so mellow yet so full, so subtle yet so fruity, is constantly ignored. My rivals are inferior. Their grapes are inferior. Their wine is inferior. It is uncared for and reduced to weeks spent in rotting barrels, instead of many months or even years in fine oak casks, before it is ready to drink. Poo… pooo,” he would say.

  Now, it was just Nathaniel and his ‘mother’. Annette was suffering from arthritis, as many years spent in the fields had taken its revenge and slowly bent her limbs and bones beyond anymore-useful productive working days. However, she was still capable of much, and cooked and darned and cleaned pots and pans as she made herself and darling Nathaniel’s home very comfortable. Their tiny house had no running water, so buckets were ferried from the upper stream, which in turn fed the lavorie and latrines, which are situated at the far end of the fields and beyond the edge of the vineyards. Cooking was done on a ram shackle wood burning oven-cum-stove and their beds had clean crisp sheets and duck down pillows. The roof didn’t leak and the four small wood framed glass windows kept the harsh hot French summers at bay. In winter the stone built chimney breast, with the roaring log fire beneath it, warmed and heated the three rooms --- their floors made of packed clay --- which were cleverly positioned around its periferique. A huge formidable oak front door completed their setting, ensuring a-safe-free-from-the-world, escape-from-it-all, good night’s sleep.

  Natte’ could clearly hear laughing from under the high, thin clouds above. Trees swayed and rope lines fluttered with fresh washing. He rounded the knoll and the voices stopped. Beady eyes widened and approving looks came his way. Mothers and their daughters sniffed the air at pretence of graces and airs. But it didn’t work and they eventually laughed again with embarrassing tones. Natte’ emptied the basket and rubbed a little soap in to each piece of laundry and wetted, rubbed again to clean them through. He then soaked them in the clear, clean cold water which flowed from the low horizontal slotted opening beneath the Celtic style carved stone cross at the lavorie’s open top end. Similar activities were pursued all around the shallow stone trough, but concentration faltered and distracted minds were born away upon more important tasks. The company around gave him their best sunny smile’s as Thursday at the lavorie, to the local young women was a special competitive day. They put on their ‘Sunday best’, and with their mother’s escort, they resembled the ‘homely, home-some offspring and eligible daughters that aught to show themselves off… to… erm… young, handsome, desirable men like Nathaniel Jacques’.

To Natte’, these displays were flattering, very interesting and tempting. He caught his blurred reflection beneath the waters surface. Milky bubbles floated away and dissolved as they casually headed for the outlet some six meters away. The water cleared from around his submerged head and he saw, forlornly looking back at him, a lonely young man.

For all these alluring effects, he was as yet to feel and know the spark of a true love that his fiery heart so patiently desired, then and only then, would he finally and willingly concede.

        “ Nathaniel Jacques,” said a voice from a distance. “Mummies little wee boy,” and more sniggering disappeared behind the Knoll and back towards Cholet town.

Natte’ was used to the ribbings and took no insult from their constant torment.

Another voice chimed in, “Bon Jour Monsieur, could you help me please. I think that I am lost. I took a wrong turning maybe, but I was told I would find Madame Jacques and her son, who live near the third gate past the Lavorie, down here I believe.”

Natte’ didn’t look up as he would be playing into the hands of another launderer’s joke.

         “Oui Madame,” he replied, and nodded, “Oui, the third gate. That is a joke is it not?” The only ‘third gate’, he thought, that he could bring to mind, were the latrines access gate at over a kilometer away. He was now the only man in Cholet with the locks and keys that tended the vital anti-pollutant systems for the benefit of water supplies and their users between Cholet and the Loire.

        “Ha ha ha…” but the cynical laugh never left his lips.

        ‘Pardon Monsieur, I am sorry, I will go back.’

He raised a curious eye to see, from where it was; this unusual broken French accent was coming from. She had begun to turn her back when he noticed that they were all alone. A church bell rang out and struck eight. The lavorie and its clearing on the edge of the woods seemed all of a sudden to be very a small place when suddenly it’s deserted. She turned and faced him, and at once he realized she was dressed, not for the fields or for washing, but for considerable traveling.

         “I though it would be all right to explore along here today as a man from the hotel last night has told us of the vines of this small region and how underrated they are.”      

        ‘Except that is, those who might not want other people to know for the better.’ Said Natte’.  ‘And who is this man who speaks so knowledgably of the wine?’

       “I know not who he is, but I understood why he said such things. The Jacques’s have many loyal friends I believe, that I know. They all know that they are a gifted people to have available to them such coveted treasures as these. I have come to see for myself. I would like to introduce myself. I am from far away. I am English. How do you do!”

          ‘Bon jour Mademoiselle Anglaise, je suit Nathaniel Jacques.’ 

Her heart leaped and blood filled her face and turned it bright red. A silence stood between them as the Earths rotation around the Sun suddenly stopped. In the stillness of the moment, thus was created, a feeling, which would last in her, for a thousand years.

         “Ah, err, ah-umm err.” She cleared her throat. “Bon jour, Monsuire Jacques --- Je suit --- a’ hem, je suit err, --- Naomi McClain.”

         ‘Good, ah good,’ said Natte’, ‘then you are just in time for breakfast.’ 

~

            ‘So that’s how they met. They married a year later in Cholet. The small town was taken over by the wedding and a band played as the procession left the tiny church. It was the wedding of the year in those parts. My French father had married my mother, an English Bride. It was positively unheard of in French Society, let alone in rural France. It even made the front-page news with a photograph, in the Loire Gazette. But y’know Bill, they wouldn’t have met at all, if it hadn’t been for that Victor Threllfall character on board the ship.

The story has it, that very morning, when they meeting at the lavorie; Naomi and her father should have been well on their way back to catch the Abstinence in Nantes. They were delayed by a telephone call from the local Gendarmerie to expect a special letter to be delivered by hand by the local Poste’, at the Hotel du Rene’, where they had stayed for the last week.

 Allez. Pour Ms M. McClain.

Maurice looked anxiously around for Naomi as he opened the sealed envelope. Naomi was impatient, she had gone to explore.

          “Were is she? Where has she gone,” he cursed. “How am I to read this? I don’t read French!

He pulled out the letter and unfolded the single velum page. He recognized the ships insignia and the MV Abstinence’s Captains name. It was written in English.

Dear Mr. McClain.

The ‘Abstinence’ has been impounded by French Customs Authorities. I am suspected of smuggling illegal contraband and therefore requiring extended search for verification. I have no knowledge of any certain release date or if the ship will become valid evidence in any court cases brought against myself, or my Company.

Many sincere apologies for the inconveniences. Please arrange for your alternative transportation to England.

Yours faithfully

Leonard B. Falks

Captain. MV Abstinence.

  Contraband! Aye you might say that? Mr.Threlfall, in his wisdom, had commissioned some of his products to be delivered and distributed to new customers in what was to be a new market for rare drinks. Ginger ‘Beer’ and Dandelion and Burdock soft drinks, is where his dreams lay, and in France and then Europe, and on to making his first fortune. Or so he would have it seen. Customs Officers were not thorough breeds of persons in those days, and when it comes to things finding their way in and out of foreign countries, they tended to have poor vision or have acquired sudden deafness provided it was lucratively advantageous to do so. A certain Victor Threllfall got cocky though, and amongst the consignments on the ‘Abstinence’ were quantities of Lancashire Whiskey. The ‘Travelers Association’ trips were a great cover for his illicit operations, as was the ‘Abstinence’ herself. Being deemed a ‘dry’ organization the Temperance Society had no idea of these activities, but as an upshot, they were to be eventually oh so acutely and completely embarrassed. But as I said, young Victor saw a fast buck to be made. He told his French ‘customers’ that ‘his’ whiskey was Scotch whiskey that they believed was made in Lanarkshire. He was making his own brew at the back of his Carbonated Drinks Factory in the village of Scronkey Pilling, near Preston. He had several illegal stills and had no licence to brew liquor. But, he copied the bottle labels from legal brewers so it would look like it was their Whiskey, if they were ever caught. I suppose if the French hadn’t found out that Lancashire was in England and that Lanarkshire was in Scotland, and to this day they wouldn’t have noticed as he confused them into pronouncing Lancashire Whiskey as ‘Lanarkshire Whiskey.’ So, Victor and his dreams went down the pan so to speak, after he was set-up after a tip off, from a disgruntled and knowing ‘Scottish customer living in France.’ He blew the whistle but informed French police discretely. The French Authorities worked together with British Customs and Excise and rumbled the whole lot of them. From Scronkey Pilling to the middle of France, English and French alike. The ships Captain got a reprimand as he was not in the pay from Victor Threllfalls back pocket, but the Temperance Society gave him the sack anyway. The image he portrayed for them was totally unacceptable and they needed to show a steel-willed, ruthless side to their natural pius nature. And they needed to get their ship back; which they did. Victor, however, got four years in a French jail and after he was released, it is said, he liked France so much, he married a local girl, and has lived there till his dying day, where he popped his clogs.’

  The wedding day, it was talked about for many years. Like I said, the entire town almost ground to a halt. Celebrations continued for the entire weekend and for some hardy revelers, the rest of that week. St Augustine’s Church had hardly seen the like. Maurice and Angela McClain invited many English friends and relatives to the LoireValley and they alone filled up all the few hotels rooms. Madam Jacques allowed to be opened for this special day, the small twisted iron gate, which leads down to the musty cave, where she and my father Philippe had placed some treasured wines from many years before. Part of the cave was in everyday use and provided storage for the oak barrels and its contents to mature in an ever steadily maintained temperature and humidity. Whilst all attention was focused on the wedding party ceremonial of opening the dark ancient bottles, Madam Jacques also invited Naomi’s mother to sample another of her secret specialties. Taking her to one side she placed a small package in her hand and mouthed the words: A-THR-I-TIS, said no more and promptly returned to the festivities.

  Not everyone was celebrating this day however. The Mayor of Cholet, Ms Peltier was not a happy man. Outwardly he blessed this Anglo/French union as a unique and welcome ‘civic enhancement’. But just below the seedy smiling surface, the stranglehold on his long held, private dominance of the towns wine industry had taken a severe blow and was now under threat, from ‘would you believe, a nineteen year old English woman’.

Naomi and Natte’ were also to get a rare surprise from the young locals who frequented the lavorie on Thursday mornings. Together with their boy friends, husbands and brothers they playfully blindfolded the newly married pair. They led them along and down the short distance to the lavorie. They protested mildly to their captors but of course, it was of no avail.

          “Remove your shoes Ms and Mrs. Jacques.”

         ‘The water is too cold for our feet tonight. They were washed this morning anyway, sil vou plais,’ said Natte’ laughingly.

         “Tis of no consequence you newlyweds.”

They stood in the cold water and felt gentle trickles of flowing water as it caressed their ankles and toes. They stood back to back in the middle of the small pool. All around them they sensed something mischievous afoot. After several rustling noises amongst the suppressed giggles, a voice instructed them.

        “You can remove your blindfolds now.”

As their eyes slowly took in the scene, pin pricks of bright light shone from the surface of the pool: hundreds of them. They floated around and seemingly invisible, they began to take formation. Many of the floating candles were strung together and as the men gently pulled them in ever changing directions. The ‘lavorie girls’, who suddenly were joined by the church choristers, launched into a pre rehearsed song. Rose buds were scattered across the clearing from high in the trees. Settling gently on the warm heat of the evening air, some lightly lifting, others covering the path and touching the water as might a covering of lightest snow. The crescent August moon shone brightly into the clearing.

          “You may kiss your bride Nathaniel,” said the Priest. “God bless you both.”

So they kissed and a hundred hearts joined as one.

        “Naomi”, whispered Nathaniel, “heaven’ is not a place, it is a feeling.”

Tears of unashamed joy filled two hundred eyes as LoireValley witnessed a moment in time, when time itself, for Nathaniel and Naomi Jacques, had once again for them, stood exquisitely and perfectly still.

  In the year between their first meeting and the wedding day, my mother had been busy learning the business of French wine making. At home in Lancashire she was fully conversed in wine merchandising thanks to her highly skilled family mentors. However, she left the familiar opulence of life in the cozy spacious surroundings of Haverborn House and went to live in Cholet with Nathaniel and his mother. She spent some time traveling between the two onboard the Abstinence and there in her single cabin, she formulated her revolutionary business plans. The Suffragette movement had won its way at long last and the momentous battle for a women’s right to a vote was now on the Government’s statute book. Her meetings with the radical ladies of their time had left her in no doubt about how women would now change the men’s ‘old ways’ forever, and McClain’s Wine Merchants Company Limited Est. 1875, with Nathaniel’s wine and her new world vision, would be at the cutting edge of this emancipation. Her Father began to import the quite superb Champigny Red Wine for his traditional market and straight away it outsold all his competitors brands. There was no need for advertising, word of mouth and a mystical exclusivity saw to that. But Naomi also had her dreams to fulfill, and so did the young women of the towns and villages of the northwest too. Whilst a dignified effort was made to enjoy men’s alcoholic tipple, women needed something that they could call their own and enjoy drinking it at not an unreasonable expense, and Naomi --- through The Jacques Winery Of The Loire Limited Est. 1920 --- would supply it to them. Dry Sparkling Wine: wine that is fermented twice in its own bottle is made in the region of Champagne where the Department’s capitol is Epernay in North Eastern France. It was a world famous drink in its own right even then Bill, and belonged almost exclusively to an elitist and gentrified, class ridden English clientele. But Naomi would market her version, available in smaller green bottles with an attractive elegant label and be easily affordable, which would be available to all, particularly, to women and, here it is Bill, she would call it, BABYCHAM.

  I hadn’t been born yet and my turn came in 1922, a year after the wedding. I’m Sorry Bill,’ said Father Jacques, ‘I’ve never told this next part to anyone. More tea? Ahem, forgive me! You see, my mother and father were blissfully happy and everyone was thrilled at my imminent arrival. But, also Bill, there is a but, and it is a big but.’ He wiped huge tears from his eyes. ‘On the day that I was born, in the morning of 22 June 1922 my dad had been barred from the house and was only to be readmitted when the time was happily appropriate. He spent sometime attending to routine matters with the barrels down in the cave, which could easily be suspended when eventually he was summons to perform his first fatherly duties to me as a newborn. When I was born that day I gave my mother an easy reception, or so I’m told. My exited grandmother went to the cave to collect the new father and announce the wonderful news. There was no sound from the cave after she had called. She called again as she entered the candle lit gloom. Further down past the locked wrought iron gate a vague apparition came into view. My father was sitting upright on the hardened clay floor with his back rested against an oak barrel. He had a slight smile on his face and his eyes were closed. He never moved a muscle as my grandmother’s face changed gradually from curiosity to fear and then into dread.

Son? she said. Son?

She knew before she touched him.

The scream from the cave was something that no living Christian soul should ever in their lives have to hear, and my mother heard it; Nathaniel Jacques, my father, was dead.

  The funeral was even bigger than the wedding. The entire LoireValley was there. It rained every day and night for a month after he was buried. The entire communities of mid Lancashire grieved together with their French cousins. It brought the whole cultures as near enough together as it was ever possible to do so. Members of Parliament from both sides of the channel joined local government officials. The tragedy cut unbelievably deep, but to this day it formed a unique bonding of people from both our communities. Out of adversity can always come something good, and so it was to be. I came to Lancashire to live with my mother and…my twin brother. --- Yes Bill --- whilst my grandmother was down in the cave with my father, my mother that day performed another small miracle, within twenty minutes of each other, she had given birth to my brother Edwin. We were unexpected twins.

  My mother saw her dreams come true in more ways than one. The new merchandising techniques worked slowly at first and The McClain Empire’s yearly turnover and profits improved each year and, she now had two healthy bouncing baby boys to care for and she loved it, being a doting mother to them. But father was growing old and often he had to take time away from his work as sick leave. Mother too had shown a distinct improvement in her health since she enjoyed the relief given from Madam’s Jacques ‘gift’ of Aspirin in tablet form, taken three times daily with plenty of water. Again, age was a cursed enemy.

My mother had been the a leading light in the early women’s right’s movements and she used to say;

      “Give me the time and I will to change the world for better! But, first I need to find a reliable baby sitter.”

So, cutting a long story to the short, my Grandfather sold the business to a National Wine Merchant’s, or so it eventually became. They took the ‘names’ they had acquired from McClain’s and promptly destroyed the images of them and removed them from the public’s sight and minds. The products however remained and they manifested themselves years later as ‘new’ brands in a chain of new types of drinking places were women would be welcome. They where known as ‘Wine Emporium’s’ and they could be found on most major northern towns High Streets where they still run to this very day. You’ve heard of them Bill, the man who bought out McClain’s was Walter Yates. He called them Yates’s Wine Lodge’s.

Meanwhile the Peltier’s of Cholet acquired the Jacques property in 1948. Whereupon my brother held the public shares of our grandmother in the French stock market and was the Managing Director of the company founded by our mother, until he retired in 1987. He lives in the old house of our grandmother at the end of Rue de la Jacques, as they named the path leading to the lavorie and on to my grandmother’s house where we were born.  It still has no running water. You, yes you Bill, aught to go there and visit my dear twin brother in Cholet, he is the perfect French host. I will make arrangements for you. Yes, he will love your company and he has many friends. You will not want to leave once you have been there. Ho…ho…ho….!

  My mother saw Edwin and I off to fight the war in 1943. We were twenty-one. After my discharge, I applied for the Church of England Clergy and was immediately accepted for training. I was given my first chance to shine here, as Rector at St Johns. My mother saw me ordained in January 1946 and I became the Parish of St John’s youngest ever Priest. She died three months later; a week after my grandmother had died. Edwin had chosen to live with my grandmother in Cholet and we buried them both in the specially consecrated grave of her beloved son, and husband, my father Nathaniel. When you go to France you will easily find it behind the Celtic cross of the lavorie in Rue de la Jacques in Cholet. My mother and grandmother had both died in the same year. Bill? My mother? She never remarried - she was forty-five years old - and I believe she died of a broken heart.’