Rebirth: A work of fiction by Des Molloy

Chapter 1

“Ayup Silverman!” the tall dark young man called out, in an oddly faux Yorkshire accent.  He pushed open the green-painted, wooden door, which acted as a gate into the tidy back yard.  A white-haired figure knelt on a small piece of old carpet at the edge of a beautifully manicured vegetable garden.  The elderly man started a little, then rose with the aid of a handily placed garden fork and brushed the dirt off his hands with a rag pulled from the side pocket of his light brown dust coat … a slightly querulous look passed across his visage.

“Oh my word, oh my word!  Tha’s come ‘ome at last!  Oh my word!  What tha doing sneaking along in through t’ginnel lad?”   The elderly man stretched and arched his back before he drew to his full height, average though it was.   His wizened face was flushed red and now he squinted at the newcomer.  His breath was short and wheezy.  “By Lord … hangin upside down oer’ there for ten years ‘as stretched thi lad!  Quick son, gi’ me a hug before Dot sees and starts telling all tha’ we’re a couple of nancy boys!”

Like a pair of wrestlers, the ill-matched couple throw themselves together in what looks like a bone-crushing hug.  They’re squeezing like there is no tomorrow.  In a slow dance they rock and twist before finally breaking apart.  Tears are flowing down the cheeks of both men.  The taller figure holds onto the older man’s coat sleeve like a small child claiming ownership of a special friend.

After wiping their faces with the rag, the older man calls out, “Dot girl! Get out here, I’ve got summat for thee!

A full minute passes before a sprightly woman bustles through the back door.  “I were ont’ …”  Her mouth drops open and she stops momentarily before she rushes forward with a speed that belies her obvious age.  “Oh my, oh my … it’s Darkie’s boy … oh dear … Darkie’s boy!”  

Her voice has become quavery but she lessens not her speed.  Her endeavour is obvious, her target large, the distance small, the steps sped down in a trice.  She seems speechless.  She pulls his hand free from her husband’s coat sleeve and somehow finds his other hand and hauls back, looking up into his open brown face.  Her husband, the one addressed as Silverman, reclaims his share of the prize by pulling away one of the bony hands tightly clasping the bare skin of this tall young man.  He links with his wife and they fan out like they’re about to start a ring-a-ring-a-roses game.  The young man starts to laugh, a deep rumbling happy sound that can’t be stopped.  Soon all three are laughing and laughing, their body parts shaking uninhibitedly, their eyes opening and closing, seeming to squirt salty tears down their disparate cheeks.

Between the snorts and paroxysms of laughter, the big young man manages to gasp, “I’ve never heard you laugh, Mrs Silverman … nor you Silverman!”  His nose is running and tears are still running down his face.

The elderly couple look at each other and pause for a moment before in almost perfect unison they proclaim, “Well we’ve heard you laugh, lad!”  

“You were always laughing as a young‘n,” continues on the short and wiry, elderly woman.  They all laugh again, now more controlled but if anything, even more joyously.  Words aren’t needed yet.  It is still time to just laugh and grin and grin and grin some more and smile and cry.  Dorothy looks to her husband and sees his tears of support.  She is overwhelmed inside with pride for those tears.  After 50 years she is still surprised that she can still love so strongly.

A peel of thunder interrupts the moment and almost instantly, drops of rain as big as the old threepenny bits, start to cover the dusty paving and make patterns on the old man’s brown coat.  With a gasp of amazement, and a girlish squeal, Dorothy drops the calloused hand of her life-mate and simultaneously releases the large soft warm paw of Darkie’s boy, James.  She scampers across to the back steps and like a tap dancer, rapidly ascends the twelve steps, one at a time, with a staccato clacking of her low heels.

Breathlessly tumbling into the small kitchen she pulls out two wooden chairs from the rectangular table, which abuts the wall.  So obviously a room for two, it is now full and loud with happiness.  

“Oh Flower, giz a gander at thissen, tha big lug!”  Dorothy steps back as if to admire a new fridge.  She then laughs and bursts into a made up song with a constant repetitious refrain of “Jimmy’s coming home, Jimmy’s’ coming home … ”.  With her stick-thin body swaying to her own music and joy, she holds out her pinny with both hands and swirls around and around.

“Stop faffing around, woman, get the tea on, the lad’ll be gaggin after coming all t’way from New Zealand and we’ve got talk to have!”

And for two hours James Knight talked and answered their questions.   More than once Dorothy Boycott butted in with, “Oh lad, tha don’t sound like a Tyke.  Tha do talk so funny!  And tha shouldn’t be calling me Mrs Silverman, that was then.  Tha’s a big lad now!”  

It had been in his tiniest years when young James had spawned the name Silverman for what was, in real terms, his grandfather, even if it wasn’t a result of nature’s progression.  Bertie Boycott had first been ‘the silfa man’ because of his shock of silver-white hair, with that naming slowly just evolving into Silverman and Mrs Silverman for Dorothy Boycott.  In their quiet moments the Boycotts admitted to a tiny disappointment of not being a Pops or Nan although they did feel special knowing that this naming was from the eagerly developing four-year-old James.

It was oddly cathartic for James, recounting how as a weeping 12-year-old, he had been swept away from the tiny Yorkshire town of Cleckheaton, the only place he’d known, the moment the funeral of his mother, father and two younger sisters had taken place.  They had been killed in a tragic house fire, with James only being saved by jumping out of the first floor window while the others were overcome with smoke and then the inferno.   James had landed in the garden and on other occasions his concussion and deeply cut head would have been notable.  At the time it was said that he’d been miraculously uninjured.  He had been left with just a small scar to his head, nearly lost in the hairline of his temple.  Over the years, the hardened tissue had become almost like a security blanket.  In times of stress or in reflective sad times he’d gently rub it unconsciously, a small physical link to his near-forgotten past.

His mother and father had been an odd couple he supposed.  His father with the birth-name of Peter, was Jamaican-born but Yorkshire-bred, a lad abandoned by his hopelessly inadequate parents when they returned to the West Indies while he had still been at school.  This had left him, a weedy swot of a boy to be a Ward of the State for the remaining years before he reached maturity.  It was in this unsettled period that he had been brought into contact with Bertie and Dorothy Boycott.  They’d been a young childless couple, who took the confused and disturbed Peter in as a foster child in the early 1970’s when he was fourteen.  Bertie Boycott had been a design engineer and welder with a gentle practical touch, but no matter what he showed the lad, it never sank in unless it was related to nature.  He seemed clumsy and not understanding of technical things, yet once he started to dissect things in biology classes, he was skilled and precise, an artist his tutors called him.  Dorothy was an industrial sewer of handbags and belts.  Grounded folk, they gave good care and Peter thrived in their simple but loving environment.  An unheralded success, they expected and received no kudos.  When told at Peter’s 21st birthday party, by his crusty old case-manager, “You’ve done a fine job with Peter” they both chimed in as though rehearsed “It’s na been a job, lass!”

And so the abandoned Peter Knight, in time became Mr Knight the surgeon, a man of standing and substance, yet he never lost his common touch nor respect and affection for his foster parents.  A community man, loved by all, he was known as the Dark Knight to many, and by his closest friends, simply as Darkie.  And when in time, into his life came Sandra Mulvey, a strapping Kiwi girl, who’d left her homeland to do her OE … her Overseas Experience, it was natural that he’d choose to return to what he saw as his roots, later buying the house on the corner of Hoyle Street and Pococks Lane in Cleckheaton.  Once a grocer’s store, the three-storey brick place was only four doors up the lane from the Boycotts.  He’d turned up with the jovial and gregarious Sandra, obviously bursting with happiness.  Unashamedly smitten, he was brim-full with pride when he introduced her to his foster parents, the only real carers he’d known.  He was a latent family man who’d been mainly deprived of that nest with siblings.  He now sensed his chance to right that wrong.

They made a striking couple, the gentle and dapper Darkie with his near shiny, black skin and the sporty, wholesome Sandra, just on six foot tall with long golden locks and the sun’s kiss-mark freckles on the firm, strong arms and legs that she liked to expose in all weathers.  She wasn’t pale like her Irish forebears, she was ruddy, well fed and loud.  She’d been a top provincial netball player in her homeland but had also excelled at all sports in school including swimming and rowing.  Darkie always lovingly described her as a goddess.  

“The Good Lord got it right when he made this one!  Perfection.”  He was further amazed, by her liking, and being good at cricket … “a right little Freddie Truman.”  Many a game was played up and down the ginnel behind the houses.  “A one-way match made in heaven!”  The doting Darkie spilled trite phrases like this and more from his lips every day.  “I won the pools without even taking a ticket!” he’d often exclaim and laughingly chase her around their small house.  “A gift from heaven … one that I accept … with pleasure!”

There had been visits home to New Zealand but there was never talk of a return.  “It may be the land of milk and honey” Darkie would say “but I’m a Tyke and we’re honour-bound to make a lot of little Tykes too!”  

“Just a failed Bantu warrior, is all you are … not a real Yorkshireman!” Sandra would bait him with.  “You might have the connections, but you don’t have the complexion!”  

There was always this sort of quick and often witty banter between them.  They’d seemed overwhelming, breathlessly happy and in time, the little Yorkshire Tykes did start to make their appearance, Sandra or Sandy as she was almost always known as, being a natural ‘Earth Mother’.  In 1988 James was born – named after Captain James Cooke to share a Yorkshire link with New Zealand and in 1990 Emily followed, then in 1994 Charlotte filled their small house with the screams of a needy third-born.  The street wondered if other Bronte’s would follow, knowing of Sandy’s love for the iconic Thornton family.  It was not to be.  

As a small child James would follow his dad everywhere and his dad Peter encouraged his first born, loving the unconditional adoration.   James mimicked his every move … his way of walking and even his way of talking - in the crossed up West Indian Yorkshire way of his father.  It was a street joke that it wouldn’t be long before young James would be following him into theatre and passing over the instruments.

The night their little cosy world was destroyed later became one of infamy when it was found that a lighted cigarette seemed to have been pushed through the letter slot in the front door during the hours of deep sleep.  A sad factor resulting in intensifying the conflagration was that Darkie had bought a new stove-top cooker and a microwave that day.  The polystyrene and polythene packaging detritus was stacked along the hall waiting for the chance on Sunday to take it all to the refuse transfer station down in the town.  Within seconds the pungent black smoke and licking red flames were charging up the stairs looking for their sleeping prey.  With a family maxim of always having their bedroom doors open, the family never had a hope, probably dying of smoke inhalation before the flames reached them.  

But young James had recently moved into his own room, which looked out over the back garden and neighbouring yards.  He made this his own little refuge away from his often-demanding younger sisters.  He’d been granted immunity from the open-door rule and his room was a no-go place unless invited and on the night of the fire James had gone to his room to listen to music and had shut the door behind him to show he was not to be disturbed.  This was a privilege that had been extended to him to acknowledge that having reached double figures, he was on the cusp of adolescence.  Many hours later asleep with his headphones on, a smoke-induced tickle made him cough and awaken.  Smoke was wafting up towards him from under his door.  

“Never, never open a door if a fire is on the other side … and always have a way out!” the fire service personnel had told them at school earlier in the year when they’d visited with all their engines and trucks … giving the littl’uns rides all morning.   James had discussed this with his parents.  They’d promised him a rope ladder from his new room, which he’d be able to throw out in times of trouble.  They’d laughed about it, with his mum teasing him in a mock-stern manner about not using it to let all his girlfriends in with.  They’d been still making one with the help of Bertie Boycott.  It was never to be finished.

Sandra’s kin came from New Zealand for the funeral and in the absence of other legal family, they took the stunned young James home with them.  The Boycotts would have gladly taken him in, just as they had had his father, but they weren’t asked and never had the confidence to step forward.  “Perhaps it is for the best” they sadly muttered at the time.   And now more than a long decade later, this large, mature man sat in their kitchen momentarily struggling for words

“It’s been OK, it’s been a good ten years, I suppose.  I’ve had a lot of good things happen.  They’re all really nice people and I’ve got nice cousins.  It’s a beautiful place that I love a lot … but I’ve …” and here he hesitated perhaps knowing it would sound strange,  “… missed home.  I’ve never quite known how to be one of them”

“Tha’s alreet lad.  Y’can take the Tyke out of Yorkshire, but y’canna take the Yorkshire out of the Tyke.  I’m sorry we weren’t up to much writing but we’ll soon make thee right as rain.”  Another tear threatened to run down the deeply lined face of Bertie Boycott.

“D’ya want to see the grotto?”

Bertie felt the moment needed lightening and he knew this big, almost-Kiwi lad had once been enthralled by the long shed that took up all of one side of the back yard.  A special place of mystery and maleness, it had promised so much in the long-back past … when he’d still been a Tyke.

“I thought you’d never ask?  How’s Thunderguts?

“So you remember summat yr past then?  She’s great.  As good as ever and when it suits, we’ll do a ride o’er the old test loop.  Come on then, we’ll go explore while Dot makes us a bap.”

James laughed that deep, throaty rumble again as he entered the grotto, greeted as he was by evocative sights of a half-forgotten memory.  The most striking memory had been of all the signs and motorcycling memorabilia.  Here they all were, almost as large as he remembered from his childhood.  Panther Motorcycles, Cleckheaton proclaimed one.  A faded advertisement from the 1930’s showed a long, lean motorcycle beneath a slogan of Grace and Speed and a spotted Panther on the prowl.  A stylised Phelon and Moore insignia two metres square took up a large portion of a windowless section of wall. The Perfected Motorcycle was the strap-line below the bold P & M.  Every spare bit of space held posters and banners and advertising for P&M and Panther Motorcycles.  A full-sized, stuffed Panther stood near the back of the long shed, looking to guard a trio of dust-cover clad motorcycles.  

Between the small door they’d entered and the bikes at the far end, stood machinery of all types.  None of it new, all industrial size and so obviously well-oiled and maintained.  The faint smell of gear-cutting oil tinged the air.  The smile hadn’t left James’s face as he looked at the lathes, big and small, the milling machine, the shaper, the power hacksaw, the drill presses and the myriad of small tools and sturdy vices.  There were bending and rolling tools and a big chalk board with long-hand calculations and oil-change reminders on it.  There were screw pitch charts and exploded diagrams of gearboxes and engines.  Every corner had something tucked into it. It was tidy but seemingly chaotic.  James spotted a plasma cutter peeping out from behind some of the welding plants.  This was a fully equipped engineering workshop in a suburban backyard.

“You know this is my world now, too?” said James a little awkwardly.

“What tha mean?”

“I’ve been doing Industrial Design at university in New Zealand and have transferred to Bradford, to complete their Automotive Design course for my Masters.”  He paused.  “I love all your old machinery.  We usually use all new computerised stuff and my speciality is CAD, designing items that can be made on fully automated combination machinery like 3D milling machines, but I learnt on the farm using an old Myford Lathe and drill-mill … and I’m OK on both gas and electric welding, TIG and MIG.”  

Again he paused, biting one side of his lower lip, thinking momentarily that he mustn’t come across as a big head.  There was so much that he wanted to tell Bertie and so much he wanted to ask … but the time was not yet right.

“I love your big sign there though – Yorkshire’s Finest motorcycles … there was only one other wasn’t there? “  

“Eeh by gum, your’e a surprise, Jimmy boy!  Aye, there were only the Shipley-made Scotts.  They were all stink-wheels … two strokes, not the same at all.  There’re those who like’em though … jus not me nor Dot.  When I came along she were riding out, wi’ a lad on a Scott.  She soon saw that the honest muscle of a Cleckheaton-made Panther was matched by the reliability of the rider and his honest muscle” and he paused for a second after giving an almost salacious wink, “… and as you young’uns are want to say … the rest is history.”

James was pensive, just for a moment, he still was not sure quite how much to tell Bertie.  He didn’t want to be seen to be babbling, but he was keen to show that like his dad before him, he wanted to be spending time in the grotto.  He too wanted to be accepted into this nice old man’s world.   Almost like a circus barker, Bertie stepped forward and with a flourish pulled off the covers from the three bikes.  James immediately found his eyes drawn to the furthest away bike, the most modern and easily the largest and most imposing, with its distinctive Avon handlebar fairing and sleek steel Rodark panniers.  He chortled and quietly announced, “Gidday, old fella.  I’m back!”  Only after he had taken in every almost-forgotten detail of the silver-tanked beauty, did James cast his eyes over the other two that he knew to have been part of Bertie’s life for more than 50 years.

Nearest the door and obviously the most used bike in the shed was a low and long bike with girder forks on the front end and a worn sprung saddle sitting above an unsprung rear.  It looked purposeful and eager.  Even to James’ untrained eyes it looked splendid … lithe and nimble, yet almost regal looking with a seemingly enormous flat-glassed headlight standing high to dominate the frontal view.  Silverman confirmed it as a 1935 600cc Model 100.  It was hard to determine if the colour on the tank was a dark green or a faded black.  A dirty cream contrasting panel had a scratched and faded script that boldly proclaimed Panther.  You could feel the tens of thousands of miles, the history of 75 years of commuting, holidaying and pure self-pleasure.  

Sitting between the two siblings was a smaller and even older, more fragile looking bike, but this one looked as though it had been wheeled into the shed straight from a showroom of long ago.  In contrast to the other two that openly declared their age with a patina of use, this one shone in the artificial light.  The shiny, nickel-plated handlebars and headlight rim complemented a beautifully shiny two-toned green tank that had a stalking panther figure on it.  A spindly italic script had the word Panthette curved over the image and a simple but bold P & M alongside.  A tiny vee-twin engine mounted crossways in the frame like a modern Moto Guzzi made it unlike any other Panther ever made.

“Not a real Panther, a right show pony, she were a bought-in design of that bloody Granville Bradshaw … too clever by half that’n.  Only two others in t’world that run!  That doesn’t say much for how good they were, does it … tha almost nowt survive!”  Bertie noted, before laughing and sitting down on a stool in front of the trio of Cleckheaton’s products.

Contrarily, he then started extolling the virtues of the little masterpiece.   “Exquisite detailing, a magic little unit-construction, vee-twin motor … way back in 1926.  Decades before its time!  Only 250cc mind, so isn’t a stump puller.”

James let him continue on explaining about all three bikes, just enjoying the specialness of the moment.  He felt so included … so part of it that he could feel a watering gathering momentum around his eyes.  “I really am home!” he thought and squatted down alongside his elderly shed guide before speaking.

“I’ve read all I could find on P&M and their Panther motorcycles.  They produced their first motorbikes in 1904, branding them as P & Ms until 1923 when they named the bikes Panther, continuing to do so until the finish of production in February 1966.  I never saw one in New Zealand but do know they are there.  You worked for them didn’t you?”

“Aye lad, only for three years but they were the best three working years of my life I reckon.  I were termed right ‘and man to Ken Billings, gaffer in the experimental shop.  I was to do all the fabrication and testing of new ideas.  It were good times, even though we knew summat was up, being in receivership in’all.  We all still felt we could’ve traded out if they’d given us a chance to make a new bike to sell.  We ‘ad good ideas and could have done it, but the bean counters and lending banks didn’t see us as real industry, so we were sold off to Birketts to make valves and the like for the North Sea oil boom.  Good times and sad times they were!  Some of this in ‘ere were from t’closing auction, the signs and banners just scavenged … and I’m not tellin about ‘er” Bertie said with a nod towards the stuffed Panther.  “How she got ‘ere is one of life’s mysteries!

“We called her Penelope.  Sometimes Lady Penelope like the gel in the Thunderbirds and other times just the big, old, mangy, moth-eaten cat.  Occasionally a rum’n would put a half-eaten plate of meat in front of her like it were ‘er feed.  Good days!”

He walked over and gave her a fond pat.

“At the end, when they weren’t letting us play wi’ new things, I helped wi’ the making of the bikes on the line.  I made y’dad’s Thunderguts!”

Bertie went on to explain, how when they first had Darkie with them, they got him a job after school so he could get a good work ethic, save some money and be a little independent in his choices of what he wanted to buy as clothes and music cassette tapes and the like.  He took to it like a duck to water and saving money and managing it, was something he quickly became good at.  Later when it was evident that he was going away to Medical School, Bertie had told him, “Tha’ll need wheels … strong, reliable wheels or we’ll never see thee.  I’ll get thee a good’un and Dot n’ I will pay half, if thee can manage t’other!”

And so he did, finding only a few streets away, one of the very last bikes to come out of the Commercial Street factory.  Immediately Bertie had checked the inside of the swinging arm to see if it were one of the ones he’d stamped BB, to show he’d put it together.  It were, and this made him very proud … to be helping their lad out with a Yorkshire-made motorcycle that he himself had mainly assembled.  

“I allus hid my BB where the production inspector wouldn’t see it, as we were’na meant to put our names on them.  Here, feel your hand under tha”

Back in the 1970s, young Darkie had thought the bike old-fashioned and hardly something a 19 year old on the brink of adulthood would ride.  But he was very respectful and proud of his foster-dad’s pride in things Yorkshire, and thought it would maybe do until he could afford a faster, better, more sexy, Italian bike, possibly a Moto Morini, or a Ducati – something that would turn the heads of the pretty girls he felt he was sure to encounter now he was going off to the ‘big smoke’.  He soon found however that he was quite enamoured with his sturdy, stolid Cleckheaton thumper, with its barely-adequate, 27 horse-power, long-stroke 650 cc engine.  Slow and ponderous maybe, but the booming thud of the exhaust had character and personality.  Dorothy would have liked Darkie to name the bike after a classical heroine like Boadicea but Thunderguts it became.  Darkie knew he was unusual, being a dark-skinned rider of a 20-year-old bike.  “Unique!  That’s what you are,” he’d say to himself, “Nothing wrong with that.”  

And so it was that Thunderguts and the Dark Knight became part of local folk-lore.  A little black man, always coming and going, on a part of their recent past’s history, struck a chord with the West Yorkshire folk and they feted him.  When he finished his first year at Medical School, the Cleckheaton Age and the Spenborough Argus both featured him with captioned photographs and from that point on, a week wouldn’t go by without someone asking “How’s Thunderguts?”  or telling him what a ‘goodun’ she was.  Young and old alike, seemed to see this working relic, with its silver and chrome petrol tank, as somehow being part of what made being a Tyke, something to be proud of.  It wasn’t showy or flash, like’d been spat out in their thousands in the industrial Midlands or by the namby-pamby southerners in London.  This wasn’t a toy bike for playing on.  This were a real working bike.  A working-man’s bike.  She’d been proudly made in Yorkshire by Tykes - real men and women, not machines.  There was pride too … that it had been hard to get a Panther. You had to want one.  You could only buy them from the factory or from one shop in London.  There weren’t High Street shops everywhere selling them.  It was almost like you’d been chosen, to choose one.  You were special and the bike were special.  You both were family.

Through their student years Darkie and Thunderguts were inseparable.   They faced each day together and close observers would have noted the talking, the cajoling and the praising that gave rise to an unbreakable bond.  Once the ownership had passed a couple of memorable birthdays Darkie knew that he’d not ever be parted from this loyal and faithful servant … not ever.   There had even been a wistful adventure one summer, where they slowly and happily rode all the way down to Gibraltar … “to look at the land of my far distant forebears” he had announced before trepidatiously leaving the fens and all he’d ever known.  Three weeks later they’d parked where Thunderguts could also share in the moment, and they looked across to Africa.  “You’ve done well old fella!  It’s tempting but I think I’d better get you home to the grotto.  It’s more my place than yours over there!”  And so it was another three weeks of wandering across Spain, Portugal, France and England before they were home to the welcoming arms of Bertie and Dot.

The first fourteen years of Darkie’s life might have been tough but the following twenty, were, to use a word he loved … sublime.  It was like there was a supreme masterplan and all he had to do was turn up.  He was extremely contented. He loved his work, knowing that his skill with the scalpel was doing good, every day.  “I’m better than a missionary … save more souls”, he’d often relate to his underlings who would feign boredom and disinterest, whilst really being enthralled by his skill and ability.  And even more than his work life, he loved his home life.  He loved his little family and their happy lives.  He loved his foster parents and he still loved his Thunderguts, even though the bike now mainly rested in the grotto, only coming out for special occasions.  He’d settled into a comfy routine and embraced the thought of the future.  Now was great and what must be ahead, will be even greater, he always thought.

Monday night, every week became was what he called ‘club’ night.  This was his only time away from the family, but one he liked to think would become a family tradition, forever.  He’d toddle up to the lane to the grotto at 7.30 to meet in the man-cave with a small group of local Panther owners.  They’d fiddle and fettle and chat, reminisce and plan rides and other things.  They had the old clocking-in time clock, which had been at the left side of the main door into the machine shop of Phelon and Moore, for more than 30 years.  As a fun thing to do, they’d check in each Monday night, chipping in a £1 coin and at their Christmas club night there would be a presentation hamper to the person who had been the best attendee for the year.   For four years in row, this was won by Darkie.  He had no real mechanical skills and would always defer to others when it came to actually doing the work.  “Of course I have to keep my hands pristine!” he’d say and laugh his big West Indian laugh.  The others called him their mascot, and loved the joy and supportive pride that he brought to the group.  There was reliably, a plate of Sandra’s freshly baked Anzac biscuits to finish the night with … washed down with a cup of tea.  The nights always oozed a sense of camaraderie and men’s contentment at having a secure place of belonging.  It was always gone 10.30 before the night rang to “Tarra then!” and the grotto’s door locked shut.

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