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We’d get over it somehow though, I would have assured him of that. We were going to fight back. And we were going to start by robbing the robbers. To recompense my boy for his gimcrack education, I’ve invested in a small business, to be run by him, in which he’ll nip back and forth across the English Channel, bringing back tax-free hand-rolling tobacco, which he’ll sell on privately around the council estate where he lives, thus depriving the government of revenue. I would also have liked to tell him how excited I was at that moment, because this was my boy’s first tobacco run, and the first time he’d been abroad on his own.
Fortunately, he went with his mother’s blessing. His mother’s mother, however, was anxious; she travelled 20 miles to the ferry terminal to see him off, chain-smoking all the way. His mother’s mother’s mother, on the other hand, was so pleased about her great-grandson’s new career as an international businessman that she contributed a £5 note and a St Christopher medallion, costing £7.99, ordered from the catalogue.
But I decided against telling the fat man on the bench any of this, in case he was one of a rapidly diminishing number of people who persist in regarding the law of the land as sacrosanct. And anyway this genial gentleman wanted to tell me about himself and his interesting life. He was in a ship himself only the other day, as a matter of fact, he told me. He was transporting a pair of Hereford bulls across to the Scilly Isles from the mainland by lorry.
But at the ferry port on St Mary’s, the authorities wouldn’t let him on to the island unless he surrendered his clasp knife. ‘I always carry a knife,’ he said. ‘I have to. I’m a farmer.’ To prove it he whipped out a five-inch, brass-inlaid clasp knife. The handle was smooth with wear. He opened the blade, flourished it — then remembered where he was, snapped it shut and slid it back in his trouser pocket with one smooth, well-practised motion.
I looked at him. You could almost tell from the way he wore his leather belt, and how essential it was, that this John Bull-like figure was nothing other than a West Country farmer. You could even have hazarded a guess that Hereford bulls were somewhere in the equation. And even supposing that this man had somehow been converted to Islam and was intent on committing an act of terror, what was he going to do on St Mary’s? Release his bulls on the quayside and blow himself up in the Spar shop?
Incredibly, the security officials on St Mary’s convened a meeting, he said, which lasted 50 minutes, after which they reluctantly returned the knife and permitted him and his bulls to proceed. He rounded off the amazing tale by cursing them, to which I added an amen.
Then a door slammed open and foot passengers emerged, the first ones coming through as if they were finishing strongly in a walking race. There were no customs officers to negotiate. The finishing line was a man slumped in a booth dismissing passports with the flap of a hand. My boy came in about sixth. I felt immense pride at the handsome, dark-eyed, broad-shouldered lad that came breezing past the passport officer jauntily swinging his holdall. But when I stepped forward and introduced the fat man as a customs officer who would like to have a word with him for a moment, his jauntiness turned to panic for a split-second, until cheerfulness and love gave me away.
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