Grrrr-‘ah…ma

Could you use this as an imagining room? I could use it.

What would I play on the record player?  Would I be taken back to the 1940’s, bombing overhead, Nottingham’s industry a useful target for Germany’s Luftwaffe. Outside, the unlit Mansfield Rd and on it my shop doorway which provides shelter for Rose the prostitute’s ten minute or less love affairs. Some-times a black marketeer uses it when exchanging meat for stockings, their trades favour darkness and darkness will be come their thoughts, memories, futures.

If you stand with your back to my shop door and look directly across the road you can often see train smoke and hear the rumble of the engine and carriages, they cannot be seen as they have already entered the tunnel which take the passengers and goods to the East Coast routes. Turn left and it is uphill, I walk this way every evening to The Lincoln Poacher Pub, its where I exchange items I purchase during the day, for beer, whisky, food. Sometimes people are so desperate they will trade petrol coupons for a material desire, these are my gold mine, ten gallons worth of coupons for one gold sovereign. There are many of them hidden away, the war has along way to go until the final shot is fired, the last man killed, the days of reckoning which will never end, and when the end comes I will expect to have two thousand of the gold tokens, just think, two thousand of them, I quickly earned the price of my shop, all from the war, we profit from this madness, and the guilt will turn many insane from the greed.

Two hundred years ago the condemned were executed on the gallows which stood on the crossroads only 600 yards away. When they came for me, and charged me, and found me guilty, and sentenced me, and hung me, I thought of the gallows at the top of the hill, the Shipstones bitter I drank in the ‘Poacher’  – they called me Black Marketeer – I looked at the Judge as he put on his black cap and thought of his clerk swapping sovereigns for petrol coupons. Here I am in my shop, looking at the junk, only two feet away from two thousand bright golden coins. I have been waiting for seventy years and no one sees me.

Grammar? Who cares? Story? Everyone cares…….