Blackie

Finding love and happiness with a junkyard angel in Kent (or Blackie’s farm and scrapyard)

Blackie Cohen was a happy man, for he had achieved the family trappings, the physical surroundings and the lifestyle which suited him perfectly. He only half-understood his great fortune, yet it was as if he had deliberately modelled himself and his situation on a detailed image in his mind of how his life could and should be. This story is that picture in words -- not Blackie’s words, for Blackie was never much of a writer -- but nevertheless a picture which he would recognise as portraying him and his life.

    The large crudely hand-painted sign at the entrance announced: “Blackie’s Farm and Breakers Yard”. Smaller writing underneath read: “Fruit + Veg/Spares + scrap bought and sold”. There followed a telephone and fax number, and an Internet address. 

    This last mention was a fiction, however. Inventing www.blackies.co.uk was an imaginative recent touch to the signboard, Blackie’s way of showing the world he was keeping up with the times. Or so some thought.

    In point of fact, he was not keeping up with the times at all, and nor did he care to. The fake Internet address was a deliberate irony lost on many who could not see past Blackie’s outward appearance, impressive though that was.

     He had been very handsome as a young man, if a bit of a spiv. The shock of curly black hair which had given him his nickname when still a small boy was now greying and no longer so glossy, and he had developed a belly. 

    But though over 50, he still had a considerable roguish charm. With his twinkling dark eyes and habitual half-a-week’s stubble, and his ready show of grinning teeth, he looked like a latter-day pirate or a well-preserved Keith Richards. 

    He was of only average height but stocky and seemed taller.

    Blackie liked to think of himself as a rebel, and in many ways he was. But he was above all a romantic. Fortunately he had the sense, relatively late in life, to team up with a woman who had both feet firmly on the ground.

    Cheryl, his common-law wife, was a key component of Blackie’ real-life picture of happiness. She was, to quote an early Bob Dylan song*, his junkyard angel.

    As a girl she had been what was then called an “early developer”: puberty had made her into a slutty little sex-bomb long before she and Blackie met in a noisy pub in Maidstone around 1983.

    By this time she was already a single mother with several unhappy affairs behind her, and life had started to harden her beguiling, elfin looks.

    Their backgrounds were different and thereby complementary, and yet they discovered they had much in common.

    Blackie had Jewish parents, and his earliest years had been in the East End of London, until the family moved when his father, now long dead, opened a second-hand furniture shop on the Old Kent Road. 

    His real name was Bernard but nobody used it. His mother and his older sister called him Bernie, but to everyone else he was always Blackie.

    He had been spoiled by his mother as only Jewish sons are, and showed no great aptitude in school or inclination to a trade or profession. It was assumed that he would work in his father’s furniture shop until such time as he could take it over. 

    But his father’s business faltered and then failed along with the old man’s health. Besides, working in that shop was a dreary enough prospect for anyone, let alone Blackie…

    He at first made some ignominious attempts to emulate a cousin in the second-hand car trade, until he was virtually run out of Warren Street by the dealers there. Then came a character-building stint as a roustabout on the North Sea oilrigs.

     Eventually Blackie found himself driving fruit-and-vegetable trucks to and from the market gardens and orchards of Kent, supplying London.

     His main recreation was beer with the boys and live rock’n’roll in the pubs, plus the odd motoring trip to Spain with some mates in a shared Jaguar for the sunshine and cheap wine. 

    Contrary to received wisdom about Jews, he liked his drink and had no qualms about frequenting gentile women. He had left religious orthodoxy behind with his barmitzvah around the age of 13.

    But he also knew there had to be more to life than a good time down the pub and two weeks of the year on the Costa Brava. Above all, he wanted “his own place”, “a house with some land”, he always used to say.

     Cheryl had mainly grown up in and around Dover, but she knew the Medway towns as well as the East Kent coast. 

    Her Dad had been a brickie of vaguely Irish descent, and he moved around the county for his work, leaving her Mum and her younger sisters for weeks at a time, while he lived in boarding houses and drank away most of his wages.

    Cheryl’s mother, who had been a great beauty in her youth and claimed to have gypsy blood, struggled hard to make ends meet. 

    When the children were old enough, she took them on hop-picking trips, during which her father would sometimes meet up with them, in Wrotham or Maidstone or Sevenoaks. That was the nearest they got to a vacation.

    In later life, Cheryl came to suspect her mother had been an occasional prostitute too. How else to explain the strange men who sometimes stayed overnight and were introduced the following morning as Uncle So-and-so? 

    Cheryl’s ambition, she told Blackie the night they met in a Maidstone “live music” pub, after he had mentioned his fruit-and-vegetable truck work, was to have her own market garden and orchard. She’d had enough of working as a waitress or barmaid.

    His ambition, he rejoindered, was to have a vehicle scrapyard and deal in parts for rare old cars, “somewhere out in the country”. 

    For the first time ever really – and he was already past 35 – he felt almost immediately that here might be a woman he could make a life with. Her mind was as sharp as her features, her pointed little teeth and bright blue eyes, he quickly learned.

     But what impressed him no less was the fact, as he confided to a drinking buddy, that Cheryl “fucked like a jack-rabbit”. What a relief to finally meet a woman who was “always up for it”, after so many wet blankets and faint-hearted lilies!

     His mother of course would disapprove of this shiksa with the dyed blonde hair, her tight blue jeans or mini-skirts and high heels. But Blackie had already emancipated himself from the opinions of his mother and like-minded people.

    He knew Cheryl was a bit common. Trailer-park trash, the Americans might say. But he loved her for that, rather than in spite of it, for she had made him realise that she corresponded with a long-cherished subconscious image of his ideal woman.

    He believed she “fitted into his picture”, and he sought, somewhat confusedly, to convey this sentiment to her. She must have “got the picture” well enough, because just a few weeks after they met, they agreed to pool their resources for a joint project which would meet both their requirements.

     With the added energy and confidence that her relationship with Blackie gave her, Cheryl set about looking for a property, and eventually came up with something so ideal, to Blackie’s mind, that he could hardly believe it.

     Going very cheap somewhere near Swanhurst was a small run-down orchard and former hop-farm, with a horse-paddock. It included a farmhouse which was near derelict, though it had been lived in until recently by an old lady of 92 who had been born and died there.

     The county authorities had effectively put a blight on the property and its surroundings with a plan to put a bypass road through it, somehow related to the A2 and the Southwest Orbital roads.

     But the old lady had refused to move, holding out for some 20 years in the end, until economic considerations and alternative plans effectively put paid to the bypass. Although officially the project was not dead yet, to all intents and purposes it already was. 

     Blackie could hardly contain his excitement on discovering a pre-war Bedford charabanc, its axles standing on bricks but otherwise in one piece, in a corner of the paddock. That, he immediately decided, would be his “office”.

     Rusting old agricultural equipment tangled in brambles all around the place also titillated him. If it were left entirely up to him, he would have been happy simply collecting such old junk, with scarcely any consideration for its utility or resale value.

     In an earlier era, he would have liked to be a blacksmith, he often thought. Or perhaps a horse dealer.

     Cheryl loved this side of him, although she had little time for some of his dafter self-indulgences, his own peculiar forms of male vanity, like his obsession with rare old cars, or his taste for 1950s rock’n’roll.

    The tough life she had led meant she was much more hard-headed. She insisted that their place must pay for itself and provide them with a decent living. She had a sharp tongue when she had a point to make, and was never one to suffer fools gladly.

     Blackie loved the direct way she expressed herself, with her vulgar accent: pure Estuary, if such a thing can be called pure; it was as much Southend as Dover. He himself had retained the old-fashioned cockney of his early boyhood.

    Above all he loved her sexually. But because of, rather than in spite of, her rather small tits and sharp, hard features. In any case, she had excellent legs, pretty hands and feet, and boney but broad hips.

     She also had – he only discovered this by surprise some time after first meeting her – rather pointed and slightly protruding ears. It was as if she had been hiding them under her hair. But once he discovered them they too turned him on.

    He knew she liked his hairy barrel chest, because she said so. On the rare occasions when she showed a tender emotion, she would call him her “teddy bear”. But she was not one for “hearts and flowers”, as she put it.

     She wanted action, not words, in that department. And -- blessed miracle! --  she knew how to make Blackie provide it.

                                                

    They both knew that no Kentish smallholding could grow hops economically today; the big brewers did virtually all that now. But she was determined that the orchard be upgraded to produce saleable apples again, and that they grow vegetables for market.

     Neither of them had much horticultural or agricultural experience, but they were surprised by how much they did know – thanks in part to Blackie’s haulage of such produce, which helped them with the marketing of it. The rest they learned.

    After improving the pasture and fencing of the paddock, they were also able to let that out for horses, which both raised the status of the property and provided valuable manure for their cultivated produce, most notably mushrooms.

     Blackie on his side was able to indulge his other old fantasies further.

     As a young man he had hankered after Ford Zodiacs and old American jobs, especially convertibles. Now he drove an immaculate early 1980s XJ6 Jaguar saloon, in white, whose exorbitant cost of upkeep was a recurrent source of friction with Cheryl.

     “I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” he would reply with a smirk. “You should be pleased I’ve not got the 12 cylinder version. Now that would cost a bit to run.” For Blackie really believed that in this he was showing restraint.

     As indeed he was, considering the tasty wheels that were to be found by the discerning. His latest fantasy desire -- still kept a secret from Cheryl -- was a V8 Bentley Continental coupé. He already had his eye on one, in burgundy.

     Over the years the yard had meanwhile slowly filled with the remains of horrible items such as a Hillman Avenger, a Vauxhall Viva, a Ford Corsair and an Austin Allegro, some worn-out Escorts and Minis, and an obscure Japanese model.

     All of these had been just dumped at Blackie’s as scrap. Not many people came looking for spare parts there, as the pickings were lean.

     Fortunately a bit of automotive class was provided by a rare complete Volvo 164 circa 1972 and two hulks Blackie had sought out specially for his collection: a 1940 Lincoln Zephyr coupé, unfortunately with a Ford V8 Pilot engine in place of the original V12, and a 1956 Ford Thunderbird with right-hand drive but no engine or gearbox.

    The latter two items were testimony to Blackie’s capacity for self-delusion; for years after their acquisition he claimed still to be “waiting to get round to restoring them”.

    The back half of a 1951 Fordson 5cwt van riveted to the side of the charabanc completed the collage of rustbuckets. The demi-van served as kennel for a fierce Alsatian bitch and her incestuous son, a black Labrador cross, who jointly guarded the establishment.

     As the car spares business was slow, Blackie talked of  “branching out” into old agricultural equipment. After all, he already had old ploughs, disc- and chain-harrows, and some other unidentified but apparently horse-drawn gear, all around the place…

    

    A more serious exploit had been his fathering of  two children with Cheryl, which with the girl she already had when he first met her made a family of five. The girl was now just 16, their first boy 11 and the second nearly five.

    Blackie would have been very happy to have more girls. “You can’t have too many girls in this world,” he used to say. But Cheryl had definitely wanted a boy – no doubt to compensate for her youth of  living in a virtually all-female house – and got what she wanted.

     However, the last-born was an accident, although they loved him just as much, and Cheryl insisted they practice safe contraception thereafter. 

    She hated him pulling out of her just before he came. “I want it all in me!” she’d loudly whisper, her voice always thick and hoarse at this point. She still “fucked like a jack-rabbit”, she was still “always up for it”. 

        

     Despite all their hard work – especially Cheryl’s – the farm, the breakers’ yard, or whatever the whole place was, looked like a hillbilly homestead in the Appalachians might. Or like a rambling gypsy camp.

     This impression was reinforced when Blackie had the interesting idea of making cider from the lower-grade apples that they couldn’t otherwise sell. In an old shed he produced a killer seven percent proof liquor, local sales of which just went up and up. 

 

     For many generations, up until the old lady died, the name of the place had been Hawden, but everyone in the district by now knew it only as “Blackie’s Farm”.

     The daughter, Sharon, was already strangely beautiful, with her mother’s sharp features, though unlike her mother she was a true blonde, thanks to her long-disappeared real father. Her main interests were horses and pop music.

    The elder boy, Dirk, was a handful in school and out. Big for his age, dark like his father, always in a scrape, but already showing signs of unusual academic ability. 

    Paul, the youngest, was a natural clown and mimic. One of his favourite tricks was to put a pair of large rubber kitchen gloves on his bare feet. “Me Bigfoot,” he would then declare, waddling about like a penguin imitating the Yeti.  The effect was all the more burlesque because little Paul would usually be naked from the waist down.

    With all three of her children, Cheryl had let them run around bare-arsed all day when they were little. “What the hell, they’ll only shit and piss in them and I’ve got better things to do than wash knickers all day,” she’d say.

    When word of this reached the old biddies in the nearby village, it set them tut-tutting, and of course helped add to their local reputation as a “feckless family”. Cheryl hooted with laughter when that one got back to her.

    “I don’t give a tinker’s cuss what people say,” was her typical response. And nor did she. Blackie admired his wife for her attitude to things like that; it helped strengthen the rebel streak in him too.

    Nineteen years they had been together. Blackie was getting fat, thanks to his own cider, which he had come to prefer over beer, and Cheryl was no longer so beautiful: her nose and chin were sharper still, her lips thinner, and her neck frankly scraggy.

    Her hips too were even bonier now than he could remember, but the funny thing here was how much he liked them that way. She was also much more relaxed than the tense, rarely smiling woman she’d been when he first met her.

     And she still looked damn good in a pair of blue jeans or a short skirt !

     Cheryl never wore tights, and only wore stockings to please Blackie, or if required for some rare formal occasion. Convinced that tight-fitting nylons were harmful to the legs, she would go bare-legged until the very coldest weather.

     Blackie had been shocked and thrilled to discover that she often went without knickers either. The only time he ever saw her blush was when he asked why. “I just don’t like wearing anything there,” she muttered evasively and changed the subject.

     Blackie liked to show Cheryl off, as if he were a wealthy old man with a young trophy wife. His favourite occasion was when he drove her up to Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning in his white Jaguar on the pretext of meeting some business contacts.

     He would wear a blue suit with a well-ironed white shirt open at the neck, a flashy silk scarf in his breast pocket and a cigar between his teeth.

     She would wear high heels with a short tight skirt, and outrageous make-up: heavy black mascara with green eye shadow, and a slash of orange lipstick which heightened the touch of cruelty in her mouth.

     After gossiping and joshing with old street-market acquaintances, Blackie would take her for lunch in a famous Jewish restaurant in the East End to which his father had treated him once when he was 13 or 14.

     It was at moments like this that he would realise that he had achieved his dream-picture.

     Blackie was by no means sure that Cheryl saw this picture of their life as he did. Of the two of them, he was the dreamy, reflective one, he believed, but it was difficult for him to put his thoughts and feelings into words.

     And then after all, what did it matter? What mattered was that each of them was happy, he mused. How much did it matter that two people, even living so close together as he and Cheryl, should understood one another or see things the same way?

* “From a Buick Six”,  from the Bob Dylan album Highway 61 Revisited