While Heather was working in Tesco’s she met a kind old man. He was in his seventies and cycled in to do his shopping in the village every week. He stood about five foot two tall inches with a stoop. He dressed in a jacket and trousers with a shirt with no collar. Braces kept his trousers up never a belt. He always wore hob nail boots and had his trousers in cycle clips to stop them catching on the chain. On his head was a flat cap that he never took off. Wisps of white thin hair came from under the cap. His face was furrowed from his constant smile. His hands were hard and calloused from years of hard physical work. He smiled at everyone but never said very much. His eyes danced with the experience of years and the knowledge of a wonderful full life. One day as he was coming through the shop Heather was filing the fridge with boxes of eggs and he approached her. “ Those eggs could be three weeks old you know. “ he said in a broad Lancashire accent, “ I will bring you some fresh eggs next week” Heather said that would be nice and forgot all about it. The next week he turned up with a box of six fresh eggs, “ you will not get any fresher than that “he said” they were laid this morning”. Heather was stunned and offered to pay for them which he refused saying “I said I would bring them and did not ask you for anything”. He was right, they were really tasty when we tried them with our tea that night. Heather asked him his name and he said “ Mr Vickers”. Every week after that he brought eggs for us and we started to buy them from him for our families.
One day he asked Heather “ what would you do if someone gave you one hundred pounds?” She said “I would probably put it towards a newer car.” She didn’t think anything about it until the next week when as he passed her in the shop he put an envelope into her hands. She looked in the envelope and was so shocked to find twenty crisp five pound notes. She not know what to do she said thank you and he went off on his business before she had time to recover her decorum. She went straight to the shop manager who said he would put it in the shop safe until she went home. When she came home Heather told me what had occurred and showed me the money. I said that she ought to make sure that he really could afford it before she accept or use the money. The next week Heather approached him and said that as much as she wanted to she really could not accept it but he insisted that it was a gift for her and not to worry. He was really a kind old man that wanted to help her for no other reason than she was nice to him when he did his shopping. Heather said we could trade in the mini we had with the money to buy a better car. We went and bought a Mach II Cortina that lasted us for a good few years.
We started to visit him at his home which was an old cottage out in Lathom where he kept his chickens and his son ran the local blacksmiths shop. He welcomed us in wearing his shirt and braces, on his feet were a pair of wooden clogs with steels on the bottom. his polished hobnail boots stood by the back door. He was really pleased at the newer car we had bought. We took him a stew or a casserole each week and bought his eggs. He became like a sort of adopted grandfather for Heather and each Christmas or birthday after that Heather would receive an envelope with a hundred pounds in it. We told his son what he was doing and he said it was his dad’s own money and he could do anything he wanted with it. One of the many things he gave us was a Christmas cactus that was always full of beautiful pink blossoms and we still have it today over thirty years later. He said put your cold tea from the pot on it to keep it watered.
He grew all sorts of vegetable on his smallholding at the back of the cottages. He tended them all himself digging the land and spreading manure it for his crops. He would not bother if he got a scratch or a cut while he was working. He would just rub it to stop any bleeding and carry on. I got a message from John Davis, his neighbour and my work colleague at Hedges, that he was quite ill one day and we went around to see him right away. His son Jimmy was in the cottage and he told us that he had caught lockjaw from a cut on his hand he had got when cutting cabbages. Now lockjaw is probably better known now as tetanus, he had taken ill, gone in to Ormskirk where the poisoning had gone too far for antibiotics to work and he had passed away. We still remember how he helped us as a young couple just starting out in life together and we remembered him by giving our son his name James as a second name.
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