The Idiot, the Farmer and Me Ch. 01

Education had been about school when I was young and once you left that was it. The college was great however and before I knew it they had worked their charm on me and I had a couple of diplomas.

As my confidence grew I applied for another course in accountancy from the small business people at the council so I could manage the books, and soon I was applying for grants and loans and WE were employing twenty women at OUR two sites and doing quite nicely. That has now increased to four.

The quality of life of my little family improved and we all three started to lose the lazy London twang to our voices, and it all just got nicer. After two years and my decree absolute, I moved even further away from London, heading south and a few streets away from Denise and away from him and his (and some of my) family and the shit they were up to or in to.

The Idiot Ex was fuming and complained that Ray would miss out on his education and his future, and then complained about his access rights. My response was that as soon as he actually started paying the maintenance he owed me, we'd start to talk about 'rights'. He shut up at that point; what he really meant of course was that Ray wouldn't learn the family trade of 'wheeling and dealing' ala' 'Only Fools and Horses' in the way that all his other male relatives had, and the Idiot Ex would have no one to hand on his wisdom and the keys to his lock-up's. It was my Dad and Brother Mike all over again but without the violence.

I said that no way were my children to have the same life that we did. Ray and Izzy were in an excellent local school and they both did brilliantly, getting even more qualifications than their Uncle Mike had. Ray won an apprenticeship as an electrician with the Local Hospitals Trust and after finishing that was watching me and his Auntie Den learning AND managing our business, he found my old management and accountancy training books and notes, applied to sit them himself and has moved off of his tools and is now a maintenance manager across a massive area.

He lives far enough away from his extended family now for them to have stopped bothering him with offers for building supplies (bound to have been stolen) and offers to work 'off the books' for him.

Fortunately one part of his upbringing Ray could remember was how to tell his Dad, his Uncles and Cousins, and their associates to fuck off and leave him alone. Thanks to the computer and the world-wide web, along with centralised accounting the days of 'cash-in-hand and not a word to the taxman -- I'll help you out if you help me' have long since gone, at least in his part of government work.

So The Idiot Ex decided that his best chance of ensuring his legacy was with his daughter. Isabel; Izzy or as he had always had it 'his Bella', even though she's 'Isabel' not 'Isabella.'

As far as he was concerned she didn't have my curves and looked a bit plain compared to me. I didn't care of course, to me she always has and always will be my perfect, gorgeous girl, but I knew deep down that both me and Auntie Den had been plain Jane's right up until we hit late puberty and the boobs and the bums happened, then the confidence. I just knew that was what was going to happen with my Izzy.

But not the Idiot Ex it seemed. After handing her the shittiest present he could find, I remonstrated with him that he could have made more of an effort considering it was her sweet sixteen, we even had a party.

"Sixteen?" he said, "Cor, bloody 'ell Sammy, were does the years go ah?" He looked like he had come to a and major decision, "Right," he said, "Right!" He rubbed his hands together.

"Right what? You're going to buy her a present that she won't want to donate to the Charity shop the minute you've gone?" I cast an eye over the toy make-up set and tiny hairbrush and mirror he'd bought for his sixteen year old, blossoming daughter.

"Better than that Sammy!" he said rubbing his hands together with even more vehemence, "Set her up for LIFE Babes!"

Oh shit, what now?

It took a couple of days...

When Izzy was right in the middle of swotting up for her GCSE exams, we had the first knock at the door.

His idea of 'setting his Bella up for life' was this. He kept sending the sons of his Idiot mates around to ask her out on dates, and the more scruffy, unattractive and occasionally smelly they were, the keener they were to meet her.

For days there was an almost never-ending stream of them, and I actually thought of moving house. I banned Izzy from going to the door as some of these fucking Idiots were very hard to convince.

I even had to drive her to and from school as after a week and a half of me saying once or twice a day, "no she doesn't live here, she's staying with her Aunt while her exams are on," her Idiot Dad had picked her up from school one afternoon and took her to some out-of-the-way burger bar, ostensibly to buy 'his Bella' tea, but actually to meet and then leave her with Carl, the Idiot son of his Idiot best mate Brian. At that stage Izzy was a vegetarian and not eating meat.

"Don't worry" said Idiot Carl trying hard to be cool about it, "I'll buy ya a chicken burger instead sweet'eart..."

She smiled, made out she was going to the bathroom and hid there, sending me a text message to please come and get her. I did so, arriving to her rescue ten minutes, some broken speed limits and at least one orange to red light later, and on arrival asking Carl what the Idiot Ex had actually promised.

"He said Bella was reasonably fit and woz lookin' for the right man ta' settle dahn wiv, an' seeing as how we'd known each 'uver for years like, I was virtually a dead cert to get some."

"Get some?!" I snarled.

"Well..." said the borderline troglodyte, "I 'fink he only meant she'd fall in love wiv' me like."

"You got your car Carl?" I said.

"Yeah..."

"Les said you lost your licence?"

"Naah," he said, "Ain't got one to lose 'ave I," he said matter-of-factly, "Got banned from drivin' though." He looked almost proud of that.

"And you were going to drive my Isabel home?"

"Why not?" he said confusedly, and I really think he meant it.

"Thanks Carl," said Izzy, "but I'll go home with Mum."

He stood looking a bit disappointed,

"So we got it going on or what?"

"I'm sorry?" said Izzy.

"You an' me, we an item?"

"No, sorry Carl, whatever Dad has told you I'm concentrating on my exams at the moment."

"So when we going out ag'in?"

"We aren't Carl, you're a really nice bloke and all but... you're not my type, sorry."

"But your Dad said we was gonna go out."

"You can go out with Les if you want Carl but Izzy is her own person and doesn't do what her Dad says as far as boyfriends go." I said putting myself between Carl and Izzy, just in case. Carl was much like his Idiot Dad but had that look in his eye that said he didn't have all the self-control mechanisms that the homo-sapiens did.

"But your Dad said..."

"Yeah," said Izzy laying a hand on his beefy shoulder, "I know; sorry..." she paused and closed her eyes for a second, "But my Dad right, he ain't all right in the 'ead see? 'ee finks that I'm... like... a bit of a slag what wants it off everyone, but I ain't like... actually?"

"Ooh!" said Carl as my Darling Izzy turned the light on in his little world, "Well, see ya then Bella."

"See ya Carl."

He left and walked across to the car parked on double yellow lines that while it wasn't actually stolen, didn't actually belong to him, or anyone else for that matter. As Izzy and I bought a couple of Lattes for our drive back we saw him messing around under the steering wheel and the car burst into life, there was a faint hint of a screwdriver going back into the glove compartment.

"Fucking hell Izzy, I didn't know you spoke Idiot."

She wrinkled her nose and shrugged her shoulders,

"I learned it at skool, din I?" she crossed her hands in a 'word to your mutha' movement.

I laughed and we went home.

That wasn't the end of it though. I had already called the Idiot Ex and told him to stop sending Idiot chavs to my house as they were starting to get a bit nasty.

"It's fuck all to do wiv' you Sammy," he said grandly, "this is between me and my Bella."

Finally, and after a third week of almost nightly door knocking, the Idiot Ex must have been running out of young gallants and we met the nastiest of the Idiots he sent and we ended up calling the police and I finally threatened the Idiot Ex with legal action if he didn't stop giving my address away to random East End teenage boys.

The police were called when the last thug decided he was going to lose his temper and kick the crap out of my front door when my son Ray told him that Isabel wasn't in and not to listen to what her Dad says.

"Fuckin' cost me a tenner to get all the way down here," spat the prospective Romeo, "I ain't going back across town for fucking Jack PAL," he sneered at Ray, "Ee'ver she comes out wiv' me or I want a fucking tenner."

"Well you'll really need to speak to the bloke that told you to come here mate, it's nothing to do with my sister."

"Your fucking sister? Well that makes it your fucking business mate," said the Romeo, "She fucking owes me, know what I mean?" he raised his eyebrows before resting a hand on the door post and leaned forward threateningly, still concerned about his investment.

Ray was and always had been amazingly protective of his little sister but wasn't going to get involved in a scrap over something so pointless as his Idiot father telling Idiot chavs to come courting and slammed the door shut. In doing so, he trapped Romeo's hand. Romeo howled, all the while Ray just leaned harder against it, until eventually he managed to pull his hand out.

"Now fuck off," said Ray slamming the door.

Romeo wasn't having that and said so; he proceeded to kick and batter at our front door and Ray just called the police standing as close as he could get so the call taker could hear the bangs and crashes and the shouted four letter words and what he wasn't going to do to Ray and eventually his fuckin' slag, prick-teasing sista' when he got to them. The patrol car was on its way in seconds, and the coppers captured the whole scene on their body-worn video cameras.

Romeo told the police that he was on a promise and 'that twat in there' wouldn't let him in to see the girl what 'woz apparently 'begging for it'.

The police officers said that they really doubted that as they had spoken with both the young man defending his home and the young lady in question and she knew nothing about it. They were then led to understand that the girl's father was telling every male he knew under 18 to take his daughter out, he even showed them the betting shop form that the concerned parent had written his daughter's address on. Sadly he still hadn't discussed it with her.

While the police did kind of see Romeo's point of view he was convinced of the error of his ways and was released with a police caution for the criminal damage, threatening behaviour and without the bags of marijuana he had in his jacket pocket, then told not to go within two miles of my house.

I was fuming once I found out of course but the Idiot Ex was bright enough to turn his phone off after the psycho had tried to contact him demanding his 'romantic refund'.

After calming down and arranging repair to my front door I reflected that almost every young girl from that community had always tended to find their true love through parents or a friend of a friend, I certainly did after all, and I suppose that Les thought that it was his job to find the right man for his daughter 'from the right stock' as our Dads would have put it.

He could then rest easy knowing that he had done his fatherly duty to marry her off a bit sharpish to start a family and breed more of the same; he could meet his son-in-law in the pub on Friday while the whole family would head out on Saturday night to 'The Club' where their kids would meet and mingle and continue this strange courtship ritual. I knew of the Irish Traveller concept of 'Grabbing' and I'm pleased to say that never was there a suggest of that tradition.

Two days later Les was on the phone to me complaining that I'd set the police on him.

"Yeah because you keep sending fucking Idiot chavs to meet Isabel and she isn't fucking interested you twat!" I screamed down the phone at him, "one of them mad bastards tried to kick my door in and said he was going to 'have Izzy'."

"Yeah... well..." the Idiot Ex bluffed, "it's about time she started courtin' innit'!" he snapped back at me.

"She's just sixteen you fucking perv!"

"Yeah..." he said with a giggle in his voice, as if his daughter starting to have sex the second the smoke had cleared from her birthday cake candles was just the greatest laugh.

"She isn't getting pregnant to get her first council house and throwing her life away, she wants to go to university."

"An' what fuckin' good is that gonna do 'er? A load of fuckin' debt and a pointless qualification so she can show off arahnd' tahn' that she's much cleverer than all us wrong'uns?"

"Not at all Les," I said, "she's already cleverer than you and all your mates put together."

"Fuckin'... fuckin'..." he snapped.

"She is Les, between you and Brian, you have NO qualifications, Izzy has 11, so I make it that she's 11 times cleverer than you and Brian. Somehow I don't think Carl is going to be knocking on the door at Oxford or Cambridge too soon is he; unless they need their windows cleaning of course..." She didn't have 11 qualifications at that point, but within 5 weeks she had 12, but the Idiot Ex wouldn't know that.

"Stuck up, that's what you fuckin' are," snarled the Idiot Ex, "you was never like that when you woz married to me!"

"No, that's right," I said, "but that's because I WAS married to you." I paused and took a deep breath, "Les, you have the ability to drag all of the class and finer things in life out of a situation the second you open your big mouth." This was a circumstance I had discovered over the ten years we'd been apart. It didn't always have to be sooooo nasty or so bloody cheap, and I don't mean that purely financially.

"Well... well..." he struggled to find a comeback, "I... I wanna hear it from my Bella," he said, "Put Bella on the phone and SHE can tell me, that way I know it ain't just you and yer stuck-up ways."

"Izzy!" I shouted up the stairs, "Can you come down and tell you Dad whether you actually want him to keep sending all the juvenile delinquents round for your hand in marriage or your virginity?"

"What?" she came thundering down the stairs. I put the phone onto speaker so I could hear the whole conversation. "Dad!" she snapped down the phone, "you have got to stop sending all these boys around, I am perfectly capable of finding my own boyfriends thank you very much!"

"Oh!" In that one syllable I could hear the creak of the saddle as her Idiot father climbed onto his high horse, "Oh yeah, don't want yer old Dad to 'elp you 'aht and point you in the direction of some nice local boys do ya, oh no."

"No I don't; not now, not any, not ever. That enough?"

"Carl is..."

"Oh shit, not Carl, he's a bloody thug, don't you dare try and set me up with him!" she snapped at her Dad, in the same way that I did I was quite proud to notice.

"EE'S A GOOD LAD!" shouted the Idiot Ex.

"He's got previous for assault AND robbery, he was driving without a licence - how is that good?!" sighed Izzy.

"Everyone does that!" he laughed as if it was a mark of good character, "He's a steady lad Isabel!" cautioned the Idiot Ex Sage, "you could do a lot worse..."

"Yeah, the drug dealers and armed robbers you know I expect," said Izzy.

"We doan' 'ave none o' that drug shit Bella," said the Idiot Ex, "never have..."

"That last thug you sent round had four three-ounce bags of weed on him when he was nicked at my front door trying to kick it in," I said.

"Oh... well..." he stopped and I hoped desperately that was an end to it, but no, "Well he looked very smart when I was talking to him in the pub, very well turned 'aht I 'fought!"

"Drug dealers often do dress quite well Les," I threw in.

"Yeeeeeah, well you see... weed ain't actually drugs... 'as such'..." said the amateur criminal pharmacologist knowingly, "prob'ly jus' for 'is personal use I 'spect..."

Izzy sighed and shook her head, mouthing 'oh for fuck's sake' to me. She cut in

"Anyway Dad, they aren't local and they aren't nice, end of story."

"They are local," he wasn't giving up on 'his Bella' and her chances of happiness without a fight that was for sure.

"Not to us," both Izzy and I said at the same time.

"Yeah, well that's because you forgot you roots." Les sniffed, "you gotta 'fink aba'ht this Bella" he said, "After 'awl..." Fuck, I thought, he wasn't going to say it surely... "you ain't no oil paintin' luv are yah?"

Jesus! Surely not, to his own daughter, could there BE anything worse to say to a teenage girl?

Her mouth hung open in shock,

"Dad?"

"Yes Baby?" he all but cheered.

"FUCK YOU! And fuck all of them scummy fucking hooligans you keep trying to set me up with. I NEVER WANT TO SPEAK TO YOU AGAIN!" She screamed, "you send any more of those bloody people round and I'm telling Uncle Mike!" and disconnected the phone.

I pulled her into a hug;

"Don't you listen to him," I said rubbing her back as she cried into my shoulder, "he was just trying to get back at you, at us actually."

The Idiot Ex phoned me back that night, slightly pissed, demanding to speak to Izzy, probably concerned that his former brother-in-law might be on the way round.

"Fuck off Les," I said, "you were so rude and nasty to your own daughter, might I suggest that you stay out of our way for a while - say a couple of years? Because, so fucking help me, you come within ten feet of me and I'll swing for you, get me?"

"Wot?" he said, innocently, "what did I say ah? Ah? Wot? WOT?!"

"You told your gorgeous daughter that she is unattractive, you tactless cunt!"

"No I din't!" he snapped self-righteously.

"You told her, and I quote, that she 'ain't no oil painting' you dickhead!" I snapped back.

"Oh," he said remembering "Yeeeeeah well, she knows I din't mean it!" he chuckled.

"That's the problem Les, you did mean it and she knows you did. If you ring me again, I'll change the number. Stay away from me and the kids, AND I want the balance of my money or I'll ask the court to send the bailiffs round."

"Oh that ain't fair, I can't find that sorta money, you know it!"

"I have to 'find the money' Les." I said, "because if you remember you haven't paid maintenance to me in well over two years."

"Yeah well... business ain't 'bin that good."

"No it never is when it's for us is it, yet somehow you still find enough money to go on YOUR holidays or on the piss every Friday and Saturday night."

"Yeah, well that's all the socialising I get to do these days."

"And I can't afford to go out at all, not with two kids to feed and clothe, with no help from their father."

"Yeah... well..."

"Yeah, well... you owe me four and a half grand and if I don't see at least three of it in the next week, I'll send in the bailiffs. Bye Les."

"I in't got that kinda cash and you know it!"

"I'll send them to your lock up then, bound to be a few grands worth of stuff in there, that'll be a start won't it," I said brightly and helpfully.

"I..." he stuttered, then babbled his response, "well... see, I ain't actually got a lock-up no more... and... well... I definitely ain't got no stock." He calmed down the tiniest bit, "if I 'ad o' course I'd be sellin' it 'wouldn't I."

"Of course you would!" I crooned to the Idiot Ex, "course you would, how silly of me to think that you'd be knocking out shit round the pubs and clubs and down the market rather than doing legit stuff and telling the tax man and the Child Support Agency!"