A Twist in the Tale Read online

  Angela Bradbury’s help was never sought.

  All three continued on their separate ways.

  * * *

  Two years later when Gerald Haskins won a place at Durham University, no one was surprised that he chose to read engineering and listed as his main hobby collecting medals.

  Walter Ramsbottom joined his father in the family jewelry business and started courting Angela Bradbury.

  It was during the spring holiday in Gerald’s second year at Durham that he came across Walter and Angela again. They were sitting in the same row at a Bach quintet concert in Hull Town Hall. Walter told him in the interval that they had just become engaged but had not yet settled on a date for the wedding.

  Gerald hadn’t seen Angela for over a year but this time he did listen to her opinions, because like Walter he fell in love with her.

  He replaced eating cornflakes with continually inviting Angela out to dinner in an effort to win her away from his old rival.

  Gerald notched up another victory when Angela returned her engagement ring to Walter a few days before Christmas.

  Walter spread it around that Gerald only wanted to marry Angela because her father was chairman of the Hull City Amenities Committee and he was hoping to get a job with the council after he’d taken his degree at Durham. When the invitations for the wedding were sent out, Walter was not on the guest list.

  The marriage took place at St. Peter’s and the reception that followed afterward was at the Dragon Arms.

  * * *

  Mr. and Mrs. Haskins traveled to Multavia for their honeymoon, partly because they couldn’t afford Nice and didn’t want to go to Cleethorpes. In any case, the local travel agent was making a special offer for those considering a visit to the tiny kingdom that was sandwiched between Austria and Czechoslovakia.

  When the newly married couple arrived at their hotel in Teske, the capital, they discovered why the terms had been so reasonable.

  Multavia was, in 1959, going through an identity crisis as it attempted to adjust to yet another treaty drawn up by a Dutch lawyer in Geneva, written in French, but with the Russians and Americans in mind. However, thanks to King Alfons III, their shrewd and popular monarch, the kingdom continued to enjoy uninterrupted grants from the West and nondisruptive visits from the East.

  The capital of Multavia, the Hawkinses were quickly to discover, had an average temperature of 92°F in June, no rainfall and the remains of a sewerage system that had been indiscriminately bombed by both sides between 1939 and 1944. Angela actually found herself holding her nose as she walked through the cobbled streets. The People’s Hotel claimed to have forty-five rooms, but what the brochure did not point out was that only three of them had bathrooms and none of those had bath plugs. Then there was the food, or lack of it; for the first time in his life Gerald lost weight.

  The honeymoon couple were also to discover that Multavia boasted no monuments, art galleries, theaters or opera houses worthy of the name and the outlying country was flatter and less interesting than the fens of Cambridgeshire. The kingdom had no coastline and the only river, the Plotz, flowed from Germany and on into Russia, thus ensuring that none of the locals trusted it.

  By the end of their honeymoon the Haskinses were only too pleased to find that Multavia did not boast a national airline. BOAC got them home safely, and that would have been the end of Gerald’s experience of Multavia had it not been for those sewers—or the lack of them.

  * * *

  Once the Haskinses had returned to Hull, Gerald took up his appointment as an assistant in the engineering department of the city council. His first job was as a third engineer with special responsibility for the city’s sewerage. Most ambitious young men would have treated such an appointment as nothing more than a step on life’s ladder. Gerald, however, did not. He quickly made contact with all the leading sewerage companies, their advisers as well as his opposite numbers throughout the country.

  Two years later he was able to put in front of his father-in-law’s committee a paper showing how the council could save a considerable amount of the ratepayers’ money by redeveloping its sewerage system.

  The committee were impressed and decided to carry out Mr. Haskins’ recommendation, and at the same time appointed him second engineer.

  That was the first occasion Walter Ramsbottom stood for the council but he failed to get elected.

  When, three years later, the network of little tunnels and waterways had been completed, Gerald’s diligence was rewarded by his appointment as deputy borough engineer. In the same year his father-in-law became Mayor and Walter Ramsbottom became a councillor.

  Councils up and down the country were now acknowledging Gerald as a man whose opinion should be sought if they had any anxieties about their sewerage system. This provoked an irreverent round of jokes at every Rotary Club dinner Gerald attended, but they nevertheless still hailed him as the leading authority in his field, or drain.

  When in 1966 the Borough of Halifax considered putting out to tender the building of a new sewerage system they first consulted Gerald Haskins—Yorkshire being the one place on earth where a prophet is with honor in his own country.

  After spending a day in Halifax with the town council’s senior engineer and realizing how much had to be spent on the new system, Gerald remarked to his wife, not for the first time, “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” But it was Angela who was shrewd enough to work out just how much of that brass her husband could get hold of with the minimum of risk. During the next few days Gerald considered his wife’s proposition, and when he returned to Halifax the following week it was not to visit the council chambers but the Midland Bank. Gerald did not select the Midland by chance; the manager of the bank was also chairman of the planning committee on the Halifax borough council.

  A deal that suited both sides was struck between the two Yorkshiremen, and with the bank’s blessing Gerald resigned his position as deputy borough engineer and formed a private company. When he presented his tender, in competition with several large organizations from London, no one was surprised that Haskins of Hull was selected unanimously by the planning committee to carry out the job.

  Three years later Halifax had a fine new sewerage system and the Midland Bank was delighted to be holding Haskins of Hull’s company account.

  * * *

  Over the next fifteen years Chester, Runcorn, Hudders-field, Darlington, Macclesfield and York were jointly and severally grateful for the services rendered to them by Gerald Haskins, of Haskins & Co.

  Haskins & Co. (International P.L.C.) then began contract work in Dubai, Lagos and Rio de Janeiro. In 1983 Gerald received the Queen’s Award for Industry from a grateful government, and a year later he was made a Commander of the British Empire by a grateful monarch.

  The investiture took place at Buckingham Palace in the same year as King Alfons III of Multavia died and was succeeded by his son King Alfons IV. The newly crowned King decided something had finally to be done about the drainage problems of Teske. It had been his father’s dying wish that his people should not go on suffering those unseemly smells, and King Alfons IV did not intend to bequeath the problem to his son, another Alfons.

  After much begging and borrowing from the West, and much visiting and talking with the East, the newly anointed monarch decided to invite tenders for a new sewerage system in the kingdom’s capital.

  The tender document supplying several pages of details and listing the problems facing any engineer who wished to face the challenge arrived with a thud on most of the boardroom tables of the world’s major engineering companies. Once the paperwork had been seriously scrutinized and the realistic opportunity for a profit considered, King Alfons IV received only a few replies. Nevertheless, the King was able to sit up all night considering the merits of the three interested companies that had been shortlisted. Kings are also human, and when Alfons discovered that Gerald had chosen Multavia for his honeymoon some twenty-five years before, it tipped the ba