Chapter 5: Behind the feud

Tom, Vivienne and Chuck worked steadily for a couple of hours and had most of the repairs done to the fly cutter. The cutter now ran easily and accurately on the spindle. All it needed to complete the job was a new pulley wheel but the old one, although chipped would suffice for the time being. They would try it out first. Having a break from the workshop they sat around the kitchen table. Tom made a pot of real English tea and everyone had to sample it. Chuck was reluctant to have milk in his tea but Vivienne, once she had allowed it to cool, said she could get used to the taste but didn't have Tom's cast iron stomach to drink it scalding hot.

"You haven't showed her that pile of polished scrap brass you brought with you," Chuck reminded him.

"What did you bring?" Vivienne asked. "You didn't mention anything to me." Tom went and fetched the box. Vivienne's eyes lit up at the sight of the exquisite fire engine. Tom sat her on his lap so she could see better and just as he started to explain things to her, Mary came in with her sister Marjorie and two more of her lady friends. It was obvious they expected Tom and Vivienne still to be downstairs and the two women looked with some disgust at bearded and black eyed Tom clasping the deformed girl sitting on his knee with one hand and pointing to the funny if rather elegant looking thing on the table.

"Tell them! Tell them they are for you and Viv. I've never been so embarrassed. Marjorie and her friends came in just as I was at the checkout. I thought I'd done fine as the shop was nearly empty and then they came in."

Tom looked up and started laughing in his infectious way, which caused Chuck and the Vivienne to start too. "Sorry," Tom stuttered, "We could have gone tomorrow. I didn't really expect you to get them but thanks, it will save us a trip. Shopping is not one of my fortes unless it is for tools."

"What is it?" enquired Marjorie.

"Don't start him off," Mary exclaimed, "He'll talk all night about it." And Tom did. He was a superb engineer and also a very good raconteur. The ladies soon forgot about appearances as Tom took them back in time to the end of the nineteenth century and his stories of firefighting and the equipment they used and some of the fires and rescues the engine had attended. He'd copied the old logbook still extant in a South London station and could build word pictures in their minds that kept them enthralled. Of course they also tried to wheedle from him how he'd spent the previous night and how he'd got his black eye but Tom was much more reticent in giving that information. However, they got some idea of the relationship from the packet Mary had bought and from the fact that Tom carried her to the toilet and stayed with her until she was finished.

Marjorie was very blunt in her questions and virtually accused Tom of abducting her sister but Vivienne heatedly disavowed that and suggested that if Marjorie hadn't been so eager to go to the theatre it would only have been a pleasant walk around the lake. "But I am glad the theatre was more important than me," she went on, "I've known love even if it is only for two days."

"Tell me. What it is between Mary and you," Tom asked when they were together at her place that evening. "There is much more to it than looks and disabilities."

"Make me," Vivienne taunted him cheekily.

"Okay then, but keep your fists out of my face. I know you've got the job you wanted done so it is usable but I don't want to need a guide dog or as you say, a seeing eye dog, for the rest of my stay." Picking her up and removing her skirt he held her face down on a cushion. "Are you going to tell me?" He tried to use his best interrogator's voice.

"No! Oooww!!" Vivienne cried as his hand landed on her bare arse. "That hurt."

"Tell me." Vivienne remained silent. Smack! Smack! Smack! Smack! The blows were nowhere near as hard as the on previous evening.

"Alright I'll tell you. First though take me to the bedroom and make love to me. I feel all warm and tingly there now." Tom did as requested and fucked her hard. Both of them climaxed and lay still and naked in each other's arms.

"There is nine years between my age and Mary's. I think I must have been an accident on my mother's part, in more ways than one. She died giving birth to me and Mary has always blamed me for her death. All of my other sisters are older than Mary so she was the one most often that had to take care of me. Father worked four nights a week so he wasn't there too often and when he was, he was working on getting compensation for what they did to me in the hospital."

"What did actually happen?" Tom asked.

"Somehow in my development inside my mother, my legs got tied up and lost the blood circulation to them. I wasn't due for another six weeks when mother's water broke and she was rushed into the hospital. It was only a small local hospital with one junior doctor on duty and when my mother arrived the junior doctor had only been a week out of training. He had sense enough to call the consultant but he was suffering a heart attack. A second consultant he tried to get was at a party fifty miles away so this junior had to try and birth me on his own with just the nurses to help none of whom was overly experienced. It should have been a C birth but the junior didn't think he should undertake this on his own so let mother try and birth me naturally. When my head showed he gripped it with tongs and had started to pull before the nurse yelled at him not to. That's why my head is the shape it is. Being premature, the bones were not hard enough to take the pressure and the fact that my legs were tied somewhere inside meant I wasn't going to come out anyway. All this came out later at various inquests and tribunals.