He said: “If I stand up in that court and say my head’s gone, they’ll have me assessed. Then it’s not a shop any more. It’s the house, and the car, and whether I’m fit to sign my own name.”
He said: “Let them have me for a thief. A thief gets to go home.”
That is not a confused man talking. That is a hundred and one years of sense, working out which of two things costs him less.
He had it entirely the right way round and nobody in that courtroom knew it except me.
ITEM 5. THE PROMISE.
I have been saying, since the September, that he made me promise never to tell anybody.
That is what I said to Judge Clathorne with my hand on my bag and about forty people listening.
It is not what he asked me for.
What he said, at that table in the April, after the bit about the house, was this.
“Don’t go to anybody with it. If it gets bad, you come to me and you say it to my face. I’ll not have it done behind me.”
***You come to me and you say it to my face.***
That is the promise. It is not a promise to keep quiet.
It is a promise to tell him.
ITEM 5a. WHAT ELSE HE SAID AT THAT TABLE.
The April conversation was eleven minutes and I have given four of them.
Near the end he asked me a question and I have never repeated it to anybody.
He said: “Am I bad yet?”
Those words. A man of a hundred and one, at his own kitchen table, asking his neighbour of thirty years for an honest assessment.
He was not being pitiful about it. He asked it the way you ask somebody to look at a mark on your back.
It is the only time in thirty years that man has asked me for anything.
I said: “You’re all right, Bertie.”
He looked at me for a bit and then he said: “Right.”
Then he got up and put the kettle on, which took him longer than it used to, and we talked about the fence.
That is the whole of the promise, in both directions, in about nine seconds.
He asked. I said he was all right. He let me.
ITEM 6. THE FIVE MONTHS.
April to September.
I did not go to anybody. I was very good about that; I did not tell my daughter, I did not tell the shop, I did not ring his granddaughter in Prescott.
I also did not say one word to him.
Five months of Thursday teas in that kitchen, every week, the two of us.
It came up once, on about the second of July, when he could not find the word for the thing you boil water in.
He laughed about it. He said: “Here we go.”
That was my opening and he handed it to me himself, and I said something about how I do that all the time.
I do not do that all the time. I am seventy-four and my head is fine.
ITEM 7. WHAT I GOT OUT OF THOSE FIVE MONTHS.
I have to put this down because without it the rest is a story about a kind neighbour.
My husband went in 2017. My daughter is in another state and she rings on a Sunday.
Bertie Mahon is the reason I get dressed.
Thursday tea. The bins on a Monday because he cannot manage them. The hour on his step in the summer.
If I had said it to his face in the April, one of two things happens. He gets help in, and there is somebody else in that kitchen on a Thursday. Or it goes further and he is not on Sallow Lane at all.
Either way the Thursdays stop.
I did not work that out in the April. I worked it out in the October, sitting in my own front room, after the whole thing was over.
I kept quiet for five months and told myself it was the promise.
ITEM 7a. THE THURSDAYS.
I have a diary because I have always had one, and it is in there, every Thursday: B, 3.
In the October I counted them, and then I went back through the earlier ones.
2024: about one a fortnight. The first half of 2025: most weeks.
From the September of 2025 it is every single week without one missed, including the week I had my hip looked at and the week my daughter was over.
She was here five days in the February and I went to Bertie Mahon’s on the Thursday. She said something about it, lightly, and I said he gets lonely.
He does get lonely. That is true and it was not the reason.
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