Scardale
III — A Chance Encounter
Mary had met Ronnie two years earlier on a trip to the Doncaster races in midwinter. Shivering and standing alone outside the women's toilets, Mary waited for her friends.
Ronnie, triumphant after a "nice" win in the second horse race and gesticulating wildly with his hands, not looking where he was going, accidentally knocked poor Mary over.
"I'm sorry," Ronnie stammered, trying desperately and without ceremony to drag Mary up off the floor.
"Will you get off me, you great fool," Mary shouted back at Ronnie, without looking up at him.
When she had risen to her feet and recovered her senses somewhat, Mary was about to launch into a tirade of abuse, but halted when she viewed the man before her.
"My name's Ronnie. What's yours? Let me buy you a drink to say sorry. I'll buy one drink for an apology and one for your beauty. How about it?"
"A lager top will do just nice, Ronnie," Mary replied.
Before Ronnie, Mary had had only a couple of boyfriends, but they were only brief affairs. "Ronnie's different from them, Mam; he has determination and fire within him, and the other two are a pair of lettuces compared with him," she told her mother.
Her mother tried to reason with her daughter about her concerns regarding Ronnie, but the ardent girl wouldn't have it, and within the year, Mary and Ronnie were married.
Mary left her job in a florist's shop and moved to Scardale with Ronnie and his parents.
Ronnie's parents were veritable Yorkshire 'no fuss' creatures descended from centuries of coal mining culture, and they didn't take too kindly to the arrival of Mary with her serious character and her 'fancy flowers and trimmings' from Doncaster.
This made early married life for Mary somewhat strained, and if the truth be known, she thought she had married "a bit too quickly."
She would regularly chastise Ronnie's heavy drinking and remonstrate with him when his roving eye and chatter became too effusive. "Will you stop that, Ronnie," she would shout when private occasion allowed, for Mary was not, unlike her husband, a courter of attention.
Overall, though, she did love her husband, and when he didn't drink himself into a state of alcoholic liquefaction, she was generally happy.
The arrival of their son enhanced Mary's happiness, and when they secured a local council cottage with a commodious kitchen and a little living room, she glowed in the felicity of marriage.
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About Karl Swainston
Karl Swainston is a writer and storyteller whose work is forged from a life lived across the North of England and far beyond. Growing up on a Leeds council estate in the 1960s, Karl's journey was anything but linear. By the age of thirty, he had already lived a dozen lives: from the rigors of grammar school to a degree in Latin, a stint as a fishmonger, a period of discovery living in Marseille, and a return to the hustle of London. Whether working as a postman, a builder, or competing as a county-level chess player, he was, above all, an avid reader—constantly documenting the world around him. This restless spirit continued into his professional life. Karl later taught in Bradford, where he ran a specialist unit for 244 of the most excluded students from across the region—young people whom even the local Pupil Referral Units could not accommodate. Working alongside his old friend Malcolm, Karl spent his days navigating the volatility of Bradford's most aggressive and dysfunctional teenagers. Throughout his life, Karl has been an avid runner and has always shared his home with a rotating cast of beloved dogs and cats—companions who have been constant witnesses to his work. As a writer, Karl's range is as expansive as his history. He works across a wide breadth of genres, including fiction and short stories, autobiography and memoir, biography, non-fiction, and metaphysical writing, as well as providing sharp commentary, opinion, analysis, and essays. Whether writing about his years managing the Harrogate Arms or offering insights from his current adopted home in South East India, where he lives in a simple village with his dog, Bambi, Karl's voice reflects the full, untidy, and deeply human breadth of life. He continues to draw on the rich, decades-long tapestry of his experiences to tell stories that matter, proving that no matter where you live, the human story remains the same.
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