This Must Be The Plaice

- a brief encounter at the chip shop

It was not going to be a cordon-bleu meal, but after exploring the hills all morning I was ready for something to eat, and while waiting for my meal to arrive at the table (plaice and chips, mushy peas and a mug of tea - all for £3.50) I took stock of my surroundings. The fish-and-chip café was convenient, and fitted the popular tourist advice to ‘eat where the locals eat’, so I decided to give it a try.

About half a dozen women, outnumbered by small children, were huddled in the smoke-filled section of the dining area but the non-smoking end where I sat was almost empty. Outside, across the small market square, a crowd of men, glasses in hand, stood at the doorstep of the White Swan, a pub bedecked with the flag of St George and a banner proclaiming ‘Live Football Here.’ Possibly the husbands/fathers of the cafe customers, I thought.

This was Bolsover in the heart of the once thriving North Derbyshire coalfields. The last time I was here, in the 1950s, it was the centre of a bustling community. Not so since the local pit closed, together with most of the UK coal industry, in the wake of the disastrous miners’ strike of the 1980s. It was a human tragedy and, many agree, a serious mistake, both by the unions and the Government of the day, which led to our current fuel crisis, almost entirely dependent on imported gas and oil.

My reverie was interrupted by a female voice, very close. ‘Is anyone sitting here?’ it asked. It was a rhetorical question, to which I replied ‘Be my guest.’The voice belonged to a presentable woman in her middle years, and while she was at the counter ordering her meal I was thinking about that accent. Derbyshire, certainly, but somewhat mellowed. Perhaps she, like I, lived elsewhere now but was on a nostalgic return visit here today. Perhaps we might have a conversation. Perhaps she could add to my memories.

Returning to the table she took her seat and gave me a quizzical look. ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’ she asked. I smiled, somewhat bemused by the question. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.‘I’m a people-watcher,’ she confided. ‘Did it as part of my PGCE’. It was said with an air of confidence which seemed to assume that I would know that she was referring to the Post Graduate Certificate in Education.

‘So you’re a teacher, are you?’ I returned, quite happy to play the question-and-answer game with this total stranger who had chosen to sit at my table although there were other seats available.

’‘No,’ she replied, are you?

‘I’ve been retired for some years now,’ was all I said in reply, deciding that she was not going to get too much information out of me without working for it.

It became clear that she wanted to talk, to relieve some pent-up cares, and seemed comfortable using a stranger as a confidante. She had grown up near here, she told me, but moved away in her early 'teens, married and raised a family, and was now on a brief return visit to see her sick mother who was in a nursing home and had a limited life expectancy. I was happy to lend her my ear, and chipped in with a few comments of my own. It was like talking to an old friend; we each had a ready response to counter the other’s remarks.She told me tales of her childhood visits with her father to the castle on the hill, and other incidents in her life, some of them quite personal, almost as if feeding me with material for an article.

‘I knew you were a writer as soon as I walked in,’ she said, quite suddenly. ‘Books or newspapers?’I hadn’t answered her initial question, so why did she assume?

‘Yes’, I replied, determined to maintain the enigma.

She went on to say that her late husband was a writer. 'He died a little over a year ago. I recognized the expression on your face as soon as I walked in.’If this was a chat-up line it had a compelling tone of innocence about it.

It was true that I had already started writing this article in my head before she walked in, but could it have been so obvious? Perhaps, to a ‘people-watcher’, it was.More was to follow

‘He was a keen photographer too,’ she told me, and he just loved photographing steam trains‘.This was getting eerie. Too close for comfort. She had just described another of my interests, and when the conversation turned to genealogy, and her current use of the Internet to trace her ancestors, bells started ringing in my tiny brain. Everything she had said could have been gleaned from notes posted on several websites and discussion groups. My photograph also appears in several places. Had she recognised me and was that what prompted her to play this delightful game. For a split second I felt like voicing my suspicion, but it was more enjoyable to play it this way.

We talked for an hour and a half and then, as if hearing a ghostly colliery hooter announcing the end of shift, we rose simultaneously from the table, smiled and said in unison ‘It’s been nice meeting you’ and walked off in opposite directions, both smiling. Two strangers who shared an unplanned meal and exchanged confidences and will, I know, both treasure the memory of this brief encounter.

I’ll also remember the meal: the fish was a thin, tasteless, frozen fillet. I have enjoyed an abundance of fresh fish since living near the coast, and forgot that this café was about as far away from the sea as is possible in England. But the mushy peas were a real treat and brought back memories of a different time.