Omally grinned. He had not misjudged Mandy from the first moment he’d seen her pocket his pennies. “What exactly is on the cheap?”
“How does a ten spot sound?”
“It sounds most reasonable, and where are these bottles at present?”
“In the boot of the white M.G. out the front.”
Omally delved into his money belt, and a ten-pound note and a set of car keys changed hands. Winking lewdly, Omally left the bar.
A strange smell of the kind one generally associates with crematorium chimneys had began to weave its way about the bar. Some thought it was the last relics of the taint left by the Spirit of the Old West, others sensed its subtle difference and began to fan their drinks and cough into their stetsons. Suddenly there was a mighty crash as Neville brought his knobkerry down on the bar top. “The barbeque is served,” said the part-time barman.
Knowing the rush that would ensue at the announcement of free food, and still wishing to shield his carpet slippers from critical onlookers, Neville remained behind the bar to watch with some interest the way that one hundred or so cowboys might fit into a six-foot-square patio. Young Master Robert, clad in lurid vinyl apron and tall chefs hat, was going great guns behind the barbeque. Mountains of sizzling sausages, and steakettes and bubbling cauldrons of beans simmered away on the grill and Sandra stood near at hand proffering paper plates and serviettes printed with the legend,
The first half-dozen lucky would-be-diners squeezed their way through the Swan’s rear door and found themselves jammed up against the blazing barbeque. “One at a bloody time,” bawled a scorched Ranger, patting at the knees of his trousers. “Don’t push there,” screamed another as his elbow dipped into a vat of boiling beans.
Order was finally maintained by the skilful wielding of a red-hot toasting fork in the hands of the young master. A human chain was eventually set up and paper plates bearing dollops of beans, a steakette, a sausage and a roll were passed back along the queue of drunken cowboys.
“More charcoal,” the Young Master cried as a helpful Jim Pooley heaped stack after stack on the flames of the blazing barbeque. “More sausages, more beans.” Jim dutifully set about the top of a five-gallon drum with a handy garden fork.
Rammed into the corner of the patio and watching the barbeque with expressions of dire suspicion were two Rangers whose abundance of cranial covering identified them to be none other than Hairy Dave and Jungle John, well known if largely (and wisely) distrusted members of the local building profession.
Jim had watched these two surly individuals from the corner of his eye for the better part of the last half hour and had wondered at their doubtful expressions and occasional bouts of elbow nudging. A sudden sharp report from the base of the brick-built barbeque which slightly preceded their hasty departure from the patio caused Pooley to halt in his can-opening and take stock of the situation.
The barbeque was roaring away like a furnace and the grill had grown red hot and was slightly sagging in the middle. Young Master Robert was perspiring freely and calling for more charcoal. Jim noticed that his vinyl apron was beginning to run and that the paint on the Swan’s rear door was blistering alarmingly. The heat had grown to such an extent that the remaining cowboys were pressed back against the wall and were shielding their faces and privy parts with paper plates.
“More charcoal,” screamed Young Master Robert.
Pooley’s eyes suddenly alighted upon a half empty bag of cement which lay among a few unused red flettons in the corner of the patio. He recalled a time when, taking a few days’ work in order to appease a sadistic official at the Labour Exchange, he had installed a fireplace at a lady’s house on the Butts Estate. Knowing little about what happens when bricks and mortar grow hot, and having never heard of fireproof bricks and heat resistant cement, he had used these very same red flettons and a bag of similarly standard cement. The fire- engine bells still rang clearly in Jim’s memory.
There was another loud report from the base of the barbeque and Pooley reached out to make a grab at Young Master Robert’s shoulder. “Come on, come on,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard above the roaring of the fire. “Get inside.”
“Leave off, will you?” the young master shouted back. “Open those beans.”
Jim was a man who would do most things to protect his fellow man, but he was not one to scoff at self-preservation. “Run for your life,” bawled Jim, thrusting his way into the suddenly stampeding herd of cowboys who had by now similarly realized that all was not well with the barbeque, and that the all that was not well was of that kind which greatly endangers life and limb.
The mad rush burst in through the Swan’s rear door, carrying it from its hinges and depositing it on the cross-legged form of “Vindaloo Vic”, the manager of the Curry Garden, who had been busily employed in the heaping of sausages and steakettes into a stack of foil containers to be later resold in his establishment as Bombay Duck. He vanished beneath the rented soles of forty-eight trampling cowboy boots.
The merrymakers in the saloon bar were not long in discerning that something was going very wrong on the patio. As one, they rose to their feet and took flight. Neville found himself suddenly alone in the saloon bar. “Now what can this mean?” he asked himself. “The bar suddenly empty, drinks left untouched upon tables, cigarettes burning in ashtrays, had the Flying Swan become some form of land-locked
Before Neville instinctively took the old “dive for cover” beneath the Swan’s counter he had the impression that a being from another world had entered the bar from the rear passage. This vision, although fleeting and seen only through the part-time barman’s good eye, appeared to be clad in a steaming skin-tight vinyl space-suit and wearing the remnants of a chefs hat.
The first explosion was not altogether a large one; it was by no means on the scale of Krakatoa’s outburst, and it is doubtful whether it even raised a squiggle upon the seismographs at Greenwich. It was the second one that was definitely the most memorable. Possibly a scientist schooled in such matters could have estimated the exact megatonnage of the thirty cases of Old Snakebelly. However, we must accept, in the untechnical jargon of John Omally who was returning at that moment from the allotment where he had been burying twenty-four bottles of the volatile liquid, that it was one “bloody big bang”.
The blast ripped through the Swan, overturning the piano, lifting the polished beer-pulls from the counter and propelling them through the front windows like so many silver-tipped torpedoes. The Swiss cheese roof of the gents’ toilet was raised from its worm-eaten mountings and liberally distributed over half-a-dozen back gardens. The crowd of cowboys who had taken cover behind the parked cars in the Ealing Road ducked their heads and covered their ears and faces as shards of smoke-stained glass rained down upon them.
Neville was comparatively unscathed. When he felt it safe he raised his noble head above the counter to peer through shaking fingers at the desolation that had been his pride and joy.
The Swan was wreathed in smoke, but what Neville could see of the basic structure appeared to be intact. As for the cowboy trapping and the pub furniture, little remained that could by any stretch of the imagination be called serviceable. The tables and chairs had joined the patrons in making a rapid move towards the front door, but unlike those lucky personnel their desperate bid for escape had been halted by the front wall, where they lay heaped like the barricades of revolutionary Paris. Sawdust filled the air like a woody snowstorm, and in the middle of the floor, lacking most of his clothes but still bearing upon his head the charred remnants of a chefs hat, lay Young Master Robert. Neville patted away the sawdust from his shoulders and found to his amazement one lone optic full of whisky. This indeed had become a night he would long remember.
The now emboldened cowboys had risen from their shelters and were beating upon the Swan’s door. Faces appeared at the glassless windows and inane cries of “Are you all right?” and “Is anybody there?” filled the smoky air.
Neville downed his scotch and climbed over the bar to inspect the fallen figure of the Young Master, who was showing some signs of life. The patrons finally broke into the bar and came to a crowded and silent standstill about the prone figure.
