A monthly anecdote of Suffolk living

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Lenny Lenny

by Guy Massey

Lenny Lenny stood on the bank next to the frozen pond and watched with anxiety, his brow furrowed, as I walked across the ice to the far side. He then stated firmly:

"I'm not going on there, boy. I'm not going on there. They keep telling you on the wireless not to go on the ice."

"Its quite safe Lenny," I reassured him, jumping up and down on it like some kind of demented jack-in-the-box.

But he remained motionless; standing there in his matching blue overalls and blue woolly hat (without a bobble) that he wore for his work as a forklift truck driver in nearby feed-mill.

Of course Lenny Lenny wasn't his real name, his real name was actually Lenny King and he was the youngest of six children. King is one of those wonderful old Suffolk names and there have been Kings in the village since before Adam was a lad. We called him Lenny Lenny because always, without exception, he repeats anything he says. If you asked Lenny Lenny how he was feeling, he would say: 'All right boy, All right'. If you asked him if he had had a good week at work he would say: 'Busy boy, Busy'. If you asked him, as we did once, whether his bathroom was warm enough in winter, he says: 'Its bit-eer boy. Its bit-eer.'

We often said that it was a good thing that Lenny Lenny repeated everything, because he had such a strong, broad, Suffolk accent that it was sometimes difficult to catch what he said first time. Therefore if he said everything twice, us non-Suffolk folk stood a fighting chance of translating it, or at least understanding it, second time round.

Lenny Lenny was of good, solid, Suffolk stock and was one of the happiest people we knew. He seemed never to have a care in the world. He had worked all his life and even at the age of 59, he was still living in the same council house in the village that he had been born in. He had never lived anywhere else. Never been to Scotland, never been to Wales. He had, however, been to France but that was simply because one weekend before Christmas, he had joined a works bus-trip to Calais to stock up on duty-free booze.

"Funny bunch of people over there boy. Funny bunch of people," he had said upon his return.

There were only two things in life that Lenny Lenny wanted; good, wholesome food, and plenty of it, was one, and a new car every three years was the other. Apart from those his needs were small. He was un-married. He wasn't interested in expensive foreign holidays and generally modern life had passed him by.

Once, the company that he worked for had put a bar-code reader on his fork-lift truck. The idea was that Lenny Lenny would ran a scanner over the bar-code of each pallet he moved. "I don't want to learn about commuters [sic] at my age boy, not at my age." But, after a little in-house company training he did manage it - but only if it all work as it should. The first time it didn't work, he carefully disconnected the wires and continued on. The company realised there and then that trying to teach Lenny Lenny to use computers was a challenge too big for them. I'd once asked him where he had gone to school. I knew it would have been locally, but I was bit taken aback when he said: "I didn't go to school much boy. The truancy officer was always round at our house talking to my mum!"

Only twice I had seen Lenny Lenny upset. The first time was when his sister's Jack Russell died at the age of fifteen. The second time was when his mother had died at the great old age of 98. She died in Rose Bush Hospital and he telephoned me that evening, after he arrived home and said:

"I've never in the been in the house overnight on my own boy, never over night. Funny feeling boy. It's a funny feeling."

I had first met Lenny Lenny about 15 years before when he was working for a nearby pig farmer. There is one thing you can say about Lenny Lenny and that is that he isn't afraid of hard work. 'Strong in arm and weak in head' is what the newcomers to the area say about the indigenous locals. They other thing they say is 'They don't move fast enough to catch a cold.' But we've seen them coming down from London in their Volvo estates, packed so full with green wellington boots and Barbour jackets that tow-bar practically runs along the ground.

We also seen them scuttling back to London when that lazy wind from Siberia sweeps in over the Norfolk coast from the North Sea and comes on down into the county. It's known as a lazy wind because it goes right through you rather than around.

Lenny Lenny once won a small amount of money on the National Lottery and came up to the house one wet Sunday morning to tell me about it. "What are you going to do with it?" I asked. "Save it for a rainy day boy. Save it for a rainy day." I looked up from my tea to see the rain outside lashing down on the windows and said: "Well, it's not going to get any rainier than it is now so what are we going to do?" "Put it in the bank boy. Put it in the bank."

When Lenny Lenny was made redundant from the pig farm, due to the falling price of pork, he found his present gainful employment as a forklift truck driver in the nearby feed mill. There he worked a shift pattern; 'six to two' one week and 'two to ten' the next. When he wasn't driving his forklift, or attending to his vegetable garden, he would come up to the house to help out around the grounds. Which is why he was standing on the bank watching me prove that the ice was strong enough to walk on.

Again, I said to him:

"It's quite all right. It's perfectly strong enough. You just trust me."

With that I walked back to the bank and encouraged him on the ice.

"Don't you stay too near to me boy, not too near now."

I choose to ignore that as we had more important issues to discuss on the ice. A few years ago, in one of the long hot summers that we were having at the time, the pond had dried up and we had taken the opportunity to dig out over five hundred years of rotting leaves and other miscellaneous rubbish. Whilst the pond was dry and before it had refilled with rainwater, Lenny Lenny and I had cut back all the overhanging branches and opened up the pond and made it look all rather nice. Now that the pond had frozen over, I was proposing that we go on the ice and trimmed back the few years growth that we had had since we had cut it all back before.

"It shouldn't take too long should it Lenny?" I asked the petrified figure standing next to me.

"Should do it in an afternoon boy. Should do it in an afternoon. What day do want to do it? What day do want to do it?" He replied.

"Wednesday?"

"Righty oh boy Righty oh," he said scuttling back to the safety of terra ferma.

And so it was arranged. Two thirty next Wednesday, ice holding, Lenny Lenny and I would trim back the newly-grown overhang.

Come Wednesday afternoon, Lenny Lenny was standing on the bank in his matching blue overalls and blue woolly hat (without a bobble) with chain-saw, clippers and secateurs in hand ready to hit the ice a la Ernest Henry Shackleton crossing the Antarctic. We have always said that Lenny Lenny is no respecter of nature. When hacking at undergrowth he goes at it though it's a personal vendetta. Everything in his path is cut down to within half an inch of its life. And so it was with the overhanging branches. Lenny Lenny put his heart and soul into the job. Anything that had the audacity to come out beyond the vertical was smartly snipped back into line until, around dusk, he stood back and said:

"That's a good job done boy, good job done."

"Do you want a cup of tea Lenny?"

So, with the bonfire dying down and the embers glowing in the twilight, Lenny Lenny and I walked back up the hill to the house to have a well-earned cup of tea and plan what he was going to grow in his vegetable garden later in the year.

"It wont be long now boy. Wont be long."

© Copyright Guy Massey

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