Carmel
Created | Updated Apr 1, 2003
Carmel was almost thirty when we met. I’d seen her many times before over the last few (two as it turned out) years, but we’d never actually met. Oh I’d played the, ‘One white wine, one pint of bitter, two vodka and slim lines’ game several times, but we hadn’t actually been introduced.
We met formerly on new years eve 2002. Strangely enough, as it follows, a funeral introduced us, owing to the fact that a luminary from one of my past lives had sadly died just before Christmas and the flowers had to be delivered to the funeral directors on New Years Eve.
Interesting concept I always think, ‘Funeral Director’.
‘And now introducing Frederick W. Paine and his epic production…A funny thing happened on the way to the Crematorium.'
I digress, so sorry.
The river was swollen at the old mill opposite the undertakers when we dropped off the flowers. It was beautiful. Muddy grey waters overlapping the road. The farmers’ field behind the mill completely submerged. Only the tall tufts of meadow grasses visible in small clumps.
A cold brown day, the wooshing of the beautiful and, oh so dangerous, waters coursing through the mill being the only sound to break the holiday silence. Thackery, Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, all sprang to mind and the absurd desire to take a walk almost persuaded.
Instead I suggested a drink, and so it was we ended up in the pub at about eleven.
Being New Years Eve and early, it was decidedly empty. Carmel (I didn’t know her name at the time) asked what we would like. Two double vodkas and slim lines later we settled at the table nearest the door, always a good vantagepoint to see whom, if anyone, of remotest interest might arrive.
There were only two other people in the bar. A thirty-something -ish young man with dark curly hair and a not-quite-tartan kind of shirt, who would have looked more at home in the Wool Pack, and a totally unremarkable elderly gentleman, who later proceeded to become at least possibly remarkable by donning a Crocodile Dundee hat as he departed.
Carmel decided to have a cigarette.
’Do you two want another drink before I have a cigarette break?’
We decided we did. Carmel brought us our drinks and then, nursing a mug of something steamy and almost certainly non-alcoholic, she lit her cigarette and moved to the table by the open fire, just one away from ours. She poked the logs for want of something to do.
’You’ve been here quite a while now haven’t you?’ Amazing how inane I become, when curiosity overcomes.
’Yeah. Two years.’ (Australian brevity at its best.)
The Pub was built in 1460 a fact proudly displayed in stained glass above the bar, no doubt a legacy from a far later period. Five hundred years of history have passed through this quaint crooked house. Kings and queens have come and gone as have villains, revolutions of varying kinds, two world wars and several others not all globe encompassing but, no doubt, equally devastating.
Five hundred years, that's forever. That's before America was imagined, before the King James Bible was first printed. Music, science, the arts, politics, ferret breeding, this public house has surely been privy to just about anything you can imagine, and what are its only constants?
Ale and Barmaids.
Carmel has to be the ultimate barmaid.
She is large and warm and sassy and orange. Orange is odd I grant you, but she was wearing an orange T-shirt so bright it almost dulled the flaming red unruly locks that surrounded her wide, open and decidedly freckled face.
Five hundred years ago the same face would have fitted perfectly atop a corseted ochre dress. Creamy speckled breasts bursting over the corsets and plump arms and strong hands doing battle with trays of ale and the unwelcome advances of the, all too frequently, worse for wear regulars in equal measure.
Not a lot changes. The dress is now a T-shirt pushed into too tight blue jeans. Where the waist and breasts were once the focus, a broad and rounded jean clad rump now swings from side to magnificent side in defiant attitude.
Carmel is the daughter of a sheep shearer from Western Australia. She’s almost thirty and has been working since she was eight. Well, not officially working, but helping out the family business for a fair remuneration, so judged by her.
At eight she and her two elder brothers were working in the yards on the ranch. There were three jobs as far as I could ascertain. The first had something to do with checking to see which animals had been shorn, the second to do with where the wool was going. Neither of these tasks it seems was particularly arduous. The third had to do with the cleaning up, which was… arduous that is. Carmel got the third.
When they were young all the money went into a communal pot which was shared equally between them.
The justice of this arrangement stays with her still as a work ethic, the injustice of it caused her to leave the family business at 21. Both the justice and the injustice now sit quite happily side by side on her broad and carefree shoulders.
She remembers starry nights spent sleeping under the wool bales. The only visible part of her being the tip of her sunburnt nose. Happy exhausted memories of an easy childhood. Memories of pristine white shell beaches unadorned by the now obligatory resort hotels. Empty stretches of shoreline wilderness where today German tourists do battle with their cameras to capture images of a dolphin colony that never was indigenous, but is now so much part of the twenty first century coastline industry.
She began her travels at 15.
’I don’t mean my parents just let me leave home. Nah, I had relatives all over Western Australia and I just started visiting them…a habit I never kinda broke’. This revelation is accompanied by a deep throaty laugh that bathes us all in its warm amber nectar.
At 21 she decided that although the pay was equal in the family firm, the workload was definitely not. Time to move on.
’It's not that I don’t like hard work. I mean I could be butt lazy when I was young, but now I get twitchy if I’m not doing something, and I hate being on the dole.’
Trying to build up a sisterly bond, I agree and point out that I too come from the hard working classes a fact testified to by the condition of my hands, all calluses and broken nails.
’Ah hell. I bite me nails. Always have. ‘Cept of course when I was a mortician, but you can understand that.’
My mouthful of vodka and slim-line hits the floor.
’Ah s**t another customer. Remind me to tell you about that sometime.’
I did, not two minutes later.
It seems that at twenty-one, Carmel had become an apprentice mortician with a well-known firm of funeral directors in Perth. A safe secure future beckoned. Apart from giving up biting her nails not a lot had changed in her life. The new job offered hard work for a fair return. Her peers, like her siblings in the past, played plenty of indescribable pranks on her, and all were in the worst possible taste. When Carmel rose to the dizzy heights of the second level, she happily played the same distasteful pranks on the new intake of funeral freshers. The future looked rosy in a ‘lets rouge the cheeks of this one’ kind of way.
So what brought her here?
’They wanted me to convert’.
’I beg your pardon?’
’They wanted me to convert to Catholicism. Hell I ain’t even religious! So I quit and applied for a job over here. Said I wanted to work in a traditional English old-fashioned pub not too far from London and got the job before I even left home. I’m leaving at the end of January, thought I’d go and have a look at the north of England.’
How could she? How could this gloriously perfect titian haired barmaid leave? She has been here for over five hundred years. She is part of the very soul of the pub. I should know. I must have drunk in this pub at least twenty times over the past sixteen years. How will we survive without her?
The best I can offer is a telephone number in Aberdeen and dire warnings about anything north of Watford.
She will be fine Carmel. She has a love of life that will stand her in good stead whatever the North has to throw at her. The real regulars in the pub will I’m sure mourn her passing until the next good-hearted, easy listening and, preferably, large-chested replacement arrives.
For me I have something special this New Year, a new character. You will see yourself one-day Carmel, maybe in a 15thcentury pub in rural England, sashaying through the bar swapping bawdy anecdotes with a future Shakespeare. Or perhaps you’ll be sharing a bus in Thailand with sweaty students in rose coloured Raybans, as you make your way to the bar you run (along side the drugs), in Krabi. I may even take you back to Australia to witness the murder of a stranger who comes to the ranch you work on. Everyone needs you Carmel. The murderer needs to silence you. The new Shakespeare needs you as his muse, the prosecution at the drug trial needs your evidence and I need you.
I hope when I use you, I do it honourably and honestly and with as bold a pen as the one you use to draw your path in life.
We met formerly on new years eve 2002. Strangely enough, as it follows, a funeral introduced us, owing to the fact that a luminary from one of my past lives had sadly died just before Christmas and the flowers had to be delivered to the funeral directors on New Years Eve.
Interesting concept I always think, ‘Funeral Director’.
‘And now introducing Frederick W. Paine and his epic production…A funny thing happened on the way to the Crematorium.'
I digress, so sorry.
The river was swollen at the old mill opposite the undertakers when we dropped off the flowers. It was beautiful. Muddy grey waters overlapping the road. The farmers’ field behind the mill completely submerged. Only the tall tufts of meadow grasses visible in small clumps.
A cold brown day, the wooshing of the beautiful and, oh so dangerous, waters coursing through the mill being the only sound to break the holiday silence. Thackery, Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, all sprang to mind and the absurd desire to take a walk almost persuaded.
Instead I suggested a drink, and so it was we ended up in the pub at about eleven.
Being New Years Eve and early, it was decidedly empty. Carmel (I didn’t know her name at the time) asked what we would like. Two double vodkas and slim lines later we settled at the table nearest the door, always a good vantagepoint to see whom, if anyone, of remotest interest might arrive.
There were only two other people in the bar. A thirty-something -ish young man with dark curly hair and a not-quite-tartan kind of shirt, who would have looked more at home in the Wool Pack, and a totally unremarkable elderly gentleman, who later proceeded to become at least possibly remarkable by donning a Crocodile Dundee hat as he departed.
Carmel decided to have a cigarette.
’Do you two want another drink before I have a cigarette break?’
We decided we did. Carmel brought us our drinks and then, nursing a mug of something steamy and almost certainly non-alcoholic, she lit her cigarette and moved to the table by the open fire, just one away from ours. She poked the logs for want of something to do.
’You’ve been here quite a while now haven’t you?’ Amazing how inane I become, when curiosity overcomes.
’Yeah. Two years.’ (Australian brevity at its best.)
The Pub was built in 1460 a fact proudly displayed in stained glass above the bar, no doubt a legacy from a far later period. Five hundred years of history have passed through this quaint crooked house. Kings and queens have come and gone as have villains, revolutions of varying kinds, two world wars and several others not all globe encompassing but, no doubt, equally devastating.
Five hundred years, that's forever. That's before America was imagined, before the King James Bible was first printed. Music, science, the arts, politics, ferret breeding, this public house has surely been privy to just about anything you can imagine, and what are its only constants?
Ale and Barmaids.
Carmel has to be the ultimate barmaid.
She is large and warm and sassy and orange. Orange is odd I grant you, but she was wearing an orange T-shirt so bright it almost dulled the flaming red unruly locks that surrounded her wide, open and decidedly freckled face.
Five hundred years ago the same face would have fitted perfectly atop a corseted ochre dress. Creamy speckled breasts bursting over the corsets and plump arms and strong hands doing battle with trays of ale and the unwelcome advances of the, all too frequently, worse for wear regulars in equal measure.
Not a lot changes. The dress is now a T-shirt pushed into too tight blue jeans. Where the waist and breasts were once the focus, a broad and rounded jean clad rump now swings from side to magnificent side in defiant attitude.
Carmel is the daughter of a sheep shearer from Western Australia. She’s almost thirty and has been working since she was eight. Well, not officially working, but helping out the family business for a fair remuneration, so judged by her.
At eight she and her two elder brothers were working in the yards on the ranch. There were three jobs as far as I could ascertain. The first had something to do with checking to see which animals had been shorn, the second to do with where the wool was going. Neither of these tasks it seems was particularly arduous. The third had to do with the cleaning up, which was… arduous that is. Carmel got the third.
When they were young all the money went into a communal pot which was shared equally between them.
The justice of this arrangement stays with her still as a work ethic, the injustice of it caused her to leave the family business at 21. Both the justice and the injustice now sit quite happily side by side on her broad and carefree shoulders.
She remembers starry nights spent sleeping under the wool bales. The only visible part of her being the tip of her sunburnt nose. Happy exhausted memories of an easy childhood. Memories of pristine white shell beaches unadorned by the now obligatory resort hotels. Empty stretches of shoreline wilderness where today German tourists do battle with their cameras to capture images of a dolphin colony that never was indigenous, but is now so much part of the twenty first century coastline industry.
She began her travels at 15.
’I don’t mean my parents just let me leave home. Nah, I had relatives all over Western Australia and I just started visiting them…a habit I never kinda broke’. This revelation is accompanied by a deep throaty laugh that bathes us all in its warm amber nectar.
At 21 she decided that although the pay was equal in the family firm, the workload was definitely not. Time to move on.
’It's not that I don’t like hard work. I mean I could be butt lazy when I was young, but now I get twitchy if I’m not doing something, and I hate being on the dole.’
Trying to build up a sisterly bond, I agree and point out that I too come from the hard working classes a fact testified to by the condition of my hands, all calluses and broken nails.
’Ah hell. I bite me nails. Always have. ‘Cept of course when I was a mortician, but you can understand that.’
My mouthful of vodka and slim-line hits the floor.
’Ah s**t another customer. Remind me to tell you about that sometime.’
I did, not two minutes later.
It seems that at twenty-one, Carmel had become an apprentice mortician with a well-known firm of funeral directors in Perth. A safe secure future beckoned. Apart from giving up biting her nails not a lot had changed in her life. The new job offered hard work for a fair return. Her peers, like her siblings in the past, played plenty of indescribable pranks on her, and all were in the worst possible taste. When Carmel rose to the dizzy heights of the second level, she happily played the same distasteful pranks on the new intake of funeral freshers. The future looked rosy in a ‘lets rouge the cheeks of this one’ kind of way.
So what brought her here?
’They wanted me to convert’.
’I beg your pardon?’
’They wanted me to convert to Catholicism. Hell I ain’t even religious! So I quit and applied for a job over here. Said I wanted to work in a traditional English old-fashioned pub not too far from London and got the job before I even left home. I’m leaving at the end of January, thought I’d go and have a look at the north of England.’
How could she? How could this gloriously perfect titian haired barmaid leave? She has been here for over five hundred years. She is part of the very soul of the pub. I should know. I must have drunk in this pub at least twenty times over the past sixteen years. How will we survive without her?
The best I can offer is a telephone number in Aberdeen and dire warnings about anything north of Watford.
She will be fine Carmel. She has a love of life that will stand her in good stead whatever the North has to throw at her. The real regulars in the pub will I’m sure mourn her passing until the next good-hearted, easy listening and, preferably, large-chested replacement arrives.
For me I have something special this New Year, a new character. You will see yourself one-day Carmel, maybe in a 15thcentury pub in rural England, sashaying through the bar swapping bawdy anecdotes with a future Shakespeare. Or perhaps you’ll be sharing a bus in Thailand with sweaty students in rose coloured Raybans, as you make your way to the bar you run (along side the drugs), in Krabi. I may even take you back to Australia to witness the murder of a stranger who comes to the ranch you work on. Everyone needs you Carmel. The murderer needs to silence you. The new Shakespeare needs you as his muse, the prosecution at the drug trial needs your evidence and I need you.
I hope when I use you, I do it honourably and honestly and with as bold a pen as the one you use to draw your path in life.
