Unassuming

"Many homicidal lunatics are very quiet, unassuming people.  Delightful fellows." Agatha Christie

The one thing I can say about Graham, without fear of contradiction, was that he was not a homicidal lunatic. He was, however, very unassuming: a man who you would walk past in the street. He mostly wore greys and blacks, and his hair had thinned so that his bald patch was the lion's share of his head.  Graham wore his hair slightly longer than you'd expect for a man in his sixties and he seemed unfinished, slightly grubby.   This is not to cast aspersions on his character - he was a nice, decent man.

We encountered Graham when we lived in Rossendale.  He drove his white Granada up the unmade road past our house twice a day, and parked it in front of some disused garages.  He'd leave the car there, and then head on foot to the patch of land he rented off the Hardman Trust to feed his animals.  We too rented land off the Trust, a slightly under the radar operation that owned most of this part of Rossendale, including - one assumes - Hardman Drive that ran at the end of the unmade road, curling up to a dead-end and a field full of sheep.  Old Mr Hardman was in effect one of the founding fathers of Waterfoot, one of a few Victorian gentlemen who made money from the felt mills on the valley floor. The Trust carved up the space into various chunks and asked for a small amount of rental once a year - many people lived out their dreams of being small-holders on Hardman land.

In fact, most people who came to live in Waterfoot had come originally to work the mills and at their height they'd sent the woollen material across the world.  I don't know the full history of Hardman (although a W. Hardman seems to have been some sort of Historian), but stone was also quarried in those parts and there was business in the town for a man who could make the most of it.  Indeed, Graham had done just that - although on a much smaller scale.

Before we moved into Waterfoot Graham had owned and run the sweet shop.  Tucked in just beside the pub, he'd made a good living from selling sweets: generations of children and young people from the Grammar school had doubtless seen it as the place to be directly after school filling up on Riley's Chocolate Toffee Rolls, Licorice Allsorts, Turkish Delights and supplies of penny sweets of all kinds: milk bottles, chocolate logs, mojos and more.

I never saw inside the shop because it closed just as I was finding my way about the place.  For a while, the shopfront was a bit desolate, and the odd business moved in and then out without ever really making a go of it.  Finally, it was re-shaped into an Estate Agents and we all just walked past it and straight into the Co-Op for supplies.

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