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An Englishman’s House is his Castle

Derrick Sherwin

    He wasn’t a particularly good looking man nor ugly but basically ordinary in every respect. He didn’t get admiring glances and people didn’t discuss him except to remark how inoffensive he was. He was therefore surprised to find on holiday in Thailand, which he has heard was a friendly country, when girls appeared to notice him and even smile at him. His workmates made fun of him because he appeared to have little personality, no friends as such and certainly had not been known to have any girlfriends. They had told him that a Christmas holiday would put this right because the Thai girls fell for Western boys and called them Farangs – the polite Thai word for foreigner.
    After a day or so being on the receiving end of the Thai girl’s apparent friendliness he did something he had never dared do with a English girl – he started a conversation – tentatively and nervously but definitely a conversation. He told her that he worked for a big company building houses and drove a big earth-moving machine. He earned good money and had saved a great deal of it because had no passions for anything except perhaps a day by the river fishing. He went out every Friday night for a beer at the local Pub but nobody really talked to him and he not to them because he had nothing really he wanted to say and nothing he was interested in – except fishing! So to be sitting in a bar talking to a pretty Thai girl was an unusual and exciting experience for hm.
    Before the night was out he had learned from her with her very small English vocabulary that her name was Noi, that she lived in an unpronounceable country village in an area in the North East of Thailand and that she worked at the bar entertaining customers as a dancer. She demonstrated this later when at the orders from the rather formidable Mama San she went behind the bar and climbed up on a concrete podium in the centre of which was a metal pole. She used the pole for support as she, to the accompaniment of pounding Thai music danced around the pole provocatively swaying her hips and gyrating sensually. All the time smiling at him as though this total performance was for him alone.
    He didn’t notice the time go by until the last few drunken men left the bar with girls hanging on their arms. Noi joined him. “Time go” she smiled at him again as she followed the other girl’s example and locked arms with him.
    He didn’t know how or why they ended up back at his small hotel room where without any embarrassment she stripped and entered the ice-cold shower. The rest of the night was ecstasy after ecstasy and even though unusually drunk he swore he would remember it forever. “You virgin.” she giggled. “Not any more.” he giggled in return!
    They spent the next week together hardly out of each other’s sight and when the time came for him to go to the Airport to catch his airplane for the long flight home to England he was almost in tears. He gave her a substantial amount of money and swore that at the next opportunity he would be back.
    Back in the dirty grayness of London he was a changed man. His workmates commented on his “new man” attitude and quite rightly assumed it was because he had fallen in love. Each week he telephoned Noi and each week he sent her Western Union payments and implored her to stay faithful and count the days to Easter when he would visit again.
    Easter wouldn’t come soon enough and he even took an extra week off and left early. Noi met him at the airport and amidst passionate scenes persuaded him to take her to her village, “Mama she want meet you.”
    The old woman he met was gray and bent almost double her teeth were stained from the Beetle-Nut which she chewed constantly. He was dragged around the village and paraded like a trophy by Noi and she finally took him to a plot of land on the edge of the village.
    “My land,” she said proudly. “We live here? You build house?”
    He had no choice but to agree and met the local builder. With his brain in a whirl he agreed with Noi’s plans for the building of the house which was remarkably cheap and he managed to persuade his bank in London to send him enough for the construction and within a week he was back in London. He had agreed to travel back in three months time and to marry. He had understood that it was the custom that he would have to put up a dowry and pay for the entire ceremony which would have to involve over three hundred people. Noi reported every week on the progress of building their love nest and preparations for their wedding and to demurely ask for more cash for the house. She was obviously very happy and very proud.
    On his return she met him at the airport in Bangkok and immediately whisked him off to the nearest big town to her tiny village and the Chinese jewelers where she chose her wedding Gold. Next she dragged him off to a photographers where she had him fitted out with hired traditional Thai clothes for the wedding and several different dresses for her and within the hour, after she had been suitably made-up and her hair dressed and slung up in a high bun they were photographed in innumerable poses and different changes of clothes.
    The three hundred guests duly arrived were fed and watered and he was once again paraded around like a recently acquired prize. Everyone was happy – loads of food, booze and many were so happy that they passed out of the floor. Thais are not known to be able to hold their liquor and the bottle of Whiskey on each guests table soon disappeared and many a head bobbed below the table emitting sonorous noise.
    The next week passed by and he was shown the house and taken to various furniture shops in preparation for their occupancy. Noi was in command and loving every minute of it but money was passing through his wallet like there was a hole in it and finally he had to call a halt.
    This didn’t go down at all well. “You don’t love me no more.” She whined and sulked. This petty and childish mood went on remorselessly and he was glad when the last few days of his holiday came to an end and he headed back to London having promised to send her money every month.
    Work was almost a welcome relief and he enjoyed the familiar thumping of the diesel engine of his massive Earth Moving machine. He should be happy, he thought, married now to the lovely Noi, owner of a brand new house in exotic Thailand and a new life awaiting him. But how, he wondered can I continue the ‘good life’ if I have to leave the UK? Would it be possible to get employment in Thailand? He was fifty years old and not far off retirement for which he had been saving to supplement his Old Age Pension but now that he had spent a great deal of his savings on the marriage and the new house there wasn’t much left!
    The answer came when he returned again to Thailand. Noi didn’t waste any time demanding more money to buy this and that but he objected informing her that all of her demands had left him unable to supply her constant needs. Her familiar sulking mood ensued and she took to leaving the house every day for long periods at a time – sometimes all night.
    Finally, fed up with being left alone, cooking his own evening meal taking his usual wander down to the local shop cum bar to chat with the owner he followed her one early evening into the village. He wasn’t particularly surprised when she disappeared into a Thai karaoke Bar and, waiting a few discreet minutes he made his way into the gloomy interior. Noi was sitting, glass of whiskey in hand next to a young Thai man whom she obviously knew quite intimately.
    It took her some moments before she realized that he was there but his presence annoyed her. “You follow? You spy?” she raved her objections, the fury at being caught out fueling her anger until finally holding it by the neck she smashed the almost empty bottle on the metal table and raised the jagged remains towards his face.
    Her Thai boyfriend caught her arm just in time as she attempted to thrust the Whiskey bottle into his face.
    It took him just a few minutes to cram his few belongings into his suitcase, hail the local tuk-tuk and give instructions to head for the nearby big town and a hotel he was familiar with. There he checked in, ordered a bottle of whiskey and retired for the night to ponder the awful events that had just passed.
    The next morning, sitting on the terrace of the hotel eating his comforting English breakfast he was surprised to see Noi’s big Sister arrive. She was obviously upset that he had left – he was after all the breadwinner for the family and she tried to persuade him to return. However, this had been the final straw for him and she could not persuade him to stay. He told her that he would find somebody to buy the house and he would, as he understood Thai law 50-50 split of property following divorce, would give her half although in his opinion she deserved nothing.
    “But she gets all” Noi’s Sister announced “land in her name. You can not sell – she own.”
    Despite his protestations that he had paid for the land, the building of the house and everything inside it Noi’s Sister said that he owned nothing except the bricks and mortar which he had paid for.
    This was confirmed when he visited a Thai lawyer. In Thai law Noi owned the land
    So he had spent a good deal of his savings, acquired a wife who apparently had simply wanted him for his money and anyway preferred younger Thai men, built a house and furnished it in which he had supposed he would spend the rest of his life in an idyllic marriage – all a lie he thought! And now to be told that the love nest and everything else was owned by his wife’s was the last straw! What on earth was he to do? Go back to London and the gray life there and face the ridicule of his fellow workers and everyone else who knew him? There was no alternative... or perhaps there was!
    The crowds of children in the village where he thought he was destined to spend the rest of his life rushed around excitedly clapping their hands joyously over the sound of the mighty diesel engine as it roared angrily above the ever-present Thai music pumping out from his love nest of a house.
    The mighty machine, a Rough terrain telescopic forklift CATERPILLAR type with a lifting height of 12 meters and a Shovel protruding out in front was exactly the type of powerful tool that he was used to handling back in London on the building sites where he worked. The diesel engine roared in defiance overpowering the thumping Thai music as he throttled it aggressively.
    Noi flung open the front door of the house and stood angrily hands on her hips and glared at her crazy Falang of a husband.
    “What you do? Why you drive that stupid machine here?”
    He operated the control and the shovel rose up above head height.
    “Come to get what’s mine,” he said a small amused smile on his lips. “The house is mine – I paid for it and I want it.”
    “House mine – belong me!” She yelled defiantly back. “Land mine! Thai law say mine. House mine! Go away!”
    “The land is yours, yes,” he yelled back at her above the growling of the engine. “But I paid for every brick, every piece of timber, everything to build that house and everything in it! Now I want it back!”
    He didn’t wait for her to argue further but operated the mighty beast’s controls, aiming the shovel at the front of the house as he drove the massive wheels forward. Noi had no option but to leap aside as the shovel buried its jaws into the single-skinned concrete brick façade and ripped a great chunk out of the structure and spat it aside. It took just three bites before the flimsy roof structure collapsed inwards.
    He manipulated the shovel and shoved the internal walls aside to reveal the bedroom and the sturdy double-bed in the main bedroom. The shovel picked the bed up and hurled into the front area of the house.
    “There you go – I’ll give you that. You’ll need it for the next sucker! Learn a lesson girl – An Englishman’s Home is His Castle!”

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