and 1985 and was considered to be instrumental in securing the future of hundreds of workers at the Langridge paper factory, who had been threatened with redundancy, in 1980.
A neighbour, who did not wish to be named, revealed thatMr Armstrong had not been seen for some time. ‘He used to be always out walking; he’d always say hello. I haven’t seen him for a few months. I thought he’d gone into hospital, or into a home.’
Marjorie Baker, of Newton Lane, said she believed Mr Armstrong had gone to live with family in Australia. ‘I think it’s terrible that in this day and age nobody notices you’re gone,’ Mrs Baker said. ‘People should take more care of each other.’
George
Things were never the same for me after Vilette died. Vi, I called her. She was my sunshine and my light and my joy for fifty-nine years. Vi was the reason I was here, just as I was the reason she was here.
We met when I was twenty-two, quite by accident as it turned out. I was on shore leave, only two days, and then I was back to sea. It was February and the lake was frozen over. I was taking a short cut across the park back home, I’d been to the shop to get some cigarettes I think. Some errand for my old mum, anyway. I saw a group of girls by the lake, they were scuffling, laughing, you know, mucking about. I saw something fly up into the air and sail in the wind out on to the surface of the lake, something bright blue, like the wing of an exotic bird. It sailed up into the air and the breeze caught it.
Then the girls ran away, laughing, leaving one of their number behind at the edge of the lake.
The blue thing – a silk scarf, as it turned out, that had been given to her French mother when she had lived in Paris before the war, a scarf that young Vi was forbidden to look at, never mind take out of the house, never mind wear – was lying forlorn in a little blue puddle about ten yards from the edge.
Before I could get to her to help, she’d set one foot on the ice and then another, and was walking with a determined but cautious gait towards the middle of the lake, and the scarf. She was only a slip of a girl, just eighteen, light as a feather and tiny, but even so the ice was thinner than it had been when she’d skated on it the weekend before, thinning by the day thanks to the weak February sunshine.
When I was still a hundred yards away the ice cracked beneath her. I was close enough to see the shock on her face, hear her scream, before it cracked again and gave way. She only fell in up to her chest – thankfully the water wasn’t deeper than that – but still she clawed on the edge of the ice and could not get any purchase to pull herself out.
‘I’m coming,’ I yelled, ‘don’t worry!’ – as though that would make any difference to the terror and the pain of being stuck in an icy lake.
I took off my woollen coat and my jumper that mum knitted for me last Christmas and my shirt too, and tied all the sleeves together. That wasn’t long enough, so I ended up taking off my vest too and tying that on the end. All the while I could see her turning blue. After that it was just long enough for her to reach, and I told her to wind the end of it around her hands so that she didn’t need to grip, and then I hauled her out.
We were both shivering, her more than me of course. By this time a little crowd had gathered, including my brother Tom, who’d come to see where I’d got to. He gave me the coat off his back, and someone else took off their coat and put it round the young woman.
She was taken to hospital but she was alright after that. She even managed to get the scarf put away back in her mother’s closet before it was missed.
The next day I went round to see her before I had to go back to the ship and she told me that I’d saved her life. It didn’t feel like all that big a deal to me, after all what was I