ENOCH POWELL wasn’t much of a customer. His wife was the one who spent the money, regularly buying kitchen utensils and garden tools from my father’s ironmongers shop in Wolverhampton’s Chapel Ash.

During its final years the shop’s trade had declined and my father ran the place alone. From time to time he’d ask me to take over so that he could enjoy a much needed weekend break. It was towards the end of a dismal November day and I was looking forward to closing up and heading homewards.

There had been no customers since half past five and, as I began to cash up at ten to six, rain was falling steadily in the darkness outside. There were rarely any customers during the last half-hour of the day and I often wondered why my father never chose to close the shop that much earlier. It was only years after that I realised the shop’s closing time coincided with the opening of The Clarendon, the congenial pub only a step away, where Dad invariably put a full stop to the day’s business.

I was locking the back door when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and heard the unmistakable tones of Enoch Powell. He had a curious accent – what I can only describe as ‘posh Wolverhampton’. ‘Don’t close yet,’ he ordered me. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’

I was very young and he was a distinguished statesman, so I did as I was told. All the same, by five past six I decided he wasn’t coming after all, so I switched off the lights and made for the front door, which I’d locked while counting the day’s takings. As I reached it there was a loud tapping on the glass. The prominent eyes of Enoch Powell peered from his pale face into the gloom within. His moustache quivered with urgency and water streamed from the broad rim of his black Homburg hat.

Reluctantly I let him in and locked the door behind him, wondering what problem was so urgent it was worth braving such foul weather. He marched up to the counter, pulled a green-stained brass garden tap from the pocket of his heavy overcoat and placed it in front of me. ‘It needs a new washer,’ he said, flatly.

I turned on the lights again and asked him what sort of washer it needed. He didn’t know; he couldn’t get the thing apart. Great, I thought. After several minutes of futile struggle, engaged in a sort of arm-wrestling match with Mr Powell, who held the tap in the grip of a large wrench while I heaved on an equally large spanner, I gave up. ‘It’s not going to shift,’ I said. ‘You’d be better off with a new tap.’ Enoch Powell, however, gave up less easily.

‘We need a vice,’ he said. ‘You must have one in here somewhere.’ I should have replied with a categorical ‘No’. Unfortunately, I hesitated. ‘Not really… There’s a very old thing upstairs, but...’

He jumped on this eagerly. I explained that there was no light on the top floor; electricity had never been installed beyond the first flight of stairs. In fact, the upper storey of the house was now used only for the storage of unwanted clutter; piles of dusty hessian sacks in which lawn seed had been delivered, broken and unrepaired tools long forgotten and unclaimed by their owners, and several life-sized cardboard figures bearing cheerful smiles as they demonstrated some new product or other.

Many years ago, the front room of the top floor had been a simple workshop. The bench my grandfather once used was still there but it now leaned awkwardly at a sharp angle since one of its legs had become detached. The vice was completely rusted over but eventually I managed to open its jaws and, while Enoch held the torch, I tightened them on the resisting tap. Slowly I prised it apart. I picked up the pieces and, taking the torch from Enoch’s hand, led the return to the ground floor, periodically shedding the light behind me. It wasn’t so much courtesy as a desire not to be crushed to death by a falling Enoch Powell.

Behind the counter, on a high shelf reached only by the small wooden ladder kept for the purpose, was a box of leather washers. I climbed up and brought it down. Inside, the box was partitioned by interlocking cardboard dividers into 24 small compartments, each containing a different size or shape of washer. On the underside of the lid was a diagram replicating its contents with a brief description of each item – three-quarter-inch cup, half-inch heavy duty, etc. Unfortunately, the compartment that should have contained washers of the sort needed was empty. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.

Mr Powell reached into the box and picked out one of the three-quarter-inch cup washers. ‘This should do it,’ he said. ‘It just needs trimming to shape.’

So, naturally, that’s what I did. I took up a Stanley knife and trimmed the cup-shaped flange until I’d achieved a three-quarter-inch flat washer – more or less.

I squeezed it into the tap, reassembled the various bits and handed the product of half an hour’s labour to what I assumed to be a highly satisfied customer.

‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked. I peered at the lid of the box where prices had been written in pencil, probably by my grandfather 25 years earlier. It read ‘6d’ – six pence in old money.

I should have said six shillings but I was anticipating a handsome tip. ‘Sixpence,’ I replied. And that’s what he gave me – sixpence – not a penny more.

By the time Enoch Powell had departed into the night, it was turned half past six. I switched off the lights once more, stepped into the still pouring rain, locked the shop door and walked, very briskly, to the pub.

David Thomas