Seventy-three-year-old Jimmy Dixon left the George and Dragon just after 10 o’clock, which was early for him. He had drunk seven pints of John Smith’s Bitter and ate the George’s steak pie with chips, mushy peas, and lashings of gravy for his evening meal, the same as he had done on every Friday night for years.
He had lived in the village of Lower Tetney for most of his life, in the cottage on Foxlands Road in which he had been born, and where he fully expected that he would die. He was a widower, his wife Jean dying from breast cancer aged 57, and Jimmy had been on his own ever since, more than 13 years, and he still missed her every day.
Until his retirement, he had been a jobbing builder, undertaking most small building works apart from gas and major electrical work, for which he was
