NINETEEN
Derek left early the following morning. He had work at Poncenbey’s. Babs, Derek’s wife, baked, pleased her husband had left, he did not approve of her sideline in pies. The local butcher had become suspicious of her regular purchases of considerable quantities of offal and so she went to her brother, a porter at Smithfield’s, the London wholesale meat market, slap bang in the centre of the City, not that Babs saw the irony. Babs’s brother now brought home increasingly larger quantities of offal as the demand for pies grew steadily and although she was pleased for the extra income, the neighbours had begun to complain about the “something offal” smell.
And still Claudio returned with orders for more pies.
She wondered what her husband would think of her. Was she losing it, takin
