PORK CHOPS

When I first moved down to the coast, I used to cycle into Deal every Saturday morning to look around the antiques and bric-a-brac in the market. Over the years, I acquired quite a lot of interesting bits of junk from the old tinkers, as well as a few gems from times long past that out of habit I often took with me to The Ship to browse over with a couple of pints of Gadd's beer.

The pub was like a still-life painting at that time of the day, usually just a handful of regulars standing apart at the bar, silently recollecting memories of things once said and done.

On my first visit, the only voice I heard was from a grizzled old soak bent forward on his bar-stool, who was ranting aloud to himself about what he was going to have for his tea.

"Pork chops tonight. Yes, pork chops, two pork chops for my tea."

In the few times I caught the actor Hywel Bennett's last act in The Ship on Middle Street, the conversation rarely strayed beyond his diet.

"Yes, chops for tea tonight, two pork chops on a plate for my tea."

Looking at him, it was quite a challenge to recall his electrifying performance as Ricki Tarr, four or more decades earlier in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, when a young, bullish Bennett sparkled next to Alec Guinness's George Smiley.

"Yes, it'll be pork chops for my tea tonight, the same as last night, two pork chops for tea."

He had trained at RADA, starred in the film version of Joe Orton's Loot and a string of British hit comedies by the early 1970's. Bennett's ITV sitcom Shelley, seem to run through my entire childhood and its reoccurring comic plot about a freelance layabout doing all he can to avoid proper work in the Thatcher-era, must have inspired thousands of people beyond me.

Of his numerous credits which I read in his obituary some months later, it is his unforgettable role as the edgy and charismatic secret agent, Ricki Tarr, that I will remember him most fondly for, as well as an amusing anecdote told to me by another local actor about how Hywel was regularly barred from The Ship and other of the town's numerous watering-holes largely because of the foul stench of his farts.

'Gordon Bennett! We used to exclaim, when he blew one off in the bar.'

It must have been his chops.

Sketch by Rozanne Palmer RA, 1950

Pork Chops is a story by Tim Synge, owner of Old Coves in Deal.