This excerpt is taken from: pp68-9 Tangerine Press hardback edition (2014)

An extract from the story entitled ‘The City Slicker and The Barmaid’

The actual farm animals themselves did not worry me. Although after sundown a pack of cows used to try and sniff me on my way home from the village pub. There were all these lanes to walk down and usually I took a shortcut through a couple of fields. These cows came wastling along at my back without a sound bar the shshsh of their smelly tails. I walked slowly, kidding on it was okay, but it wasnt and I felt like dashing headlong to the tent, but then these guyropes and metal spike things I kept tripping over and twice I fell right on top of the tent. Plus too my boots, all spattered and saturated with dew and whatever else, what a mess. I took them off at the entrance, seated on the so-called groundsheet with the doorflap open. And all the insects flew in from the hedges. The floor inside the tent was always covered in clumps of grass, dung too at times, the colour of baked seaweed. Earwigs crawled the walls searching for ears to crawl in, then the ants, ants were everywhere. I closed my eyes at night thinking “spiders, thank christ for spiders”.

No sleeping bag. Terrible itchy exarmy blankets to go with the mattress, hired from the farmer’s wife and deducted from my wage at source. Of course my feet stuck out at the bottom and I can never sleep wearing socks, even if I had any.

The farmhands were continually cracking jokes in Oi Bee accents at my expense. I would laugh, or stare. Other times I replied in aggressive accents of my own which got me nowhere since they pretended not to understand what I was saying. Because I drove the lorry I was accorded a certain respect. In the local den of a pub I was known as Jock the Driver. The previous driver was an Irishman who worked seven years on this farm till one Saturday night he went out for a pish round the back of the bar. It was the last they ever saw of him. A man to admire.

The guys working beside me were yesmen to the core. Carried tales about each other to the farmer and even to me if the farmer was off on business. They spent entire days gossiping. I never spoke to them unless I had to. The tightest bunch of bastards I have ever met. Never shared their grub or their mugs of tea. Or their cash if you were skint. And they never offered you a cigarette. Then if you bought them a drink they thought you were off your rocker and also resented it because they were obliged to buy you one back and never did, so that was them marked as miserable in their own estimation, not because they thought it but because you did, or so they thought. But they thought wrong. I could not have cared less. I just did it to flummox them. In their opinion city folk were either thieves or simpletons. An amazing shower of crackpots the lot of them.

The barmaid in this local pub was a daughter of the village. I think she must have hated me because I represented outside youth – otherwise how come. Apart from myself there were no other single men of her age in the dump. She was chaste I think unless the Irishman ever got there which I doubt. I never fancied her in the first place. A bit tubby. Just if I had not tried I thought the regulars might have felt insulted – the barmaid was not good enough etcetera for a city slicker like me. The night I made the attempt was awful.

The majority of the 18 stories in A Lean Third have been substantially revised by the author, making these new versions of great interest to academics and fans alike. Of particular note is a 3,000-word essay, written especially for this edition. The author gives revealing insights into the background of many of the stories and his lifestyle at the time of writing. A fascinating and essential new edition.