The Mean Sicilian with the Massive Knife.

I was twenty one and working for Mars Ltd, the chocolate manufacturers, as a sales merchandiser. It came with a decent salary and a company car, but I wasn’t enjoying it. Apart from being the worst salesman ever, I was getting pretty fed up with hearing ‘Hey, Doris. Come and see what’s in the shop. A man from Mars!’ I’d given up even pretending to smile after about the twelfth time of hearing it, but anyway...

My job was, according to the official line at least, ‘to increase displayed distribution.’ Among other things, this entailed persuading shopkeepers to accept one of our display stands on loan in return for using the said piece of equipment to display Mars products prominently. It was also part of the job to ensure that the agreement was honoured.

So, one morning my boss decided to spend the day with me. We were in Peterborough that day, and a lot of the small shops in Peterborough were owned by Italian immigrants. The first shop we went to was owned by probably the biggest Italian in the town, maybe even the country. He was huge, and had a very mean look about him. His English was none too good, and I’d already noticed that the floor-standing display unit wasn’t displaying Mars products prominently. It was full of fruit and vegetables. My boss had noticed it too, so there was no way I could exercise discretion and turn a blind eye to the problem.

I explained the situation to him very politely. He remained surly and said that nobody was going to come into his shop and tell him how to run his business. I countered that we weren’t trying to do that, but we did have rights over the use of the display equipment because it was ours and there was an agreement attached to the loan of it. It cut no ice. He became even more surly and refused to accede to our request to replace the fruit and vegetables with Mars products. And then he told us he came from Sicily, and Sicilians don’t take orders from anybody. He might have said that he was in the Mafia, but I can’t be certain. It’s possible I just made the connection, as one would of course. In either event, the intimidation factor was becoming an issue and my boss decided to put his foot down. If he wouldn’t keep to the agreement, we would remove the stand. There was no response from the shopkeeper, and so we set about removing the fresh produce so that we could take the display unit to the car.

It was located near the door, which was fortunate because I looked up to see 20-odd stone of manic Mafiosi striding towards us with a huge butcher’s knife. And he looked like he meant business. He really did! Now, however much I have revised my opinions in later years, I had been brought up in the old style of English male attitudes. The only animal more unpredictable than a woman was a foreigner, I’d been taught. Johnny Foreigner was a bit of a rum cove, don’t you know, and one expected him to behave in an upright and civilised manner at one’s peril. It seemed to me that the moment of peril had arrived.

I grabbed my boss and shoved him towards the door, and then we hurried to the safety of the car. The shopkeeper didn’t follow us. We discussed the matter for a few minutes, and my boss decided he was going to call the police. He was determined to take that stand out of the shop, and assumed the police would stand by to enable us to perform our legal function.

Two policemen arrived in a patrol car. They said that they couldn’t come into the shop with us, but they would remain close by to ensure there would be no breach of the peace. They didn’t say why they couldn’t come into the shop, and they didn’t exactly ‘remain close by’ either. They drove to the end of the street about fifty yards away and sat there. We plucked up our courage anyway and went back into the shop. Mr Mean wasn’t there; I assumed he’d decided to keep out of sight when the police turned up. We completed the job and carried the contraption out of the shop.

Mrs Mean was outside serving apples to a customer. We hadn’t seen her before, but she looked harmless enough – small, blonde and pretty innocuous. We walked past her carrying the metal frame and trays between us. Without warning, missiles began whizzing past our ears. Apples. Dozens of them. Mrs Mean, too, was obviously a woman of sprit. She had a strong arm, but fortunately a poor aim. None of them hit us. As we drove away, I wondered whether she would make the effort to retrieve the apples, but we had no intention of hanging around to find out, especially as the two policemen had mysteriously disappeared.

And Mr Mean got struck off my list of visits.