Death of a Dustman

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They are still called dustmen in Britain. Not garbage collectors or sanitation engineers. Just dustmen, as they were called in the days of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.

Lochdubh’s dustman, Fergus Macleod, lived in a small run-down cottage at the back of the village with his wife, Martha, and four children. He was a sour little man, given to drunken binges, but as he timed his binges to fall between collection days, nobody paid him much attention. It was rumoured he had once been an accountant before he took to the drink. No one in the quiet Highland village in the county of Sutherland at the very north of Scotland could ever have imagined he was a sleeping monster, and one that was shortly about to wake up.

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Mrs. Freda Fleming had recently bullied her way onto Strathbane Council to become Officer for the Environment. This had been a position created for her to shut her up and keep her out of other council business. She was the only woman on the council. Her position in the chauvinist Highlands was due to the fact that the ambitious widow had seduced the provost – the Scottish equivalent of mayor – after a Burns Supper during which the normally rabbity little provost, Mr. Jamie Ferguson, had drunk too much whisky.

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