In their fourth year, Mr and Mrs Haskins won the ‘Area Post Office of the Year’ award, and nine months later paid off the final instalment to Britannia.
The board of Britannia invited Chris and Sue to join them for lunch at the Royal Hotel to celebrate the fact that they now owned the post office without a penny of debt to their name.
‘We still have to earn back our original investment,’ Chris reminded them. ‘A mere matter of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.’
‘If you keep going at your present rate,’ suggested the chairman of Britannia, ‘it should only take you another five years to achieve and then you could be sitting on a business worth over a million.’
‘Does that mean I’m a millionaire?’ asked Chris.
‘No, it does not,’ butted in Sue. ‘Our current account is showing a credit of a little over ten thousand pounds. You’re a ten thousandaire.’
The chairman laughed, and invited the board to raise their glasses to Chris and Sue Haskins.
‘My spies tell me, Chris,’ added the chairman, ‘that you are likely to be the next president of our local Rotary.’
‘Many a slip,’ said Chris as he lowered his glass, ‘and certainly not before Sue takes her place on the area committee of the Mothers’ Union. Don’t be surprised if she ends up as national chairman,’ he added, with considerable pride.
‘So what do you plan to do next?’ asked the chairman.
‘Take a month’s holiday in Portugal,’ said Chris without hesitation. ‘After five years of having to make do with the beach at Cleethorpes and a plate of fish and chips, I think we’ve earned it.’
That also would have made a satisfactory conclusion to this tale, had officialdom not stepped in once again; this time with a letter addressed to Mr and Mrs Hoskins from the finance director of the Post Office. They found it waiting for them on the mat when they returned from Albufeira.
Post Office Headquarters,
148 Old Street, London EC1V 9HQ
Dear Mr and Mrs Hoski
The Post Office is in the process of re-evaluating its property portfolio, and to that end, will he making some changes to the status of some of its older establishments.
I therefore have to inform you that the board has come to the reluctant conclusion that we will no longer require two category A status facilities in the Cleethorpes area. While the new High Street branch will continue as a category A post office, Victoria Crescent will be downgraded to category B. In order that you can make the necessary adjustments, we do not propose to bring in these changes until the New Year.
We look forward to continuing our relationship with you.
Yours sincerely,
Finance Director
‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ said Sue after she had read the letter a second time.
‘In simple terms, love,’ said Chris, ‘we can never hope to earn back our original investment of two hundred and fifty thousand, even if we go on working for the rest of our lives.’
‘Then we’ll have to put the post office up for sale.’
‘But who will want to buy it at that price,’ asked Chris, ‘once they discover that the business no longer has category A status?’
‘The man from Britannia assured us that once we’d paid off the debt it would be worth a million.’
‘Only while the business has a turnover of five hundred thousand and generates a profit of around eighty thousand a year,’ said Chris.
‘We should take legal advice.’
Chris reluctantly agreed, although he wasn’t in much doubt what his solicitor’s opinion would be. The law, their advocate dutifully advised them, was not on their side, and therefore he wouldn’t recommend them to sue the Post Office, as he couldn’t guarantee the outcome. ‘You might well win a moral victory,’ he said, ‘but that won’t assist your bank balance.’
The next decision Chris and Sue made was to put the post office on the market as they wanted to find out if anyone would show an interest. Once again Chris’s judgement turned out to be correct: only three couples even bothered to look over the property, and none of them returned for a second viewing once they discovered it was no longer category A status.
‘My bet,’ said Sue, ‘is that those officials back at headquarters knew only too well they were going to change our status long before they pocketed our money, but it suited them not to tell us.’
‘You may well be right,’ said Chris, ‘but you can be sure of one thing — they won’t have put anything in writing at the time, so we would never be able to prove it.’
‘And neither did we.’
‘What are you getting at, love?’
‘How much have they stolen from us?’ demanded Sue.
‘Well, if by that you mean our original investment—’
‘Our life savings, every penny we’ve earned over the past thirty years, not to mention our pension.’
Chris paused and raised his head, while he made some calculations. ‘Not including any profit we might have hoped for, once we’d seen our capital returned—’
‘Yes, only what they’ve stolen from us,’ Sue repeated.
‘A little over two hundred and fifty thousand, if you don’t include interest,’ said Chris.
‘And we have no hope of seeing a penny of that original investment back, even if we were to work for the rest of our lives?’
‘That’s about the sum of it, love.’
‘Then it’s my intention to retire on January the first.’
‘And what are you expecting to live off for the rest of your life?’ asked Chris.
‘Our original investment.’
‘And how do you intend to go about that?’
‘By taking advantage of our spotless reputation.’
The End
Chris and Sue rose early the following morning: after all, they had a lot of work to do during the next three months if they hoped to accumulate enough capital to retire by 1 January. Sue warned Chris that meticulous preparation would be needed if her plan was to succeed. He didn’t disagree. They both knew that they couldn’t risk pressing the button until the second Friday in November, when they would have a six-week window of opportunity — Chris’s expression — before ‘those people back in London’ worked out what they were really up to. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of preliminary work to be done in the meantime. To start with, they needed to plan their getaway, even before they set about retrieving any stolen money. Neither considered what they were about to embark on as theft.
Sue unfolded a map of Europe and spread it across the post office counter. They discussed the different alternatives for several days and finally settled on Portugal, which they both considered would be ideal for early retirement. On their many visits to the Algarve they had always returned to Albufeira, the town where they had spent their shortened honeymoon, and revisited on their tenth, twentieth, and many more wedding anniversaries. They had even promised themselves that was where they would retire if they won the lottery.