For Joyce and Bernard, twentieth century London is a different story. There’s a temperature inversion trapping car exhaust and factory smoke beneath low cloud, people are dying in their hundreds and the government are issuing the populace with useless paper masks in an attempt to look as if they’re doing something. Everybody’s coughing, spitting black muck onto overcast lanes with the Durex brand-name swimming forward out of backstreet fog in sticking-plaster cream and lipstick neon. Bernard realises belatedly that England too is a land of distinct and separate uncouth tribes – cosh-boys and market traders, socialists and spivs, white savages – united only by their grievance and an envy of their betters. Worse, nobody here seems able to appreciate the yawning gulf in status that exists between the black men of Sierra Leone’s Colony and those of its Protectorate, perceiving any coloured person as a coon regardless of their elocution or their bearing, irrespective of their spectacles and waistcoats. Joyce produces their first child, a boy named David, and is pregnant with their second while her husband finds that jobs for which he’s qualified, where his employers also have no qualms about his being African, are few and far between. It seems to Bernard that outside the capital there may be law firms who are not so used to the easy availability of quality employees as their London counterparts and who thus might be more impressed with his impeccable qualifications. He decides to cast his line further afield and at last gets a bite from a company of solicitors in somewhere called Northampton just as Joyce presents him with a second son, whom he proposes they name Andrew. Looking for accommodation in the new town, Bernard is confronted by a policy equating him with both dogs and the Irish while expressing a refusal to rent property to all three of these categories. His infuriating sense of being snubbed is only muddied by his sympathy for the position of the bigot landlords. If Bernard himself had space to let he knows he wouldn’t lease it to Dickensian criminals with vicious hounds, to drunken Irish labourers or to the great majority of his own workshy countrymen. When he gets news of rooms available not far from the town’s centre on a busy thoroughfare seemingly known as Sheep Street, Bernard’s celebratory mood endures until the final paragraph of the acceptance letter, where it states that this agreement is made on the understanding that just Mr. Daniels and his wife will be residing at the flat, and that there won’t be any pets or, most especially, children living there.
Meanwhile, in 1896, Henry and his young wife get carried to their new home on a vast and foaming tide of mutton. From what Henry understands, the landscape-bleaching herds are driven out from Builth and then persuaded to head east through Worcestershire and Warwickshire until they wash like bleating surf against Northampton. It’s a track been there a thousand years or more, and Henry hears how in the old days, century or so before, the drovers learn to stay away from inns where horses are tied up outside that look to be
in too good a condition. This is on account of how these well-fed horses more than likely turn out to belong to highwaymen, who have a habit back then of befriending drovers who are headed east, inviting them to call in for a drink on their way back when they’ll have traded all their sheep for money. Naturally, this means that on the return journey they’ll be more convenient to rob and get left with their throats cut in some Stratford ditch. Because of this, most of the herdsmen carry on out of Northampton with their sheep and take them down to London, so they can head back to Wales through Bristol and down that way, missing out the Worcester taverns where the highwaymen are waiting. It occurs to Henry that this Wales – Northampton – London route marks out another triangle much like the one connecting England with America and Africa, and in both cases it’s a kind of cattle being moved. And then of course you’ve got another similarity in that some of the animals that Henry is in charge of – although not that many of them, now he comes to think about it – have been branded. The main difference is the colour of the goods. Henry considers how the movement of his family over generations has been down these well-worn paths of trade, whether that trade be sheep or people, U.S. steel or Buffalo Bill chapbooks, and supposes that these lines of least resistance, which first get carved out by enterprise, end up as destinies. It’s down these money-trails that, say, your great-great-grandpa’s fondness for a drink or else your grandma’s big green eyes go wandering, around the world and through the ages. Henry and Selina don’t have much of what you’d call a plan behind their journey, figuring they’ll maybe carry on to London with the drovers and if they don’t like it there, why, then they’ll head on back to Wales. This is before they reach Northampton and get funnelled in through its north gate in a great swathe of white, where there’s that circle-church that’s older than the hills, there’s that almighty tree been scarred in all the wars, and Henry and his wife Selina, with her mile-long tick-infested bridal train trotting behind her on the cobbles, first set eyes on Sheep Street.
Electing to take up their new address, there in the grey and tan Northampton avenues of 1954, demands that Joyce and Bernard make some hard decisions. Clearly, the “no children” rule presents the biggest obstacle to living in the Sheep Street flat and thus to Bernard taking up his best and thus far only offer of a job, but he thinks he can see a way around it. Up by train from London in a cloud of steam and coal-smoke for a visit to the premises he meets a would-be neighbour from the rooms downstairs, an amiable idealist from the International Friendship League. This is some form of thankfully entirely ineffectual English socialist conglomerate of the variety that Bernard generally avoids, but in this instance the old chap appears to offer Bernard a solution to his “no children allowed” predicament: the man suggests that he has room to hide a child in his downstairs accommodation during those occasions when the landlord comes to pay a visit, which would go at least halfway to solving Bernard’s quandary, the other half of which is his and Joyce’s second baby, little Andrew. Their new neighbour clearly doesn’t have the room to hide two infants, and as Bernard’s firstborn it seems only right that the two-year-old David should take precedence. After an unusually heated consultation with his wife, Bernard decides it would be best if Andrew were to stay in Brixton with some relatives of Joyce’s until they’re established in the town and can arrange a mortgage, can arrange a permanent address with room for all the family. In Bernard’s view, with Andrew being still a few months shy of his first birthday he’s less likely to have formed a strong attachment to his mother and will therefore miss her less than David would do. Bernard doubts so small a child will even be aware that anything is different. And besides, in later life the baby won’t be able to remember anything about it. It will be as if this admittedly less than ideal situation hasn’t happened. At last everything’s arranged, everything goes ahead and on their first night in the new flat with its view of that peculiar and hardly Christian-looking church across the street, Joyce doesn’t sleep and weeps until the morning. Bernard, frankly, doesn’t understand why she can’t just resign herself and make the best of it. They’re only doing what they have to do, and in perhaps a year it will all work out fine for everyone. Andrew will be all right. There’s no harm done.
Henry and his Selina make their way down Sheep Street to the market square so he can go collect his wages from the Welsh House that they have there, and he knows from the way everybody’s looking at him that he’s got the only black face in the town. It’s not that they appear resentful or they’re giving him the hard eye like he shouldn’t be there, how it would have been in Tennessee. The people of Northampton look to be more plain amazed, regarding Henry like they would one of them big giraffes that he’s seen pictures of, or something else so rarefied and out-the-way that no one had expected to see nothing like it in their town or in their lifetime. People smile or some of them look shocked but mostly they just stand there with their faces hanging out as if they don’t know what to do with them. For his part, Henry figures he must look the same way, gawping at the ancient town in all its queerness. It’s like Henry and Northampton are dumbstruck with mutual astonishment. First that round church, been standing on its spot eight hundred years, while down the street there’s that big beech tree must be pretty near as old, and then you’ve got a market square that’s from around the same time, from around the year ten hundred-something. That’s a long time, long enough to make his head spin. Why, back then the slave trade between countries hadn’t been invented, far as Henry knows. There’s no United States, no Tennessee, and white people have never heard of Africa. There’s just the circle-church, the beech tree and the woollen river winding between here and Wales. To Henry it seems like all of these centuries the place has been here are a kind of breadth or depth that he can’t see but which conspires to give the town a feeling of great magnitude that’s bigger than its visible real size. After they pick up Henry’s pay the pair of them go for a walk up from the market square and back to Sheep Street, where they make their way down this old alley with a sign up says it’s Bullhead Lane, so steep and narrow it feels like one of them nonsense-places in a dream, and that’s how they descend into the Boroughs. From the start it’s all around them, clamouring for their attention. There’s some tough old girls look fit to pull each other’s heads off rolling in the street outside one of the beer establishments, and anywhere you’re standing you can see around a dozen similar public houses, there’s that many of them. There’s a blind man playing on a barrel-organ, rabbits hopping right there on the cobbles, everybody’s got a hat on and nobody’s got a gun. There’s every kind of call and conversation, and in Scarletwell Street, where they spend a piece of Henry’s wages in advance rent on a house they take a shine to, they see Newton Pratt’s astounding beast drinking its beer and trying to stay upright just across the street there. Henry and Selina take it for a sign and move in right away. They’ve got a whole house to themselves, and though it’s small and wedged into its sooty terrace like a book jammed in a bookshelf it seems much too big at first, but that’s before the babies start to pour out of Selina in a happy babbling flood that rises to their ankles, then their knees, and in what seems like just a year or two they’re standing shoulder-deep in children.
As a grown man David Daniels can’t remember much about his origins there at the flat in Sheep Street, his two years as an official Boroughs resident. His infancy, that endless continuity of moments when each moment is a saga, has evaporated to leave only a thin residue of pictures and associations, brittle sepia snapshots taken from floor-level with the details and the context bleaching out around the edges. He recalls the endless plain of carpet in the living room, soft beige with fronds and curlicues that are an acre of gold fuzz now in his memory, stabbed by slanting blades of sunlight. There’s a flickering internal film-loop, a few seconds long, of David hooked up to his mother Joyce by leather reins and stumbling uncertainly downhill along a sloping path with crumbled loose-tooth tombstones rising up to either side, which he
now realises must be in the graveyard of the Holy Sepulchre, the old church just across the way. When he gets taken out for walks it’s always to the north or east of Sheep Street, never to the west or south. It’s always to the Racecourse just a little up past Regent’s Square and never down into the Boroughs, a disreputable neighbourhood where unbeknownst to him his future playmate Alma Warren sleeps sound in the bosom of her ordinarily peculiar clan. David’s initial recollections of his dad are more like memories of a ship than of a person, with the chest and gentle paunch thrown forward like a brocade mainsail swelled by tailwind. Thumbs hooked presidentially in waistcoat pockets and up past the crow’s nest of his tie-knot, Bernard’s proud face like a flag; a better-nourished Jolly Roger with its twinkling glass sockets gilded at their rims, sailed here upon spiced currents from High Barbary, from the lion hills of the old country in which David was conceived and which his parents very seldom mention. Then there are the days of mystery and adventure when his mother takes him on the huffing dragon train to London so that she can visit friends or family, he’s not sure which, and David spends the afternoons in unfamiliar Brixton parlours playing with a little boy called Andrew who seems nice enough, but whom he doesn’t know. When David’s four years old in 1956, Bernard and Joyce at last discover a white couple who’ll arrange a mortgage with the racially mistrustful banks. They move into a pleasant house in Kingsthorpe Hollow, funny little Andrew turns up unexpectedly to live with them and for the first time David comes to understand he has a brother, that he’s had a brother all this time and never heard a thing about it until now. He starts to wonder how much of his life is going on without his knowledge, starts to speculate on where and who his parents might have been before they suddenly materialise as a home-owning married couple in Northampton, just as though they’ve always been here. Why don’t David and his baby brother seem to have grandparents? Are his mother and his father born like gods out of the mud and sky, from the Northampton landscape with no mortal ancestors preceding them? He has the sense of a big, complicated story that he’s come in at the middle of, and an impression of a history that’s kept apart from him, in quarantine, like Andrew. How could they not tell him that he’s got a brother? He begins to worry about any more astonishing surprises that might be in store for him. Given their new house and new neighbours, given the way his family are encouraged to regard themselves now they’re not living in the Boroughs anymore, David begins to wonder whether he’s even actually black, if David is indeed his real name.
Almost as soon as Henry first sets foot inside the Boroughs he’s Black Charley, like the title’s just been waiting for him to turn up and put it on like an old overcoat. He doesn’t mind. It’s not meant disrespectfully, the “Black” part of it being no more than the honest truth, while “Charley” is just something you call men around here when you can’t remember what their proper name is. In its way it’s almost like a mark of special standing, a way of acknowledging that he’s unique and that there’s not another place around Northampton can boast anybody as remarkable as Henry George. Though other coloured people drift into the town across the years, there’s none of them so well known as what Henry is. At least that’s true until 1911 when the local football team – what’s called the Cobblers on account of all the boots and shoes made here in town – they take on a black football-player by the name of Walter Tull. They make a big fuss in the local newspapers, which is how Henry hears about it, and that gets his interest fired up so that he wants to find out all he can about this new arrival threatening to steal his coal-jewelled crown. He even takes a ride up to the football-field that’s off Abington Avenue to watch Tull play, despite the fact that Henry’s never really taken to the game, and he’s forced to admit the boy can run like lightning and he sure knows how to kick a ball around. Good looking too, a young man about twenty-four years old, getting on thirty-five years Henry’s junior and with skin that’s a whole lot lighter in the bargain. Seems how Tull is born away down Kent where they pick all the hops, with his pop from Barbados and his mom an English girl. From what Henry gets told, both of Tull’s folks are passed away before he’s ten. Him and his brother Edward – the same name as Henry and Selina’s youngest boy – are raised up in a London orphanage until Edward’s adopted by a Glasgow family. He goes off up to Scotland and becomes the country’s first black dentist, if you can believe that. Walter, he plays football for some boys’ club that’s in Bethnal Green or someplace, where the talent scouts what all the big teams have take notice of him and before long he gets taken on to play with Tottenham Hotspurs, that they call the Spurs. That’s in 1909, and though Tull’s not the first black or brown man to play professional football here in England – there’s another coloured man in Darlington, Henry believes, who plays as a goalkeeper – Walter’s the first one who’s playing out there on the field and not just stood in goal. He doesn’t stay with Tottenham more than a year or two, though, and as Henry hears the story it’s because of how all the when the team plays off in another town, all the spectators there shout hurtful things at Tull, comments occasioned by his colour. How must that feel, Henry thinks, to be stood in a stadium of people with them hating you and ridiculing you; those hundreds of eyes on you and nowhere that you can go to get away from them until the whistle’s blowed? As far as Henry’s concerned something like that would be his worst nightmare, and he’s mightily relieved that he sees nothing like it those times when he rides over to watch Walter play at what they call the County Ground in Abington. Everyone seems to feel that it’s a pleasure having Tull here in the town, and Henry takes a sort of pride in his association by appearance. Then, 1914, that real bad European War breaks out and Walter Tull proves to be just as brave as he’s good with a football when he’s the first player in the town to join up in the army and go off to fight. From the reports what make their way back from the front it seems that he does pretty good. He fights in the first Battle of the Somme and they make him a sergeant. Then in 1917 when he’s promoted to Second Lieutenant and goes off to fight at Ypres and Passchendaele, that makes him the first officer who’s black in the whole British Army. That next year, the last year of the war, Walter goes back to France for what’s referred to as the Spring Offensive where he gets blew up and they can’t get his body back so that he never even has a proper grave. The night after he hears the news, Black Charley has a dream where Walter Tull’s with Henry’s western hero Britton Johnson and they’re dressed like cowboys, sheltering behind the stallions what they’ve shot for breastwork and returning fire as all around them circle whooping German infantry on horseback, wearing feather headdresses instead of bill-spike helmets.
Forty years or so into the afterwards, David gets on with things. He gets on with his newfound little brother, Andrew, and he gets on well the moment he starts school down at St. George’s in the heart of Semilong. So well, in fact, that David finds he must bear the full brunt of his dad Bernard’s proud, beaming approval and encouragement, something that David feels uncomfortable about when he begins to realise that the same enthusiasm doesn’t get extended to his younger brother. While their mother Joyce is scrupulously even-handed in showing affection to her boys, it starts to look as if her husband has already chosen which one of the children he would save in the event of household fire. Where Bernard comes from, this pragmatic attitude is not unusual. Sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes the only way to make sure any of your offspring will survive is to make brutal, terrible decisions and put all of your resources behind just one child. It’s a strategic, military approach where reinforcements are sent to the regiments already winning, never to the most embattled troops, the ones in most immediate danger of defeat. Why throw good effort after bad? The widening disparity between the brothers from their father’s viewpoint is just how things are, at least there at their Kingsthorpe Hollow residence. It isn’t mentioned and, after a time, is barely even noticed, is a thing that can be lived with. David loves his brother. Andrew is his constant playmate, not to say almost his only playmate. David isn’t really close to any of the other children, the white children, in his class at school. He’s cleverer than they are, for the most part, and a different colour, neither of these attributes contributing to social success with his classmates. There are other black kids that David and Andrew sometimes hang around with at the playground with the swings and see-saw on the Racecourse, but these are mostly the children of Jamaican immigrants and David feels as if there is some sort of barrier dividing them from him and Andrew, one that he can neither see nor understand. Part of it’s in the way their father clearly disapproves of their new friends, and part of it’s how he makes David and his brother feel that they should disapprove as well; that they come from a better background than their pals from the Big Island. David knows this isn’t right, this attitude, but somehow it creeps into things, into just playing on a roundabout, and makes an atmosphere, creates a distance – even between him and boys and girls of his own colour – as if David’s not lonely enough already. His dad’s class-based segregationist agenda at least pays off when it comes to David’s education. Lacking the distraction of companions he has little else to do but get on with his work, prepare for the eleven-plus examinations that will more or less determine, at this early age, the prospects for the rest of David’s life. The only break he gets from schooling, other than the time he spends mucking about with Andrew, comes in his discovery of fantasy, in dreams of noble-looking people with astonishing abilities. David has never heard of Henry George much less of Henry’s hero, black gunslinger Britton Johnson, but perhaps there’s something in his trading triangle-dictated blood that gives him a predisposition for the vibrant Technicolor dream-life of America. David begins to haunt the book and magazine stall, Sid’s, that’s in the ancient market square on Wednesdays and on Saturdays, where the eponymous proprietor with his cloth cap, his muffler and his fuming pipe presides over a marvellous array of lurid treasures. There are boxes crammed with yellowing second-hand paperbacks where the delirious jackets of science-fiction books seem to predominate, and hung from the stall’s upper reaches in the locked ferocious jaws of bulldog clips are men’s adventure magazines where naked-to-the-waist marines with gritted teeth are whipped by lovely women wearing only undies and swastika armbands, beneath blurbs which promise him THE KINKY KRAUT LOVE-GODDESSES OF TORTURE ISLAND! Even more enticing from David’s perspective are the rows of U.S. comics displayed cover-up on the bookstall’s front table: fluttering coloured butterflies held down by metal discus
paperweights. Iron Man battles Kala, the Queen of the Underworld, and high above the thrusting skyscrapers Spiderman fights the Vulture. Superman and Batman meet when both of them are just young boys, how can that be? The constantly expanding ranks of costumed characters become the secret comrades of David’s imagination, a whole hidden world of friends that no one else but him appears to know about. He keeps the comics he’s collected in his room, sprawls on his bed and reads them while a world away downstairs his father fumes about the news from somewhere that’s called Sierra Leone, which somebody called Milton Margai has just led to independence. None of this is half as relevant or half as interesting as the Skrulls, the Human Torch, Starro the Conqueror. Despite the lure of his new passion David’s schoolwork doesn’t suffer and he passes his eleven-plus. This certainly pleases his father as it means that David will be sent to the prestigious Grammar School for Boys out on the Billing Road. Bernard is even more delighted when the Chronicle & Echo post a journalist and a photographer to cover David’s entry into his new seat of learning, with a picture showing David in his new school uniform, sat at his desk there in an otherwise deserted classroom, just in case he doesn’t feel sufficiently conspicuous or isolated yet. The headline reads FIRST BLACK PUPIL FOR GRAMMAR SCHOOL and David’s face in the accompanying image wears a look of wariness and apprehension, as if he’s got no idea what’s going to happen next.
For Henry and Selina, nearer to the turnpike of the twentieth century, what happens next is that they send their several children off to Spring Lane School that’s right across the street from where they live, crowded amidst the mess of public houses, businesses and homes all fitted in a huddle there between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street. When he cycles out upon his rope-wheeled chariot to look for odds and ends each morning Henry likes to hear the boys and girls all giggling and shrieking in their playground that’s away behind the red brick schoolhouse somewhere, if it happens to be the right time of day. He’ll be coasting on down towards Saint Andrew’s Road that’s got the railway track beyond it, past The Friendly Arms, the little shops and houses, and he’ll listen for the youngsters kicking up a noise to see if he can pick out his own offspring’s voices from amongst them. Far as Henry knows, his and Selina’s kids are the first ones of any colour at the school, but still they never hear about no bullying or teasing, or at least none that’s about their skin. On more than one occasion when he struggles up Black Lion Hill into Marefair with the lit-up shop windows, or he coasts down Bath Street where they got that big dark chimney – that Destructor – it occurs to Henry that despite appearances him and Selina picked exactly the right place to raise their family. It’s taken him a while to fathom it, but Henry reckons that relations over here between the black folk and the white folk is a little different to the way that things are over in America. The business about class has got a lot to do with it, as Henry sees things. Back in Tennessee, even the humblest white folk still look down on coloured people, maybe because in their eyes a black man’s always going to be a slave. But here in England, even though it’s mostly the rich English people doing all the trading, they don’t personally keep no slaves themselves. So down in someplace like the Boroughs, where the people and their parents and their grandparents back to the knights-in-armour days are always on the bottom of the heap, they look at Henry and the first thing that they see it’s not a black man, it’s a poor man. If you want to know the difference that’s between the countries then you only got to look at their respective civil wars as far as Henry sees it, living here in the place that supplied the boots for both of them. In England back there in the sixteen-hundreds, old man Cromwell, he pretends as how he’s fighting for to liberate the poor from their oppressions. Meanwhile, over in America when Henry’s just a small child, old man Lincoln, he pretends as how he’s fighting for to liberate the slaves from their plantations. Speaking from his own experience, Henry reckons Mister Lincoln only wants to get them slaves out of the cotton fields down south so that they can be put to work in mills and factories up north. And from what Henry hears about the English Civil War, it seems like Mister Cromwell’s only after power and glory. Once he’s got that he starts killing off the leaders of the common people what supported him, and in both England and America the civil wars end up with those that they were meant to liberate no better off than what they were before, blacks over there, poor over here. Now, put like that the wars sound pretty much the same, but it appears to Henry that while both of them most probably have grabs for power at the bottom of it all, in England it’s put to the people as an uprising against the better-off, just like the business that’s in all the papers about Russia at the minute. In America, they have to make out that their Civil War has got to do with liberating slaves, because Americans are never going to want to overthrow the wealthy when becoming wealthy is the idea their whole country’s stood on. There’s the difference right there, that’s what Henry thinks. In England they don’t barely understand the hate that’s between folks of different colours when what’s on their mind is all the hate between folks come from different classes. Rope tyres rumbling on the cobblestones Black Charley runs around the Boroughs like a song what everybody knows. As long as he keeps to this part of town he don’t get any trouble, but then that’s the same for all the white people down here as well. He likes it here, and privately he marvels at all of the big and little things what tie it to the country that he come from. There’s George Washington and old Benjamin Franklin too, their families leaving Northampton to escape one civil war and heading for America to help set up the makings of another. There’s Confederate boots, and Henry hearing about Mr. Philip Doddridge’s considerable influence on the reformer William Wilberforce, and then of course there’s Pastor Newton writing his “Amazing Grace” out there at Olney. There’s a Mr. Corey who’s baptised at the round church in Sheep Street, goes out to America and gets tortured to death in Salem, caught up in that Cotton Mather witchcraft foolishness. The stars and stripes, the flag of the United States, that’s some old village crest the Washingtons took out of Barton Sulgrave with them when they left, and then there’s Henry George himself, another link there in the ugly chain connecting one land to the other. Henry judders on the Boroughs’ stones and loves the dirty mysteries of his adopted district, with all the cast-off centuries just lying heaped in bundles on the streets like unsold newspapers. He likes the convolutions of its paths and alleys – what they call a jitty here – and even though the whole place isn’t any bigger than a half square mile and he’s been living there for nigh on twenty years, Henry can still discover passages and short-cuts he don’t know about. Then come the war’s end in 1918 he sees it all begin to change, with Walter Tull filling an unmarked grave somewhere away in France and the commencement of the Boroughs’ slow and painful demolition, all the interesting yards and alleyways and complications at the back of Marefair just knocked flat and turned to rubble that weren’t neither interesting nor complicated, all the lives and history in those narrow lanes just wiped away like they were never there. More and more ground he sees fenced in with sheets of corrugated tin, more and more women widowed from the war reduced to peddling fornication in the graveyard by Saint Katherine’s Church and the almighty tower of the Destructor fuming up into a noonday sky that’s near as black as he is. A great heaviness begins to take up home in him, and Henry notes with puzzlement that amidst all the alterations Scarletwell Street seems to gradually be getting steeper.
A short way uphill in 1964, David is plunged into a sudden understanding of England’s antiquity and strangeness when he first attends the Grammar School in Billing Road as a short-trousered first-year in his navy blazer and compulsory cap. Already starting to develop a keen dress-sense, he knows that this isn’t a good look for him, particularly the short trousers. This last intuition is confirmed when he discovers that the Head of First Years, Mr. Duncan Oldman, is an unrestrained boy-fondler who’s apparently allowed to call eleven-year-olds out to stand beside his desk where he can r
un his pudgy fingers over their bare thighs, or at least he can do this with the ones whose parents have decided they’re not ready for long trousers. Mr. Oldman is an archetypal creepy child molester from a Charles Addams cartoon with his plump mollusc body tapering to dainty little hands and feet, his porcine nose and ears and darting, beady eyes; the web of burst blood vessels in his cheeks which lends him a perpetual choirboy blush. The word out in the playground is that on at least two separate occasions Mr. Oldman has invited first year pupils to his nearby home for after-class tuition, where he tries to touch them up and kiss them. In the two known instances where this gets back to the boy’s parents and they formally complain, the new headmaster begs them to consider the good reputation of the school, they settle out of court and Dunky Oldman is allowed to carry on as Head of First Years with impunity, his underage seraglio in easy reach around him like an R.I.-teaching Emperor Tiberius. The new headmaster, Mr. Ormerod, has recently replaced the previous incumbent Mr. Strichley after Mr. Strichley took an overdose of sleeping pills and then went out and drove his car at speed into a rock wall. Mr. Ormerod, by contrast, has been previously employed as deputy headmaster at one of the posher public schools and doesn’t see his new job as headmaster of a grammar school as a promotion. After all, though the eleven-plus does quite a reasonable job of making sure that only a bare minimum of boys from less exclusive backgrounds can attend the school, there’s still the risk that Mr. Ormerod might run into a member of the working classes or, in David’s case, one of the Hottentots. Indeed, a few years after David has moved on from the establishment in the mid-1970s the grammar schools are all turned into comprehensives, liable to take in the same riff-raff as an ordinary secondary school. According to the rumour David hears, for Mr. Ormerod it’s a demotion, an indignity too far and one day he goes into work a little earlier than usual so that he can follow the example of his predecessor, hanging himself in a stairwell near the art room. From what David understands, the next headmaster after Ormerod avoids having to kill himself by getting fired for stealing three pounds forty pence in change from the school’s drinks machine, but back when David is just starting at the school all this is in the future and the former public school enforcer is in charge. A tall man with a defect of the inner ear that makes him hold his head on one side like a vulture with a snapped neck, Ormerod attempts to recreate his new school in the fashion of his old one. Given the pretensions that the Grammar School already has, the institution doesn’t need a great deal of persuading. Many of the staff still have black gowns and there are even a few of the older teachers wearing mortar boards, perhaps the last such in the town to dress like this outside the pages of The Beano. The headmaster’s office has red and green traffic lights installed outside the door to inform visitors that they should either wait or enter, thus excusing Mr. Ormerod from having to say anything as common as “come in”. Inside his office a glass-fronted case contains a range of canes designed to inflict various degrees of punishment; thick ones that bruise; thin ones that cut. When Ormerod decrees that henceforth boys using the open air school pool must swim without recourse to swimming trunks after the custom at his prior establishment there’s not a squeak of protest from the staff and Mr. Oldman more than likely writes the head a letter of congratulation. This, then, is the world that all the new arrivals at the school find themselves overwhelmed by, but at least the white ones have each other for support. David has nobody. His classmates want no more to do with him than did the children at St. George’s, and the teachers seem to see him as an opportunity for minstrel show amusement. For a while David hopes selfishly that in a year or two his brother Andrew can pass his eleven-plus so that at least there’ll be the two of them to look out for each other in this bigoted asylum, but that isn’t going to be what happens. Andrew, well aware and justifiably resentful of their father’s favouritism, realises that however hard he tries he’ll never win his dad’s approval and so takes a more relaxed approach to schoolwork, fails to clear the bar on the eleven-plus and opts for the diminished expectations of a secondary school where at least there are other black kids. Meanwhile, David is discovering that though he may be a class-topper at St. George’s, in amongst these prep-school educated boys he doesn’t stand a chance. After that first year everybody takes exams to see which stream they’re suited to for the remainder of their school career and David ends up in the ‘C’ stream with the divs and trainee sociopaths. The masters and the other kids are on his back at school, his disappointed father’s on his back at home, so David spends most of his spare time at the Baxter Building, or Avengers Mansion, or in some alternative Fortress of Solitude. One bright and fresh Saturday morning David’s down at Sid’s stall in the market square. The latest Marvel comics are just in and David’s trying to work out how many he can comfortably afford, whether to leave the Strange Tales or Fantasy Masterpieces for another day, when he becomes aware that Sid’s stall has another customer and that they’re staring at him. Turning slowly, David finds himself confronted for the first time by the dark-ringed eyes of Alma Warren, who has just turned twelve and isn’t wearing any makeup. She’s holding a copy of some comic that he’s never heard of, something called Forbidden Worlds from one of the small companies he doesn’t bother with. They both smirk condescendingly at one another’s woeful taste and overhead the pigeons flutter restlessly from ledge to ledge, weaving threads of trajectory across the square’s stone loom.
Black Charley in the main avoids the better parts of town, confining himself to the Boroughs and the villages out in the reaches of the county, where he’s so well known that mothers use him as a way to make their kids do as they’re told: “If you don’t get to bed, Black Charley’s gonna get you”. Henry doesn’t much care to be made a monster in the eyes of children, but he guesses it’s a measure of his fame. He mostly gets no trouble out there in the villages, the Houghtons and the Haddons and the Yardley Gobions and such, though once out near Green’s Norton he gets set on by a big giant of a drunken ploughman who holds Henry by one leg and dangles him above an open fire until his white hair’s singeing and he’s wailing fit to wake the dead. This is the only time that anything real bad happens to Henry when he’s out about his rounds, and in the end the feller lets him go and Henry comes away with the impression that the giant only means near setting Henry’s head on fire as some kind of half-wit Green’s Norton joke, one that he fully expects Henry to find comical as well. Still, it’s the kind of incident leaves an impression, and now Henry’s getting on in years he finds his travels out around the villages are in smaller and smaller circles until pretty much his whole world is reduced to just the Boroughs, not that Henry minds. Most of his life he finds he’s getting moved from here to there, from Tennessee to Kansas to New York to Wales, and never gets to settle in one place for long enough to feel the benefit of having a community. Down in the Boroughs, after living here for long enough, Henry has come to understand how being in a district and getting to see how everybody’s lives work out, in many ways it’s like the reading of some huge and stupefying book of stories where you stick with it for long enough you find out what becomes of all the characters and circumstances and so forth. Rattling and squeaking on his bicycle down Freeschool Street and round the bottom into Green Street he sees young May Warren, who he calls young although after having all her little ones she’s grown into a big old gal. She’s rolling down the little path they call Narrow-toe Lane dressed in her black coat and black bonnet, like a round iron bowling-ball that rumbles so’s to let the ninepins know they best get out its way. Henry expects she’s off about some work connected with her calling as a deathmonger, the women what they have round here takes care of all the babies and the bodies, which of both there are a mighty number. Henry and Selina get a woman name of Mrs. Gibbs comes round to see them when their children’s born, but Henry don’t doubt that if Mrs. Gibbs should happen to be unavailable or off on other business then May Warren would do just as fine a job. He figures that it’s losing her own firstborn, a sweet little thing also called May, makes her so good at what she does. He calls a cheery greeting to May Warren as he cycles past and in return she lifts one heavy arm and offers him a gruff “Hello, Black Charley, how yer doin’?” by way of reply. As he rides on to Gas Street and down there, Henry considers the downright peculiar fortunes of the Warren family what with May’s pop, old man Snowy Vernall, getting in the newspaper for climbing up on top the town hall roof one time he’s drunk and standing shouting with his arm around that angel they got up there, like they was old friends. And then of course there’s May’s aunt, Snowy’s crazy sister Thursa got that big accordion what she goes wandering the streets with, playing that strange, awful music with the funny gaps in so you think it’s over just before it all starts up again. When Henry’s getting down near where you got the little bridge what takes you over to Foot Meadow he spies Freddy Allen, a young ne’er-do-well who’s no doubt on his way home seeing as he sleeps under the railway arches in the meadow, being in his twenties without house or family all on account of poverty and drink. Henry can’t say as he approves of Freddy, who gets by through stealing things off people’s doorsteps, but he can’t help feeling sorry for the boy and Henry guesses that a body’s got to eat. Curving around towards the crossroads by the West Bridge where they got the castle ruins still, there’s every kind of people out there in the streets going about their business. He knows almost everyone he sees, and almost everybody that he sees knows him. He goes over the crossroads when it’s safe and on down the Saint Andrew’s Road, but when he’s sailing along up the top there with that dirty red brick wall towering above him on his right and all the tumbled ruins of the castle poking from the grass there on his left he gets a powerful sadness suddenly come over him, and don’t know why. He’s thinking of Selina and his children and what most concerns him is their youngest, little Edward. Henry’s seen the stretches of grey rubble springing up around the district as though they were patches of some terrible new bindweed, all the knocked-down houses back of Peter’s Church where there’s just cowslips and dead-nettles now, and it occurs to him the Boroughs will be different by the time their littlest is grown. It’s all these demolitions that’s unsettled him, places that Henry knows are standing for a hundred years or more and what he’d thought would stand forever, just pulled down and gone like it don’t matter. Ever since the war’s end you can feel it. Some big change is coming, and though he can’t picture what the place is going to look like fifty, sixty years from now, he gets the feeling he most likely wouldn’t care for it too much. He doesn’t like to think how it will be for Edward or their other children after him and his Selina are passed on. Even though Henry knows that Edward will be properly growed up by then he can’t help but imagine him as he is now, as a young black child wandering all lonely down some shabby, cold tomorrow-street what Henry doesn’t recognise.
Dave Daniels skims over the singing tarmac of the Barrack Road astride his Raleigh bicycle, with all that early morning Saturday potential in the battering wind against his eager face. He’s off to call upon his new mate Alma at her house down on the broken-nosed but amiable row of terraced homes between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street. Here in 1966 the music over the transistor radios is sweet and effervescent, Vimto for the ears. Month after month the comics from America keep getting better, there are programs that he likes on television, David has a proper friend and it’s the pocket-moneyed weekend, full of Sky Ray rocket lollies and perhaps a Tamla Motown single from John Lever’s, with no school and thus no institutionalised humiliation until Monday. He describes a jubilant freewheeling arc through Regent Square, from Barrack Road to Grafton Street, and as he does so spares a glance down Sheep Street with its top end opening there on his left. He knows that this is where his family were living when they first arrived in town, the year or two before he realised he’d got a younger brother, but his actual memories are blurred and often contradictory. He can recall, however, the perambulator journeys to the Racecourse that avoid excursions to the west, into the Here-Be-Tygers thickets of Northampton’s dark interior, the inland continent known as the Boroughs, both decrepit and somehow disgraceful. David tells his parents he’s got a new friend called Alma who he sometimes visits, even has her round his house to meet his dad that once, but doesn’t tell them where she lives. As he slides into the long plunge of Grafton Street, David passes the dusty glass and peeling emerald door of the Caribbean club on Broad Street’s corner, once more over to his left. Someone has written on its woodwork in black paint the phrase THAT MOUNTAIN COONERY, which he supposes is related to that “Mountain Greenery” song that he vaguely remembers hearing on the radio during his childhood. It strikes David as a feeble-minded kind of joke and he ignores the prejudice, letting it all wash over him in strict accordance with his personal policy on racial taunting, or rather doing his best to let it all wash over him. In actual truth each washing leaves an ugly tide-line residue of stepped-on anger in his fourteen-year-old spleen, but what else can he do? His father Bernard’s way of dealing with it would be to suppose that daubing slogans on the Caribbean club is only meant as an affront to the Jamaicans whom he also doesn’t care for very much; that being a successful lawyer from his background means that the word “coon” is almost certainly referring to somebody else. David knows better, standing in the empty playground at the Grammar School with a blackboard eraser in each hand and pounding them together i
n explosive, choking cumuli of chalk-dust while his form teacher and schoolmates giggle at him through the classroom window from inside. Descending Grafton Street, squeezing the brakes as he approaches Weston’s the Newsagent halfway down, David dismounts and drags his Raleigh up onto the pavement, propping it against the wire-crossed hoarding – with a headline about Dr. Christian Barnard’s heart transplant – that’s under the front window. Peering through the faintly greenish glass his own cardiac organ flutters to discover that at least some of the latest Marvel comics have arrived, their English distribution irritatingly erratic owing to their transport from America as ballast to bulk out more profitable cargo. David spots a new issue of The Avengers that he’ll probably pick up despite the fact that he finds Don Heck – the book’s artist – a bit dull, even though Alma says she likes Heck’s work. With more enthusiasm he sees there’s a new Fantastic Four and even more significantly a new Thor with his idol Jack Kirby’s Tales of Asgard in the back of it. He ducks into the shop, emerging just under a minute later with a haul of six additions to his burgeoning collection for just four shillings and sixpence. Stuffing them into the duffel bag he’s got over one shoulder David saddles up and carries on down Grafton Street to Lower Harding Street, where he turns left. It is immediately apparent that he’s now in a completely different part of town. On David’s right a slump of rubble that might once have been two or three blocks of houses rolls downhill towards Monk’s Pond Street and the gated rear yards of a reeking tannery. According to what Alma tells him, this is her equivalent to David’s listless mornings in the children’s playground at the Racecourse, fannying around inside great concrete duct-pipes on this wasteland, accidentally smashing up her fingernails until they turn black and fall off while David sits with his considerably lighter brother Andrew on a see-saw that’s not moving and is never going to move, will always leave his little brother stranded up there in the air. David’s not sure if it’s himself or Alma who has the best deal, concluding that it’s ultimately six of one and half a dozen of the other, swings and roundabouts. He wouldn’t want to live here in the soot blown from the railway yards, among the rose bay willow herbs rooted in that same grime with drooping petals like pink tinfoil, but then there are times when he can see the area’s mysterious appeal. There’s the occasion when he calls on Alma and she isn’t in, so that he has to leave a message with her grandmother. According to what Alma fills him in on later, when she finally gets home her gran describes the visitor as a boy roughly Alma’s height or possibly a little shorter, riding on a bike, very well-spoken, wearing jeans and a blue jumper. Alma, in an effort to speed up the identification, asks her gran if the boy happens to be black by any chance, to which the seventy-something responds by looking startled and bewildered, saying “Do you know, I really couldn’t tell yer.” Even Alma doesn’t quite know what to make of this and David is completely baffled, although at the same time he’s amused and he’s also impressed in a way that he can’t entirely put his finger on. He has to say that just in terms of an accepting, even-handed attitude to visitors, Alma’s gran Clara has his father Bernard beat hands down. He still feels mortified about the time when he asks Alma round to see his comics and his dad insists on interviewing her alone in the front room, like a Victorian patriarch seeking assurance as to her intentions. After Alma’s gone, Bernard takes David to one side and soberly explains that while there’s nothing wrong with mixing with white people, Alma isn’t really the right sort of white person for Bernard’s son to be seen hanging round with. She’s failed the audition. Dave and Alma laugh about it and conclude that in the prejudice league tables, class beats race. Dave cycles along Lower Harding Street towards the top of Spring Lane, and the people that he glides past don’t appear to pay him the least measure of attention, almost as if they’ve seen black people on bicycles before. The boy hums down the ancient hill in an exhilarating rush onto St. Andrew’s Road with drowsing railway yards arrayed beyond it in the rust and sunshine, pedalling to see his friend who lives here in another world, another decade, duffle bag full of primary-colour gods and scientists, Negative Zones and Rainbow Bridges on his shoulder, talismans as he descends into the district and its crumbling wonderments, its raucous prehistoric atmosphere.
When Henry’s on The Pride of Bethlehem all them long weeks he reads the Buffalo Bill chapbooks what are padding out its hold as ballast, but that’s just because it’s sometimes all there is to do and not because of any admiration he might have for Colonel Cody. Still, he understands the need that people have for such nonsensical adventures, and he don’t begrudge them that. What Henry reckons is that in amidst the shove and effort and small comfort of this world when we’re down here enmired in it like what we are, a man has got to have a star up there above him so as he can navigate, and what that star is, it’s some manner of ideal what you can’t reach but what shows you the way. Back there in Tennessee on the plantation you get the old stories come from Africa about the fearless warriors and all the clever spirit-animals what teach about how it’s good to be kind to people and the benefits of being cunning and the like. At the same time you got the songs and the religion, Pastor Newton’s hymn included, which Henry supposes is another breed of the same thing, some better way of living or some better place what we might never get to but where the idea of it can keep us going all the same. Where it don’t matter if you find out that the man what writes the hymn has got his shameful side and doesn’t necessarily live up to what he writes about, because it’s the ideal what’s the important thing. On the same track you have your mythological inventions like, say, Hercules and made-up characters from out the chapbooks like that Sherlock Holmes they got here or, for that matter, like Buffalo Bill, a made-up character if ever Henry met one. Just the thought there’s somebody that clever or ingenious or brave, even if they don’t properly exist except when you’re all caught up in the story, it gives you something to reach for and to head the wagon of your life towards. And then there’s the real men and women what in Henry’s estimation make the brightest beacons and most glorious good examples you could follow, seeing as they’re flesh and blood and not some ancient god or hero from a chapbook, which means maybe if you try as hard as them then wondrous things might truly come of it. Sometimes when he’s asleep he calls up Britton Johnson, like a stepping beauty on the boardwalks of some giant place what’s always there in Henry’s dreams, twirling his six-guns like a cowboy in a moving picture or else dressing up like a Red Indian to get his wife and children back from the Comanche. What it must be like to be a man like that, and Henry hopes that if Selina or his little ones are ever in harm’s way he’ll have the courage to do just what Britton Johnson does, or at least something what’s as brave. Black Charley gets enough attention in the ordinary run of things and don’t know about dressing up like no Red Indian. He’ll do it if he’s got to but there’s no great likelihood of that here in the Boroughs. Henry dreams of Mother Seacole livening up the wounded soldiers with some herbs, some rum and maybe a quick dance round the field hospital and general provisions store she’s got on the front line of the Crimean War, who in most people’s eyes is never going to measure up to Mrs. Nightingale no more than Britton Johnson’s ever going to have a silly chapbook in his honour like Bill Cody. Henry dreams of Walter Tull, out there in no-man’s-land between the trenches like in all those stories what come back of how the Germans and the English play a football game on Christmas day before they all get back to blowing out each other’s vitals the next morning. Henry dreams of Walter Tull in his white baggy shorts and claret shirt, dribbling the ball between the tank traps and dead horses, darting this way and then that invulnerable through mustard gas, and booting it high above all the duckboards and the bodies and barbed wire into the black skies over Passchendaele like a bursting signal-flare. He never dreams about John Newton, never dreams of Jesus, and now that he’s getting on in years Henry prefers his saints to be just ordinary men and women who make no great claim to saintliness. He’s not in any way
an atheist, it’s more like these days he’s not specially inclined to put religious faith in people what might let him down, or in some institution other than his own self who he’s sure of. Henry raises up a rough church in his heart what he can carry with him where he goes, poking around in the old barns and that, with humming to himself instead of organ music and the stained-glass light spilled out of his imagination on the floor in all the straw and horse muck. Henry thinks about all what he’s done, taking care of his mom and pop like they took care of him, crossing the great wide sea and sliding down upon Northampton in a snowy woollen avalanche, him and Selina raising up their children without losing any of them, and he feels contented with himself and with his life. It’s best, Henry believes, a man should be his own ideal and champion, however long it takes him to arrive there.
Doggy-paddling in the lazy, undemanding currents of the ‘C’-stream, David just about completes six year-long pool lengths of his education without drowning. He secures one or two subsequently useless O-levels, fails all the rest and doesn’t see the point of going on to fail his A-levels as well. He doesn’t want to go to college, wants to have these years of pointless and demeaning prelude over with so he can get on with his life in something that resembles a real world. His dad is furious with disappointment. Nothing’s turning out the way that Bernard wanted. Back in Sierra Leone it’s military coup on top of military coup, with ethnic Limba Siaka Stevens finally ending up in charge and straight away revealing his true colours, executing his political and military rivals by means of a gallows on the Kissy Road in Freetown. Bad and getting worse, this is how Bernard sees the prospects for his homeland and his eldest son alike. Dave is demoted in his father’s estimations, although obviously not to the extent of his young brother, Andrew, who has never figured in those estimations. David doesn’t care. Being the chosen one has always been a burden, and he finds that he and Andy grow much closer in the cosy doghouse of paternal disapproval. Whispering and laughing in the darkness after lights-out they begin to plan their bold escape. Outside their parents’ dearly-won front door the 1970s are pooling even in the sump of Kingsthorpe Hollow, a fluorescent froth of platform heels and stick-on stars. The song lyrics are all chrome-dipped in science fiction and Jack Kirby has quit Marvel Comics to turn out a stunningly prolific flood of fresh ideas for their main industry rivals, full of warring techno-gods and revamped 1940s Brooklyn kid gangs. Meanwhile, a real local gang of vicious seventeen-year-old apprentice skinheads have, somewhat uncomfortably, rebranded themselves as “The Bowie Boys” and now wear eyeliner and carry handbags in Bay City Rollers tartan. The decade bowls into town riding a sequin blizzard and leaves drifts of glitter in the gutters. Flaunting its fantastic Biba clothes and Day-Glo hedgehog hair it flirts with the two brothers, finally enticing them to run away from home and join the circus. They move down to London just as soon as they’re both old enough to do so without needing their dad’s never-going-to-happen blessings and consent. It’s a completely different place now to the city that confronted Joyce and Bernard when they first arrived in Brixton twenty years before, and being black is almost fashionable now. This previously undreamed-of world embraces Dave and Andy in a way Northampton never could, finding them flats, finding them work. David commences his employment at a clothing outlet that’s the current talk of the black entertainment field, finds himself recommending gear for Labi Siffre, kung-fu fighting with Carl Douglas and discovering the fragrant world of girls in a way that would be unthinkable in Kingsthorpe Hollow – under Bernard’s gold-rimmed eye and quarantined from females at a same-sex grammar school. It feels to David like he’s living for the first time, dressing how he wants and getting a bit Funkadelic when it suits him, making it through the whole heady period without recourse to dreadlocks or an afro. He and Andrew sometimes pop back to Northampton, just to see their mum and so that David can catch up with Alma, but the atmosphere and barbed-wire silences around their dad mean that the intervals between their visits gradually grow longer. Even Alma is becoming harder to keep tabs on once her terraced row on Andrew’s Road is pulled down, in the final mop-up of the clearance operation that’s been going on down in the Boroughs since the end of World War One. The Warren family get moved to Abington, then Alma takes off on her own into a string of boyfriends, bedsits and addresses without telephones. Slowly the two of them lose touch but by then David has hooked up with Natalie, a beautifully-assembled girl from a Nigerian family who’s looking like a keeper. His life picks up pace until he’s skimming through the years as though he’s on a Raleigh bicycle, with his exhilaration only slightly curtailed by the stark fact that, in life, there don’t seem to be any brakes. You can’t stop and you can’t even slow down.
Henry and this place where he lives are running out of luck, he knows it, if they ever had any to start with. There’s a stiffness in the joints and hinges, there’s a rheumy quality comes in the eyes and windows, and a never-again feel to things. Some of the streets and plenty of the people what he’s been familiar with are disappeared. Around Chalk Lane where it’s all coming down and everybody’s moving out, he sees these ladies that he knows just stood there weeping and one saying to the other “Well, this is the end of our acquaintance”. He feels sorry for the fallen buildings, dust and rubble where it meant something to someone once, but they’re hard stone and it’s the people, what are softer, that get hurt most cruelly. It’s the bonds between them that are delicate and built up over years what get tore up, all on a stroke of someone’s pen at the town hall. There’s friends and families get scattered without rhyme or reason like so many billiard balls, sent shooting off to the four corners of Northampton with their whole lives gone a different way and Henry can’t but feel it’s all a shame. From how he hears it, it won’t be that long before it’s Bath Street, Castle Street and his own Scarletwell Street what are next for demolition and he knows a time will come when even the Destructor is destroyed, with all of this replaced by some variety of great big modern rooming-houses that he don’t much like the sound of. He allows that it might be a little cleaner and more sanitary round here after all the changes, but from what he’s seen of diagrams and drawings that get printed in the evening paper it’s not nowhere near as friendly in appearance, and he isn’t certain there’ll be a position for no deathmongers or crazy people such as Thursa Vernall; for the mooching kind like Freddy Allen or else Georgie Bumble; even for Black Charley with his funny-looking bicycle and cart. He drags his wooden blocks more on the roads now when he’s going down these tilted lanes for fear that if he picks up speed him and his vehicle alike will both be shook to bits. One day when Henry’s resting on the grass up by the stump of the old castle he gets into conversation with a nice enough young gent who’s well brought-up and seems like he’s been educated quite a bit in ancient history. This boy brings up the subject of Black Charley’s skin, but in a nervous way in case it’s not polite to mention it, when he says that it’s not the first time that these falling-down old stones have been acquainted with a black man. Then when Henry asks him what he means he talks about this feller by the name Peter the Saracen, a coloured man come from the Holy Land or Africa who’s living here around the year twelve hundred, working as a crossbow maker for who they call Bad King John, near seven hundred year before Henry himself arrives in these parts. On the one hand Henry will admit to feeling a touch disappointed that he isn’t the first man of his complexion hereabouts, but then that’s only prideful vanity, and on the other hand he’s pleased he’s got another hero what can socialise with Walter Tull and Britton Johnson in his idle daydreams. He imagines how he leads the three of them on his contraption with the rope instead of tyres, escorts the crossbow-maker, footballer and cowboy all the way back home to Tennessee and sixty years ago, so they can liberate all Henry’s people with their fancy shooting and their deadly silent crossbow bolts and their goal-scoring capabilities. He sleeps more these days and so has more time for all his flights of fancy. Meantime out of his front window and just over Scarletwell they’re taking down the warehouses and so on that are at the bottom, so that no more than that narrow terraced strip of homes is left on the Saint Andrew’s Road. A little way uphill The Friendly Arms is all shut down and boarded up, ready to vanish when its time comes. He finds out from somebody how Mr. Newton Pratt was taken ill and died some years ago with the pneumonia, or anyway that’s what he’s told. Of what befell Pratt’s legendary beast, however, Henry never hears a word and in the end he’s half-convinced he must have dreamt it, its existence being to his mind a more unlikely prospect than the get-together between Walter Tull, Peter the Saracen and Britton Johnson. Henry dozes while the world out past his doorstep comes to pieces.
Just five or six decades up the road David is gliding comfortably into the 1980s, married now to Natalie and b
lessed with two fine kids, Selwyn and Lily. The science-fiction predilections of his boyhood mean that when the first commercially available computers hit the shops he seizes on them with delight, these fabulous devices previously unknown outside the Bat Cave. Having always been much smarter than his C-stream Grammar School track-record would suggest, he quickly finds that he knows nearly everything about the new technology, almost alone in a still-dazzled world that doesn’t seem to have the faintest clue. Like some explorer on a distant, savage planet who subdues the awestruck natives with a mirror and a box of matches, David’s smooth facility with getting a recalcitrant machine to work again is looked on as miraculous by those who witness it and before long he finds himself working in Brussels, home at weekends, as a highly valued cybernetic trouble-shooter. When he gets the chance he stays in touch with Andrew, who is married with two children of his own and also doing well, but while there’s been a measure of rapprochement with their dad, David still finds he only gets back to Northampton once in a blue moon. All that he sees of how the town is changing is, therefore, a disconnected string of snapshots in a poorly-maintained photo album where whole years of continuity are simply missing. On a visit around 1985, as an example, he discovers that the town’s largely Jamaican black community has taken over a Victorian Salvation Army fort that resides by itself upon its patch of Sheep Street wasteland down from the aesthetic pickaxe-in-the-face of Greyfriars Bus Station. David imagines that some sort of preservation order keeps the beautiful old structure standing after everything around it’s been torn down. Its new inhabitants, with caterpillar locks crammed into knitted Ethiopian flag bulbs atop their heads, have fashioned the neglected fort into an energetic hive of Afro-Caribbean activity. Renamed as the Matafancanta Club after what David understands is the Jamaican for something like “place of sharing” he sees them minding the pre-school toddlers, giving local artists and sound-systems somewhere they can set up and rehearse and keeping a perpetual stew going in their canteen on the second floor. The building, with its rose-pink brick façade and graceful scrollwork of its mouldings given life by all the goings-on inside it, looks terrific. When he passes through Northampton just a few years later it’s been bulldozed and there’s nothing but the stretch of yellowing grass and a few stories about evidently untrustworthy trustees pissing off back home to Kingston with the funding, youngsters with colourful street-names dealing ganja and eventually police raids after one too many BMWs get spotted in the edifice’s car park. So much for a preservation order, if there ever was one. On the same trip David is relieved to find that the incredibly old beech tree which he just about remembers from his infanthood is still alive and thriving in a courtyard further along Sheep Street, and of course the similarly ancient bulkhead of St. Sepulchre’s is right there where it always was, that and the beech tree as apparently immovable as Alma Warren, who he’s back in touch with. Keeping up a dwindling comic habit with infrequent visits to a Covent Garden shop called Comics Showcase, David first becomes aware that his old mate is doing nicely for herself when overhearing other customers discuss her recent cover-work in tones of muted awe. He picks a couple of the books up for himself and has to say he’s impressed by the haunting realistic quality that Alma brings to silly thirty-year-old costumed characters by taking them all much more seriously than they would seem to deserve. Then, just a few weeks later, David meets Alma herself in the same shop when he’s out with his tiny daughter Lily riding on his shoulders. They’re both overjoyed to see each other, have a lot of catching up to do and from that point his travels to Northampton are a bit more frequent. He’d go there more often, but the situation with his dad and Andrew is still strained and awkward. After Bernard’s efforts to encourage one son at the disadvantage of the other founder on David’s refusal to engage in such a competition, the old man has found a way to carry his unwanted and divisive favouritism on to a new generation, doting on Selwyn and Lily while ignoring Andrew’s two boys, Benjamin and Marcus. What particularly upsets David with their dad’s behaviour is how much it hurts Andrew, much more than when it was only him that Bernard left out in the cold. Andy could shrug that off, but he can’t watch it happening to his babies. He starts to become obsessed with making sure his offspring get the same advantages that he perceives as being heaped on David’s pair, spurring them on through school and college, doggedly determined that sheer academic excellence will force their granddad to acknowledge them. David advises Andrew to forget about their dad, but he can see that’s easier said than done when it’s your own kids being treated badly right in front of you. He sees the bitterness and the resentment in his brother’s eyes, and David doesn’t know where this is going but suspects it’s nowhere good.
Black Charley’s dying in his house on Scarletwell Street, getting out just a few months before they knock it down to put up flats and move him and his family somewhere else what they won’t like so much. Selina and his children come and go about the bedside in a kind of sleepy blur that Henry can’t keep track of with the medicine they give him so his chest don’t hurt. Across the road he’s told it’s pretty much all gone except for Spring Lane School and them few houses down the bottom there. He doesn’t want to see it as it is, just heaps of bricks on scrubland, but likes to imagine that one stable that’s still there in back of the surviving homes down on Saint Andrew’s Road. Since he don’t care to go to church and couldn’t get there these days even if he wanted to, then that old barn’s the nearest thing to Henry’s idea of a place of worship what’s in walking distance if Henry could walk, and what’s at least in thinking distance seeing as he can’t. He presumes he’s getting close to that occasion in his life when it might do him good to have a few words with his maker and so what he does, he goes down to that old shed in his mind without once having need to get out of his bed. He pictures himself getting onto his old bike what he gave to his son Edward to play on some few months back after it become apparent that he’d not himself be needing it no more. In his imagination he pretends he’s rolling off down Scarletwell Street, which is just the way it was with Newt Pratt and his drunken critter both outside a likewise resurrected Friendly Arms and greeting Henry with well-meant but unintelligible noises as he rattles past them heading for Saint Andrew’s Road, the way they had when he could still ride bicycles and they were both alive. He sees himself all young and vigorous, turning his vehicle along the cobbled alley what they call Scarletwell Terrace on the right there just before you reach the main road, trundling down it to the rear gates of the stable, which in Henry’s mind are open and not boarded up the way he hears they are in ordinary life now that the horses what were once within have gone. Henry leaves his imaginary contraption leaning up on the imaginary wall outside and pictures himself opening the rusted latch and going in, summoning all the scents and noises of a place like that as well as he is able with the flutter of the nesting pigeons and the smell of straw what’s not been changed in years: stale oats and a faint memory of dung. Light through the busted slates above as Henry falls on his imaginary knees and asks the thing what he feels might be listening somewhere if he’s truly soon to die and if there’s anything he should look forward to after that happens. When he gets no answer, same as usual, Henry asks himself just what kind of an answer he might be expecting, just what kind of afterlife he thinks that he could be contented with for the long next part of eternity. He’s not that sold on the idea of Heaven like you see in Bible illustrations. He’ll admit that it looks clean and pretty with the clouds and marble stairways but, like with these modern blocks of buildings what they say they’re putting up, he can’t see any place for Henry in the picture, or at least no place as looks like he’d feel comfortable. Well, if he don’t want that, what does he want? He’s entertained the notion what the Hindoo fellers have of getting born again in a new life as someone different, maybe even as some kind of witless animal, and he’s not taken with it. If he dies and someone else gets born next week who’s a completely different person what has got no memory
of ever being him, in what way is that Henry George? Unless there’s something in the idea what he’s missing, it seems pretty plain that that’s somebody else entirely who’s their own self and not Henry George at all. No, when he tries to call up his idea of paradise he finds he’s summoning the things he knows, what have already happened. He thinks how he’d like to see his pop again, and hear his mom when she was singing in the fields. He’d like to live again those careless years when he was just a child, before he got his mark when everything seemed sort of kindly and mysterious. He’d like to be meeting Selina for the first time and out walking with her by the River Usk where it runs through Abergavenny, or be lying with her in their useless ragged tent beside the great herd after they were wed and headed out of Wales towards Northampton. He yearns to be back on that afternoon when he’s just got his pay and him and his Selina first set eyes on Scarletwell Street where he’ll live and shortly die, wants to be with his wife and little Mrs Gibbs the deathmonger when they call him to the confinement room to see his newborn babies. He wants his old bicycle with the rope tyres back from the past along with the ability to ride it. It occurs to him that what he wants the most is his whole life again, all of the things what are most dear and most familiar to him. If he could have that, Henry reckons that it would be worth the branding and the seasick nights aboard The Pride of Bethlehem. That’s all he wants, but in his thoughts the sunlight tumbling through the broken roof onto the rafters striped with pigeon droppings seems as though it’s getting brighter, and then later when Selina brings his dinner in to see if he can eat a little of it she can’t rouse him.
Somewhere else it’s 1991 and Bernard Daniels, now retired, decides that he and Joyce should visit Sierra Leone once more before they’re both too old to travel. David doesn’t know a lot about the politics prevailing in West Africa just then but isn’t sure the journey is a good idea, and Andrew feels the same. Their dad waves their concerns aside. His sons are Brixton born, have never been to Africa and no doubt see it through their native English eyes as somewhere threatening, as a dark continent. Bernard and Joyce are Africans and have no such anxieties. They’re simply going home, and David harping on about the tensions growling round the lion mountains at the moment isn’t going to dissuade them. Bernard casts a cursory glance over the international pages in The Times, concluding that the situation over there is just business as usual by Sierra Leone standards. Siaka Stevens steps down a few years ago in favour of another ethnic Limba, Major General Joseph Momoh. There are all the customary attempts at overthrow, or at least allegations of the same, and all the usual retaliations by way of low-hanging fruit along the Kissy Road. Admittedly, there’s all this business going on with Momoh being forced to re-establish multi-party politics, with plenty of dark mutterings breaking out already in the opposition ranks, but Bernard knows that if he waits for a politically clear day to make their trip then he and Joyce will wait forever. It’s all settled. Flights are booked. There’s nothing else that David, Andrew and their families can do but cross their fingers and hope for the best, which obviously never works. In all their fretting over the fraught politics of Sierra Leone nobody has considered what’s currently happening across the border in Liberia, this being bloody and horrific civil war, most of it orchestrated by the leader of the National Patriotic Front, Charles Taylor. This is the man responsible for the most forceful and compelling slogan ever used in an election anywhere:
I KILLED YOUR MA.
I KILLED YOUR PA.
VOTE FOR ME.
Taylor decides it’s in his interests if fighting kicks off in Sierra Leone as well. He helps to found the Revolutionary United Front with ethnic Temne army corporal Foday Sankoh, expert in guerrilla warfare, trained in Britain and in Libya. When civil war erupts in Sierra Leone, Bernard and Joyce are in the middle of it, in their seventies, both ethnic Krios who are disliked by the native tribes, with no flights to or from the country and thus no way to get out. It’s terrifying. Lives are ending right across the street in unimaginable shock and fear and pleading, seldom with a gunshot, seldom swiftly. There are fashionable necklacings with burning tyres and twenty-minute executions using blunt machetes that can leave the murderers exhausted. Cowering in their hotel the couple peer out from between drawn curtains at the drifting smoke, the angry black tide sluicing up and down the street. Meanwhile, in England, David and the family are frantic, making calls to travel agents, embassies, and in the end somehow they bring their parents home, severely shaken but unharmed. Unharmed, and, in the case of Bernard, seemingly unaltered. Everything he’s seen confirms his strongly-held conviction that Sierra Leone’s native tribes are savages who only benefited from colonial rule and find themselves unable to exist without it. As for his opinions on events closer to home, these remain similarly unaffected. Bernard still refuses to bestow affection and encouragement on Andrew’s kids to the degree he does with David’s, while Andrew’s attempts to prove their father wrong by forcing Benjamin and Marcus to shine academically are by now ingrained and obsessive. David watches this unfolding and it’s like a ghost story, a haunting, an uncanny repetition of events and attitudes out of the past eerily manifesting in the present day, in 1997. Finally he gets a phone call from his brother one Saturday morning where Andrew can hardly talk, can’t get the words out properly. Marcus, his eldest son, has killed himself. Andy’s just heard about it from the college. Pressure of exams, they think. Oh, Christ. A terrible slow car crash that’s begun in Freetown forty years before reaches its point of impact and the Daniels family find themselves sat dazed and paralysed in the emotional debris, with blossoms nodding in the breeze all up and down the Kissy Road.
It’s 1997 and the Railway Club along the end of the St. Andrew’s Road by Castle Station is pretty much all that Eddie George is living for. He’s getting on, eighty or more, and he’s got one of those things that he can’t pronounce, sclerosis or what have you, but if he can get out from his place in Semilong down to his usual table in the club he’s happy just to have a Guinness and see all his friends. You get all sorts of people from the district going in there, that’s what Eddie likes about it. Couples with their children, lots of old gals and old fellers like himself and all the beautiful young women where there isn’t any harm in looking. Often when he’s in there he’ll bump into young Mick Warren and his family, Cathy his wife, sometimes his scruffy-looking sister and his two boys, Jack and Joe. Jack’s around six or seven and he seems to like having a chat with Eddie when he sees him. Eddie likes it too. They mostly talk a lot of nonsense with each other and it takes him back to when he was a boy himself, playing with all his sisters and his brothers on the pavement right outside their house in Scarletwell Street with his little wagons, and then later when his dad gave Eddie his own funny bicycle and cart before he died. The damn thing fell to bits only a few weeks after. It makes Eddie chuckle just to think of it while he’s calling his cab to take him to the Railway Club, but that sets off a thudding in his chest and so he just sits on the sofa and calms down while waiting for the taxi to arrive. It’s a grey day and what with Eddie’s eyes it’s looking kind of murky as he sits there in the tiny living room. He’s thinking about turning on the light just for a bit of cheer, damn the expense, right when his car turns up and toots its horn outside. Just standing up makes him feel dizzy, as if all the thoughts and the sensations in his head are draining to his feet. He lets the capable young driver shuffle him from his front door into a back seat of the vehicle, where he needs help to get his seat belt buckled properly. At least it’s warm, and when the engine starts up and they roll away he’s looking out the window at his neighbours’ flats and houses sliding backwards up the hill as he descends down Stanley Street towards St. Andrew’s Road. Stanley Street, Baker Street and Gordon Street. It’s taken Eddie some good years of living here in Semilong to figure out that they’re the names of famous English generals who relieved Mafeking and all that business, back more than a hundred years ago. For a good while he’s laboured under the impression that it’s all something to do with the film actor Stanley Baker, and that makes him smile as well. The taxi-cab turns left into St. Andrew’s Road, and on his right there’s all the yards, furniture reclamation businesses and lock-ups that have been here for as long as Eddie can remember, some with signboard lettering upon their peeling wooden gates that looks to Eddie’s eye like it might be Victorian or something. Across the road from these and on his left, there are the openings to the neat row of hilly streets that make up Semilong, all parallel with one another, Hampton Street and Brook Street and all them. Eddie’s always been very happy here. He likes the neighbourhood, but nobody could say that it was doing well. It’s not the worst of places by a long shot, but in terms of getting taken care of then it’s plain that Semilong’s a fair way down the list. What it’s about as far as Eddie sees it is that where he lives now is too close to where he used to live, which is to say the Boroughs, or Spring Boroughs as they seem to call it nowadays. It’s as if things like being poor and having low property prices are contagious and will spread from area to area if they’re not kept in isolation, maybe with a blanket soaked in disinfectant hung across the door the way they used to have up Scarletwell Street when somebody had the scarlet fever. Just like with his mix-up over Stanley Baker, Eddie can remember when he thought that scarlet fever is something that only people living up in Scarletwell Street got; that maybe people down in Green Street got afflicted by green fever. How you think when you’re a youngster is something that never ceases to amaze him, and he hopes that little Jack is maybe going to be there when he gets up to the club. Out