Voice of the Fire
He placed a foundry up on Hunsbury Hill to overlook the town and gouged away at the remains of the adjacent Iron Age settlement in search of ore to build the railway. Most of what he paid his labourers would be returned to him across the bar-tops of his taverns on the Friday night he doled it out. Northampton had a lot of pubs back then. You could start at the top of Bridge Street and with only half a pint of bitter at each stop along the way never reach the Plough Hotel down at the bottom end, by then receded to Infinity.
Phipps reasoned that his drinking dens might be perceived as having set temptation on the straight path of the righteous and that taking a dim view of all this, the Almighty would be certain to condemn him to the flames. His only chance, the way he saw it, was to curry the Creator’s favour by constructing an estate that had four churches but no public houses. By slipping this modest bribe to God, seen as Northampton
Borough representative writ large, the brewer thought to thus avoid a furnace deemed more hideous than that which he’d erected up on Hunsbury Hill. Though designated ‘Phippsville’ in official documents, native consensus soon re-christened it Phipps’ Fire Escape. Home of ten years now, at one house or other.
There seems to be a local predilection for expressing contours of the spirit world in terms of stone and mortar, matter in its densest, most enduring form. Phipps builds a dry and austere maze, its terraced streets become the rungs of his ascent to Paradise. Simon de Senlis builds his round church as a Templar glyph to mark the martyrdom and resurrection. Thomas Tresham codes the outlawed Holy Trinity into his lunatic three-sided lodge. These testaments of brick are weighty paragraphs writ on the world itself and therefore only legible to God. The rest of us who do not build express our secret arcane souls in scripts more fleeting, more immediate to our human instant: wasting spells or salesman’s patter. The betraying letter. Prose, or violence.
Squinting through the dark and drizzle, turn from Cedar Road to Collingwood, the downpour now a steady sizzle of dull platinum on the uneven paving slabs. Pass by the small, uncertain row of shops with a sub-post office so often blagged that it’s established a cult following among the audience of Crimewatch, most of whom are criminals who tune in for industry news and gossip. Walking on, past alley mouths that open on the long and lightless gullets of back-entries, puddles rippling in the sumps and sinkages of century-old cobble, iridescent moss accrued between the blunt grey stones. Rapes here, and strangled schoolboys, yet these miserable and poignant corridors don’t even get a walk on in the local A-Z. Our real, most trenchant streetplans are mapped solely in the memory and the imagination.
A right turn, into Abington Avenue, the cold slap of its crosswind and the driven rain. Across the street stands the United Reform Church, one of the four pillars upon which rests Phipps’ blind swing at redemption. Francis Crick came here to Sunday school back in the 1920s, evidently so impressed by Bible stories of a seven-day Creation that he went on to discover DNA. The dual helical flow of human interchange spirals around the recently refurbished building: brawls at closing time, and copulations. Love and birth and murder in their normal vortex.
Kettering Road, and the backwater junk emporiums that have collected in the tributaries of the town, an algae of grandfather clock and gas-mask. The abandoned Laser-Hunter-Killer Palace with the soaped up windows where the future closed down early for lack of local enthusiasm. Further down, stranded amidst the traffic flow of Abington Square on the brink of the town centre, stands Charles Bradlaugh’s statue, finger raised and resolutely pointing west towards the fields beyond the urban sprawl, assisting Sunday shoppers who’ve forgotten how to get to Toy Us.
Charles Bradlaugh was Northampton’s first Labour MP and the first atheist allowed to enter parliament, though not without debate. The night that his admission to the Commons was decided saw a demonstration in the Market Square with riot policemen sent in to administer the smack of a firm government. No stranger to controversy, he did time with Theosophist and Match-Girl agitator Annie Besant for the distribution of an ‘obscene publication’, being contraceptive information of a kind thought generally unsuitable for wives or servants. Amongst local politicians he has little competition save perhaps for Spencer Perceval, British Prime Minister unique for being, firstly, from Northamptonshire, and, secondly, assassinated. Bradlaugh stands upon the grassy knoll and points accusingly at Abington Street, at the shopping precincts, at the fag-end of the twentieth century.
Abington Street, pedestrianized some years ago, has flower baskets dangling from the gibbets of the reproduction Dickens-effect streetlamps, with a creeping sub-Docklands aesthetic gradually becoming evident in its façades. It’s as if when Democracy and Revolution came at last to Trumpton, the corrupt former regime of Mayor and Council were airlifted out with CIA assistance and resettled here, to brutally impose the values of their Toytown junta on this formerly alluring thoroughfare.
Some fifty years ago this was the Bunny Run, the sexual chakra of the town, where giggling factory girls would squeal and totter through a well-intentioned gauntlet of the neighbourhood testosterone. Now, in 1995, the cheerful lust has curdled into harm and frequent bruisings, violence manifested in the architecture of the street itself, inevitably percolating down to find its outlet on a human scale. The sumptuous and majestic New Theatre was demolished first in 1959. Faint echoes of George Robey, Gracie Fields and Anna Neagle pining from the sorry rubble. Next went Notre Dame, a red-brick convent school, Gothic receptacle for ninety years of schoolboy longing, and then finally the yellowed art deco arcade of the Co-Operative Society: a beautiful, faintly Egyptian relic with a central avenue sloping down as if designed to roll the final stone that would wall up alive those slaves caught browsing in the Homecare Centre.
Here, unmasked, a process that distinguishes this place as incarnated in industrial times. The only constant features in the local-interest photograph collections are the mounds of bricks; the cranes against the sky. A peckish Saturn fresh run out of young, the town devours itself. Everything grand we had, we tore to bits. Our castles, our emporiums, our witches and our glorious poets. Smash it up, set fire to it and stick it in the fucking madhouse. Jesus Christ.
At the street’s lower end a ghostly and deserted Market Square rises upon the right, while All Saint’s elderly patrician bulk looms underlit upon the left. A rank of Hackney cabs shelters against the church’s flank, hunched in the rain and glistening, like crows. The shop-fronts opposite on Mercer’s Row invite another reading of the town: only the ground floors have been modernized, as if the present moment were a heat-haze of tumultuous event that ended fifteen feet above street level, with the higher storeys in the lease of earlier centuries. Go upstairs at the butcher’s, Sergeants, and the Geisha Café would be open still, with spectral waitresses gliding between the murmuring, empty tables bearing sandwiches, triangular and numinous. Bram Stoker sharing tea for two with Errol Flynn between the Repertory Theatre matinées.
Splash on, rounding the front of All Saint’s with its sheltering portico. A plaque here to the memory of John Bailles, a button-maker of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the county’s best attempt to date at a robust, no-nonsense immortality. Near six score years and ten: a long time to spend making buttons. Only zips and Velcro killed him.
The church stares with blank Anglican disdain down Gold Street’s narrow fissure; stone-faced Protestant resentment is directed at any Semitic shades remaining in this former haunt of money-lenders. In the thirteenth century it was from here that local Jews were taken out and stoned to death, accused of sacrificing Christian babies in the course of arcane, cabbalistic rites. This was among the earliest incidents of violent European anti-Semitism that were recognizable as such, the town as eager and precocious in its pogroms as it was reluctant to stop burning witches.
During World War II a bomber crashed up at the street’s top end, a great tin angel with a sucking chest wound fallen from the Final Judgement. It was drawn down inexorably by tractor beams of sympathetic magic emanating from the subterranean speakeasy that’s under Adam’s Bakery behind the church, a marvellous forgotten space designed to reproduce the shape and seating of a buried aeroplane. Imagined engine-drone above the cold flint jetstreams, the clay strato-cumulus, like calling unto like, dragging the bomber overhead into a helpless and enraptured nosedive. One lone cyclist with a broken arm after the impact knocked him from his saddle, otherwise no casualties. These streets again show their surprising and capricious mercy. One by one the townsfolk file out through the Welsh House from the burning Market Square. The cyclist rises dazed and injured from the wreckage and stares dumbstruck at Jane Russell, pouting, painted on the ruined fuselage.
From Gold Street over the dual carriageway of Horsemarket, more horse-power stampeding there now than ever, where a left turn would lead down towards the Fritz Lang horror of the Carlsberg Brew
ery. It was in the Copenhagen branch of this establishment that physicist Niels Bohr first formulated his axiom that all our observations of the universe can only be seen, in the last analysis, as observations of ourselves and our own processes. A haunting notion, hard to write off as the product of one Special Brew too many, and as true concerning observations of a town as when relating to the cosmos, or the hidden quanta.
Cross Horsemarket into Marefair with the unforgiving mausoleum of the Barclaycard credit control headquarters on our right. Poker-faced, its gaze concealed behind opaque black windows, it gives nothing away. Northampton, once the centre of the boot and shoe trade, that grew fat on war and saw John Clare’s long desperate hike as one more pair sold, is now the seat of Barclaycard and Carlsberg, perfect icons of the Thatcher years reflecting our new export lines: the lager lout, the credit casualty. Here we go, here we go. Here we go.
Across the street are council offices where Cromwell is reputed to have slept and dreamed the night in 1645 before he rode to Naseby and midwifed the gory breach birth of our current parliamentary democracy, the adult form still clearly warped and traumatized by this unspeakable nativity. They marched the Royalist prisoners out to Ecton afterwards and herded them into a paddock by the Globe Inn for the night before the march to London, trial, imprisonment or execution. Many of the wounded died there in the field behind the Inn. A century later William Hogarth, a recurring patron, offered to design and paint a new sign for the Globe, and changed its name to the World’s End with a depiction of the planet bursting into flames. The pub signs of the county are a secret Tarot deck, with this card the most ominous, the local theme of fire asserted in its final, terrifying aspect.
Walking on, St Peter’s church stands floodlit, golden in the last few shakes of rain, a Saxon edifice rebuilt after the Norman conquest. A funeral service was held here for Uncle Chick, a wide boy in more ways than one: black marketeer of the family, he lost a leg in later life but not his splendidly unpleasant sense of humour, nor the knowing leer of a supernal toad with diamonds in his brow. The vicar eulogized him as a decent, law-abiding man, respectable in every way. Dad and Aunt Lou kept looking at each other in bewilderment throughout the service, having no idea who he was on about.
Here too the half-wit’s vision and the beggar woman, crippled by the gate. The bones of Ragener, unearthed in an unearthly light. The brother Saints, Ragener and Edmund; their remote November graves and separate miracles.
When they found Edmund’s severed head it was protected by a fierce black dog that would not let them near. The frilled pink gums, curled back across pale yellow teeth; the murdered saint with fly-specked gaze, a mouthful of dead leaves, his hair, alive with ants: these are the icons of a secret local heraldry, the cryptic suits that mark Northampton’s deck: Flames, Churches, Heads, and Dogs.
Down Black Lion Hill, still on the path suggested by Charles Bradlaugh’s finger, to the crossroads and the bridge beyond, the ancient heart of the community, where everything began. The Shagfoals, as described by local folklore, are believed to favour crossroads or a river-bridge, sites where the fabric is stretched thinnest between our world and the hidden place beneath. The town, of course, has crystallized around these very features; and so gets no more than it deserves.
St Peter’s Way curves south from here, and to the north extends St Andrew’s Road, childhood address and western boundary of the Boroughs, this town’s oldest, strangest quarter, sprung up where the neolithic track of the Jurassic Way that stretched from Glastonbury to Lincoln crossed the River Nene. Simon de Senlis’ castle stood here once beside the bridge, where Becket came to trial and was condemned, the castle itself suffering a similar fate not long after. Now Castle Station stands here, with the relocated postern gate a sole remaining fragment of the former structure like a dead man’s ear saved by his murderer as a memento.
On the corner sits the Railway Club, this evening’s destination. Since Mum’s death four months ago it has become the venue for a weekly meeting with the brother; point of contact now that the maternal Sunday dinner table is no more. Beyond the double airlock doors that grant admission from the street there is a single large, low-ceilinged hall that’s lit as though for neuro-surgery. A low stage at the far end where sometimes the bingo caller sits, charged with the arcane glamour and authority of his profession, audience hanging breathless on each syllable as on the utterance of a divine, or numerologist.
Other than children, it’s unusual to discover anybody here that’s under fifty. The collective ambience is overcast, abruptly lit by static discharge from a kippered laugh. This atmosphere is stable, soothing and familiar. These are people who have always been here, by the vanished castle, by the bridge. The words have changed but not the voice, nor yet the greater part of their complaint.
The brother’s here already, at the usual table with his son Jake, six years old, already either self-possessed or just possessed. The drinks are ordered and the conversation, easy as old shoes, turns to the week’s events. Mike, after five years, has discovered where Dad’s ashes ended up; where Mum’s will follow. Not that nobody’s been looking during all that time, of course. Simply that no one at the crematorium appeared to have the first idea of how to find Rose Garden B; had recently declared albeit wrongly that Rose Garden B did not exist. This had given rise to a brief flurry of unsettling suspicions: Soylent Green is people. Luckily, the matter was resolved and the parental plaque discovered quite by chance among the lanes of roses, ranks of men and women wondrously transformed to petal, scent and thorn.
Having concluded his account the brother sips, wiping antipodean surf from upper lip before he speaks again. ‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Just the book.’
‘That’s the Northampton book?’