The ride that had brought him a small fortune, and helped make the Moodys one of the most famous showground families in England, had consumed him.
The funeral drew close to two thousand mourners.
Walt’s eldest son and heir to the family’s fairground empire, the notorious Whitey Moody, delayed the big day until season’s end so that show folk could journey great distances to pay their respects to one of the old-timers. Representatives from all the oldest show folk families were in attendance. From Kent and Cambridgeshire they came. From Derbyshire and Gloucestershire. Some travellers even came over from Ireland.
It was a two-day send-off held right there on the showground, with flowers and foaming kegs of beer, eulogies and shared memories, fist fights and sing-songs, and a roaring bonfire whose smoke dried the damp eyes of many the entire weekend long.
On the night of the second day, deep in the ale and cider, Whitey Moody stood and made a heartfelt declaration to anyone who would listen.
‘I will honour this man,’ he said, pointing to a framed photograph of his father that he held aloft, ‘he that built an empire from nothing; a man who has entertained generations, given pleasure to millions.’
The mourners and drinkers who surrounded the fire quietened down and listened, for when Whitey Moody spoke it was always with a flourish and a flair for drama. His oratory skills were renowned and few ever dared to talk over him.
‘A humble fellow, my father. A small man with a big heart – and a great vision. So I will honour him with something great too. Hear this now: to Walter Moody I will erect a monument.’
His accent was geographically unidentifiable and linguistically nebulous, a hybrid of traveller cant and colloquial argot; that of a man perpetually on the move.
‘I will climb the biggest hill and I will build it with my own hands,’ he said. ‘A stone sculpture to stand for centuries. Yes. A reminder of who this man was and what he represented. And for those of you who don’t know, that was hard work, charity, generosity – and family. Especially family. Walter Moody was a god among men, and like a true god he will be honoured.’
As he talked, the glow from the hissing fire lit Whitey Moody’s features from below. It accentuated the triangular shapes of his cheekbones and pronounced a mouth that appeared overcrowded by his strong equine teeth. It drew shadows down amongst his weathered creases and around the sunken pits of his wide eyes. Eyes that could reduce a man.
Most of all, the flickering orange light turned the brilliant blonde strands of his hair, now pulled back and thinning across his pate into a trademark ponytail – and for which he had earned a nickname so longstanding that few knew his birth name – magnesium in colour.
In the fire’s glare every muscle of his short, taut body, every cord, seemed coiled in readiness for the task ahead.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘who’s with me?’
The wooded slopes stretched the length of the remote valley, up to a crest where the jagged treeline scratched at the turbid sky.
A motorcade of vehicles moved along the rutted track in a slow procession, tilting through potholes and edging over discarded, rotting lumber or tangled sprigs of fallen branches.
Leading from the front in a flatbed truck loaded with tools, tents and provisions was Whitey Moody. Behind him followed his younger brother, Joss Moody, who steered a battered old Land Rover with a large horsebox in tow. At the rear of the procession was a Transit driven by a showground hand known only as The Pole, an Eastern European war veteran hired three summers earlier and kept on by the Moodys for his strength, loyalty and mute menace. His cargo was human: a motley menagerie of men in various states of drunkenness and disrepair, collectively press-ganged, coerced, intimidated or snatched from smoky back rooms, parole-board halfway houses, gambling dens and the comfort of their beds across the north of England in the dead of night.
There were ten in all, and each indebted to the Moody family one way or another, for their business enterprises stretched beyond fairgrounds and into arcades, cafes, seaside promenade palm-reading booths, betting shops, card games, cattle trading, terrier breeding, dog tracks and an under-the-radar loan business. Those who had failed to repay their longstanding debts or had inadvertently crossed the Moodys – smashing a fruit machine in a fit of anger, perhaps, or attempting to rig a poker game – now found themselves having to compensate in a most unexpected way.
The track petered out into a clearing where the remnants of a logging operation were still visible: ragged stumps, a blackened fire circle, crushed beer cans.
The dense woodlands spread in all directions, the timber trunks and latticework of bare branches cutting light to a minimum.
Whitey Moody climbed down from his truck and stared deep into the trees, and for a moment the wood was as still and hallowed a space as a church. A rug of needles lay underfoot, their tips the colour of rust. Somewhere in the distance a well-fed pheasant clumsily took flight from the undergrowth, clattering through the corridor of spindly columns and rising up into the air with neither style nor grace.
He turned back to the men as they unfolded themselves from the vehicles, and spoke.
‘You might as well get yourselves comfortable, lads. No one leaves until the job gets done.’
‘What job?’ said one of the men.
Whitey Moody turned back to the trees again, squinting up the steep slopes to the crest of the vale. Here he saw landslides of shale and stone. He saw undulations and craggy protrusions; knuckles of rock the size of small buildings.
He said nothing.
The horsebox had been fitted with bunks to sleep on, and two large circular canvas military tents were erected either side of it. A bleating lamb was tethered to the tow bar of the flatbed truck, on which there was also a cage of chickens. A large bonfire was built and lit.
The men stood around it, absorbing the heat, sullen and uncertain. Fearful. The soft wet loam beneath their feet felt unusual and the strange full-throated croak of a pair of nesting ravens nearby was like no sound they had heard before.
Joss Moody circled the fire and handed each man a boiler suit and a woollen hat. The Pole followed, passing each man two raw sausages, a bread roll and a can of beer. Some of them tentatively scouted for sticks on which to roast their dinner. Unsure, others loitered. One or two of the more hardened drinkers swapped their sausages for an extra can.
Soon there was the sound of pork fat hissing on glowing coals and the murmurs of men crouched low on their haunches as the sun began to sink below the treeline.
Wearing only a vest, Whitey Moody emerged from the horsebox. He held a number of pairs of handcuffs and folded over one arm was a length of chain.
‘See these?’ he said, rattling the cuffs. ‘These are for those that reckon on leaving. So pipe up now if you’re planning on that.’
No man spoke.
‘And don’t be thinking of taking off in the night either,’ he added. ‘It’s a good ten-mile clip to the nearest town. Thirty to the nearest train station. We’ll be after you with dogs before you’ve cleared a woodland mile.’
He let the threat settle.
‘Good, then,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
He took an overgrown trail thick with brambles where the only footprints were the two-toed markings of deer hooves. They arrived at a smaller clearing. In the centre were three large blocks of rough-cut granite, each about a metre across.
‘Right,’ said Whitey Moody. ‘This is what’s happening. You lot are going to take these and shift them up there.’
Here he pointed up through the woods to the top of the hill, a hundred metres or more away.
‘You’ll stack them and when that’s done I’ll get the whole lot engraved in remembrance of my father, Walter Moody. Until that time, you’re mine.’
‘Those blocks must weigh a tonne,’ said one of the men.
‘Nearly three, as it happens,’ said Joss Moody. ‘Each.’
‘We’ll never be able to move them.’
Whitey strode over to the man who had spoken, a young sneak thief from Glasgow, and grabbed him by the front of his boiler suit. He slapped him once, hard. The sound of open palm on the young man’s cheek echoed through the still wood.
‘You can and you will,’ he said. ‘If the Egyptians could build the pyramids, Whitey Moody can get three bloody blocks up a hill in England.’
One of the other men cleared his throat and then tentatively spoke.
‘Mr Moody, sir.’
Whitey turned to him. ‘What?’
‘I just wondered, how do you propose we do it?’
‘With muscle and might,’ he said. ‘With brains and brawn, lad. With ropes and pulleys and rollers. With generators and chains. With whatever it takes to get the job done. There’s food and shelter and more ale than any of you could hope to ever drink for those that prove themselves. Our Joss has done a fresh batch. Isn’t that right, brother?’
Beside him Joss nodded.
‘A right good sup,’ he said. ‘It’ll make you see God and want to kiss his feet. It’ll blow your head-handles clean off.’
‘And what about those that don’t want to work?’ said the young Glaswegian, a man barely out of his teens.
Whitey turned to him again.
‘You’re testing my patience, son.’
‘And he’s not a patient man,’ said Joss.
‘I just wondered, though,’ said the Scotsman.
‘It’s simple,’ said Whitey. ‘There’s a spade and plenty of soil for you to dig it with. You want to make sure the hole is deep, though, so the foxes don’t get at you when The Pole here puts you under. They say it’s worse than drowning, being buried alive. The dirt gets everywhere. Fills every hole. The worms and insects too. Oh, and the maggots. They get in there and start eating at you from the inside.’
Whitey Moody looked at the rest of the men. He saw the fear on their faces and he was pleased. Fear was what would fuel them onwards.
He sniffed.
‘You best get started, then.’
The next day was spent hefting granite and slipping in unforgiving sod.
Hands became first blistered and then callused. The men argued amongst themselves and nearly came to blows several times, only to be separated by The Pole, who did not utter a single word.
As they worked, Whitey went off to check the snares he had set the night before. He returned an hour later with a half-dozen rabbits, strung through the heel on a line, and already becoming stiff with rigor mortis.
He sat on an alder stump and set about gutting the animals, their entrails thrown sizzling on to the fire. With a series of incisions and two large jerks he turned each of their pelts inside out and then hung them from branches. On a block of wood he butchered the rabbits and then dropped their parts into a large stew pot. Thigh, leg, torso. Haunch. He added potatoes, carrots, cabbage. Salt.
By the sun’s setting the men had moved one block of granite twenty feet across the soil under the watchful eye of Joss Moody.
They ate well that night, then retired to their tents and horsebox. In the darkness they whispered about the possibility of escaping to their wives and girlfriends and children. They talked about overpowering their captors and taking flight, and letting the moonlight guide the way.
In the morning a skein of frost had tightened across the soft soil and made furrows of their footprints and the track marks left by the dragged block. They were awoken early, given tea and a tin of fruit each, and then sent to work on the slopes all day. Lunch was leftover rabbit stew. Tea was boiled eggs, bread and beer.
The granite block was dragged up the slopes first with ropes and felled trunks acting as rollers, and then, where the slope steepened up towards a sky that was now streaked with the first incoming frosted fingers of winter, via a series of steps dug into the earth.
The men worked this way for two weeks. They slept and ate. They defecated into a pit and they washed themselves in a flooded ditch deep with copper-coloured bog water. They still talked about escaping back to their homes and hovels but it had become an abstract idea, as they now believed Whitey Moody to be a man of his word. They understood that Whitey Moody had the whip hand.
Snow fell on the day that they heaved the first block of granite up to the lip of the valley and out on to the peak of the hill. Here the men slumped to the ground, their muscles aching in sweat-soaked boiler suits now stale and pungent.
The peak was a small area of scrub thick with brambles, through which a small patch had been cleared to make way for the monument.
Only when they stood and stretched did the men see the view.
The countryside ran in all directions, a series of layers and levels, the land a laminated space of dales and delphs, vales and valleys, their uppermost edges dusted in the first tentative snowfall. It was like a dream. They became silent, their chests rising and falling as they gulped in the cold metallic air of an English winter.
‘Not there,’ said Whitey. He pointed to a patch six feet further along. ‘There.’
The men groaned.
‘Can’t we take a minute for a gasper, Mr Moody?’
This was said by a stout ex-boxer from Norfolk who now made a living taking on all-comers in a tent on the Moody funfair. His crime had been to fight in a showcase bout at McGintey’s Pleasure Palace in Blackpool during the off-season. His work for a rival family had cost him several weeks of his life – and two crushed fingers.
‘Aye, I expect you can,’ said Whitey Moody. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Pass them round,’ he said. ‘Go on: smoke yourselves silly.’
The men lit up and stood inhaling and exhaling in silence, the canopy of trees below them dotted with the bladed crowns of crow’s nests swaying in the scaffold of the thinnest branches and the slopes rolling downwards to where a twist of grey smoke spiralled upwards from their camp.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said a voice. It could have been any one of the men speaking, for they were all sharing this same thought. ‘Bloody beautiful.’
The second stone took ten days to heave up the hill.
Across the woods the snow lay thick on the ground now. It changed the shape of the landscape. Levelled it in places. It shortened contours and erased hollows. Muted the woodland noises.
The dirty circle of the camp was still visible from up on the crest of the valley, a trampled target of tiny footprints with the firepit its bullseye. Then, leading from it, a narrow dark streak of mud running up the hill like a road to the sky.
Whitey joined the men putting his shoulder to the stone. Joss too.
They were all gaining strength now. The men’s bodies were changing. Tightening. The clean air, exercise and fresh meat and vegetables that Whitey brought them meant many were experiencing the first balanced diets of their lives. Save for beer and cigarettes, their other vices had been forcefully curtailed.
Naturally there were arguments and several fist fights, one of them organised as evening entertainment for which the contenders received a cash payment from Whitey, and during which a nose was broken and several knuckles left crooked, but the combatants shook hands at the end.
One evening, after the stone had been dug into the earth and held fast with driven stakes and chains lagged to nearby trees, Whitey Moody left the camp with a pair of bolt cutters. He was gone all night and returned at first light with a gash on his forehead, a generator, two drums of diesel and his young nephew, Frankie Moody.
The firstborn of Whitey’s second sister, Francine, Frankie Moody had the same blonde hair as his uncle, near-albino in colour, and he too worked the fairgrounds as a humper and handyman. At sixteen he already had the physique of an older man, and a scowl that suggested he feared no one, not least a rag-tag press gang of men.
Frankie took to tinkering with the generator. On the second day he stepped back, put his toolbox to one side and started it up. It coughed three times like an emphysemic old man lighting up his first phlegm-cutter of the day and th
en sputtered into action, the mechanical put-put sound of it echoing up through the woods. There was a small cheer from those watching men who knew that their workload was now halved.
The generator was soon set up to turn a cable wheel to hoist the stone up the final few metres of the bank.
That night Whitey let the men finish early.
‘Get yourself scrubbed up,’ he said. ‘We’re going out.’
The men looked at each other.
‘But we are out?’ said one.
‘We’re going out out,’ he replied. ‘Out of these bloody woods.’
‘You mean we’re going home?’
‘I already told you: you go home when the job gets done. I’m taking you out on the town.’
At this, the men were unsure how to react.
‘You’re allowed to crack a bloody smile, you know,’ said Whitey. ‘Me, I’m off for a feed and a right big drink.’
‘Really, Mr Moody?’
‘Look lively. We leave in ten minutes.’
The men climbed into the Transit and on to the back of the flatbed and left. Only The Pole stayed behind to watch over the camp.
They ploughed through the woods as the trees on either side hung heavy with thick pillows of snow. The night was still and clear as their vehicles rolled and stalled and the men shivered.
After a time they turned into an old cart track and then that widened into a logging road and then soon the logging road plunged them towards civilisation. They drove on, passing farmsteads, hamlets and villages, and then they were at the edge of a town.
The men marvelled at the neon lights, the traffic and the sharp angles of the buildings that grew tall around them. They saw lamp posts and over-lit offices. Garage forecourts and flyovers. Multi-storey car parks and dark underpasses. It all seemed such a contrast to the trees and mud and snow of the past few weeks.
Male Tears Page 8