Rule of Night
Page 20
They were starting to be a nuisance at football matches, even at Rochdale with crowds of less than 2,000. Now and then you’d see a flurry of activity on the terraces, some pushing and shoving, and a fight would break out. (I’m almost certain this was before the fans were segregated but wouldn’t swear to it.) Anyway, on this particular afternoon the police waded in behind the goals, grabbed this Dale yobbo and frog-marched him past the Main Stand and up the players’ tunnel to the jeers, obscene catcalls and flying spittle of the home fans. I can see the lad now, arm locked up his back, bent over nearly double by the copper, glaring at the crowd with a kind of sullen bravado. Not a pretty sight. And the thought went through my mind: the crowd have worked themselves up into such a blind fury that they don’t see a human being any more; what they see is an animal, one that deserves all it gets; yet this lad has a mum and dad, and mates, maybe a job, possibly a girlfriend – in other words he was no different in all essentials from the folk jeering and spitting at him.
To be honest I didn’t feel much sympathy for him personally, and I had little doubt he was a nasty piece of work. But still I was curious. Mainly because I hadn’t a clue what went on inside that shaven skull, what he thought about, how he saw the world. In other words, what made him tick. So the desire to find the answers (or some answers at least) to these questions fired my imagination – and being a writer of fiction and not a journalist, I decided to tackle the subject by dreaming up a story and creating characters based on people I talked to and the experiences they told me about. Maybe that way I would gain some understanding of the (to me) biggest mystery of all: their taste for and attraction to violence, which was something I couldn’t comprehend at all.
A big help in getting to know groups of teenage lads and their girlfriends was plainly the fact that I was working for Granada TV in Manchester at the time. The lads got some kind of buzz, I suppose, from going to the pub with a bloke they’d seen on television presenting a weekly arts and entertainments programme called What’s On.
From the start I was completely open and honest with them: I told them I was gathering material for a book, a work of fiction. Anything they revealed to me was in strict confidence. None of them would be identified, either by name or description. They didn’t object, in fact quite the reverse. I think they felt flattered that someone was prepared to take an interest, to ask their opinions and listen to their views on the world. I made one early mistake though. I took along a pocket tape-recorder to the pub, and we all know what happens to even garrulous people when they see they’re being recorded: they either clam up or they become wooden and self-conscious. From then on I left the tape-recorder behind, which meant I had to wait several hours until I got home – often after midnight, with three or four pints of John Willie Lees sloshing inside me – to scribble down everything I could remember of the evening’s conversation. I did this with different groups over a period of months, drinking in pubs and clubs. From this material I started making notes, trying to work out a structure or a shape for the book. I had a bunch of characters in mind but only a vague notion of what might happen to them, or even to the leading character, Kenny Seddon. This was intentional. The kind of novel I had in mind wouldn’t work if it was too tightly structured, following too rigid a plot-line. It needed room to breathe: a freedom and a flexibility to go wherever the people in the story seemed to be heading, rather than making them jump through so many dramatic hoops. (In present-day publishing editor’s jargon, ‘character-led’ rather than ‘plot-driven’.)
From the moment I sat down to write it, I felt I’d caught the right tone for the book. This is very much a hit-or-miss matter; you need good luck as much as good judgement. I believe a writer should trust his gut instinct and not get too intellectually hung up about the process of creation – in my case for fear that it will place the dead hand of some kind of orthodox or politically correct viewpoint over the whole enterprise. (Of course the term ‘politically correct’ was unknown in 1975, but even then there were ‘acceptable’ and ‘correct’ moral attitudes, particularly as regards young people, it was worth ignoring and defying for the hell of it.) Also, I must have sensed that with subject matter this controversial and inflammatory – the cult of the skinhead, football hooliganism, racism, mindless Clockwork Orange-style violence, working-class life at the bottom of the barrel, the crude language of the streets – that to offset and downplay all of this, the writing had to be restrained, the style calm and matter-of-fact, almost documentary in approach.
Some time later I came across a remark of Evelyn Waugh’s (a writer I very much admire), who in discussing fiction technique said something along the lines of: ‘The hotter the emotion, the cooler the prose,’ which summed up perfectly what I had been aiming for in this novel.
• • •
When the book came out, Ed Teague, a friend of mine, held a small launch party at his bookshop on Yorkshire Street in Rochdale. Because of the book’s subject matter, and the fact that Kenny Seddon ends up in Buckley Hall, the local youth detention centre (now a women’s prison), Ed invited along members of the probation service. During the course of the evening, as we sipped wine and nibbled cheese, two, or it might have been three, probation officers sidled up and murmured in my ear that they could identify, without a shadow of doubt, the actual person that Kenny was based on. Each gave me the lad’s name they were confident was the real Kenny – and each one was different. This demonstrated, I like to think, that the fictional character had sufficient depth and authenticity to convince them that they had encountered and had to deal with Kenny’s real-life counterpart. They couldn’t have done anyway. Kenny Seddon wasn’t any particular person, he was a pick ‘n’ mix of several individuals. And the final character on the page was as much a product of the imagination as a portrait of anyone I met during my nights in the pub. I was a writer, not a journalist, and that’s what writers are supposed to do.
The Ashfield Valley estate, a very unlovely group of buildings as you’ll have gathered, was flattened in the late Eighties, though it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the council is still paying back the loan that built the ‘San Quentin of the North’, plus whacking great interest charges to boot. Even when relatively new, at the time Kenny Seddon’s family lived there, they struck a chill to the heart. The piece of graffito I opened the book with – ‘If you get caught in here God help you lousy scum’ – wasn’t my invention, it was scrawled on a wall at the bottom of a concrete stairwell.
A year or so after the book came out there was interest from a television company in making a film of it. I remember taking the producer and director on a tour of the actual locations: Ashfield Valley, tow centre pubs, Tweedale Street (where the mugging of the Pakistani happens in the book). They seemed genuinely enthusiastic, and for a few months it looked as if we were going ahead, but as is the way with the majority of such projects, talk is cheap and in the end nothing came of it. I’m pleased that the book is being reissued after this length of time – it’s one I’m still rather proud of – to what is literally a new generation of readers. Strange to consider that Kenny and his mates will be in their mid-forties now, with teenage kids of their own…
For those too young to remember, in the Seventies you’d see slogans sprayed all over the place with the word ‘Rule’ in them, as in ‘Ashfield Skins Rule OK’. Hence the title, which I think fits the book well.
As for Buckley Hall, which I was given a tour of (courtesy of the Home Office), I was told years later by somebody who’d taught there that they had half-a-dozen copies of Rule of Night in the library. The book was a big favourite, apparently, much in demand by the teenage inmates, most of whom never read anything except The Sun and maybe the racing results; very popular until all the copies got nicked. What I like to think of as literary criticism in action, and possibly the most flattering response I’ve had yet to any of my books.
Trevor Hoyle
Spring, 2003
/> Trevor Hoyle, Rule of Night