by Alan Moore
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.