by A. J. Kirby
‘The Graveyards of Newton Mills’ was the first school project that I ever aced. It was the first that I’d ever tried in. I suppose I was morbidly fascinated by them. I put together this lever-arch file full of photographs and maps, pencil rubbings of some of the gravestones. I even tried to draw some conclusions about why there were so many graveyards.
My dad loved that I was getting interested in history, and helped me out at the local library. We dug out loads of old books and newspapers. Gradually, he edged me towards his own conclusion about the graveyards. He suggested that working on the mills was a terrible, life-sucking existence and that most of the folk would die young. But because the farming industry was doing so badly, people kept coming into the town from the surrounding countryside, looking for work. He suggested, in his fiery working class hero way, that the mills were doing more than manufacturing cotton. They were cleansing the local area of the undesirables. They were processing the workers; depositing them straight into the graveyards at the end of the shift.
I stared out over the town and remembered. I remembered my dad and the way that he’d been a little obsessed with the graveyards; after my project, the teacher invited him in to talk to the class about them. Later, my friends gave me no end of crap for having a loony-tune dad. Nobody but nobody ever wanted their parents to come to the school, let alone if they came in and ‘talked to the class.’ That was the lowest of the low. But despite my embarrassment, I had found myself becoming interested in what my dad had to say. He was talking about the amount of different burial sites; there were some for the Protestants, some for the Catholics, some for the rich, and some for the poor. There were some that weren’t affiliated to any church. In fact, he said, only two of the graveyards in the whole town came with your traditional church spire in the scene too. I’ll always remember what he said at the end of that talk. It was like he’d shaped that voice in my head even further. He’d let me see the light.
‘Newton Mills,’ he said, ‘is a town which has always been surrounded by an awareness of death. We’re comfortable with it, even. But we shouldn’t be. We don’t have to allow ourselves to simply sleep our way along the conveyor belt and succumb to our fate.’
Suddenly, I remembered the taxi driver that had dropped me off at the airstrip in the desert in Afghanistan. I remembered what he’d said about the ‘awareness of death.’ I also remembered that I now knew what death and pain really were, in the end. Involuntarily, I shuddered.
Dad wasn’t invited back to the school again after the talk. I think the teacher thought that it wasn’t his place to rant about stuff like that and put ideas like that in children’s heads. The teacher was from out of town though, and probably hadn’t grasped the fact that Newton Mills life was exactly how dad said it was. Most of us were surrounded by an awareness of death. We saw it in the heavy grey stone of the suffering houses. We saw it in the faces of the men and women that had grown up in the town.
As I stared out, I picked out some of the graveyards that I knew. And we did know some of the graveyards fairly well. Unconsciously, all of the lads I grew up with spent times in the graveyards. We were a little scared of them, of course, but what kids don’t like doing things that are a little dangerous; a little close to the bone?
What we really liked were the old abandoned ones, like the one off Dye Lane, which I could pick out as it scarred across the land, running parallel to the river. Back then, we knew that we could play in the graveyards to our hearts’ content and no adults would come asking questions or telling us to shove off. They were kind of like secret gardens or something. I didn’t tell anyone, but I thought of them as magical places, like the plateau in The Lost World. I thought that time stood still in those places and that lurking in the dense bushes would be prehistoric creatures and mythical demons and the like.
As we got older, the yards had begun to mean less to us in terms of fright-value. Instead, they were places where you could go and let loose; rid yourself of the existential teenage angst by pushing over gravestones or writing other kid’s names in the place where an old name had worn away. My friend Lee (Twinnie), the first of us to become sexually active (by a long way), chose the graveyard at the end of Cutter Street as the ideal place to lose his virginity to the local bike, Lisa Fletcher. In the end, she became his missus, and he told us that he loved nothing more than boning his bony missus in the bone-yards. Lee was right about his missus being bony; her face was downright skeletal and sometimes if you looked at her in the right/ wrong light you got to thinking that you could see right through her skin. I couldn’t see the graveyard at the end of Cutter Street now; it had most likely been concreted over to act as a car park in the new industrial estate. But the knowledge that it had been there… well, it was enough.
Most of us had used the graveyards as a better place to go and smoke than up at Grange Heights. My dad used to call cigarettes ‘coffin nails,’ and I kind of liked the way that this image played out there amongst the real coffins and stuff. At fourteen, I was a hardened smoker. I puffed away about as much as the old mills would have done back in the day. Smoking helped me relax a little. I was always a bit nervous around other people and liked to hide away the fact that I was probably a lot more intelligent than the other lads I hung around with. I could hide behind a coffin nail and look as stupid as the rest of them.
We got our cigs from Burt’s shop, which was just over the road-bridge on the river, and closest to the oldest of the graveyards on Dye Lane. At the start of the school day, the lads and I would pool together our pocket money and purchase ten cigs, or if we couldn’t get enough, Burt would sell us individual cigarettes and a book of matches. I always wondered who the single cigarettes were aimed for if not schoolchildren. I mean, what right-minded working man would go and buy a single cig when they could buy the whole packet?
I suppose that was why we liked Burt’s back in the day. It had an air of lawlessness about it which appealed to us. Two mouldy dogs wandered about the shop, in amongst the foodstuffs and the sweets, so if you ever bought a sandwich from there, you always had to check it first for stray black hairs. Towards the back of the shop, I remembered there being two old arcade machines which we could generally rob for a few extra coins if needs be.
Everything was old and decaying in the shop, and that included Burt. He was a big brute of a man, but he wasn’t all there; half of his teeth were missing, the rest were little black gravestones which peeked out of his rotten gums. He spat when he talked and always had all kinds of crap all over his fingers. It was as though he wiped his arse with his hand.
Burt pretended he hated all us lads. He’d shout at us for a while about messing up his shop every time we went in, as though he thought that was what behaviour was demanded of a shopkeeper, but eventually, one of us would always get him onto the subject of his army years, and then he’d drone on at us for hours and hours. The irony of the whole thing was that in a town where everyone died young, the oldest resident was probably the unhealthiest, angriest, and most undesirable of the whole lot. We all thought that Burt would live forever. I wondered if he was still alive now, but concluded that it was impossible.
My dad had once showed me a picture of the exterior of Burt’s shop from a history book. It used to be a butchers shop, and right behind the windows you could see all these carcasses hanging up. The carcasses were the only thing that had changed in the seventy years from when that picture had been taken. It was still a grand old building, but one which looked as though it was halfway through being dismantled by a wrecking ball. It kinda leaned over to one side where the river had eaten away at the banks. Most of the walls were coated in a light covering of moss or mould.
We hadn’t really cared what the place looked like as long as Burt would give us the coffin nails, and fair play to the old chancer, he never questioned our right to decide to die. And in a way, by living in Newton Mills and slipping into the same traps as most of the generations of lads that had come before us, we were kind of deci
ding to die. Or certainly, we were deciding that our hopes would die.
Not one of us even thought about the possibility of leaving the town. I had thought about it in the darkest hours, but I pretty much know for a fact that it simply wasn’t an option for the rest of them.
‘Them’ was generally Paul Morton, Lee Crossett and Richard Featherstone, although none of them were ever referred to by their real names unless by teachers or by (unseen) parents. Paul was called ‘Twinnie’ by basically the whole town on account of the fact that he was born as one half of a set of twins. The fact that his brother Steven died at the age of two didn’t seem to put anyone off calling him that. It was as though once you’d been through the rite of passage of being given a nickname in Newton Mills, nobody or nothing could change that. It was like your destiny.
And nicknames ran across generations too; Lee Crossett was called ‘Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion’ or just ‘Lion’ for short, after some crap 1960s film that nobody of our age had ever heard of, let alone seen. But because his dad had been called ‘Cross-Eyed Lion’ back in the day, it was handed on like a baton which could not be dropped in the sprint relay which was life in the town. Richard Featherstone’s nickname was less interesting; he was simply called Dick, and not in the affectionate Famous Five kind of way, which was numb to the very idea of a dick being a body part.
‘Them’ was the reason that I’d come back to Newton Mills, I supposed. One day we’d all done something that still made my blood run cold. Then we’d started something that was coming back to haunt us now. I suppose, looking out over Newton Mills and all of the old buildings and dilapidated houses and unsafe graveyards, it was an accident waiting to happen to anyone, but the fact that it happened around us four should have been no surprise.
I pulled my fatigue jacket close around my shoulders against the cold. The shivering had started again. I could delay my return no longer. Newton Mills waited.
It wasn’t exactly a hero’s return, my traipsing back into Newton Mills that morning. Once, men returning from war might have expected bunting hanging from the front of the shops on the main street; they might have expected an endless amount of free drinks lined up on the bar of the Royal Oak or the Mason’s Arms. They’d certainly have expected the fluttering eyelashes of the local lovelies. Everyone loved a man in uniform.
Not any longer, it seemed. As I limped down Eaves Knoll Road and out of the thick cover of trees, I saw numerous curtains twitched and a few cars slowed to see if they could ascertain my business. Eaves Knoll Road took me down a steep slope which I found incredibly difficult to creak down, but nobody emerged from their dark houses in order to give the footless man a hand. Newton Mills was a town of hills; the land rises and falls with the old contours as set by the river. It was not ideal terrain for me.
When I finally gained Main Street, I was breathless and windswept and my hair, as I saw in a shop window, was matted against the sides of my head. More people were out on the streets here; old dears going about their daily shop; old men drinking on the promenade; truants drinking their leftovers. Still nobody spoke to me though. I began to feel like an invisible man. Until I saw Dick, that was.
I saw him first. It was unmistakeably him. Although he’d let his hair grow a little longer than he usually had it, I would have still recognised that bullet-head of his anywhere. As I would the leer which was constantly plastered across his mean face and the way that he always slouched when he moved anywhere, even now. He was backing out of the Main Street Caff, trying simultaneously to drag out a purple twin-seater pushchair, swig from a bottle of White Lightning and ward off the attentions of the café owner. The pushchair was too wide for the doorway and kept getting stuck. The owner of the café kept reaching over and trying to make a grab for Dick’s bottle.
‘You can’t be drinking like this around kids,’ he shouted, small-town knowitall that he was.
‘Fuck off,’ blared Dick. He’d never had any volume control, that one.
A crowd had started to develop now. Tutting young mothers and disapproving local businessmen shook their heads and secretly enjoyed the little break from the day to day mundanity of small-town life. I tried to melt into the background a little longer, just so’s I could observe Dick in his natural state and surroundings, but he soon spotted me.
‘What you lookin’ at, soldier boy?’ he roared. And then he tried his death-stare on me. And then, even through his drink-stained eyes, something sparked within him and he knew me.
‘Gaz!’ he shouted. ‘Bully!’
He barged through the crowd, leaving his pushchair blocking the entrance to the shop. He was on me before I knew it; all daft, drunken-man bear-hugs and slaps on the back. As he reached to put his thick arm around me, he sloshed some of his cider onto my uniform.
‘Soz, man,’ he said, trying to wipe it away with the sleeve of his tracksuit top.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘Chill.’
And Dick certainly looked as though he needed to chill. He’d always been an edgy character, but now he seemed as though he was a walking time-bomb. His eyes constantly flickered from side to side. He masticated furiously on a piece of chewing gum; choddy, we used to call it. On close inspection, his face was deathly pale and covered with yellowy-green spots. He looked as though he was on something, and had been for a good while now. And whatever he was on, it was something harder than goddamn White Lightning.
‘Come on. Let’s go ferra pint,’ he continued, mouth going ten to the dozen. He pointed at the Royal Oak, as though I wasn’t aware that you could indeed buy a pint from a pub. ‘There’s something I need to tell you. Something bad…’
I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. In the background I could hear the café owner shouting for us to come and collect the pushchair from out front of his shop. I could hear the Main Street shoppers tutting in unison at Dick’s forgetting his own children. But above all of that, I could hear the sound of little Tommy Peaker’s laughter. It was echoing down to me from the creaking pub-sign for the Royal Oak. It was rustling through the shopping bags and creeping through the bins. It fair thunder-cracked across the Newton Mills promenade.
‘I know what you’re going to tell me,’ I said softly, feeling tears pricking at my eyes. ‘Lion’s dead, isn’t he?’
If it were possible, Dick’s face grew even more pallid. A simple nod told me that I’d followed death halfway across the world and that I was too late.
Chapter Eight
“Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye”
If some smarmy TV executive was looking for a decent location for a pub scene in some 1970s drama, they could have done worse than take a look at the Royal Oak (or the Royal Choke, as most Newton Millsians called it). It was a desperate place. Stuck in a time-warp; a living museum to the time when, most likely, women weren’t even allowed to cross the threshold and men defined themselves as men by spitting into their own pints, as well as those of their friends.
My old grandfather, old drunk that he was, used to tell an amusing tale about the Choke. Apparently, there was this one guy used to go in on his own and prop up the bar all day every day. But he was renowned for being a tight-arse. Wouldn’t stand even his next door neighbour a pint when the poor guy’s wife had topped herself. And I don’t know if the story’s true, and it would be a typically Newton Mills story if it was, but eventually, the old bastard’s tightness started to descend to new levels. Driven mad by the fact that someone might sup his ale when it was unguarded when he went to the toilet, he started to ask the landlord to stick the pint behind the bar, where nobody could get to it. But madness, and years and years of drink eventually made our guy even more paranoid. In the end, he started to suspect that the landlord himself was the one helping himself to the beer.
Eventually, he came up with a fool-proof plan. Or what he thought was a fool-proof plan. He wrote a brief, blunt note on a beer mat, with a pen he stole from the bookies for that very purpose. ‘I have spitted in this drink,�
�� he wrote, in his spidery, drunken hand. Oh the guy must have loved the fact that he could finally luxuriate in having a long horse-like beer-piss in peace, without that doubt constantly nagging at him. He could take the time to wash his hands and even try to use the broken old dryer in the corner.
But what he hadn’t reckoned on was that Newton Mills spirit. The one which said fuck ‘em all. The one which my grandfather and his pals held as their badge of honour. When our now totally-pleased-with-himself guy comes back from the toilet, he saw the beer mat still in place by the side of his pint glass. (And mind it was a pint glass one with no handles; my grandfather always used to add at this point: ‘never trust a man that needs handles on his pint.’) As our guy approached the bar, he saw, with a sinking heart, that his scrawl was not the only writing on the back of the beer mat. Underneath, in the confident block capitals of a younger man was written: ‘SO HAVE I!’
Of course, our guy didn’t know whether to drink or to look for any traces of spittle in the glass, or worse, hand the pint back. And as his internal monologue continued to play out in his head, he must have heard my grandfather and his mates from the toffee works spluttering with laughter; spilling their own pints in the desire to congratulate themselves on their own youthful ingenuity.
The sad conclusion to the story was the fact that the last time I saw my grandfather, it was he that propped up the bar of the Choke on his own. All of his mates were gone; dead, banged up, missing in action. And it was my grandfather that raged against the arrogance of youth, often reaching over to give me a clip round my ear for being too loud before he even realised that it was me he was chastising.
In a way, the Choke was the place that told the story of the misspent hopes and dreams of Newton Mills far more than the town library or the school or the graveyards. From the mottled brass table tops to the plates which were nailed to the walls, only slightly masking the yellowing stains from a hundred years of cigarette smoke; from the plastic carpet protector which surrounded the old bar and stuck to the soles of your shoes if you tried to walk away, to the constantly closed frilly blinds; nothing had changed. Every sad detail of the place seemed engineered to force the regulars to drink more. The place seemed to give off the same sense of hopeless decay as I’d felt clinging to me ever since Tommy’s return.