A Search for Donald Cottee

by Philip Spires

  Eleven

  I am sure you have already guessed... - Don recalls poor little Johnny Green and reignites forgotten suspicions.

  I am sure you have already guessed that Kiddington was the kind of village where no-one had secrets, but one where also everyone tried to keep them. What each household served for breakfast was generally assumed, not even reportable, let alone remarkable. There were a few good ‘uns, and a few bad ‘uns, and in between there were folk, ordinary folk like you and me. Ordinary folk did as ordinary folk did, got on with life, played at its periphery, coupled at its core. Village life pretended to a boast of permanence, a deliberate, perchance predictable repetition of the perhaps inevitable, a birth, a Maypole dance for juvenile spring, a marriage, a birth, a Maypole dance for new life, a marriage, a birth, a death, and another, and again, almost all celebrated in proud public view in the same church hall. For most of us, it was the only covered space we could commandeer for our public display of joy, grief, respect, duty or silent derision. Unless, of course, you were chapel, in which case there was the red brick Methodist structure of ideologically generalised purpose that sat almost opposite the Working Men’s Club. If you were moneyed from the top of West Lane or the owner of a farmer’s estate, then there was always the stone-built pub on The Green for selective, secular hire.

  Thus, by religious affiliation or looser bondage, coupled with desire for social separation, elements of Kiddington’s community hosted the sub-sets of their aspirations and responsibilities when events demanded. I was there when Bella and Jack were married. It was a wonderful do in the church hall, with at least a hundred people invited to jam tarts, sponge cake, trifle and the inevitable potted meat sandwiches, perhaps the same ones that had been left over from the hall’s last do, and anyway they really were only half sandwiches because they were open to the air, their filling left on the outside. They called it a reception. I didn’t go to the church to see them married, because we weren’t really a church family. My mother went, of course, proudly showing the thick green felt hat she had bought specially for the occasion, a cowl-like cowrie shell that had to be skewered to her hair with a pin the length of a knitting needle. She had made a special trip to Mullins The Milliners in Bromaton a good month before the event and had still taken it out of its box every day to try it on and mull over her image in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door to deliberate her decision. On the day, one by one her friends dutifully and respectfully smiled at her and commented on the style of her new hat before, of course, turning aside to mutter under their breath, “No taste at all... common as muck.”

  So, while my mum went to church to watch the ceremony, my dad and I, along with most of the other males, hung around outside the entrance to the church hall. It was the arrival of the wedding party at the termination of its hundred yard trek along the lane from the altar that we were waiting for. You would have thought that Bella and Jack were local celebrities of sorts, because the whole village seemed to have turned out to see them wed. But the real reason was because Bella was the local belle, the voluptuous beauty from Pit Lane. The village men, young and old, fancied and even quietly lusted after her. The women, without one ever admitting it, both identified with her and despised her. They all wanted to be her, but silently wished for some comeuppance to compensate for the obvious privilege of her birthright.

  “It’ll be the furthest she’ll ever walk from now on,” said Charlie Taylor, a tall, cheek-hollowed miner with the stoop of a wilted peony. “He’s got himself a combination.”

  Now this strange term did not signify an undergarment, or indeed a safe to store expected riches. What it identified was a motorcycle and sidecar, a three-wheeled combination of cutting edge transport, whose two elements inclined slightly towards a central vertical, like a courting couple publicly arm-in-arm. “She won’t even have to worry about her hairdo inside that thing,” pontificated Charlie, the belly laugh that concluded dissolving into a coal-dust-laden gravel of the chest.

  “But they’re a lovely couple, Charlie,” said my dad, prolix for once.

  “Aye,” Charlie confirmed, the sound surfing the crest of the first breaking breath he managed to catch.

  I was of an age when I thought I was the only human being with feelings in the universe, maybe six, maybe seven, I can’t remember. What I do recall, vividly, was that alongside my necessary and learned Kiddington male public revulsion of everything remotely female, I had a desperate crush on Bella Trimble. In hindsight, I was probably just another of the tribe that day and, along with every expectant male at the door of the church hall, I queued as informally as obligatory respect allowed for even a hint of a peek of the beautiful bride.

  It was an era of change, an era when my dad’s job was reclassified, thus rendering him something less pigmented than blue around the collar. It meant that he got a car to boot, because his work now demanded it. He had to travel around local branch offices, some of them more than ten miles away, so the car was essential. But unlike the cars of the drivers or deliverers, my dad’s stayed at home at weekends, or didn’t, as the case may be, when we drove to the coast or the fifty miles to Jest to see my cousins. This metal box on wheels thus endowed us Cottees with a new status in the village, a leg up the social ladder to a position we would have to live up to in future. No longer could we do merely as anyone else might, hence my mother’s trip to Mullins The Milliners for something special, rather than finding a ready-made from BHS.

  But the new status also demanded regular evening attendance at the work’s social club, as much to show a face as to seek enjoyment. Being both literate and numerate, he soon found himself elected an officer by its members. Well, after all, he had got the job. He might as well earn his keep. A young Donald at home thus required a baby sitter or two, and Bella and Jack were known, trusted, dependable and steady, both personally and together. In the two years that they looked after me an evening each week, I doubt I went a waking ten minutes during their attendance without a welcoming hug from Bella. She was probably only around eighteen at the start of the association, but I now realise that even then the one thing she wanted above everything else, including a husband, was a child. She was an impatient mother to be, Jack her passport to her promised land. Because she made a fuss of me, I always looked forward to her and Jack’s arrival on Tuesday evenings, not least also because their dependability infused a tranquillity into the arrangement that rendered it enjoyable and reassuring for all concerned.

  I know now, of course, that Bella and Jack were baby-sitting me because they were putting together a bottom drawer, saving to get married, already engaged, proto-pillars of stability, their meld already community-sanctioned. The engagement ring meant that no-one tut-tutted about their being in our house alone together, alone, that is, except for me. But I was in bed. They, no doubt, were on the sofa. And so they could earn a few extra bob looking after me of a Tuesday and could also, by virtue of that pay-packet-busting sparkler on Bella’s finger, incur neither the wrath nor gossip of the judgmentally inventive populace of Kiddington. And, also in hindsight, I can now interpret Bella’s deliciously close embraces of young Donald as eagerness to protect her assumed and soon-to-be expected brood.

  Jack was just as keen, in his own way. He used to read to me, play Ludo, tiddlywinks on the carpet - there was just about room enough for two to lie down on it, but he, being much taller than me, had to drape his lower legs across the concrete apron that surrounded it. Occasionally he helped me with my colouring books, his mature hand, unlike my own unguided mitt, always able to stay within the lines. So, all those years later, when I unearthed some of my infantile offerings from the loft as we cleared out before we left, you could identify clearly the pages where Jack had helped, and even sections of a simple drawing where my hand had been guided. Like all of us working-class men, he both revelled and rejoiced in the predictability of his conformity, for without that he could not retain the respect of his co
mmunity and, denied that, he knew he was nothing.

  So that day, that sunny, warm, summer wedding day, a young man and woman now sharing the same surname walked along the main road from the church gate the few strides to the village hall, while the newly and resplendently-clad women of Kiddington scattered rice and luridly coloured confetti into the air. I, along with the other males, waited at the door of the church hall, knowing that Jack, and especially Bella, would greet us, one by one, and, from Bella there would be a kiss. Thus we queued, happily and in anticipation.

  And yes, she did feel different, altogether transformed by the new completeness of her now confirmed adulthood, her new respectability, her now assumed equality of status and entitlement. It had been some weeks since Bella and Jack had ceased their regular visits to our house. My mother said it was because they had decided to get married and that they needed all their time to get ready for the ceremony, to plan their future, to choose the lampshades and a colour scheme for their house. As a six-year-old lad, of course, I never equated the greater fullness of Bella’s recent embrace with anything other than extra fish and chips and, at that age, I would not even have linked the eventual birth, both premature and laboured, with my changed perception those months earlier.

  But Johnny Green was born and Bella had her boy, a lad she hugged and squeezed as much as she used to hug and squeeze me. Jackie, however, would never touch him. He was a different child, as my mother described him, different both in his slightly swelled, apparently over-inflated appearance and his open-mouthed, late-developed slobbering of words, which few in the village could understand, and whose utterance fewer still were willing to experience, most opting to cross the road rather than pass close by him.

  It was a source of sadness for me to realise, so young, that an association whose strength and permanence I had come to regard as unquestionable could be so abruptly, so completely and so devastatingly severed. It was only a year after Johnny’s birth that I realised I was no longer welcome at the Green’s new home. It was a house I assumed was as open as my own, a place I could call in after school for a glass of milk and a slice of bread and jam. And then, without warning, its door closed against me.

  I took it personally, but I was not alone. My mother tried to explain what had happened, saying that Bella and Jack had things to think about and because of that they had less time to talk to other people. She described how sometimes things don’t turn out how we expect or even how we want. She said that sometimes we have to accept what God sends us because we have been chosen for his purpose. She told me that sometimes, when that happens, other people are afraid and want to keep their distance. I was seven years old, for God’s sake!

  As months passed into years, however, Kiddington grew to know and accept Johnny Green, the slow-witted mongol of what the village majority assumed might have been a too early consummated engagement. Judgment, oh yes, judgment, no less, was what many assumed had been meted out. Everyone’s former friend, everyone’s former model became, on the suggestion of alienating, misunderstood imperfection, an object infected by the wrath of a God few still believed in, but who only rarely would be denied.

  Now, along with most of Kiddington, I hardly knew little Johnny. After all, he eventually went to a special school, taken there on a special bus of a special colour that picked him up from home. But I had had those two years of Bella’s weekly embrace and Jackie’s interest. I loved them and, though they could not begin to express or even acknowledge it, they still loved me. Now I realise that I formed the model of what they had wanted, a mild-mannered, mild-tempered, softly-spoken little boy, a model they had striven to create, perhaps on the settee in our living room while I slept upstairs, only to be devastated and alienated by the product of their union, a deformed child they came reluctantly to interpret as a judgment of their provenance of sin. But this ability to interpret comes to life later, when we arrogate the right to divine motive.

  I was seven, then before I knew it ten, and then twelve. I had gone through the Blackpool Hills era, graduated from the dens on the common to smutty nattering with mates as we picked our way through the August brambles in search of raw material for our tea-time jam sandwiches. But one day, as a fourteen-year-old, when Johnny Green was six, I was party to something I would live to regret, perhaps live to avenge, one day.

  Kiddington Common had a lower part. We called it the Low Common, otherwise known as the bluebell wood. There were no woods, as such, just clumps of gorse on flat land between the sewage farm and the railway line. The bluebell part was accurate, however, because each year’s late spring laid a veritable carpet of blue over the tussocky grass.

  But there was also a stream across there. We called it the Red Beck, one of many by that name in the area. It ran across the Low Common and through a tunnel beneath a two-lane, recently widened road that in those days was a busy artery of commerce. Coal lorries trundled along it, high-sided non-articulated Albions, Leylands, Seddons, ERFs, Fodens, Atkinsons and AECs, all black, bearing homely names such as Hargreaves. They were laden and slow one way, empty, rushing and rattling the other. They would bounce over the ramp that marked the bridge over the Low Common’s Red Beck as they logistically connected pit output with the all-consuming power stations that fired our new electrical consumerism.

  As a younger lad, I called it the stickleback stream, and regularly visited it with bright red or sometimes green fibre-mesh sacks that brought onions or potatoes to the local shops. Whenever I was lucky enough to get one, since the shopkeeper distributed them according to what now seems like a system of patronage based on how much a family put on tick into his monthly account book, I would roll them up in my pocket and head down to the brook. There, I would unravel it with care and then poke it through with a skewering stick that would hold its mouth open against the flow of the stream. I would drive the protruding end of the same stick into the bed of the beck and then sit back to eat the condensed milk sandwiches I had made before leaving home. As time passed, I would watch the coal lorries rattle on their way, crashing their gears along the main road.

  My return visit into the beck an hour or so later might find a cod-end of sack with a three-spined stickleback or two, a water beetle or even an eel or a newt. Whatever I caught went into a jam jar of beck water to be carried home, a collection of trophies that for several days I would unsuccessfully attempt to feed.

  But one of the great dares of a Kiddington childhood was a Wellington-booted stumble along the beck, through the tunnel, under the road. It was never more than a foot deep, even after the frequent rain that would water-log the peaty, reeded common before swelling the beck. But, for a child it was a challenging heaven, the flow would always swamp your wellies, always push a foot into soft mud that would cling to, suck in and detach the boot on attempted extraction, ensuring that socks would be wet, legs would be muddy and that homecoming would be squelchy. It was, in other words, exciting.

  But also, it was a Romantic achievement to walk through the tunnel under the road. For a Kiddington lad of limited, exaggerated experience, it was a challenge that matched an Eiger, an Everest, a South Pole. It was an experience of dark, noise, wet, threat and self, all in one. The lorries thundered overhead, their coal-emptied backs bumping harder against the ramp of the bridge, harder than their laden counterparts passing the other way that could only muster a quarter of their speed.

  So even in my early teens I still went there to poke a nose into that challenging darkness, to hear the brook trickle in the silence between the convoys of trucks passing along the busy, but still often quiet road. And I went there on the day the entire village panicked at an alarm that proclaimed Johnny Green missing. Bella, my Bella, was in tears in the street, scantily clad in her nightie, dressing gown and mules, saying that he hadn’t been home all night, that she had gone to bed early knowing that Jack would be looking after young Johnny when he came home from work. Jack, however, had not come home after
his shift at nine. For some unforeseen reason, he had not appeared until six o’clock the next morning and Johnny’s bed was still as Bella had made it the day before, undisturbed, unruffled. He must have let himself out of the house during the evening. There was a special, disturbed hopelessness in her screams.

  I don’t know why I assumed I would find Johnny on the Low Common, but I was there before nine having, like the rest of Kiddington’s youth, taken the day off school in view of these pressing reasons of local significance.

  It had been dry and the beck was low, exposing numerous prams, push chair skeletons, bike frames and bedsteads along its now low-level course. As I let myself down in my best, biggest wellies, into the flow, I stumbled a little on the now exposed, but still weed-draped stones at the mouth of the tunnel under the road. It took a moment or two for my eyes to get used to the dark, and a few more to get used to the stoop. A few years earlier, I could almost stand upright under that arch but now, as a fourteen-year-old, I could hardly fit in when bent double and found my back scraping along the knobbly roof, a rough brick-arched tube I had always previously seen as smooth. There was also more road traffic those years later, enough to maintain a constant booming that drowned other sound.

  And then I began to make progress towards the bright semi-circle of light at the other end. When I was a small boy, many years before, it seemed to take an age to walk from one side of the road to the other. For a fourteen-year-old, it was barely a few strides. There was still, of course, the regular if intermittent rumble of the power station coal lorries along the road, but now the gaps were filled with the steady, rhythmic rattle of private cars filing their way from Ribthwaite to Bromaton and back. There was now only an occasional silence. But, when their heavy rumble briefly stilled, I could detect a lonely moan in echo, a call that sounded defeated by time and weakened at its edges. While everyone else searched the common, the dam, the fields, the railway, the muck stacks and slag heaps, the pit ponds, the derelict houses and back streets, I went to the Low Common and the Red Beck tunnel and I, alone, I found Johnny Green, a six-year-old mongol tied to an old pram, wedged firmly between rock and wall, exactly half way through the tunnel, his wailing screams unheard in the place when no-one passed and inaudible above the traffic noise when someone did.