The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  ‘Diwen cry, lover,’ Mighty was telling a tiny, bird-like Chinese woman. ‘They’re bastards. That’s all they are, bloody bastards. Young’ins. If they were mine aa naa what aa’d do. Tan their arses till they were red raw. There yar, chicken,’ she said, taking the small gill bottle of brandy that had been offered by a man Ray knew was called Stanley (never Stan) and tipping it into the hot drink that the woman was clutching on her knee. ‘Steady the norves, hinny,’ Stanley said as Mighty handed him the bottle back.

  The woman was dressed all in black with inch-wide margins of grey either side of the parting in her otherwise raven hair. Somebody had brought one of the big puffed-out jackets and put it around her shoulders, but she was still shivering convulsively from the shock. There was a red weal around her neck where her necklace had cut her flesh before it snapped. Ray knew this without even having to ask. He quickly learned that a mobile phone had also been taken from the woman.

  ‘Arreet, John.’

  ‘Canny.’

  ‘All right, John.’

  ‘Canna grumble.’

  Ray brought his drink from the Formica counter and found a place to sit. Only men who had known each other back to their schooldays – fifty and sixty years in some cases – called each other by their given names. Everybody else, to everybody else, was ‘John’.

  Ray hadn’t lost the habit, instilled in him after years of dodging the attention of autograph-seekers and, in recent years, of the didn’t-you-used-to-be-ers, of sitting where he was able to see without being seen. (Unless being seen was the point of being somewhere – a charity event, a restaurant – which was different.) He chose a table where he was shielded from the road and looked around on the ground for the wadded Marlboro packet that he knew was usually jammed under one of the legs of the chair he was sitting on to stop it rocking.

  Mighty was down on her knees, dabbing at the Chinese woman’s leg now with a paper napkin and Ray noticed that passengers on some of the buses, usually away with their own thoughts and oblivious to their existence, were craning their necks to see what was going on. He could see the woman had a bad gash on her right knee just above the flesh-toned half-stocking that Mighty was in the process of carefully rolling down. Under the bench, at her feet, was a pink nylon mesh bag with coloured flowers appliquéd to it which he hadn’t spotted until then. The Heavenly Terrace, a Chinese supermarket, had recently opened on a piece of spare ground behind the Texaco garage, and that had almost certainly been her destination when she was attacked. (By, he was prepared to bet, the pair of troglodyte pyromaniacs he had encountered earlier on the Moor.)

  This piece of speculation, though, was purely Ray’s own. Nobody at the van was using the event as an excuse to stir up some small excitement or for gossip, or behaving in any way differently than they normally behaved. Only the two men who had given up their seats to the Chinese woman and had moved to a table where Ray had never seen them sitting before were giving any outward indication of being affected by the incident. Although they were trying not to be, they seemed resentful, and were braced for when they could reclaim their places, knee to knee on the bench. It was the displaced attitude of children who had arrived at school to find strangers sitting at their desk.

  Most people, having weighed up the situation, had quickly gone back to doing what they were doing before it occurred: working out an accumulator or a ten-bob e/w on the 3.30 at Lingfield, or browsing in the paper, or trying to bring out a crossword. The habits of a lifetime are hard to break. But it wasn’t out of disregard for the distress of the Chinese woman, or callousness, but rather as a show of good manners and a determination not to make a bad situation worse by adding to the woman’s disorientation and sense of shock at being set upon by foreign devils in a foreign city that they had made an effort to re-immerse themselves in the ordinary dull routine of an ordinary dull day.

  Somebody had even turned the radio back on after a while. But it was low, and the banal songs and the cheap chatter were perfect for establishing a sense of nothing going on. (This, in fact, had been the Ray Cruddas show-business philosophy when he started out, before the times, and his personal circumstances, forced him to go blue: a few songs, a few laughs, an act that pays no attention to the facts of life but just goes down the road. It’s only how things were. Nobody’s idea of a good time then was to be scared witless or scarred for life when they went to the pictures or to see a concert party. In the British films of those times, the formula was tried and tested: simple tales, simply told, dealing in the main with nice people doing nice things.

  It was first brought home to Ray how far the world had turned when the owner of the Villa Capri Casino Nightclub, Kettering, gave him the benefit of his showbiz credo one night in the early seventies: ‘Give ’em a gamble, bare tits and a laugh and the buggers’ll shit money all night.’ This same man kept his money packed in a very large concrete safe with a mattress on top where his children slept.)

  ‘Five letters. Begins with p and ends with p. Means clubby.’ Conversation at the Scran Van rarely extended beyond that, and the occasional reaction to some phone-in comment (‘Yi naa what you’re supposed to call shoplifters these days, divven yiz? “Non-traditional shoppers”’), or speculation on who had the number-one hit in August 1958 with ‘Carolina Moon’, or which famous screen actor’s real name was ‘Frederick Austerlitz’. (A: Fred Astaire. Ray knew it but didn’t pipe up.) Every Friday Big Alf went round depositing the monkey nuts and liquorice allsorts he carried in his pockets in little piles in front of people he knew. Now and again somebody might offer Ray a joke they’d heard and were happy to pass on. Big issues were never addressed, and big thoughts were never spoken: it would be regarded as breaking the code somehow to speak them. Anything likely to provoke argument, such as a live broadcast of the Budget speech, or a programme about the relevance of the monarchy to modern life, was discreetly turned off. Mighty’s was no place for amateur priests, or preachers. The only issues to get debated were things like which has the most ache in it, a rum hangover or a gin hangover. The Scran Van was a place to go to briefly get away from life. A snug harbour.

  Jackie Mabe had stood between Ray Cruddas and the world for more than thirty years. Jackie was Ray’s eyes and ears; he was his butler, gofer, personal assistant and wife. Jackie was the reason Ray couldn’t tell you the price of a newspaper or a pint of milk; why he didn’t know how to boil an egg, and why he hadn’t travelled on public transport (he liked to say) since Keir Hardie and the horse-drawn tram.

  To be famous is, in many ways, to be an exile from life. Fame breeds a kind of contagion among the famous whose major symptom is a fear of going where other famous people don’t go. For many years Ray had refused to believe this applied to him. And then one day Jackie asked him: When was the last time he’d been in an off-licence or picked up his own cleaning? Or walked in a park, or shopped for a present for a friend or his wife, or bought himself a tie? What was he scared of? (They both knew. A familiarity with ordinary dailiness by definition meant you couldn’t be considered special, or consider yourself special, any more.) How did you rent a video, or put a bet on in a betting shop? When did he last walk in a room on his own without knowing in advance who everybody in it was going to be?

  Easy question: what did a cinema ticket look like these days? Ray, who still carried a mental image of a woman in her ticket cage dinging up narrow folding tickets through a metal slot while smoking a cigarette down to the end without taking it out of her mouth once, even while talking (she has a deep cigarette cough; she likes vigorous colours; her big breasts pointing through the thin vulgar summer dress; she does not mind being stared at; the big breasts and the blown charm – he remembered such a woman from the Brighton, and then later the Gem, which itself in time became the Beth Shan Tabernacle), had to confess he didn’t know.

  His solitary meals at the My Blue Heaven osteria in his village had been an ordeal without the wall of protection constituted by Jackie, but in the end it had been conside
rably less stressful than the alternative of shopping and cooking for himself. His daily run, and his recuperation period at the tea van at the gates of the Park, had marked his first real attempt at a re-engagement with life, and he had felt comfortable there among Mighty’s regulars from day one.

  It was a relief to Ray that nobody at the van wanted to test him by offering the friendliness that, for many years, as a face coming into their living rooms, a familiar voice drip-drip-dripping into their kitchens, he had appeared to invite. They were cordial and outgoing, but they left him to himself.

  Some residue of resentment would have been understandable. Everything about the trajectory of his life and its reporting in the press could be interpreted as a repudiation of how they lived and behaved; even of the way they spoke and what they wore. The more he achieved by going away, the more dissatisfaction they could have reasonably felt by being left behind. For a long time for the men of his generation in that area he had been an index of their mean ambitions and low horizons; a standard against which to measure the featurelessness of – nobody might ever have said this to them, but the implication was always there – their ‘sad little lives’. Unlike them, he had got on the bus before it passed him by and gone on to become, in the opinion of the disaffected, all suede shoes and Babycham.

  But now he was back, and he was only an old bag of bones like themselves; flesh and old bones. The essence of life at the Scran Van was not judging other people and not expecting to be judged by them. If Mighty had had a motto, it would have been that. ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ (That, or another favourite verse from Matthew: ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.’)

  Nevertheless, in the miserable months before he slunk home to the North East to live, Ray had believed that in one area of his life he was going to be particularly vulnerable to rejection and even vilification. Like Jimmy Tarbuck and Ted Rogers and others who had also grown up in the old industrial regions, his attachment to the Conservative Party in general, and to Mrs Thatcher in particular, had ensured that at one stage he was virtually court jester at Downing Street.

  Ray had first met Margaret Thatcher soon after her election as leader of the party in 1975, and had entertained the delegates at the annual conference in Blackpool that year, a town he knew well. In 1979 he had appeared for her at a televised election rally, and had been rewarded with a gilt-framed grip-and-grin picture of the two of them together and an invitation to her first drinks party at Downing Street as Prime Minister.

  Unlike Tarbie, who was squat and perspiring and still carried the authentic whiff of a working class she had made no secret that she regarded as idle, deceitful, inferior and bloody-minded, Ray was the cut of a man it became increasingly clear the Prime Minister liked. ‘Perma-tanned’ and ‘smarmy’ to his critics, who by then were many, and baying, she was clearly captivated by his tailoring (Duggie Millings of Soho for stage and television; Kilgour and French of Savile Row for civilian and formal), his tonsure (silvering, but still all his own), his attentiveness, his usefulness as a social lubricant, and his charm.

  His way in had been through Gordon Reece, her director of communications and producer of Ray’s first showcase series for Associated Television in 1965. Ray Cruddas Invites … was dropped after six weeks because it failed to find large enough audiences. But the two of them had had other successes together (Holiday Star Time, with Esther Ofarim, Reg Varney and Acker Bilk; Ray Cruddas’s Monday Night Live, with its popular ‘Spot-the-Tune’ interlude in which cash prizes could be won), and had remained firm friends. Their shared lack of interest in the substance of political issues also found favour with the Prime Minister, who turned to them increasingly for advice on how to project the most authoritative yet televisually engaging image of herself.

  Reece had already demonstrated to her how the handling of the camera and lighting can aid the performer in his or her expressive task. Reece too could claim credit for getting her to sharpen her hairstyle and lower her voice. But she was constantly on the look-out for new phrases and pay-off lines, and this was where Ray was able to help. Ray it also was who pointed out that she was using her arms a little too predictably and a little too often, and assured her that the key word in television performance was nonchalance – ‘carefully studied nonchalance’. (She made a careful note of this in a small, leather-bound notebook which she kept in the slip pocket of her handbag, when he had expected a laugh.) But perhaps his greatest contribution to her TV persona was the suggestion that she might like to try slightly whiter make-up on her upper eyelids to lighten up her eyes, and the colour stick he gave her that he had used himself since the coming of colour television to tone down the fleshy, other-worldly fluorescent pink of his tongue.

  ‘Mr Ray Cruddas and Mrs Charmian Cruddas’ were regular guests of the Prime Minister’s at official receptions at Westminster and in Whitehall, and eventually in the more intimate surroundings of Downing Street, where they were gratified to find they were able to hold their own with the members of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ who included Alan Walters, her trusty guru; the old intriguer, Alf Sherman; Ralph ‘Rolf Harris, the founding father of the Institute of Economic Affairs; her Chelsea neighbour, Sir Laurens van der Post, the traveller and semi-mystic; and the self-made computer millionaire, John Hoskyns, who always seemed to back Charmian into a corner on these occasions and start banging on about Britain ‘going down the tube’. The wife of the educationalist Sir John Vaizey, a canny American in a kaftan dress, once confided to Charmian that they had a cat at home that they called ‘Lady Daisy Vaizey’, and she dined out on that for years in the bungalows and light-drenched villas of the South Hams.

  It was the passing of these times, following Mrs Thatcher’s fall from power in November 1990, that Charmian had especially mourned: the after-hours washing-up at the sink in the little flat under the eaves of Number 10 with Margaret – who Charmian always addressed as ‘Prime Minister’ even when she was only asking whether she would prefer to wash or wipe – while the men shared a joke against a background of light-orchestral music over their single malts in the next room.

  One of the first things Charmian packed when she gave up the ghost and went to live with Gavin, the flippered golf-ball retriever, was a letter that Mrs T. had written to Ray in the middle of a particularly bad spell when she knew he was struggling, and that Charmian had had framed and hung over the tallboy in their bedroom. It quoted four lines of an inspirational poem:

  Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

  Yes, to the very end.

  Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

  From morn to night, my friend.

  Charmian had gone out and found the book it had come from – it was a collection by Christina Rossetti – and the book from that day forward had become her solace and her constant companion.

  Looking around him at Mighty’s regulars, the lame ducks and lost causes who gathered round her daily at the tea van – men for the most part who had never owned a car or a passport, all of them products of the old industries – the heavy industries – that had created the character and culture of that part of the world, who didn’t really own anything other than the clothes they stood in – Ray occasionally allowed himself to see it from Charmian’s perspective, and inwardly grinned when he thought how his former wife, happening across him now, would feel vindicated in seeing what she had always said would happen come to pass: she had kept on telling him that (once a Geordie, always a Geordie) he was going to end up without a pot to piss in, living in the gutter.

  Except that, in the matter of their appearance at least, the Scran Van regulars didn’t conform to the street-corner-dole-wallah, flat-cap-and-rag-muffler stereotype of the old North East. They were a colourful bunch, kitted out in synthetic animal-pelt fleeces and comfortable sweatpants and the big padded training coats and replica team shirts with iridescent watermark patterns that strobed when they caught
the light. It’s something Ray had particularly noticed since he’d gone back there to live: that everybody dressed sportily younger than their years – or sportily older in the case of the nursery-age children in their cropped tops and bare midriffs and hip-hugging jeans. People of all ages and both sexes seemed to have decided that the best age was around seventeen. A disco dolly with glossy long hair and chiffon bell-bottom trousers could easily turn out, when she turned around, to be a grandmother of seventy. At Mighty’s, steel toe-caps and heavy work boots had mostly been replaced by trainers with Velcro fastenings and reflectors, fat laces and fashionable signature logos. A group of four men who regularly used the table closest to the van’s counter looked like a boy band persevering well into their sixties. Their shoes, and virtually everything else they were wearing, Ray knew had come from ‘Magpie’ Jeff who sold out of a suitcase from a wall screened from the road by bushes, just behind the van, and always knew where to get what you wanted if he wasn’t carrying it himself. It’s from Jeff that Ray had got his Kappa tracksuit and the fluorescent monsters he was wearing on his own feet.

  A large part of the success of Bobby’s, the nostalgia enterprise he had launched eighteen months earlier – its slogan was ‘The kind of club that takes you back even if you were never there originally’ – was due to the fact that people could go there wearing the clothes traditionally associated with the area – the proletarian ‘Andy’ caps and turban scarves, the unravelling ‘ganzies’ and massive ‘pinnies’ – and celebrate the fact that these things had been consigned to history. Another reason that business at Bobby’s was booming was that people liked to go there to be reminded of simpler, less neurotic (and less dangerous) times.

  ‘He’s late the day, lad.’ The regulars had got to know Ray’s habits as well as he’d got to know theirs. And it’s true that Jackie should have arrived to collect him by now. The man who had spoken had seen Ray irritatedly looking at his watch. ‘Howay, here they come,’ the same man said then, at the sound of a police siren coming closer. ‘It’s only tekken them half an hour. They must have stopped somewhere for a cuppa tea on the way.’