The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  All three dogs took it in turn to leave their mark (the younger shepherd just managing to remain upright this time) against the zinc dustbin that had been put outside the main gate at Nettle Hill Farm for the benefit of the postman (somebody had written ‘POST’ on the lid). A second notice had been fixed to the gate: ‘PLEASE KEEP OUT. WE ARE NOT CONTAMINATED, WE WANT TO KEEP OUR ANIMALS.’

  Stella was standing at the corner of Half Nichol Street with his tail whirlybirding nuttily in circles, waiting for the signal to tell him whether to continue straight on or turn right into what was known locally as the Settlement. Old Nichol Street, New Nichol Street and Half Nichol Street were narrow cinder alleys cutting between rows of miners’ cottages. The Settlement was the oldest part of Rusty Lane. Jackie lived in the new part of the village along with most of the other ‘blow-ins’ in a modern development called Manor Grange (or ‘New Kennels’ to the locals, after a large sign with fluorescent arrows that had gone up on the trunk road pointing traffic in the direction of Jackie’s estate. The developer’s ‘traditionalizing’ elements at the New Kennels – cast-iron foot scrapes, decorative cobbles, ‘Victorian’ street lamps incorporating a make-believe flicker – had also been the target of considerable mockery.)

  There had been two pits in Rusty Lane, but they had both been closed for over twenty years. The pit rows in the Settlement, once tithed to the colliery, were now occupied by retired miners and families with close mining connections. Without the renovations of recent years, the cottages would have been museum pieces. (Identical cottages from a nearby village had in fact been transported brick by brick to an open-air theme-park museum, where they formed part of a hands-on interactive display.) The cottages had had temporary-looking, semi-prefabricated structures added on front and rear: new kitchens and bathrooms at the back; glassed-in porches erected around the existing front doors. And, after the now nearly unimaginable privations of their predecessors, the people who lived there were proud at last to be able to consider themselves modern. The porches, which were sun-traps, were showcases for all styles of resort furniture – fatly padded recliners and loungers, and wrought-iron and bamboo occasional tables and sofas. Tinkling wind chimes were popular, as were tweeting budgerigars and lovebirds in domed cages. Many houses had vertical swivel blinds at the windows and most had a black, colander-like satellite dish probing the ether for sport and films round the clock.

  What Jackie was always most struck by when he walked through the Settlement, though, was the way relics of the old industrial past had been reassigned a new use as hanging baskets and planters. All summer, French marigolds and nasturtiums and petunias frothed out of Davy lamps and pitmen’s helmets. Love-in-a-mist and sweet william grew in the old rusting tubs that half-blind, bow-legged ponies had once pulled along the tunnels of a busy underground town. (The ponies would be tossed on top of the coal and hauled to the surface themselves when they had outlived their usefulness. Jackie had heard tales of them being shot en masse in the fields of Nettle Hill Farm after modern mining methods had made them redundant, and bulldozed into mass graves.) Strangest of all, pairs of pit boots that had once been put to warm against the kitchen fender in preparation for the beginning of a cold night shift were now home to busy lizzies and hardy annuals in a few of the Settlement gardens: it was as if the owner of the boots had been detonated out of them, like a scene in a Buster Keaton film, leaving a straggle of flowers instead of trouser tatters and trails of curling cartoon smoke.

  The prettifying of industrial relics – turning miners’ helmets and steel-toe-capped boots into garden ornaments – was only a domestic version of the glut of ambitious landscaping and reclamation projects that had been instigated in the countryside around Rusty Lane in recent years. In this process, the scars of the mining past had been flooded with ponds and lakes, and planted with meadows and saplings. The slag heaps from the twin collieries had been levelled off and grassed over (and in the case of the spoil heap at the Lee, turned into a dry ski slope); the railway line the coal wagons had trundled along was now a nature trail; the headgear for the main shaft was a picnic area complete with a flushing toilet and scribbled-on, but as yet relatively unvandalized, comprehensively illustrated information panels. (Herons and bitterns, little ringed plovers and reed warblers had come back to breed at the recently established deep sump lake.)

  The countryside around Rusty Lane was blistered with man-made hills filled up with hundreds of tonnes of household rubbish and organic waste, where sheep and cattle grazed on the lower slopes. Vast tracts of disturbed land had been designated a Heritage Park. An unnerving silence lay over the area, whose new orderliness and cleanness, although representing a kind of progress, struck the people who had lived all their lives there as queer.

  Before they reached the end of Half Nichol Street, Jackie called to Stella to come so he could put him on the lead. There were two horses on the scrap of spare ground at the end of the street, and the dog had yapped around worrying them in the past. Stella didn’t want to come and thought about it for a minute, but then did, with his tail down and his haunches low in submission and his belly almost scraping the ground.

  The horses were piebalds, and they were tethered by heavy clinking chains, morosely cropping the thin litter-strewn grass. Rusty Lane was situated on a high ridge in sight of the coast. Sea coal from the coal seams that rose in the sea-bed was washed ashore all along the coast there and the horses were used to collect this in little carts. Blue plastic sacks lined with coal dirt had been split and opened and tied over their backs. They followed Jackie and the dogs gravely through their milky eyes and their curled pale lashes as they passed.

  Jackie kept all the dogs with him as he skirted behind some modern school buildings at the edge of a playing field. He faintly heard a chord struck on a piano, then children’s voices singing, and the dogs in the nearby (canine) New Kennels baying for their morning feed; he tried to avoid starting the dogs off by not slamming his car door hard when he got home from Bobby’s in the middle of the night. Two-thirds of the way down the field, behind the metalwork room, which was emitting the smell of a coke fire and melted solder, a hole had been torn in the wire mesh fence. It would have been easier to let the dogs off here, but there was a lane on the other side of the steep embankment that cars (driven by buzzed-up, showing-off ex-pupils) sometimes came tearing along too fast. Jackie put his foot through the fence on to a pile of cigarette ends and had to shoot a hand out to stop himself falling when the dogs started trying to scrabble all together to the top of the denuded muddy bank. When he was satisfied there was nothing coming he let them go, and followed them across the lane and over a stile on to a footpath which, as he suspected, the men from the Ministry hadn’t been able to get to to rule out of bounds yet.

  Jackie still had the margarine carton inside his jacket. And when Telfer, who had quickly lost ground to the others, tentatively lifted his leg against one of several dozen blue plastic tree tubes that this part of the field was bristling with, he grabbed his chance. He transferred the unhealthily sluggish sample to the plastic bottle and buried the carton in nearby bushes while Telfer hobbled away in pursuit of Ellis and Stella, who had hared off in the direction of a perfectly bone-shaped pond, developed from a settling pond used to trap silt from rainwater run off during open-casting and newly colonized by dragonflies (an illustrated board explained all this). Telfer’s rich sable tail was tucked miserably into his blond hindquarters and he was moving in a way that couldn’t help but remind Jackie of himself.

  There was an old saying among the fraternity of punchateers: First your legs go, and then your money, and then your friends. Jackie’s legs had gone and his career had hit the buffers in another age, on another planet, more than half a century earlier, on the night of 11 December 1951.

  It was in a British lightweight title eliminator at the Empress Hall, Earls Court. He was on the undercard of Arthur Danahar vs. Omar Kouidri. His opponent was Alby Ash, a Hackney plumber who boxed under the name
‘Kid Bostock’. Jackie knew he wasn’t fit at the time of the fight, but he was boracic, as everybody seemed to be in those days, and needed to be earning. Six weeks earlier he had been doing some sparring with the European and Empire featherweight champion, Al Phillips, who was known as ‘The Aldgate Tiger’, at Jack Solomons’ gym in Soho, his home from home, when Jackie had felt his knee go. He felt it pop. But he had kept on going and afterwards the Tiger had taken him downstairs to the billiard hall, where there was a coffee bar, and bought him a cup of tea, a cheese roll and five Woodbines. The next day Jackie had been back for more punishment, and a couple of weeks later had even sparred for two rounds and eight pounds with Sandy Saddler, the featherweight champion of the world. In the run-up to the eliminator with Alby Ash, instead of resting the knee, he had punished it by running up and down the terraces at West Ham’s ground at Upton Park, where one of his hundreds of cousins from the Fens had signed papers as a junior. He spent hours alone on the terraces, high-stepping up and down, punishing himself; up and down.

  On the night, he began by giving Alby Ash a boxing lesson and was ending by handing him a large-size hiding when, about a minute into the fourth round, he threw a left hook at the hapless Hackney plumber. Jackie’s foot got caught on something loose in the canvas. His body went with the punch but his leg didn’t move. His knee made a terrible pop, and split like it had been sawn in half. He got up and kept hopping on one knee, throwing punches. And then he blacked out. They took him off on a stretcher. The cruciate ligament was torn and repair proved to be out of the question. The hospital operated on the medial as well as the cruciate ligament, and his leg was set in plaster from the ankle to the groin, with the knee in a bent position. That’s the way it had to be for three months. But at the end of that time Jackie knew it was over for him, even if other people didn’t. He remembered telling Mr Solomons, who was his manager, of his belief that it was all over. Mr Solomons was rotating a cigar between his lips to light it evenly. Jackie heard the sip sip of his pull on the cigar and watched the flame flare up on Mr Solomons’, the very powerful operator’s, cheeks and brow. Naturally Jackie was tearful. It was a difficult moment. But Mr Solomons stood and walked over to the fan-backed green-leather club chair where Jackie was sitting and kissed him lightly first on one cheek, and then on the other. Jackie felt the yellow tea-rose Mr Solomons habitually wore in the buttonhole of his jacket touching his face. When Mr Solomons had kissed him on both cheeks he also kissed him lightly on the top of the head. Jackie understood this to be a kind of anointing, and so it proved.

  Jackie’s duties from then on might have involved only gym-bum duties and general dogsbodying, acting as bucket-and-sponge man on fight nights, seeing to it that Mrs Solomons and her party had everything they needed before and after fights (Mrs Solomons was a champion eater and always required three hot-dogs, one before and two after, with a triple serving of onions with each dog), but Jackie was mishpochah. Kosher. Jackie was family, and into the bargain a well-respected, fondly regarded lifetime member of the fraternity of the thick ear.

  (A strange postscript to this affair was that, although his immediate family was allowed in to visit Jackie at the hospital, Tina, his wife at the time, didn’t appear. Tina was a vivacious bubble [bubble-and-squeak = Greek] who waitressed for her father in his café in what Soho habitués knew as Frying Pan Alley. They had been married for only a few months at the time of the accident, but whenever Jackie asked about his ‘child bride’ [Tina was seventeen], they changed the subject. Eventually she arrived after about four, maybe five, days, and her normally dark skin was drained of all colour. Jackie attempted a joke about her looking paler than the sheet that was draped over him. But she floored him with something he’d never expected to hear: ‘I’m afraid I’ve had a miscarriage.’ He hadn’t even been aware she was pregnant. ‘Well,’ Jackie would say when he related the story in later years, ‘you didn’t ask at that time.’)

  Jackie hated everything about getting old. The twinge in his knee was something he had come to be more conscious of, and his limp, although still only slight, had become more noticeable now than when he was a younger man. When he breasted the hill, he saw Telfer limping towards the lake and he could see Ellis was in the lake making contrails on the otherwise still surface with Stella tearing up and down the foreshore but staying well clear of the water. There was a wood beyond the lake with a dry stream-bed path leading uphill to Back Church Lane and the village.

  This was land that had been repeatedly mined, cultivated, stripped bare and restored for three centuries. There had been an aerial ropeway bringing coal from Spylaw Colliery to the screens at Rusty Lane 2, a distance of over three miles – 32 tonnes of coal an hour, 23 hours a day. Its high pylons had marched across this field, but there was no sign of them now. Now the blades of a row of tall white wind turbines turned in unison in the distance, churning the wind. The lake here had originally been formed by subsidence. Then it broke through into old mine workings and, after an interval of many years, the lake had been relined with red clay and refilled. When the clay had been laid it was pressed into place with the revival of a tradition dating back to the first Industrial Revolution. This involved driving a herd of cows up and down and around the lake basin until, like the case for a muslin-wrapped suet pudding, it was judged watertight and uniformly thick. There had been a carnival-like atmosphere on the day the cows had been brought to do a job at the lake, pounding down footprints like fish scales that might still be there, and people had travelled from miles around to see it.

  The interpenetratedness of the life that had been lived under ground for generations and the modern lives currently being lived above ground was something that was constantly making itself felt. The previous summer large numbers of homes in Rusty Lane had had to be evacuated when polluted mine water from the old mines flooded the main street, slicking it ferrous orange. More recently a pensioner had died from inhaling stythe – mine gas pushed to the surface and expelled by the rising rank water. Jackie was always aware that wherever he walked there were complex networks of roadways and tunnels below him where day after day for a hundred years men had gone to work in the closed body of the earth.

  Much in the way that Ray, in his new commitment to being more outward as a person, had fallen right in with the regulars at the Scran Van, so Jackie, blow-in as he was, felt a strong affinity with the former coal-hewers and tub-menders he was obliged to rub along with at this latest (quite possibly the last) staging post in his life. Just as he had been marked up by his job, so they carried the marks of theirs in the form of missing fingers and eyes and coal dust worked into worm shapes and spirals and blackly fused with the contours of old accident scars under the skin.

  One day, flicking the pages of a Spanish-language pin-up magazine already hundreds of customers old while he waited his turn at Barnet Fair, the barber’s over the pork shop in West Allen, Jackie had fallen into conversation with a retired pitman, one of the old school who liked to be shaved with a freshly stropped cutthroat razor and expected to have the stiff hog hairs on the meat of his ears and at the base of his neck burned off with a wax taper. ‘If I was fowty years younger, lad,’ the old pitman had said, indicating a black model in Jackie’s magazine who was bending over a cocktail counter with a hot-pink thong pulled up in the cleft of her buttocks and smiling over her oiled ebony shoulder at the camera, ‘aa’d give haw some stick an’ aall, divven worry aboot that.’ They had gone on to talk about this and that – changes in the district, the number of teenage pregnancies and crack dealers and the unemployment, always chronic and getting worse – and then by way of nothing the old pitman had suddenly said, ‘There’s nothing as dark as the darkness down a pit, the blackness that closes in on you if your lamp goes out. You’d think you would see some kind of shapes but you can see nothing, nothing but the inside of your head. The darkest place on orth.’

  Jackie had turned and looked at the man’s head and wondered about the darkness in it. The customer in
the barber’s chair with the plastic sheet tented up to his chin and the Kleenexes stuffed in his collar gave him a strange look in the mirror then. The old man’s cranium stuck out quite unpleasantly far at the back. Jackie noticed the faintest trace of a scar, like the tramline on a tennis ball, just beneath his already short silver crop. He remembered a fight of his where the outcome had been about sixty staples in his head, and his head had been half shaved and swollen. All he could think about was looking normal again.

  He had got caught in the first round of the fight and didn’t box the same after that. To begin with, he thought he was just having a bad day at the office. But they let him out for the twelfth and he got hit with three or four shots straight away, and then, when he went down, he knew there was a problem. He began to experience the dull euphoria, that carelessness, the giggly incomprehension. He thought about that: the blackness that closes in on you if your lamp goes out. ‘In boxing,’ Jackie told the old man, ‘they say when you get hit and hurt bad you see black lights – the black lights of unconsciousness.’

  ‘I think everybody should go down the pit at least once to leam what darkness is,’ the customer who was currently in the chair said, belligerently, as if Jackie hadn’t spoken. The man had had his hair washed, which didn’t happen at Barnet Fair very often. His face was still blotched and raw-looking. He had backed up to the sink and Tony, the owner, had worked up a lather on his scalp, and then massaged it and rinsed it, cradling the man’s neck in his arm, expertly sifting his hair through his fingers, and Jackie had reflected on what an intimate thing this was to happen. ‘Are yi on a promise the neet like, Norman?’ the older man had asked, and the man called Norman had winked back at him gruesomely in the mirror.