The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  They had been talking for about a quarter of an hour and the audience was singing along silently with their hands to ‘Cushie Butterfield’ when there was a flutter of excitement among the people sitting closest to the door, who had spotted five of the United players coming in. They were quietly ostentatious in designer clothes and in boisterous good spirits as they moved up through the bar. They sat a few tables away from where Ray and Ronnie were. Ronnie pantomimed some tick-tack signs in their direction, and a couple of them tick-tacked back. A big defender called Darren Easby pointed at the Ephphatha people and mouthed the question, ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Yi divven have to whisper, man‚’ Ronnie shouted. ‘They’re all deef as posts.’

  With the group was a recent signing from a German club, a Paraguayan or Chilean with the unlikely poetic name of Triste-le-Roy, although it had been announced he would be wearing the single name ‘Roy’ on his shirt. Also in their company were two local girls they had hooked up with in the course of the night. The girls were dressed almost identically in semi-transparent lace tops and tiny skirts made of scraps of denim held together with white laces criss-crossed through brass eyelets up the sides. Both girls had lots of elaborately piled and twisted blond hair and jewelled bolts in their navels.

  Colin Shales, the captain, came over. He squeezed Ray on the shoulder and shook hands with Ronnie. ‘All right, Mr Cornish?’ ‘Not bad for a Wednesdee neet, bonnie lad.’ They talked football and motor cars for a few minutes, and then when Shales turned to walk away Ronnie seemed to think of something and called him back. He whispered something confidential in the player’s ear, and when he was finished Shales laughed. He went over to where Alexis was playing on one of the pool tables and, after a brief conversation, Alexis disappeared.

  When he reappeared he was wearing a long white apron and carrying a tray which was loaded with an ice bucket and an assortment of snacks and drinks. He approached the table where the players were sitting and, while unloading the tray, managed to spill some ice into the new player’s, Triste-le-Roy’s, lap. He apologized very nicely and then, while fussing around him with a napkin pretending to clear the mess up, caught him with his elbow in the ear. When ‘Twisty’, as he had quickly been nicknamed (‘Triste-le-Roy’/‘Twist again’/‘Twisty’), stood up, he dragged a bowl of piccalilli and a bowl of olives to the floor, and Alexis trampled heavily on his feet while pretending to brush these up. He tripped and dumped the contents of the dustpan over the player’s shoulders when he was seated again. And it was at this point, with the two girls giggling and Ronnie gulping and reddening and his team mates falling about, that Twisty went for Alexis big style, as they would all later say.

  ‘Initiation, son‚’ Ronnie said, when the ex-fitter waiter who had been lurking in the shadows finally stepped in and pulled them apart. ‘You’ve got your traditions where you come from, we’ve got ours. Thi’ probably drink the blood of ten-year-old virgins ower there. Dee funny things wi’ chickens. People up here will always mek you welcome. They’ll always ask yi back to their place for a fight. Welcome, Twisty, if I may call you Twisty, welcome to the North.’

  Ray had been called away while all this was going on. Suddenly Ronnie realized he didn’t have any cigarettes. He looked around for somebody to fetch some and, failing to see anybody else, called over to Jackie. ‘Jackie, man! Jackie!’ He used a slightly impeded, high-pitched voice like Jackie’s. One of the footballers half turned and faced Ronnie, squeezing his crotch. Ronnie called Jackie over again, in a normal voice this time. ‘Ah howay man, Jackie, divven gerrin a pet.’ He always talked broader when he was drunk. ‘Has somebody tekken your baal, or what?’ Jackie came to the table and asked Ronnie what he wanted. When he wanted something Ronnie always wanted it quick fast in a hurry. ‘Kish mir ’n tushes,’ Jackie said under his breath when Ronnie told him he was out of smokes. Yiddish is a language rich in insults and curses. ‘Kiss my arse.’

  Jackie had learned the rudiments of Yiddish from Mr Solomons’, ‘the potentate’s’, black-veiled, mahogany-coloured elderly mother who he used to secretly bring waxed cartons of jellied eels and other forbidden treats in to from the stall outside the Knave of Clubs pub on Club Row in Whitechapel.

  What Ronnie Cornish should have realized, and perhaps didn’t, was that Jackie had been in some bad company. He knew a lot of the ‘chaps’ who used to hang around Jack Solomons’ Soho gym in the fifties. He knew that Tony Mella in those days. They were both boxing for Solomons. Mella had been badly cut by Mad Frankie Fraser, whose services Mr Solomons on one or two occasions employed to cut some Americans who were clouding his horizon. Tony Mella had ultimately been offed by his partner in the Bus Stop Club in Dean Street, after Mella had humiliated him in front of some of the girls who worked there. He had been shot and died in the gutter outside the club with the girls all screaming and half naked around him.

  In those days when Jack Solomons reigned supreme over the fight game, a boxer had really arrived when he appeared at either the Albert Hall or Harringay Arena. And towards the end of his career Jackie had appeared on a Solomons Christmas promotion at the Hall, as it was always known in boxing circles, which had all three Kray brothers on the bill. Ronnie fought Bill Slimey of Kings Cross; Reggie fought Bob Manito of Clapham; and Jackie got the oldest of the three, Charlie. In the week leading up to the fight, he had been leaned on very heavily by one of the razor gangs who ran the betting to lose it; he had got his fingers severely stood on when he went to try and pick up the ‘nobbins’, the loose change thrown into the ring, when the fight was all over. But he had stood his ground and refused to box at less than his best, and all the Krays had continued very friendly towards Jackie afterwards. Ronnie Cornish was purely one hundred per cent a lightweight compared to some of the mad crazy deviators Jackie had known.

  When he came back, Jackie saw that two of the footballers and one of the girls had gravitated towards Ronnie Cornish’s table. Ronnie was doing one of his party pieces for them that Jackie had seen him do many times before. He put a napkin on his head and pretended to be Queen Victoria.

  Jackie placed the cigarettes on the table in front of him. He had brought them on a plate, with the Cellophane taken off and the flip top tipped open in what Jackie considered to be a subtle fuck-you gesture. ‘Khob im in drerd‚’ he said as Ronnie went on playing to the table without acknowledging him. And a strange idea occurred to Jackie then: it was always almost like jealousy on Ronnie’s part; almost as if Ronnie Cornish was jealous of him.

  Heading back in the direction of the pool tables, Jackie spotted Alexis slipping out of the men’s toilets and sauntering knowingly back to the table where he had been playing for the last hour with one of the younger United players.

  The hand drier in the Gents came on automatically as Jackie walked past it and he felt the whoosh of warm air. In the chrome paper-towel dispenser, he found a small packet of cocaine. Jackie slipped it into his pocket and walked back into the club.

  *

  After he’d closed the souvenir stall and cashed up Jackie took Ellis for a walk. It was a fresh night with some dampness in the air. Nothing was moving on the river, but the lights from some buildings on the opposite bank were reflected in the black water. A set of construction cranes towered above the buildings and their night lights were points of roiling light reflected in the river. There were still a few cars left in the car park and the boy car-park attendant was still in his booth. The light was on and a radio was playing. Ronnie Cornish’s driver was sitting in the front of his car with a low light on, reading. They were working late at Tip Top Crash Repair. The radio was playing a song that Jackie knew was called ‘Here Comes That Rainy Day’. It was the Peggy Lee version. The metal roller gate was raised a couple of feet and orange light with the blue light of metal-cutting torches in it seeped through the gap on to the baulked and lightly circling litter.

  The industrial estate where Bobby’s was situated was high up on the side of the valley. Once the streets
here had dropped precipitously down to the shipyards at the river. Clara Street, Violet Street, Aline Street, Helen Street. Streets named after the wives and daughters of the bigwig industrialists and shipyard owners. There were big blown-up pictures of the streets of the former neighbourhood on the walls at the club. It was a neighbourhood that, in its heyday, had been famous for the number of licensed premises per head of population. There was a pub on every corner, and the names reflected the industries for which the area had won world renown: The Gun, The Hydraulic Crane, The Vulcan, The Forge Hammer, The Blast Furnace. The Forge Hammer had stood on exactly the spot where Bobby’s now was and had long enjoyed a reputation for providing everything the visitor could require: a barber shop, women for sale, stabling for horses. Bare-knuckle boxing took place in a ring on the first floor. For generations ‘a fuck or a fight’ was the Saturday night promise at The Forge Hammer. In the twenties, the pub had been managed by the former world heavyweight boxing champion, Tommy Burns, a Canadian who lost his title in Australia to the first black champion of the world, the American, Jack Johnson.

  A giant mural photograph of The Forge Hammer hung in the foyer at Bobby’s. Blowing up historical ‘Views’ and plying the nostalgia industry was what Warren Oliver, Ronnie’s sleeping partner, did for a living. Many of the computer-enhanced, hand-tinted family portraits hanging in the club had passed through Warren Oliver’s Photoshoppe. He supplied images to pubs, supermarkets, railway stations, motorway eateries, showing what had been cleared away or trampled under in the march of progress. The more completely the environment in a photograph had been destroyed, the more sought after the picture. After a trail of false career starts involving mothballs, bubble baths, prams and fridge magnets, Warren had finally struck lucky with the retro-imaging.

  The eastern boundary fence of the industrial estate followed the path of a stream. The stream had once run through the grounds of a grand house built by one of the illustrious Victorian empire-builders. Both house and stream, along with a considerable acreage of the original grounds, were, surprisingly, still in existence. They had been bequeathed to the city by the spinster daughters of the great man whose name they carried. The house had become a hostel for the homeless, the grounds were overgrown and choked with ivy, and the stream was clogged with refrigerators, supermarket trolleys and other rubble. As Jackie approached, two women workers were having a cigarette break on the steps outside the hostel whose windows were protected by ominous metal grilles. It was a creepy, Gothic building standing well back in the grounds and the women looked horror-show ghostly in their white uniforms and clinging cocoons of swirling smoke. As he got nearer Jackie smelled the Jeyes which had permeated the fibres of their clothes. He thought of Telfer sedated in the vet’s basement in a shopping precinct in West Allen and called Ellis’s name. The dog came instantly, bounding through the thorny undergrowth, panting and wagging his tail.

  When he returned to the club, Ray was with Ronnie and Warren and the footballers, messing around with a drink that involved trapping ignited alcohol fumes in a glass and inhaling the fumes through a straw. Alexis and the two girls, who seemed pretty drunk now, were also included. It was 4 a.m. before Jackie could persuade them all to leave.

  *

  The sky above Allotment Field when Jackie dropped Ray off was bright and clear. The moon and stars had never been as brilliant as in the blackouts during the war. But tonight the stars were out and you could see the mountains and craters of the moon. With his key in the door, Ray turned to wave cheerio to Jackie and saw that one star appeared to be particularly bright and seemed to him to be blinking in the clear dark sky. ‘It’s a new satellite. It’ll be leaving our orbit in a few days’ time‚’ he was certain he heard a woman’s voice say – a girl’s; only a girl – although he couldn’t see anybody in the road or in any of the gardens.

  Same trees, same stars, he thought, as he went inside.

  After satisfying himself that there were no cows near by, Jackie released Ellis on to the Moor for his final run before taking him home. He took off towards the Park with his ears flattened and his rich fur parted and flying. And then he suddenly stopped and smelled the air. He was used to being a pair, and kept running and stopping, looking around and waiting for his partner to come.

  4

  One night towards the end of January 1947 when he was still sixteen and cycling home through the night to his village at Chatteris after a fight which had been a close-fought thing at Mr Solomons’ converted church-hall club in Hackney, Jackie felt what was to be one of the harshest of all English winters start to blow in.

  A north-east wind started blowing that night and blew for a month without stopping. Weeks passed and the temperature never rose above freezing. The Thames froze. Coal boats, bound for London, were ice-bound in the North East ports. Coal was frozen at the pits. There were no trains to shift it. People worked in offices by candlelight; fires and traffic lights went out; lifts stopped. Thousands were laid off work and went home to houses that were dark and freezing. The newspapers reported queues of professional women with buckets waiting at a stand tap in the road in St John’s Wood, like a night after a blitz. Big Ben was silenced, its mechanism frozen solid.

  In the early hours of 24 January 1947, an area of high pressure somewhere above Archangel began moving in an arc over Scandinavia and down towards England, sucking Siberian cold with it, and Jackie was one of the first to feel it. It cut through the layers of vests and shirts and two corduroy jerkins he had put on. It even penetrated the impractical heavy topcoat Mr Solomons’ book-keeper at the Devonshire Club had wished on him and stabbed through his trousers and his long-johns to the satin Lonsdale ring shorts he was still wearing.

  The road from the West End ran more or less directly from ‘the square mile of vice’ past Hackney and round the Epping Forest borders to Essex and Cambridge and straight past Jackie’s door in the flat country of the Fens. One road, and a flat one, from Chatteris going south past the Isle of Ely and the great floating mothership of the Cathedral, riding high in a dead line above the marshes and mud flats and the sucking peat fen, past the steam-pump houses and the ruler-straight and geometrically patterned rivers, and then along between old fields choked with thistly weeds and brambles until the isolated single houses started to become attached to other houses one by one, and the houses became a terrace, and the terraces darkened into rows of dark brick terraces and the smells of that part of London came in – glue and paraffin; paint and bonemeal, the ‘stink industries’ as they were called – and Jackie, leg-weary as he was, couldn’t wait to get in and get the fight behind him and climb aboard his bicycle which he would have parked outside the hustling matchmaker Mr Solomons’ Devonshire Sporting Club in Devonshire Street, Hackney, and head back along the long straight road to where he felt he belonged.

  It was a strange landscape of the Fens. But it was the one he had looked out of his window and seen around him all his life, bare trees edging the fields like stamp perforations against the sky; islands sticking out of the sticky fen floor. And the road was raised up and it was an area well dotted with memorials to the Great War in every village and medieval steeples and cemeteries where the white shapes of the gravestones would suddenly become visible in a break in the straggling privet hedge bound with vines and climbing plants of cat brier, trumpet creeper, morning glory. And so Jackie did not feel alone the way you could suppose he might with the night and pitch darkness all around and unaccountable noises and animals shifting in the dark and in fact would say that he could feel more by himself in a room with people all talking or in a ring going after a man with the intention of smashing his face and people on their feet shouting the odds than he ever did on his long rides home to Chatteris with his ribs sore and his knuckles smarting and a ten shilling in his pocket after a fight.

  The snow started falling just outside Duxford in the first hour of the famous freezing winter of 1947, and snow stood an inch deep on Jackie’s body and two and a half inches deep on h
is woollen balaclava when he finally reached home. The double doors of his father’s smithing shop were open, and he could see his father inside stoking the fire of the furnace in his long leather apron. He shook hands with his father, who poured out a cup of beef tea for him, and was glad to be able to give his father three of the four heavy half-crown pieces that had been his pay for the night.

  Jackie was a country boy. His mother, a local Chatteris girl, drank. She was a common drunk and a bloody scandal of a wife to Jackie’s father, who asked her to stop, and begged her to stop, and did all he could, went to doctors for advice, tried this, tried that, but she wouldn’t stop. It was a mystery to everybody, because Jasmine Drake as she was before she was married – ‘Jass’ – was such a cheerful, pretty person. But eventually she took up with a man travelling with a road-laying gang and one day, when the gang packed up and moved on, simply disappeared. The only thing that anybody could find that she had taken with her apart from items of clothes was a small schoolboy trophy Jackie had won for boxing with an argent tin-plate figure on the top which his mother had always insisted, with its wild thicket of hair and brave fisticuffs stance, reminded her of him. His father had gone on to have a number of other children with several other ladies in the village, but nobody had seemed to regard that as particularly unusual at the time, and his father’s attitude, and the attitude of the ladies themselves, as far as Jackie knew, had always been: ‘Who’s countin’?’