She was (in Rhona’s words) a silly old trout (and sometimes worse!). But oh, how I loved her, Donovan, for all her many faults! I loved Glenys. I don’t even mind admitting it, now. I loved her because she was the opposite of you, I loved her because to love her – the mother, your opposite – was as close as I could get to loving the son. I made loving her my life’s work (my trial, my test, my passion), and I feel such a gaping hole inside of me – a ludicrously huge void – now that she has gone.
Of course I don’t suppose for a moment that she ever loved me back! Glenys tolerated me, at best. It’s not that she was entirely cold. There were signs of warmth, on occasion (not heat, no – just the dull, red coals that glimmer in a cooling grate at the end of a long, inhospitable evening).
She could be funny – often unintentionally. I wouldn’t call her ‘unkind’, not as such; there was kindness there (microscopic little drops of it). It just wasn’t very well distributed. It was like those tiny scraps of burned newspaper that fly out of a bonfire – delicate tornadoes – on a gusty autumn afternoon.
She certainly cared for her animals. In their case you might almost say she cared too much. Her love could be ruinous (not to mention her over-feeding!). She killed three dalmatians ‘with tenderness’ over the past twelve years. When the last one died – Faith, a fine, good-natured, liver-coloured bitch, only five years old – it took three men to carry her out (rolled up in two blankets). They could barely squeeze her through the garden gate.
But enough of all this! I’m straying, once again, from the real purpose of my letter (I can hardly bear to engage with it, the subject is so painful – to both of us, I’m sure), so here goes… Deep breath…
Please try and forgive us, Donovan, for all the crimes you feel we have committed against you. If they were committed, then they were completely unintentional. You are one of our oldest and our dearest friends – a brother to us both. Let us start afresh. Let us put aside all the misunderstandings and the rancour and the pettiness (it can be done, it is possible, all it takes is a small act of will)! Let us try and return to the way things once were! The good old times!
If only you could be persuaded to believe me when I tell you that Rhona and I had no idea – not the slightest inkling – of the many arrangements that Glenys had set in place prior to her death. Glenys didn’t tell us about her burial plans, I swear (not so much as a whisper)! When I wrote to you (on the sad day she died), I had no notion (absolutely none!) of the strange events that were soon to unfold.
She had never (never!) discussed the details of her will with us (we didn’t even think there was a will. We had no earthly reason to expect that there might be. You were her natural heir, her only child).
After she died we did not – as you suggested in your last communication – ‘ransack the cottage searching for valuables’ or ‘take up partial residence’ there (it frightens me to think who could have fed you these untruths, because I know – I’m certain – that you couldn’t possibly have come up with them all by yourself).
I’ve racked my brains and I still can’t settle on any one individual in the village who might have anything positive to gain by stirring up such cruel rumours against us (although Rhona, alas, is not of my bent). In fact I’ve become profoundly depressed about it all. I’m currently on a course of sleeping medication and Rhona has lost over two stone in weight (although her doctor says this is no bad thing: every cloud has a silver lining, I suppose!).
After thirty years in Burley Cross I’ve started to find the atmosphere here stifling and claustrophobic. I’m constantly on edge, staring at all the kind people I’ve known for years with nagging feelings of suspicion and disquiet.
It’s been horrible.
It pains me to have to go into all the details once again, but just so that there can be no further confusion on the issue, since Rhona discovered poor Glenys’s body on that awful day, I can assure you – hand on my heart – that we have crossed the threshold into Camberwell Cottage on only two occasions, in total (even the estate agent went in alone).
The first was to select a suitable dress for Glenys to wear in her casket (when we found her, as I mentioned previously, she was in her nightdress), and to clean out the perishable contents of her fridge (none of which we kept – all of which we disposed of).
The second was to facilitate the delivery of a commode (the driver refused to take it back, although he did kindly agree to dispose of the old one). I can only guess that the ‘disinterested party’ your lawyer referred to when he called was a witness to this transaction and leapt to all the wrong conclusions.
For the record, the new commode (which was ordered – and paid for – by me) currently sits, still boxed up, in Glenys’s hallway (even if Rhona or I had found it a desirable artefact, neither of us – thank God – have any need of it, as yet!).
In regard to ‘prettying the place up for ourselves’ (and it cuts me to the quick to even write down those words) I can tell you that we have continued to trim the grass and prune the roses. This was something we had always done for Glenys, and something we have continued to do – as an act of good will – for you.
And why? Because the house is yours, Donovan. It was always yours. I thought we made that plain when this thorny issue first arose. It never entered our minds that it should be otherwise. Your extraordinary theories about Glenys being ‘under our spell’, ‘subject to our wiles’, ‘frightened, desperate and vulnerable’ (and countless other bizarre notions which bear no relation to the truth), I can only imagine were uttered in the dark haze of grief.
What confuses me the most (and forgive me for this, because I know I can be a little slow on the uptake, sometimes), is your apparent determination to make the whole thing ‘a matter of principle’. Which principle? I don’t understand! There is no principle at stake here! The house is yours, Donovan, both by warrant and by right!
As you are well aware, Rhona and I had already consulted a lawyer (and at considerable expense) to begin the process of handing it over. That process is now in abeyance. If it were down to me, this would not be so, but it is not down to me. Rhona must also have her say in the matter.
To put it plainly, Donovan, Rhona’s feelings have been hurt – her pride has been deeply injured – and when Rhona feels something strongly, experience has taught me that there is only so much that I can do to guide and counsel her. It may help you to understand the apparent severity of her reactions to your accusations when you discover that, far from ‘sitting on a nice nest-egg’, Glenys had been under increasing financial stress over the last few years.
In the autumn of 2005, for example, her boiler stopped functioning and Rhona cashed in a portion of her own pension to fund a replacement for her. We paid Glenys’s phone bill on countless occasions. We had Glenys’s roof insulated when our own was done. For the final five or so years of her life, we fed Glenys at least two of her daily meals.
Wherever Glenys needed to go, we drove her. We arranged incontinence care (which she rejected, for the most part). Whenever Glenys came over to visit us in Threadbare (which was most days), we had to wash/clean/disinfect the upholstery (although we always tried to ‘guide’ her into a particular chair).
These are small things, silly things, things that shouldn’t need to be mentioned, but I am saying them here, Donovan, I am writing them down, in my silly green ink, even though I feel humiliated by it, belittled by it, because I want you to understand that the only crime we have ever knowingly committed against your mother was the crime of kindness.
Sometimes I sit and I wonder why it was that Glenys made the decision that she did. Was it out of gratitude? (She was never very big on saying thank you, but then nothing we ever did for her was predicated on that.) Or was it simply to cause mischief? To break your poor heart? To forge a rift between us? Was it a final, cruel way of making it plain that she had never truly forgiven me for the breach I had (unwittingly) caused, all those years ago, between you and her?
I
don’t know. I don’t want to know (I’m just so sad, so worn, so exhausted by the whole affair). What I do know, though, is that all this procrastination over the will and its outcome is costing Rhona and me dearly (and not just emotionally). Camberwell Cottage is presently being sold. Rhona and I had no choice in the matter (we are currently liable to pay death duties and under threat of losing our own home).
I also think it only fair to warn you that two days ago Rhona told me that she was withdrawing £3,500 from Glenys’s account (last May Glenys’s depleted finances received a much needed injection of cash after an old insurance policy came into fruition. Up to that point she was over £5,000 in the red, a debt we were liable for. I’m not entirely sure of all the exact details, but I can find them out, soon enough, if you want).
I have no idea what the money is for. I presume that it is to cover legal fees and other debts incurring to us as a result of this impossible situation (Rhona had sworn that ‘nothing on God’s good earth’ would impel her to touch a penny of the money. I can only guess that something important has changed her mind).
I am unhappy about the withdrawal, and I felt that it was only right to let you know about it. Can I assure you, though (for my own part, at least), that my determination not to access Glenys’s account remains as strong now as it ever was.
So there you have it. I’m not sure there’s anything left to add. If you still are resolved to pursue the case against us, then all I can do is wish you well. I think it only fair to tell you, though, that both our lawyer, and Mr Baquir, seem to think your hopes of achieving anything by this course are not good.
Please see sense, Donovan! Don’t let foolish pride get in the way of a happy outcome. Stop this mess while it can still be stopped. We are your dear friends. We love you deeply. You are always in our thoughts and in our prayers,
Tilly
PS On a slightly lighter note: someone bought us a duck! He’s a Muscovy and very fine! Rhona sank a bath for him in the back garden, but he still persists in following me up on to the moor for a swim in the ghyll each morning. He had befriended a lone swan up there who unfortunately died after swallowing a load of fishing twine. By rights we should clip his wings (we’ve had complaints about him – he’s quite a beast!) but we’ve yet to catch the little devil!
Do take care.
XX
[letter 4]
1, The Old Cavalry Yard
The High Street
Burley Cross
Wharfedale
WD3 4NW
20/12/2006
Dear Mr Vesper Scott-Jones,
I am writing to you, care of your publishers, because I have contacted you via your website www.sky-turns-black.com on three separate occasions and have received no direct answer to my enquiries. Instead my questions (and my email) have ended up – in bastardized form – on a ‘fans’ forum’ to be chewed over and debated by other ‘fans’, which isn’t at all what I’d had in mind (and, to put it bluntly, their various contributions have, by and large, been nothing short of asinine).
If I had wanted to know what Joe Bloggs thought on a variety of issues relating to your ‘oeuvre’ I suppose I could always have strolled out on to the High Street, right here in Burley Cross (West Yorkshire), and conducted a small random poll myself (I don’t doubt that it would have taken me considerably less time and been infinitely more illuminating!).
It might interest you to know – by the by – that you have an Australian fan who haunts your site called AUSSIEHARDASS (I’m guessing he’s an Australian – of course this can’t be definitively proven) whose provocative views and coarse language I find especially difficult to stomach, as do many other contributors (I believe he answers to the general description of what they like to call ‘a troll’ in the lingo). I would suggest that his presence on the site is counter-productive and that all traces of him should be expunged from it as a matter of some urgency.
Perhaps this letter may serve to draw your attention to some of the other problems with the website: it’s slow to download, the graphics seem a little amateurish – far too much lime green for ‘average tastes’ – and there’s an irritating, somewhat gratuitous home-page which you need to double-click – several times, in my case – to gain proper access to the contents (I am presuming that you have some flunkey from your publishers running the show, or – worse still – that you are actually paying some wet-behind-the-ears graduate a living wage out of your own pocket to take care of it. I don’t know. But either way… etc.).
May I now just say – to start my letter, proper – that I enjoyed the four books in your ‘Sky Turns Black’ series a great deal, although I thought the last book, Chute to Kill, took some of the ideas and themes explored in the earlier novels a stage too far – into the realms of the surreal in some instances, e.g. the girl, Lola, who dressed and acted like a circus poodle (to try and exorcize her experiences of childhood abuse at the hands of her dog-breeder uncle) was stretching a point, I felt, but the boy who spoke only in garbled rhyme? Way too much! I realize that he served as a kind of modern-day Greek Oracle figure, but I found both his use of the vernacular and his ability to conveniently pop up (muttering a tired, little ‘rap’ – apparently to order) whenever a new corpse was unearthed from one of the various high-rise blocks’ many rubbish chutes a tad unconvincing, to say the least.
The book just didn’t hang together as well as it might have – and I’d guessed the final twist by chapter four (having said that, I am very quick on the uptake. It sometimes drives my wife Moira around the bend when I leap up, ten minutes into a film or television drama yelling, ‘The transvestite did it! He killed his father to fund his breast surgery…’ etc. etc. I just can’t help it. It’s simply a knack I have).
But all credit to you for trying something different. A lot of young(er) writers don’t seem to have the gumption for that, nowadays – especially after a period of success (when a sense of complacency often tends to set in, and they end up churning out any old trash).
Of course like most people I came to your work through the TV series, which – to be frank – I thought was arty-farty and over-directed. I only watched it because my daughter, Elise, who was visiting us at the time, twisted her mother’s arm into giving it a go.
That said, I did rate Kenneth Hursley’s cartoonish portrayal of Tim Trinder, the failed private investigator turned estate manager, solving crimes on the job (while a group of idiotic coppers and social workers weighed in with their size twelves, making the already delicate racial and social relations on the estate in the swinging sixties/early seventies even more parlous than they already were!).
As a matter of interest, I saw Hursley in the new Kenneth Branagh vehicle recently and thought he looked strangely out of his depth rubbing shoulders with more ‘established’ actors (which was a shame for the poor lad. The conclusion I was forced to reach was that he was one of those actors who performs at his best when playing a role very close to his own personality – not that this is entirely a bad thing: it’s always worked for Scotland’s Sean Connery).
Now I hear they’re toting his name about as the new Dr Who! Who’d have thought it?
I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see what he comes up with for the role; although he’ll have his work cut out to do a better job than Christopher Eccleston, who brought a much needed measure of northern grit to the part (he’d be hard pressed to do a worse one than the effeminate boy they’ve had in the role since!).
In truth, I’ve never really made much of a habit of watching the show, myself. My wife watches it, on occasion. The BBC love to over-hype it – but it’s just for kids, really, isn’t it?
The TV series of Sky Turns Black was filmed in Coventry, whereas the location of the original books was Manchester’s Hulme estate. Presumably this change was necessitated by the demolition of Hulme’s (by then) notorious crescents in 1993. As a Coventry lad, born and bred, who later lived in Manchester for some years, I was naturally keen to see if this drast
ic southward shift would prove successful. In the end, sadly, I felt it wasn’t.
I read in a question-and-answer slot (in the Radio Times, I think it was – or possibly in something more down-market which I paged through at the dentist) that you were on a Media Studies course at the Polytechnic College in Coventry for almost a year (I know they like to call them all ‘Universities’ nowadays, but they’re not kidding anybody, are they?). I wondered if this formative experience might have been a factor in your choice of a new location?
Either way, it seems you didn’t enjoy the academic life and headed down to London to work as a runner for a film company before later moving into advertising where you worked on campaigns for Dairylea Cheese Triangles, and, later, Dove moisturizing underarm deodorant (I can’t distinctly recall the adverts for either of these products, although I do remember partaking of the odd cheese triangle when my children were young, and while they weren’t anything spectacular they were certainly perfectly edible).
Not only did I grow up in Coventry, but (cue the drum roll!) my father was the caretaker on a housing estate near the city centre for several years! I have extraordinarily strong childhood memories of the post-war geography of the town, and was a first-hand witness to the radical changes that took place from the late 1950s onwards (although I was lucky enough to move further north in 1964).
I won’t pretend that there is much of the Coventry I knew so well as a boy present in your TV series – or, indeed, of the Manchester I knew later on in your books. It’s obvious where the gaps in your knowledge are, but I like to think that this isn’t simply a lack of good, detailed research on your part, but rather an author’s artistic prerogative to reinvent a location (or setting) to better explicate their character and their plot.
When it comes to the ‘caretaking’ aspect of the books, I also have (as mentioned above) a special insight into this particular area of endeavour, although of course my father, Ken, was nothing like Tim Trinder; he didn’t suffer from childhood polio, for starters (his hand was not malformed, and he didn’t walk with a limp), nor was he given to dramatic flights of fancy on the job. He was, as you might expect, a very sensible, responsible member of the Coventry community (a stalwart of the Rotary Club), a much liked local figure with a great talent for plumbing (something he later exploited by becoming a plumber, full-time).
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