by F. G. Cottam
It had gone further than that, hadn’t it, he thought, sitting down to his fortifying mug of café tea. London in his younger life had been his vindication. The fact that he had prospered there and bought a home and found a wife and raised a family there and established a professional reputation had been the proof of him. He had arrived as a raw and provincial northerner and London had tested and challenged and then opened its welcoming and generous embrace to him.
He had believed the Johnsonian adage about the man who was tired of London being tired of life. But he did not believe it any more. The older you got, the more abrasive London became. Or perhaps it was just that the older you got, the less tolerance you had for London’s unchanging abrasiveness. As you matured and your values and responsibilities became inevitably different, aspects of the capital revealed themselves that were less and less easy to tolerate.
And the place was changing. The demographic was altering. The Guardian was James Greer’s newspaper of choice. But he had eyes in his head.
Turkish drug gangs fought turf wars in Finsbury Park. Muslim kids from Pakistan had beaten up a Shoreditch vicar because they were affronted by a church they claimed should have been transformed into a mosque. It didn’t matter to them that the church had been consecrated in the eighteenth century. Their own faith had been set in stone much earlier than that. Now a group of Somali youths, schooled in the medieval ghetto values of Mogadishu, had beaten his son almost to death in Peckham for the sake of a mobile phone with a street worth of perhaps ten pounds.
It was called white flight, wasn’t it, the middle-class escape from this sort of urban pressure? That was the contemptuous name given it by the lofty liberal commentators who still set the tone in James Greer’s newspaper of choice. But he didn’t care. He really didn’t, not any more. He had tolerated the alternative for long enough. What had happened to Jack had been both a punishment and a warning. London had been very good to him and even more lavishly generous to Lillian. But they had changed. They had become vulnerable. And the city in which they had both lived the bulk of their adult lives had changed too. If they were not to risk becoming its victims, the casualties of its changed character and increasing hazards, they should exercise the luxury of the choice their prosperity had given them and simply leave.
He was down to the leaves of his tea. It was one of those places where the beverage was poured from the sort of steel communal pot they would have used in cafés just like this one seventy years ago in the London Blitz. He was seated on a tall stool at a narrow counter that ran the length of the window. Behind him he could hear market porters and cabbies and hospital orderlies debating the previous evening’s middleweight title fight. He could smell bacon frying and the pungent tartness of brown sauce smeared on warm plates. Outside, through the steamy glass, he could see the flagstones of the pavement glazed by the strengthening sun. Directly outside was a cast-iron lamp post, thickly painted in a municipal black and carrying a crest cast in Victorian times.
James Greer liked his Dickens and his Peter Ackroyd and he thought he knew what they were feeling when they celebrated London in their prose reveries. He shared the sentiment. He loved Gabriel’s Wharf and Hampstead Heath and the river at low tide at Chelsea Reach and the Tate Modern and the hung game and pewter light of Borough Market at Christmas time when the stalls smelled of mulled wine and freshly baked bread and biscuits spiced with cinnamon. But he could carry all of these things with him in his memory. It was time to leave. It was time for the sake of the kids, for the sake of all of them. The adventure of resettlement would be exactly what Jack would need to help with his recovery from the trauma of attack and injury.
His son would not make it back to school for what remained of his term, even if they elected to stay. It would soon be the summer holidays and the best time possible as far as schools were concerned to make the break. Children were adaptable. Both Jack and Olivia had good friends they would certainly miss. But they had their social networking sites so the loss would not turn to grief. And he did not think that Jack would miss the running gauntlet of his daily bus ride to the Peckham badlands.
When he thought about it, he did not honestly know how Lillian might react to his insistence that they uproot and leave. She had shared his sofa-born dreams of escape to somewhere at the seaside. They even subscribed to Coast magazine and had often spun verbal fantasies together about a wave-lapped refuge from their daily lives in Ventnor or Whitstable. But he did not know everything about his wife. In some ways she was unpredictable and in some ways unreadable.
After fifteen years together, Lillian was still capable of surprising him. It was, he supposed, one of the reasons why he retained the fascination with her he had held at the outset, when they had first met. It was an attribute that had helped keep their relationship fresh despite the mundanities of shared parenthood.
He thought that she might miss Starbucks and the gym. She was a pretty solitary individual socially. More accurately, they were rather self-contained and insular as a couple. He did not think she would particularly miss the people loosely regarded as her friends. What was certain was that as an illustrator, she was even better placed professionally than he was to live wherever they chose. The only question was whether he would be able to persuade her to do it.
He could not insist on the change. He was not the dominant partner. They were not really quite equals in their relationship. She earned more than he did. By any measure she was the more successful of the two of them. He might be able to persuade her to try a different sort of life and after what had happened to Jack he thought that she would certainly consider it seriously. But he could not dictate such radical and wholesale change in the pattern of their lives.
He looked at the leaves drying now in the bottom of his mug. The mug was a white, ceramic item and the leaves a green so dark they looked black. They formed a pattern that was dense and unreadable. But then James Greer did not believe the future could be read in tea leaves or crystal balls or tarot cards or anything else. You determined your fate for yourself. You created your own destiny and you did it out of determination, ambition and force of will.
He thought of his unconscious son and it occurred to him that fate was decided most by need. His was compelling. Theirs was compelling. Their need for change was urgent. It was escape, of course. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. But it was something else, too. It was opportunity. It would not just be an adventure for Jack, but for the four of them.
A police officer was standing at Jack’s bedside when he returned to the hospital room. He was immaculately uniformed, bareheaded, around six feet tall, about thirty years of age and black. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Alec McCabe. They shook hands. McCabe looked him directly in the eye. They probably stressed the importance of eye contact on the courses they all did these days. The policeman had a firm handshake, but then he was powerfully built. James thought about all the articles he had read over recent years about institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. He wondered what rank McCabe would have achieved by now if he had been white.
‘They’ve left your son in a dreadful state. I’m very sorry, sir.’
‘Will you catch them?’
‘Catching them will be the easy part. Charging them will be a formality. Bringing a successful prosecution might be more difficult.’
James gestured at his son. ‘Why would it be? There’s no shortage of evidence of assault. It might even be a case of attempted murder.’
McCabe nodded. ‘I don’t wish to sound cynical, sir. But for some elements of the legal profession, recent human rights legislation has turned defending the sort of offenders who did this into a very lucrative industry. Bringing a prosecution will not be straightforward. Technically, your son’s assailants were boys. Even if they’re proven guilty at trial, even if the jury agrees, a custodial sentence isn’t guaranteed. They might even be on bail or parole or serving out community orders or under probationary supervision already. The
y’re feral. This will not be a first offence.’
‘Welcome to London in the twenty-first century,’ James said.
McCabe looked at the boy in the bed and raised an eyebrow.
‘You agree with me?’
‘I was born in Brixton, Mr Greer. I was raised just off Coldharbour Lane. I got out as soon as I could. I live with my wife and daughter in Kent. The commute’s a slog, costly in time and in money. But for my family, it’s worth it.’
‘Feral, Detective Sergeant,’ James said. ‘I’ve heard that description used twice now. What exactly does it mean?’
‘These youths are wild. They are literally untamed. It means that they never plan a crime and they never consider the consequences. Notions such as ownership and personal integrity are completely alien to them. They regard anything they want as theirs by right. They act without compunction. There was CCTV on the bus where the attack was carried out. The whole event will likely have been filmed. The cameras are supposed to be a deterrent. Nothing deters them, though.’
‘Can the film be used at the trial?’
‘If it doesn’t appear in public prior to the trial and thus pose a potential threat to judicial fairness. If footage appears on YouTube or if stills are used in newspapers pre-trial, it won’t be allowed as evidence.’
James bit his lip and looked at the floor.
‘This gang will be known to our community officers on the ground in Peckham. But only locking them up in a barred cell with a locked steel door can really inhibit their behaviour. You can’t modify it. They have no understanding of or respect for the values we live by.’
‘For fuck’s sake, McCabe, why are they even here?’
The policeman shrugged. ‘They’re refugees from a war zone. They’ll likely have been granted asylum. They have their human rights.’
‘Then they have an obligation to behave like human beings.’
McCabe smiled and glanced at the boy in the bed. ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ he said. ‘And I will do everything I can to catch them and ensure that they are convicted.’
‘And subsequently deported?’
‘A conviction and a custodial is the very best you can hope for. The defence will argue that it breaches their human rights to send them back to the place that brutalised them in the first place and made them into what they are. I’ve dealt with several cases like this. The Home Secretary will say otherwise in a Newsnight soundbite, but he is lying when he does. There is no chance at all of repatriation.’
‘But your cases generally go to trial? Please tell me you have a good conviction rate.’
‘I do. I have an excellent conviction rate. I believe in what I do for a living and I’m good at it, sir.’
When DS McCabe had gone, James took out his laptop and did a search for Chubbly and Cruff. More accurately, he did a search for Chubbly & Cruff, because that ampersand seemed so much a part of the character of that particular publishing house. He remembered that the 1980s had been the age of the ampersand in marketing all those bogus heritage brands so popular then. Chubbly & Cruff sounded exactly like one of them, though the book on the shelf in the hospital room had been published in 1993.
There was absolutely nothing on the publisher when he did his internet search. Nor was there anything on the title Lillian had illustrated for them. James concluded that Chubbly & Cruff had been a short-lived project, probably the still-born brainchild of some marketeer in bright red braces and spectacles with oversize frames in matching colour. He glanced at Jack, who was still sleeping deeply. And he did a search for Brodmaw Bay itself. Here, he had immediate success. The little port was real. It was located on the southerly coast of Cornwall. Recent photographs showed it to be entirely unspoiled.
There was a fairly recent piece about the place, a sort of essay or meditation written by a man called Richard Penmarrick. It had been carried in a couple of the Sunday newspaper supplements and travel sections in the autumn of 2008 and appeared also, slightly annotated, in an issue of Reader’s Digest. Penmarrick was a local man, the piece implied of some standing in the Brodmaw community. His essay took the form of a tribute to the unchanging values of the place. James read it. When he had finished he glanced from his laptop screen to the bed and the still shape of his sleeping son. Then he read it again, more carefully.
I write these words from the desk of my library. The library is sited on the first floor at the front of my house and the house itself is sited on the rising ground to the rear of the Cornish coastal village of Brodmaw Bay. It is early morning. The window of my library runs the length of the room. Through it, I can see the boats returning with their nets hauled and their holds, I hope, full of freshly caught fish. The lead vessels lie low in the water, an encouraging sign.
I can hear the clatter of beer kegs on the cobbles as the draymen unload outside the cellar of the high street pub. A milkman on his rounds is whistling and the tune carries cleanly through the salt air. Above me, the gulls are gathering in the sky with familiar shrieks. The hoardings are coming off the shop fronts and I can see a string of pennants testing the breeze, fluttering as they rise on the flagpole above the chandlery. There is the hammering of nails into the teak planks of a hull in Billy Jasper’s seafront yard.
I’ve been pondering on the subject of tradition. The old traditions are dying out. In some places they have been revived for the sake of profit from tourism and exist as cheap parodies of what they once signified. Elsewhere, though, there is a general and persistent pattern of decline of custom and ritual that is perhaps inevitable, as populations, once isolated, succumb to the migratory shifts that seem so much a part of the way life is lived in our transient time.
There are exceptions to this new rule, of course. The bonfire parades come to mind, celebrated every November in the Sussex town of Lewes. Lewes lies only seven miles across the Downs from its garish modern neighbour, Brighton. But spend a Bonfire Night in Lewes and look at the faces in the torchlight processions and watch the nonchalant way even the children trail their burning cargos and parade their flaming torches through the streets. You are in an ancient English town. The mood and atmosphere are unmistakable and unique. You could not be anywhere else in the world at any other moment. Why would you wish to be?
So it is each April 30 in Brodmaw. Walpurgis Eve is a pagan celebration with its origins stretching murkily back to at least the eighth century. It might have begun in the Scandinavian countries much earlier than that. But it has been a tradition in Brodmaw for as long as surviving archives record and as far as local folk memory is able to recall. Mention of it was made by an irate cleric in the years immediately prior to the Norman Conquest. This pompous prior considered the public ritual an affront to the Almighty.
It might be said that in the intervening millennium nothing very much has changed. The established Church still frowns upon what it sees as the mischievous antics of the Walpurgis Eve pagans. In the ancient parts of Europe, the priests and ministers see the glow of the fires from their porches and shake their pious heads. Perhaps they see it as sacrilegious. Perhaps they simply resent the competition.
For my part, since the Brodmaw event is hosted on my land, I take a very different view. I see our April ritual as the innocent celebration of seasonal change. We light our great pyres and sing our cherished songs and dance the self-same steps as our forefathers did. There is comfort in familiarity and joy at the return of light and warmth to our little corner of the world. And when I look at my costumed neighbours, at their flushed faces as they recite with me in unison the words that greet our dawn, I am reminded of who and where I am. And I am pleased and fulfilled and rightly and completely unashamed.
Identity is a precious attribute, increasingly threatened by the promiscuous values of modern life. But I am a Brodmaw man, a Cornishman and an Englishman and proud. I would not lightly surrender the unique and ancient traditions that have helped shape me.
I am obliged at this point to confront the paradox of political correc
tness. In pleading the case for local custom, it seems in our intolerant times that any resident of any small town risks accusations of insularity. This is particularly true of a local landowner, such as I am guilty of being. But Brodmaw is an inclusive place. Visitors have always been warmly welcomed. Fresh blood is lifeblood, after all.
In championing tradition, I am not adopting the fortress mentality of the regional bigot. I am simply doing what it is in my power to do to preserve that which I most value. In a country criss-crossed by motorways and studded by the totemic masts of mobile phone networks, you might think the Little England of Chesterton and Brooke and Belloc and Housman gone for ever. But we still have it here in Brodmaw Bay, unsullied and somehow magical.
Some might disparage the very name and notion of Little England. But I do not. I cherish it. And I will do all in my power to preserve my piece of it.
James thought that Richard Penmarrick could only have written this article in response to some critical attack. Its tone was an uneasy mix of defensiveness and defiance. He did not really, personally, have an opinion on paganism. He had seen the druids at the summer solstice on the evening news at Stonehenge. The footage tended to raise a smile. He knew the old faith survived in the ancient parts of Britain marked by such enigmatic features as burial mounds and standing stones. Those features were found mostly in the western counties of England. Nowhere was more westerly than Cornwall.
He had been to the bonfire celebration in Lewes. His brother had lived there for a time. He had thought it entertaining and sinister in equal measure. But the Lewes event had its origin in Christian religious conflict and Protestant martyrdom. However bizarrely, it commemorated historic fact. By contrast, Walpurgis Eve was a black magical celebration, wasn’t it? Penmarrick’s comparison was at the least disingenuous. He was comparing chalk and cheese.