The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

  I’m not being insulting by the way. It was an actual clown, and he certainly ruined my chances of the Messi shirt. The fact that one of the re-animated corpses should be dressed as a scary clown and have access to a chainsaw is puzzling too. It’s almost as if he knew he was going to get roped into an assault on a Manchester fairground. (Incidentally, if you really do want to see a cracking oddball zombie horror set in Manchester and the Lake District, seek out Jorge Grao’s wonderfully barmy Spanish Italian 1974 cult classic movie The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue.)

  As you’ve surmised, there doesn’t seem to be a coherent narrative. Essentially it boils down to a shedload of zombies running amok and terrorising random civilians and screaming nurses. From what I can see, the few who do get cornered by one, perhaps by the hook-a-duck stall, or the one where chucking balls at a target could win you a large pink orang-utan, get taken away to a sort of M.A.S.H. type triage centre and made up as zombie recruits. I don’t want this to happen to me, because I have my eye on the iPad mini top prize at said hook-a-duck stall, where one of the lesser prizes is four isotonic drinks. I don’t win – it seems impossible – but I do have a nice chat to the smiley lady stall holder and a bit of a play with her small feisty Jack Russell, neither of whom seem put out by the full-scale zombie apocalypse happening all around them.

  The rummest element of a fairly rum set up is that in the midst of all this fantasy military versus bloodthirsty zombies stuff, the actual army are here recruiting. The reservists of the Queen’s Own Yeomanry no less. Well, I guess we’ll need to call up the TAs in the event of a zombie apocalypse so it’s as well to be prepared. They ask us if we want a go in their armoured car, which strikes me as a brilliant way of getting you to join up. Sadly it’s probably more effective letting you fire off a few imaginary rounds at a stampeding mob of mutants than showing you a film about building a new well for a village in Burkina Faso. The guy from the Yeomanry, a chubby little fellow with glasses and a cap with a feather on, says that they can’t use the actual rear mounted machine gun ‘for reasons of space’. I would have thought it was for reasons of ‘not killing a load of people in a mass carnage’ but I let this pass.

  In theory, you could have four hours of this, but I think – fun though it was – an hour was about enough, especially since it was raining so you couldn’t go on the outdoor rides. This was a real shame as I quite fancied going on the giant teacups with a bloke with one eye dangling out on his optic nerve and a gangrenous face. As we leave, my friend Helen nonchalantly steps over a drooling halfwit zombie lying on the ground who swipes at her ankle with a bloodied stump. She carries on chatting unperturbed. ‘Wow,’ I say, ‘didn’t you see that?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replies, ‘but I’m from Clitheroe. All the fairs are like this up there …’

  Clitheroe is certainly ‘up there’. It overlooks the Ribble Valley, the town on the rocky hill, as its Anglo–Saxon name ‘Clyderhow’ tells us; a name that survived even when their reign didn’t. Invading Norman Roger De Lacy made the town his fiefdom and built the smallest Norman keep in England there, which on a winter night feels colder than the Urals and just as steeped in dark and bloody history. From the Pendle Witches to the haunted pubs of the Trough of Bowland, this is spooky, darkest Lancashire, a county which, according to historian Rachel Hasted, was once ‘fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the church was honoured without much understanding of its doctrines by the common people’

  Clitheroe and Pendle’s dark past has been Lancashire lore and legend for centuries, but turning it into a marketable leisure proposition is another of our local innovations. Clitheroe tourist literature positively revels in this saturnine side of its character. It tells you as proudly of the haunted stepping stones over the Ribble, which every seven years drown an unsuspecting traveller, as it does of the award winning Byrne’s wine store and, my favourite, Cowmans Famous Sausage Shop with its 75 different varieties of succulent banger.

  This kind of thing – the ghosts, not the sausages – lured the team behind the wonderfully silly Most Haunted TV show to Clitheroe, and, in its wake, great swathes of nutjobs – sorry dedicated paranormal researchers – have beat an uphill path to the town. My browsing eye was caught instantly by ‘Scariest Demon Ever Actually Caught On Tape’ in which two lads from Dorset – who seem to have made 58 of these short films previously so you have to admire their commitment – went at night to ‘Cliffrow Carstle… home of many hauntins and light anomarlies an that’ and, what a stroke of luck, seem to find some blood and evidence of a demon he spots in the keep ‘just wandrin around’. (I hate phonetic transcriptions of local accents but here, I think, it adds to an appreciation of the film.)

  ‘If there’s a spirit here now, could you just, err, stand in that li’l archway over there. We’ve come all this wayter speak to you … and it’d be brilliant if you could just wave or summink … it’d be really amazing if you could do that …’ Something then jumps out of the dark at them – we don’t see this and we only have their word for it – and, with a shriek, the camera goes black. (‘I apologise to the viewers but my ’and must have arcidentally touched the arff button.’) As a finale, the lads use a shortwave radio to try and pick up what are called in the trade EVP (Electric Voice Phenomena), and in among what are clearly random bursts of BBC Lancashire and Clitheroe Cabs, we are told (via captions) that the ghosts are relaying messages such as ‘Kill me’, ‘I silenced you’ and ‘Ahmed’. To me, these sounded more like ‘car fourteen’, ‘half past two’ and, yes, ‘Ahmed’, who probably works late shifts at BBC Lancashire or Clitheroe Cabs.

  I’m headed up towards that castle now, though, silhouetted a menacing black against the gathering dusk. An unnaturally cold night everyone is saying, and there’s rain in the chill wind that comes in from Pendle Hill. A rook caws, perched in a mossy arrow-slit in the ancient crenelated wall, and as I near the keep, I see a figure awaiting me. It is a man dressed in antique funeral dress, a top hat, a cravat, and a frock coat flapping like a bat wing in the wind. It is a strange, unearthly sight, full of foreboding. But I am not afraid, because I rang him up a couple of days ago and asked him to meet me here at seven o’clock on Tuesday.

  Simon Entwistle does all this stuff properly, with thoroughly researched and superbly told tales of sinister history and macabre folklore. He is a genial man, at odds with his morbid attire, and he notices me shivering. ‘Unnaturally cold, isn’t it?’ he says, with a twinkle.

  In his previous life (though not literally) Simon was a groundsman in the town with a passion for history. Making small talk as we enter the castle grounds, he mentions that he lost out by one vote on becoming mayor but as his wife hated the idea of being mayoress, she was delighted. An American friend said ‘you’re in the wrong job’, and he decided to turn that passion for history into work, at first informally and now very successfully.

  His astute wife told him, with his knowledge and flair, he should cash in on the Most Haunted team’s seven days visit and so he did, doing 15 tours that week for 100 people at a time. He had arranged for a friend to jump out from behind a gravestone at a certain point in his tour, but his mate stayed put, gazing at the sky and claiming, ‘I saw a spaceship.’ Similarly, erstwhile resident Scouse medium of Most Haunted Derek Acorah said that one of the nearby houses was ‘full of aliens’. Here, Simon does a really rather good impression of Derek and later I see from his website that he has a sideline in an ‘uncanny knack of impersonating accents, and people, and can also create some unbelievably realistic sound effects. Chainsaws, machine guns, horses, dentist drills, strangled dogs, passing trains’, etc.

  As he cautions me away from the edge of the keep, he tells me that he couldn’t do the gravestone stunt now even if his mate was up for it, and the skies were clear of UFOs. Health and safety has put a stop to such malarkey, and Simon’s tours now have public liability insurance of a million pounds. We’re standing looking down on the pretty little town. There’s bunti
ng up, but the streets are deserted. It’s charming but perhaps a little spooky, especially if you’re on a ghost walk. Simon disabuses me of any sinister notions though. ‘Despite all the history and the stuff I talk about, Clitheroe has the lowest crime rate in the north. It’s quite a right-wing town though. When some local kid with a joint was arrested, the local paper headline was “Drug Baron Captured!”’

  Across the town, over the rooftops, through a lowering mist, you can see the green heathery bulk of Pendle Hill, along with Saddleworth Moor, surely the hill with the darkest history in the north. I can’t do justice to the whole strange and horrific tale of the Pendle Witches in a paragraph, but in essence, in 1612, 12 local women were tried as witches, found guilty and executed, victims of a combination of state sexism, the devious patriarchy of men like Justice of the Peace Roger Nowell, local infighting, corrupt officialdom, religious fundamentalism and the mental instability of some of the accused.

  In the shadow of the hill lie the little villages where these events took place. In one of them, Roughlee, they’ve erected a statue to one of the most famous victims, Alice Nutter, and in 2012 hundreds of people, some dressed as witches, marched up the hill to commemorate the women, much to the concern of the bishop of Burnley. Local MP Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, was petitioned to pardon the women, but this was refused. Astonishingly, the convictions stand.

  The same year, writer and local girl Jeanette Winterson published a superb, coldly intense novella about the matter called The Daylight Gate. I ask Simon if he’s read it. ‘Oh yes,’ he says, with deep and evident admiration. Less nuanced maybe but more regularly visible than Winterson’s prose, all the events are commemorated in the black double-decker ‘Witch Way’ bus which serves the local area and bears the logo of a witch on a broomstick flying across the moon.

  Looking out from the keep at Pendle stands the statue of a First World War soldier, and Simon tells me the story of a young Great War infantryman who ‘had no gripe with the Germans’, and his widowed bride, that is more ordinary people’s history than a ghost story and very moving.

  In the wall of the keep itself, there’s a large ugly hole. Though the local kids say that the devil himself threw a stone at it, the truth is that it was a cannonball fired from across the fields during the English Civil War, something that reminds me of the richness of the stories in this little island. That hole, that wound that looks so raw and livid in the castle wall, was fired by a breaching cannon across those damp fields 500 years ago; the wall itself built by the de Lacy’s, warlike invading Frenchmen who live on in the names of local pubs. Down in the town stands a fine house called The Almonds. It is named after a family who were one of the 26 burgesses of the de Lacy’s, locals given good jobs to keep them onside. Then, half a millennium later, it was bought by local comedian Jimmy Clitheroe, a fifties star who renamed himself after the town and would drive through it regally in his Rolls-Royce.

  Simon and I turn and look the other way and into what would have been, until 1974, Yorkshire. A vale called Bashall Eaves is gorgeous but solemn in this failing light. Lonely now, it would have been even lonelier when, in 1934, a bachelor farmer called John Dawson was walking home one winter’s night from Edisford Bridge Hotel. He heard a click behind him and felt a tap on his back. Thinking not much of it he went home, had his supper and went to bed where he slept soundly.

  Next morning, his sheets were soaked in blood from a gaping wound in his back. Taken to hospital, a surgeon removed a small filed rod of hardened steel embedded four inches deep in his back. Three days later, Dawson was dead, and his murder remains unsolved, but was believed to be some bitter local feud, possibly over a girl.

  The community clammed up. ‘It was like talking to a brick wall,’ said the London detective in charge of the investigation. The subject is still taboo locally, and I wouldn’t say too much about it in the bar at the Edisford Bridge Hotel, which still exists. Indeed, a weird home-made gun, which may have been the murder weapon, was found in a barn next to the pub only a few years ago. Some of this new information came to light after the publication of a good book about the subject called Wall of Silence by Jennifer Lee Cobban, a local author. It’s out of print now but you can pick one up on eBay for 15 quid or so.

  We walk up Clitheroe High Street and past the Swan and Royal pub, which has entertained some famous residents in its day. Gandhi spent a night here while touring the Lancashire cotton mills, and Winston Churchill stayed when he came to see the world’s first jet engine built and designed in Clitheroe by Sir Frank Whittle.

  They had an undisturbed night’s sleep as far as we know. They were lucky. For years, the landlords of the inn received complaints about bedroom number five. Guests complained that the walls were too thin and regularly asked to be moved because they were constantly being woken by a baby crying until in 1957 renovation work took place in the hotel’s attic. Builders uncovered a parcel made up of a bundle of Victorian newspapers. A thick crust of dust covered the package and when it was unwrapped, the last sheet contained a baby’s skeleton. The newspaper was dated March 1879.

  I’m not going to relate all Simon’s stories because they’re good ones, he tells them brilliantly, and you should go on the walk for yourself. He peppers them with nice little coup de théâtre moments and I liked how detailed they are, without the kind of ‘many years ago’ vagueness that characterises the obviously false.

  It took a pint and a whisky chaser in the Swan with Two Necks in Pendleton to get me warm again. Mulling the ghost walk and waiting for my pie and chips, I thought about those two strains in our character, and how you could argue that they are there in how we work and live and how we play. It’s a very northern mix I think, the chilly and the cheery, nights spent in laughter on streets full of ghosts. Every night when the Lancashire Evening Post and Chronicle arrived at my nana’s house (best headline, ‘Paper Knife Stolen’; best apocryphal headline, ‘Sir Vivian Fuchs Off To Antarctica’), she would turn to the ‘deaths’ bit of the ‘births, deaths and marriages’, just as some people might to the gossip columns or the sports pages, and read it with a grim smile of satisfaction, immersed in life’s miseries and the passing of her friends.

  As Morrissey sang on ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’, ‘In the midst of life, we are in death … etcetera … etcetera etcetera etcetera’. We know just what he means with that stony northern mix of the maudlin and the matter of fact. Stan Laurel, the comic genius of Ulverston, said to his doctor on his deathbed that he wished he were skiing. ‘I didn’t know you liked skiing, Stan,’ the nurse said. ‘I don’t,’ replied Laurel ‘but I’d rather be doing that than this.’

  Peter Tinniswood’s fabulous creation Uncle Mort put it like this, ‘I’ve got faith in the old tried and trusted values of the north of England. We’ll never give in. Come 2084, the north will be alive and kicking … with rampant gloom and despondency.’

  Uncle Mort’s gallows wit is a very northern trope, much more characteristic of us in its ruminative gloom than that of more infamous and stereotyped north country gagsters like Bernard Manning or Roy Chubby Brown. In truth, northern working-class humour is much stranger, much deeper than Manning’s arid hate or Brown’s coarseness. Their tone, for me, is much more that of London ‘funnymen’, more cocksure and belligerent, more Mike Reid than Al Read.

  Al Read, Sid Field, Frank Randle and Rob Wilton are now famous for their lack of fame, for the fact that while bolder and brasher voices like Max Miller, The Crazy Gang, Charlie Chester, Arthur Askey (who along with wisecracking smart alecs like Tarby and Stan Boardman prove that Scousers are different) and goofy but heroic Lancastrian George Formby were national treasures, Randle and Field’s comedy never made it south of Crewe station. Their style set a template for a kind of rueful if not entirely black humour rooted in the same world view that you can see in Lowry, Peter Tinniswood, Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood and more; the notion that life is a baffling, humiliating and unpredictable farce, bookended by silence, more usually sc
arred by work and family ties than improved by them, and made tolerable only by sex, beer, skiving and by the adopting of an absurdist whimsy in the face of it all that Camus would have approved of.

  A hangdog deadpan melancholy has always made us laugh up north. We find failure and thwarted ambition touching and very funny, be it Victoria Wood’s desperate singleton Kelly Marie Tunstall, Alan Bennett’s Mum and her social gaucheness, or Eric Morecambe leaving quietly downstage for the number 72, rain-coated and crestfallen, a Larkin of the Last Bus.

  I can remember the silences that would descend on my living room of a seventies Saturday evening whenever a cockney comic would appear on the big variety shows of the day. ‘Flash Harry type’ would be the disapproving conclusion, in the same withering and dismissive tone of voice reserved for flamboyant Chelsea wingers or celebrity hairdressers.

  Max Miller, Jim Davidson, Mike Reid, Sid James, with their crass sexual boasting and desire to get one over on the other guy, rang utterly false to us. They are show-offs, braggarts, the kind of bloke we avoid in the pub.

  Peter Kay, the most successful and quintessentially northern comedian of his generation, may be the last word in ebullience. But his humour is that of limited horizons and the trials of the everyday, and based on painfully accurate domestic detail, such as getting the mismatched ‘emergency chairs’ out when the relatives come round at Christmas, the dexterity with the remote control needed to book cheap holidays off Ceefax, or your dad’s early eighties pride in his green leatherette cases for his video cassettes. Kay’s sometime colleague Dave Spikey has a joke I love: ‘I once got a puncture in a place called Hindley Green, on the outskirts of Wigan. I pulled into the garage and said, “Have you got an Airline?” He said, “Piss off, we’ve not even got a bus station.”’ This is funny wherever you come from. But if you’ve ever been to Hindley Green, it’s hilarious and a little tragic.