A few of the ewes and lambs were huddled by the remnants of a wall while the others watched him blankly from the edges of a pond ringed with holly bushes. He followed the stream that tumbled away into a ravine, troubled by every loose stone, beset with fear, he said, that he should soon become like the poor animal that he saw down in the chasm, fallen from the steep terraces of grass.
In time and with careful footsteps, he reached the valley floor and picked his way across the marshland, heading for the farmhouse that came and went in the drifting cloud. The shepherding family had given him no more than a stranger descending off the moors could have expected, but he was glad of the bread and the apple and the shelter of the hay barn until the storm passed over. And when it did, and the sunlight returned and the birds began to sing in the Wood, he knew that God had wanted him to see this wild garden. That He would bless a man who brought others here to work.
When Arncliffe wrote to Edgar Denning requesting to lease some of the land in the valley in order to build a fulling mill, the wine merchant was amused as much as he was bewildered that anyone should want to try and do business in such a place, and he was happy to part a fool from his money. But that August afternoon he’d been driven from the moors, Arncliffe had watched the river coursing with a determined power as it moved through the rocks and trees, running faster still when it came to a place of deep ferns that the farmers called Underclough. Even a layman could see how its strength might be conducted through the wheel and the shaft and the cog and make a mill here a going concern. There was good trade to be had on this side of the Pennines, too. The finished cloth could be easily transported to Preston and Liverpool and Manchester, and there were a dozen other market towns within half a day’s ride that he could sell to.
In 1813, when the mill was nearing completion, Arncliffe built Syke House for himself and his wife and children and the Nine Cottages for his workers, whom he drew from the West Riding villages impoverished by the war with France. Skilled men and women going hungry through lack of bread and lack of work. There’d been riots over food in Sheffield and Leeds and he could understand, even if he couldn’t condone, the Luddites going armed into mills to butcher the machines that had taken jobs from strong hands and nimble fingers. Good cloth, said Arncliffe, should have passed through hands from start to finish: from the shepherd shearing the fleece to the merchant teasing the fabric with his thumb. He vowed that he would have nothing in his mill more mechanical than a set of water-powered fulling stocks. The rest of the process would be driven solely by human muscle.
The women pricked their fingers on the tenterhooks and had palms chapped to bleeding by cold water yet not one of them complained. And the dressers he employed to finish the nap might have winced and rubbed in their liniment, but each was secretly proud of having a wrist bent out of shape by years of using the heavy shears; their cropper’s hoof. To them, said Arncliffe, it was a disfigurement of the upmost beauty, like the bound feet of Chinese courtesans.
The mill thrived, as Arncliffe had prayed it would. Each morning, pleats of weavers’ cloth would arrive to be washed of their claggy oils with soap and soda, urine and clay. The fulling stocks beat out the hours of the shift, and each shift was recorded in yards processed. Weekly totals grew into quarterly figures and then to an annual summation that affirmed a healthy profit margin. Enough for Arncliffe to turn his attention to his village, in particular the little church. He dated it to before the Reformation, perhaps a place for the monks who’d come to collect firewood to pray and feel assured that God was watching over them.
Damp had moulded the walls and the missing pieces in the simple arch of stained glass let in finches and sparrows that had built nests in the rafters and turned the chancel into an aviary. It was clear that the renovations would be expensive but it was necessary that his workers should have somewhere to give thanks to the true father who had liberated them from hunger and indigence. That it was called St Michael’s was no coincidence either; churches on the edges of these lonely places were often dedicated to the Archangel, he noted. And here it was like a glimmer of light beside the huge darkness of the moorland.
∾
When the service ended, we carried the Gaffer out of the church and the Burkitts lowered him into the grave along with all the usual thous and thees and ashes and dust. A little wooden box of soil did the rounds and each of us peppered the lid of the coffin, which was strangely small now that it was deep in the earth.
Laurel sniffed into a handkerchief and Liz comforted her. Bill put his hand on Dadda’s shoulder. Kat squeezed my arm. Grace watched the Burkitts rolling up the towelling straps they’d used to steady the coffin’s descent and fiddled with the locket around her neck.
Perhaps it was looking at all the long faces, or it was the seriousness of the whole thing, but she started to laugh.
‘Quiet, Grace. Show some respect,’ said Liz, nudging her and looking over at the villagers who had all turned their attention to a noise they hadn’t expected to hear. Laughter during a burial was as strange in the ear as a dirge at a christening.
‘What’s the matter, Grace?’ said Angela. ‘What’s so funny?’
Grace tried to clench her bottom lip in her teeth, but it quickly slipped out and she laughed again, snorting in her nose.
‘Jesus, Grace,’ said Liz. ‘That’s enough.’
‘I’ll take her across to the pub,’ said Angela, steering Grace down the path, following those from the village who’d started to drift off to the wake.
Kat watched them, wondering if she ought to go too.
‘Sorry, Tom,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t know what’s got into her lately.’
‘It’s the change,’ said Laurel. ‘Like I said.’
‘Perhaps when our Jeff gets back she’ll settle down,’ said Bill.
‘She’d better,’ said Liz. ‘I mean imagine laughing here. What the hell is wrong with her?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Dadda. ‘It’s not as if the Gaffer can hear her now, is it?’
He moved away from the grave first and then the rest of us followed him across the road to the Croppers’ Arms.
∾
It was a place of grubby anaglypta and carpets the same shade and smell as dishwater. The pendulum clock by the cigarette machine was as pissed in its timekeeping as the men who wandered in every afternoon and stayed until midnight with their dinners and their wives going cold at home. Rusty handsaws and billhooks, horse-brasses and crooked oil paintings of men in red hunting jackets hung on the walls. Above the bar, a pair of antique blunderbusses yawned at each other, their trumpets dull with dust.
The lounge bar was hazed with smoke and by the time Kat and I were through the crowd of black suits near the door, Dadda and Bill were already halfway into a scotch that the landlord, Brian Anderton, had given them on the house. He’d run the pub since before I was born with his wife, Eileen, a sumptuously proportioned, green-eyed Irish woman who often infiltrated my filthy adolescent dreams.
‘Over here, love,’ Laurel called, and waved Kat to go and sit with her and Angela and the others. Grace had stopped laughing now and sat quietly spinning the locket on its chain as Liz scolded her about some muck she’d got on the sleeve of her dress.
‘Go on, Kat,’ I said. ‘I won’t be long.’
I made my way to the bar, receiving comforts from the girls with pineapple hair-dos who worked at the abattoir and then the wrinkled Dewhursts, Parkers and Wards.
‘Well, at least he had a decent innings.’
‘Glad the owd sod went peacefully.’
‘He’d have been pleased with the turnout, wouldn’t he, John?’
All of them were hopes for their own endings, of course. We all want to live to a good age, but not decrepitude; not colostomy bags and puréed dinners. We all like to imagine ourselves white-haired and sane, unafraid of death, brown as a shoe, touching the hands of our nearest and dearest as we slip into eternal sleep. We want to go before we have time to know we’r
e gone, as if under anaesthetic. I hope it was like that for the Gaffer. I like to think that if he had realised his heart had stopped beating, then it was only for a second.
∾
The bar of the Croppers’ Arms was built in a U-shape that allowed Brian and Eileen to move between the lounge and the small tap room, which for as long as I could remember had been under the sole occupancy of the slaughtermen. They tolerated some of the scrotum-faced Methuselahs who came in for the comfortable chairs by the fire, but no one else set foot in there. Apart from the Gaffer who, after he’d finished playing cards, would drift in and ruffle their feathers, flashing his winnings or tapping them up for a drink, depending on the outcome of the games of whist and cribbage.
Looking over, I could see that Jason Earby and Mike Moorcroft were drinking with the other men just off shift. It was incredible to think that Mike was the foreman of the cold store now, a man of authority and executive power. Monkey Moorcroft. The lump of a lad that we used to follow around the playground scratching our armpits when he wasn’t looking. We’d always assumed that he would end up marrying Janet Abbot—or Janet of the Apes, on account of her hairy forearms—but she’d been one of the few from my class who’d escaped the valley as soon as they could (even if it was only as far as Accrington) and Monkey had shackled himself to Tracey Parker instead.
She’d been friends with Claire Eaves, who still lived on New Row and worked in the admin office at the abattoir with Irene Dewhurst, who used to let boys put their fingers down her knickers at the Midsummer Fair in exchange for sweets. Their manager was the often-spoonerised Kelly Smith, who—cruel gods—had halitosis and a lisp.
Finally noticing that I was there, Jason and Monkey gave the slightest acknowledgement that they remembered me—that quiet, friendless streak of piss from the Endlands whom Lennie Sturzaker once battered in the churchyard—and went back to eviscerating Davy Wigton about his lack of girlfriend, his lack of prospects, his lack of everything.
They were one of the reasons I left the valley, Jason Earby, Monkey Moorcroft, the Sturzakers. Not because they hounded me out or anything like that, but because it frightened me how easily they’d settled for so little. They’d married girls from school—Sam somehow netting the studious, sensible Cheryl Beckfoot—and followed their fathers into the abattoir as instinctively as the pigs followed each other in from the lairage to the killing floor. And sure enough, Earby, Moorcroft and Sturzaker senior were also there in the tap room, playing darts in a haze of smoke.
‘He’s got a fuckin’ nerve,’ said Bill, knocking back the rest of his scotch.
Dadda turned from assembling a roll-up on the bar.
‘Who?’ he said.
‘Who?’ said Bill. ‘Ken fuckin’ Sturzaker. Who do you think?’
‘It’s a free country,’ said Dadda.
‘He knew we’d be here,’ said Bill.
‘He can have a drink if he wants, can’t he?’ said Dadda. ‘Anyway, it’s not a day for falling out with folk. Just leave it.’
Bill shook his head as loud laughter came from the tap room and someone started the jukebox going.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘There’s a bloody wake going on in here.’
A few faces looked over but quickly went back to their conversations.
‘At least turn it down a bit, lads, eh?’ said Dadda.
Jason and Monkey ignored him and carried on taunting Davy until Ken Sturzaker came to the bar.
‘Didn’t you hear the man?’ he said. ‘Have some fuckin’ respect. Go and sit over there.’
They stopped laughing and looked at us before squeezing in with the other men at the table by the fireplace.
‘Switch it off, eh, Brian?’ said Sturzaker, and Brian felt around behind the cardboard rack of peanuts for the socket where the jukebox was plugged in.
The music cut out to complaints that Sturzaker quickly subdued. He’d been at the abattoir for so long that his word went on most things, in and out of work. He was a small, ratty man, but it would have been unwise to dismiss him as a weakling; he’d boxed at bantamweight in his younger days and hadn’t lost the hardness in his fists.
‘I heard about the fire,’ he said across the bar. ‘Sounded like you had your work cut out.’
‘We managed,’ said Dadda.
‘Any idea what started it?’ said Sturzaker.
‘You mean who,’ said Bill.
Sturzaker smiled and sipped his pint.
‘Sounds like you’ve got summat on your mind, Bill,’ he said, lighting up.
‘Do I?’ said Bill.
‘Aye,’ said Sturzaker. ‘You don’t seem your usual cheery self.’
‘Well, I am at a wake,’ said Bill.
‘My commiserations,’ said Sturzaker, lifting his glass. ‘He were a game owd lad, I’ll give him that much. Your Jeff not with you?’
‘He’s working away,’ said Bill.
‘Is that what he calls it?’ said Sturzaker. ‘Last thing I heard it weren’t just barrels of beer he were shifting up and down the country.’
‘Well, you heard wrong then, didn’t you?’ said Bill.
‘Whatever you say,’ Sturzaker said, and took another mouthful of stout.
Like all the male Sturzakers, he’d never seemed entirely well. His father had died young from tuberculosis, and middle age had brought Ken intermittent bouts of bronchitis. His eldest son, Sam—Jeff’s inept partner in crime—had venous, translucent skin, his eyes afflicted with the bulbousness of someone born prematurely. And Lennie, of course, hadn’t been able to run more than ten yards before he was struggling for breath.
All the Sturzakers lived together in the end house of New Row along with the dogs that Ken bought and sold to make a bit of money on the side. How they’d all survived this long without killing one another was difficult to imagine. But they were like so many others in Underclough, preferring to scrape by than chance it anywhere else. They didn’t leave, or couldn’t leave, or lacked the courage to leave, and relished the gossip that returned to the valley about those whose escape had ended in failure: the Abbots’ eldest daughter, Susan, sister of the hirsute Janet, had been mugged at knifepoint in London as she walked home from work one night; Terry Anderton, Brian and Eileen’s son, had gone off to make his fortune in Blackpool and ended up drinking himself to death. For two weeks, he’d lain in his North Shore flat before the hum of flies brought a policeman’s shoulder to his front door. Life away from the valley wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He shouldn’t have bothered. He should have stayed put.
No doubt they would have thought the same about me if they’d known how I’d been at the school all term. Distracted, forgetful, late.
So much so, that not long before the half-term holidays, I’d been summoned to the head’s office after the last bell of the day.
‘I’ve had a letter, John,’ Sweeting said. ‘From a parent.’
He didn’t like letters from parents. Letters from parents usually made ripples. And ripples spread.
‘It’s Mrs Weaver,’ he said. ‘Nicholas’s mother. She’s rather unhappy.’
‘About what?’
‘Nicholas has told me on a number of occasions that Mr Pentecost has not arrived on time for lessons and that the lessons themselves have been found wanting,’ Sweeting read from the letter.
He took off his glasses and sat back in the chair, waiting for me to speak. When I didn’t reply, he sighed and shook his head.
‘It’s just not like you, John,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been so—’ he flapped his hand like a fin as he searched for the right word—‘straightforward. I’ve always been able to rely on your levelheadedness.’
Part of me was convinced that it wasn’t only the references I’d got from a notoriously unruly comprehensive in Ipswich that had persuaded him to give me the job but that I’d been employed on the strength of my accent too. Sweeting had been brought up in Sheffield and he was proud of telling people that his father had spent thirty years in the steelwo
rks, his mother thirty-five engraving cutlery. His vowels might have been flattened during his scholarship to Cambridge but he was, at heart, a northern working-class boy, and felt himself allied to me in some way.
For him, my accent contained a promise of the worldly, nononsense teaching that Churchmeaders needed, bubble-wrapped in privilege as they were. Foreman-like, I’d stand in my blue coat with a clipboard and stopwatch and oversee the lads’ edification from Goods Inward to the final buff of the sleeve on the way out of the showroom.
‘You know it’s not uncommon for people to burn out in this job,’ Sweeting said, practising the bedside manner he’d learned on his management course the previous week. ‘Even young men like yourself can lose their way a little.
‘If that’s how you feel,’ he went on, ‘there are certain—’ flap flap—‘mechanisms in place which can put you in front of a professional trained in these sorts of things.’
I told him I was fine. Only I wasn’t. But how could I have begun to explain why I wanted to go back to the Endlands? And what I owed everyone there.
∾
When he came back from taking his turn at the dartboard, Sturzaker looked at me.
‘It must seem a world away from you now, all this,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet you’re glad you don’t live here any more.’
‘I’ve not forgotten the place,’ I said.
‘Was that your lass you came in with?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Pretty, isn’t she, Bill?’ he said and pursed his lips. What he wouldn’t give.
Bill started to speak for me and Dadda shook his head to stop him.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Take the drinks over. I’ll be there in a minute.’
Bill looked over at Sturzaker. ‘You tell your Vinny I’ll be coming to have a word with him,’ he said.
Sturzaker watched him go and shook his head.
‘My condolences, Tom,’ he said.
‘Aye, well, he were eighty-six,’ said Dadda.
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