Nameless voices crying for kindness

I signed on in Farnshaw at twelve and phoned Grant to ask him if he wanted to go for a drink.

While waiting in the dole office I noticed my old English teacher Mr. Giles sitting there—Jeremy told me later that he’s been made redundant after taking secondment for a year. I didn’t get a chance to speak to him.

I met Grant by St. Anne’s and we went for a drink at the Albert Hotel down Moxthorpe Road and had four pints there listening to “Pyjamara,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Suffer Little Children” repeatedly on the jukebox—this last song has been banned by some shops because of its Moors Murders subject matter. We went on to the Builder’s Arms (PIL, Hendrix) before walking home to listen to more music - Beefheart and The Fugs second album this time. The latter is an excellent record.

Grant mentioned as an aside that John Peel played a track by the (now defunct) Eat People on his show last night. Grant and the band recorded the track for inclusion on a compilation LP of bands from Phases back in February—he came up from Gloucester to a studio in Whincliffe especially. The LP is out now and John Peel played Eat People’s sole contribution at 11.30 p.m. last night, much to Grant’s surprise, who was listening in bed at the time.

He said it was an odd and slightly embarrassing experience hearing himself singing on national radio; he now thinks the band’s stuff is fairly undistinguished and he agreed with me when I said it sounded very much like the Birthday Party. He even conceded that such was his admiration at one stage he’d made a conscious attempt to sound like Nick Cave. . . .
He left about five. Mum and Dad came back and Dad later told me of his amusement at the way Grant had asked him for a light, with exaggerated politeness and awkward words. Nanna P. was brought across in the evening, and although she was quieter than usual, she was OK. Andrew rang later too. He’s back in the UK after his Denmark trip and is talking about America now.

An end to all that

Lee got back last night and I called round to see him.

He was noticeably quiet and subdued but seemed to perk up when out of the house. As we waited for the bus into Easterby he told me Ian has come back from Marrakech bronzed and sunswept, only to discover that Gav and co. had "borrowed" £150-worth of his dole money while he was away. The squalor of the Philip St. squat continues, as does Alex’s detention in police custody pending charges about the stolen skull.

Lee tentatively suggested we “find somewhere else,” which I’ve been advocating all summer—he’s always refused to consider this as he feels bad about leaving Mrs. Coldwater-Hicks’s son with the mess of Gav, etc. I just wish we’d crossed this bridge weeks ago as I’ve got the new term looming ahead with all still to do.

I feel overwhelmed.

On top of all this, Lee showed me a letter from Seeboard demanding either a guarantor or £90 to keep the electric for the top floor of the grey house. This seemed like the final straw, the effort needed to sort out the hassle just too much . . .  So we—Lee, Ian and I, and possibly Stu and Gareth—must find somewhere new and soon.

Lee’s brought the nicked oscilloscope up from Watermouth to flog. An end to all that. Our striped jersey, swag bag days are over, an odd feature of life at Jervis Terrace and the Vicarage, now gone in a new regime of moderation and stability.

I came home with Dad at three and telephoned Watermouth DHSS to see if I could sign on up here, spinning a yarn about needing to look after a sick relative. It worked, and now I don’t have to travel 600 miles just to sign a scrap of paper.

Dad seems to be in a better mood today, limiting himself to a single despairing tirade against the “evil and ugly” McGahey who “deserves to be hanged.” He speculates that McGahey is waging war on Coal Board boss MacGregor because of ancient clan differences—“I bet that’s it! I’ll bet McGahey’s a Campbell !” I couldn’t believe it.

I wore my recovered coat today—I’d given it up for lost. . . .

Dole

Stu came down with me in the morning to sign on and he and I bumped into Guy in town.

We met Lindsey and Mo in the Frigate at one; Mo was all tanned and smiling, just back from France.

Middle class revolt

This morning Dad gave me a lift up to Admiral Street and I signed on for the last time. I was anxious in case I met anyone from the RCP again (they’ve been harassing one of Lee’s friends), so I slipped into the office and out again very quickly, but the coast was clear.

In the car back I was congratulating myself; it’s so stupid, this self-inflicted anxiety. I’ll be OK now until Barry or Carl Cotton dredge the unpleasant sensations back to the surface and I have to face them again . . .

Dad went up to Nanna B.’s in the afternoon. She rang earlier to ask if he'd take her to Gillrigg to visit a friend; he’d intended giving her a run out, but not taking her all the way to Gillrigg, and so for half an hour or so before he set off I was treated to his aggrieved complaints about the selfishness of his mother: “If I ever get like that you have my permission to get rid of me.”

Yet he takes it all lying down. He says this is because there’ve been countless rows between her and us in the past and he wants no more, but his desire for general calm has led him into a cul-de-sac of personal misery. Both he and Mum are burdened by their respective mothers.
Our relatives seem such a drag. I dislike most of them.

With a sigh, Dad set off, dropping me in Farnshaw so I could go to the dry cleaner’s. It was very pleasant just wandering about in the mild air, everything seeming very leisurely and unhurried, but my journey was unsuccessful (half-day closing) and I had to walk home empty-handed.

After a bright start, the day has degenerated and it’s colder. Rain threatens. There’s a big dispute going on in the pages of the Echo and on local news over the introduction of halal meat into Easterby Schools. To pre-stun or not to pre-stun? There’s much debate over the morality of animal suffering and the “cheek” of minority groups “imposing their alien cultures on the majority,” and thereby (presumably) subverting white Protestant England.

It’s a pretty immaterial question really. The smug millions whose consciences are eased because “at least my Sunday joint doesn’t cause anyone any suffering” should take the time to visit an abattoir and see the room where the animals die, watch the skilled killers at work and smell the stink of fear and crap and blood. But all this said, vegetarianism smacks of odd priorities to me. I wonder how many bask in muesli-ridden middle-class meat-less self-righteousness unmindful of the millions who die worse than animals in other, larger slaughter houses across the globe? But I’m no different and the fact that I eat meat doesn’t separate me out from the vegetarians because I’m as blind to the world’s problems as anyone.

I dislike the naïve tone of this sermon-rant, and really it’s no big anger that seizes me, just the merest of thoughts.

I don’t mention any of this with a view to saying ‘stop’ in any real, practical sense, but merely to acknowledge that all ‘civilization’ is the flimsiest of foils, and that civilization's sustaining principles are those of crass ignorance and brutality. Billions of devotees take these to heart and uphold them with a savage loyalty. What hope is there for man as a whole? We’re all cut off from one another anyway, in real terms. . . .

And with this, I’ll climb down from my podium because I’m going out to meet Deborah, Steve and Jeremy at The Moon Inn.

Tang

I rose blearily at eight-fifteen to catch the bus into town to sign on. Autumn definitely detectable in the air which was damp and chilly; I could almost smell the tang of foggy mornings and wet leaves.

As I made my way to the dole office, there was my RCP bogeyman Keith and his blond friend, selling the Next Step. “Hello Paul” he said, almost knowingly. I smiled weakly. He gave me a leaflet advertising a demo’ in Blackpool on September 5th, and asked me if I wanted to go.

I hedged. “Goodbye, I’ll see you on Saturday” I lied, both to him and to myself.

Lee and I made another unsuccessful trip to try get blood from the abattoir. It had turned into a warm and stifling day and the smell around the abattoir was worse than ever. It made Lee feel ill. I can see how the workers there must get hardened to it, for it was only our second trip bit the sight of drums full of sheep’s heads and blood trickling across the loading bays wasn’t quite as horrible as the day before.

In the evening it seemed as though the telephone never stopped ringing: cousin Nicola, Barry, a friend of Andrew’s, Jeremy . . . Barry told me he’s drawing £460 out of the bank soon to buy a synthesizer and next year he and a friend who’s coming down to live in Watermouth are getting a group together.

He’s been working most of the summer apart from a fortnight in Spain (“no drugs”). Andrew’s mate treated me like an old friend. I told him Andrew was now in London and he said he remembered seeing me at Andrew’s party in ‘82). He's now living in Watermouth and said, “maybe the three of us could get together sometime?”

Jeremy was full of his trip to see Ms. Hirst.

Make no delay

Another day spent with Lee; he phoned me mid-afternoon and came round an hour later, supposedly to dye a shirt black, but that never got done. My cheerful optimistic mood continues.

We went down to Farnshaw and I cashed my dole cheque. We looked round the second-hand clothes shops but ended up in a cemetery which I’ve often noticed but never been in before. It stands on a small hill overlooking the railway station and Kirkgate and seems to have been completely overlooked.

There can’t be above fifty graves there, all of them black with soot, a few headstones but slabs laid flat mostly, inscribed with the names of the dead and with epitaphs reminding readers that we are mortal and must die too. Lee found one grave dating back to 1689 and a couple to the eighteenth century, but most seemed to be from the 1830s and 1840s. It seems incongruous to me that this plot of land has survived for three hundred years while all around it the world has changed

It’s a shame that it’s so neglected, overgrown and filled with rubbish. I went up to Farnshaw and bought a pen and some paper to write down some of the epitaphs:

All you who come my grave to see
As I am now so you must be
Prepare in time make no delay
I in full bloom was call’d away.

We wandered back via Douglas Mills warehouse where I bought two shirts, inbetween laughing until tears were streaming down my face at the tacky clothing therein. Lee stayed until well-gone nine.

Later I watched a 1979 horror film, worth watching if only for the effective bald-headed yellow-toothed vampire which appears in the second part.

Psychosomatic eye

Dad suffers at the moment with a rash on his neck and an inflamed eye, which looks a mess. Mum thinks it’s a nervous reaction to the enormity of a whole year on the dole just sinking in.

He’s in low spirits because never did he believe he’d be out of work so long. I feel sorry for him. The applications for jobs still go out regularly but I can’t see him getting what he’s looking for, and I reckon he’ll either have to look farther afield or work part-time, because now the dole cheques have stopped.

Shaheen is cool

I signed on in the morning and on the way back, Dad and I stopped to wander down past Cardigan Park. The white walls of the ground were quiet and smelled of dereliction. At one end of the ground a demolished wall let us see into the ‘stadium’ (ha ha) and out across the weed-strewn Easterby End and onto the luxuriously green pitch. “Shaheen is cool,” says the graffiti on the wall.

In the afternoon, Andrew and I went to see Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life at the Farnshaw Odeon. It was OK, not as funny as their efforts of old, and as to solving the riddle of life's meaning, I suppose they got quite close: sex, food and death, with a lot of pointless bits in between.

After tea, we watched a programme on Beeb 2, Iran: The Revolution Betrayed. The overthrow of the tyranny of the Shah’s regime was followed by the usual in-fighting between the various factions, resulting in the ascendancy of the Mullahs, Iran's most powerful authoritarian group, who now exert a more terrible power than the Shah ever did. We sat in our comfortable armchairs and watched an interview with an imprisoned and tearful sixteen-year old, a victim of rape. Two hours after the filming, he was shot.

The Iranian revolution rolls on with the fanaticism and blindness from which it sprang. Just as in Russia, the conspiratorial, elitist subversion of a revolution creates a conspiratorial, elitist and authoritarian state. ‘My Party Right or Wrong.’ Look and learn, RCP! (but look at me! Sitting on my complacent bourgeois backside and patronising a world’s revolutions in one breath!).

I sometimes think there's something wrong with me. I’ll turn into a bitter old crank one day. The TV fills me with disgust at adverts and programmes alike, raging against grey-suited newsmen, government officials, everything, anyone. . . . “You’ll never become a Buddhist,” says Andrew, half-smiling, half-serious, after one of my regular tirades against all and sundry, tirades which start as a joke but which always have a grain of sincerity to them.

Peace of mind is far away.

[Audio version]

Dole penicillin

I got another cheque from the dole office today, this time for £47.30. So in a week I’ve received nearly £120; maybe I’ll be able to afford to go to Greece with Gareth if I’m very careful. I revealed this idea to Mum and she reacted predictably: “You young people make me sick”—the word spat out—“you’ve got all your priorities wrong.”

This signaled a bitter tirade against me over the bike incident from a year or so ago (“Thirty pounds for a rusty, unused bike . . .” etc.) and I was angry that she was dragging out this skeleton.

Jeremy rang and says that Lee is keeping to his friends from Easterby College and going out a lot with them. I haven’t rung Claire—I’m a stupid bastard, and no doubt my thoughtlessness and paranoid uselessness has reaped the harvest it deserves. I promise myself I’ll do something about it as soon as we get back (we're leaving tomorrow for a week in Calverdale).

There’s been much fussing and packing from Mum the last two days but now we’re set. Dad has been cleaning the tanks in preparation. This morning, he, Andrew and I went to Dengates to let a dozen or so little frogs go. The grass was teaming with them.

The weather has been warm again today after the drizzle of the last few days; thunder and lightning rumbles and flashes threateningly in the distance, beckoning us into the empty spaces and the sweeping skies.

Y-reg Chevette

I signed on again today and got home to find a £47.30 dole cheque waiting for me. My overdraft now stands at £77. I also bought Mum a card and present in Farnshaw; she’s forty nine today.

I got a letter from Shelley who's very busy in Watermouth. She has a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Penny has a temporary job as a receptionist in a psychiatric unit which, predictably, “is cracking her up.”

I started a library book on Nietzsche but did so with little-to-no-enthusiasm. I aborted it a half-dozen pages in. I’m suffering through a state of majestic boredom, an almost irretrievable state of brain death.

Outside in the nightmare suburb, everything’s frozen into an afternoon calm; the petty little domestic rituals and the soft sound of the garden hoe are the only evidence of human activity. No strife, no “anti-social” behaviour permeates this self-satisfied little world of privet hedges and Y-reg Chevettes.

Easterby is a shit-heap and doesn't raise its sights above its own red-tiled rooftops. But then I suppose the whole country is the same.

TV eye

I got a dole cheque for £23.65 today and a postcard from Lindsey. She's in London at the RCP Conference; Pete’s there too. She sounded surprised at herself for enjoying it.

Carl Cotton rang me last night, very late, just after I’d gone to bed under a cloud and feeling none too healthy (I haven’t felt too good since I went out with Lee and Jeremy at the weekend and I keep getting irritating aches and pains that are probably my body’s protest at enforced inaction). My absence I put down to poverty (coward), but I went back to bed thinking I probably should have gone, if only for my own good.

Suddenly wide-awake, I lay in bed thinking about Carl and the RCP. I felt my mind filling with a great empty nothingness and I couldn’t focus properly on anything. I finally lay my head down unable to think at all. My ideas were indistinct and weakly formed, like I was seeing them vaguely beneath the surface of mud.

I watched two TV programmes with Andrew and Dad. Both were on the subject of war journalism and censorship. The first roused no comment from Dad, but the second raised his hackles and he came out with all the hoary old arguments and platitudes, and the old huffing puffing “I love my country, I’m patriotic” crap.

I just couldn’t see how he could trot this out yet again after sitting through two hours of (what seemed to me) fairly honest stuff. How can anyone be so blinkered and totally bigoted? I felt an impossible anger—anger that he should be so infuriatingly blind to military ideologies, anger at the lies and falsehoods and that censorship keeps people from understanding the true horror and violence of war, and anger from wanting an end to the fucking mess once and for all.

But I think I ought to shut up now as there is nothing so boring as a zealot and I suppose I’m the wettest liberal of all in that it takes a TV programme to get me going.

Step inside

I went into Easterby and met Lee. We went up to the Admiral Street dole office, then down to the one on Lloyd Street so that he could sign on. It was again very hot; I felt as if I was being burnt.

We wandered up to the Art College and Lee collected a boxful of ‘objets d’art’ which we then took around to the derelict house on Abbot Street that he's using as his base. He’s boarded up all the doors and we climbed up onto the porch roof to gain entry through an upper floor window. He hid the box in an upstairs room, barricading the door with a huge wooden beam, and we left for the pub for a drink, and then drifted around Easterby feeling jaded by the heat.

Lee seemed distant and uncommunicative.

We went to Suits Me and I looked for a second hand overcoat and after this, we ended up down on Lockley Lane, trying to gain entry to the old photography studios where he found all the photos. We crept through the overgrown rubble-choked yard but found the back door locked, so Lee suggested we explore an empty school nearby, the old Easterby Grammar School building that stands near the point where Hetherington Road and Dyson Street split. It’s been empty for as long as I can remember, the odd pane of glass broken, brick work black with soot and grime.

We got in through a gaping glass-less window, jumped down and I found myself in a classroom, empty and debris-littered, but still recognizably a classroom. The rest of the school was being gradually overtaken by grass and weeds; a dark and decaying staircase with a spidery tracery of banisters wound up into unknown regions above, the steps worn into hollows by the tramp of long dead feet. We visited each classroom in turn, gazing in on the huge main hall, its floor strewn with glass and lit by sunlight slanting in through large arched windows. Plants grew in green profusion from the walls.

Upstairs, Lee found his way into the tower up a cramped and steeply narrow staircase hemmed in by walls, up into a tiny secluded room lit by floor level windows—quite tidy. Through a hole onto the roof we could look out over the hazy skyline of Easterby.

We had a coffee at a Schofield Street café and I spied a girl I remembered from school, feeding her baby. She’s nineteen. Lee signed on at 3 and we said goodbye. I bought Joy Division’s Closer, but when I got home I discovered it was scratched.

In the evening I met Lee, Jeremy and—a ghost from the past—Tommy Whelan, at the Egley Former Students Disco. It was inauspicious. Tommy hasn’t changed a bit. Harvey’s was as crap as ever, a handful of people from our year there but we ignored them and they ignored us. Several times I felt hidden feet attempt to trip me up as I walked to and fro from the bogs. I ran into Julie Crabtree and Dawn Jagger, both very different now. Dawn was dressed all in white; gone the monkey boots and spiky locks of yesteryear and Julie’s hippy days are over too, apparently; she was dressed conservatively in a white skirt and red T-shirt with a page-boy haircut. She’s getting married next year.

We sat ourselves in a distant corner and hooted at the dancers, all girls initially, flowing virginal pastel shades of green and yellow predominating. They stood like statues, decked out in glowing ultra-violet whites, twisting and swaying imperceptibly in time to the music; they were soon joined by clone-like lads in tight jeans and white socks.

We spied Matthew Knight who looked like some gone-to-seed overweight thirty-year old. All the usual wankers were there, flashily dressed Mr. Farrar in mouthy good humour, Lynn Norden gone the way of all the rest it seemed. By way of parody and just for the doss, Lee and Jeremy went and stood out on the dance floor, totally motionless, gazing blankly into space like two waxwork dummies while people danced around them.

Tommy and I joined them and soon we began to attract attention, people pushing us or waving their hands in front of our faces. The wanky DJ said “They don’t realise how stupid they look, do they?” Them and us, and we were four.

I was hassled by stray dogs on the way home and got back at ten to two.

Peasants with free milk

I had to sign on at nine. Dad drove me down to the Admiral St. dole office, the sun already glaring at us from a clear sky. Away across Knowlesbeck, the Cluder valley slumbered under a washed out haze.

We pulled up in Admiral Street to find a large queue of people young and old outside the doors. At desk 13 I signed paper work and was told “Thank you.” Money should come next week. We drove back to Farnshaw as Dad had to sign on too, and then up to Bentsworth to a pet shop to buy daphnia for Dad’s amphibians. The broad stone-walled fields towards Bethany basked green and still in the sun. We got back at about ten-thirty.

I spent a lazy afternoon writing a letter to Shelley and just wasting time. I felt like going down to Phases later so I rang Grant—his brother answered; he was out, didn’t know where he’d gone or when he’d be back—so I asked him to tell Grant to give me a ring back but he never did. I couldn’t decide whether to go out or not and eventually decided not to bother.

My musical tastes are almost schizophrenic. I like jazz but also P.I.L, the Fall, The Pop Group, etc. Andrew has brought back all his records and they’re almost exclusively jazz—I couldn’t concentrate exclusively like that. The two types of music appeal to two different sides of my character, although I can’t reconcile the two.

It’s still smotheringly warm (76°F) even at this late hour, the sky a uniform light grey, a hint of hot rain drops in the steamy air, just a breath of warm breeze in the branches. Dad methodically waters his precious garden. Mum watches a programme about India on TV.

Nothing breaks this grip of Northern domestic stagnation.

Words flow from my inked-up pen

I got up early, Carol and Rob having left for work already, leaving Mum, Dad and me to lock up.

Mum explained, with weary insistence, that the car was so full of Andrew’s college stuff she worried (in her usual way)that  it might break down if we overloaded it, so I had to go back to Easterby on the bus. I left at half-past nine . . . . Another red-hot day, uncomfortable already at this early hour.

In Dearnelow I bought a Pere Ubu record for £1.99 in a sale and caught the bus back home. I got into Egley about noon, & then did nothing but slip into a boredom too familiar to describe. I lounged distractedly before the TV and then in the back room writing this.

The DHSS sent my SS application back because I’d missed something out, so I walked through the stifling heat to repost it, suitably amended. It’s been too hot to do anything.
.
I’ve got a letter from Shelley. She wrote it last Thursday, and she's had a good time at home and has been to a friend’s farm: she penned a long description of an idyllic walk to a quiet lake, writing “I still haven’t come down to earth”; so typical of her! I remember how hyper-sensitive she was last term when struggling with some momentous Wordsworth essay; she kept telling me how tender and unworldly the whole experience had left her feeling, and how vulnerable she was to the stinging ‘materialist’ attacks of Barry and Stu, how close to tears they brought her. She signed off with an airy “cheerio” and enclosed a spent match, a bit of a fag packet and a piece of patchwork wrapped in paper.

After three years, why do I keep at this journal? The initial reasons are no longer so clear-cut and easy to define. If I honestly believe ‘everything is pointless,’ that nothing has any meaning and existence is futile, then why do I carry on writing with such monotonous regularity? If all this is pointless, where’s the point?

I can’t honestly say why I’m doing what I’m doing. To what end? Doubtless none of this is of any historical importance given our age’s excess of mundane records and sources. I suppose it relieves what would otherwise be an utterly structureless existence that seems to drift on and on without rhyme or reason. Perhaps writing this offers the tiniest of constant, unifying threads. I’m writing now just for the sheer hell.

Words flow from my inked-up pen.

Gang of one

I got up early-ish and set off to Grant’s, getting there at eleven; he was out so I went into Easterby and signed on along with skinheads and others. I have to go back on Wednesday at 9 a.m.

I bought The Fall’s new single “The Man Whose Head Expanded/Ludd Gang” which was new in the shop today, but it’s disappointing. Marc Riley’s been kicked out and Mark E. said in the Melody Maker recently that he wants to cut the melody out completely and get back to a simpler more noisy format, but this single shows no sign of this, just a restatement (and not as good a restatement at that) of old themes.

Maybe I’ll grow to like it.

I went back to Grant’s house and we passed the afternoon in the dark back room playing records while Grant criticised his brother, forcing him into humbled half-apologies. He was pretty fed up again I think and dislikes his family, describing them as “good liberal middle-class Guardian readers.” He seems to be constantly on edge and in a prickly mood with them which his Mum counters with blind cheerfulness and chuckles.

His sister has grown up a lot since I last saw her and has developed into a typical Egley Grammar Schoolite. His brother flogged me some singles  by New Order, Sex Pistols and Public Image hw wants rid of. At his age I was listening to Santana and jazz-rock, but then I didn’t have Grant for an older brother. But he’s still into Doctor Who, so he’s an odd mix.

At seven we went round to Nik’s house and set off through the woods to the Albion. Grant and Nik seemed quiet and subdued. Tim the guitarist was there and a few others I remembered soon turned up.

I went to cash a cheque at the off-licence nearby, came back and bought Grant and Nik a drink, half-intending on getting pissed but my money soon dwindled. We went to the Brass Cat and then the Hare and Hounds where we met Jackie, but I had to leave to catch the last bus.

Youth opportunities

Mum and Dad left before I woke up to go down to Andrew’s degree show in Badon.

When I did finally rise at one to answer the phone the house was empty and silent. It was Grant, who just wanted to talk, so I stood there totally naked for quarter of an hour. I’d said I’d meet Lee at 1 p.m. outside Smiths but as usual I was late and I ended up going into Easterby at three.

I’d missed the dole office so I went to the Job Centre, but ended up buying P.I.L.’s first album, and all-in-all spent a fair bit of money.

Watched TV and went to bed.