Crag

Our hike went off as planned despite glowering skies and spots of rain.

We left the house at nine and parked in Ranelathe, a place I dislike for the simple reason that I can never forget the terrible outings we had there with Nanna Beardsall and Reg when I was a kid. We would sit by the river while the latter would drag an unwilling Dad to the White Boar for a round, N.B.’s sandwiches of undercooked bacon and limp white bread getting bigger and bigger in my mouth as I chewed until, finally near to puking, I’d remove the rubbery mass without being seen.

With these memories looming large in my mind we set off over the bridge and on towards Carngill.

The Ainder was in full spate despite the drought, the water racing muddily between its banks. We tried unsuccessfully to cross through fields at Carngill but were forced back by a vicious looking brown bull with a ring through its nose which ignored Dad’s attempts to deter it with his stick. He was angry and “humiliated” at having to retrace his steps past two men repairing a roof who we presumed to be the creature’s owners.

We continued on the road through Raikel Stones. It grew very still and warm despite the overcast and as we climbed up onto the moors near High Edge Farm it looked as if it could thunder. . . .

We crossed a metaled road and continued along a green track emerging high above Whitgarth Reservoir which has recently been enlarged. Mum and Dad showed me a nearby barn that has been thatched with ling and heather by an expert from Northamptonshire at the behest of the Water Board. From then on it was a steady climb through fields to Dry Crag and the road which passes near Whitehill Cave; this we crossed to follow a rough rocky track across the moors, being passed by dozens of trials bikes, some of them quite old. We headed back down a metaled road to High Edge Farm in bright sun and our walk was nearly ended.

We were back at Ranelathe for six and at home within an hour.

Jeremy arrived at eight while I was on the ‘phone to Lee, who’d rung to say his bike has disappeared from the hallway of Maynard Gardens and that he was going round to tackle the prime suspects (from the Philip Street squat) with Gav, whose bike has gone as well, although his was stolen in the first place.

Our tape with the “whispers” has turned up at Radio Watermouth, which is good news as we thought it had been lost. I said to Lee that I’ll see him on Friday as I’ve got to sign on, but will probably come back straight away.

Jeremy is staying overnight.

No feelings

I caught the Gilthwaite bus onto Lodgehill and walked down to Lee’s. Lee was bent over his desk fitting new lenses into his Malcolm X sunglasses when I got there, his Mum humming and singing to herself contentedly as she pottered about. Lee was very subdued during the time I was there.

Jeremy turned up shortly after I did. I felt down, so I left after a few hours and caught the bus into Easterby and went to meet Mum at Nanna P.’s up Cross Green Road. The latter looked ill, grey and old and quite subdued. Uncle Kenneth called round briefly while I was there.

No feelings for relatives.

Floating

I spent £21 on a new coat and new shoes, an extravagance which made me feel a little guilty. The sun was again glaring down as I sweated my way around town, walking all the way along Leckenby Road to see the empty mills of Southampton Woolbrokers Ltd which Lee had said was worth a visit.

I called in on Nanna P. She had a “turn” on Monday and thought she was dying. “I felt like my head was separate from my body and was floating around the room.” She still looked ill although she was vocal enough and trotted out the expected tedious stories of Uncle Kenneth and Shirley and “ar’ Nicola.” Her wheelchair stood in the hallway, folded and awaiting use. . . . She says she gets a pain in her head which sounds to me like a potential cerebral haemorrhage.

Her Mum and Dad died of these.

I came home, had tea and watched TV all evening. Old routines. My mind has frozen up as I try to write this, evidently because the torpour of my existence the last few days has allowed it to fall into a dull, forgettable state. How slowly I write—how slowly the thought processes are clumsily parodied by word formation. The Acker-inspired torrent of Sunday night is the least self-conscious thing I’ve written since I came home.

John Turney rang at 11.30 p.m. to remind me to bring him a biography of Stalin I’d promised him.

Love what you know

I got up this morning to find Dad in a bitter blank fury, railing against “immigrants” and the policies of the past for bespoiling ‘his’ Easterby. “There was a time when Easterbians were proud to be Easterbians,” he said angrily, with hot-eyed bitterness.

It’s just been announced that cut-backs in education in Easterby will mean 400 job losses among teachers and nursery nurses and Mum is worried about her job. If she loses it then she and Dad are fucked and I don’t see how they’ll be able to afford to keep me at Uni. Dad worries more about Mum’s health than anything, because the greater the hardships the greater her levels of worry.

He lashed out with blind, angry bewilderment and declared that Enoch Powell has been proved right. It was announced the other day that Easterby has the third highest birth rate in the country, which is about the only thing that’ll keep Mum in a job, because it’s the Asian women who have their kids the fastest. I’m not too worried about Uni.: the main problem if I did leave Uni. would be seeing direction and justification in my life.

I’m going to Watermouth on Sunday and so today was taken up in part with preparations for my departure. Dad and I drove down to the Parcel's Office at the station with my trunk (and cheese), which cost me £7. Dad told me that Mr. Tillotson hasn’t used the trunk since 1937 and the early years of his marriage.

It was a hot day, a last evocative glimpse of summer before we are swallowed up by the wintry weather, and as we drove up Gilthwaite Road the moors away beyond Keddon basked under pale blue skies and I wished I were miles away over the horizon, walking amid vastnesses.

After dropping my trunk at the station we called up to see Nanna B., but she was out, so Dad and I went for a walk around his old haunts when he was growing up, stooping by an old wall overlooking the last of Kerforth’s common land, now a weed-filled field sweeping down towards Iredale's Mill, in whose dam one of my relatives once committed suicide.

Nearby, partly hidden by trees, Dad pointed out the dark squat shape of an ancient cottage where John Wesley once stayed and preached. New housing has encroached on the old, but the skyline beyond Flaxhall Top, punctuated by the silhouetted steeple of Flaxhall Church, can’t have changed much since the turn of the century when Dad’s Dad was a kid. There was a tinge of poignancy and hidden sadness in the way he showed me Charnwood’s dam, where another distant figure from the family’s past ended his life, and old Kerforth abattoir, soon to be demolished, now derelict and boarded up.

We skirted the fields and took a small snicket that ran alongside Iredale’s Mill. Dad showed me the spot where as a kid he would lift the large stone slab of a hidden well and gaze down into the cool dark depths. The mill, once empty, is now in use again and the clackety-clack of machinery was somehow reassuring. The path ran between red-brick sheds and yards full of building materials. Here when he was a lad, Dad told me, sheep grazed and over there, the farmer kept his horses, whose restless night-time snuffles unsettled Dad and Uncle George as they returned home from the pictures. No. 59 Pollard Road, where they grew up, looks empty and semi-derelict now.

We wandered back up through Kerforth and along the main street, passing the house where Dad’s Dad lived after the suicide of his father (to this day we own a sepia-brown photo of him looking like Al Capone, standing in the doorway, fag in mouth); the Wheatsheaf pub where one day in 1917 my Great Uncle Ernest slapped his newly awarded Military Medal down on the bar promising, “It’ll be the VC next time!”: he was killed in France a month later; no. 52, where Dad’s Auntie Florrie was found dead one morning, so thin and frail that George had sat on the bed for fully ten minutes reading the ‘paper before realising she was lying there next to him, lifeless, while upstairs her sister Olive rooted about for the insurance papers. The whole of the Martindale and Watkin family histories—great chapters of them at least—have run their course within those few acres of old Kerforth.

N.B. was still out when we got back to her flat so we made a cup of tea and watched the Liberal Party Conference for a while before leaving (David Steel quoting Cromwell: “Know what you fight for, love what you know”). We made a trip to pick up Mum from school, but she’d gone, so we returned home feeling that somehow the day had slipped wastefully by when perhaps we could’ve gone somewhere.

When Mum came home from work deadbeat as usual, there were more niggles between her and Dad, as there often are nowadays. “I think we’re seeing too much of one another,” sighs Mum wearily, and then complains to me that she doesn’t think Dad is doing enough to relieve his isolation at home. A few weeks ago they’d both been full of enthusiasm about adult education classes and had even gone to the trouble of getting all the forms, but Dad backed out at the last minute, limply saying £17 per year was too expensive (the creative writing classes were free!).

It’s almost as if he’s scared of making any commitment and frightened to break the routine his life’s fallen into. He never meets anyone apart from Mr. Tillotson across the road and does nothing but write his diary and tend his newts and toads, although he’s often saying “I wouldn’t mind doing so-and-so,” and so on. “He’s just hot air,” says Mum, but I’m no one to harp on about lack of effort and motivation, and it’s obvious who I’ve inherited it from.

Stu, Pete and Shelley have all rung in the last day or so. Stu asked if he can kip on the floor at Jervis Terrace while he finds somewhere to live. The accommodation situation in Watermouth sounds pretty bad. Pete rang up just to talk and Shelley said she might be suffering from hepatitis; she doesn’t know yet. I’ll see her on Sunday evening.

I’ve casually started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the last couple of days and I think Nietszche has a lot to offer.

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.

Beached

Hot stifling weather. I went to Moxthorpe with Dad to watch a cricket match. I didn’t really want to go to be honest, but Mum cajoled me and I gave in, out of deference to his feelings more than anything else.

We didn’t stay long and came back via Beatrice Avenue and Moxthorpe roundabout. As I sidled past No. 55 I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Pearson but no Claire who presumably is in Whincliffe. It would’ve been awkward to suddenly blunder into her. I bought The Varieties of Religious Experience (1903) by William James which I remembered from Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.

I was expecting a call from Grant which didn’t materialize, so I rang his house but he was out, as was Jeremy. I even rang Stu in Basildon but he was out too, and his Dad answered. So, feeling a little at a loss, I went out and sat on the lawn with Dad in the gathering darkness, drinking beer and talking. He told me stories his Dad had told him of wading ashore at Suvla Beach, Gallipoli, with his rifle above his head to keep it dry, while men fell around him and bodies drifted back in the tide. But for that luck, I’d not be sitting here writing and someone else would be living in this house.

I felt quite content there in the dusk, looking forward to the morning and listening to Dad. Nanna P., who's here today, will be joined tomorrow by Nanna B., so I’ll go out. As I write this Mum, Dad and N.P. sit in the front room watching some brutal tale of escape from Nazi-occupied France starring Anthony Quinn again,

The luxury gap

I was up early. Dad dropped me off at Moxthorpe so I could get my hair cut. This done, I walked home and we set off for Nanna B’s.

The weather was again very hot and muggy, too warm for comfort. Nanna B. was unchanged and  quite entertaining, but I sat there feeling uncommunicative, apart, and totally removed from this circle. She fell to reminiscing, reciting school rhymes word perfect from sixty one years previously with all the rush and enthusiasm of a little girl.

She also revealed more tantalising fragments of family history: William John Martindale, my Dad's grandad, committed suicide in Loney’s Dam early one Sunday morning in 1906 following the death of his wife Emily, leaving their three children orphans. Eldest son Ernest grew up to die in WW1, Harold became my granddad and Esther, battered by her husband, died one day in 1926: the incident was hushed up and passed off as meningitis.

N.B. gave me £2 for my birthday and with the empty fussings ringing all around, we left. Dad dropped me in Easterby. It was too warm to move.

Later on in the evening, Dad and I went down to the station to pick up Andrew but his bus was late, leaving Dad and I to wander through the station to the incongruous strains of military music over the PA. Eventually there was that familiar self-conscious half-smile, sliding in aboard the coach. He looked tanned and we settled back into our well-worn ways immediately.

Dad dropped me off at Jeremy’s ½ an hour later than I’d arranged.

We went up for a drink at a noisy crowded Kerforth pub, The Adelphi, which was filled to overflowing with beery affable groups of loud people. Jeremy and I sat inconspicuously on a bench to one side while the crowd swore and laughed and talked and screeched, the girls fashion conscious in the pastel shades of their smart ‘going out’ clothes, the blokes all in jeans, tight T-shirts, white socks and low slung shoes. A handful of Hell’s Angels hung about in the obligatory denim waistcoats, their girls in tow.

Jeremy and I reminisced and bemoaned our lack of a social circle here. He seemed to have limitless resources compared to me and quite happily bought me drinks and kept my glass filled.

By closing time I was in a sloppy mood and as we walked down Whincliffe Road we were intercepted by two flat-capped drunken occupants of a red open-topped Triumph Herald. Jeremy knew one of them. Terry and Kevin were both pissed and, as they said they’d give me a lift home, we clambered into the back of the car and roared off doing eighty at least while I shivered in my thin shirt. Jeremy laughed unbelievingly as we screeched through Farnshaw, a Heaven 17 cassette at full volume, the two in front jeering drunkenly whenever we encountered a lone figure wending his or her way home.

We stopped at the petrol station near Moxthorpe roundabout, and curses were directed at the pale-faced petrol attendant in his glass cubicle. I was persuaded to stay in the car and go down to Jasper’s, an ominous sounding nightspot in Easterby. As we hurtled along the main road I was amazed no one stopped us, for Terry drove like a madman, overtaking on the inside, screeching to a halt at junctions, cursing and laughing as the traffic lights changed on us.

Just beyond Lodgehill he screeched to a halt and threw up over the side of the car. A hundred yards or so further on it happened again, but he drove off right as rain, laughing, spitting and wiping his mouth on the imitation leopard skin steering wheel cover. Somehow we made it to our destination in one piece and Jeremy paid for me to get in.

Jasper’s a typical Easterby night club, the mating game in full swing inside, couples snogging and dancing. We stood about drinking (me on Jeremy’s money) and left after about an hour for a curry up by the poly, where our hosts entertained us with beery bombast.

Kevin enthusiastically described for us in graphic detail his day spent in the shower with his girlfriend Alison. “It were real!” he said, with a raucous laugh. I had a chicken curry and ½ a prawn curry too, and we watched an Indian film on the TV along with the intent, white-coated staff.

At two a.m. we raced back to Egley and I am writing this. . . .