There was a letter sent in to an American climbing magazine once deriding me for “lacking in character” because I indulged my passion “at the expense of the British tax-payer by claiming the munificent British Dole”. There are many of this opinion when it comes to judging the out of work. I would like a little room to explain the system I grew up in. I would like to give those people a portrait of the Lancashire of my youth.
In ’79, after Callaghan lost, it could be said that the blanket attitude of the young began to change. By ’83 there were 4,000,000 men and women unemployed, workers’ morale was sinking. Companies won contracts by paying their workers less money for longer hours. The dismantling of the heavy industries and the move toward communications and finance sucked the life out of the industrial areas. This led to a widespread loss of respect for the Conservatives in my home, a northern mill town, which still endures today. To the north of Manchester the miners’ strike brought communities to tears, as the collieries of Brackley, Ashtons Field and Hulton stood silent. But, for us youngsters, this was now the land of opportunity, the government told us anything could be ours. We were free to gamble, but if we failed, we would be at the bottom of the heap. When it came time to leave school most of my friends either signed on as unemployed or went on government job creation schemes. The ones that signed on had free time to develop sometimes obscure skills that seemed at first to have no use to the community. Later this would be seen not to be the case as, throughout the country, champion runners and cyclists and famous painters and writers emerged.
At Hulton some of our neighbours went through the picket lines to work because their families needed food. They compromised principles, though they agreed with the strikers’ cause. Moral decay had been forced. Nationally this went even further as armaments became one of the biggest industries of the UK, our most marketable product, and who the buyer was didn’t matter. How do climbers fit into this you may wonder? Out of the ashes of this social, economic and moral turmoil the full time climber rose like some scruffy, bedraggled phoenix to push the boundaries of what was possible on our crags, quarries and sea cliffs.
There had already been full-timers for a while then. Bancroft, a gritstone cult hero, was probably the original dole climber back in ’77, followed by such masters as Allen and Fawcett who gave so much to us younger climbers. When I stood at the bottom of Beau Geste or Master’s Edge I could see them moving just as I wanted to move. I wondered if I could ever be like them. Many then could still use university as an excuse to climb. Grants were good and it gave lots of free time, and a chance for MacIntyre and Rouse to become such great mountaineers. Later, as grants decreased, students even had to work their summer holidays (as they still do) and the university life became less appealing to the dedicated climber.
As the young athletes strove to ascend wilder and wilder rock climbs the endeavour became more time-consuming. They had to train long and hard to develop the power needed to create these masterpieces. These climbers paid little thought to the politicans in Westminster, who were inadvertently creating an environment most suitable for the serious climber – with so many unemployed it was easy to sign on. How could they prove you weren’t actively seeking work if there wasn’t any work to be found? And it became easy to justify too; you could go out to the sea cliffs self-righteous in the knowledge that another was working and feeding his family as a result of your sacrifice! We did look for work, me and my friends, but we were not going to go into a factory after the freedom we had tasted. That no jobs were ever offered to us by the job centre, as was the system, only reflected the economic circumstances of the country, especially in the rural areas of Wales. So why should I not use my time to go climbing? It now seems ironic that my passion contributed to the transformation of the gigantic Dinorwig slate quarries, the scar left after the community was near fatally wounded by its closure. Together we unemployed bums created, from what was once a thriving place of work, and then a vast, silent ugly space, a place of leisure for the weekend climber. And it was hard, dangerous graft, let me tell you, the clearing of loose rock and the drilling, just like the quarrymen had once done. Harder than any desk job I used to think.
But the dole handout or the government climbing grant, as we called it, paid very little. For my first two years as a full-timer, living in the Stoney Middleton wood shed or in caves around the Peak, I received eighteen pounds a week. I had to buy and sell, borrow and steal to get a rack and feed myself. We lived in the dust on a diet of cold beans and white bread. They banned us from the pub because we didn’t spend enough and they thought we would give the other customers our flu. It was a gamble climbing on the dole, to deprive yourself of all those potential luxuries for the sake of pushing up the grades. Most of my old school mates had cars and girlfriends by then. And what if you didn’t make it? What would you do in ten years time if you got injured and you had no education or trade to fall back on? I still wonder. But I don’t regret forfeiting the career and the consumer durables.
Some of the route names of those days celebrated the unprecedented situation in which climbing found itself, which couldn’t have come about in a more healthy economic state. Doleman, Dole Technician, Dolite, Long Live Rock and Dole. One of the ardent Stoney dossers, Dirty Derek, said he’d vote Tory again to ensure he’d get another four years of Giros! But the dossers have gone now. Their generation only really lasted a decade. A climber on the dole is scum in the eyes of many now. New rules have made it tough to stay signed on for any length of time and to be a traveller, like many US climbers, is not an accepted way to live. They put barriers up in Britain and signs, NO OVERNIGHT PARKING. Now many climbers aspire to wealth and sponsorship and a sporty car as an escape from the trap of conformism. They want to attain what their heros have attained. But neither type, not the doley nor the new professional, ever escapes. They both play the system.
It is acceptable to be a student, to study philosophy or art, and you can receive a meagre grant, but to filter out a little money to create great lines up cliffs is, in the eyes of some, morally wrong. It doesn’t quite adhere to the system which we manufactured. What does appear ironic now is that those unemployed, who appeared of no use to the community, having perfected their craft, were seen on the pages of magazines and in advertisements. They were transformed into heroes who helped to sell the equipment the manufacturers were producing and so, inadvertently, became an indispensable part of the system they thought they had dropped out of.
To live the life we chose we rode on the wealth of others, just like the explorers of old and these, surely, must command all our respect. Shipton, Tilman, even Darwin made their journeys of discovery using the riches of the empire – from exploitation of conquered lands. They were of the original leisure class which will always be with us. They have been around for ever, almost. The working-class climbers slowly came on the scene from the thirties to the fifties. They were hard men who gained fame on the outcrops near their city homes. After the war there were enough jobs for everyone and their ascents could be made in a day or two at the weekend. As the boom babies grew up job opportunities diminished and the seventies brought the new leisure class, rebels with a rock hard cause. And now, are we heading back to the beginning? You can climb Everest if you have enough cash. Or perhaps you would prefer Antarctica or Irian Jaya? It was said in the eighties that at either end of the economic spectrum there was a leisure class. Through unemployment the poor had the time to have their adventures, albeit on a smaller scale, on the rock outcrops close to their homes. Now, in the nineties, this may still be true but the opportunities open to the lower leisure class would seem to be restricted somewhat when compared to how it was a decade ago.
As the economy of our island grows again and more restrictions are put on our welfare state the unemployed climber is becoming a thing of the past. Now you’ll see less and less of our type. I knew some real characters dossing on that Peak District garage forecourt we called The Land of the Midnight Sun. They lived for th
e rock and material gain never really entered their heads. I think when we opened the door for the new professionals some of those characters slipped out the back.
CRACK
CHAPTER ONE
FIRE-STARTER
I was born on top of the quarry. It was the best place to mess about a kid could ever want. I never had to go to my mates’ houses to play, ’cos they would always come here if I said let’s go in the quarry. It was a glowing green hole in the moors. It was my Grand Canyon, my Amazon, my centre of the earth and my one million years BC. I had seen Tyrannosaurus fighting with Stegosaurus, flying saucers with deathrays, and even a ghost – a yellow custardy thing. That ghost gave me such bad dreams that I shat in my bed when it drifted across our best room towards me.
If you leaned out of our bathroom window, the cliff went sheer down to the scrappers’ yard and me and my mates used to push bits of our garden wall over the edge so the rocks would land and crash on the pile of dead cars and corrugated tin below. We’d count one … two … three … f … always a little too fast. But then the scrapper would come up and him and my old man would shout at each other. Another good one was to stand and pee over the edge and see if you could see it reach the bottom by leaning out more and more, but you had to have good balance for that. There was one tree that tilted out right over the drop and we would climb it, up into the thin top branches and look straight down a hundred feet. We could get the whole tree moving like mad if a few of us started swaying. We even made a death swing out over the cliff, but that disappeared one day.
In the dry summer I sometimes nicked a box of Swan Vestas, we always had matches on us, and we would set the grass on fire on top of the cliff. It always got out of control really fast. We tried to put them out, the fires, but we all secretly wanted the whole moor to burn ’cos when it got too big we’d all laugh and betcha whether the fire engines would come or not. When we heard the sirens we’d all get dead excited and run off, but not too far, so we could hide behind a wall and see the fire brigade beating at the grass. But once we got caught after we’d burnt a derelict hospital down and the pig said the arsonist always returns to the scene of the crime. Me, Lloydy and Cooksy were bricking it but they couldn’t prove anything. It’s just it was the same ones who caught us after we’d tied the elastic across the road and it had twanged their aerial, so they were suspicious.
But down inside the quarry it was all shady and cool and we would get goose bumps as we sat and chewed the white roots of the couch grass which tasted of summer. Heather tickled the backs of our grass-stained legs and we sprinted off, with our hands and feet, up ledgy rocks. To the top of Cleveland’s Edge we would go, a thin finger of rock miles high sticking out into the quarry, only three feet wide at the end. We would play tig on it, and if you didn’t stand right on the end you were a big girl’s blouse. But the ramp up the front was the best dare. We knew a kid had fallen off the top and died but that didn’t stop us. The whole gang of us would swarm up, sometimes standing on each other’s shoulders to reach the next shelf. In summer the rocks were dusty, but in winter they were green and slippy – and you’d always have soaked keks before you got to the bottom, from the long grass and heather. Once, trying to get onto a ledge that all the others were on, with the rocks all sloping the wrong way, they started lobbing matches at me. I shouted, “Quit it. Quit it!” and after we got on top I hated them. I got my own back another day though, when I set a plastic bag on fire and dropped zippers, that’s what we called the dripping plastic, on Sucks’ kid brother while he was stuck on a ledge. He hadn’t done anything to me but he was the easiest to pick on – even Sucks kicked him in all the time.
My dad used to tell me stories of when he was in the army. Of Egypt, the Pyramids and Petra. Down in the quarry the towers of rock became great sitting Ramases and Sphinx, the mill-wheels spare parts for Egyptian chariots. The slag heaps became burial mounds which I excavated in search of treasure and mummified bodies. I had my tool kit in a canvas satchel, with trowels and brushes for clearing the dirt off potential precious objects, and a ball of string. During one excavation, at the entrance of a definite burial chamber, we found a stack of nude books which we all gathered round, pointing at the pictures and giggling confusedly. We hid them and came back most evenings for kind of club meetings, but when we came back one day someone had nicked them.
My old man didn’t like me going to school. He said I would learn more walking on the moors with him. He never really went to school when he was a kid and he said he was better for it. So we’d go off in the early morning with the shotguns along the edge of the hole, shooting at whatever we saw. Besides rabbits, hares and pigeons, we shot blackbirds, peewits, geese and even, once, a fox. We ate everything but the fox tasted horrible. The worst time was when he went mad at me ’cos I looked inside the barrel of the shotgun when it was loaded. “What the bloodyellfire,” he shouted, pulling the 12-bore out of my hands. Once, on top of Cleveland’s Edge we saw a family of owls, a mother and three babies. We just sat and watched them. We didn’t want to shoot them. They were the best things I’d ever seen. After that I got really into watching the birds and didn’t want to shoot them any more. A bit later I remember crying when he shot a kestrel. I held it in my hand and it was so soft and still warm. Its blood trickled down my hand.
It was the same kestrel whose eggs I once nicked when me and my brother still had our big collection. It took us ages to work out how to get to the nest. We’d known where it was for ages, miles up the cliff, but only a stupid get would climb down there. But then we nicked some bailing twine from Locker’s barn and I was lowered over the edge. It was all grass and loose rocks and the twine dug into my kidneys. At the nest I was mesmerised, the eggs were so perfect. I put them both in separate pockets and scrambled back up with the gang pulling from above. Later we made pinprick holes in each end of the eggs and blew them into a saucer. Then we proudly set them in their right place in the collection, in their bed of sawdust between the thrush egg and the crow’s egg.
In the winter-time we lived in Spain. It was great ’cos it meant that I didn’t have to go to school. I laughed about all the others back at home in school and here was our Dave and Trace and me doing what we wanted every day, playing on the beach or fishing or adventuring. We lived eleven storeys up in some apartments, right above the cemetery. Sometimes we’d be having our dinner and there’d be a funeral going on down below. Once me and our Dave went exploring in there and saw these dirty hunchbacked men digging up all the graves. There were coffins and piles of bones everywhere. We started to go nearer for a closer look but this grave-digger saw us and picked up a skull and ran at us with it. We started legging it and my heart was beating dead fast and then this skull came bouncing past me. We told our mum and she told us not to go in there again.
Me and our Dave used to fight a lot but he was six years older than me so I always got paggered. But he tormented me so much that I’d get my own back on him by stealing his spends. He got really angry with me once ’cos I had told on him for drawing pictures of people with no clothes on and when mum and dad went out he picked me up and dangled me by the ankles over the balcony. I stopped shouting and wriggling and just went quiet as I stared down for hundreds of feet. He dragged me back over but I didn’t cry, I just looked at him, and he said that if I told I would get it.
Back home we had pigs and hens and rabbits, too, and my dad showed us how to slaughter them. My sister wouldn’t get involved, but me and our Dave loved it. We killed the rabbits by chopping them on the back of the neck but they didn’t always die straight away. The hens were easier, you just twisted their necks and sometimes they would run around with their heads flopping around. Once a year we had to kill our pigs and to save money my dad didn’t take them to the slaughter-house. One Sunday morning, dead early, we went up to the pen. The farmer had told dad that if you draw a line with a magic marker between the pig’s ears and eyes and hit it spot on with a pick-axe, the thing will die in a second. So my
dad crept up to it and whacked the pick into its head, but it went mad and started screaming. It tore the axe out of his hand and ran about the pen. Its howling was like a baby. It was horrible. My dad picked me up and ran out of the pen with me and told me to get the gun. He was worried ’cos he said the bloody neighbours might call the bloody police. I ran like mad back up the steps with the 12-bore and the cartridges. Pinky, that’s the name our Trace gave the pig, was still screeching and the axe handle was waving around in the air. My dad loaded the gun, aimed it and fired. He’s a good shot, my dad. Pinky shut up straight away and fell on its face and my dad was pleased ’cos he’d shot it right in the heart. We tied a rope around its head and lifted it into a bath for cutting up. As me and our Dave pulled on the rope, dad chopped at Pinky’s neck with his Bowie knife and we went flying backwards as its head came off. Our Trace didn’t like eating bacon for breakfast after that.
Most of Bolton’s joyriders dumped their night’s fun in the quarry, too, and we would always be first there to strip off all the useful scrap. Even the windscreens and seats we got for our dens, but we never found a suitcase of dosh in the boot. If they hadn’t already been burnt we would set them on fire and run off to hide nearby and watch the black smoke rising. Running through the quarry I cut my knee open on glass. It didn’t hurt, but I still cried. The blood tasted of metal. Suddenly I hated the quarry and wanted my mum to wash the cut. Back home in the cool cave of our dining room it took a while for my eyes to get used to the darkness. She put a sticking plaster on my cleaned up knee, ruffled my hair, and got back to top and tailing gooseberries. I limped back out into the heat, proud of my wound, to eat slugs and horse muck for 10p dares off my mates.
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