*
In silence they stood together in the sitting room, the small sum of Gore’s worldly goods stacked all around them in sealed wooden crates, his bicycle pointlessly wrapped in paper and propped against a radiator in the hallway. A gloss-painted door yawned open onto a narrow fitted kitchen, off-white units crammed together in an awkward L-shape. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out onto a patch of enclosed lawn. The place was cold as stone and Gore knew by his nose that it had been recently wiped clean with bleached rags throughout. He traced a semicircle with the tip of his shoe on the carpet, a rough and bristly industrial textile in charcoal.
‘That’ll be black so the fag burns don’t show,’ said Ridley, returning from an inspection of the fuse-box in the hall.
‘Oh, but they do,’ murmured Gore, pointing his toe-cap at a crop of small scorched holes. He climbed the staircase that led from the sitting room to the upper quarters, and surveyed the cabin-like rooms. A turquoise bathroom with sink and shower tub, mildew leaching into the corners of the splash-back tiles. One decently sized bedroom and two cubbyhole spares, all with magnolia walls, Allied carpets and cheap pine-finish furnishings. He drew back a yellow voile curtain and peered out. Ridley was crouched on the lawn below, fingering the stem of a wilting plant. Gore headed downstairs again, keen to discharge the needful goodbyes.
‘My wife,’ said Ridley, unmoving, ‘asked us to ask you if you’d like to have your tea at ours th’ night.’
‘Oh, that’s very generous. I just have a feeling, you know – I’d like to make a start, crack on with things here?’ He gestured around him, not wishing to offend, nor to lose the chance of a break from the steady barometric pressure of Ridley’s company. Ridley, though, took several brooding moments before responding.
‘Aye, well, I see that. You’ve got your work cut out.’
*
In the smallest bedroom he bolted together the panels of his collapsible desk, then unwrapped and wiped clean a framed print that he nailed into place above the worktop. The picture was a Byzantine mosaic of Christ Pantokrator, one that Gore had toted with him from place to place since seminary days. Generally wary of the graven image, he made an exception for Byzantine art. This Jesus was face-front and symmetrical, his forehead long and furrowed, features lean and lips pursed in a blank, unreadable mien. There was just a certain something in the rational, near-anonymous execution that rendered the son of God no more exalted than the man in the street.
As he wiped the glass he heard a sharp crack from out of doors, like the report of a starting pistol. Christ, was his thought. Not a gun? Then came a sizzling sound, airborne. Okay, a firework. Surely?
From a box file he retrieved a carefully pressed photocopy he had made of his catchment area from an Ordnance Survey section, and he Blu-tacked this to the wall beside Christ.
At just after three o’clock he lifted the telephone receiver, found it functional, and dialled the mobile number he had been given, its sequence still foreign to him. But the call was snapped up on the second ring.
‘Hel-lo?’ Mildly irritable, over background buzz and chatter.
‘Suze. It’s John.’
‘Oh! Hello there, St John. Hang on … God, it’s today, isn’t it? Are you here?’
‘Yep, just got in. Just getting settled.’
‘And how’s your new gaff? Is it really, really awful?’
‘It’s fine, I’ve no complaints.’ Gore was never sure why his sister had ever strayed north of Watford again, having made home in London all through her twenties. Yet here she was, a mere few miles from where he sat as the crow might fly.
‘And have you spoken to Dad yet? Have you fixed to go and see him?’
‘I haven’t. Not yet. I will.’
‘Look, you’ve got to see him, John. He’s talking about going back to work again. With electrics and whatnot. And God knows what he could do to himself, the state he’s in.’
‘Suze, we’ve been through this, that’s rubbish.’
‘John, it’s dementia. Or some sort of clinical daftness, I’m telling you. He’s getting nearly as stupid as you.’
Further pleasantries were exchanged, but Gore could taste the usual tartness in their conversation, one that did not conclude with a pledge from either party to pay a call upon the other.
*
In fading light he pulled on his topcoat, addressed the Chubb, Yale and mortise locks of his new front door, and walked out into Oakwell’s long corridors. Rain was still palpable, but merely a mist. Strung across the full lengths of many a tightly boxed backyard were crammed lines of jeans, knickers and bright synthetic sportswear, lemon-yellow, lava-pink, slowly soaking.
He set out northward, planning a stroll of an orderly square half-mile that would return him to his door. Passing the heating factory, crossing Hoxheath Road, he turned east, past a scrappy patch of parkland in the shadow of a cluster of twenty-storey high-rises. Modular and Scandinavian, they had once proclaimed the future, perhaps, but they were forlorn and weather-beaten now. On the horizon east, St James’s Park football ground sat impregnable as a castle above its environs.
Trudging on, Gore passed a small estate where brown-skinned children hopped and skipped in the street, and the signage appeared to be entirely in Sikh. The next estate was Blake, little two-storey abodes in stained grey brick. Toiling up a poor-looking road of grocers and bric-a-brac shops, he made note of the Netto supermarket, its trolleys chained in a row like a listless gang of labourers. The houses now were back-to-back terraces, split by long alleys, their high yard walls topped by cruel shards of glass. On the street corners lads in caps loped and loitered in pairs, seemingly restless but not going anywhere. Gore kept his head low and felt happier once he reached the vast precinct of the General Hospital, before turning south and heading down past a quiet stretch of semi-detached houses that restored him to Hoxheath Road. Past a dank-looking carpet warehouse and a bedframe superstore, past a row of small shopfronts embattled behind grilles, and the office of Tyneside West Labour Party, VOTE PALLISTER in smart red capitals. To his right were long slopes of Victorian terracing declining in the direction of the Tyne’s old grey waters, and a mass of riverfront industrial works now rendered into disused warehouse space.
The Scoular Estate proposed a minor advance on Blake: solid redbrick construction, some good iron fencing, some decent garden plots. Gazing up and over the rooftops Gore made out the green-and-gold cap of a mosque, and he detoured from the main drag for a closer look. In its shadow was a squat, unlovely pub – The Gunnery by name – and a so-called YOUTH CENTRE, a breezeblock hut with a flat roof and poky high windows like a changing room for school sports. Its front doors were bolted but a quartet of boys sat outside, smoking, on a railed concrete ramp. Even from twenty yards Gore could smell something acrid on the air.
And now, unavoidably in front of him, was the Crossman Estate. A more grimly gimcrack construction he could not have imagined: brick and clapboard buildings, erected with what could only have been a callous disregard for time and weathering – dreadfully rotted window frames, low wooden fences hardly worth kicking down, front doors with numbers chalked or painted on. Stupefying amounts of rubbish were strewn about the place – not merely foodstuff and discarded wrappings, but industrial pallets, broken-backed recliners, a knackered fridge, a punctured ball. Pigeons clustered and strutted about with an air of proprietor’s ease.
It was sensory overload of a sort – more pure bleakness than Gore could fully assimilate. There had to be lives going on behind these terrible facades, the actual condition of which he was going to have to determine. But the evening chill felt much the harsher now, and he decided for the time being to suspend his enquiries into the condition of the English working class.
Chapter II
FACTS OF LIFE
On secular occasions when it was asked of John Gore quite why he chose the vocation of Anglican priest, he had two responses ready to hand – one for such inquisitors as seemed to respect t
he life of the spirit, the other for those who appeared, affably or otherwise, to be taking the piss. Parties of the former were favoured with his best recollection of a moment in his early twenties when, breaking rocks in the Auvergne region of France, he had – for want of a less worn expression – ‘felt the call’. As for the piss-takers, Gore told them that he came from a little village in County Durham by the name of Pity Me, and so resolved from an early age to go forth and pity others.
It was a one-street town within the parish of St Cuthbert, and John grew to know its contours as well as the nose on his face. Northward sat the more populous Chester-le-Street, and ten miles on lay Newcastle, as much as he could then imagine by way of a metropolis. But to stray a mere mile south was to enter the environs of Durham City, with its grand Norman castle, hallowed cathedral and esteemed university college. Pity Me and its near neighbour Framwellgate Moor had been founded on Front Street in the nineteenth century, per the needs of the coalmining industry, for both squatted over St Cuthbert’s share of the vast Durham coalfield. But local mining had dwindled to a halt by the 1920s, the workers forced to shift to nearby Bearpark or to Easington on the coast. By the time of John’s adolescence, Framwellgate’s ‘Old Pit’ was buried far beneath a fenced depot belonging to the County Council, and the villages were mere dormitory suburbs of the city.
The Gores lived but a stone’s throw from Front Street in a tidy red-brick close, their semi within sight and earshot of a thundering bypass that carried cars and lorries down to Darlington and, further yet, to that other place called THE SOUTH. And yet John always bore the vague conviction that he had received a rural upbringing. From his bedroom window he would spy on two languid chestnut mares kicking their heels in a secluded field. Many a local estate bordered on woodland that could turn surprisingly thick, albeit scythed through by bridleways. This much John learned of County Durham from the seat of his Raleigh Grand Prix bike, and he grew fond of the way in which invisible borders were traversed and works of man receded, while fresh vistas and tracts of green space opened up – stretches of field and farmland, fences of post and wire, horses and shabby-fleeced sheep.
He found Durham rich, too, in place names that struck him as novel and fantastical – Craghead, Monk Hesleden, Quaking Houses. One evening over the family’s tea he stated his intention to cycle five miles out to Sacriston, the invoking of which seemed to fill him with an instinctual piety. But his father Bill only creased his brow in a familiar manner that cancelled all debate. ‘Whey, it’s just a bloody pit village, John.’ And from the far coast of the kitchen table Susannah let out a short scoffing laugh.
Only Granddad Alec ever saw fit to indulge the boy’s fancy in this area.
‘Have you ever been to no place, bonny lad?’ Such was his stock query. John would giggle, only for Alec to make a great show of rueful head-shaking and produce from his pocket a square of yellowing paper, unfolded carefully into an Ordnance Survey. And there indeed, at the end of Alec’s fingernail – and really no further than another five-mile jaunt up the road – was NO PLACE, CO. DURHAM.
*
Alec was broad-shouldered and forthright in any social gathering. Bill was whip-thin and pensive, prone to the silent chewing of a thumbnail. Alec’s capacities looked to be distributed evenly about his sturdy physique, while Bill’s seemed to have migrated entirely upward, to that furrowed brow beneath a helmet of prematurely silvered hair. And while Bill was perennially unkempt, living in cardigans and corduroys far past their good wear, Alec clad himself always in a three-piece of black gabardine with a pressed and collarless white shirt, the fine strands of his own snowy hair brilliantined back across his scalp.
John knew in his bones that Dad and Grandad were very different men, but the grown-up world mystified him such that he couldn’t quite see why. The facts known to him were that Alec had worked in a coalmine for twenty years, his cheeks pockmarked by tiny shards of anthracite, before he was granted promotion to a managing role in the pit welfare fund. Whereas Bill drove a yellow van all round the locality, and made people’s telephones work. Why one job for money bested another was unclear to John. He assumed only that if people worked hard then they got their just desserts, but Dad and Granddad seemed not quite to concur on this point, at least on those evenings that they spent supping beer and disputing matters in the parlour by the three-bar fire.
Their regular schism was over the Labour Party – which, if Bill was believed, embodied all things slovenly in the world, even though he had once subscribed keenly to his local branch. But Alec still lived and breathed Labour. And as far as John could see, the very facts of life in the region were Labour through and through. This, though, was precisely his dad’s point.
It seemed to have a perplexing amount to do with houses – how they were built, and then allocated, by the Labour council. ‘Rotten,’ Bill decreed. ‘All out for themselves.’ John thought he would never hear the end of T. Dan Smith or Alderman Andrew Cunningham. If Bill was believed, scarcely a new home got built in the north-east but for Smith profiting by the very bricks and mortar. ‘He pays them who decide what gets built,’ Bill fumed, ‘then the bloody builders pay him for the job.’
‘How is that allowed?’ was John’s falsetto contribution.
‘Aw, it’s not against the law, son. Would you credit that? A blind man can see it’s all wrong. But owld Smith, he gets away with it, see, cos they’re all rats. All in each other’s bloody pockets, man.’
This was where Alec would clear this throat heftily and remark that not all parties should be tarred by the same brush. Bill, though, was merely warming to the topic of Alderman Cunningham – the ‘Baron’, as he was known, and John pictured a caped and moustachioed villain trussing a damsel to a railway track.
‘How many jobs has that bugger got, eh? He’s running Labour in Durham. Running General and Municipal union. Twenty-grand house he’s got in Chester-le-Street. And his bliddy son’s an MP. How’d he fix that up, eh?’
‘He was elected, Bill. Him and his lad.’
‘Whey, Dad, man,’ Bill scorned. ‘A bliddy parrot in a red rosette could hold that seat. Labour Party looks after none but itself.’
‘So you’d have the Tories, would you? Eh? Is that what you want?’
This seemed to be Alec’s coup de grâce, for Bill would lapse into the stoniest silence.
It was a flag-day in the Gore house when Dan Smith was packed off to prison along with the Baron and another crony, some Yorkshire architect. For Bill the joy was tempered by the return of Labour’s avuncular Mr Wilson as prime minister. John had thought his teachers would throw a party, so keen was their pleasure. But ‘Owld Wilson’, Bill was adamant, had benefited by a miners’ strike, of which Bill didn’t approve. Bill thought the miners selfish, saboteurs – whatever the sins of the Tories. Precisely what his father did admire in this seamy world, John had no clue. He could see, though, that Alec let no slur on the miners go unchallenged.
The modest bungalow where Alec lived alone was the gift of the Durham Aged Mineworkers’ Association. John’s mother, too, had been a miner’s child, and when she was no older than his age something had happened at Easington Colliery so dreadful that it could hardly be spoken of thereafter.
‘They had an explosion, see,’ Alec told John on one of the boy’s Saturday visits, as he sat in a deckchair watching his granddad pull up leeks in the small walled back garden. ‘It was all cos of some sparks come off the cutting machine, when they’d methane gas in the air. Dreadful it were. Eighty-one men, dead and gone. And your mam’s dad,’ he sighed, ‘Herbie, he was one of ’em. Did y’knaa that?’
John nodded dumbly. But he had not. And he wasn’t sure he wished to know more, for the whole world of that work, the pit-shaft and the black seam, wore a grim, forbidding aspect.
*
John inherited Bill’s gangling leanness, but his mother was portly, for she relished good meat and gravy and all sorts of pies and pastries, sugared or savoury. She was partial, mor
eover, to a sweet wine or a sherry, and the odd furtive cigarette. She wore her thick hair in a curly mop at the front and a bunch tethered at the back and there was a dolefulness to her eyes, accentuated by the bags and the slab-like frames of her spectacles. She was no beauty – a plump mole on her cheek and a lugubrious long philtrum under her nose. But her smile was warm, serene, and suggestive of intellect. Her regard for local history led her to found a Pity Me Society, though it never found sufficient members to justify a meeting. Thwarted, she transposed her energy to instructing John on the monastic tradition of the area – how the monks of Lindisfarne bore St Cuthbert’s coffin to Chester-le-Street, so founding a community that would become the episcopal county palatinate. Weekly she marched her children down Front Street to Sunday School at the church hall of St Aidan’s, and on bright mornings set fair for games it seemed to John a huge injustice that he be dragged once more to that dusty hall.
St Aidan’s was a plain stone chapel built for the miners, set in leafy grounds behind the modern prefab hut where John was taught his Bible stories. At first he found these lessons about as appealing as the monthly visit to Terry the Barber over the road. But he tarried with his peers while a chubby young woman led them through illustrated books describing the travails of Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, and other strangely bearded men in robes and sandals. The tales began to exert a charm – not least that of Joseph, who long suffered the disdain of those brothers, only to realise his destiny in Egypt. In due course John joined Audrey in the chapel, since Bill and Susannah had other things to do. He was not fond of hymnals, oblivious to boring stretches of the service, but keenly attendant to his own imagination, piqued as it was by images and concepts of pilgrimage and mission, of Potiphar’s wife and the Pharaoh’s dream, seven lean years and seven years fat.
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