A Search for Donald Cottee

by Philip Spires

  Geoff and I were quite good mates for a while, for a year or two, when we were little. Boys can be friends in the loosest and most distant of ways. We perhaps shared no more than a desire to skim stones across the village dam, or climb a particular tree, but we did those things together, at least for a while. In particular, we both liked running, and the Blackpool Hills across Kiddington Common were our favourite haunt.

  I had - still have - a theory about Kiddington Common and its shallow, peaty, reed-filled depressions. They are set between the intermingled gorse and blackberry bushes, about ten strides across and regularly fill up with water after rain. They are perfectly circular, with interiors depressed to the depth of an eight-year-old’s jump down from the bounding bank. And the whole common is covered with them, covered with these dips, as if some giant chef has attacked the land with a circular pastry cutter, like my aunt twisting tart bases out of a sheet of short crust. The bushes always grow out of the skeleton-like raised ribs between the dips, never in the soggy, damp of the bottom, where a tufted grass grew in tussocks and thin reeds thrived. It was always soft enough for us kids to call them bogs and worry about sinking out of sight if we fell in them.

  But I have a theory. These places are ancient mines, vestiges of vertical shafts that the tykes of old dug to find coal, or flint, or shale. They would pile up the tailings around the edge and undermine the overhanging topsoil until it collapsed. Then they would pile all the spoil back into the hole and cut another shaft a few feet away, beyond the limit of the collapse. So all these centuries later, the clays and topsoil remain mixed, whereas they are still layered along the intervening ridges. Thus, the filled-in shafts settled and became depressions, places where water would lie over the clay, making bogs of the pits. We used to dare one another to walk across them, knowing that after a step or two the mud would start to flow over the tops of our wellies.

  But the Blackpool Hills were different. They had bracken, not grass, were solid and stony underfoot, with no soft soil, and the depressions were deeper, though drier. I now know that during the 1920s, during the general boredom of the General Strike, the village’s miners cleared the silted dam and piled the dredgings selectively along the ridges between the depressions, because it had started wet, of course, and they wanted it to have a chance to drain into the hollows. The stuff they pulled out was more sand than clay, pebbly and laced with gravel. When the smaller things leeched out, they left solid, hard-set hills along the ridges between the now better drained bogs. And so, by chance, they created the perfect children’s playground, a place where you could run and hide in summer, snowball and slide in winter. And I grew up to know every path, every rise, every fall, every slip, every slide, every inch of this heaven on earth.

  It was an area covered in bracken. I always used to call them ferns. “Where are you off to?” my mother would ask as I made for the door. “I’m off to the ferns,” I would answer. Perhaps it was because the row of houses that faced the common was called Fernside that I latched onto the name. But I also liked the sound. It was the single syllable of indeterminate length that I liked. I found it reassuring. It conjured up a sensation of secure, all embracing softness. It was an image that could only be confirmed by submerging yourself beneath the elevated blanket of the foliage on a June or July afternoon when the sun shone diffused and golden through the delicate shade. It was the silence, as well, that bewitched, a quiet that an occasional striding toad might crinkle or a lapwing or skylark, invisible above, might perforate.

  I knew Kiddington Common so well that I used to take visitors on conducted tours of its pleasures. When my cousins from Jest came to visit, I always took them for a run across the hills. My two cousins were a bit older than me. We didn’t travel a lot in those days because our Ford Eight wasn’t that reliable and the fifty mile trip to my aunt’s house would take two hours or more. It’s hard to imagine that we used to stop on the way to brew tea on a primus stove that my dad had to prick into flame with a little pin. It burned methylated spirits, a blue liquid that we carried in an old Compo bottle.

  But when we did travel, it was a real event, a day to be anticipated, with every one of its minutes consciously lived, and then permanently logged in the memory of experience. The only problem was, of course, that the cousins were girls. Girls, for God’s sake! And they wore dresses! And shoes! Well I wore shoes, I suppose, but not plastic pink-strapped sandals with shiny floral trims and moulded soles that clapped along the pavement like the muted applause of a reluctant audience. And they lived in Jest, fifty miles away near the coast, a port city that was quickly, though not realised by us at the time, being transformed from a seaway to a backwater.

  But the real problem for Jestians, at least when they visited places like Kiddington, was their voices. The sounds of Jest are unique. They have a flat open vowel, just one, that stretches every word, creating a blandness of tone, punctuated only by their universally short-tongued r. I studied such definitive, geographically-specific examples of language in E316, Linguistic Differentiation By Specific Protolingual Fixation, An Exploration. Little did I know of the theory as an eight-year-old when I hosted not one, but two girls - both taller than me! - with their clanking shoes, surprising strength, threatening softness and creamy voices that intoned an unmistakably foreign accent. They were a stringy nine and a hefty ten to my rather diminished eight. They wore summer dresses that day, comfy and loose-fitting, their floppiness almost confrontational, their bare arms whiter than the fabric against which they brushed. For an eight-year-old boy, it was an image of striking, frightening yet dominating vulnerability.

  I had already taken them to granddad’s allotment to show them the chickens. He hadn’t kept pigs for about two years, but somehow the homely smell of the mash still pervaded the huts. I had even shown them my collection of rusty nails, some of which weren’t even rusty. I used to spend hours scrabbling and scrambling through the derelict terraces that stood, partially, in ranks, perpendicular to the main road and eventually backing onto the Watson’s council estate. The idea of collecting nails arose one day when my granddad presented me with what seemed to me like an infinitely long fire-blackened plank, a floor board, I was told, out of which at apparently random angles sprouted thick, blunt iron nails. He taught me how to hammer them back without bending them, lever them a little with pincers to ease their grasp on the wood fibres and then to knock them free from the other side using a blind, thin steel shaft and a sharp hammer tap. Then he set me on, saying he wanted all the nails out and then straightened so he could repair the allotment’s fence, because the chickens were escaping.

  “There’s a lot of planks full of nails like this in them houses,” I can remember saying.

  “Then tha’d better get ‘em out,” he said. “It might make thee a millionaire.”

  I took him at his word, and so my nail collection began. It was some years later that I watched a television programme about a man called Paul Getty (except that he seemed to have three names, but then every Tom, Dick and Harry can be called John...) and until then I never knew what a millionaire looked like. But I knew they existed. I’d been told stories about Fords, Rothschilds, Hearsts and even a fellow called Riley, who had a life. But when I showed my two cousins my fine voluminous horde, a vast pile of rusty shards of iron, I had no idea what a millionaire might look like. I had practised writing the relevant number, carefully counting the zeroes, but I had little idea what it was that we were counting, because, at the age of eight, I had never actually held a pound note. I had graduated from pennies to shillings, but no further. My treasury of nails ran to hundreds, but the girls were not impressed. They seemed to be more concerned that I always had black finger nails where I had hit myself with the hammer. I remember they kept holding my hands to look. I didn’t like girls touching me. It felt funny. And above all, I was disappointed. I had spent months amassing those nails and months more sorting them by size, type and colour into a stacked b
ank of matchboxes I had assembled and reinforced with loops of crimped wire for the purpose. I was in the middle of explaining the difficulty of retrieving the planks from the rubble of the derelict houses, and the intricacy of the extraction of the prize nails. And Jane, the ten-year-old, just turned aside and said, “I want to walk on the common.” Betty smiled at me, stuck her nose in the air and followed her sister out of the allotment gate and into the backyard, leaving me alone with my prized fixings.

  They had already got to the shop at the corner by the time I reluctantly followed them. They were not even ten yards away from the start of the dark, almost sinister gorse bushes that dappled the open expanse of Kiddington Common. They waited for me not, as I thought then, because they didn’t know the way, but, as I now realise, the ten-year-old was charged with looking after me and was dutifully doing as she was told.

  I marched them along the paths, some of which I was convinced only I knew. When I told them about the Blackpool Hills and my secret dens hollowed out in the crispy dryness of last year’s, now grown-through bracken, they immediately insisted I take them there. For all children, it seems, the promise of special status in a secret world is irresistible.

  We went straight to the best one, where my private place extended from under the ferns to an overhang of tree roots, where the steep clay bank beneath a giant sycamore tree had been eroded by rain along with subsidence caused by the honeycomb of pit workings deep below. We lay there on that warm sunny day. The three of us were side by side, our arms touching, just listening to the sounds of the place. Once or twice I started to speak, but each time Jane gave a sharp “Ssh” to shut me up. What I do remember, vividly, were the grasshoppers. They were minute, hardly bigger than pinheads, and a bright, iridescent green. After a few minutes, the girls’ pale dresses were covered with them, but still none of us moved. We didn’t want to disturb them.

  “I wonder what it’s like being dead,” I remember saying, at last. Such words come easily to an eight-year-old.

  The girls needed no reminding of their previous visit to Kiddington, an afternoon when the three of us were parcelled off to the cemetery, a place of crosses, pock-marked stones with eroded writing, overgrown paths and sprays of cut flowers, many of them sad. Our goal was in the newer part, where the marble edging, black and white, still contrasted rather than weathered to uniform grey, mingled with plaques and their inscriptions. One such bore the name of my great grandmother, whose rounded features used to greet every person who walked past her cottage window until, one day, my mother told us we wouldn’t be passing by any more. That day, when we visited the new grave, Jane, then nine, dressed me down in clear, admonitory terms. When I spoke in my normal voice to indicate the path we should take, she whispered sternly, holding my arms, saying “Donald Cottee, when you are in the symmetry you must always be quiet. Dead people are rising here and noise stops them, interrupts them. They have to concentrate. It’s not easy to rise and we should never disturb them.” She had learned the Mrs Malaprop from my grandma, who always said symmetry when she meant cemetery. When you think of the cross and the gravestone, it makes perfect sense.

  So that afternoon, lying like laid out corpses side by side under the ferns, I asked my question to receive no answer. The silence that followed, however, seemed more intense, apparently deepened by the lack of expected reply. And we let it rest heavily on us for a minute or more, until suddenly there was a sharp crack somewhere above us, followed, just an instant later, by stones falling through the ferns nearby. Small shards landed on me like a shower of grapeshot, as if they had been lobbed intentionally to do no more than disturb us.

  We stood up amidst a cloud of dashed off insects and there, on the bank overlooking my secret hideaway were four boys. There were two Watsons, my friend Geoff and his elder brother, Mick, and the two Stokes brothers, the older one fourteen, big for his age and a notorious village bully. If you met him on the way home from school, it was Joey Stokes that would pick you up, rough you up, throw you over his shoulder and spin you round until you were dizzy. As long as you didn’t struggle, he didn’t hit you, though you always felt he would. If you lashed out, he would beat you up and promise more next time. If you ran away, he did everything twice the next time he caught hold of you. And there he was, Joey Stokes, a giant compared to us, towering over us from the top of the bank.

  It wasn’t Joey that was our real problem, however. That role was to be played by Sam, his thirteen-year-old brother. Samuel Stokes, less than a year younger than Joseph, was small, thin and pasty when compared to the heavily-built Joey. Alone, Sam was a physically timid, if a verbally aggressive boy. Alone, Joey was something to fear, of course, but Joey alone was a mere thug. You knew where you stood with him. But combined, the two Stokes boys were something different from their individual types. When slow-witted bully combined with cowardly schemer, the mix was dangerous. Every child in Kiddington knew that mix and we all feared it.

  At his brother’s shoulder Sam became the tough guy, the imaginative brain that invented and then lay down the dares for Joey’s brawn, deeds that Sam could then proudly claim as his own, unless, of course, they went wrong or were found out, in which case he let Joey take the blame. In L255, Inter-War American Literary Invention, I came across Steinbeck’s George and Lennie, and as I read the book, it felt like re-visiting my childhood experience, so completely did these fictional men fit the Stokes boys. But, that summer afternoon, it was Joey Stokes who spoke first in his slow, deep and aitchless voice, with its highly accentuated dentals.

  “Now tell me, Donald Cottee, just what have you been up to, lying in the bushes with two smart bits of tottie?”

  “They’re not bushes,” I mumbled. “They’re ferns, my ferns, my secret den.”

  “Secret?” Joey shouted, and then louder again, “Secret? This place is about as secret as the inside of my trousers!” Perhaps in some respects, and with the benefit of hindsight, he was mentally as well as physically beyond his years.

  “Joey’s had his den here since last year,” said Sam, his high voice prancing and sneering through the words like garden fence gossip. “So this is Joey’s place, not yours!” His tone always travelled from assertion to aggression, from statement to sneer, and the quicker it moved the more it promised threat.

  The Watsons said nothing. But they did smile, the political necessity of currying the Stokes’s favour cloaking any offer of recognition, let alone friendship. I remember looking at Geoff, looking at him directly, straight in the eye, in the same way that I did when I caught him copying from me at school. He was uncomfortable, nervous, breathing hard, but trying not to show it. Mick, however, exuded the confidence that proximity to the Stokes engendered. And it was a proximity that would eventually provide him with his first downfall, because, less than two years later, Joey and Mick would be caught stealing from shops in Bromaton. They were lucky to avoid borstal.

  The Stokes family were infamous throughout Kiddington. There wasn’t an adult in the village that had a good word to say for them. They lived on the end of a row, the last of the newer houses before the council estate reached Pit Lane, the road that skirted Kiddington Junior School. Parents used to tell their kids to cross to the other side of the road when walking to school, rather than pass directly by the Stokes’s gate.

  The Stokes had a big dog, an Alsatian that was forever in their small front garden. It was always tied up with a length of washing line to the front door handle. The word ‘garden’ here is used to refer to the three metre square patch of land bounded by a rotten fence and containing four wrecked prams stuffed with weathered off-cuts, an old chicken coop that still smelled of its former occupants, its doors permanently ajar, spewing straw, and various bits of bicycle strewn randomly about. The regulation deep red of the front door - all the houses on the row had the same colour, at least in theory - was peeling and showed softened, alternately blanched and blackened pine through the gaps. Th
e council did send men to paint the doors, but they could never get past the Stokes’s dog, not that they tried very hard. The front gate was missing, its posts long rotted to dark crumbly comb, and it had been replaced on a long-term temporary basis with a plywood board that loosely covered the gap, its crinkled edges flapping and scraping across the concrete path when anyone moved it. The males of the household would habitually vault over the top rather than move it when they came and went. Mrs Stokes, the only woman in the household, seemed never to go out, nor even to show her face at the window, so the board hardly ever shifted. There was a ginnel that ran along the back of their row, an old access to the rear half of a now bombed-out terrace of back-to-backs. On one side, the high wall was still intact. On the other, it had largely gone, partly demolished along with the now derelict houses it served.

  I used to love those old houses. It was in them that I collected my nails. The floors had largely gone, though most of the joists were still intact. The cellars were interconnected by holes knocked through the brickwork. The partially demolished walls above allowed even a none-too-adventurous child like me to crawl from one end of the terrace to the other, sometimes at ground level, sometimes subterranean, sometimes dangling in mid-air along the skeletal first floor joists. There were even occasional patches of floorboards still intact here and there, places where you could halt the all-fours crawl for a rest. Near the end of the terrace one such sturdy resting place directly overlooked the back of the Stokes’s house. It was there, late one summer afternoon that I saw Mrs Stokes. It was the only time I ever saw more than a momentary glimpse of her.