I had never seen anyone look so old, which is strange, since I was used to visiting my grandma and my great-grandma. Now they were old. But they looked years younger than Mrs. Stokes. She was grey. It was not her hair that was grey, because that was in fact white. But it was not the pure white of a really old woman, but yellowy or milky white, suggesting that it merely lacked the energy to aspire to colour. But she was utterly grey. Her skin was grey, a dark steely grey, not white, not pink, not brown, but grey, and lined, looking toughened and rubbery, despite hanging in painful flaps at the neck and arm. She was also dirty, dirty beyond anything I could imagine. When I came back from a romp through the ferns on the common, I was often caked with mud, but I knew that if I washed, it would all come off and I would be clean again. As far as I could see, however, nothing could have cleaned Mrs Stokes. She would still have been dirty after a bath, even if the house had one. She had layer upon layer of clothes and they all looked like rags. She had cut off woollen gloves on her hands, the type that let the fingers poke through so they can work and grip, but there were also holes in the palms where the grey skin showed through. I can remember feeling sick when I saw her and crouching down below the level of the window so I couldn’t see her any more. I almost felt guilty looking at her, as if her very decrepitude was a kind of taboo. It was only when she died, some ten years later, that I realised she was about the same age as my own mother.
Mr Stokes, I was told by Geoff Watson, was away a lot, and he ought to know because he and Sam Stokes had been best friends for a while. There were four lads at home. Besides Sam and Joey there was sometimes the older one, Harry and, always, the baby, always called ‘babbie’. Babbie Stokes died quite soon after I had spied on his mother, before he started school. Harry was like his father, my mother told me. Later, I realised this meant he was a jail-bird, but still too young to take the full punishment. So, while his father did time for petty larceny, house-breaking, receiving stolen goods and the like, his partner, his eldest son, was in reform school, the infamous borstal.
“He’s a borstal lad, that Harry Stokes,” my mother told me. “You stay away from him! And the others as well, for that matter.” And the babbie? He grew to a pathetic four-year-old with torn clothes, a dirty face and toilet-stained hands that constantly seemed to clutch at the end of a grubby, chewed crust. I saw him regularly, because he used to run to the front window and poke his head up under the blackish nets whenever the dog barked. He wasn’t allowed out of the house, and his mother’s cursing could be heard right across the street whenever he ventured as far as the front garden. He lived to a few months short of his fifth birthday. It was some disease, my mother said.
So with his brother Harry in borstal and his dad in prison, it was Joey Stokes who found himself the head of the household. But it was his thirteen-year-old brother, Sam, who made all the plans. The Watsons, Geoff and Mick, could only jealously aspire to emulate their idolised version of the Stokes family’s lawlessness, but their envy was real and their admiration declared.
“So Donald coruscating Cottee,” I can remember Sam saying on that summer afternoon with my cousins on the common, “repeat after me. This is Joey Stokes’s den. He was here first.”
I can also remember the look on his face when I stayed silent. I wasn’t disobeying, I was merely quietly defecating myself.
“I said repeat after me, you stumpy little squirt... This is Joey Stokes’s den.”
Still I couldn’t speak. I looked at my older cousins. Jane was two years older than me, taller and altogether bigger than my male eight years. She ought to know what to do. She was almost grown up. She even looked like her mother.
Joey found this funny, very funny indeed. He could barely slot the words between his fits of laughter. “Sam, did you see? Did you see him? He’s trying to get a girl to help him out,” he ranted, turning at the end to face us again, still helplessly amused.
There was grass at the top of the bank, heavily clumped. It was Sam who first bent down to rip out a lump of sward, and it was he who tossed the first of many down towards us. The others, especially Mick Watson, who followed his lead, ripped up clumps of couch grass by the roots before lobbing them towards us, their roots releasing the soil packed amongst them like black rain as they fell. Their fun lasted a couple of minutes. All we could do was crouch down with our arms across our heads to absorb the impacts.
But the clods of grass weren’t enough for Sam Stokes. He always needed to go one better, and the step up, that afternoon, was a stone or two ripped from the clay of the bank below the line of the grass. So he was already closer when he launched them with more of a push than a lob.
We had a classification system for bricks, and it was a method that transferred to stones. A full brick was called a macker, a half-brick a half-macker. When Sam’s half-macker-equivalent stone glanced the side of Betty’s head, just above and behind the ear, his face lit up with gleeful achievement. Betty screamed. As the hand that rose to clutch the graze withdrew, it dripped with blood. It was Geoff I remember saying, “She’s cut her head open,” as if it was somehow Betty’s fault that someone had shelled her and, though we used that over-stated expression for any scratch that drew blood from the scalp, I can also remember, that day, imagining my cousin’s head literally splitting open like a peeled orange at any moment. It wasn’t a bad wound, we soon realised, but still it bled.
“Go on,” cried Sam, “scream your head off! It’s all your fault! You shouldn’t have been in our Joey’s den!”
It was then that true character revealed itself. The silent elder Watson, Mick, latterly of the Ribthwaite Castle, announced to his allies that now they couldn’t let us go, at least not until the wound had stilled. Mick Watson was born knowing how to cover his back, how to avoid responsibility, and it was he who led the lads down the bank to surround us. So, while Jane fussed through her screaming sister’s hair to judge the severity of the cut and I shrank beside her reassuringly stronger frame, Mick and Geoff, Joey and Sam closed in to form a square around us, closer than comfort, but staying beyond reach.
“Sit down,” said Mick. “Sit down!” he repeated, shouting when we didn’t immediately move. Smaller than Joey, brighter than Sam, Mick instinctively knew how to coerce, how to use a stretch of the frame or a hardening of the voice to elicit a response he desired. And so we sat, or knelt on the ground, our knees almost touching, as Betty continued to scream. “And shut up, you little slag,” he said quietly to my cousin, who was immediately silent, though her slight frame still shuddered with fear and shock combined.
For a minute or two, no-one said a word. The tiny green grasshoppers appeared again amongst the flecks of soil and blood that now spattered the girls’ clothes. When they swept them aside, Sam told them not to move and then to put their hands above their heads. We had all seen too many cheap Westerns, it seems. “Stick ‘em up, Donald Cottee,” he said, pointing a mock forefinger and thumb Colt 45 at me. I did as I was told.
“We are kidnapping you,” said Mick in an attempted John Wayne accent. “If you move just one muscle, pal, we’ll fill you full of lead.” So that was what the Watson’s had watched on Saturday night.
Joey pointed a stick at us from his hip, and made noises like a Tommy Gun. We used to do that when we played at war, our favourite game of the past decade, making a sound like a forced laugh as we swivelled back and forth with our make-believe guns, thus imitating those black and white heroes of a war fought across Sunday afternoon television screens.
Betty had already started to calm down by the time Mick approached. She was too terrified to react when he touched her. She did flinch as he wiped a spit-wetted hankie against her graze. He didn’t want to help, only to remove the evidence.
They held us there for an hour. They were hardly older than us, hardly bigger than us, but the terror they imparted is with me still. In hindsight, the four lads were probably as afraid as we were. Mi
ck, especially, was bright enough to know that Betty’s cut could get them into serious trouble. Geoff, his brother, ostensibly still my friend, stayed out of things throughout. Joey Stokes did stupid things, but only when egged on by his snivelling little brother.
Mick made up a story and had us learn it off by heart. It told the fib that I had dragged the girls through the ferns as a game and that Betty had tripped and fallen against a tree root. Her cut had stopped bleeding long before, but there was still dry blood in her hair and spots on her dress. He made me go down to the dam, wet a hankie and wipe away all I could. Jane took over and made a better job of it, and by the time we had finished the cut was barely visible and the evidence that remained was all our own work.
Then Mick told us - alongside a nod to Sam that revealed where the real brains were - that we should stick to the story he had taught us, because if we didn’t, he would set Joey on us the next time. Then they left, telling us to count slowly up to a thousand before we followed. We did as he ordered. And I got into trouble. We were two hours late for tea. Parents had been walking the streets calling our names and my cousins would be late setting off home. And their dresses were filthy. “Where on earth did you take them, Donald Cottee?” my mother asked.
“Only onto the common,” I answered, cowering in anticipation of the clout I expected to land around my left ear. “We went to the ferns.”
“I’ll give you ferns!” she said before delivering something quite special, which wasn’t ferns. It was years before I realised that the word kidnap did not specifically apply to kids.
11 Sods - ed
Seven
The real Ribthwaite Castle... - Don and Suzie go to the pub where they meet the current staff. Don meets Phil, who shows him the works. Mick raises an issue.
The real Ribthwaite Castle was dismantled after the Civil War, its long history coming to an end when the Protector protected it one last time. It was said that the locals destroyed it themselves, because it attracted sieges and fighting that repeatedly ruined the town. The resentment must have been a bit like that felt by the Stokes’s neighbours. No-one wants to live next to bad news. The castle had seen action in the Wars Of The Roses as well, long before the event became a cricket match. And, despite the town being famous for its manufacture of foodstuffs, notably the famous black sweets that bear the town’s name, King Richard The Second starved to death in its dungeons, though apocryphally there was plenty to drink.
I first trod the ramparts of Ribthwaite Castle as a child to look over the Vale Of Pork as part of a Kiddington Working Men’s Club outing to the liquorice works. We all stood there, leaning into the gale that threatened to render us airborne as we munched all sorts of sweets we had collected on our factory tour. I remember the derelict walls suggested construction rather than decay, a work in progress, perhaps. I imagined using some of my nail collection to put it back together.
The Ribthwaite Castle in Benidorm - at least in daylight - is almost the complete opposite. All the stones are in the right place and there are no obvious holes, but the place exudes a dereliction, as if threatening to collapse around you. At night, of course, when the lights are down, you can’t see the cracks. But today, the lighting was conventional, if dim, rather than the fluorescent violet darkness of later hours. In this watery yellow light, the interior looked scruffy and peeling, possibly dirty, not unlike the inside of the Watson’s council house in Kiddington, at least that part of it that the passer-by could see whenever they left the door open. There was a line of greasy grime at the junction of floor and wall and discolouration where bodies had leaned and scraped against the paintwork. A frayed hall runner finished shy of the skirts and loose balls of grey fluff wafted across discoloured tiles at its edge.
The Castle looked so different thirty years ago when it was new. For Kiddingtonians on holiday, it was the place to go, the very height of sophistication, the venue that both endowed and confirmed our right to celebrity. After all, we could now afford holidays in Spain, holidays whose funding no longer demanded that we save all year. We were new affluence personified.
It was in The Castle where you got the best turns to go with the jug of sangria, that obligatory start to any night out on the town. And it was also in The Castle where we sang the night away via the words of the traditional old classics. “Take me home,” we used to sing, precisely when we wanted to stay where we were to live the life of the stars, “to the place I know...” But of course we had never been there. We knew different country roads, the lanes that ran through Gagstone.
Country roads (leading to Ribthwaite Castle)
Almost heaven, Ribthwaite Castle
Liqu’rice, All Sorts, Morrison’s Hyper
Oldies live there
Older than the streets
Younger than the All Sorts
Blowin’ like a breeze
Gagstone lanes, take me home
To the place I belong
Ribthwaite Castle, hilltop fortress
Take me home, Gagstone lanes
All my mem’ries gather ‘round her
Miner’s lady, stranger to hot water
Dark and dusty, painted on the cheek
Lips that tastes like shoeshine
Teardrop in my eye
Gagstone lanes, take me home
To the place I belong
Ribthwaite Castle, hilltop fortress
Take me home, Gagstone lanes
I hear her voice, in the mornin’ hour she ca-alls me
Radio reminds me of my home far away
Drivin’ down the road I get a feelin’ that
I should have been home yesterday, yesterday
Gagstone lanes, take me home
To the place I belong
Ribthwaite Castle, hilltop fortress
Take me home, Gagstone lanes
Take me home, Gagstone lanes
Take me home, down Gagstone lanes...
Mick Watson, the recently installed king of the Ribthwaite Castle, had travelled those Gagstone lanes more times than he could count, but he would never dream of singing about them. Our host was there as promised. We were early, for some reason, and had been hanging around for half an hour when he arrived on the dot of four.
“Nice to see you, to see you nice,” he said, chinning again, his wrap-around airman’s shades offering rainbow-edged reflections of ourselves.
“You did that one last night,” I said.
“But it’s a classic, isn’t it?” he said, as he led the way through his business pitch, confident of the quality of his personal aesthetic. The half-mast, string-waisted trousers finished mid-calf. His designer-named trainers were cut low enough to expose the splitting blood vessel net that had caught his ankles. His black t-shirt was emblazoned with the motto ‘Detritus happens in Prague.’
We had waited inside, telling the staff that hurried about their preparatory bar duties that we were waiting for Mick Watson. Clearly, it was Mr Watson to them. There was more than a hint of distance maintained when we declared we were friends of their boss. Once Mick had arrived just a few minutes later, however, it was all jollity, smiles and fawning false camaraderie. Affectionate slaps of the back accompanied introductions that were conducted with an air of hilarity that exceeded any audience response to a Papa Tia joke the night before. Mind you, that wouldn’t be difficult.
“This is Don and Suzie Cottee,” said Mick several decibels louder than necessary, the names themselves apparently prompting mirth, a guffaw as blatantly false as any associated with television comedy. “And it’s Donkey to his friends! They’re from Kiddington, my home town.”
“Town? That’s stretching it a bit,” I said.
“They’ve moved to the La Manca camp site, past the new hotel beyond the Benidorm Palace. They’re also just retired. So, Ribthwait
e Castle, put your hands together for two new members of the Third Age!” There was a clap, which I stifled.
“Wait a minute, you vertiginous appurtenance,” I said, my words projected to drown the audience participation, “you’re at least two years older than me! So cut the ordure about us being old and decrepit! Third age, indeed...”
It was Mick who actually stopped the whoops and whistles of the audience with a raised palm. He was the chat show host, newly on stage and attempting to quell the spontaneously-planned adulatory effusion. “The big fat one over there is called Phil Matthews. The gorgeous lady next to him is his missus, Karen, who was once a winner in a Victoria Beckham look-alike contest run by The Sun.” We nodded a greeting, resisting the temptation to observe that the newspaper competition must have been a few years ago. “They’re both from Bromaton.”
“Now there’s a turn up for the books.” said Suzie. “Whereabouts?”
Now here appears something of interest to the blog reader. It’s a question to which I have no answer. Suzie and I were barely a month estranged from our weekly walk around the shops in Bromaton. During the years of those regular four or five hour Saturday pilgrimages, with a cappuccino in a mock Italian bar at some point during its duration, we must have rubbed shoulders with tens of thousands of Bromatonians, sometimes even bumped into the thersitical graphospasms, and did we ever worry about where they were from, who they were, who their frigoric dromonds were? Not a bit of it! And so why, when we are now living in squaliform Benidorm do we seek out Bromatonians, examine their address, their holobaptist family back to their gratulatory grandparents? Beats me! But here was Suzie doing it again. Now the usual Bromaton sort will wax lyrical about his borborygmic family, the castrensian house they grew up in, their conchyliated years at school. But Phil Matthews proved to be something less than forthcoming about his origins, laconic, indeed. Reticent, I might have put it, if pressed.
“My mam and dad live up the hill near The County. I left there when I was sixteen, when I went in the army, so no-one up there would remember me now. We had a place along Punslet Road before we moved out here, didn’t we Karen?” The question was a clear invitation for her to get him off the hook of my interest, which he clearly sensed as a potential petard.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 6
