Tag: leeds

Laura, That Summer and John Martyn

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For some reason I’ve been thinking of someone I knew long ago. Well, not just for any reason. In this new place I’m not far from where she lived, and driving along these streets, the ones where I walked – I was just 18 and who owned a car or took driving lessons all those years ago – has bounced her back into my head a few times. I don’t even remember her surname now, her face is a blur in time, but really, that doesn’t matter.

We were a couple for less than a two months, just a blink in the scheme of things, but I owe her a great debt. After all, she introduced me to the music of John Martyn. And that really did change my life. Over the years since I’ve bought his albums, seen him play whenever I could and even ended up writing a book about him (which you can buy here if you really want to). At his best, the magic of John remains strong, even 41 years after I first heard him.

She was called Laura, which she shortened to Lol, back when that had no other connotations. I’d finished my A levels, I was done with school, an empty summer loomed ahead of me. She was a little younger, just back from a trip to Paris with her mother after a small breakdown following an abortion. We met at a party, one of those teenage affairs where a couple of bottles of light ale and a toke or two on a joint seemed daring.

Now I think she was probably drifting a bit, trying to find herself. Her parents were very liberal, her father was a professor at Leeds University, her mother a published poet. They lived in a detached Victorian house with a flagstone floor in the big kitchen. Dinner conversations ranged all over, and I was included as an adult. It was all I’d dreamed of for myself.

It was an affair that came with a time limit. I was leaving in September and she’d be back to the mundane life of school. We knew it without saying a word.

One day in August, when the trees in the garden were full green and shady, she took me into the music room. Grand piano, a wall full of sheet music, expensive stereo. We sat on the floor and she put on an LP. A few seconds later came the first notes of “Go Down Easy” off John Martyn’s Bless the Weather and I was shaken to my core. I must have heard him on John Peel’s radio show, but this was really hearing him for the first time. It was slow, sensual music, so different from any singer-songwriter I knew. The voice slurred through the notes like a tenor sax, the guitar and bass worked off each other. This was…I didn’t have the words for it. Then came the title track and all the rest and I knew I’d heard something that would lodge in my heart.

We played that album a lot over the remainder of that summer. I bought a copy, I was hooked in a way I’d never been with anyone before or since. The music still moves me. It always will. At his best, John vibrated my soul the way no one else ever managed. Even late in his career, after a couple of decades of ups and downs, he had something special – I was able to review On the Cobbles for NPR. I’m still ridiculously grateful to Lol for introducing me to him.

I did see Lol once more after the inevitable breakup. It was two years later. I was back living in Leeds, a student who’d decided studying wasn’t for him. It was outside the Town Hall, after a King Crimson concert. I was on my own, she was with some new boyfriend. A brief surprised hello and we went our separate ways into the rain. But some moments in life don’t always vanish into nothingness.

Walking With Ghosts

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It’s six days since we moved into this new place. Six days since I came back to Leeds and 37 years since I left. And I’ve returned pretty much to the neighbourhood where I grew up. It’s a feeling of both tension and relief. Even after so long, this is familiar ground. I know the streets, I know the shopping areas, I can find my way from A to B without thinking.

In these six days I’ve done a fair bit of walking. But at every turn I find myself face to face with the person I was all that time ago. He comes with baggage. A mother and a father, a dog, the friends of his youth. He’s the ghost who walks every step beside me.

Sometimes I almost see him from the corner of my eye, wearing the old dark blue Navy greatcoat he favoured once the weather turned cold, or the cheap hippie Afghan coat that stank of goat whenever it was wet. His hair is longer – but not long, school wouldn’t allow that – and sometimes he’s carrying a guitar. He always has a paperback book peeking out of his pocket. Sometimes he seems to turn towards me with a questioning look, as if to say, ‘You look strangely familiar. Do I know you?’

It’s been six days of walking here and there. The ginnels and alleys that were my way home from school. The road to the tennis courts. The park where I lay on my back on a summer’s night in 1968, having had my head torn apart by Easy Rider, the hill at Roundhay Park, which was cut into terraces then, where I’d spend warm weekend afternoons hoping to meet girls. The paddle boats that no longer exist on the lake. Seeing the faint outline of a shaggy little dog roaring over the grass, happy to be off his lead and free.

Heartbreak, joy, and the day-to-day tedium. An awakening into adulthood. So many of the streets and the buildings around here hold my stories. For six days now I feel I’ve been walking with ghosts, going to place to place and collecting those stories, putting them in a bag and moving on to the next one. Six days so far, but many, many more to come. Then, perhaps, there’ll be new ghosts walking.

T Minus 4

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It’s T minus 4 and counting. On Friday we move. Finally. Finally? Well, we originally thought it would happen at the beginning of August. But buying a leasehold place seems to create its own set of hellish problems that drag on and on. If I were Catholic I’d believe we’d already gone through at least half of purgatory.

The house is made up of hills boxes. Of course, it’s been that way since the middle of July. We’ve had to dig in some of them in order to find things we didn’t believe we’d need before moving. But now there’s very little left to pack.

As we’re downsizing a lot has gone to charity shops. Last Friday saw them take out five wardrobes (yes, you read that correctly), a couple of bedside tables and a few other things. It’s a strangely cleansing experience, watching it all disappear.

I’ve moved numerous times before – to another continent and back, and once a good couple of thousand miles across that continent, as well as many other smaller moves – but this one fills me with joy. I never believed I’d go back to the place where I was born, let alone to the area where I grew up. Yet times change feelings. Since I began writing about Leeds I’ve wanted to spend more time there. I seem to know more people there than elsewhere in the UK, and none of them are old schoolfriends.

I’m excited by what’s ahead. We both are.

A Bit More 50s

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“Good morning, Mr. Markham.”

            He glanced up, thoughts vanishing behind him.

            “Hello, Joyce.” She was bundled in the old back wool coat she only shed at the height of summer. Long and shapeless, it made her look like someone who’d stepped out of another century. She worked in the Kardomah down on Commercial Street, a cheery enough soul in her sixties with grey hair curled tight against her scalp, covered with a headscarf.

            “You can seem ‘em all remembering, can’t you?”

            “Do you blame them?”

            “Not a bit, luv. We just need to make sure we never forget and let it happen again.”

            At 10, Albion Place he pushed hard on the door, forcing it over the hump in the lino and walked up to the second floor, past the typing bureau and unlocked the door of his office. Daniel Markham, the plain brass plaque read, Enquiry Agent.

            One pace inside and he stopped. Someone had been here. Everything look right, the arch files on the bookcase, folders neatly aligned, the ashtray emptied and the chair squared against the desk. But there was a faint scent, a hint of bay rum, trapped in the closed room that shouldn’t have been there.

            Whoever broke in had been neat; they’d even set the lock behind them. If the burglar hadn’t been so vain he’d never even have guessed. He unlocked the drawers of the desk, searching through, but nothing seemed to be missing. Even the Webley Mark Six he’d brought home from the service was there.

            Another twenty minutes and he was ready to swear that nothing had been taken. Even the smell had vanished. He sat back in the chair and lit a Gold Leaf, watching the smoke rise to the ceiling. A careful burglary where nothing was stolen. A coshing with no robbery. It didn’t add up. What the hell was going on?

 

By dinnertime he didn’t have any answers. The telephone hadn’t rung and the postman hadn’t delivered any letters. An empty morning. He put the trilby on his head and strolled around to Briggate, glancing in Burton’s window before going next door to eat at Lyons.

            The windows were damp with condensation and the air heavy and warm. Someone had left a copy of the Manchester Guardian at the table and he skimmed through it as he ate. He’d just pushed the plate aside and settled back with a cup of tasteless coffee when a hand touched his should and the fat man eased into the seat across from him with a grunt, placing his hat on the table.

            “I hear you were lucky not to end up in the cells last night, Dan.” Roger Baker took a briar pipe from his jacket, a box of Swan Vestas out of the waistcoat stretched across his belly and lit up, puffing patiently until he was happy with the way it drew. “Three sheets to the wind, the copper on the beat said.” He turned to the hovering waitress. “A cup of tea and a slice of jam roll, please luv. My friend here’s paying.”

            Baker was a detective sergeant with Leeds Police, a man with a wide, florid face and deep knowledge of Leeds behind his soft eyes. He’d started out as a young constable in 1935, his service interrupted by the war. He’d seen the city grow and change. Not much happened that escaped his ears.

            “I know you’re young and you need your beauty rest, lad. But your own bed’s a better place than Merrion Street.”

            Markham bristled. At twenty-five he was half the age of the other man, and Baker never let him forget it. Still wet behind the ears, he said. Hardly out of nappies.

            “I was coshed, Mr. Baker. Got the lump to prove it.”

            “What did they get?”

            “Nothing,” he answered and Baker pursed his lips.

            “I know they have cosh boys down in London. What do they call them?”

            “Teddy boys.” He’d seen the pictures in the Sunday papers, posing with their Brylcreemed hair and long drape jackets. But he’d never spotted one in Leeds.

            “Aye, that’s it. Bloody disgrace. Should birch the lot of them.” He put the pipe aside for the tea and the jam roll smothered in custard. When Baker ate, everything else stopped. He was a man who relished his food. Markham lit a cigarette and waited until the sergeant wiped his mouth with the serviette, the signal that he’d finished.

            “There’s something else. Someone broke into my office last night.”

            “What did they take?”

            “Nothing.”

            “Another nothing?” he asked with disbelief, taking a long drink. “Seems like you’ve got a whole lot of bugger all.” But his eyes gave him away. He was interested. “Sounds like someone has it in for you lad.” He relit the pipe, waving away a cloud of smoke. “Been doing summat you shouldn’t?”

            Markham shrugged.

            “No. I don’t even have any work at the moment. The last thing was a divorce. I turned the photographs over to the wife’s solicitor last week.”

            “Dirty business, divorce.” Baker grimaced. Dan knew the man had been married for a good twenty years, with two sons and a daughter.

            “It pays the bills.”

            “Aye, like as not.” Baker pushed himself up with a grunt and reached for his hat. “If owt else happens, you come and tell me, lad. Alright?”

            “Yes, Mr. Baker.”

            After the man left he pushed the coffee away, paid the bill and made his way through the crowds on Briggate. Cars and buses and delivery vans filled the road, a tram passing silently as the crossed the Headrow by Lewis’s. On New Briggate, next to the Odeon, he climbed the stairs. The door proclaimed Studio 20 and he rattled the handle until he heard someone muttering inside and a key turned in the lock.

            A short man with a long, dark beard and bleary eyes looked up at him.

            “Bloody hell, Dan, what do you want?” I thought you was the bread man.”

            He turned his back and Markham followed him into the attic room with its sloping ceiling and garish musicians wallpaper. An upright piano stood in the corner, a drum kit had been pushed against the wall, and folding chairs were stacked in a row.

            It was the only jazz club in Leeds. Probably the only one in Yorkshire, he thought. Music seven nights a week, going on until the last player gave up. They all came here when their gigs had finished, to sit in and jam, George Webb, Ken Colyer, Ronnie Scott. He’d come down and listened to them all, carrying on until dawn.

            He’d picked up a taste for jazz in Hamburg during National Service. Not that the Germans had any. They didn’t seem to have any music worth the name, just the desperation of finding enough food to keep body and soul together every day. But his intelligence work meant liaising with the American forces and one of them, Jimmy Powers, a slick little corporal from Ohio, had been a jazz nut. He’d set out to make a convert of Markham and he’d succeeded.

            There’d been good coffee – real coffee, not the NAAFI rubbish – and records from the PX, enough to start a collection. Then he was back on England, on Civvy Street. And Leeds was a wasteland for the new music.

            Someone had told him about Dobell’s down in London, and he spent far too much on their mail order service. And then Studio 20 had opened.

            “If you’re looking for Bob, he won’t be here while this evening.” The man filled a kettle at the sink and placed it on the gas ring. “Cuppa?”

            Blackie Smith seemed to live in the club. Maybe he did, he was always here, day or night, as if he had nowhere better to be. And Bob Barclay, the owner, seemed to trust him.

            “No thanks. Were you around much last night?”

            “In and out,” Smith said cautiously. “Why?”

            “Do you remember me leaving?” It hadn’t been much of a session, no one catching fire, fronted by a tenor player no one knew who wanted to be Lester Young and feel far short.

            Smith shrugged. “Wasn’t paying attention. Why?”

            “I was coshed on my way back to the car.”

            The man’s eyes widened under his thick brows.

            “Coshed? Did they get anything?”

            “Didn’t even try,” Markham told him. “I was wondering if anyone left right after me.” It hadn’t been a large crowd, just ten or twelve. Other than a couple of faces he knew, he hadn’t paid the audience much mind.

            “Not that I remember,” Blackie said after some thought. “Sorry. Dan. You alright?”

            “Thick skull, that’s me.” It was what his mother always said when he banged his head. For a moment he could almost hear the tone of her voice. But she’d been dead for three years now, a tumour that ate away at her brain, leaving her family helpless. His father had gone six months later, his heart broken and no will to love. “Never mind, it was worth a try.”

            “You coming down later?”

            “Will there be anyone good?”

            “Probably just Bob and the lads. Tomorrow, now, that’s a different matter. Chris Barber’s in York. He might come over when the gig’s done.”

            He’d heard Barber. The style was too traditional for his taste. But somewhere freer he might be worth hearing.

            “We’ll see. Thanks, Blackie.”

And Now for Something…

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I’m happy. We have an almost[-firm date for our move back to Leeds, only the better part of two months after we expected it to happen. But better late, etc….and my copies of Fair and Tender Ladies have arrived, with its wonderful cover.

On an unrelated note, in recent weeks I’ve been reading a great deal about the 1950s. It’s the decade when I was born, so I assumed I knew it well. Wrong. Seems I knew next to nothing. But my reading sparked an idea. Or the start of one. Like they say in music, it goes something like this….(no apologies for typos – it’s rough). Let me know what you think. Please.

CHAPTER ONE

He was falling, falling, somewhere between heaven and earth. He reached out but there was nothing to hold on to, only the feeling of tumbling through space. Pictures spun and twirled in his head, things he could quite place before they moved on. A face, a building, a hand.

Then he landed.

It jolted the breath out of him. His skull banged down hard and a shock of pain ran through his body. For a moment he could do nothing. All he could manage was to lie there, trying to gulp in air and stop the nausea rising.

Finally it passed and he was breathing steadily. He rolled gently onto his side and opened his eyes. He was lying on the pavement, the flagstones shiny and wet against his cheek. It was night and he couldn’t remember what had happened.

The next he knew, something was pushing gently against his ribs.

“If you can stand up and walk away, I’ll not arrest you, lad.” He blinked, trying to bring the figure into focus. A copper, he saw finally, with the pointy hat and the black boots that shone in the streetlights. “Had a skinful, have you?”

He didn’t try to answer, but sat up, his head drumming with every movement. One hand against the wall, he eased himself upright, pausing until the dizziness passed.

“I’m sorry, officer, I don’t know what happened,” he said honestly, rubbing the gash by his temple, then the bump at the back of his skull, wincing at the tenderness.

“It’s alright, sir.” The policeman’s mile was almost hidden by his thick moustache. “Couldn’t let you sleep there all night, that’s all.” He bent and picked a trilby from the ground, dusting it off with large hands. “This yours, is it?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Get yoursen home, that’s my advice. You’ll be feeling it in the morning.” He gave a brief nod. “Goodnight, sir.”

“Goodnight. And thank you.”

He waited until the constable had disappeared around the corner, brushing the worst of the damp and the dirt from his suit and picking gravel out of his palms. Then he felt inside his jacket, checking the wallet was still there, and the watch still on his wrist.

His head hurt like buggery but it was beginning to clear. Looking round, he knew exactly where he was, on Merrion Street, the ABC cinema dark at the bottom of the hill. He moved his fingers gingerly around the lump on the back of the head.

Why had someone coshed him?

CHAPTER TWO

All around, Leeds was quiet, two in the morning and barely a sound, the shop windows dark. He sat in the old Anglia, window rolled down, and smoked a cigarette. Men had taken a swing at him before; it came with being an enquiry agent. But no one had ever used a cosh. Why? There was nothing unusual on the books. Just the usual divorces and frauds that paid the bills.

Finally he pulled out the choke then turned the key in the ignition, pressing down on the accelerator as the engine caught. There was no traffic, just a few lights shining behind curtains where sleep wouldn’t come.

In Chapel Allerton he turned onto Town Street, then down the alley between the police station and the Nag’s Head, parking by a brick house. Inside, he climbed carefully to the third floor, avoiding the tread that squeaked, and let himself into the flat.

It was a small place, no more than a bed-sitting room with a sink and gas ring in one corner, the bathroom and toilet on the landing, perched at the top of the stairs. From the window he looked down on the graveyard. But it was his and a damn sight better than the lodgings.

He stripped off the suit, examining the material and hoping against hope that the dry cleaner would be able to rescue it. It was good worsted, better than any fifty shilling job. He’d bought it right after National Service, a sly deal that didn’t involve clothing coupons, and it had worn well.

Sod it, he needed to sleep.

He woke as the early sun streamed on his face. He clawed his way out of a dream, opening his eyes as he sat up, stopping as something seared behind his eyes.

By nine he’d washed and dressed. He couldn’t do much about the dark circles under his eyes but he’d shaved and cleaned up the cut on his temple. At least he no longer looked like he’d spent a week on the razzle.

He parked the Anglia on King Charles Street and walked down Lands Lane. Everyone he passed seemed subdued. The third of September. It was a date none of them could forget. The start of the war and thoughts of lost comrades, fathers, sons, brothers.

He’d been ten, called in from a Sunday morning playing in the garden just as his sister was dragged down from his bedroom. He’d sat cross-legged, picking at a scab on his knee as Chamberlain’s voice came out of the radio. When the speech had finished, his father had looked at his mother and simply said, “That’s it, then.”

He was a bright enough lad, set for a scholarship to grammar school. He knew what war meant. Or he believed he did. All the bravery of Empire, the things he’d been taught in schools. It wasn’t until he did his time in the army that he learned the brutal truth. The empty faces, the ruins as far as he could see. He spent a winter there, working in military intelligence. He saw the people freeze and work and scrabble for anything resembling a normal life. What they taught him at Roundhay, death and glory and greatness, it was all bollocks. Dead was nothing more than dead, another memory and a poppy in November.

“Good morning, Mr. Markham.”

He glanced up, thoughts vanishing behind him.

The Dog Days Of Leeds

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August is in its slow crawl towards closing. At some point in the next few weeks – and that point is still undetermined, even after three months – we’ll have a moving date, load up all the boxes that are packed and head up to a new life in Leeds.

So perhaps the dog days of summer, that last sigh, will be spent in my hometown. After so long in hurry up and wait mode, it would be welcome. I want to have the luxury of time to explore the place again, fully. I want to see those nooks and crannies, to dig deeper into the history and mystery. I want to be involved with the place.

God knows that I was glad to move when I went off to college all those years ago. But I came back after a year and ended up staying until 1976 when the lure of America drew me. And now I’m going back again to enjoy those dog days. And quite a few more years, I hope.

Each time I’m there I see something new to fascinate me. It might be the date on a building, the promise of a Cloth Hall restoration, the intakes for the old water engine (pointed out to me by someone else). In those dog days and beyond I’ll have the chance to discover, if not everything, then a good chunk of it.

Coming Home to Leeds

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Any week now I’ll be living in Leeds again. I’ve been telling myself that for the last several weeks. We’re in that strange legal limbo, the no-man’s land between selling and buying a house and actually signing the contracts then moving in. It’s an odd space, where time seems to expand, making a day feel like a week, a week like a month and – well, you get the picture.

I grew up in Leeds but I haven’t lived there since January 3, 1976. I’ve been back regularly, sometimes for a week or more at a time. But it’s only in recent years that I’ve realised it’s where I need to be, it’s where my heart lies. Most of my books are set there, albeit well in the past. I know it in my bones in a way I’ll never know anywhere else.

My partner’s daughter went to university there and stayed. She’s made a life for herself but she’s stayed close to her mother. Events have aligned in a way that makes this a perfect time to sell, buy and put ourselves in that great Yorkshire city.

It’s a big, daunting adventure, of course. And right now, after hanging around as lawyers do whatever it is they do in these situations, all we want is for it to be over. Most everything’s packed, boxes all over the house.

Soon, though, we’ll be in Leeds. And you know what? It’s going to feel just like coming home.

Gods of Gold

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Yesterday my agent heard back from the publisher which had been weighing whether to publish my new book. Needless to say, I’d been on tenterhooks (a good Leeds expression, by the way) since it had been sent off.

The result, as those who saw my Facebook and Twitter posts will know, is that Crème de la Crime will publish Gods of Gold in April next year – and four months later in the US, as usual.

So what is Gods of Gold? It’s the first in a new series set in Leeds, this time in the 1890s. The small town on Richard Nottingham’s time has grown and grown, bringing in the suburbs. It’s an industrial place now, full of dark Satanic mills and factories. Street after street is filled with back-to-back housing, the homes of the poor. Most of the buildings are black with soot from all the chimneys.

It’s a place much closer to the Leeds of the present day. Not just in time, but in attitude; it’s very recognisable. The main character is Detective Inspector Tom Harper. He’s 31, from a working-class background. Left school at the age of nine and worked 12 hours a day in a brewery, but was determined to become a policeman. He’s worked his way up from walking a beat in the yards and courts off Briggate – still around 160 years after my earlier Leeds series – to plain clothes.

His partner is Detective Sergeant Billy Reed, a man who spent time in the West Yorkshire Regiment and was in Afghanistan during the Second Afghan War. The nightmares of those times still come to him, leaving him a troubled man who finds it safer not to grow attached to people.

As the book opens, Harper’s wedding to Annabelle Atkinson is just a few weeks away. She’s a new type of women, not so much ahead of her time, but in the vanguard. After growing up very poor in the Bank – the area of Leeds where most of the Irish settled – she became a servant at the Victoria pub in Sheepscar. The landlord, an older widower, fell for her and married her. When he died, she took over the business and made it more successful, then opened two bakeries to cater for the working men at the factories all around. She’s based, in part at least, on stories about a relative of mine who was the landlady at the Victoria (the pub is now gone, turned into an Indian community centre. I did have a drink there once, back in the ‘90s, and it seemed a wonderful place). So a fictionalised version of my own family’s tale is one thread in the tapestry.

The books are more political. The first one unfolds over the backdrop of the 1890 Leeds Gas Strike, one that the workers won (and it’s well worth reading about the strike).

I suppose that this series is part of my continuing love affair with Leeds. The place won’t let me go – possibly just as well as I’ll be moving back there within a month. It’s the start of something new, and it pulls at me just as hard as Richard Nottingham ever has.

The big test, of course, will to be see how all of you like it…

A Third Leeds Story

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This will definitely, certainly, and unequivocally be the last story from Leeds, The Autobiography that I’ll post on the blog. After all, if I continue doing it there’ll be nothing fresh when I try to interest a publisher in the book. But no book that presumes to offer a history of Leeds would be complete without something about the great Ralph Thoresby, the antiquarian who wrote the first – and still the definitive – history of Leeds and its surroundings. A remarkable man, he’s commemorated by a blue plaque where his house once stood and Kirkgate and his memorial is in the Parish Church, although on the wall these days, not the floor of the choir.

 

MR. THORESBY’S CURIOSITIES – 1725

 

“It won’t do,” he said, shaking his head and pursing his lips. “It just won’t do.”

            “No, sir,” I agreed.

            Mr. Brocklehurst looked slowly around the room once more. He’d tied his stock too tightly in the morning and his large face had been red all day.

            “No,” he repeated. “It just won’t do.”

            But it would have to be done. Every item in this collection of curiosities needed to be catalogued. And I knew it wouldn’t fall to Brocklehurst the lawyer to do it. It would be my job, his clerk.

            Mr. Thoresby had amassed thousands upon thousands of objects during his life, so many that he’d needed to build an annexe to this modest house on Kirkgate for them all. Now he’d passed on his heirs needed an inventory of everything.

            I’d miss the man. He’d been my favourite of Mr. Brocklehurst’s clients. Whenever he’d visit the office he’d ask after my wife and children with honest interest. No matter that he was a gentleman with his independent means and I was no more than a law clerk.

            Even after his first stroke his mind had been alert. I’d come here several times with papers to be signed and he’d always been polite. He’d even insisted on showing me around this place, his museum as he called it with a wry little smile, and he’d pressed a copy of his book on me, his history of Leeds and the areas around it, picking it from a tall pile, blowing off the dust and inscribing it with his name, writing in an awkward scrawl. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that only gentlemen had the leisure for reading and learning. For the rest of us, life was made for work and sleep. So his Ducatus Leodiensis propped up a broken table leg in our house now, the gold letters on the spine growing dustier each month.

            Brocklehurst paced around the room, hands clasped together in the small of his back, pausing here and there to look at this and that. Finally he announced,

            “Well, you’d better get to work. And don’t be too long about it. I want you back in the office as soon as possible. There’s plenty of work among the living.”

            “Yes, sir.” I opened the ledger on an old table then set down the quill and the ink pot, hearing the door slam in the empty house as the lawyer left. I knew I should begin the task, but instead I walked to a shelf at the far end of the room and picked up a small object.

            I’d last been here two months earlier, no more than a fortnight before Mr. Thoresby suffered his second stroke and died. I’d come on a trifling errand, his signature on a note to append to an annuity. He’d been sitting in his parlour, lost in thought when I was shown through.

            “Young man,” he said with real pleasure, as if I’d been his first visitor in an age. He struggled to his feet with the help of a stick, putting out a heavy, palsied hand to grip mine. Wigless, he showed wisps of grey hair over a shiny pink skull, and a mouth that drooped on one side. But his eyes still twinkled. Over the last months he’d grown portly, his movements confined to his house or the streets close by. No more wanderings around England or setting off in the morning to walk to York and dine with the archbishop. And invalid now, his wide world had become so small. “Come with me, come on. I have something very special to show you,” he urged, his voice just an echo of the cannon boom it had once been.

            I followed him through to this room of wonders. He shuffled slowly, pausing two or three times to catch his breath. Yet once we reached the shelf and he reached out, it was as if his illness had never happened. His hand was steady as a youth’s and his thick sausage fingers were deft as he plucked up the item.

            “Do you see that?” he asked me, letting it sit on his palm. “The vicar in Rothwell sent it to me last week.” He displayed it like something precious but I had no idea what it could be. I wasn’t like him, I had no knowledge of these things, no chance to learn. My only learning had been letters and numbers before I had to earn my way in the world. It seemed nothing more than a piece of sharp stone, nothing of value. He saw my look and smiled. “Would you like me to tell you?”

            “Yes, sir, I would.” If it was important to him then it must have a purpose, I thought.

            “Long ago, before there was any Cambodunum, or Leodis or Leeds, long before anyone thought of a town here, there were people in this country,” he began. It wasn’t the chiding, strident tone of my old schoolmaster. Instead, there was enjoyment in his voice sharing these things with all the eagerness of an enthusiast.

            “Where did they live?” I wondered.

            “In caves, perhaps, or out in the open. We don’t know that yet,” he answered with a small sigh, as if he was disappointed that he’d never know. “But they hunted. They had to, for food. And they possessed spears and arrows, we do know that. And clubs, I suppose,” he added, as if it was an aside to himself. “This, young man, is an arrowhead made of flint.”

            Once he told me, I could discern the shape of it, the point at one end. It was delicate, crude yet carefully worked and I marvelled at how anyone could have made that so long ago and that it could still be found like this.

            “Just imagine,” Mr. Thoresby continued, “that a man might have killed many animals with this arrow. Perhaps it ended up in some beast that escaped him. Or maybe it was a wild shot he never found again. Or,” he winked at me, “he might simply have lost it somewhere.”

            He replaced the arrowhead on the shelf and we returned to the parlour to finish our business. Since then I’d thought of it often. I told my wife about it but she paid it little mind. Seeing an arrowhead wouldn’t put food on our table or clothe our children. It came to me later that I’d never asked him just how old it was. He would have known; after all, he was acknowledged to be the most learned man in Leeds. Now, though, he was interred under the choir of the Parish Church, his widow gone to live with one of their sons.

            I lifted the arrowhead very carefully, astonished that something with all this wait of years on it could be so light. I ran my thumb along the edge and gasped out loud to discover it was still sharp enough to cut the skin. How long had it taken to fashion something like this? What tools had he used? Suddenly I had so many questions ringing like Sunday morning bells in my head and no one to answer them.

            Furtively I looked around, as if there might be someone spying on me. It was a ridiculous fancy, of course. The house was all closed up, the shutters pulled tight, the air inside stuffy, still holding that old, desperate smell of disease and death that tugged at the nostrils. Then I took out my kerchief and gently wrapped it around the arrowhead. Another glance over my shoulder and I tucked it away in my coat pocket. No one would know. No one but me would count all the curiosities here.

Another Leeds Story

On By chrisnickson2In UncategorizedLeave a comment

Your reaction to the Roman Leeds story, and to the idea of a fictional history of Leeds in stories, has been so lovely that I’m going to post one more. This is from 1963, about as far from Roman times as this is going to get. It was the year England went boom! – although it took quite a while before the reverberations reached Leeds.

BEAT MUSIC

 

“Are you going?”

“Don’t be daft. Of course I’m going.” He hesitated. “If we can still get tickets.”

They were walking along Duncan Street, past Rawcliffe’s with all the neat, clean school uniforms in the window, crossing Briggate and out along Boar Lane.

“There’ll be tickets, they only went on sale half an hour ago,” James told him. “They won’t have sold out yet.”

“Hope not.” His fist was curled around the pound note in his pocket. Before taking the bus into Leeds he’d queued for ten minutes to draw it from his Post Office account. His father had disapproved, of course, wasting all that money on a pop concert. But it was just one more criticism on top of so many in the last year.

It was May, almost summer, and the air was warm enough to leave his windbreaker unzipped, the old grey school shirt underneath.

They turned by the station, down onto Bishopgate Street, through the tunnel under the tracks, bricks black and sooty, all the sound amplified. Now they were close to the Queen’s Hall he speeded up, his steps tapping quickly on the pavement.

“Did I tell you what my uncle did?”

James glanced over at him, keeping pace easily, wearing a striped tee shirt, a pair of American jeans his father had brought back from a trip, and his plimsolls. He looked relaxed, bemused by the whole idea of spending a little over ten bob to see a group.

“What?”

“You know he’s a commercial traveller?”

“Yes.”

“He was up in Sunderland last week, at the hotel where he always stays and sitting in the bar with the other salesmen there. You’ll never guess who was staying there and came walking in.”

“Go on,” Chris said with a smile. “You’re dying to tell me, anyway.”

“Only the Stones.”

“What, the Rolling Stones?”

James nodded and continued,

“My uncle and the others took one look at them and went off to talk to the manager. They said they weren’t going to stay in a place that let in animals. Either the Stones went or they did, and they were the ones who came back week after week.”

“Are you serious?” He was close to laughter, his soft smirk cracking into a grin. “What happened?”

“The manager kicked out the Stones.”

“Bloody hell.”

The words came out as astonishment. James followed his gaze and saw why. There were hundreds of people queueing outside the Queen’s Hall, all the way down the side of the building.

“We’re going to be here all day trying to get a ticket.”

“Worth it, though.” And it would be if he could get to see the Beatles. He hadn’t managed to buy a ticket for their show at the Odeon, but this would be bigger and better. They were even going to be onstage twice during the night. Any money, any length of time spent queuing would be worthwhile. “Going to stay?”

“I don’t know,” James answered doubtfully. “I said I’d be home by dinnertime to revise for my exams.”

Chris shrugged.

“Your loss. Take a look.”

“What?”

“Girls. Lots of girls” He grinned and pushed his quiff into place, the scent of Brylcreem on his hands, then began to walk to the end of the line. “But if you want to go, it’s OK. I don’t mind.”

 

In the end it only took an hour and a half to move to the ticket window. James tried to chat up the girls around them, but they weren’t interested; all they cared about was seeing the Beatles and he wasn’t John, Paul, Ringo or the other one. In the end there’d been nothing to do but enjoy the sunshine and wait.

            Chris bought his ticket, paid and began to turn away, when James said,

            “One for me, too.”

            “I thought you didn’t care about the music,” Chris said as they walked back towards Briggate.

            “I don’t,” he insisted briskly, it was true. For all his casual appearance, James was the perfect grammar school pupil. Piano to grade six, always at the top of his year, certain to do well in his O-levels next month. Then there’d be a smooth passage through the sixth form all the way to Cambridge. A boy to fulfil all his father’s aspirations.

            They’d known each other since primary school. On the second day James had stopped Chris from hitting a girl who’d bitten his arm. They’d been friends ever since, a curious bond that neither of them really understood.

            It would change soon enough, Chris knew that. He’d sit his exams then leave school. His father already had a job lined up for him, clerking in an office. The two of them would spend less time together, drifting apart. Probably in weeks rather than months. Somewhere in the future they’d bump into each other, say hello, and wonder how they’d ever been friends in the first place.

“Did you see how many were still waiting?” James asked.

            Chris shook his head.

            “There must have been at least another thousand behind us. It’s going to be something.” He shrugged. “I thought I might as well see it.”

            “You’ll hate it. It’ll be loud. And all those girls who were there, they’ll be screaming. That’s what they do for the Beatles.”

            “Maybe,” James answered doubtfully, as if he couldn’t believe anyone would behave like that. “I suppose you want to go up to Vallance’s.”

            Of course he did. Down in the basement there he could go into a booth and listen to the latest singles and hear what was new. That was the draw, the music. He’d played guitar since he was thirteen, and old instrument one of his aunts had passed on when she saw how he liked what he heard on the radio. He learned to play it properly, the lessons his father insisted on, hours of practicing scales and classical pieces, and enough theory to understand how songs were put together.

            And once he realised how simple it all was, pop music had bored him. Until the Beatles came along. With three singles they’d made him realise there was more to it than he’d ever imagined. He’d bought them all, worked out the chords and listened to the way the voices all worked together. It was a new world. And he wanted to step into it.

            Once he was working he’d be able to save money for an amplifier and an electric guitar. A Burns, like Hank Marvin played in the Shadows. He’d find a few others who loved the new music and form a group. Give it a little time and they’d be able to play youth club dances. Church halls. And if things went really well there was always the Mecca. After that…well, it would be fun, if nothing else. His dad would hate it, but by now he was used to that. He couldn’t live his father’s life.

            He picked out three singles, the Saturday girl with the beehive hair and tight skirt telling him to go to booth three. He and James were cramped inside, but then the music began and he was lost, listening to the lines the guitars played and the power of the drums. Beat music, they called it, and the term was right. It needed the beat to work properly. James looked bored, but ten minutes later it was over. Chris was smiling as they walked out into the sun on the Headrow.

            In the end they simply went and caught the bus home, the long pull up Chapeltown Road. James was itching to go, to put in more time revising for his O-levels, as if he didn’t do enough already. They were the only people on the top deck, the windows wide to catch the breeze. They were sitting right at the front, the best seats, where overhanging branches would hit against the glass as if they might break it.

            James stared straight ahead, lost in one thought or another. Chris gazed out of the window. The street was full of dark faces. West Indians. A few white people remained, passing through the crowds like fading ghosts. The business signs were colourful, each one offering a mystery. It was a different world. A dangerous one, his father said. But the world was full of fear, according to him. It seemed strange when the man had fought in Burma during the war. What could be so fearful about home?

            Soon enough he’d be home. The usual Saturday summer dinner, ham, lettuce and tomato with salad cream. He knew he should spend the afternoon revising, trying to make some sense of calculus. He’d try. He always tried, until it defeated him and he’d put the book away in frustration and pick up his guitar. That always made sense, the logic of chords and notes.

            Another month and he’d be washing the ink from his fingers for the last time. He’d hand in his books and walk out of school, take off the tie. Then life could begin. Sometimes he believed that he’d spent all his life just holding his breath, waiting for something to happen.

            The bus juddered to a stop across from the war memorial in Chapel Allerton. Wreaths of paper poppies laid in the two minutes of silence last November, still stood against it, their blood colour faded to pink by the weather.

            He hadn’t even been born in 1945. He could only faintly remember the very end of rationing. But so many of his father’s generation still lived in that time, as if the fighting had never ended. He’d heard their evening conversations over a bottle of whisky, the longing reminiscences of their finest years, when they were allowed to be real men.

            He stood.

            “I’ll see you on Monday,” he told James, receiving a nod in reply. At the bottom of the stairs the conductor rang the bell. Chris jumped off before the bus stopped moving, almost stumbling until he found his feet.

            A new England, he thought as he walked away. That was what they needed.