Devil's Day Read online

  ‘You and Mrs Pentecost had a church wedding, didn’t you?’ she said to Dadda.

  ‘Aye, love,’ he said.

  ‘In the village?’

  ‘At St Michael’s, aye,’ said Dadda.

  ‘John’s shown me pictures of his mum,’ said Kat. ‘She was very beautiful.’

  She wasn’t. Not beautiful, as such. But Dadda gave her a sort of smile and put his eyes back on the road.

  Kat began to say something else then stopped short when we came out of the trees and the ravine to the left was exposed. There was nothing to stop a car from shearing off into the white stream below but a flimsy barrier of wire and wool tufts. But Dadda had driven the road in all weathers, at all times of the day and night, and took the bends unfazed by the drop.

  The wind got stronger the higher we went and I felt Kat’s hand tighten on mine. By the time we’d come to Syke House—the sullen, red-brick mansion set back from the lane in a knot of horse chestnut trees—it had risen to a gale and sent branches and leaves skittering off along the Cutting, as the road from here on in was called.

  For three miles, or thereabouts, it wound northwards through the hills before it came to Wyresdale and dropped down towards the market towns and the byways that led to the ports along the coast. A packhorse route that had been here for centuries, even though the passage through the hills was bleak and boggy.

  ‘Ah, but folk are like water, Johnny lad,’ the Gaffer said. ‘They always find a way through. No matter what’s underfoot.’

  The road had always been at the mercy of the weather and he remembered the Cutting being nothing more than a dirt track that softened to butter in the autumn, and in the summer kicked up dust that marked its meander in a thick brown haze. After even the briefest of rainstorms, the top layer of it would run like a river and horses would have to trudge the miles knee-deep, dragging the carts like sledges. In the worst winters the valley could be cut off for days. After the Blizzard, it was weeks before anyone got in or out. By that time, what had happened there, what the Devil had done, was already fable.

  ∾

  To this day there’s no road sign to the village of Underclough or the few houses of the Endlands. Anyone who needs to come to the Briardale Valley knows where they are, and if a stranger asks for directions then they’re told to turn between the abattoir and the three beech trees that keep that part of the lane in permanent shade.

  They were each at least eighty or ninety feet tall, elephantine and twisted, old even in Joe Pentecost’s time, the Gaffer used to tell me. He’d given them names too.

  ‘But once I put them in your head, Johnny lad,’ he said, ‘you can’t let them out again. Trees are funny about things like that.’

  I’d kept my word. I hadn’t told anyone. Not Dadda. Not Kat. I’ve not even told Adam, who at ten—the age of curious digging—would feast upon the knowledge. Perhaps the names might conjure up something to help him picture them. I mean, what does he think a tree looks like? How can he imagine height? I’ve lifted him up and sat him on a branch and he’s listened to the wind blowing in the topmost leaves, but for all he knows the trunk that he touches might carry on rising into the clouds, like the beanstalk in the fairy tale.

  From the mouth of the valley it’s at least a couple of miles to Underclough and there’s nothing much to see at first. A few broken walls. That wooden trailer that’s been rotting away for years. It’s quiet enough for a weasel to take its time crossing the lane. The grass and the bracken is never cut or tamed and thickens each year with the brambles and the sedge.

  Kat looked out of the window as the cloud drifted over the crags like battle-smoke, shrouding and revealing the holly bushes and the rowan trees that grew in the clefts. It began to rain in needles and then wheatstraws and Dadda set the wipers going in a shuddering arc.

  The lane came closer to the River Briar as it flashed past in spate and stuck close to the banks all the way to the village. When the first buildings appeared, I could tell that Kat was disappointed. I think she’d expected to find Underclough nestled in the valley, not dark and cramped like something buried at the bottom of a bag. She hadn’t imagined it would be so overgrown either, so loud with water, nor the fells above too steep for anything to cast a long shadow.

  ‘It’s quite sweet, really, isn’t it?’ she said, though she didn’t need to be polite for Dadda’s sake. He’d have been the first to agree that the place was run-down and abandoned. The lane had become potholed and grassy, and on the other side of the river the old woollen mill—Arncliffes to everyone in the valley—had been derelict since the Gaffer was young. It had started life as a humble cottage industry, and even though the addition of weaving sheds and an extra storey by subsequent generations had made it the largest building in Underclough, it still looked small beneath the fells.

  ‘Oh, that’s such a shame,’ said Kat, looking across the river. ‘I’d love to have seen it running.’

  But she’d come more than eighty years too late. The sheds hadn’t been in operation since the Great War, when they turned out yards of khaki serge and thick, durable blankets for the military hospitals. In the years that followed, with half the workforce dead and the empire countries with cheaper labour and looms of their own, the company that owned the mill floundered and went into receivership. Some time back in the twenties the roof had collapsed, and the pediment into which the Arncliffe name had been engraved lay in pieces on the ground.

  Since then, from what I know, it’s changed hands half a dozen times and there have been plans now and then to level the site and build houses. Or, more recently, when it became fashionable to live in the remains of industry, to turn the existing building into apartments. But nothing ever happens and year by year it falls further into disrepair. Its windows are all covered in steel plates now, but back when the Gaffer passed away they were open to the elements, having been broken one after the other by the village kids.

  The river under its looming presence was whisky-coloured and thick on the banks with the nettles and hogweed that had, as always, gone wild in the summer and overgrown the millrace. Crumbling now and green with moss, the brick-built structure had once siphoned off some of the water down a steep drop to power the wheel, which was still intact even if it only now collected the detritus that the river carried here, or what the villagers threw in. Decades of silting had also raised the water level, so that the steps quickly disappeared into a stagnant well that undulated with branches and leaves, beer cans and crisp packets. I’d always stayed well away from the river by Arncliffe’s. Fall in and you’d struggle to get out again. Hands and feet would find no grip on the slimy brickwork. And your last breath would take in a mouthful of fag ends and turds.

  I hadn’t told Kat—why would she have wanted to know?—but the summer I’d left primary school they’d found Lennie Sturzaker there one afternoon rising and falling with the debris.

  Along with many of my classmates, he’d lived on New Row, the terrace of eighteen workers’ cottages on this side of the river. Like everything that had been built here in the valley, the houses were made of a brown sooty brick that the damp air made darker still. Mind you, they’d been forward-thinking types, the Arncliffes, and a small allotment had been set aside at the back of each so that the mill workers could grow their own vegetables and raise a fruit tree. A few were still used in that way, but most had been left to go to seed or flagged over for the sole purpose, it seemed, of giving hard-standing to rusting motorbikes and broken ovens.

  There was a permanent smell of coal fires here and the smoke from the chimneys rose through the rain and lingered as a cindery mist in the trees. On days like this, the streetlights came on early and folk stayed at home, leaving the village to the jackdaws, which had always nested here in great numbers and made more noise than the river.

  A gang of them took off from the bridge as Dadda approached and flapped away to the roof of Beckfoot’s. Bay-fronted and painted in a mutton-coloured gloss, the butcher’s hadn’t c
hanged much since I used to come down with the Gaffer when he had pheasants or snipe to sell. He wouldn’t ever get very much for them, enough for a few games of gin rummy in the pub on Saturday night, but it was a good excuse to probe Alun Beckfoot about the village rumours that had found their way down to the Endlands. Who’d done this or that. Who’d been seen in the Croppers’ Arms. Who was on his last legs. Who was always at number eight when her husband was on nights. If they looked over at me while they talked, then it was an indication that I shouldn’t be listening and I moved to the other end of the counter to watch the Beckfoot brothers in the prep-room hacking and slicing behind the threadbare plastic strips. They did everything so quickly that it was hard to understand how they managed to last a single minute without severing something vital. And yet I never saw any of the Beckfoot family bleeding or bandaged. Alun, especially, had hands that didn’t look as if they’d been anywhere near a meat cleaver or a bone saw. He had hands like a woman’s, in fact. Pale and hairless with slender fingers that would have better suited a piano player. That they were so pristine was astonishing, especially given his lazy eye. But then I suppose that a clumsy butcher doesn’t stay a butcher for long—and perhaps his affliction had forced him to take extra care with the knives.

  ‘He’s got the lamb for Devil’s Day, has he?’ I said, watching Beckfoot switching the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, and Dadda nodded.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘The Gaffer took it down last week.’

  ‘I’d never heard of Devil’s Day before I met John,’ Kat said to Dadda.

  ‘No, well, you wouldn’t have done,’ he said.

  ‘And it’s when Bill plays the fiddle, I hear,’ said Kat with a smile. ‘I can’t imagine him doing that somehow.’

  ‘We’re all expected to perform,’ I said.

  ‘Even me?’ said Kat.

  ‘You can sing,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard you.’

  ‘I don’t know the songs they sing here, though,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll pick them up quick enough,’ I said.

  ‘I bet the Gaffer enjoyed it, didn’t he?’ said Kat.

  ‘It’s a day for the children,’ said Dadda, ‘so I dare say he did.’

  ‘Come on, Dadda,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard you complain on the night.’

  ‘The whole thing’s daft,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why we bother with it any more. It’s a waste of a good animal.’

  The stew that we had on Devil’s Day was always made with the meat of the lamb that was born first in the spring; male or female, it didn’t matter. As soon as it slithered out into the straw it was ear-tagged with a red label so that it could be easily picked out of the flock when it got closer to the time. Then we’d take it down to Beckfoot’s and he’d cut its throat and leave it to hang for a week before he butchered it. The rump was diced for the pot, Beckfoot got a leg, and whatever was left over split into thirds for the chest freezer at each farm, enough for several meals over the winter. Kat said that it sounded as though everyone went into hibernation here. And it was true, I suppose. Come November, Dadda didn’t leave the valley all that often. There was no reason to do so. The larder was full, the scullery dangled with rabbits and birds, and anything else he needed he could get from Wigton’s.

  ‘Is this the place you were telling me about?’ said Kat, wiping away some of the condensation so she could see the village shop. ‘God, you’re right. It’s just the same as Granny and Grandpa’s.’

  It was one of those corner cornucopias that anywhere else would have long since fallen by the wayside, as the place Kat’s grandparents once owned in Felixstowe had done. Its windows were covered in a uriney cellophane to stop the goods from fading in the sunlight, though they ought to have been more concerned about them fading with old age. The display looked exactly the same as it had always done: toy boats, fishing nets, trashy Westerns on a stiff carousel, jigsaws—so many jigsaws—of castles and harbours and soft-focus kittens; boxes and boxes of Hornby train track and every type of bridge and locomotive, enough to fashion a complete pre-Beeching fantasia.

  The Wigtons’ son, Davy, had been in my class at school. Always red-cheeked and sweaty, he worked as a cleaner at the abattoir, shovelling up innards and collecting sheep heads in a trolley. From what the Gaffer used to tell me, he was still as put upon as he had been at the age of eleven by Sam Sturzaker and Jason Earby and Mike Moorcroft, those classmates of ours who, like him, had gone to work at the slaughterhouse as soon as they’d left school. Pigton Wigton, they called him, Piggy Wiggy. They’d drop an eyeball in his tea, leave a trotter in his coat pocket, slip a sow’s ear into the sandwich that his mam wrapped up for him every morning. Pigton Wigton. Piggy Wiggy. Mummy’s Little Piglet.

  But they couldn’t say much when they all still lived with their parents too: the Sturzakers and Earbys next to one another on New Row; the Moorcrofts in the second of the Nine Cottages, which sat between Wigton’s and the school. They were some of the oldest buildings in the village, the Nine Cottages, and it was hard to imagine that they’d ever looked any different: sagging and flaking and meek as alms-houses. Each tiny plot separated from the next by a fence of varying height and material, replaced or repaired with whatever had been to hand at the time of need. Most of the front gardens were overgrown and children’s bicycles and plastic toys sat deep in the weeds, making the last two houses seem out of place with their painted facias and little rectangles of clipped grass. A pair of old boys—Laurence Dewhurst and Clive Ward—stood in their dripping doorways talking to one another as they drank tea and smoked. When they saw us driving past they both looked and nodded, confused by the sight of Kat in the Pentecosts’ Land-Rover, as they were confused by any deviation from the normal way of things.

  Nothing changed in Underclough. Nothing happened. Not really. The headlines that came and went from the Lancashire Gazette newsboard on the street outside Wigton’s only reiterated what everyone here already knew: that elsewhere was always a place where the worst things happened. Take those two little children in Burnley, mauled by dogs.

  ∾

  The rest of the village went by and Kat smiled as she saw for the first time what I’d been describing to her ever since we’d met. We came to my school, Dadda’s school, the Gaffer’s school, a brownstone barn with a cockerel weathervane and a bell on the roof. The playground was noiseless and strewn with puddles, the windows of the Infant classroom plastered with sugar-paper autumn leaves and pumpkins, silhouettes of stealthy cats and witches riding broomsticks. Halloween was a few days away and the village kids would soon be out trick-or-treating, the little ones working their way along New Row and the teenagers lighting bangers in the graveyard. We’d never bothered with all that in the Endlands. We had Devil’s Day instead.

  Kat turned in her seat and smiled. It amused her, I could tell, to imagine me as a little boy barely older than the ones she looked after at the nursery. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘It’s so tiny.’

  It was true. Whenever I came back here, I wondered how the yard had ever contained us all at breaktimes. And the field, I was certain, had once been wide enough for athletic prowess to be demonstrated or disproved.

  It had been because I’d beaten Lennie Sturzaker by a country mile that he’d collared me after school one afternoon and given me a black eye to save his shame. He’d have swollen the other one too, if I hadn’t extracted myself from his wrestling hold and run off through the graveyard. Threats and promises came after me but I was quickly over the railings and down in Archangel Back, that short alleyway of grassed-over concrete between the church grounds and Sullom Wood.

  It was always the place—and still is now—where the older kids in the village went to smoke and drink and do things to each other that sounded painful. Perhaps in an effort to dissuade the next generation from doing the same, we were given warnings at school now and then about Archangel Back being church property and that if we were to go there we’d be trespassing and the police would be called and so on, but no one t
ook much notice and no one in authority ever came. It was hard to imagine that anyone really cared about St Michael’s any more at all. In Dadda’s day, folk were married there and the villagers held their babies over the font, but I’d only ever known it used for departures.

  The stump of a bell-tower made it more of a chapel than a church, and as we drove past, it looked even more dilapidated than it had in the spring. Wet, rotting leaves had turned the slates green and the flashings at the top of the downspouts had been left half-peeled by thieves who had either come ill-equipped or had been scared away before they could strip off the lead. There might have been a commendable, last-stand defiance about the place—it was still there, it still squared up to the Croppers’ Arms like an old adversary, as it always had done. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the pub had fared better in this war of attrition and the hanging baskets of ferns lauded it over the weedy plot of tombstones where, the following morning, there would be a new addition.

  It was still hard to believe that the Gaffer was dead. That he wouldn’t be there at the farmhouse when we arrived. That he had gone to join the other deceased Pentecosts, like his father, Joe, and his brother, Philip, whose name was spattered with lichen on the war memorial with a dozen others. Still, it seemed right that a Pentecost was fixed there, as a reminder that what lay beyond the stone cross belonged to the farmers. Here, the Endlands began and the lane ran into the gloom of Sullom Wood.

  At this time of year, the place was almost silent, the leaves and sodden windfall gently mouldering in the ditches. It’s how Adam knows it’s the end of autumn, that smell. That and the sound of me chopping wood in the yard. That and the taste of the blackberry jam we always make in spades for the larder. And in those days, I tell him, the Wood in autumn was the kingdom of Owd Abraham, the Beasleys’ boar. An inelegant but industrious gardener who would snout up the rootballs of ferns and chew the bracken so that, come the spring, the trees in the ash coppice would have room and light to grow. Not that we ever saw much of him. As the season wore on, he roamed deeper and deeper into the trees, looking for acorns and mushrooms until Angela came to collect him a few days before Christmas.