It's a hot and sunny Tuesday just before noon and Tuesday means one thing: market day. I always like to be here on a market day: I don't know why, it only takes five minutes to do the rounds and there's not really anything to see, but there you go, it's another one of my Elmsall traditions. Like walking past the houses I've lived in - 93 Victor Street, in what was 'The Bronx', now thankfully demolished; and 40 Pine Street, that my mum had a chance to buy for next to nothing, but didn't (regrets) - and like cruising the sites of my youth. The top field, where we played cricket and football till it was too dark to see (bus shelter now gone; one of the trees we used for a goalpost disappeared). The rec, where a weighty metal crossbar once fell on Richard Turner and Alan Lodge put a cardboard box on his head for a laugh and someone shot him with an air rifle - presumably also for a laugh. The mad massive hill with the big posh houses on Vickers Avenue (people owned them! their parents weren't divorced!) that Kev Cowell pagged me down on a bike with no brakes, barely making the corner at the bottom, instant death should a car have been coming. Like I said, memories everywhere. And I always feel compelled to do the tour.
On a sunny spring day I can dig South Elmsall considerably. The jumpers are off and everyone's smiling after the long grey winter. People chat loudly in the street and make jokes. Everyone knows everyone, it seems. The woman on the cash register in the supermarket asks every second person, 'ow's your Janice? (not me) and it must take an age to get anywhere if you're a local. But no one recognises me - though I recognise them - and without the stopping and chatting and inquiries and gossips it's only about four minutes from one end of town to the next. I can't believe how small this place is. The fields we once roamed over to quest to mythical conker trees felt like the journey of half a day or more: but now with these stretched-out adult legs everything's literally just around the corner. I like that.
I make the market and am greeted immediately by a stall selling chocolates and biscuits and everything's ridiculously cheap: cheaper than the eighties. I buy five Flakes for a pound - who can resist? - and marvel at clear plastic bags of cookies and biscuits, broken and unbranded, fifty pence and no doubt the staple of many a home, as the great prophet JC so well observed in 'Mis-Shapes'. Broken biscuits! In this day and age! But then again, people keep saying things like, can you get access to the internet? as though it's 1997 and they're half-surprised you've heard of it - how cute is that? It's bygone days in this weird little village I still can't believe I spent the first seventeen years of my life: it's weird beyond weird to contemplate that and to try and force my head to believe that it's true. And yet - there it is: the market stall my mum sold Charlie Brown books on when I was six; and the pub where we ate fish fingers and chips and played pinball, and where I later got drunk and puked and ran away from fights in; and the other market stall I bought tape cassette computer games on - the Dizzy Compendium, Shadow of The Beast (arcade perfect!) - and then shadows of me and Johnny Lynam running overhead on the roofs at night; and me and Kev Cowell on the tracks just beyond, placing milk crates full of stones in front of HSTs. And all the naughty things I've done around this place, and remember only too well...
I pop in the market cafe to buy an egg sandwich and say hello to my first girlfriend's mum, who was ever-generous with the chip pan and a cheese sandwich - as well as bedroom access - some seventeen years ago. Unbelievably, she's still there - though now divorced from the true Elmsall father (actually Kirkby) who barely spoke six words to me in two years (and then only when he was drunk) and was apparently at a Sunday lunchtime lesbian sex show in a working men's club when his daughter was born. We laugh about that and she says, well he never really said that much to me either, and we have a brief fill-in of the last decade or so. The egg sandwich is good. Then I buy a broom. Then I buy a McVities Flapjack - quite large - with my last ten pee. The sign proudly proclaims, "Still in date!" I love that too. I can't say I even like flapjacks but it'd be silly not to buy it. And now, with my broom, everyone can make jokes about me coming to sweep things up...
I'm curious about a great many things. I want to know about the massive pile of flowers outside the front of the post office - a young man was beaten to death by five guys one post-pub night - and I want to know how the housing market's faring. I go into a recruitment agency and see how the job situation is: they've got one. One job! How do they survive? I ask them. How long's it been like this? Apparently nothing much going on for the last eight months, they say, and two other agencies have already closed down. One job! And houses aren't really selling either, unless they're a bargain price: I get online later and find one that went a couple of months ago for £35,000; probably a 3-bedroomed terrace. I start to seriously think about buying one. I mean, not that I've got much money but for that price...a couple of months heavy work and saving in London, a borrow here and there...I'm sure I could find the cash. Cheaper than chips. I've got plans, ya see: it might make sense...
In the sports shop - I recognise the guy there - I enquire about opportunities to play football and I get the sort of guarded, slitted-eyes response I've found in a few places. It seems to be saying, who is this man with the questions and the accent and the slightly weird way? I imagine they're thinking I'm some government spy, someone up to no good: certainly the woman in the local paper office was very cagey with any information. I guess not knowing me, and not knowing my accent, they can't really put me in a box: but all they've got to do is invoke the spirits of their non-timid grandfathers and roll out the magic question - 'oo's thee fatha? - and that would sort everything out. That's what they would do when I was a boy playing snooker in the Harlequin WMC, and as long as you had some sort of link with the coal board you were okay. Even now it works: during a mistaken visit to a New Age shop - bloody amateur clairvoyants always thinking they're reading you - my surname was duly demanded and links were made to the Upton Millers, and family history fleshed out (they knew more about that side of my family than I did) and all was well. Maybe what I need is a t-shirt saying 'oo me fatha is.
It's cool. It's groovy. The whole town smells today of chips, not dogshit, and all the t-shirts and milling around and interaction and running-free children make it feel like another age, a scene the likes of London will never witness. The soul of South Elmsall may be slightly crippled and deformed - but at least it has a soul, and I'm not sure London does. Whether I could ever fit in here again is debatable - the phrase "village of the damned" is never far from my mind, and the sheer quantity of mentally handicapped people makes me wonder whether the whole thing isn't some grand government experiment in open air asylums, some ancient nuclear accident I've weirdly never heard of - but right now, it's okay. I've got a good friend here, and that makes a big difference. And for the first time in perhaps my whole life the thought of being here isn't entirely objectionable. I mean, I couldn't wait to get out when I was a boy - my best friend and I's favourite topic of conversation was taking the piss out of everything around us and dreaming of not being here - but now I can contemplate it and, rather than feel horror, feel the attraction and the possibility. Of walking everywhere. Of buying vegetables in the local shops - yesterday I bought a goose egg straight from the goose's arse! and three lovely head of fresh broccoli on the market, also a pound. Of rambles up through Frickley Park and Hooton Pagnell and the Old Lane and all my boyhood sites. And of doing things, the like of which...well, I'll mention them if I do them; I think that would be best.
In the meantime: so what if you have to go all the way to Leeds to see a normal face? So what if the teenagers scare me? (They're probably not scary) And so what if there's dogshit and garbage and mothers beating children and fathers beating mothers (it's the past I tell thee!) and grim-eyed madness everywhere? The madness has its charm. And beyond that the charm's charming enough too.
There! I wrote something positive and - hopefully - with hardly any judgment at all. I wonder what we'll feel next? ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment