The Last Englishman
by Martin Haddelsey.
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Mr Watling ushered the two young men into the twin-bedded room.
“So, no girlfriends on this trip?” he said.
The young men exchanged a quick, amused glance and the elder one replied, “No, not this trip.”
Another furtive look bounced between them, and the younger one added, “We’re brothers. Taking a break from the girls this weekend. They don’t much like cathedrals, anyway.”
Mr Watling tried hard not to look too relieved. “Well, it’s well worth it. One of the finest Norman cathedrals in the country. And one of the most unusual. The Rose Tower, I mean.”
Framed prints of the cathedral, seen from various angles, were displayed on the walls of the small room. Like many towns with limited tourist appeal, this one made frequent reference to its one attraction. Mr Watling’s eye was drawn for a moment to the finest of these prints. About a foot square, sitting above the far bed, it was an acquatint of the cathedral and close. The close slumbered at the feet of the soaring building. The cathedral was clearly striving for heaven, while the close represented the town in some pre-lapsarian age either imagined by the artist, or captured in all its innocent truth. Beyond the picturesque ruins of the Bishop’s Palace, rolling fields dotted with sheep stretched towards a twinkling blue river. Mr Watling felt his soul yearning to transmigrate into the picture.
“Could you recommend a pub or restaurant in the town?” It was the elder one again, busy unpacking his suitcase on the nearest bed.
Mr Watling regaled them briefly with a well-rehearsed list of local amenities. He even threw in the address of the local doctor and the whereabouts of the police station, even though this information was already provided on a leaflet pinned to the downstairs notice board. Then he began to wander again.
“Of course, it’s not a bad town.” His milky blue eyes searched the face of the elder boy. “But there have been a few fights lately.”
“Should we be worried?”
“I don’t think so. They probably just fight amongst themselves.”
“Rival gangs?”
“Perhaps so. It’s hard to say. I’m no expert, after all. Only, in the last few years, they’ve been building social housing on the outskirts.” His nose wrinkled slightly as he emphasized the word. He smiled conspiratorially at the boys, not unaware that he was beginning to sound like a fuddy-duddy. “It’s brought a few bad types into the town. Drunken fights, litter, that sort of thing. Graffiti, too. But that they clean off pretty damn quick, I’m pleased to say.”
The younger boy broke off his own unpacking and visibly brightened. “Quite like Hereward the Wake’s time! You can’t keep the Anglo-Saxon blood down for long.”
The three shared an educated laugh, but for Mr Watling the humour was not even skin deep. His eyes trailed back in the direction of the print above the bed. In the corner of the picture, a group of yokels in their best dress could be seen edging into the scene, making their way in procession towards the cathedral. So it was Sunday, then. The town was about to worship.
“Anyway, I’ll leave you to it. Did I say: breakfast is between 8 and 10?”
Mr Watling locked the front door behind him and walked cautiously in the direction of the town centre. Everything he did these days was marked by caution. The fights in the town had disturbed him. A zone of disorder he had always known existed – depicted in lurid newspaper spreads or on late night documentaries – had drawn unexpectedly closer. This phenomenon had a name. They called it “anti-social behaviour”.
At one time, Watling would have described himself as “anti-social”. It had meant quite simply that he preferred to avoid social gatherings, something for which his wife continued every so often to chastise him. The term appeared to have acquired a new layer of meanings, shedding this innocent connotation. Now, anti-social behaviour – no, that should be capitalised, surely: Anti-Social Behaviour – denoted:
1. drinking on the streets
2. urinating in public
3. not clearing up after your dog
4. dropping litter
5. foul language
6. fighting
Watling mentally reviewed this inventory of minor sins and decided he was guilty of none of them. Or not in combination; or not in the way the legislators meant, surely? Certainly, he had been known to cuss: but that was usually because of some DIY mishap, or a moment of frustration on the roads; and there had been occasions when he had had to surreptitiously urinate, miles from a public lavatory, on one of his rambles. He felt instinctively that none of these offences would attract the ire of the state, although they did arouse a slight feeling of shame in him.
But years of the welfare state had brought into being a race of feral children and their unruly parents, and that race - like some warrior horde invading from the steppe – had descended at last on his home town, previously peaceable beneath the comforting shadow of the cathedral. The new estate, built especially for the incomers, could not be described (even in his sometimes overworked imagination) as a ‘warren’ of sin, a Victorian archetype of degradation. More accurately, it was a bare version of any modern housing estate: the houses ever so slightly smaller, the driveways less roomy; an absence of decorative effects declaring each house’s uniqueness. The councillors had told them that the price of land in and around Cambridge had rendered the construction of social housing in that city impossible; so the developers had settled here instead.
And – not so slowly – the ambience of the town had changed. He had noticed the litter first. Chip packets, drinks cans, Styrofoam burger cartons, lapping at the pavement and skittering in the breeze. He could not connect the litter with those who dropped it, at first; he rarely ventured into the town at night, so remained shielded from the worst of it. He saw only the aftermath. In an alleyway behind a chip shop someone had painted in bright red letters: SUCK YOUR MUM. Ducking down the alleyway en-route to the newsagent, Watling had frozen before this message in fascination. During his National Service, he had routinely overheard obscenities, often funny, sometimes vicious. Whether it was the starkness of this phrase against the brickwork, removed from the context of any banter, or the disgusting nature of the sentiment it expressed, he was unsure: but it wounded him in some secret place. It was an injunction to do the unspeakable.
He turned right at the top of his street and walked speedily towards the High Road. The air was dirty with exhaust fumes. A low blanket of cloud stretched for miles towards every horizon, a grey beast which had swallowed the vast Fenland sky. There was no flicker of a breeze and the cloud trapped the heat of June. Watling began to feel his skin prickling beneath his cardigan and sports jacket. He tugged at his collar to provide some ventilation, felt air against his sticky chest and neck. It was late afternoon. The streets were busy with weekend shoppers, middle-aged couples mostly, conservatively dressed, peering into antique shops and second hand bookshops, both of which were available in abundance in the town, genteel emanations from the cathedral. Cathedral-lore dominated their window displays: dusty biographies of Victorian bishops; books on ecclesiastical architecture; photographs and prints of the cathedral Close. Watling glanced into one of these shops and saw a coloured print not unlike the one in the guest bedroom. The cathedral was seen at a strange angle from below, climbing vertiginously into the sky, as if in motion; a small section of cobbled square was visible at its feet, only this time there was no hint of a human dimension, of people going about their business. The square was draped in shadow while the cathedral glowed with reflected light, luminous against a dark sky. By contrast, leaning to the side of this almost mystical vision, was a grainy image from the early days of photography. A farmer’s market: the streets thronged with men in rough tunics chewing pipes, gazing distrustfully in the direction of the camera, some of them eternally smudged in that moment of time as they ignored the instruction to stand still. Women in doorways. Carts laden with produce. Market stalls in various stages of construction. Frozen movement. Watling found it all comfortingly human.
Looking up from the window, the streets seemed faded, dozing in milky cloud light. Less real somehow than the image. Not too far ahead, he could see where the hundred year old photograph had been taken. Where the market stalls had once been, a pack of kids clustered round benches, devouring cigarettes.
He walked into High Road, towards the kids. The old thoroughfare, crowded with carts in the photograph, was now pedestrianised. Identikit green street furniture, already chipped and covered with graffiti, sprouted from red block paving. Georgian houses converted into shops lined either side of the street, the pale stone of their upper storeys mingling with the opaque light, eclipsed by the primary colours of the shop frontage. Every few paces, ugly post-war newcomers crouched untidily between the older buildings. The genteel atmosphere of the High Road’s tributaries was left behind here and Watling felt himself stiffen: the antique shops became pound shops, and the average age of the shopper plummeted. Tweed and Barber were replaced by crinkly leisure wear and trainers. He had to get into Safeway, but this involved walking past the kids. He steered as far to the left of them as he could, walking close to the shop entrances and almost colliding with the streams of people going in and out. The kids didn’t seem to notice him and he relaxed; it was just paranoia, after all. They didn’t even seem to be doing anything: certainly nothing that could be described as ‘Anti- Social Behaviour’. He could hear the rat-tat of their nervous, competitive laughter, smell the clouds of smoke from their cigarettes. From the corner of his eye, he saw that they were not posing a challenge to anyone; rather, they were grouped in a tight, inward-looking half circle, as if they were conducting some esoteric rite. They had no time for others, for the world of adults. There were five or six of them, mostly boys, dressed almost identically in hooded jackets and with tracksuit bottoms tucked into their trainers. They were motionless and almost silent. Nevertheless, Watling felt a ripple of energy break from their circle and caress his back as he entered the supermarket. He turned instinctively and found one of the boys peering at him. Their eyes met. Watling registered cornflower blue eyes and tightly curled ginger hair. The boy’s pale face was dotted with freckles. He imagined it had been a chance look which had just happened to settle on him, but now that they had made eye contact the boy’s expression changed. The neutrality of his look hardened into something else. He seemed to blush, and his nostrils shivered with inhaled air. His eyes widened as he took the old man in. Watling turned away quickly from the invasiveness of this encounter and ducked into the shop.
Here, a soothing tune was playing: Dean Martin or some other crooner, singing into being a world of erotic urbanity. Saturday shoppers circled sleepily round the aisles, couples arguing sotto voce about their purchases, parents hissing warnings to badly behaved children. Single men in their twenties and thirties stood before the wine and beer shelves as if before a giant bookcase, selecting and rejecting bottles of improbably named organic beers and Australian wines, wrapped in a connoisseur’s world of anticipated pleasure. Pre-recorded messages announced the latest deals. Watling felt immediately comforted by the familiar atmosphere. As a rule he hated shopping, but food and drink were an enthusiasm of his. He started with the breakfast materials needed for the following morning: the boys would want the full English, no doubt.
Pausing to add a couple of bottles of sherry to his cache, Watling pushed his trolley to the checkout. Now that running the B&B was his only employment, he did most of the household chores. His wife still worked as a peripatetic violin teacher, and was out of the house for most of the day. She had returned to work after their eldest child had left home, and he had watched with a mixture of pride and fear as her personality blossomed. She had grown in stature as, in retirement, he had diminished. Watling had been a teacher of Modern Languages for the whole of his professional life, but had never developed the obvious rapport with children which his wife enjoyed. She came home each day full of stories to tell of the latest triumph. On the one hand he admired the way in which she identified her own well-being so intimately with the work; on the other, he felt a masculine contempt. After all, it was only teaching. Those with any talent would prosper come what may. Watling had become a teacher not because he loved children, but because he could not make a living from freelance translation. In the classroom, he shied away from the spoken word and concentrated instead on grammar exercises. Conjugating verbs had something of the comforting precision of Mathematics. It was in this way that he had dreamed away forty years of existence.
Outside, the kids were still gathered, but now there were only three, all boys. The ginger-haired one seemed to be in charge. The others kept laughing at his jokes. He was bobbing from foot to foot, perhaps demonstrating a dance move. He span in a tight circle, balancing his weight on the toes of his right foot, came to rest and leapt into a crouch. They all laughed. Perhaps he was parodying someone: a peer, or some pop star whose dance routines were no longer fashionable. Watling started to hurry past with his two heavy bags of shopping, the sherry bottles peering over the top and clinking agitatedly.
“Hey!” It was the ginger-haired one. He had stopped dancing and was edging forward. Watling shuffled on, ignoring him, eyes fixed ahead.
“Hey, you! Hey, mister!”
Watling risked a quick look back. After all, maybe the boy was in trouble.
“Yes?” His wavering voice did not sound familiar. “What’s wrong?”
The boy’s nostrils shivered again as he sucked in air. His red hair and eyebrows stood out against his pale, freckled face like crudely applied dashes of paint. The white skin seemed to glow as blood pumped into it. The boy seemed to inflate in readiness. Then:
“Suck your mum!” he shouted.
His henchman appeared at either side and cried the same message antiphonally. “Suck your mum! Suck your mum!”
Watling sagged involuntarily. He felt his grip on the shopping bags slacken. One of the bottles spilt out over the lip of the bag and fell the short distance to the ground, shattering. Pale dry sherry oozed over the red block paving. The boys laughed.
Watling scurried down the High Road in the direction of the Cathedral, those insensate words still crashing in his ears.
“Suck your mum! Suck your mum!”
***
End of part one
©2007 By Martin Haddelsey