Tollington: A Village's Transition from Agriculture to Industry - Prof. de Romero, Apuntes de Biología Molecular

¡Descarga Tollington: A Village's Transition from Agriculture to Industry - Prof. de Romero y más Apuntes en PDF de Biología Molecular solo en Docsity! 1 ‘I’m not lying, honest, papa!’ I pleaded as he took my hand and pulled me towards the kerb, briefly checking for traffic along the twisting country lane. It was hot and I could feel beads of sweat and fear threading themselves into a necklace of guilt, just where my itchy flesh met the collar of my starched cotton dress. Papa did not look angry, he had the air of a man on a mission. He was walking along with that jaunty air that my mother said had made her fall in love with him, a hop of optimism in his walk that belied a sensitive, introspective-looking face. His features effortlessly combined those same contradictions of vulnerability and pride, the sharp leonine nose that swooped down towards the generous questioning mouth, meeting in what looked like the fleshy imprint of a single teardrop. I scuttled after papa along the single road, bordered with nicotine- tipped spiky grass, the main artery which bisected the village. A row of terraced houses clustered around the crossroads, uneven teeth which spread into a gap-toothed smile as the houses gradually became bigger and grander as the road wandered south, undulating into a gentle hill and finally merging into miles of flat green fields, stretching as far as the eye could see. We were heading in the opposite direction, northwards down the hill, away from the posh, po-faced mansions and towards the nerve centre of Tollington, where Mr Ormerod’s grocery shop, the Working Men’s Club, the diamond-paned Methodist church and the red brick school jostled for elbow room with the two-up-two-downs, whose outside toilets backed onto untended meadows populated with the carcasses of abandoned agricultural machinery. There was only one working farm now, Dale End farm, bookending the village at the top of the hill, where horses regarded the occasional passers-by with mournful malteser eyes. From the crest of the hill, on a clear day, you could see the industrial chimneys of Wolverhampton, smoking like fat men’s cigars, and sometimes glimpse the dark fringes of Cannock Chase, several square miles of thick conifers bristling with secrets and deer, where every so often, forgotten skeletons of ancient victims were discovered by local courting couples. But the horizon gradually disappeared as we marched down the hill towards Mr Ormerod’s shop, down into the up-two-downs, whose outside toilets backed onto untended meadows populated with the carcasses of abandoned agricultural machinery. There was only one working farm now, Dale End farm, bookending the village at the top of the hill, where horses regarded the occasional passers-by with mournful malteser eyes. From the crest of the hill, on a clear day, you could see the industrial chimneys of Wolverhampton, smoking like fat men’s cigars, and sometimes glimpse the dark fringes of Cannock Chase, several square miles of thick conifers bristling with secrets and deer, where every so often, forgotten skeletons of ancient victims were discovered by local courting couples. But the horizon gradually disappeared as we marched down the hill towards Mr Ormerod’s shop, down into the valley of…I wished I’d never gone to Sunday School, I wished I did not know the name for what I was now feeling. Sin. One word, three letters, eternal consequences. Unless I confessed all now. I swallowed and looked around, as if for help. There was my home, halfway down the hill, standing on the corner of the crossroads, one of the miners’ tithe cottages huddled around a dirt yard which was the unofficial meeting place for our small community. There was the small overgrown park next to the Yard, where the swings and ricketty slide were watched over by the witch’s hat of an ancient metal roundabout. I could see children riding their bikes, screeching in and around the parked cars and lines of washing, practising noisy manoeuvres which threw up clouds of dust, punctuating each skid like e xclamation marks. I could see my mother, even at this distance her brown skin glowed like a burnished planet drifting amongst the off-white bedsheets of her neighbours. She was wearing one of her slop-around outfits, a faded Punjabi suit whose billowing trousers rippled in the breeze, mercurial wings fluttering at her ankles. She paused, gathering some bundle from a basket at her feet, and then with one motion shook out a peacock-blue sari which she began tacking to the washing line. It puffed outwards in a resigned sigh between her hands. She looked as if she was holding up a piece of the sky. Maybe someone from the Big House would come out and save me. The Big House, as gloomy and roomy as a set from a Hammer horror film, was the only building set apart from the main road and lay at the end of an uneven track which began five hundred yards from our front door. The Big House occupied its own island of private grounds, shielded by high mournful trees and a barbed wire fence. Two ancient, lopsided wooden signs declared NO TRESPASSERS! and BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS! The latter featured a slavering Doberman frothing at the mouth, except the paint had peeled around his muzzle, replacing what were once ferocious teeth with flaking splinters so he looked like he was chewing on a loo brush. On windy nights, the trees around the Big House, a thicket of towering chestnuts and poplars which sometimes blocked the sun and filtered damp something creative with a pair of pruners. I looked at Mr brasses and copper plates, a row of Santa’s grottos all year round. It was a constant source of embarrassment to me that our front garden was the odd one out in the village, a boring rectangle of lumpy grass bordered with various herbs that mama grew to garnish our Indian meals. ‘This is mint, beti,’ she would say, plucking the top of a plant and crushing the leaves under my nose, ‘This one thunia… coriander I mean…this lemon verbena, you can make tea from this …’ I did not want things growing in our garden that reminded me of yesterday’s dinner; I wanted roses and sunflowers and manicured hedges and fountains where the blackbirds would come and sip. I wanted to see mama in a big hat doing something creative with a pair of pruners. I looked at Mr Topsy’s garden and felt furious. Suddenly, somehow it was his fault that I was standing here in front of him waiting to be tried and punished by a jury of grinning gnomes with no genitals and fishing rods. ‘How you doing, Topsy?’ Mr Topsy had christened me thus as he claimed he could not pronounce my name, and I returned the favour by refusing to ever learn his. He talked out of the side of his pipe, like Popeye, and had a bullet shaped face softened with a dusting of white and grey whiskers. He scratched his belly absent-mindedly and I became suddenly fascinated by the size of his trousers. There was enough material in one leg to build a den and his fly stretched all the way from knee to navel like an operation scar. ‘Alright, Mr Kumar?’ My papa paused and exchanged pleasantries, still holding tightly onto my hand. I could not speak, as by now my teeth were e mbedded in the strawberry tarmac of a penny chew which I had sneaked from my dress pocket. I thought I might be able to swallow the evidence of my crime before we reached Mr Ormerod’s shop. I hurriedly unwrapped another and stuffed it in, gagging on the goo. I looked up at papa. His silhouette momentarily blocked out the sun and his eyelashes seemed spiked with light. He could traverse continents with a stride and hold the planets in the palm of his hand. He was going to kill me. We reached Mr Ormerod’s shop and stopped outside the window. The display had been the same for years: a huge cardboard cut-out of a Marmite jar dominated the space, bleached on one side where the sun had caught it, the Player’s Capstan cigarette display behind it, featuring a saturnine sailor’s face in the centre of a lifebelt. A few days earlier, Anita Rutter had told me that this sailor was in fact her father. I had been in my usual spot outside Ormerod’s window having a visual affair with his sweet display when she had sauntered past, arm in arm with her two regular cohorts, Sherrie, who lived at Dale End Farm and Fat Sally. As they came nearer, they began exchanging excited stage whispers and clumsy dead-arm punches. I had instinctively stiffened and busied myself with reading the small print on the Marmite jar, my heart unaccountably flipping like a fish. Anita stopped and looked me up and down, her top lip beginning to rise. She pointed at the Player’s Capstan sailor and said, ‘That’s my dad, that is. He wuz in the Navy. He got medals for blowing up the Jerries, like …’ I wondered why he had taken a particular dislike for men with this name but before I could ask, Sherrie and Fat Sally burst into side- hugging laughter. Only the big girls laughed in this way, malicious cackles which hinted at exclusivity and the forbidden. I knew they were all at senior school, I had seen them round the village in their over-large uniforms, customised with badges and cropped-off ties. I was nine but felt three and a half as this particular day, mama had had one of her ‘You Always Look Like A Heathen’ moods and had forced me into a dinky pleated dress, which despite my efforts at ripping and rolling in mud, still contained enough frills and flowers to give me the appearance of a bad tempered doily. I shot Anita a haunted look, I told her silently that this was not me. She paused and then spun round, scowling, the other girls’ smiles melted and slowly trickled out the side of their mouths. Then Anita broke into a beam of such radiance and forgiveness that my breath caught and my throat began to ache. They linked arms again and walked away, leaving questions buzzing around my head like a heat-hazy fly. It had been the first time Anita had ever talked to me and I had wondered what I had done to deserve it. The day after this encounter, I happened to see Anita’s dad, Roberto, standing at the village bus stop. He had his blue Dunlop tyre factory overalls on and was dragging deeply on a butt end. He did not look much like his photograph any more, but maybe it was the trauma of his wartime experiences that had caused his beard to fall out and his eyes to change colour. I ambled past and smiled at him. He winked back, ‘Alright, chick?’ I stood before him for a moment, waiting for courage to open my mouth. He smiled at me again and dropped the butt into the road, squinting up the hill for any sign of the asthmatic single-decker which would take him to town. ‘Mr Rutter,’ I squeaked, ‘do you miss the sea?’ ‘Ey? Rhyl you mean? Oh ar, was alright.’ He did not want to remember. I could see pain and confusion contorting his face. I changed tack. ‘Have you got any tattoos?’ He smiled proudly and rolled up the sleeve of his oily overall, stabbing a finger at his forearm. ‘Look at this, chick.’ The flesh looked like the exam paper of an unhappy dyslexic; a row of names in blue fuzzy ink ran up his arm like a roll call, Brenda, Deirdre, Janice, Gaynor, just legible under unsuccessful I stood before him for a moment, waiting for courage to open my mouth. He smiled at me again and dropped the butt into the road, squinting up the hill for any sign of the asthmatic single-decker which would take him to town. ‘Mr Rutter,’ I squeaked, ‘do you miss the sea?’ ‘Ey? Rhyl you mean? Oh ar, was alright.’ He did not want to remember. I could see pain and confusion contorting his face. I changed tack. ‘Have you got any tattoos?’ He smiled proudly and rolled up the sleeve of his oily overall, stabbing a finger at his forearm. ‘Look at this, chick.’ The flesh looked like the exam paper of an unhappy dyslexic; a row of names in blue fuzzy ink ran up his arm like a roll call, Brenda, Deirdre, Janice, Gaynor, just legible under unsuccessful attempts to cross them out with what looked like blue marker pen. He tugged the sleeve up further to reveal the name perched on top of an undulating muscle, still pristine and untampered with, three letters set in a faded red heart, MUM. ‘That’s who I miss, chick. No one could replace her. No bugger alive.’ He sniffed loudly and rearranged his Brylcremed quiff. Suddenly he raised a hand to his eyes, scanning the top of the hill, and shouted, ‘Bus, ladies!’ All at once, several cottage doors flew open like airholes on a concertina and blew various women out of their houses adjusting headscarves, closing handbags, shouting at husbands, voices hoarse with cigarette smoke or muffled by herbal cough sweets but all dipping and rising in that broad Midland sing-song where every sentence ends in a rhetorical swoop. ‘What you done to your hair, eh? Dog’s dinner or what, aaar! Am you gooing up bingo tonight or what, eh? Mouthy wench, that Sharon, aaar? Ooh, yowm looking fit today, Roberto duck, getting it regular then, aaar?’ These women were commonly known as The Ballbearings Committee as they all worked at a metal casings factory in New Town, an industrial estate and shopping centre and our nearest contact with civilisation. The factory had opened, by way of compensation, soon after the mine closure, and everyone had assumed that the jobs would be given to the ex-colliers. But it was not the men they wanted; they wanted women, women who would do piecework and feel grateful, women whose nimble fingers would negotiate their machines, women who, unlike their husbands, would not make demands or complain. So it was that in the could peer up the girls’ dresses, raised a sleeve covered in snail trails of snot and said, ‘B…b…because so m…many darkies…live here, miss?’ I laughed along with everyone else but the next time I heard Peter snuffling around under the desk, pencil in hand, peering optimistically past reinforced gussets and woolly tights, I aimed a quick kick and was surprised to see him emerge with a fist clamped over a bloody nose. As Mrs Blakey karate-chopped the back of my legs with a splintered wooden ruler, I tried to explain that we were the only Indians that had ever lived in Tollington and that the country looked green if anything to me. My humiliation had been compounded by the fact that mama was an infants’ teacher in the adjoining school; we were separated by a mere strip of playground, and I knew it would only be a matter he could peer up the girls’ dresses, raised a sleeve covered in snail trails of snot and said, ‘B…b…because so m…many darkies…live here, miss?’ I laughed along with everyone else but the next time I heard Peter snuffling around under the desk, pencil in hand, peering optimistically past reinforced gussets and woolly tights, I aimed a quick kick and was surprised to see him emerge with a fist clamped over a bloody nose. As Mrs Blakey karate-chopped the back of my legs with a splintered wooden ruler, I tried to explain that we were the only Indians that had ever lived in Tollington and that the country looked green if anything to me. My humiliation had been compounded by the fact that mama was an infants’ teacher in the adjoining school; we were separated by a mere strip of playground, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before she got to hear of my behaviour. I knew I should tell papa everything now, Confess said the Lord and Ye Shall Be Saved. Papa’s expression made me wonder if this only ever worked with English people, but I had to say something because if we entered Mr Ormerod’s shop, my crime would become public shame as opposed to personal failure and that, I knew, was something papa hated more than anything. Somewhere a front door slammed shut. It seemed to reverberate along the terrace, houses nudging each other to wake up and listen in on us, net curtains and scalloped lace drapes all a-flutter now. Everyone must have been watching, they always did, what else was there to do? ‘Right then. We’ll ask Mr Ormerod what happened.’ P apa pushed open the door of the shop, the brass bell perched on its top rang jauntily. Its clapper looked like a quivering tonsil in a golden throat and it vibrated to the beat of my heart. ‘I was lying,’ I said in a whisper. Papa’s face sagged, he looked down and then up at me, disappointment dimming his eyes. He let go of my hand and walked back towards our house without looking back. First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1996 13 chapters