Sunday at the Cross Bones

Sunday at the Cross Bones

– Old rhyme, c. 1880

Well go ahead and call the cops –

You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops

– Tom Waits

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_6399b614-ce4e-5fdc-9ff4-2807ff442a44)

Journals of Harold Davidson

Central Beach, Blackpool 6 September 1932

Some child of Satan has deposited a quantity of candyfloss in my hair. I suspect it may have been the gormless boy in the Edwardian sailor suit, four or five at most, whose mother lifted him up in her meaty arms to be kissed by the famous rector. A sulky, unbiddable young man with a face that Raphael himself would have found it a burden to render adorable, he performed his task with reluctance, turning his putty cheek away so that my lips found only his ear, and leaving me the inestimable gift of sticky spun sugar clamped to my snow-white locks. By the time I realised the damage that was done, she and he were long gone. I must have greeted a dozen visitors looking like a Lancashire barmaid permed and pink-rinsed for a night on the tiles.

Cramped legs; sticky hair; kissing babies; enduring the sniggers of the ungodly. These are hardly the ideal circumstances of the modern clergyman, no matter how nationwide his renown. But then neither is this barrel in which I sit for the second morning of my ten-day-long stint. I do not say it is uncomfortable. Mr Gannon has kindly provided me with a cushion upon the narrow seat where I perch like a maiden aunt. The structure of the barrel has been cut away to allow me a kind of counter upon which to rest my arms, or to write in this journal, or to sign autographs – that puzzling new phenomenon, as though the inscription of one’s name on an envelope or ticket stub forged a connection of sorts with a complete stranger, who will display it later as proof of his having met me, as though a lion in Chessington Zoo might have volunteered to him a paw-print of brotherhood.

Above my head, raised on a metal stalk, a wooden roof houses a small electric fan to circulate the late-summer air and disperse the cigar fumes. ‘We generally disapprove of the exhibits having a smoke, Padre,’ said Mr Gannon with his habitual air of a man supervising an event of vast importance, ‘but we’ll make an exception for you.’

On my left is Mr Gavin Tweedy’s World-Famous Flea Circus, a ludicrous entertainment constructed from a plywood door laid across two steel drums, upon which tiny insects are encouraged to jump over obstacles, walk through hoops, pull tiny carts and dance together to a tinny foxtrot. If Jonathan Swift were to walk by this bonsai extravaganza, what a metaphor he would find for human endeavour: the vanity of display, the pointlessness of striving, the folly of courtship, the puniness of ambition! On my right, a Miss Barbara Cockayne sits in a barrel similar to mine. Her beard is remarkable, an elaborate, flourishing beaver similar to that of Lord Rosebery, or St Jerome as imagined by Rubens. She has a limited repertoire of conversation, contenting herself with growls and oaths and lavatorial remarks; I suppose it must be hard for her to find subjects of chatty inconsequence to share with those who have paid twopence merely to come and gawp at her hairy chin.

I suppose I should be grateful that twopence is also the tariff they pay to come and inspect me, in my snug, brandy-scented wooden casket. It would be a little too cruel if I were paid less than the bearded lady and the waltzing fleas. As to the fee structure enjoyed by my other neighbours here on the strand – the Dog-Faced Man and the Three-Legged Boy of Italy – I am in the dark.

The soft crash of the incoming tide from the Irish Sea can occasionally be heard when the music – that endless, jaunty, soul-deadening jingle-jangle of popular tunes further down the promenade, played apparently on a broken pipe organ – comes to a blissful halt for a moment or two. It fills my heart with sadness, for it reminds me of the waves on the Norfolk strand at Wells-next-the-Sea, where Mimi and I would take the children for Sunday picnics in happier days, the breeze from the salt marshes stinging our nostrils, the gulls flapping and barking over our heads. Those lines from Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ come unbidden into my head:

… the stormy Hebrides

Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world.

For there is no doubt that I have found the bottom of the monstrous world here, in Blackpool. I, who have devoted my life to the betterment of others, sit now like Diogenes the philosopher, a man who gave up the luxuries of the material world to find enlightenment, to end his days in a barrel in the Athenian marketplace. Have I found enlightenment? No. Instead, I wrestle with the events of the last two years, picking over the past, looking for the reasons why I find myself here, gazing across a multitude of day trippers, sunburned holidaymakers, squalling children, ignorant matrons perusing their puzzle magazines, scrofulous bank clerks surreptitiously kissing their new girlfriends on the lips as if amazed at their daring. They have come to see me, a line of several hundred scorched and moronic spectators, some way down the devotional scale from my kindly, God-fearing flock at Stiffkey. There, in the pulpit at St John’s, I would survey the expectant faces and know that I was called by the Lord for a purpose. But my purpose here? It is inscrutable. They pay their twopence. They shuffle past. They offer their compliments. (Some, even, their abuse; and one, a generous gout of his saliva.) I thank them, utter some words about the trial, call on their support in my appeal against the bishop, and bless them on their way with a raised hand. What have I, or we, achieved except a hollow exchange between an adventitious ‘celebrity’ (me) and a curious, sympathetic but morally indifferent public?

Mr Gannon will soon, I hope, regale me with tea and biscuits, and, when twenty or thirty of them have gathered round, I may deliver my little speech of self-exculpation and warning about the conduct of the Church of England. But let me put down this journal and think for a moment of the road that led me to the Palace of Amusements. To this place where I no longer enjoy a small congregation. I have only a huge audience.

Two years earlier …

Notebooks of Charlie Norton, Evening Standard London 1 July 1930

I’d just popped into the Old Coal House on the Strand for a few sharpeners after the final edition had been put to bed, and I was nursing a whisky and water with Benny from the Gazette when this guy comes in. Little short-arse he was, five foot two or so, but with an air about him. Bustle, bustle, Hi there, girls, little wave to the barmaids, and he sits down in the snug like he owns the place, and looks about him. He gestures to Bella, the fat lass from Scarborough, with a raised clump of fingers signalling a glass of beer in anyone’s language. Only, when it came, it looked like a pint of orange squash with a foaming head an inch thick.

Orange squash? In the Coal House?

I had him down as a masher of the old school, the kind of gutter swell you’d have seen ten years ago, smarming down the Haymarket with a carnation in his buttonhole and two iffy tarts hanging on his elbows, but this fellow was a masher down on his luck. His greatcoat was too long, it skimmed the pub’s scabby floor. His shirt cuffs were frayed, his collar was open, revealing a turkey neck, lined and wattled, and his corduroy breeches had seen better days. And his shoes! I’m not one to offer advice to geezers about what they choose to adorn their plates of meat, but this was bordering on the offensive. These were brogues that could’ve been through the trenches – shabby, flappy, held together with some kind of surgical tape.

‘Who’s he?’ I asked Benny.

‘Oh, him,’ said Benny, with that annoying, I-know-everything tone of his. ‘Surely you’ve seen the rector.’

The little chap in the snug was a reverend father? No dog collar, no black suit, no prayer book? What kind of clergyman was this?

‘He’s always in here,’ said Benny. ‘Right character he is. He sets up house at the same table every Tuesday, drinks dandelion and burdock, sarsaparilla, you know, kids’ drinks, and buys lemonade for kids that come in. Kids and brasses.’

Brasses, eh? I looked round the pub. The Coal House wasn’t the most respectable dive in Christendom, but you wouldn’t come in here to try your luck with Fanny Hill, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t that kind of billet. Old guys in the corner yarning about the war, young shavers from the City talking about the money they’d rescued from the Crash by investing in South African diamond mines, ash-lapelled lawyers talking in whispers about dodgy wills, I was used to that level of clientele. But this was the wrong milieu, pardon my French, for chaps out for a spot of how’s-your-father with ladies of the night. Or kids. That’s just disgusting. We’re not keen on that stuff down here. In Fleet Street and the Strand, we don’t hold with that Oscar Wilde rigmarole.

Anyway, me and Benny got talking about other things. Benny’s chasing a story about a racehorse owner down at Goodwood whose wife has been dancing the blanket hornpipe with some junior political at the Treasury. He’s been heard swearing and cursing to his pals about how he’ll have him put away if it doesn’t stop. There’s a stable lad Benny knows who’ll sing like a canary about terrible things that’ve been said, or hinted at, by the horsey grandee at point-to-point meetings and stockbreeder dinners, about the shocking state of morals in public office, that kind of thing.

Benny’s very funny about it, though he’s never met the cove in question. ‘How can this government,’ he rants, taking off the guy’s high rhetorical style, ‘seek to impose yet more swingeing taxes on the innocent, hard-working men of this country, when they themselves are mired in corruption, one hand in the Treasury till and the other down the undergarments of their malodorous doxies?’

‘But where can you go with it, Ben?’ I asked, laughing, ‘I mean, where’s the story? You can’t get the chap to admit what’s really buzzing in his breeches, can you?’

‘No, and there’s the problem,’ said Benny. ‘Of course, we can’t write a line about the adultery side because we are, you know, the Gazette, and we don’t do fuck stories.’ He poured a little water into his cloudy glass, reducing the amber fluid to the shade of afternoon wee. ‘But there may be some mileage in the Treasury chappie.’

‘How so?’

‘Constituency politics, old boy. Cherchez les politiques locale. He’s MP for Beckenham, wife and four kids, supposed to be a solid citizen, loving family man, et cetera. His father-in-law’s Lord Silchester, the peer with the bee in his bonnet about family life. Makes speeches all over Kent and Surrey about the importance of the family hearth and the awfulness of the modern world. If we can hint to the old martinet that his own son-in-law is having it away with a lady that’s not his wife, and furthermore that she’s connected to a leading light of the turfing demi-monde, well, I could predict some fireworks.’

‘I can’t see it, Ben,’ I observed. ‘These are powerful people.’

I took our glasses to the bar for refreshment. Up beside me comes the parson geezer, still in his long coat despite the warmish fug in the place. He only comes up to my shoulder, but he signals to Bella with a show of impatience, as if he’s seven foot tall.

‘Two large Johnnie Walkers, please,’ I say, since it’s my shout. ‘Ice in the glass and water on the side.’

He looks at me as if I’d just spat in his eye.

‘Bella,’ he says, his voice commanding and surprisingly deep for such a small man, ‘has Dolores been in tonight?’

His voice was like chocolate, smooth, low, melting, oddly caressing.

‘Dolores?’ says Bella, yanking the Bass pump so the maternal bosom inside her drawstring blouse wobbled like a milk pudding. ‘Haven’t seen her for three days.’

‘She should be here by now,’ he says, his fleshy lips working themselves into an extravagant pout. ‘I specifically asked her to join me here by seven o’clock.’

‘Sorry, Reverend,’ says Bella, ‘but brasses don’t keep strict working hours.’ Her lips were pursed like a cat’s arse.

‘She is a troubled young woman,’ says the parson with a hint of asperity, ‘and is worthy of your respect, if not your sympathy. Will you let me know if Miss Knight comes by this evening? I may be occupied in the snug.’

‘Mm-hmm,’ says Bella, disapprovingly. ‘If she comes swannin’ in here, I’ll make sure you hear about it.’

I picked up the glasses. I wanted to say something, but he’d gone by the time I turned his way. Back to the little cubicle where he stayed, hunched and preoccupied, for an hour over little bits of paper spread before him. I took the drinks back to Benny, and we shot the breeze about the stable boys, the politician and the errant wife.

‘How’s tricks at home?’ said I, changing the subject. ‘Married life going well?’

‘Oh, that’s all fine,’ said Ben, leaning back and stretching expansively. ‘Me and Clare are snug as moles in a hole. She goes to ballet Tuesdays and Thursdays, night class in fine art on Wednesdays, we stay in and play French horn together Friday evenings, and most Saturdays we head for the Dog in Dulwich and have a few laughs and bit of a sing with her sister and brother-in-law. Every marriage should have, you know, a structure.’

‘French horn?’ I asked. ‘What’s that, some kind of polite term for it?’