Northern Soul

Sir Stanley Shawcross, OBE, Emeritus Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, former President of the Institute of Civil Engineers, knighted on his sixty-fifth birthday for services to British construction and community development, not to mention his many donations to charities and political parties, was perplexed. Unusually so. Though no stranger to negative emotions – chiefly rage, emptiness and fear – perplexity had not featured among them until now. He tugged at his moustache, took a final pull on his cigar and tossed it into a nearby gutter. 

Behind him, lined up like a military formation, stood a line of bulldozers and cranes from whose gantries dangled large wrecking balls. From time to time the operators looked in his direction, then, still receiving no sign, hid their heads again in their tabloids and mugs of tea. The assembled local dignitaries fidgeted and scraped their feet, and behind he heard his chauffeur breathe a discreet sigh of exasperation.

Still Shawcross hesitated. This was not how it was meant to be. Not at all. It was to have been a day of sober, long-anticipated celebration, a day on which the past would be finally and forever levelled – leaving everything smooth, clean and clear. Instead, it had turned to dust and ashes in his mouth. He, who had always taken from others, had had the sweets snatched from his lips. But how?

*

The boy was waiting in front of the park gates. Rebellious tufts of hair, that repeated applications of Brylcream had failed to quell hung over his heavy bespectacled face and thick lips. Below, baggy trousers dangled at half-mast over a pair of thick shoes. There was something unconvincing about him, like an older actor trying to play a schoolboy. The boy scanned the narrow street leading to the park. As always they were late. Then suddenly they came round the corner: two separate groups, boys and girls, nudging and giggling. Stanley knew the boys from school: Mick, the soccer-playing athlete with his straw-coloured hair, thick red knuckles and close-set eyes; Dick, smaller and more approachable than the rest; Col, the noisy joker in the pack and last of all Rob, the king card, the alpha male, taller and a little older than the other three.

Dick introduced the girls: Denise, Angie, Sandy and Sophie, the first three dressed in tiny miniskirts under short leather jackets, with their hair cut in a style similar to the boys’ but slightly longer They peered at Stanley through their clogged eyelashes, their faces masks of matt powder, pale lipstick and brown eye-shadow. The fourth girl, though, was different, though: under a great mop of frizzy red hair she was wearing an army surplus combat jacket on top of a flowered summer frock and a pair of old running shoes. A pair of dark eyes stared out at him from an unmade-up, almost childish face. Stanley overheard her whisper: ‘He looks like a Sunday school teacher.’

Everyone in the school knew about the boys: their clubbing, pills and purple hearts and their strings of girls. They were the cool kids, the self-crowned kings of the scene, the self-selected, haughtily excluding, in-crowd – unmissable with their short razor-cut hair, long sideburns, their narrow-lapelled, three-button Italian suits, their Ben Sherman and Fred Perry shirts, and the parkas and leather topcoats they wore as they rode around on their customised scooters. Even at school they stood out with their  crisp white collars fastened by slim gold bars under the tie knot, satchels braced tight over the left shoulder and slim trousers breaking over gleaming, elastic-sided Chelsea boots – every little detail pressing up hard and insolently against the bounds of the school dress code.

If clothes were one of their religions, music was another: R&B, soul music, especially by little-known Black performers found only on rare US import singles that changed hands in the Wheel for staggering prices. The Mods cultivated and patrolled their tastes like a citadel entry to which was forbidden to outsiders. Life was a matter of walls, Stanley reflected, rings within rings – while he seemed doomed to linger forever outside.

It was at weekends that the Mods really woke up, coming alive early on Friday evening with Ready, Steady Go on the telly, followed by hours of painstaking grooming in front of the mirror, then the pubs, ending up with a quick dive into the local clubs. The part-time jobs – stacking shelves or making deliveries – that paid for their clothes and clubbing took up most of Saturdays but not of course the nights. These were the high spots with trips out to venues in the nearby big cities. Sundays might involve games of football or, if the weather was fine, trips on their scooters out to Skeggie or Scarborough. 

This weekend, though, would break the routine. It was when the town’s parks would be taken over by the annual fair, its stalls and attractions with their flashing lights and rolling groundswell of rock music a brief noisy interruption to the life of the little Pennine town. However the fair, Stanley knew, posed an increasing problem for the Mods. They had gone to it eagerly enough when younger, since when it had hung on, an embarrassing outdated fixture. Wasn’t it just for kids? Wasn’t it time to drop it? 

Stanley had been listening in when they debated it in the school common room.

‘We ought to give it one last whirl,’ Col had said. ‘Could be a bit of a laugh.’

‘What, all those greasers doing their numbers on the dodgems?’ Rob sneered.

‘They’re nothing to be scared of,’ Mick snorted, sucking his knuckles.

‘Could be a few birds there,’ added Dick.

‘Scrubbers more like,’ sneered Col.

Rob screwed up his face, thought, then delivered his decision. ‘OK, just this last time. But early – and only for a couple of hours. We’ll meet up at the park gates at five. But not go in through there. It’s not worth paying.  We’ll climb in behind Raglan Terrace.’

‘What about you, Stan?’ Dick asked. ‘You going too? Taking your girl maybe?’

The Mods sniggered. Then an idea struck Stanley. Before he could think it through, he came out with it.

‘Look, our house is right next to the park. My dad’s away all day Saturday. You could round, have a few drinks, listen to some music.’

The Mods stared at him astonished. Rob laughed.

‘What, you mean pop in for tea and biscuits?’

‘No, some drinks, proper drinks. I’ll get some cider in.’

The Mods looked at one another and shrugged.

‘Cider? Kids’ stuff. Nah, I don’t think so.’ said Rob. 

Dick broke in: ‘Hold on, Rob. It’s worth thinking about. Let’s talk it over.’

The Mods retreated to the far end of the room, whispering and darting grins at Stanley. After a minute or two they marched back.

‘Alright, you’re on. Stan,’ Dick said. ‘Meet you at five on Saturday at the park gates.’

‘OK, let’s go,’ said Rob. He took them quickly through the narrow back streets to Raglan Avenue. There, the wall was only a couple of feet high on its outer side although dropping down more deeply inside. The boys quickly clambered over, then took hold of the outstretched, wobbling arms of the girls as they followed. Then the group headed into the fair. Stanley tagged along behind Sophie.

‘Dick says you paint things.’

‘Yes, so what.’

‘Well, what sort of things?’

Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, abstracts mainly. Look, do we have to talk about this now?’

By now they had reached the big wheel, a gimcrack affair, its struts crudely white-washed and lit by what looked like rows of household light bulbs.

‘Go on, Stanley, take her for a ride,’ said Dick. The other Mods snickered.

Sophie exchanged glances with her sister, Angie, then marched off with her to the ticket booth with Stanley trailing behind. At the booth he dug into his pocket and paid for all three. Sophie and her sister plonked herself down in tone of the boats, an ancient creaking affair, and Stanley joined them, positioning himself at a respectful distance. They waited until a few of the other boats filled up, then the wheel gave a series of shudders and jerked into motion. It rotated a couple of times, then suddenly stopped at the top of its cirle, leaving their boat swinging in mid-air. Time passed. Stanley decided to make a joke of it.

‘You know, we could be up here forever.’

Sophie groaned. Then the wheel jolted into action once more and returned them to the ground. As soon as they got off Sophie rushed over to the other girls and started whispering angrily to them. 

Next, the group drifted from stall to stall. When they passed a shooting gallery the Mods showed the first signs of enthusiasm, jostling one another as they lined up to pay. With pipe-fed air guns they took it in turns to fire at a procession of tin ducks, jeering one another’s shots. They greeted Rob’s pellets, though, with respectful silence, watching closely as he flattened the targets one after the other. Contemptuously waving away the prize of a goldfish in a little plastic bag offered by the stall-holder, he led the group forward. 

Suddenly Sophie brightened. Facing them was an old fashioned Victorian merry-go-round, its wooden horses on slender poles looking like twists of barley sugar. She ran up and climbed gleefully on one of the horses. Stanley followed, seating himself behind her. As he handing two fares to a surly leather-jacketed youth, the rest of the group draped themselves along a balustrade to watch. 

The merry-go-round started up, its horses rising and falling in a sedate roling rhythm. What happened next Stanley was never sure. Mick jumped on next to Sophie’s horse, then at once jumped off again. Out of the corner of his eye Stanley noticed Sophie’s handbag slithering across towards a hole in the middle of the merry-go-round, where its motor chugged away below. Sophie screamed. Desperately Stanley reached out, then watched in horror as it fell into the darkness below. ‘All my things are in it,’ Sophie wailed. My diary, my money! Can’t you do something?’

The Mods made no move, simply leaning on to the balustrade to enjoy the spectacle. Stanley climbed off his horse and, feeling as if he were crossing the swaying deck of a ship, inched over to the control booth and explained to the old man there what had happened. The old man shook his head unbelievingly, then jerked a lever that brought the whole contraption to a clanking halt. The leather-jacketed youth was summoned. He got off the ride, spread-eagled himself flat on the ground and began rummaging under the merry-go-round with a long pole. Behind him, Stanley could hear the Mods tittering. Finally he youth straightened up with a look of bored triumph and held out the handbag, streaked with engine oil but otherwise undamaged. Sophie snatched it and began dabbing it furiously with a tissue. Angie glowered at Stanley.

‘Couldn’t you have grabbed hold of it?’

‘I tried …’

‘Tried!’

Mick walked over and stood himself nose-to-nose with Stanley, a smirk on his lips. Stanley felt he should do something but what? Then Dick intervened.

‘Poor old Stanley, can’t trust him with anything, can we? Anyway, isn’t it time to go round to your place, Stan? That was the deal, wasn’t it?’

Stanley nodded grimly and led them in a straggling procession out of the park to his father’s house. From outside it looked to Stanley even more run-down than usual. God only knew what they would make of it inside. He unlocked the front door and the Mods jammed in behind him, laughing. Angie immediately strode over to the mirror on the parlour wall and began combing her hair. The others pulled out cigarettes, lit them and dug their hands into the bowls of crisps Stanley had laid out beforehand. He busied himself, darting round filling up plastic cups with cider. Col flipped through the discs on top of the Dansette record player. 

‘These all you’ve got?’ he asked.

‘We’ve loads more upstairs. Mostly older stuff … not our sort of thing.’

‘Our sort of thing,’ Col sneered. He slipped Soul City Greatest Hits LP out of its sleeve and popped it on the turntable and switched the machine on. With a crackling sound a large clump of fluff detached itself from the stylus, then the room was suddenly filled with the blare of brass. At once the Mods leapt up and started dancing in the blank-faced, pared-down style they favoured. Stanley tried to catch Sophie’s eye but she shook her head.

‘Who lives here?’ Denise yelled to Stanley over the music.

‘Just me and my dad.’

‘Where’s your Mum?’

‘She’s dead.’

The girls stopped dancing and stared at one another.

‘So how do you manage then – with all the cooking and cleaning and that?’

‘Oh we get by. And there’s an auntie living nearby who helps out from time.’

‘Doesn’t it get you down living in a dump like this?’ Sophie asked.

‘No … I just get ignore it, do my own thing.’

‘Stan’s got a lot interests.’ Dick yelled over the noise of the music. He’s into collecting bits of stone and looking at stars.’ There was more laughter.

At that moment Stanley realized someone was stood outside the window looking in: his father glaring furiously. He must have had a bad day at the races, decided to cut his losses and come home early. Stanley heard his footsteps round the side of the house and a few seconds later the sound of the back door being flung open. At once he got up and went into the kitchen to confront his father. He was stood with his back to Stanley facing the kitchen table, his neck stiff with anger.

‘I went to the fair,’ Stanley began ‘Bumped into some friends from school there and invited them back.’

His father spun round. Stanley could smell sour beer on his breath.

‘I come home expecting some peace and quiet, and what do I get? The place turned into – what’s that you call it – a discotheque!  Go on, get them out of here right now. The whole bloody lot of them!’

Stanley walked back to the front room, went over to the Dansette and switched it off. The Mods froze in mid-dance as if their power supply too had been suddenly turned off. 

‘My father’s come back early. He’s tired. He says you’ve got to go. Sorry, but you’d better all go.’ 

‘What,’ said Dick. ‘Just like that? We’ve only just got started.’

‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’ 

The Mods stood there looking at one another

The frustration that had been building in Stanley all evening finally erupted. ‘It’s all over. Go on, get out, the lot of you! Get out now!’

Muttering, they collected their things and began to troop out. As Sophie  sidled past Stanley she looked him in the eye. Sympathy, amusement or contempt? Stanley could not tell and in truth no longer cared. Everything was ruined anyway. After the Mods had left he stood at the window and watched them walking up the street, laughing and talking as if nothing had happened. As they rounded the corner he saw Rob pass his arm round Sophie’s shoulders. 

Stanley went back to the kitchen. 

‘They’ve all gone. I’ll clear everything up.’

His father nodded, appeased it seemed. Stanley found a dust pan, went back to the front room, swept up the spilt crisps on the carpet, then gathered up the cups and bottles and dumped them in a dustbin at the back of the house. One bottle of cider, he noticed, was still half full. He carried it back into the kitchen and plonked it on the table in front of his father. Mr Shawcross gave him a sharp glance but said nothing. Then Stanley retreated to his bedroom. 

Outside, night was falling. Stanley stood at the bedroom window for a long time watching the lights coming on one by one down the street. A delicious shiver of self-pity rippled through him. Life from now on, he knew, would be nothing but disappointment. He would always be the one standing outside the window looking in, his nose pressed against the pane. Oh, he’d get by, he’d manage somehow. If he could not succeed with the big things, he’d succeed with the small ones – the tiny little day-to-day ones, the neat little one-steps-at-a-time. Not much but something at least. Stanley turned, walked over to the telescope stood in the corner, carried it to the window, pointed it up at the night sky and placed his eye against the lens.

*

Standing in front of the cranes and bulldozers Sir Stanley still waited, weighing the moment, weighing his life. It seemed only yesterday he’d been that boy in the bedroom staring down the street and feeling sorry for himself. The boy in that bedroom been quite wrong. He’d done more than just get by, much more. The small things, will carry you further than you can think. He’d left the town a couple of years after that dreadful day of the fair and never looked back. After completed a first degree in geology he’d switched to civil engineering and landed a job with a big construction company, steadily climbing the corporate ladder. Then he’d taken a gamble. Scraping together some finance, he had launched out his own firm. Starting small and growing step by step, specializing the giant retail developments that were sprouting up across eighties Britain, and eventually going public.. 

Sensing after a few years that the boom in this sector was beginning to fade, he switched again, this time into tourist resorts in Turkey, the Maghreb and the Caribbean. In time he detected the good times were ending here too.  China was the next big thing. Working with local partners he helped pioneer the chain of One World leisure projects there, recreations of famous Western cities, some of real places like Paris, London and New York, others purely imaginary such as the Jane Austen Villages, the Dickensian Cities, the Dreaming Spires and the northern Lowry Lands. The One Worlds had been a big hit, with the Chinese flocking to them in droves. Of course it had not been easy, in fact a nightmare trying to find the right partners and slice through the coils of bureaucracy and corruption (he did not like to think how many fortunes had flowed through his company’s slush funds!) but in the end all the effort and the attention to detail, had paid off. 

Yet for all his success that bleak moment in the bedroom forty years before never left Stanley. The emptiness had always been there, watching and waiting for its moment to spring out at him when least expected – lurking in the chairman’s private when everyone else had gone home or creeping up on him as he lay on a bed in the anonymous luxury of some international hotel. Not that the world ever guessed – or that Stanley allowed the world to guess. 

Sophie, though, had guessed it. He had bumped into her again shortly after launching his own company, touring art galleries in search of something, anything, to break up the bareness of his new office walls. By chance Sophie was working in one of them, bored and at a loose end after a divorce and the fading of her career as an artist. In early middle-age she was still attractive and her feisty vivacity as he remembered it. He saw an opportunity not just find a complement his own stolidity but a chance to rebalance the books, so to speak, and he seized it. A few months later they got married. But the relationship had not prospered. Three years into the marriage she had walked away – no particular reason, she said, it was just that he made her feel ‘lonely in her mind’. Well, Stanley concluded, some investments don’t work out, and you just have to write them off.

It had been shortly afterwards that the opportunity for his current project presented itself. Invited to speak at a prize-giving at his old school, the idea had suddenly come to him: he would demolish all the old terraces where he had grown up and the nearby park, and replace them with a new retail development. Commercially of course the project had made no sense at all. The site was miles from the nearest big city and had no motorway connection, but he mounted enough of a case to override the opposition from his Board. He’d earned it after all, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he generated enough cash over the years to fill the pockets of his shareholders time and again? It would be his own private late-life indulgence, Stanley told himself, an act of calculated destruction that would blot out forever that moment long ago of humiliation and failure. 

The project had sailed through planning – and why ever not with the local council ravenous for new jobs and investment? Stanley’s company, however, was keen to be seen to be doing the right thing in PR terms, and held regular meetings intended to keep the local community on board with developments. The last one, a celebration of the start of clearance operations had been taken place just the night before in a disused Methodist chapel. 

After the meeting had drawing to its perfunctory close, a little bald old man, had made his way, sidling and smiling, up to Stanley.

‘If I may make so bold as to say so, Stanley, it’s a great thing you’re doing for our town. You’ve not forgotten where you came from.’

Stanley nodded, hoping the man, having said his piece, would quickly go away.

‘You don’t remember me, Stanley, do you? We were at school together.’

Stanley looked more closely at the little man. Yes, there was something familiar about those large brown eyes.

‘Is it … are you Dick?’

‘Yes, it’s me, Dick. You remember me – I knew you would.’

‘Yes, Dick, indeed I remember you – you and all the other members of your gang – Rob and Mick and Col.’

The little man beamed. 

‘So, tell me, Dick, what have you all got up to since?’

‘Well, Stanley, you know, after you left things sort of fell apart. The Wheel closed down, other places opened up somehow it wasn’t the same. Not for us anyway. You see, before that we’d been special, the first there – sort of like pioneers – but then lots of other people were getting in on the act. After a bit we sort of went our separate ways.’

‘And then?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual: jobs, marriages, children …’

‘But what about Rob? He was the top dog back then, wasn’t he?’

‘Dead, I’m afraid. Passed away last year. Prostate cancer. He’d been with the council before that.’ 

‘Doing what?’

‘In the cleansing department.’

‘And Col and Mick?’

‘Col was a salesman, retired now of course. Mick still keeps a stall in the market.’ 

‘And what about you, Dick?’ 

Dick shrugged.

‘Oh, you know how it is. I’ve had my share of troubles. After my wife left me I developed a bit of a drink problem. Into other things too, if I’m honest. But I’m all right now. Clean as a whistle, a hundred percent sorted. Got a job as the janitor at our old school.’

 ‘Well, you used to rule the roost there back in the day. Like kings you were. Cocks of the walk. I remember how you looked down on the rest of us. Me too.’

A shadow passed across the old man’s face. 

‘Looked down on you? No, Stanley, you’re wrong there. We looked up to you. Yes, you were different – one of a kind – but you were one of us too.’ 

One of us? Was the old man putting him on? That would have been just like the old Dick. Stanley looked into the old man’s eyes but they stared back at him innocently enough.

‘No, we always knew there was something special about you, that you’d end up going places.’ He laughed. ‘Weren’t you the masterful one, though, Stanley? Not afraid of anyone, you weren’t.  I’ll never forget that time you kicked us all out of your dad’s old place. Sent us packing right and proper. No, Stan, we’ve always been proud of you. Followed you every step of the way. And now you’ve come back to lend us a hand, and we can’t thank you enough for it. But here I am rabbiting away and wasting your time. You’re an important man, I know. Busy too. I’d better be off and let you get on with it.’

He held out his hand. Stanley took it and shook it dubiously, and then the old man beetled off into the night.

Stanley slept badly in his hotel bedroom that night between his hot and tangled sheets. Had Dick been lying in a pathetic bid to flatter him? Or had he been telling the truth, at least the truth as he saw it – some twisted half-remembered version of the truth? If so, he was plain wrong, wasn’t he? Or, then again, was the old man in fact correct and he, Stanley, mistaken? Had his whole life – that enormous inverted pyramid of effort – been built, brick upon brick, on top of one moment of mis-perception long ago? Well, of one thing he was certain: the suffering and desolation ever since had been real. And in a perverse way he was glad of them. He had got his failure in early. It had been his life’s companion, both his friend and his foe, driving him onward and upward. Doubtless it would do so until the very end. 

Whatever. His day was ruined now, wrecked beyond reconstruction. But he was committed. It was too late to back out. Shawcross turned and nodded to the foremen, and the machines roared into action Then he scurried back to his car and, as his chauffeur swept him away, slumped back in the back seat, his eyes closed, his ears filed with the din of destruction. Dust and ashes! An ocean of sand and rubble! When would ever he break free?