feather designs stamped in the plaster and unnecessarily latticedwindows which she only cleaned when no one could see out any more, Helen, Samaritan number 434, lived with her fatherless children in a flat behind the kitchen and sustained a mutual love-hate existence with her employers.
The tall terraced houses in the Victorian part of the town were now mostly cut up into flats and government bureaux and day nurseries and clinics and offices where social workers kept a one-bar electric fire under the desk, the heat not quite reaching the visitor’s chair. On the edge of these streets, strategically placed to catch those who fell through the holes in the passionless sieve of bureaucracy, the Samaritan Centre offered unconditional welcome. You did not have to fill in a form. You did not have to categorize your problems. You did not have to have a problem at all if what you wanted was to sit and be at rest in the comfortable warm room which ran from the jungle of the front garden to the wilderness at the back, and had once been the vicar’s parlour, with a paper fan in the fireplace and brown paper to keep the sun off the carpet.
Above the Samaritans’ square stone rectory, Commercial Road deteriorated upward through the mazes of Flagg’s Hill. Half-way up was Darley Road, grim grey housing for the artisans of the early factories, now warrens where luckless families and loners like Tim and Frank paid four or five pounds a week for a peeling buggy room without heat or water.
On the flatland beyond Flagg’s Hill were the austerity flats built after the war and never improved, the ground trampled as hard as the cement yards where children shrieked and fought and bloodied their grey knees. Billie had a flat in Block C, a prison address for a prison building, the stairway open to the rain and snow, the lift stinking of urine and vomit, even when it worked.
On the mornings when she could face it, Billie put on her green cafeteria overall and hauled herself across the river to the other side of the valley where the University had kept part of that opposite hillside green, with apark and playing fields that dropped in terraces to the river and the boathouses. Upriver, the raw orange brick of the hospital where they had taken Tim, belching forbidden smoke as if it had a gas oven instead of a mortuary. Downriver, the old factories, spewing forbidden ullage. Many were defunct, all their dirty windows broken, their yards piled with rusted junk. One of their old office buildings, condemned but not yet demolished, was the house run by some of the University students for derelicts like old Michael who drifted in and out of town, and sometimes died there, from crude spirits, or drugs, or pneumonia, or starvation, or simply because they stopped living.
Lower down towards the sea, the busy town-centre clustered on either side of the river, old and new unpat-terned, shops and offices and municipal buildings. On the second floor of an old structure that rocked perceptibly when the presses ran was the office of the bi-weekly local paper, where Victoria, Samaritan number 422, was receptionist and secretary to the editor.
Behind the
Courier
building, wandering like a colon through the main part of the town and somehow ignored by the planners who dreamed of their city resurrected clean and white, Marsh Lane still held the miasma of its name. It started with the suspect Station Hotel where no one would choose to stay because of the noise, and petered out in an abandoned coal yard off Commercial Road. Somewhere near the middle, where Marsh Lane crossed the main shopping street, old Michael could be found off and on hobbling along the gutter, yoked back and front with boards that hectored, ‘Repent Brethren, for the end of the world is tomorrow.’
There were three town bridges over the polluted river, two railway stations, cinemas, theatres, traffic jams twice a day, hundreds of places where you could drink or eat, and a famous little old
The tall terraced houses in the Victorian part of the town were now mostly cut up into flats and government bureaux and day nurseries and clinics and offices where social workers kept a one-bar electric fire under the desk, the heat not quite reaching the visitor’s chair. On the edge of these streets, strategically placed to catch those who fell through the holes in the passionless sieve of bureaucracy, the Samaritan Centre offered unconditional welcome. You did not have to fill in a form. You did not have to categorize your problems. You did not have to have a problem at all if what you wanted was to sit and be at rest in the comfortable warm room which ran from the jungle of the front garden to the wilderness at the back, and had once been the vicar’s parlour, with a paper fan in the fireplace and brown paper to keep the sun off the carpet.
Above the Samaritans’ square stone rectory, Commercial Road deteriorated upward through the mazes of Flagg’s Hill. Half-way up was Darley Road, grim grey housing for the artisans of the early factories, now warrens where luckless families and loners like Tim and Frank paid four or five pounds a week for a peeling buggy room without heat or water.
On the flatland beyond Flagg’s Hill were the austerity flats built after the war and never improved, the ground trampled as hard as the cement yards where children shrieked and fought and bloodied their grey knees. Billie had a flat in Block C, a prison address for a prison building, the stairway open to the rain and snow, the lift stinking of urine and vomit, even when it worked.
On the mornings when she could face it, Billie put on her green cafeteria overall and hauled herself across the river to the other side of the valley where the University had kept part of that opposite hillside green, with apark and playing fields that dropped in terraces to the river and the boathouses. Upriver, the raw orange brick of the hospital where they had taken Tim, belching forbidden smoke as if it had a gas oven instead of a mortuary. Downriver, the old factories, spewing forbidden ullage. Many were defunct, all their dirty windows broken, their yards piled with rusted junk. One of their old office buildings, condemned but not yet demolished, was the house run by some of the University students for derelicts like old Michael who drifted in and out of town, and sometimes died there, from crude spirits, or drugs, or pneumonia, or starvation, or simply because they stopped living.
Lower down towards the sea, the busy town-centre clustered on either side of the river, old and new unpat-terned, shops and offices and municipal buildings. On the second floor of an old structure that rocked perceptibly when the presses ran was the office of the bi-weekly local paper, where Victoria, Samaritan number 422, was receptionist and secretary to the editor.
Behind the
Courier
building, wandering like a colon through the main part of the town and somehow ignored by the planners who dreamed of their city resurrected clean and white, Marsh Lane still held the miasma of its name. It started with the suspect Station Hotel where no one would choose to stay because of the noise, and petered out in an abandoned coal yard off Commercial Road. Somewhere near the middle, where Marsh Lane crossed the main shopping street, old Michael could be found off and on hobbling along the gutter, yoked back and front with boards that hectored, ‘Repent Brethren, for the end of the world is tomorrow.’
There were three town bridges over the polluted river, two railway stations, cinemas, theatres, traffic jams twice a day, hundreds of places where you could drink or eat, and a famous little old
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