A LOT OF kids are scared of graveyards.
Not me. I grew up in one.
My dad, Harry Cresswell, was verger at St Cyprian’s on the north-east edge of Bradford. Once it had been a country parish but that was ages back. By the sixties it was all built up, a mix of council houses and owner-occupied semis, plus some older properties from the village days. We lived in one of them, Rose Cottage, right up against the churchyard wall. We didn’t have a proper garden, just a small cobbled yard out back, and out front a two-foot strip of earth where Mam tried to grow a few stunted roses to make sense of the name. A low retaining wall separated this from a narrow pavement that tracked the busy main road where traffic never stopped day or night.
Nearest park was a mile away. But right next door to us there were four acres of open land, lots of grass and trees, no buildings, no roads, no traffic.
St Cyprian’s graveyard.
The wall in our backyard had a small door in it to make it easy for Dad to get to the church to do his duties. In the graveyard the door was screened by a bit of shrubbery. My mam liked to tell anyone who cared to listen that she was a Longbottom out of Murton near York, a farming family whose kids had grown up breathing good fresh air and enjoying the sight and smell of trees and grass. She wasn’t about to deprive her own child of the benefit just because of a few gravestones, so when I was a baby, she’d take me through the door in our yard and lay me on a rug to enjoy the sun while she got on with her knitting. She was a great knitter. If her hands didn’t have some other essential task to occupy them, they were always occupied by her needles. I’ve even seen her knitting on the move! And I’ve never had to buy a scarf or a pullover in my life.
As I grew older and more mobile I began to explore a bit further. Mam and Dad were a bit worried at first, but Father Stamp said he’d rather see me enjoying myself there than running around the street in the traffic, and in Mam’s ears, Father Stamp’s voice was the voice of God.
I should say that though St Cyprian’s was Church of England, it was what they called High, lots of incense and hyssop and such, and the vicar liked to be called Father. It used to confuse me a bit as a kid, what with God the Father, and Father Stamp, and Father Christmas, and my own dad, but I got used to it.
And folk got used to me using the graveyard as my playground. I think them as didn’t like it were too scared of my mam to risk a confrontation. She could be really scary when she tried. For her part, she insisted I should always stay in the area between our bit of the wall and the side of the church, and not do anything naughty. Naughty in Mam’s vocabulary covered a wide range of misbehaviour. She used to read the News of the World and shake her head and say disapprovingly, “There’s a lot of naughty folk in this world. Well, they’ll have to pay for it in the next!” I assumed she meant bank robbers and such. But in my own case, I didn’t have to assume anything. I knew exactly what naughty meant – doing anything my mam told me not to do!
My designated playground area was the oldest section of the graveyard. All the headstones here dated back a hundred years or more, and no one ever came to tend the graves or lay flowers on them. There were quite a few trees here too and it was hard to get a mowing machine in, so the grass grew long and lush and on the rare occasions someone did come round this side, I could easily drop out of sight till they’d gone. Occasionally I’d see Father Stamp but I didn’t hide from him because he’d always wave at me and smile, and sometimes he’d come and join me, and often he’d produce a bagful of mint humbugs and we’d sit next to each other on a tombstone, his arm round my shoulder, sucking away in companionable silence till suddenly he’d stand up, ruffle my hair and say he had to go and do something in the church.
Once I’d started at school, I soon realized the new activities I was enjoying, like playing football or cowboys and Indians, you couldn’t do in a graveyard. Even Father Stamp wouldn’t have cared to see a whole gang of kids rampaging round his church, cheering and yelling. So I spent less time there, but I still liked to wander round by myself sometimes, playing solitary make-believe games, or just lying in the grass looking up at the sky till Mam yelled my name and I had to go in for my tea.
Occasionally I’d have one or two of my special friends round at the house and to start with I took them through the door into my playground. I thought they’d be impressed I had all this space to roam around in, but instead they either said it was seriously weird, or they wanted to play daft games like pretending to be ghosts and jumping out on each other from behind the old gravestones. As well as being worried about the noise they were making, I found I was a bit put out that they weren’t showing more respect. Father Stamp had told me that I should never forget there were dead people lying under the ground. No need to be scared of them, he said, but I should try and remember this was their place as well as mine. So after a while I stopped taking my friends there. I was still very young but already old enough to realize it mattered at school how your classmates regarded you. I didn’t want to get known as daft Tommy Cresswell who likes to play with old bones in the graveyard.
I was what they called a slow learner, taking longer than a lot of the others to get into reading and writing, but when, one day when I was about seven, it finally clicked, I took to it big. I read everything I could lay my hands on, so much so that Mam and Dad went from worrying about me not reading to worrying about me reading my brain into train oil, as Granny Longbottom used to say.
I don’t know exactly when it was that I realized the graveyard was full of stuff to read! I’d seen there were words carved on the headstones, of course, but I never paid them much attention. I was more interested in the variety of shapes.
Some of the headstones were rounded, some were pointed, and some were squared off. Quite a lot had crosses on top of them, some of the older ones leaned to one side like they were drunk, and a few lay flat out. The ones I liked best were the ones with statues and these I gave names to in my private games. My favourite was an angel with a shattered nose that I called Rocky after Rocky Marciano who was my dad’s great hero. Never got beaten, he’d say. I think he’d have called me Rocky rather than Tommy if Mam had let him.
It was Rocky the angel that got me looking at the words. I was lying in the grass one evening staring up at him when the words carved at his feet came into focus.
Sacred to the memory of David Oscar Winstanley taken in the 87th year of his life loving husband devoted father in virtue spotless in charity generous and a loyal servant of the General Post Office for forty-nine years
He was probably a pretty important GPO official, but I imagined him as an ordinary postman, trudging the streets with his sackful of letters well into his eighties, and I was really impressed that he’d been so highly regarded that they’d given him an angel to keep watch over his grave and a full-blown testimonial. This is what started me paying attention to the inscriptions on other headstones. A few were in a funny language I couldn’t understand. Father Stamp told me it was Latin and sometimes he’d translate it for me. Mam was always telling me not to bother Father Stamp because he had so much to do in the parish. In the same breath she’d say I could learn a lot if I listened to him, he was such an educated man. When I wondered in my childish way how I could listen to him without bothering him, she told me not to be cheeky. Things have changed, but back then a wise kid quickly learned that in the adult world he was usually in the wrong!
I quite liked Father Stamp and I certainly liked his mint humbugs, but when it came to practical information about the graves, I turned to the men who dug them. There were two of them, Young Clem and Old Clem.
I don’t know how old Old Clem was – certainly no older than my dad – but he “had a back” and seemed to spend most of his time standing by the side of a new grave, smoking his pipe, while Young Clem laboured with his spade down below. Nowadays they have machines to do the hard work in less than half an hour. Back then it took Young Clem the best part of a morning to excavate and square off a grave to his dad’s satisfaction. Occasionally Old Clem would seize the spade to demonstrate what ought to be done, but after he’d moved a couple of clods, he’d shake his head, rub his back, and return to his pipe. I heard Dad complaining to Mam more than once that Old Clem ought to be pensioned off, but he got no support from the vicar. Father Stamp just shook his head and said there was no question of getting rid of Old Clem. Mam said it showed what a true Christian gentleman Father Stamp was, and I should try to be less naughty and grow up like him. When I asked if that meant that Mam was naughty because she agreed with Dad that Old Clem should be sacked and Father Stamp didn’t, she clipped my ear and said she didn’t know where I got it from. I saw Dad grinning when she said that.
Young Clem was my special friend. Nine or ten years older than me, he was a big lad, more than twice my size, and he always had a fag in his mouth, though that was OK in them days. Dad smoked twenty a day and even Mam had the occasional puff.
Clem had been around all my life, helping his dad out when he were still a kid, then becoming his full-time assistant when he left school at sixteen. Like me he clearly thought of the graveyard as his own personal play park. Wandering around in the dusk one spring evening I heard a noise I didn’t recognize and dropped down in the long grass. After a bit, with the noise still going on, I reckoned I hadn’t been spotted so I crawled forward and peered round a headstone. Young Clem was lying there in the grass with a girl. At eight, I already had some vague notion there were things older lads liked to do with girls but I’d no real idea what it was all about except that simultaneously it had something to do with courting, which was all right, and something to do with being naughty, which wasn’t. We didn’t have sex education in Yorkshire in them days. Whatever it was, Young Clem and his girl were clearly enjoying it. I watched till I got bored then I crawled away. I had enough sense to know that I ought to keep out of the way when my friend was doing his naughty courting so whenever I glimpsed Clem in the graveyard with a girl I made myself scarce.
But when there weren’t any girls around to divert him, the years between us seemed to vanish. Young Clem just loved larking around. In his snap break, he was always up for a game of hide and seek, or tiggy-on-gravestones. Or if I had my cricket ball with me, he’d show me how to set my fingers round it so that I could bowl a googly. One day he was demonstrating how to do this up against the church wall when Father Stamp came round the corner and I thought we would be in real trouble. But Clem didn’t seem bothered. He just lit a fag and blew smoke down at Father Stamp (Clem was a good six inches taller) till the vicar turned round and went back the way he’d come, like he’d forgotten something.
“He must like you too, Clem,” I said, impressed.
“You could say that,” said Clem. “Doesn’t mean I have to like him, does it?”
That struck me as odd even then. Under Mam’s influence, I’d come to think everyone in the world must like and admire Father Stamp, so it was a shock to find that my mate Clem didn’t agree.
I noticed after this that Clem often seemed to show up when I was with the vicar. I recall one occasion when I was round the back of the church where there was this funny old cross, very tall and thin with the actual cross piece set in a circle and not very big at all. Another odd thing was it didn’t seem to mark a grave and I couldn’t see any writing on it, just a lot of weird carvings.
Father Stamp came and stood beside me and started explaining what they all meant. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said but I did take in that it had been there for hundreds of years, dating back to long before the present St Cyprian’s had been built. He told me there’d always been some sort of church or chapel here right back to what he called the Dark Ages and this cross had been put up then and it was quite famous, and experts came from all over just to look at it. Then he lifted me right up on his shoulders so I could get a good look at the fancy carving on the topmost piece of the cross, and I was sitting there, clinging on to his hair, with his hands clasping the top of my legs really tight, when there was a cough behind us.
Father Stamp swung round so quick I almost fell off, and in fact I might as well have done, as when he saw it was Young Clem he dropped me to the ground so hard I was winded.
“Sorry to interrupt, vicar,” said Young Clem, “but Dad were wondering if you’d a moment to talk about tomorrow’s funeral.”
It didn’t sound to me all that important, but Father Stamp hurried away as if it was, and Young Clem said, “Giving you a ride, was he?”
“He was showing me the carvings up on the cross,” I said.
“Is that right? Tell you what, Tommy. The vicar’s a busy man. You want to play, you play with me. Or if you want to know about the carvings or anything, ask my dad.”
Even at that age, I couldn’t imagine that Old Clem would know anything the vicar didn’t but I followed Young Clem round the church to where his dad was sitting on a tombstone, puffing his pipe in the sun. There was no sign of Father Lamb so they must have finished their business quickly.
Young Clem said, “Tommy here wants to know about the carvings on that old cross”
Old Clem blew some smoke into the air reflectively then pronounced, “Heathen, that’s what they are. Nasty pagan stuff. Don’t know what summat like that is doing in a Christian churchyard.”
For all its shortness, I have to say I found this more intriguing than Father Stamp’s more rambling account but when I mentioned it to Mam, she said, “You don’t want to listen to Old Clem. What’s he know? No, you stick close to a clever man like Father Stamp and you never know what you’ll learn. But don’t you go bothering him!”
Mam didn’t like Old Clem much. She wouldn’t use the same words as Dad, who said he was an idle old sod, but that’s what she thought. And she really gave him a piece of her mind once when she found me searching through the long grass in the graveyard and I told her Old Clem had lost his rubber spade and asked me to help him find it. But she liked young Clem. She said he had a nice smile and I noticed she used to pat her hair and sound a bit different when she was talking to him. She even knitted him a scarf that he said was the best scarf he’d ever had, though I never saw him wear it.
So what with the Clems and Father Stamp, I had plenty of company in the graveyard if I wanted it. But most of the time all the company I wanted was my own and that of my friends in the ground. I had no fear of them. Why should I? They were all such good people, I could tell that by what I read on their headstones. I found it a really comfortable idea that after you were dead, folk would come and read what had been carved about you, just like I was doing, and they’d think what a great guy you must have been!
Sometimes I’d lie in the grass by Rocky, looking up at the sky and inventing things they might one day put on my own stone.
Here lies Tommy Cresswell, loving son, and the best striker ever to play for Bradford City and England.
The more I thought of it, though, the more I was forced to admit that it wasn’t all that likely as Bradford were holding up the bottom division of the league back then, and anyway I was crap at football. But anyone could be a hero, I reasoned. It was just a question of opportunity. So in the end I settled for this.
Sacred to the memory of Tommy Cresswell, beloved by all who knew him, who lost his life while bravely rescuing 56 children from their burning orphanage. “He died that they might live.”
I got that last bit from the stone of some soldier who’d been wounded in the Great War and then come home to die.
The graveyard was full of such inspiring and upbeat messages. Those who reached old age had enjoyed such useful and productive lives it was no wonder they were sadly missed by their loving friends and families, while those who died young were so precociously marvellous that the angels couldn’t wait for them to get old before claiming them.
But eventually, after I’d done a tour of the whole graveyard, a problem began to present itself. I went all the way round again just to be sure, and it was still there.
I thought of applying to Mam and Dad for help, but I didn’t really want them to know how much time I was still spending in the graveyard.
Father Lamb would certainly be able to answer my question. After all he was in charge of everything at St Cyprian’s. But he didn’t seem quite so keen on talking to me as he’d once been. If we did meet and sit down for a chat, after a while he’d get restless and jump up and say he had to be off somewhere else, even if Young Clem didn’t interrupt him.
Then one Monday in early October on my way home from school still pondering my problem, I spotted the Clems digging a grave and it came to me that if anyone would know the answer, they would.
It was the usual set-up, with Young Clem up to his knees in the grave, digging, and Old Clem leaning on his spade, proffering advice.
I said, “Who’s this for?”
“Old George Parkin,” said Old Clem. “They’ll not be putting him in the hole till Wednesday, but we thought we’d get a start while this good weather holds. Poor old George. He’ll be sadly missed. He were a grand lad. One of the best.”
That was my cue.
I said, “Clem,” – letting them decide which one I was addressing – “I know you bury the good folk in the churchyard. But where do you put all the naughty ones?”
Old Clem stopped puffing, and Young Clem stopped digging, and they both said, “Eh?”
I saw that I needed to make myself a bit clearer.
I said, “You only bury the good people in the churchyard. I can tell that from reading what it says about them on the headstones. But the naughty ones must die as well. So where are all the naughty people? What do you do with their bodies?”
There was a long silence while they looked at each other.
Old Clem put his pipe back into his mouth and took it out again twice.
And finally he said solemnly, “Can you keep a secret, Tommy?”
“Oh yes. Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said eagerly.
“Right then,” said Old Clem. “We puts them in the crypt.”
Young Clem said, “Dad!” like he was protesting because his father was talking out of turn.
Old Clem said, “The lad asked and he deserves to know. The crypt, young Tommy. That’s where we dump all the bad ’uns. Pack ’em in, twenty or thirty deep till their flesh rots down to mulch. Then they grind the bones to bonemeal and it all gets spread on the fields. But you’re not to tell anyone else, OK? This is between you and me. Promise?”
I repeated, “Cross my heart, Clem,” and went away, leaving father and son having what sounded like a fierce discussion behind me.
This explained a lot! I knew there was this sort of big cellar under the church that they called the crypt. And I knew that there’d been bones and stuff down there because a couple of years earlier there’d been some worry about the church floor sinking and I’d heard Dad talking about clearing out the crypt and setting some props to support the ceiling, which was of course the church floor. So all the naughty people’s remains must have been cleared out to spread on the fields then. That thought made me feel a bit queasy, but, after all, I told myself, if you were too naughty to be buried in the graveyard, what did it matter where you ended up?
I mean, who’d want a headstone saying, Here lies John Smith who was really naughty and nobody misses him?
I’d never been in the crypt, of course, though I knew where the door was in a hidden corner of the church porch. There was a notice on it saying: Danger. Steep and crumbling steps. Do not enter. Not that there was much chance of that as it was always kept locked.
But it had to be opened some time so that more naughty people could be put in there, that was obvious. And if, as Mam said, there were a lot of naughty people in this world, it was probably getting full up again after the last big clear-out.
Suddenly I was filled with a desperate need to see inside the crypt. I wasn’t a particularly morbid child, but I recall one of my teachers writing on my report, It’s never enough to tell Tommy anything; if possible he’s got to see for himself.
So now I’d got the answer to my question, all I needed was for someone to open the crypt door for me and shine a torch in so that I could glimpse all the naughty people piled up there! Then I’d be satisfied.
But I was bright enough to know that this wasn’t the kind of favour adults were likely to do for a kid. I was going to have to sort this out for myself.
The answer was as obvious as asking the Clems about where the naughty people had been.
Dad could go anywhere in and around the church. Obviously he wasn’t going to open the crypt door for me. But he did have a key. At least, I assumed he had a key. He certainly had a bunch of keys that opened up every other door.
And as I thought of this, I also realized that tonight being a Monday night was the perfect time to put my plan into operation. Not that I realized I had a plan till I thought of it! The thing was, Dad always went down the pub to play darts on Mondays and Mam curled up on the sofa with her knitting to watch Sherlock Holmes, her favourite TV series, and nothing was allowed to interrupt her.
So tonight was the night! It seemed like fate, but for a while it looked like fate had changed its mind. It turned out that Dad had been feeling a bit hot and snuffly all day and Mam was worried it was the Hong Kong flu virus that was just taking a grip around the country. But after tea, Dad said not to be stupid, it was just a sniffle that a couple of pints of John Smith’s and a whisky chaser would soon sort. So off he went down the pub, and not long after I went up to bed without any of my usual arguments and lay there till I heard the swelling introductory music of Mam’s programme.
It was Part Two of The Hound of the Baskervilles, I recall, and I was confident there was no way she’d move till it was finished. I had at least an hour.
I slipped out of bed. I didn’t bother to get dressed. I was wearing track suit pyjamas and it was a warm autumn night, so warm in fact I was perspiring slightly and the thought of putting on more clothes was unpleasant. I tiptoed downstairs, carrying the torch I kept for reading under the bedclothes. The TV was going full belt, and I moved into the kitchen, plucked Dad’s church keys from the hook by the back door and headed out into the night.
Our door into the churchyard was locked but I knew by touch alone which key I needed here.
As I passed through, I paused for a moment. The graveyard looked different in the dark, and the bulk of the church silhouetted against the stars seemed to have assumed cathedral-like proportions. But I switched on my torch and advanced till I spotted the comforting outline of Rocky, my broken-nosed angel keeping guard over David Oscar Winstanley, the virtuous old postman. The long grass beneath my bare feet was pleasantly cool, the balmy air caressed my skin, and I felt sure somehow that Rocky would be keeping an eye on me too.
The door to the crypt was in a corner of the church’s broad entrance porch. I thought I might have to unlock the church door itself as, ever since the theft of some items of silver a couple of years earlier, the building had been firmly locked at dusk. Tonight, however, the door was open. I didn’t consider the implications of this, just took it in my superhero mode as a demonstration that things were running my way.
Now all I had to do was find the right key for the crypt door.
It proved surprisingly easy. Close up, I saw it wasn’t the ancient worm-eaten oak door I’d expected but a new door, stained to fit in with the rest of the porch, and instead of a large old-fashioned keyhole there was a modern mortice lock.
That made the selection of the right key very easy and the door swung open with well-oiled ease and not the slightest suspicion of a horror-film screech.
Now, however, the thin beam of my torch revealed that the bit about the steep and decaying steps hadn’t been exaggerated. They plunged down almost vertically into the darkness where the naughty people lay.
Suddenly I felt less like a superhero and more like an eight-year-old boy who got scared watching Dr Who with his mam!
It felt a lot colder in the church porch and there seemed to be a draught of still colder air coming up from the crypt that made my sweat-soaked pyjamas feel clammy. I could smell damp earth – that was an odour I was very familiar with from hanging around the Clems while they were digging a grave. But what wasn’t there, which I’d half expected, was any of that decaying meat smell I’d once got a whiff of as Young Clem’s spade drove into an unexpected coffin.
Far from reassuring me, this only roused a fear that maybe the naughty people didn’t decay like the ordinary good people, but somehow got preserved like the salted hams that hung in Granny Longbottom’s kitchen. Maybe they even retained a bit of life!
In fact to my young mind, already well acquainted through the school playground with notions of zombies and vampires, it seemed very likely that the new door and its mortice lock hadn’t been put there to keep the inquisitive public out, but to keep the still active naughty people in!
I could have shut the door and retreated and gone home to bed, and no one would ever have known of my cowardice. Except me, of course.
Daft, wasn’t it? Just to prove to myself I wasn’t scared, I began to descend that crumbling sandstone staircase. And all the time my teeth were chattering so hard I could hardly breathe!
What did I expect to find? Bodies hanging upside down from the ceiling? Coffins stacked six or seven deep? Heaps of bones? I don’t know.
And I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved when all that the beam of my torch picked out was … emptiness! Except, that is, for seven or eight pillars of steel rising from metal plates set on the packed earth floor to give them firm grounding, and with metal beams running between them at ceiling level to support the sagging church floor.
And that was it. It dawned on me that Old Clem had been having me on again, like he did with looking for the rubber spade! I should have known. Making a fool of people is what passes for a joke in Yorkshire. I felt really stupid! Also despite the chilly air down here, I felt very hot. I pulled off my pyjama top to cool down and used it to wipe off the streams of perspiration running down my face and body.
Suddenly I was desperate to be back in my bed and I turned to go.
Then I heard a noise.
And all my fears came rushing back full pelt!
It was a relief to realize the noise was coming from outside the crypt, not inside.
Someone was at the top of the stairs.
I clicked my torch off and stood in the dark.
A voice demanded harshly, “Who’s down there?”
I almost answered but the thought of the trouble I’d be in at home – sneaking out after I’d gone to bed and stealing Dad’s keys to get into the crypt – kept me quiet. Also, as I say, all my old fears were boiling up again. Maybe this was one of the wicked zombies returning from a stroll round the graveyard! I found myself praying to Rocky who’d never been beaten to come and help me!
Then a bigger fear erupted to push out all the others. Suppose whoever it was pulled the door shut behind him as he went away and left me locked in the crypt all night!
So I stuttered, “It’s me,” and began to move forward.
Then I stopped blinded as a powerful torch beam hit me right in the eyes.
I heard footsteps on the stairs and a voice I now recognized said, “Tommy! What on earth are you doing here?”
It was Father Stamp! I was so relieved I rushed forward up the steep steps and flung myself around him and hugged him close with my arms and legs. His arms went around my back and I felt his large strong hands cool against my hot skin. My track suit bottom was always a bit loose, and I think it had slipped down but I didn’t care, I was just so relieved to be safe! I wanted to explain what I’d been doing but when I tried to speak, it came out as sobs, and he lifted me up and held me so close, I could hardly get my breath, and I tried to push myself free.
My memory of what happened after that is vague and confused. It was like my head was full of colours all forming weird shapes, constantly flying apart and changing into something else. And my body didn’t feel as if it belonged to me, it was like a girl’s rag doll that can be twisted into any shape you want, and I knew I would have fallen away or maybe even flown away if Father Stamp’s strong hands hadn’t been grasping my weak and nerveless flesh.
And then – I don’t think I heard anything and I certainly didn’t see anything – but I knew there was someone – or something – else on the steps. I just had time to think that maybe Rocky had answered my earlier call when there was an explosion of noise and violent movement, and something crashed into Father Stamp and together we went tumbling down the steep steps.
That was pretty well the end for me. I must have hit the crypt floor with such a bang that all of the breath and most of the consciousness was knocked out of my body. I had a sense of being embraced again but not in the strong muscular way that Father Stamp had embraced me. Maybe, I thought, this was Rocky. Then I was raised by strong arms and carried up the steps, and my lolling head gave me a view down into the crypt lit by a moving light that I think must have come from Father Stamp’s torch, rolling around where he’d dropped it as we went tumbling down together.
Finally I was outside in the balmy night air and the sky was full of stars and I didn’t remember anything else for sure till the moment when I opened my eyes and found myself back in my own bedroom with sunlight streaming through the window.
Four days had passed, four days that I’d spent being very sick, and sweating buckets, and tossing and turning with such violence that Mam sometimes had to hold me down. The doctor said I’d had a particularly extreme dose of Hong Kong flu, not just me but Dad too. He’d come back from the pub in almost as bad a state as me. How I got back to my bed, I don’t know. I had some vague notion that Rocky had carried me there. My waking mind was awash with fantastic images of my visit to the crypt and these turned into really terrible nightmares when I sank into sleep, so no wonder I was tossing and turning so violently. I were poorly for nearly a fortnight, much worse than Dad who was up and about again after a week. And it was another two weeks after I first got out of bed before I really started getting back to something like normal.
By this time my memories and my nightmares had become so confused I found it impossible to tell the difference between them. Looming large in all of them was Father Stamp. Remembering how Mam always sang his praises as a visitor of the sick, I lived in fear of seeing him by my bedside. Finally, when Mam didn’t mention him, I did.
“Father Stamp’s gone,” she said shortly.
“Gone where?” I said.
“How should I know? Just gone. Not a trace,” she said. “Now are you going to take that medicine or do I have to pour it down you?”
I couldn’t blame her for being short. Luckily for me and Dad, she’d somehow managed to remain untouched by the flu bug, but she must have been worked off her feet for the past few weeks taking care of the pair of us.
Also she’d had time to get used to Father Stamp’s disappearance. When I was up and about again, I found out he’d been gone a long time. Exactly when no one was certain. It wasn’t till he didn’t turn up for old Mr Parkin’s funeral on the Wednesday after my adventure in the crypt that folk started to get worried. He wasn’t married and he lived alone in the vicarage, looked after by a local woman who came in every morning to clean the house and take care of his meals. That week she’d been down with the flu too, so there was a lot of vagueness about who’d actually seen him last and when.
Should I say something? Best not, I decided. When you’re a kid, you learn it’s usually a mistake to volunteer information that might get you in bother! Also once I started sharing my memory-nightmare of that night, it would be hard to stop till I got to the bit where I was carried home by a marble angel with a broken nose, and I knew that sounded really loopy!
Yet for some reason that was the bit of my memories that I clung on to hardest. Maybe, by clinging to what had to be fantasy, I was shutting out what might be reality. Anyway, soon as I felt well enough, I went back into the graveyard to say thank you to Rocky.
Young Clem spotted me and came over for a chat.
“All right, Tommy?” he said, lighting the inevitable fag.
“Yes thanks,” I said.
“Me and Dad were dead worried about you,” he said. “Hong Kong flu it was, right?”
I really didn’t want to talk about it, but I didn’t want to offend Young Clem, especially not after Mam told me he’d called round nearly every day to ask after me when I was ill.
“That’s right,” I said. “Hong Kong flu.”
“Aye, it can be right nasty that. My Auntie Mary had it, just about sent her doolally, thought she were the Queen Mother for a bit, we have a grand laugh with her about that now she’s right again. Owt like that happen to you, Tommy?”
“Just some bad dreams,” I said.
“But you’re all right now?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Grand!” he said, stubbing out his cigarette on Rocky’s knee. “Everyone has bad dreams. Thing is not to let them bother you when you wake up. See you around, Tommy.”
“Yes, Clem, see you around.”
Father Stamp’s disappearance was old news now. It seemed one of the papers had dug up some stuff about him having trouble with his nerves when he was a curate down south, and his bishop moving him north for his health. So most folk reckoned he’d had what they called a nervous breakdown and he’d turn up some day. But he never did.
After a while St Cyprian’s got a replacement. He was nowhere near as High as Father Stamp, he wanted everyone to call him Jimmy, and he had all kinds of newfangled ideas. Dad and him didn’t get on, and pretty soon there was a big falling out that ended with us leaving Rose Cottage and going to live with Granny Longbottom in Murton till Dad got taken on at Rowntree’s chocolate factory and we found a place right on the edge of York.
So Mam got her wish and I was brought up breathing good fresh air, and eating a lot of chocolate, and enjoying the sight and smell of trees and grass with never a gravestone in sight. In fact, after leaving St Cyprian’s, Mam seemed to lose all interest in religion, and as I grew up I don’t think I saw the inside of a church again, unless you count a visit to the Minster on a school trip. I’d only been inside a few minutes when I started to feel the whole place crowding in on me and I were glad to get out into the air. After that I didn’t bother.
That was forty-odd years ago. I still live with my mam. Lot of folk think that’s weird. Let them think. All I know is I never felt the need to get close to anyone else. I never went courting. I did try being naughty with a girl from time to time, and it were all right, I suppose, but I could never get really interested and I don’t think they liked it that much, so in the end I stopped bothering.
Maybe I should have moved out. I know Dad thought I should. I brought it up one night after he’d gone out to the pub. Mam was sitting in front of the TV, busily knitting away as she always did. That click-click-clicking of the needles is such a familiar accompaniment that it sounds strange if ever I watch a programme without it! She smiled up at me when I broached the subject of moving out and said, “This is your home, son. You’ll always be welcome here.”
Next year, Dad got diagnosed with cancer. After that I think he was glad I was still around to help take some of the strain off Mam. She was the best nurse he could have asked for and she kept him at home far longer than many women would have done. But three years later he was dead, and since then the thought of leaving has never crossed my mind.
As for Father Stamp and St Cyprian’s, they never got mentioned at home, not even while Dad were still living. Was that good or bad? There’s a lot of folk say everything should be brought out in the open. Well, each to his own. I know what worked for me. That’s not to say I never wondered how different my life might have been if the events of that October night hadn’t occurred. We’re all what our childhood makes us, the kid is father to the man, isn’t that what they say?
Though I doubt if many people looking at a picture of me back then could see much connection between little Tommy Cresswell at eight and this fifty-year-old, a bit shabby, a bit broken down, unmarried, living at home with his widowed mam.
There is, though, maybe one traceable link between that kid in the graveyard and this middle-aged man.
I’m a postman.
How much that can be tracked back to David Oscar Winstanley and Rocky, the broken-nosed angel, I don’t know. I certainly don’t aspire to anything like his memorial, either in form or in words. In fact I’ve lowered my sights considerably from the fantasies of my boyhood. He looked after his mam, and bothered nobody would do me. I suppose I could rate as a loyal servant to the Post Office, if loyalty means doing your job efficiently. But if it entails devoting yourself wholeheartedly to your employer, then I don’t qualify. I never had any ambition to rise up the career ladder. Delivering the mail’s been enough for me.
Then the other day, my first on a new round, I knocked on a door to deliver a parcel, and when the door opened I found myself looking at Old Clem.
Except of course it was Young Clem forty-odd years on.
“Bugger me,” he said when I introduced myself. “Tommy Cresswell! Come on in and have a beer.”
“More than my job’s worth, Clem,” I said. “But I’ll have a cup of tea.”
Sitting in his kitchen, he filled me in on his life. He’d worked most of his life for the Bradford Parks and Gardens Service (though they call it something fancier nowadays), he’d been a widower for five years, and he’d recently retired because of his health. No need for details here. Most of his sentences were punctuated with a racking cough which didn’t stop him from getting through three or four fags as we talked.
“Me daughter and her two kiddies live here in York,” he said. “She wanted me to move in with them but I knew that ’ud never do. But I wanted to be a bit handier so I got myself this place. How about you, Tommy? You married?”
“Who’d have me?” I said, making a joke out of it. Then I told him about Dad dying and me living with Mam. And all the time he was sort of studying me through a cloud of smoke in a way that made me feel uneasy. So in the end I looked at my watch and said I ought to be getting on before folk started wondering what had happened to their mail.
But as I started to rise from my chair, he reached over the table and grasped my wrist and said, “Afore you go, Tommy …” – here he broke off to cough – “ … or mebbe I mean, afore I go, there’s something we need to talk …”
I should just have left. I knew what he was going to tell me, and it had been a long time since Rocky was a barrier against the truth. But I stopped and listened and let him give form and flesh to what for so long I’d been desperate to pretend was nowt but an echo of one of my Hong Kong flu nightmares.
That night as usual I cleared up after supper and washed the dishes. Mam says it’s no job for a man but she’s been having a lot of trouble with her knees lately. There’s been some talk of a replacement but she says she can’t be bothered with that. So I do all I can to make life easy for her. Most nights after we’ve eaten, we sit together in front of the telly and I’ll maybe watch a football match while she gets on with her knitting. Like I say, doesn’t matter how noisy the crowd is at the game, if that click-click-clicking of her needles stops, I look round to see what she’s doing.
Tonight when I came in from the kitchen with a mug of coffee for me and cup of tea for her, she was knitting as usual but I didn’t switch the set on.
I said, “Met an old friend today, Mam. Remember Young Clem? Him and his dad used to dig the graves at St Cyprian’s? Well, he’s living in York now. So he can be close to his daughter and grandkids.”
“Young Clem?” she said. “So he has grandchildren? That’s nice. Grandchildren are nice.”
“Aye,” I said. “Sorry I never gave you any, Mam.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but I never lost you, Tommy, and that’s just as important,” she said, her needles clicking away. “So what was the crack with Young Clem then?”
She looked at me brightly. Sometimes these days she could be a bit vague about things; others, like now, she was as bright as a button.
I sipped my coffee slowly while my mind tried to come to terms with what Young Clem had told me.
My problem had nothing to do with his powers of expression for he’d spoken in blunt Yorkshire terms.
He’d said, “I’d taken this lass into graveyard, for a bang, tha knows, and we’d just done when I saw this figure moving between the headstones. I nigh on shit meself till I made out it were your mam. She didn’t spot me, but something about the look of her weren’t right, so I told my lass to shove off down the pub and I’d catch up with her there. Well, she weren’t best pleased but I didn’t wait to argue, I went after your mam, and I caught up with her by the church door. She jumped a mile when I spoke to her, then she asked if I’d seen you. Seems she’d been watching the telly and all of a sudden something made her get up and go upstairs. When she found you weren’t in bed, she went out into the yard and saw the back gate into the graveyard standing open and she went through it to look for you.
“I could tell what a state she were in – she’d nowt on her feet but a pair of fluffy slippers and she were still carrying her knitting with her – so I tried to calm her down, saying that likely you were just larking about with some of your mates. But she’d spotted that the church door were ajar, and nowt would satisfy her but that we went inside to take a look.
“Well, we didn’t get past the porch. There was a noise like someone sobbing and a bit of a light and it were coming up from the crypt. That was when I recalled what Dad had said to you when you asked where we put the naughty people. I’d told him he shouldn’t joke about such things with you as you were only a lad, but I never thought you’d take it serious enough to do owt like this.
“I told your mam I’d go first as the steps were bad, and that’s what I did, but she were right behind me and she saw clearly enough what I saw down below.
“That mucky bastard Stamp were all over you. He’d just about got you bollock naked. I knew straight off what were going on. I’d been there myself, except I was a couple of years older and a lot tougher and more streetwise than you. When he started his tricks on me, I belted him in the belly and I told him I were going to report him, and I would have done, only I weren’t sure anyone would believe me. They’d already marked my card as a bit of a wild boy at school plus I’d been done for shoplifting by the cops. So I said nowt, but when they started talking about giving Dad the boot because of his back, I stood in front of Stamp and I let him know that the day Dad got his papers was the day he’d find himself in the papers. I’d been keeping an eye on him when I saw him getting interested in you, and I thought he’d got the message. But there’s no changing them bastards!
“Now I were on him in a flash. He must have thought God had hit him with a thunderbolt, and that were no more than he deserved. The pair of you went tumbling down the steps. His torch went flying but it were one of them rubber ones and it didn’t break. He was lying on his back, not moving. You were just about out of it. Your mam gathered you up and it was only then I reckon that it fully hit her what the bastard had been at. She put you into my arms and told me to take you up the steps.
“I said, ‘What about you missus?’ but she didn’t answer, so I set off back up to the porch with you in my arms. Do you not remember any of this, Tommy? Nay, I see you do.”
And he was right. I was remembering it now when Mam brought me back to our living room by saying impatiently. “Come on, Tommy. Cat got your tongue? I asked what you and Young Clem found to talk about?”
“Oh, nothing much,” I said. “I told him about Dad, and he told me that Old Clem had passed on too, about ten years back, heart, it was. And we chatted about the old days at Cyprian’s, that’s all.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear about Old Clem, though he was a bit of a devil,” said Mam. “Remember that time he had you looking everywhere for his rubber spade? I gave him a piece of my mind for that!”
A pity you hadn’t been around to give him a piece of your mind when he told me about the crypt, I thought. Maybe life could have been very different for me. Maybe I’d be sitting by my own fireside now with my own family around me. I thought of Young Clem, moving house so he could be handier for his grandchildren. He was clearly made of stronger stuff than me. He dealt with the crises in life by looking them straight in the face and getting on with the life not the crisis. He certainly gave no indication he blamed Old Clem and his daft lie for what happened to me in the crypt. It was just another Yorkshire joke, like sending a kid to look for a rubber spade!
Any road, the way it turned out, it wasn’t strictly speaking a lie any more. Old Clem had told me that the crypt was where they put the naughty people. And the crypt of St Cyprian’s was where Young Clem had buried Father Stamp’s body.
It must have taken him a couple of hours or more to dig a grave in that hard-packed earth. I wonder how long the poor lass he’d sent off to the pub waited for him? Maybe she’d forgiven him, maybe she was even the one who’d become his wife. I should have asked.
But the question that bothered me was, just how naughty had Father Stamp really been? That he had problems was clear. That he’d been foolish enough to grope Young Clem I didn’t doubt.
But it wasn’t his fault that I’d flung myself almost naked into his arms. And it had been me who’d been desperate to cling on to him, at least to start with. For all I know his intention was simply to carry me out of the crypt and take me home. However it had looked to Young Clem and my mam, there’d been no time for him to actually do anything.
No, it wasn’t a memory of childhood sexual abuse that had dictated the pattern of my life. It was quite another memory, one that I’d only been able to bear because I could pretend to myself that it might after all just be the product of a sick child’s fevered imagination.
My half hour listening to Young Clem had removed that fragile barrier for ever.
I don’t know how long Mam and me have before us living like this. Granny Longbottom lasted into her nineties so there could be a good few years yet.
There it is then. Night after night, month after month, year after year, I’m going to be sitting here in this room, still able to hear the click-click-clicking of her knitting no matter how loud the telly.
And every time I glance across at her to share a smile, I’m going to see her as I saw her from Clem’s arms in the fitful light of the torch rolling around the crypt floor, I’m going to see her kneeling astride the recumbent body of Father Stamp with those same click-click-clicking needles raised high, one in either hand, before she drives them down with all the strength of a mother’s love, a mother’s hate, into his despairing, uncomprehending and vainly pleading eyes.