Runaway (15 page)

The road wound through mountain passes, tree-covered escarpments rising steeply from deep, dark lakes reflecting mountains like mirrors. Thirlmere, Windermere. If I hadn’t known better I’d have sworn that the Scottish West Highlands had been transplanted right here in the north-west of England.

It was a stunning day. Chilly still, but without a cloud in the sky. It didn’t take us long to reach the crossroads town of Kendal and then on to the A65 cross-country to Leeds itself.

CHAPTER SIX

_I

Two things happened on that drive to change our mood. The first was a change in the weather. From that clear, cold, sunny start, the day turned slowly grey. Dark clouds overtook us from the west, low and laden with rain that began to fall around lunchtime. The second was a change of landscape.

From the lakes and mountains of the north-west, we had reached to the rolling farmland and picturesque stone villages of the Yorkshire Dales. But now, as we approached Leeds itself, the darkening sky turned sulphurous yellow, the mills that ringed the city pumping coal smoke into air already thick with it. Stone villages and affluent suburbs gave way to decaying brick terraces. As we drove into it, the city seemed to fold itself around us, drawing us into its crumbling industrial heart.

This was a city in transition, in the process of slum clearance and new build. A city characterized by the chimneys of the mills that pricked the blackening sky, a legacy of nineteenth-century industrialization which, within a quarter of a century, would be decimated by eleven years of Thatcher government. Years that destroyed the industrial base of a nation and sowed the seeds of future financial meltdown.

I had grown up in another industrial city, but Leeds had little of Glasgow’s Victorian grandeur, or the splendid architectural inheritance of the Tobacco Lords. Perhaps it was the rain, and the poisonous sky, but it felt mean as we approached it that afternoon, a city in decline. On another day, in bright sunshine, Leeds might have offered a very different impression of itself. Sunlight so colours our view of the world. But that afternoon it spoke to us only of grim urban deprivation. Our optimism of earlier in the day was crushed by its minacious sky and the creeping return of a brutal sense of reality.

We parked the van in a side street on the south-western edge of the city, bought some cigarettes, and went into a pub crowded with factory workers at the end of their shift. We found seats in an alcove near the back and sent Jeff to get us halves of lager, since he looked older than the rest of us. We sat and smoked, making our own contribution to the pall of pollution that hung in the place, kippering our clothes and stinging our eyes. Maurie used the phone at the bar to call his cousin.

While he was gone, Luke picked up her letter from the table and read it out loud.

Dear Mo,

Wanted you to have my address and number. Just in case. Andy’s not exactly who I thought he was when we met in Glasgow. Funny how you think you know folk when you really don’t. But things are okay. I’m trying to get a job. That would help. I’d like to feel more independent. Anyway, take care. If anything happens, tell my mum and dad I love them, in spite of everything.

Love,

Raitch

‘Raitch?’ Dave said.

‘Rachel.’ Jeff rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Lovely-looking girl. Used to fancy her myself.’

‘Before Veronica stole your heart?’ I cocked an eyebrow in his direction.

He gave me a withering look, then flicked his head towards the letter. ‘She doesn’t sound very happy.’

Luke whistled, and we all turned to look at him. His eyes were still fixed on the crumpled sheet of blue notepaper in his hands.

‘Just seen the address.’ He looked up. ‘Quarry Hill Flats.’

I frowned. ‘What, you mean you know it?’

Luke raised his eyes from the letter. ‘It’s pretty famous. Or should I say infamous?’

‘How would you know?’ Dave took a long pull at his beer.

‘We got several classes from Mr Eccleston on twentieth-century social housing. Part of my history of architecture course.’

I pulled a face. ‘You mean, you were actually awake through that stuff?’

Luke smiled. ‘It was interesting. Quarry Hill Flats was the centrepiece of it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s the largest housing estate of its kind in the world. I don’t remember the exact details, but I think they took their inspiration for it from some complex in Vienna. A new kind of approach to social housing, old Mr Eccleston said it was. They cleared an area of inner-city slums in the Quarry Hills area in the thirties, right in the centre of Leeds, and built this . . .’ he searched perhaps for the word that Mr Eccleston had used, ‘. . . Stalinesque monstrosity. Almost completely enclosed, with huge archways leading into it. He showed us plans and photographs of it. Massive, seven- and eight-storey blocks, a thousand flats for three thousand people. Sort of teardrop shaped, the whole complex, which is kind of ironic, given the way it’s turned out.’

‘What do you mean?’ I was curious about this social housing experiment where Maurie’s cousin had ended up.

‘Well, it’s become a bit of a nightmare of a place, Jack. Falling apart, really. Physically and socially. Problem families, vandalism, gangs.’

‘Jees,’ Dave said. ‘And that’s where Maurie’s cousin lives?’

Luke nodded. ‘So it seems.’

A troubled-looking Maurie came back and slumped down into his seat. We all turned expectant eyes on him, but he was lost in some glassy-eyed distance.

Jeff couldn’t contain himself. ‘What did she say?’

Maurie came out of his reverie, as if aware of the rest of us for the first time. ‘She said not to come before about ten thirty tonight.’

I leaned forward. ‘And?’

‘And nothing. That’s it. But she did say not to bring the van into the complex.’ He hesitated. ‘She thought it might not be safe.’

Dave laid his hands on the table and spread his fingers. ‘Great!’

Luke said, ‘Why do we have to wait till ten thirty?’

‘She’d rather Andy wasn’t there when we came. She thinks he’ll be out till about midnight.’

‘Aw jobbies,’ Jeff said. ‘That means she’ll want rid of us before then. So much for a roof over our heads. It’ll be another night in the van.’

But my eyes were fixed on Maurie. That sense of troubled preoccupation hadn’t gone away.

‘What’s wrong?’

He glanced up at me, and then away again quickly, reluctant to meet my eye. ‘She says she can lay her hands on some money. But she wants to go with us.’

You could have touched the silence that settled among us, as if it had taken form.

Jeff was the first to voice our misgivings. ‘We can’t take a girl with us, Maurie.’

‘Why not?’ Maurie turned angry eyes on his friend.

‘Because we’re five blokes, and . . . well, it wouldn’t work, that’s all.’

He looked around the table for support, which was there in our faces, but no one said anything.

‘Why does she want to go with us, Maurie?’ I asked.

‘Because she’s in trouble, Jack.’ He hesitated, then sighed. ‘Something to do with drugs. And Andy. She wouldn’t be any more specific than that.’ He looked around the assembled faces, then said fiercely, ‘I’m not going without her.’

‘And if we don’t want to take her?’ Luke said.

‘Then you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine.’

Which really wasn’t an option, since Maurie was our singer and frontman, and there was no way we would find work in London without him.

Jeff said, ‘How much money?’

Maurie frowned at him. ‘What?’

‘How much money can she get?’

Maurie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. More than enough to get us to London. That’s all she said. I couldn’t talk her into going back to Glasgow.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we might as well be democratic about it and put it to a vote.’ I raised my right hand. ‘I say we take her.’

I looked at the others, and one by one they raised reluctant hands, all except for Jeff. Maurie glared at him, but there was more hurt than anger in his eyes.

Until, finally, Jeff said, ‘Oh, alright.’

And it was settled. But none of us was happy with this completely unforeseen turn of events.

_II

It was dark and raining heavily when we drove down Eastgate towards the roundabout at the foot of the hill, shortly after ten o’clock.

‘Jees,’ Jeff said, his voice hushed as he peered past the wipers and the rain towards the dominating seven-storey sweep of concrete that characterized the front end of Quarry Hill. It curved round St Peter’s Street, beyond the roundabout, and filled the view at the end of the road. We all crowded towards the front of the van to get a view of it. I had never seen anything on that scale in my life. It bore no relation, architecturally, to anything else around it. It was as if some giant spaceship had simply landed on the hill, vast and incongruous, and couldn’t take off again.

‘It looks like a prison,’ Dave said.

And I thought yes, that was it. It was exactly as you might have imagined some grim Soviet prison block where political prisoners were sent in their thousands for daring to think. All it lacked was the razor wire and the sweeping criss-cross of security searchlights.

‘That must be Oastler House,’ Maurie said. ‘Rachel said the whole complex is made up of about a dozen different blocks or “houses”, as they call them. She said to enter through the arch at Oastler, and they’re in Moynihan, which is the big block that runs the length of the north side.’

Jeff swung left into Vicar Lane, and we entered a maze of narrow backstreets lined by three- and four-storey red-brick factories and warehouses. He found parking in Edward Street, and cut the engine and lights. We all sat listening to the tick, tick of the cooling engine, reluctant to go out into the rain that we could hear battering on the roof.

Finally, a little before ten thirty, the rain eased a bit and we slipped out into the dark. The city was pretty much deserted. We could hear the rumble of light traffic on the main thoroughfares of Eastgate and St Peter’s Street, and New York Road beyond, but there wasn’t a soul in sight as we turned left into Lady Lane and hurried in the darkness down the hill towards Oastler. The Kingston Unity Friendly Society building loomed over us on our right, and on the left stood Circle House and the darkened window of Harold’s hairdressers.

We ran across the roundabout in a huddle and on to the concourse that led to the huge archway in the centre of the towering arc that was Oastler House. Lights burned beyond balconies in random patterns across all seven floors, and our footsteps echoed back at us in the dark from the curved walls of the arch as we passed through it. We emerged on the far side into another world. A world unto itself, enclosed and private, the city behind us shut out and lost beyond the dominating blocks of flats that ringed its perimeter. Even in the dark you could see the neglect and decay. Stained concrete, cracked and crazed. Street lamps whose bulbs had died, leaving pools of darkness around them. Weeds poking up through fissures in the tarmac. Football fields and kiddies’ play areas sad in their tawdry, shadowed emptiness.

Away to our right I saw an old red-brick building that had somehow been subsumed into the development, and the raised circle of an enormous gas storage tank.

‘This way.’ Maurie led us off to the left, blocks of flats rising up all around us.

We followed the curve of Oastler to Neilson, and another arch that offered a tempting escape back into the outside world. But we still had business within. There were vehicles parked along the front of the buildings, and further blocks were separated by cluttered open areas abandoned to the creeping advance of nature in the process of reclaiming them.

There was no one around. No movement, no sign of life, except for lit windows punctuating black spaces. I know now, of course, that good, working people lived ordinary lives in these blocks. Were born, and lived and died here. Played, fought, laughed, made love, as well as the best of a deteriorating environment. But to us, in the dark and the rain that night in 1965, it seemed alien and hostile.