Darkmans
Authors: Nicola Barker
NICOLA BARKER
Darkmans
For
Scott Ehrig-Burgess
in Del Mar, who filled out that comment card
‘These demanders for glimmer be for the most part women;
for glimmer, in their language, is
fire.
’
Thomas Harman –
A Caveat for Common Cursitors
1567
Kane dealt prescription drugs in Ashford; the Gateway to Europe. His main supplier was Anthony Shilling, a Waste Management Coordinator at the Frances Fairfax. Shilling was a quiet, Jamaican gentleman (caucasian – his family originally plantation owners) who came to England in the early seventies, settled in Dalston, London, and fell in love with a woman called Mercy, whose own family hailed from The Dominican Republic.
Mercy was British born. Anthony and Mercy moved to South Kent in 1976, where they settled and raised four daughters, one of whom was a professor of Political Sciences at Leeds University and had written a book called
Culture Clashes: Protest Songs and The Yardies (1977–1999).
Kane was waiting for Anthony at the French Connection; a vulgar, graceless, licensed ‘family restaurant’ (a mammoth, prefabricated hut, inside of which a broad American roadhouse mentality rubbed up against all that was most intimate and accessible in Swiss chalet-style decor) on the fringes of the Orbital Park, one of Ashford’s three largest – and most recent – greenfield industrial development sites.
The restaurant had been thoughtfully constructed to service the adjacent Travel Inn, which had, in turn, been thoughtfully constructed to service the through-traffic from the Channel Tunnel, much of which still roared carelessly past, just beyond the car park, the giant, plastic, fort-themed children’s play area, the slight man-made bank and the formless, aimless tufts of old meadow and marshland with which the Bad Munstereifel Road (named after Ashford’s delightful, medieval German twin) was neatly – if inconclusively – hemmed.
It was still too early for lunch on a Tuesday morning, and Kane (who hadn’t been to bed yet) was slouched back in a heavily varnished pine chair, sucking ruminatively on a fresh Marlboro, and staring quizzically across the table at Beede, his father.
Beede also worked at the Frances Fairfax, where he ran the laundry with an almost mythical efficiency. Beede was his surname. His first
name – his Christian name – was actually Daniel. But people knew him as Beede and it suited him well because he was small, and hard, and unquestionably venerable (in precisely the manner of his legendarily bookish eighth-century precursor).
Beede knew all about Kane’s business dealings, and didn’t actually seem to give a damn that his only son was cheerfully participating in acts of both a legally and ethically questionable nature. Yet Anthony Shilling’s involvement was – in Beede’s opinion – an altogether different matter. He just couldn’t understand it. It deeply perplexed him. He had liked and admired both Tony and Mercy for many years. He considered them ‘rounded’; a respectable, comfortable, functional couple. Mercy had been a friend of Kane’s mother, Heather (now deceased – she and Beede had separated when Kane was still a toddler). Beede struggled to comprehend Tony’s motivation. He knew that it wasn’t just a question of money. But that was all he knew, and he didn’t dare (or care) to enquire any further.
‘Beede.’ Kane suddenly spoke. Beede glanced up from his second-hand Penguin orange-spine with a quick frown. Kane took a long drag on his cigarette.
‘Well?’
Beede was irritable.
Kane exhaled at his leisure.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Kane’s tone was not aggressive, more lackadaisical, and leavened by its trademark tinge of gentle mockery.
Beede continued to scowl. ‘What does it look like?’
He shook the book at Kane – by way of an answer – then returned to it, huffily.
Kane wasn’t in the slightest bit dismayed by the sharpness of Beede’s response.
‘But why the fuck,’ he said, ‘are you doing it
here?
’
Beede didn’t even look up this time, just indicated, boredly, towards his coffee cup. ‘Should I draw you a picture?’
Kane smiled.
He and Beede were not close. And they were not similar, either. They were different in almost every conceivable way. Beede was lithe, dark, strong-jawed, slate-haired and heavily bespectacled. He seemed like the kind of man who could deal with almost any kind of physical or intellectual challenge –
It’s the radiator. If you want to try and limp back home with it, I’ll need a tub of margarine, a litre of water and a packet of Stimorol; but I won’t make you any promises…
Ned Kelly’s last ever words? Spoken as he stood on the scaffold: ‘Such is life.
’
You’re saying you’ve never used a traditional loom before? Well it’s pretty straightforward…
Yes, I do believe the earwig is the only insect which actually suckles its young.
No. Nietzsche didn’t hate humanity. That’s far too simplistic. What Nietzsche actually said was, ‘Man is something which must be overcome.’
To all intents and purposes Daniel Beede was a model citizen. So much so, in fact, that in 1983 he’d been awarded the Freedom of the Borough as a direct consequence of his tireless work in charitable and community projects during the previous two decades.
He was Ashford born and bred; a true denizen of a town which had always – but especially in recent years – been a landmark in social and physical re-invention. Ashford was a through-town, an ancient turnpike (to Maidstone, to Hythe, to Faversham, to Romney, to Canterbury), a geographical plughole; a place of passing and fording (Ash-
ford
, formerly
Essetesford
, the Eshe being a tributary of the River Stour).
Yet in recent years Beede had been in the unenviable position of finding his own home increasingly unrecognisable to him (
Change;
My
God
! He woke up, deep in the night, and could no longer locate himself. Even the blankets felt different – the quality of light through his window – the
air
). Worse still, Beede currently considered himself to be one of the few individuals in this now flourishing ‘Borough of Opportunity’ (current population c. 102,000) to have been washed up and spat out by the recent boom.
Prior to his time (why not call it a Life Sentence?) in the hospital laundry, Beede had worked – initially at ground level (exploiting his naval training), then later, in a much loftier capacity – for Sealink (the ferry people), and had subsequently become a significant figure at
Mid-Kent Water plc; suppliers of over 36 million gallons of H2O, daily, to an area of almost 800 square miles.
If you wanted to get specific about it (and Beede always got specific) his life and his career had been irreparably blighted by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel; more specifically, by the eleventh-hour re-routing of the new Folkestone Terminal’s access road from the north to the south of the tiny, nondescript Kentish village of Newington (where Beede’s maternal grandmother had once lived) in 1986.
Rather surprisingly, the Chunnel hadn’t initially been Beede’s political
bête noire.
He’d always been studiously phlegmatic about its imminence. The prospect of its arrival had informed (and seasoned) his own childhood in much the same way that it had informed both his parents’ and his grandparents’ before them (as early as the brief Peace of Amiens, Napoleon was approached by Albert Mathieu Favier – a mining engineer from Northern France – who planned to dig out two paved and vaulted passages between Folkestone and Cap Gris-Nez; the first, a road tunnel, lit by oil lamps and ventilated by iron chimneys, the second, to run underneath it, for drainage. This was way back in 1802. The subsequent story of the tunnel had been a long and emotionally exhausting tale spanning two centuries and several generations; an epic narrative with countless dead-ends, low-points, disasters and casualties. Daniel Beede – and he was more than happy to admit as much – was merely one of these).
Politically,
ideologically
, Beede had generally been of a moderate bent, but at heart he was still basically progressive. And he’d always believed in the philosophy of ‘a little and often’, which – by and large – had worked well for him.
Yes, of course – on the environmental brief – he’d been passingly concerned about the loss of the rare Spider Orchid (the site of the proposed Folkestone Terminal was one of the few places it flourished, nationally), and not forgetting the currently endangered great crested newt, which Beede remembered catching as a boy in local cuts and streams with his simple but robust combination of a small mesh net and marmalade-jar.
And yes, he was well aware – more, perhaps, than anybody – of what the true (and potentially devastating) implications of a Channel link would be on the Kentish shipping industry (a loss of around 20,000 jobs was, at that time, the popular estimate).
And yes,
yes
, he had even harboured serious fears – and quite
correctly, as it later transpired – that many of the employment opportunities on the project would pass over local people (at that point Ashford had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country) to benefit non-indigens, outside investors and foreign businesses.
It went without saying that the Chunnel (now a source of such unalloyed national complacency and pride) had caused huge headaches – and terrible heartache – in East Kent, but Beede’s greatest betrayal had been on a much smaller, more informal, more
abstract
level.
Beede’s maternal grandmother’s home had been a neat, quaint, unpretentious little cottage (pottery sink, tile floors, outside lavvy) in the middle of a symmetrical facade of five known as Church Cottages. They were located at the conjunction of the old School Road and Newington’s main, central thoroughfare The Street (no shop, no pub, twenty-five houses, at a push).
Much as their name implies, Church Cottages enjoyed a close physical proximity with Newington’s twelfth-century church and its similarly ancient – and much-feted – graveyard Yew.
Beede’s paternal grandparents (to whom he was slightly less close) also lived locally – several hundred yards north up the aforementioned Street – in the neighbouring village of Peene. Just so long as any inhabitant of either of these two tiny Kentish villages could remember, they had considered themselves a single community.
When the developer’s plans for the new Folkestone Terminal were initially proposed, however, it quickly became apparent that all this was soon about to change. Several farms and properties (not least, the many charming, if ramshackle homes in the idiosyncratic Kentish hamlet of Danton Pinch) were to be sacrificed to the terminal approach and concourse, not to mention over 500 acres of prime farmland and woodland, as well as all remaining evidence of the old Elham Valley Railway (built in 1884, disused since 1947). But worse still, the access road from the terminal to the M20 was due to cut a wide path straight between Newington and Peene, thereby cruelly separating them, forever.
Beede’s maternal grandmother and paternal grandparents were now long gone. Beede’s mother had died of breast cancer in 1982. His part-senile father now lived with Beede’s older brother on the south coast, just outside Hastings.
Beede’s parents had moved to the heart of Ashford (14 miles away) two years before he was even conceived, but Beede maintained a
lively interest in their old stamping ground; still visited it regularly, had many contacts among the local Rotary and Cricket Clubs (the cricket grounds were yet another Chunnel casualty), friends and relatives in both of the affected villages, and a strong sense – however fallacious – that the union of these two places (like the union of his two parents) was a critical – almost a
physical
– part of his own identity.
They could not be divided.
It was early in the spring of 1984 when he first became aware of Eurotunnel’s plans. Beede was a well-seasoned campaigner and local prime mover. His involvement was significant. His opinions mattered. And he was by no means the only dynamic party with a keen interest in this affair. There were countless others who felt equally strongly, not least (it soon transpired) Shepway’s District Council. On closer inspection of the proposed scheme, the Council had become alarmed by the idea that this divisive ‘Northern Access Route’ might actively discourage disembarking Chunnel traffic from travelling to Dover, Folkestone or Hythe (Shepway’s business heartland) by feeding it straight on to the M20 (and subsequently straight on to London). The ramifications of this decision were perceived as being potentially catastrophic for local businesses and the tourist trade.
A complaint was duly lodged. The relevant government committee (where the buck ultimately stopped) weighed up the various options on offer and then quietly turned a blind eye to them. But the fight was by no means over. In response, the Council, Beede, and many residents of Newington and Peene got together and threatened a concerted policy of non-cooperation with Eurotunnel if a newly posited scheme known as ‘The Shepway Alternative’ (a scheme still very much in its infancy) wasn’t to be considered as a serious contender.
In the face of such widespread opposition the committee reassessed the facts and – in a glorious blaze of publicity – backed down. The decision was overturned, and the new Southern Access Route became a reality.
This small but hard-won victory might’ve been an end to the Newington story. But it wasn’t. Because now (it suddenly transpired) there were to be
other
casualties, directly as a consequence of this hard-won Alternative. And they would be rather more severe and destructive than had been initially apprehended.
To keep their villages unified, Newington and Peene had sacrificed a clutch of beautiful, ancient properties (hitherto unaffected by the
terminal scheme) which stood directly in the path of the newly proposed Southern Link with the A20 and the terminal. One of these was the grand Victorian vicarage, known as The Grange, with its adjacent Coach House (now an independent dwelling). Another, the magnificent, mid-sixteenth-century farmhouse known as Stone Farm. Yet another, the historic water mill (now non-functioning, but recently renovated and lovingly inhabited, with its own stable block) known as Mill House.
Beede wasn’t naive. He knew only too well how the end of one drama could sometimes feed directly into the start of another. And so it was with the advent of what soon became known as ‘The Newington Hit List’.