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Running along to Grafton Square where once the Earl of Grafton had some property, the resurrected Lower Harding Street was different in its atmosphere to the surrounding thoroughfares of the dream neighbourhood. It had not been remembered in its pristine state, with all the brickwork and the pointing good as new in brilliant orange that appeared to have been painted on. Instead, it had been fondly recollected from some later point, during the street’s decline. Where once two rows of terraced houses faced each other without interruption save the opening to Cooper Street which sloped off on the right, here there were breaks along the left-side row where dwellings had been emptied prior to demolition. Some of the abandoned buildings were already half knocked-down, with roofs and water services and upstairs floors conspicuously gone. Halfway up one sheer wall, which had become a palimpsest of several generations’ wallpaper, a former bedroom door hung on its hinges, opening no longer to the promise of a good night’s sleep but on a sudden plummet into rubble. Some half-dozen houses opposite the lower end of Cooper Street were barely there at all, their lines merely suggested by a few remaining outcroppings of brick shaped like stray jigsaw pieces, poking from the grass and weeds that had supplanted a beloved front-room carpet.
With the elegiac glow of Mansoul over everything, the dereliction did not seem forlorn or ugly but was more like sad and stirring poetry. To Phyllis, the effect was strangely comforting. It seemed to say that, in somebody’s dreams or memories, even the moss-bound stages of this slow deterioration were held dear. The sight of Lower Harding Street confirmed her feeling that the Boroughs had still been a thing of beauty throughout its undignified and gradual surrender. Though by 1959 and Michael Warren’s time this area’s downstairs counterpart would be a wilderness, Phyllis was confident that it would still retain its place in local hearts, or at least in the younger ones.
Beside her, Michael’s blonde head was tipped back to stare up at the partially demolished house-fronts that they were approaching as they followed their four dead confederates along the revenant terraces. The boy seemed taken by the exposed edge of a dividing wall, or with an ornate fireplace stranded in an upper room that had no floor. He turned and offered Phyllis a confiding look, so that she stooped towards him with one hand cupped at her ear to find out what he had to say.
“These houses look a bit like how my house down Andrew’s Road did when that dervlish showed me it, and I could look round all its walls to see what wiz on the inside.”
Phyllis herself had never undergone a ride like that on which the fiend had taken Michael Warren, and she’d only heard tenth-hand accounts from those rare individuals who had. As a result she only had the sketchiest idea of what the kid was going on about, and so responded with an indeterminate-yet-knowing grunt. Deterring further comment, Phyllis turned away from Michael and towards the rest of her Dead Dead Gang, who were gathered on the sun-baked slabs outside the broken houses opposite the mouth of Cooper Street and obviously waiting for the pair of stragglers to catch up. Reggie and Bill were playing a profoundly painful-looking game of knuckle-rapping with each other as they passed the time, while Handsome John stood there with folded arms and grinned as he looked back along the road at her and her pyjama-boy. Drowned Marjorie sat by herself upon the pavement’s edge and gazed up the incline of Cooper Street towards Bellbarn where she’d resided, before, unable to swim, she’d plunged into the Nene to save a dog who evidently could.
With Michael Warren pottering along behind her, Phyllis marched up to the others and asserted her authority.
“All right, come on, then. ’Ow’s this going to be ayr secret ’ideout if we’re always stood raynd in the street aytside and letting on to everybody where it wiz? Go through to the back yards where nobody can overlook us, and then if it’s safe we’ll let the lad ’ere see the den. Bill, you and Reggie pack that up and do as yer’ve been told before I give yer a good ’iding. And Marjorie, buck yer ideas up. Yer’ll get piles from sitting on the curb like that.”
With varying degrees of muttered insubordination, the dead children stepped through a mere absence in the brickwork where the door of number 19 Lower Harding Street had previously been and creaked in single file across the debris – colonised by snails – that had at some point served as the home’s parlour, living room and kitchen. The rear kitchen wall was gone entirely, so that it was hard to tell where what was formerly indoors came to an end and the back yard began. The only demarcation was a tide-line of domestic rubbish, which had drifted up against the single course of bricks that still remained, a band of refuse that was touchingly familiar and intimate. There was a doll’s head made of hard, old-fashioned plastic, brown and brittle, one eye dead and closed, the other open wide as though the undertaker’s penny had slipped off. There was a broken beer-crate and the undercarriage of a pram, along with solitary shoes, the deadly throat of a milk-bottle and one sodden and disintegrating copy of the Daily Mirror with a headline that referred to Zeus although the story underneath was all about the crisis in Suez.
Having negotiated the precarious obstacle-course of the roofless home’s interior, the gang coll
ected in what there was left of the communal back yard that had once been shared by numbers 17 to 27, Lower Harding Street. It was an area some ninety feet in width, which slanted in an avalanche of tall, parched grass towards a crumbling bottom wall, a little under sixty feet downhill. The remnants of two double-privies stood against this lower boundary, which was at intervals collapsed into a scree of salmon-coloured brick, and here and there across the overgrown enclosure there were piles of junk composting down to dream-dross in amongst the yellowed shoots. Phyllis allowed herself a tight smile of self-satisfaction. If you didn’t know already it was there, then the Dead Dead Gang’s hidden den could not be seen.
She led the gang and Michael Warren down the slope, past a haphazard pile of corrugated iron sheets, discarded cupboard doors and flattened cardboard boxes. At a point approximately halfway down she stooped and gestured proudly to the bushy gradient itself, for Michael’s benefit.
“What d’yer think?”
Bewildered, Michael squinted at the screen of wilted stalks, and then at Phyllis.
“What? What do I think about what?”
“Well, abayt our den. Come on. Get closer up and have a proper butcher’s at it.”
Hitching his pyjama-bottoms up self-consciously, the little boy leaned further in, as he’d been told. After a while he gave a faintly disappointed yelp as he discovered something, although from the sound of it, it wasn’t anything much good.
“Oh. Wiz this what you meant, this grabbit-hole?”
He pointed to a minor burrow, only a few inches wide, and Phyllis laughed.
“Not that! ’Ow would we get dayn that? No, look a bit more to yer right.”
She let him root round in the empty region on the left side of the burrow for a moment and then told him which his right was. He resumed his search and found what he was meant to find almost immediately, although he sounded none the wiser as to what it was.
“Is it a clockpit from an aeroplane what’s gone down underground?”
It wasn’t, obviously, but you could see where he’d got that impression. In fact, what the boy was looking at was the green-tinted Perspex windscreen of a motorcycle sidecar that had been embedded in the slope, then smeared with ochre mud to cut down any telltale glints. That had been Handsome John’s idea, that clever military touch.
“No. It’s the window of ayr den. When we wiz playing ’ere one day we found the ’oles and thought they might all lead to a big burrow further back. The boys fetched shovels, and we dug dayn under where them sheets of metal are, back up the ’ill. It took some time, but we broke through into what ’ad been an old rabbit-warren but was empty now. We kicked all the old tunnel walls dayn and we dug it ayt some more until we’d got a massive pit, looked like a shell ’ad ’it it. Then we widened ayt the biggest rabbit ’ole so we could ’ave a window, where we put this windscreen off a sidecar what we’d faynd. We dragged old doors and that from ’ere-abayts and fitted them across ayr pit to make a roof, but so that it would look like rubbish somebody had dumped.”
She gave a nod and Reggie Bowler scrambled back a few feet through the tall grass, up the slanted yard to where the seeming pile of refuse was located. Bending forward far enough so that his battered hat fell off, he grubbed around amongst the scrap until his fingers found the edge of a dilapidated plywood screen. Grunting with effort – Phyllis thought that he was overdoing it a bit if truth be told – he dragged the mud-stained wooden sheet back, scraping over corrugated iron, until he’d revealed the pitch-black entrance of a tunnel. Stooping to retrieve his fallen bowler, Reggie sat down on the hole’s rim with his pale legs dangling away into the darkness and then, with a slithering motion very like a stoat, he disappeared from sight.
Giving Reggie time to find and light the Dead Dead Gang’s sole candle, Phyllis next sent her Bill and Drowned Marjorie into the subterranean lair, with her and Michael Warren following while Handsome John brought up the rear, since he was tall enough to reach and slide the plywood sheet back into place above them once they were all in.
The pit was roughly circular, perhaps eight feet across and five feet deep with a flat floor and sides of hard-packed soil. The curved wall had been dug to form a ledge just under halfway up so everybody had somewhere to sit, although not comfortably. The same shelf, running all around the den’s perimeter, also provided alcove space, which had been hollowed from the southern section of its arc. Here all the gang’s possessions were kept safe, not that there were a lot of them: two water-damaged copies of Health and Efficiency, black-and-white blondes with beach-balls on their cockled covers, which both Bill and Reggie Bowler had insisted be included in the treasury; a pack of ten Kensitas cigarettes that still had three fags left inside, although the picture on the box had been remembered wrong so that the pompous butler mascot had one gloved hand raised to hold his nose and it said ‘Sea Stink’ where the Kensitas name should have been; a box of matches that had Captain Webb the channel-swimmer on the front, and, finally, their candle. This stood fused by wax to a cracked saucer and supplied the underground den’s one source of illumination, if you didn’t count the greenish underwater radiance that filtered in through the mud-plastered windscreen set into the western wall.
They sat round in a ring there on the narrow and encircling ledge, the candle-glimmer fluttering across their grinning mugs, with only Michael Warren’s legs too short to reach the ground. His slippered toes swung back and forth scant inches from the mouldy carpet-remnant that concealed most of a trodden black-dirt floor. He looked so little Phyllis almost felt a twinge of fondness for him, smiling reassuringly as she addressed him.
“Well, then? What d’yer think?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer, since there was no doubt what he would think, what anyone would think. This was the best den in Mansoul, and Phyllis knew it. Why, they hadn’t even showed him the most thrilling thing about the place yet, and already he looked mesmerised. She carried on with her enthusiastic, bubbling tirade.
“It’s not bad, wiz it, for a gang of kids? For saying it wiz us who made it, like? Now then, I’d better call this meeting of the Dead Dead Gang to order so we can decide what’s to be done with yer. I reckon yer a mystery what needs solving, what with all this getting carried off by devils, starting fights between the builders and then being back to life again by Friday nonsense. So yer lucky yer’ve fell in with us, since we’re the best detectives in the Boroughs, ’igh or low.”
