Martin JP Green

A celibate young cleric and cricketer falls for the wife of the team captain. Read Chapter One for free.

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Chapter One

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The rail route from the north into central Cliffefield curves gradually westwards and passes in its final three miles through the void once filled by the city’s distended industrial guts.

 

Today, there are wide expanses of redundant concrete interspersed with grassed-over rubble where the factories once loomed, and buddleia sprouts through the palings of jagged topped steel fences separating sterile little units claiming ‘industrial’ status, but having nothing in common with the volcanic scale heavy industry that once dominated the east end of the city.

 

In 1947 the industrial guts of Cliffefield were still ingesting energy and manpower, disgorging raw materials and waste in such profusion that the route by rail into the city, hemmed in as it was by towering black factories pregnant with flame, wreathed in billowing
steam and stippled with smoke stacks, felt like the last leg of a pilgrimage to hell.

 

Left behind the soft Yorkshire meadows spliced by collieries as the city grew closer; left behind the sun and clear air as the sewage farm soaking up Cliffefield’s slurry opened out with, at the end of its acres of hoppers and silos, the twin towers of the power station, rearing sentry-like, the furnaces in its bowels swallowing coal by the megaton and forcing thunderous voltages down conduits and cables into blistered works transformers.

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Serried terraces packed with families locked into the stygian undertaking clung to the hillside on the northern rim of the valley, with corner pubs and chapels, School Board buildings and cinemas wedged in like book ends; heavily trodden little oases providing transient hints of an alternative life to the one served up courtesy of the colossal black sheds reverberating on the valley floor.

The railway forded the sewage farm, skirted the parabolic towers, scurried over dark streets via iron and brick bridges, ducked through a dark corridor of factory blocks - their serrated gable ends fronting onto the oily River Cliffe, their lower quarters disgorging a flood of steaming effluent into the slowly moving slick - and finally shook free, skimming over the arches of an elliptical viaduct towards the city centre where, above the vapour and fumes, the formidable Jubilee Hotel rose foursquare, and beyond it the disembodied clock tower of the Town Hall swam in mist.

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Peter Delaney witnessed this through the window of his second-class carriage with mounting unease. A guard passed down the lateral passageway tapping on its side panels with his flag.
“Cliffefield Jubilee! Change here for Manchester and Liverpool!”

Delaney hoisted his leather suitcase from the overhead rack, apologising to the youngwoman he had shared the journey with down from Leeds for the involuntary grunt as the sudden weight tugged at his shoulder. It was the first sound that had passed between them in
an hour and a half.

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To read more, download the whole of Chapter One for free.

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