Power Play. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ full of “dark Satanic mills”. Whitsuntide was one of them.

      The religious persuasion of many of the inhabitants sprang from Methodism, the cornerstone on which the Industrial Revolution had been built, but this did not prevent the people from throwing themselves into their Whitsuntide celebrations with enthusiastic vigour. The highlight of these celebrations was the Whit Walks. For weeks beforehand the females of the family would gather round to gaze consideringly at the “catalogues” to choose the all-important outfit for the Walk. The Whit Walks were an unashamed opportunity to show off. A new outfit was an absolute essential, if family pride were to be upheld. Everyone would line up to walk through the streets in their new clothes; afterwards families would gather for high tea, and then later still the teenagers would be let loose to attend the fairs that had set up in the market squares.

      It was these fairs which brought the gypsies to the north-west. There were rich pickings to be had from them, what with fortune-telling, working on the fairs themselves and selling their wares.

      Rachel hated the whole thing. She hated the taunting looks the other girls in her class gave her while they giggled behind their hands about their new outfits. She hated knowing that she was an outcast, that she was being made fun of, but now this particular spring, with her body burgeoning into that of a woman, she hated it even more. The girls resented her glowing prettiness, and the boys lusted after the growing development of her body. The fact that she wasn’t one of them, that she was an outcast, made her an easy target for their malice and male vulgarity.

      She had long ago perfected the art of ignoring all that was said about her, of pretending that she simply hadn’t heard the insults. But this particular morning, knowing that the whole school would be seething with excitement over the coming Whitsuntide break, she knew she could not face them. Always sensitive to the opinions of others, she had found that with the onset of puberty her sensitivity had increased. Sometimes the effort of forcing herself not to cry in the face of the jeering taunts of her schoolfellows made her drive her nails deep enough into the palms of her hands to draw her own blood.

      The northern valleys possessed three modes of transport; the road, the railway and the canal. Rachel was walking alongside the latter, pausing now and again to watch a moorhen with her chicks or to study the fleeting shadow of tiddlers as they changed direction at the sight of her shadow. The canal had been abandoned as a transport route long ago, and the rotting lockgates and weed-filled waters gave silent testimony to its decay. Mills long abandoned by owners who could no longer afford to compete with foreign imports reared up darkly alongside the towpath, casting dark shadows, their windows gaping emptily, the glass broken, their interiors long silent.

      Occasionally a golden bar of sunlight slatted through the bleakness of the building. Rachel liked walking. It soothed her, gave free rein to her thoughts. She shivered as she walked beneath one of the narrow bridges, feeling the cold and damp seeping down through the stone. She passed few people as she walked. The occasional old man walking his dog; courting couples, giggling. Across on the other side of the valley she could see men working in their allotments alongside the railway lines, the narrow black lines of terraced houses blotting out the sunlight.

      This particular valley was very long and narrow, the hillsides treeless. It was a grim and depressing place and Rachel hated it. Whenever they came here she suffered a sense of being shut in; she loathed the oppressive atmosphere that infiltrated the place.

      Outside a row of terraced houses overlooking the canal she could see one woman donkeystoning her steps. She was wearing the all-enveloping pinafore that was the uniform of the married woman here. She looked up and saw Rachel and scowled at her.

      “Be off with you!” she called out harshly. “We don’t want no dirty gypos round here!”

      Rachel was impervious to her insults, and walked on to where the river Calder ran alongside the canal. The towpath had crumbled away at the edges here. On one side it was level with the canal and on the other it dropped away to where the river ran sluggishly below, its progress choked with the detritus of human living—old rusty prams and bicycles, tin cans, and a variety of other rubbish that had been slung out of back yards and into the river.

      She paused by a gap in the dismal line of terraced houses to enjoy a warm bar of sunlight. In front of her was the back door to a small pub. A man came out and staggered across to the gents’, and then changing his mind, instead relieved himself into the river.

      Rachel moved on, ignoring him. One day she would escape from all this, from people who disliked and taunted her. One day…

      Daydreams were the only things that made her life bearable, and she escaped into them whenever she could. She enjoyed reading and from the books she read she knew that there was another way of life, very many other ways of life, and one day…

      Her daydream was brutally crushed when she heard someone call out her name in a jeering voice. Her whole body tensed as she recognised the harsh male voices and came to an abrupt halt in front of a gang of boys she recognised from school. They were all older than her, due to leave school at the end of the summer term. They were all dressed in grubby jeans and cheap leather jackets. The rank smell of young male bodies closed offensively round her as they came closer. Resolutely Rachel stood her ground, deliberately avoiding any form of eye contact. Her heart was pumping like a terrified rabbit’s, but her body was completely still.

      “Lost yer tongue, gypo?” one of them taunted. His eyes shifted from her face to her breasts. “Got a fine pair of tits growing there, ain’t yer? They say gypos make good lays…”

      The coarseness of his comments and the laughter of his friends increased her terror, but Rachel knew it would be madness to even try to run. That was what they wanted her to do. They could hardly rape her here in broad daylight, she reassured herself stoically, as the lad reached out and pressed a filthy hand against the front of her dress. She had to fight against her instinctive desire to tear at him with her hands and nails, to rid her body of his unwanted presence, but long after they had jeeringly let her go past, calling out obscenities after her, she felt tainted by the encounter, her body still shaking with a mixture of outraged pride and feminine fear.

      During the Whit week festivities her grandmother was busy telling fortunes, and Rachel escaped to the hills, ranging over the moorlands where thin half-wild sheep foraged and the land was barren and bare. Here and there the remnants of some long-ago drystone wall boundary darkened the landscape, but in the main it was untouched by man’s hand apart from the odd reservoir mirroring the swift movement of the clouds across the hills.

      At Whitsuntide the people of the valleys went on holiday, the more affluent of them sometimes for as much as three or four days, the poorer just on a day trip, but all of them to the same venue—the Lancashire coast and Blackpool. Rachel watched the coaches depart filled with them, and heard them come back at night. The gypsies were camping on a spare piece of land, close to the market square where the buses terminated, and late at night the coaches would disgorge their passengers, replete on beer, candy floss and fish and chips.

      Here in the small town centre a viaduct spanned the canal and road, carrying the railway overhead, and at night these arches were the haunt of eager lovers. The tribe looked down on the gorgio teenagers and their lack of modesty, but Rachel knew that many of the young men, especially those who worked on the fairs, slipped away late at night to enjoy the favours of the girls who gathered in giggling masses beneath the viaduct.

      One night as she walked beneath them on her way back to the camp, she recognised one of the intertwined couples. Ann Watts was in her class at school, although she was two years older than Rachel. Ann Watts was described as “slow”, but there was nothing slow about the way she responded to and attracted the opposite sex. Jealous of her position as acknowledged sex queen of the school, Ann Watts was one of Rachel’s most СКАЧАТЬ