Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

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СКАЧАТЬ take us to the park, and occasionally we’d go climbing and camping in the Peak District, a few hours away. The camp site was only a few miles from Sheffield, but for me it was a magical place of valleys, forest and streams, and a real escape from the city.

      One morning I woke up early, crept out of the tent and walked up the hillside, through the wet ferns, and scrambled up a band of rocks called Stanage Edge. It was dawn, and mist hung in the valley below. I didn’t want to go home to the city. I wanted to stay, but I knew I couldn’t. I promised myself that one day I wouldn’t have to leave.

      Perhaps it was the memory of Tywyn, or the visits to the Peak District, but I yearned for adventure—wherever it could be found.

      We had many trips to Switzerland as children: not the country, but a disused quarry named Little Switzerland set beside the mighty Humber Bridge. We would go there in a big gang and explore its overgrown depths and flooded pools, sometimes abseiling with the rope and home-made harness my dad had given me. I took on the role of twelve-year-old climbing instructor, the rope tied off to some railings, designed to stop people falling over the edge. Now it makes my blood run cold just thinking about it. After we’d done our exploring, imagining we were in the jungles of Vietnam, following in Rambo’s footsteps, we’d make the long nine-mile march home. Often we’d return to the estate looking like a rag-tag army, covered in mud, with dads on bikes shouting at us because they’d been out looking for us for several hours. Generally my mum would send us to bed, having yet again been made sick with worry.

      Between the river and our flat lay the docks, vast and sprawling over tens of miles. Once part of one of the greatest ports in the world, like most of the nation’s industrial strongholds they had slowly fallen into a decline. The North Sea trawlers, Arctic whalers, the ships full of wood, wool and, at one time, slaves, had been replaced by rusting prams, oily bobbing polystyrene, and bloated dead dogs.

      These docks, along with the bombed-out buildings at the edge of the estate, became my wilderness, a place as dangerous, remote and grand as any Arctic wasteland, an expanse of freedom and possibility.

      In those days there was no reason to go to the docks, and the only people you would find there were prostitutes, tramps, anglers and the kids who lived in our estates along their northern edge.

      Most of the prostitutes came from our estate, with their children going to our school, and it was not uncommon for one kid to taunt another in the playground with the line, ‘Your mum’s a prozzie,’ to which they would reply ‘Yes . . . what about it?’

      I knew about prostitutes long before I knew about sex, and their trade was often a good source of fun as we sped around on our bikes at dusk like the BMX bandits, flushing out all the local working spots such as the old graveyard that bordered the docks, and watching the punters either run or stand their ground and shout and chase us.

      The tramps who inhabited the docks came from the Salvation Army building on the estate, and were of the old variety; the hospitals had yet to be cleared of the mentally ill, so the down-and-outs were mainly elderly, smelly, bearded men—no doubt soldiers who never made it home. They drank meths—or at least that was what we believed—and huddled together on the stairs of the church, waiting for the off-licence to open. They would often fall into the docks, either to be plucked out by the fire brigade or to sink below the quick mud and drown. One story at school was of a tramp who survived a jump one night from the sixth floor of Grasmere House—but the bones of his legs went right through his feet. He was left sticking out of the ground, a foot shorter, screaming, until the fire brigade could dig him out.

      Although I didn’t actually see this event, the image that it conjured haunted me through my childhood, especially when we were older and would dare each other to climb onto the roof of the flats by squeezing up behind the rubbish chutes, with an unsurvivable drop waiting below.

      We were always climbing things, running along walls, messing around on roofs, the heights being the domain of the brave or of policemen with ladders. The bigger the drop, the bigger the thrill.

      The estate was full of stories of derring-do and disaster: kids falling from balconies when their washing-line ropes snapped, or people falling down lift shafts. One landmark was a cracked paving stone below one of the ‘proper flats’. It was said to have been the impact point of a woman who committed suicide by jumping from the twentieth floor. This was perhaps the reason the ‘proper flats’ had more respect from us kids; they guaranteed death from the top. The word ‘maisonettes’ was also deemed to be a bit pretentious, not that we knew what that was. I thought a lot about death as a child—perhaps I was a bit disturbed, maybe it was thinking too much about the man who had hanged himself in our maisonette.

      In the docks, the anglers fished for the eels which seemed to thrive on the decay. This was also a popular pastime among us kids once we could afford a rod, although most fishing trips to the docks involved very little fishing. We’d cycle down there with our rods tied to our bikes, and after the initial excitement threading hooks and bait, our attention would soon wander. One popular activity was finding druggies’ hypodermic syringes down within the oily Victorian gears of the rotating bridges that joined up the docks. We’d stick them in our bait maggots, and pump these up till they popped. There was always loads of junk that could be thrown in the water, glass windows to break on derelict buildings, or we’d use catapults and see who could hit far-off dead animals that floated like bloated pigs in the water.

      When they drained the dock a few years later, to make way for a shopping centre, the workmen came across a dying giant fish over two metres long. Unidentified and looking darkly prehistoric, the fish was held up for a photo to go in the local newspaper. It must have lived in the sealed-up dock for decades, feeding off eels and rats.

      The only thing I ever fished out of the docks was Robin, who would always end up falling in—usually because I pushed him. One summer he got a second-hand bike for his birthday, a yellow Raleigh Boxer, and we cycled down to the docks so he could show it off. When he wasn’t looking, I tied a piece of old rope to it, attached the other end out of sight onto a rusty iron bollard by the edge of the drop, then, shouting, ‘Hey Robin, watch this . . .’, I chucked it in. Unfortunately, before I could haul it back up again, he burst into tears and ran off home. Twenty years later he still can’t see the funny side of this.

      One of our most popular, and hazardous, pastimes was swimming in the docks, something that generally ended up with somebody getting hurt or almost drowning. You would strip down to just your shorts, then line up along the rounded stone edges and try to find someone brave enough to jump in first. It was never me.

      Taking a running jump, the first boy would launch himself out into the water, disappearing with a loud splash and a cheer from the onlookers, who would then remain silent for a few moments until he bobbed up from the blackness.

      Eventually it would be my turn and, trembling a little with fear (fear of the cold water, fear of what lay beneath it, fear of not coming up), I would step forward. Those who had already done it would stand shivering as well, arms crossed, watching until everyone else had jumped. You knew you had no choice, you were going in one way or another.

      Taking a few steps back I would do the running jump and launch off into space with a scream that was half bravado, half fear, shooting out high over the water, eyes closed. The drop was several metres and you seemed to be in the air an impossibly long time. As you fell down towards the water you would feel that thrill of the freedom of the choice being made, there was no way back, you were committed to fate. Then you would hit.

      The impact was hard, the cold stunning, the water so black you expected to bounce, but down you would go, deep. There was always the anticipation of hitting something, until finally you stopped and, following the sounds of your friends, swam upwards towards the surface, where you would climb out via a ladder and СКАЧАТЬ