Alt-History - New Writing from Brighton

Introduction

QueenSpark Books has for many years documented the multiple histories of Brighton and Hove, publishing books whose content stretches from life between the wars to recent arrivals into the city. We also have a very close association with www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk, whose website offers local people, and those who have dispersed to all parts of the globe, the chance to add their memories and photographs on all aspects of our history. In addition, QueenSpark has always offered opportunities to people who wish to develop or showcase their creative writing; many of our 80-odd books are anthologies of fiction and poetry by new writers.

Alt-History attempts to merge these strands, offering people the opportunity to look at Brighton and Hove anew; to use the architecture, geography, politics and history as inspiration to create some new ‘histories’. We set up a competition, for local writers as well as those who no longer live here and, as you will see, word spread to the other side of the world. We also offered support, via a writing group, to those who were keen to develop their writing skills. Our thanks go to. The first two stories won the adult’s and children’s awards respectively.

We are especially delighted to publish five stories by children; their writing shows a vitality and imagination that often eludes us as adults, yet seldom are stories by children published.

Enjoy the stories – and, whatever you do, don’t relate them to other people and pretend that they’re true…

John Riches
Director
QueenSpark Books

Gallery

Eau de Nil
by Jane Hansford

“I wish you’d stop talking to me.”

Agnes was sitting with Esther on their Tuesday bench, next to the old pier and looking out to sea. Agnes said again, “I wish you’d stop talking to me. Like I’m rubbish.”

“Well, you are rubbish. The way you talk.” Esther sat stiffly upright, her shoulders back, her feet placed neatly together.

Agnes slumped slightly over the arm of the bench, so that she could see both Esther and the coastline sweeping out behind. “Is it time for lunch yet?” Agnes lifted the lid of the basket beside her. “Cheese and chutney.”

“Today? No, it’s pilchards.”

Agnes put a tightly-wrapped foil package onto her lap; it was already warm. Sunlight flashed on the surface. “Is Betty coming?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask me?”

“I see you’ve made an extra pack of sandwiches.”

“That’s in case she comes.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“How would I know ?”

If Betty came, she could sit between them, and watch the starlings swirl in and out of the old ballroom at the end of the pier. She could converse with both of them. The Art of Conversation. Agnes and Betty had studied it at school, and Betty had insisted, in her perfect, polished accent, that they must practice together, “for, dear Agnes, you may only have one dinner party in which to impress someone.”

Agnes was beginning to feel hot in her tweed coat. If she’d realised how warm it was going to be, she wouldn’t have worn it.

“I think I might take my coat off.”

“You shouldn’t have worn it.”

“I didn’t know it was going to be hot like this.”

“I wore just a cardigan, you see.”

Yes, Agnes could see that Esther was wearing her cardigan. She must have looked at the sky before they left.

The sandwiches were sitting heavily on Agnes’ lap. She gently unfolded one end of the foil package, and a swill of tomato juice rushed out and deposited itself on the green and orange checks of her coat. Streaks of oil glinted on the surface as the pool spread, and started to seep into the fabric.

“Have you got a tissue, Esther?”

Esther handed out two serviettes each. Agnes dabbed at her stain.

“I think I’ll have my lunch now,” said Esther. She held the triangular sandwiches with both hands, eating each one down to a very fine crust, whilst looking out to sea.

Agnes let her eyes trail the curve of the bay, all the way along to Worthing, just visible at the head of the promontory, then across the horizon and back down the coast to where they were sitting. Round and round, she began to see a solid line, like the edge of an enormous basin that was brimful of sparkling water.

“Esther. The sea’s like a cereal bowl, and the pier’s a spoon, resting on the side.”

Esther was folding her crusts back up inside the foil, and watching two seagulls as they wheeled around on a warm current out to sea. The two birds hung in the air, occasionally swooping and turning in unison, as if they were tied together. Their underbellies were golden in the sunshine, and their grey wings streaked with blue from the bright sky.

Blue. That was Betty’s colour. She always dressed in pale, eggshell blue. Betty, languid and beautiful, with her long arms stretched out on the dark wood of the desk. Betty laughing and leaning in towards Agnes. Bettina Frampton-Lloyd. A cut above everybody else, but she wasn’t really like that. Agnes knew. She may have lived on a country estate, her parents may have been smart and rich and the first to own a motor car; she had even had a proper coming out ball. Agnes helped her dress, weaving satin roses into her long blond hair; she had felt honoured.

Esther was pouring tea from a flask into two plastic beakers. They’d been made to look like proper china cups, with handles and a floral pattern around the top. An endless stream of people flowed past Agnes and Esther on their bench. Students, children, young women on rollerskates, older couples taking it slowly. So many people, and I don’t know any of them, thought Agnes.

Esther was sipping her tea. “It’s done sterling service, this thermos. They don’t make them like this any more.”

No, thought Agnes, the new ones are much prettier. Ours looks like a soldier’s flask. “These beakers were a good find, weren’t they, Esther?”

“One of your successful shopping trips. Even these are twenty years old.”
Agnes remembered the day she had brought them home, and how pleased Esther had been, and she was still pleased, in a way. She always smiled when she took them out. Agnes chewed on her sandwich. It was too late for Betty to come now.

“We shouldn’t waste this spare sandwich. We should give it to someone.”

” Who would want a rotten old sandwich?”

“You made it for Betty. You must have thought she would want it.”

“When it was fresh. Not now. Not now that it’s been sitting in the sun for an hour.”

“Well then, I might have it myself.” Agnes opened the foil package carefully. Esther was right. Most of the filling had melted, leaving the sandwich lumpy with leftover pilchards and swimming in a sea of oily tomato sauce.

“We could give it to the seagulls.”

“We don’t want to encourage them.” Esther shuddered. “I hate them.”

“I’ll throw it away, then.”

“Take the rest of the rubbish with you, please.”

There was a large municipal bin not far from their bench. Agnes eased herself up slowly, and set off towards it.

It really was very hot, Just this amount of activity was enough to make Agnes a little breathless, and she was panting by the time she reached the bin. She stood holding onto the turquoise railings with both hands. Looking back, she could see Esther sitting perfectly straight, sipping her tea. Crowds of tourists swarmed over the boardwalk below, the sea glittered and winked, and a heat haze was forming over the far end of the old pier. The lunch bag felt heavy on her wrist. It still seemed a waste to Agnes, but she slipped it through the mouth of the bin, and heard it land inside. Blow Esther, she thought.

The heat of Agnes’ body, trapped inside her tweed coat, was unbearable. Agnes could feel something like steam rising up under her chin, and escaping in little bursts from her cuffs. She began to undo the buttons, just the top two at first, and then all of them, more quickly. She flung open the coat and a slight sea breeze wrapped itself around her sweating torso. Agnes took a deep breath. “Blow Esther. I am going to take my coat off. And I’m going to go for a walk.” She dumped the coat on the railings and set off quickly, relishing the feel of the air on her arms.

The faces, the bustle and the colours of the teeming promenade ahead of her were all quite dazzling. It’s like a river of people, thought Agnes, and the benches are like islands, and the river swirls around them. I shall walk past five islands, against the flow, and then I shall sit down.

Esther would usually keep her eye on Agnes, but she had been distracted. A seagull had dropped straight out of the sky and crash-landed close to her feet. It lay on its front with its head crushed up against the railings, immobile. Esther herself sat rigid with shock and fear, unable to take her eyes off the corpse, and acutely aware of her heart thudding in her chest. It’s dead, she kept thinking. It’s dead and it’s here. Why did it have to fall here? After a few frozen moments, she had relaxed enough to consider what she should do. She couldn’t sit this close to a dead seagull. They would have to move to another bench. She looked up for Agnes in her green and orange coat, but she was nowhere to be seen. Esther started to pack away the thermos and the cups, taking care not to move an inch nearer the dead bird. Her hands were shaking. Suddenly, the grey and white body gave a sigh, and with a slight shuffle away from the railings, the seagull slowly raised its head. Esther yelped.

The bird was sitting very low to the ground, but now its head was turned skywards, and its beak opened and closed silently. “Looks like it’s panting,” thought Esther, and she was surprised to feel a flicker of concern for the creature. It had been able to take a little hop, so perhaps it was just concussed. And when it came round properly, it would simply get up and fly away. These were consoling thoughts, and Esther was able to observe the bird closely now, looking for signs of recovery. She was struck by the neatness of the gull’s feathers, lying smoothly on its broad back. And how clean it was – the white feathers were absolutely spotless. Were all seagulls as clean as this one? She glanced up, there was no sign yet of Agnes.

Agnes had found a marvellous place to rest, on a new bench between the two piers. She was fixated by a tiny boat out to sea, slowly disappearing into the distance. As she stared, Agnes felt herself lift and start rushing towards the boat, as if she too were going to fall over the edge and disappear. She gripped the bench, and brought herself back. She had to tear her eyes away from the beckoning horizon.

Two young women were sharing the bench with her. They were laughing and telling stories. One, a tall, dark-haired girl, was dressed entirely in black; her short tee-shirt showed a ring through her belly button. She smiled briefly at Agnes when she caught her eye. Her friend was smaller, and blonde, and she wore a light summer dress.

“And look at this,” said the blonde girl, jumping to her feet. She raised her dress, and turned to show the back of her leg. “I don’t even know how I got it.”

High up on her inner thigh, where the skin is its softest, was a large round mark, bruised around the outside, swollen and grazed in the middle.

“Gosh.” Her friend reached out and ran her fingers tenderly over the wound.” You don’t remember doing it?”

“Not at all. Come on, we ought to go.”

As the dark-haired girl passed Agnes, she gave her a half-smile goodbye. But Agnes’ eyes were dreamy, and she took no notice.

Long, white voile curtains, lifted by the breeze through open windows, and flapping gently on the floor. September sunshine pouring in and with it, the smell of Autumn. One of Betty’s easels in the corner, and a table beside with paints and brushes. The floor strewn with pieces of silk underwear. And Agnes and Betty, lying together on Betty’s big bed. Betty with her arms round Agnes, and both of them dressed in Parisian silk.

“I’m getting married,” says Betty.

Agnes’ heart leaps.

Betty’s going to be a artist. She has a studio downstairs, full of her work. Agnes had been surprised by her paintings at first; they were dark and strange. A house that looked like a tomb. A nursery, where the babies were animals. Betty had planned to devote her life to painting, and now she’s getting married.

“It won’t change anything, Agnes. It will be the same for us. And I’ll still paint.”

Betty brings out a pile of pastel-coloured boxes, and she empties each one on to the bed, discarding the tissue wrappings.

“I want this to be a gift, Agnes, but it’s not to be any old thing. We shall find the one which is absolutely perfect.”

As she lays the underwear out, she points to the details unique to each piece – the hand embroidery with pearls; the designer cut that leaves no seams at all. “But the most important thing, Agnes, is that it feels beautiful on you.”

Afterwards, Agnes lies with her head on Betty’s breast, clothed in an Eau-de-Nil silk petticoat that she would keep for ever.

“When I walk up the aisle, Agnes, I shall be looking for you. I’ll know what you’re wearing, against your skin. And I shall be wearing white for the first time. Imagine.”

The war changed everything. Betty’s fiance went away to fight, and the house was requisitioned by the Army. It was soon filled with groups of Canadian soldiers, but the family was allowed to live on in a small corner. Betty’s mother threw herself into organising social dances and Whist drives, while Betty and Agnes baked bread and scones, took letters to the Post Office, and washed the soldiers’ underwear and socks. Long lines of washing hung across the lawns.

After the raid on Dieppe, Betty and Agnes went down to the harbour, and watched the pavements fill with stretchers from the boats. Nurses moved quietly and purposefully amongst them, and there was no screaming. After a few days, it became clear that some of the Canadians would not be coming back. Their underwear continued to flap on the lines in the garden, “It’s so terribly, terribly sad,” said Betty, and Agnes saw that she was thinking about her own soldier who had not yet returned.

When he did come back, he was changed. Nonetheless, Betty went ahead and was married in the Spring. Agnes wore her Eau-de-Nil petticoat, and Betty gave her their special smile as she walked up the aisle.

After the war, Agnes took a job with the village Post Office in Ditchling. The shop doubled as a grocer’s, and received deliveries of food in bulk – tea in chests, sugar in sacks, and butter and cheese in enormous 28lb blocks. Agnes had to weigh out and bag each customer’s order, according to their food coupons. Finally, Agnes could sort the post. She loved her work. Betty praised her. “You’re doing a proper job, Agnes. I’m out of my time.”

When Betty took her down into her studio to see the latest paintings, Agnes felt privileged and stunned. “But Agnes, you are my inspiration. The way you see things, and the stories you tell – I couldn’t paint without you.”

Sitting on her new seafront bench, Agnes was letting the pictures and words of the past run through her mind like a cooling river. She knew that if she allowed herself to be drenched in her memories for long enough, then Betty would be with her all day, whispering in her ear and reaching for her hand. Agnes stroked the top of her own head with light fingers. Her hair was startlingly hot. “I need a hat,” she thought. As she stood up, she felt Betty rise beside her. “Let’s walk down to the beach.”

The hat display covered the full length and height of one wall of the shop. Agnes let her eyes travel slowly along the different rows. Straw hats, bush hats, harsh plastic toppers with jokes on the front. She was drawn to the baseball caps that offered a choice of colours; and when she tried on a red one and peered into the mirror, she felt a jolt of excitement. Betty was whispering in her ear, “Yes, oh yes, Agnes. What fun.” Agnes could almost feel the brush of her lips. She reached for her purse, and then she remembered. She had no money. Esther was in charge of the lunch basket, and Agnes hadn’t carried her own money, in her own purse, for years. Blow Esther, thought Agnes, and she walked straight out of the shop with the red cap on her head.

She stopped, once she was a safe distance away, and she could hear Betty’s delighted laughter ringing in her ears. Agnes laughed out loud with her, throwing her head back and patting her chest. Her fingers touched on something hard on her blouse. Dried egg, from this morning’s breakfast. Immediately, an image of Esther’s bony hand crashed into Agnes’ mind and Betty vanished.

The hand was scrubbing at Agnes’ chest, and she tried to brush it away. When had Esther first appeared? For a long time, it had been Agnes and Betty, and then suddenly, it was the three of them. They would go dancing together at Sherry’s Dance Hall, and, on special occasions, in the ballroom at the end of the pier. Moonlight flooded in through the windows, and all eyes would be on Betty as she glided in diaphanous blue across the floor. When the band stopped playing, Agnes would listen to the waves lapping gently below them.

Esther invited them to come ice-skating at the Sports Stadium in West Street, and Betty refused. “It’s just not me, Agnes. Too much rushing about. And that dreadful organ music.”

Agnes’ favourite part was racing round and round the ice-rink. She and Esther saved up for their own skates, and they would meet outside the council offices, where Esther worked, and run down West Street together with their skates banging on their backs.

That was before the grey time. There was no point in thinking about it. Agnes’ mind had closed down, and it sat like a blank page inside her.

She could recall a dinner party. In the winter. Esther had driven her there, through falling snow, in her new grey Austin Morris. Betty made an announcement.

” We’re moving to Paris. You will visit us, won’t you?”

Betty had given Agnes a painting. It showed a woman standing in front of a window, looking out with her back turned. There was another figure outside with a featureless face. Agnes remembers the weight of the canvas as she hugged it.
There was something else about that night. A dark claw was groping through Agnes’ mind, trying to pluck out the memory that she wanted to look at. A whispered conversation between Betty and Esther, and away from Agnes – what was it? She let the question run around tirelessly in her head, until she thought that, surely, someone passing her would be able to hear her thinking.

A little girl was standing in front of her and staring intently at Agnes’ mouth. Eventually she spoke. “You have a very wobbly chin.”

“That’s because I’m old,” said Agnes.

“Are you going to die soon?”

“I don’t think so.”

The child’s mother, embarrassed, stepped in to hustle her away, but Agnes was beaming. “I am old and wobbly,” she thought as she set off again. “My shoes slap around, I’ve got egg on my shirt, and my hair is thin, it blows about in the slightest wind. I know what they all see.”

Cushions of scorching air were buffeting Agnes gently along, and her feet started to fly over the boardwalk. She soared effortlessly up back onto the promenade, and in no time, had reached the West pier. She found herself wheeling about on the wooden deck. Sweat dripped into her eyes, and the sky and sea melted together into a fiery blue smear all around her. Agnes grabbed onto a rusty railing to steady herself, and raised her head. The stricken ballroom stood, unsafe and abandoned, on its own out to sea. Milky-green waves swirled around its legs. Agnes felt the familiar tug of the horizon, and she raised her damp arms to welcome it.

Esther awoke with a start. The corners of her mouth were crusty and rough. The seagull was still sitting at her feet, but now its head lay on one side and its eyes were glassy. Esther picked up the lunch basket and set off immediately to find Agnes. She noticed the green and orange coat on the railings, but she didn’t pause to pick it up, for she was being driven by an urgency that she dare not acknowledge.

A crowd was gathering by the entrance to the old pier, and Esther instinctively hurried towards it. While the onlookers feasted their eyes on the twisted body below them, Esther only needed to see the briefest glimpse of Agnes’ pale petticoat. A howl rose from deep inside her.

Esther couldn’t remember much about the policemen and what they’d said. She had refused their offer of a lift home. The evening was turning chilly, and she pulled her cardigan closely around her. Tomorrow – Wednesday. Chicken and salad. Just the one pack. No need for spare sandwiches now.

Jane Hansford

Jane grew up in Birmingham. She studied Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and worked for fifteen years as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. She became a specialist in working with adults and children with challenging behaviour and with learning disabilities.

She has lived in Brighton for fifteen years. After the birth of her daughter, Jane left the dance world and took an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University. She lives with her family in Kemptown, and finds the sea and the city’s people continually inspiring.

BRIGHTON BLITZ 1940
by Emily Atkinson-Dalton

1

I know my mum wasn’t being harsh, when she told me to get rid of Pumpkin, it was just that we were really struggling and she was missing Dad so much.

“Maria, you know we can’t keep that dog; it’s hard enough trying to manage to feed ourselves with the rations we are allowed, let alone feeding a big dog like Pumpkin. There must be someone who can take him on”. Poor George holding Pumpkin tight whimpered and burst into tears on his fluffy fur coat.

“But why, I.. I..” We couldn’t hear the rest as he murmured something in Pumpkin’s matted fur.

“Hi!” Michele cheered as she slammed the door behind her. “George, what is it? What’s wrong?” As she spoke her face turned from cheery to puzzled as the crying got louder.

“Pumpkin has to go to a new home, a better one, that has the money, food supplies and time for such a lovely dog” I managed to say although I felt as though I would start to cry with my eyes watering. I couldn’t bear explaining. I knelt down with Pumpkin and George and comforted them as best I could. “I understand, I thought it might come to this, though now I have gotten so close to Pumpkin and don’t want him to leave”.

Mum changed the subject to a happier one, which was probably the best idea. “So what have you been doing darling, how come you are so pleased?”

“Well, last night I went to the Regent dance hall,” said Michelle, “and I have my eye on this feller, he is an American pilot called Joe. We haven’t talked properly yet, but I think we will next time.”

“He sounds lovely darling, an American, my word! I will put dinner on. Well, I will try to, with what we have left, unless you are going out again?” Mum asked as she wandered into the kitchen.

“Oh, sorry mum, but I promised I would go to see a movie at the Odeon with Catherine and Florence,” Michelle explained with a pleading look on her face as she picked up her purse.

Mum relented, ” Ok, I guess it will be just the three of us again.”

“Sorry mum, but thanks for letting me go!” She gave mum a peck on the cheek and quickly let herself out before mum or anyone could say anything more.

“I wonder what film she will see? It will probably be that one she was mooning on about, ‘Shadow of The Thin Man’ ” I said.

I screamed as I heard on the news about the terrible bombing of the Odeon! I could see in my mind’s eye, the horror of the explosion, and then I thought of Michele. Was she all right? Listening to the news made me want to smash the radio with frustration and fear. The reporter was saying twelve people had died from their injuries and that it was Brighton’s worst air raid. You wouldn’t believe the stress we were all under as we ran to the bus that would take us to the County Hospital, all the time hoping we would find Michele unharmed, despite the reporters and others saying that survival would be unlikely.

“Mum, if Michele is all right…….” said George.

“She will be,” I interrupted, “Sorry, please continue.” I just wanted to reassure all of us, so we weren’t too upset.

“Well, do you think that she will… survive, if she has any serious injuries?”

“George, she will be fine. Just stop bothering her,” I remarked sharply “Mum…!”

“Really, Maria it is all right he is just asking, don’t get all bad tempered.”

I thought for a minute, and knew how harsh I had been to him and I knew why; I was afraid that the truth would hurt and I would lose my only sister, so I apologised solemnly. “Sorry George, I am just worried that’s all”.

We arrived at the hospital and quickly rushed inside for we were frightened of the bombs and wanted to find Michele.

“Excuse me,” Mum panted, “do you know where the ward is for the Odeon bombing and who has died?”

“Err….. Ward 8. I’m afraid they haven’t identified the dead yet.” she stammered, her eyes to the floor.

“Thank you” Mum called, already half way down the corridor.

“Sorry nurse, do you know where my daughter is?” Mum asked. “Her name is Michele, she was in the Odeon bombing and I would like to see her and if you can’t find her then…….”

The injured had only just been brought in and, not everyone had been identified. Michele wasn’t on their list. We searched through the corridors until we heard her cheerful cry, “Mum, Marie!”

“Are you all right? Oh I was so worried, what happened, are you hurt..?” said Mum.

“Mum I am fine really. I am only here for a check up, only a bump on the head” she explained as Mum gave her a kiss.

“We were all worried that you would be on your death bed. We’re all so glad that you are well” I said as the smile grew wider across my happy face.

“So where is George? Hasn’t he come too?”

“What do you mean, he’s right….” I was filled with utter horror as I realised that George was nowhere to be seen!

“Mum where is he, did you see him anywhere?!” I yelled. I swung my head around all of the corridors and beds to make sure he hadn’t gone far.

“I haven’t seen him. I thought you were holding his hand, he can’t have gone far. We will just ask others around the hospital. But we mustn’t disturb the ill people. Then we’ll go outside and in the last resort we’ll have to call the police!”

I found a doctor. “Excuse me, you haven’t seen or heard a small boy of eight have you? He has ginger hair, he looks about ten and his name is George” I said with a wobbly voice, trying not to sound too desperate.

“I am very sorry love, but I am afraid I haven’t seen any young boy at all and I am very glad of it. There shouldn’t be an unsupervised youngster on these premises.” he said.

” OK, thank you anyway.” I rushed off to ask a more knowledgeable person.

“I am sorry to interrupt,” Mum politely apologised, “but I was wondering if you may have seen a young eight year old boy he has ginger….”

“I heard, I heard. No I haven’t. Strangely enough I don’t look out for pests, I do my job properly. I look after the ill, not silly, lost trouble makers!” he stated rudely. Mum even made a comment behind his back. “What a rude man,” she said, “I could report him.” She gave him a spiteful look – and so she should.

“Woof, woof!” Pumpkin cried.

“Oh, Pumpkin it’s all right,” I said, “We haven’t forgotten you, you can stay with Michelle to keep her company.”

I saw his poor tearful eyes and, I just couldn’t help it, I had to let him tag along. When I held out my hand to tell him to come to me, his tail wagged and I could see that his eyes were glowing like stars. He came running up to me and sniffed around to try and pick up George’s scent.

“Woof, woof!”, Pumpkin barked rudely as he sniffed at a young gentleman.

“Pumpkin, down boy, stop it! I am ever so sorry about this. Sometimes he gets over excited and decides to be a pain” I explained apologetically as I desperately tried to tow Pumpkin away from his efforts to climb up the poor man’s legs.

“Oh that is quite all right young lady,” the man said. “Now, are you here with an adult? Because they don’t allow young unsupervised children to wander around here, especially with excitable dogs like that. Speaking of young unsupervised children, there was a boy, I would say of about ten. He ran into me. He was running after someone, or he was lost. I don’t suppose you know him at all? He looked quite like you. Do you know where he belongs?”

“That’s it! I am looking for him, he’s my brother George! If you could just tell me in which direction the little boy went, I would be eternally grateful”

“Anything to help a lovely young girl, although you should be here with an adult. Anyway, the boy went in that direction,” he said pointing. “Now, if you haven’t got anyone with you, I could guide you and help you with your brother”

“Oh thank you, thank you for your generous offer. It’s alright, I am with my mum, but you have been a great help. Now I know in which direction to look for him. Thank you so much for your help and I apologize again for my excitable dog. Thanks again, bye!”

I ran to Mum and in a cheery voice explained about the kind young man and pointed out the direction in which he had said George had gone. I also congratulated Pumpkin for picking up the scent on the kind man from when silly George had knocked into him.

” At least now we know which direction George went in”

We rushed off saying we would come to visit Michele again and wished her good luck. Knowing where George was heading and, seeing that my sister was doing well and would be back with us shortly, I felt hopeful. I was reassured that everything would end well and that nothing would ever split our family apart. Though the war had broken all the peace in the world, we would never be parted. Although of course Pumpkin would be going. I knew he would be safe and we would see him and we would always remember one another whatever happened.

2

We continued our chase. Pumpkin led us some of the way. We passed from street to street and knocked on door upon door.

“Are you all right? What is it? Oh come inside, you look so terrified. Come on in, I will make you some nice tea and, you, you poor little darling, would you prefer milk or apple juice?” said the kind elderly woman who answered the grand door of a wealthy person on which we had nervously knocked. We feared she would be an unkind self-centred upper-class person, as many are. We were lucky. It was a kind gesture, inviting us into such a place, like a palace, without us having even uttered a word. “Oh, how kind of you – I really do appreciate this, but we can only stop for a moment. You see, the only reason we disturbed you, unintentionally of course, was because we were looking for a young boy of eight, though lots of people say he looks ten. We were at the hospital when we realised he was missing and another kind gentlemen pointed me in this direction, so I was just wondering whether you had seen him?” We looked pleadingly at the kind hearted woman. I could see the painful look in Mum’s eyes. The lady’s face lit up, making us hopeful again.

“Well, I am so glad I can help in some way. Here take an apple and some milk (I am afraid that is all I have), and yes, I saw your little boy going down Grosvenor Street following somebody. I did try to stop the young lad to give him a biscuit and offer to try to find his parents or someone, but he was just going too fast for me. Why, I couldn’t even get close enough to speak to him. So I left it at that, but it happened just a minute ago so you may be in luck. Enjoy your gifts and I wish you well, bye!” We wished her well and thanked her for her kindness as we hurried off. We set off for Upper Rock Gardens, praying that was where George would be.

Our hearts sank in sorrow for the poor people around us – those who had not only lost their homes, but each other. We saw and hid from the loud, cruel revenge that our villainous enemy was putting Brighton through. But the worst of all was the sound of the cries of the innocent people, those who had been so unfortunate. We couldn’t bear the cries, bangs, and endless fear of death. We ran and ran through the suffering crowd and then suddenly, over the cries, we heard the bomb that fell on the clinic. The clinic that helps so many. We knew that this was not what it deserved. Amongst the rubble there were poor people, some injured, some dead. Mothers, daughters, sisters, were mourning, and others were screaming in fear. Although they were so grateful they had made it, they felt guilty that many had not.

Amongst the falling buildings and mourning people was an old house. Demolished by a Dornier Do17. Unlike the other destroyed homes, Pumpkin seemed to be particularly interested in this one. It wasn’t a house any more, but a lone pile of rubble.

” What is it boy?” I asked, unsure if he was being helpful or just holding us up. But, unlike Mum, I trusted him.

“Pumpkin, come on we don’t have time for games we need to find George and quickly, before anything else goes wrong!” Typical mum, always the optimist. Pumpkin gave an excited bark and he began digging under the dirt and dust until we heard a cry coming from underneath. We all quickly joined in the digging. We congratulated Pumpkin on his find and encouraged each other to keep it up.

“Mum, is that you? Please help get me out!” we heard the trembling voice as we kept on pushing the rubble away.

“George is that you? Oh it’s all right. We’re coming sweetie!”

Pumpkin finally succeeded in revealing poor George. The rubble was only a thin layer just covering him. He stood up, brushed himself clean, and ran to hug us all. “We were all so worried, I am so glad you’re alright! Oh are you hurt? Why did you run off like that!” Mum wasn’t angry, she was just so glad he was back.

“Well, mum I… got carried away, I saw this man and he looked as though he was a spy, it was… really… exciting. I’m so sorry I will never do it again!” he promised as another loud BANG! screamed through the streets. We tried to find shelter and ran back to the hospital clinging on to each other. As we arrived outside the door we saw Michele coming out of the glass doors. We ran to her, tears streaming down our faces. We made our way home, hoping that our house would still be standing.

We all went charging down the street, bombs exploding, cries of fear and mournful yells still filling the air. We tried desperately not to think about the tragic surroundings and terrifying atmosphere.

We arrived at the top of Rose Hill Terrace and ran to number 64, which was still standing! As we arrived at the door of the house all of us had gleaming smiles on our faces.

We congratulated Pumpkin. We all sat down relieved. We were all alright, (although there was never any doubt about it) and Mum finally said the words that we we’d all been hoping for.

“Pumpkin, we just can’t live without a hero like you. I think that you would be very happy staying with us, and we are all very glad that you can.”

I couldn’t believe how happy we were, now that no pets or people in our family had been split apart, not even through the tragedy of the Brighton Blitz.

Authors note-

All of the street names and bombings were actually true and although the characters are fictional the events mentioned are based on true historical facts that occurred during the second world war, and are now known as the ‘Brighton Blitz‘.

Emily Atkinson-Dalton

Emily Atkinson-Dalton is 11 years old, and lives with her older sister and Mother. She goes to West Hove Junior School. She loves animals and enjoys music – she plays the keyboard – as well as reading and writing.

‘I came up with the idea for the story because I enjoy History and English. I had a book at home of the Brighton Blitz and though I might enjoy learning about it. I also felt that the story could include action, history and feeling, for any aged readers to enjoy.’

The Founding of Brighton
by Stephen Silverwood

Brighton was a winking beauty in the groin of England’s southern coast.

Upturned from their beds by the heat and madness of bank holidays, the uplanders would beat their way towards her. Headbutting car horns in stagnated traffic, shuffling their weight from trainer to trainer in the standing crush of the Thameslink, they swarmed to her in frustrating passage, static in their metal coffins.

And she brought them in to land with twinkling lights along her runway thighs. Here the pier, uncomprehending phallus thrust over the sea. Here the pavilion, winter palace of globular mammary domes. Here the beach and here the rub: the brass has teeth of stone! A beach in a wonderbra. A storm defence co-opted by sun-dunkers. Unlucky barefoot children, their jelly shoes sucked away by the tide, wail as they stagger across this Somme of jagged pebbles. This is no beach. The Lady Brighton’s smile is as false as dentures.

Once, the waters thronged with Victorian health freaks riding great metallic spiders along rails beneath the waves. Once, the electric railway had even flung its tracks out on stilts to sail over the water. A cable-car had been strung across the Dyke. A monorail had linked Hove to Kemp Town. A Regency metro had tunnelled beneath the Lanes, closed now since the great flood. All these antediluvian Golems of iron and steel had been eroded and erased. Now only their stumps remained.

The town was founded by pirates. History records that Calico Jack Rackham fathered two bastards in the bellies of Mary Read and Anne Bonny – the same bastards that spared them from the gallows. These children formed a gang, peppered with Killigrews, who first named the beach their Haven. In time this became Hove, and the sprawling settlement made its way toward the standing stone circle of the Old Steine. The town was a rookery to rival Port Royal. But in time the settlement began to settle. The pirates turned professional in their new lives as apothecaries and illustrators. They began to smuggle opium and hashish, and the town has since remained a magnet of low prices and fresh imports. Their trade was bolstered by tolerance: Brightown was the first in England to have a Chinese quarter and an Iranian quarter. But it was the artistry of Coptic sailors from Cairo and Khartoum that brought the first taste of money without crime; they opened strings of tattoo parlours for passing seamen under the sponsorship of the founding fathers. The shops flourished and brought with them further demands for body modification. By the time of Prince Albert’s famous visit, there was said to be no-one left in town who did not have some metal somewhere skewered through some part of his body.

All of which libertarianism and bohemia attracted the deluded daubings and prattle of a thousand poetasters and performance artists, exiled from their London garrets for the offence of pretension without prettiness.

This new influx prided itself on the cosmopolitan authenticity of their new home and, by doing so, destroyed it. Rents and rates increased. Twitterns were bulldozed to beautify them. Squares and parks were “reclaimed” from vagabonds and mendicants. The rats were driven out and, with them, the underclass of rat-catchers and, with them, the publicans. There was an uprising against the new invaders. It was led by an apprentice laudanum addict by the name of Spikes Harvey. The uprising ended in a bloody riot with three hundred dead ‘neath the trees of the Level. To suppress further incidents, the forest of the Level was removed and replaced with grass. The bohemians walled themselves in to the gardens of Park Crescent for safety, creeping out at night through a secret tunnel. Records state that the tunnel led out to the sea via a concealed door in the base of the fountain in the Steine.

When they built the fountain, they were forced to uproot the standing stones that had circled the spot since antiquity. Legend attests that, upon one careless navvy chipping a corner off the head stone, all of the stones burst open and poured forth a million pebbles. These were initially piled into a “Children’s Mountain” on the site of the Sea Life Centre. After the great flood, they were moved down to the beach to serve as a sea defence against the mansions of Neptune.

And the city would have remained safe and deranged ever since. But the second duty of a wall between Brighton and Haywards Heath was sadly abandoned and the work never completed.

Stephen Silverwood

‘I’m an advice worker with Brighton’s refugee communities. My passport says I’m 30 years old. I’m a pacifist and a vegetarian but I make up for this in my bitter rage and hostility towards the world in general.

One of my intentions with this story was to incorporate the newer communities of Sudan, Iran and China into the town’s history. The results are mixed but the intension was honourable. The bombastic style can be blamed upon Herman Melville. I was halfway through Moby Dick when I wrote it, and some of the barnacles seem to have rubbed off. All I can do is apologise. Well, that and the point of blame.’

The Chase
by Rob Paraman

All the placarded protesters drew away from me as if I was an alien – which I was, I suppose. And there was another alien: a very pretty alien, about thirty yards away from me, and the pro-hunt crowd were drawing away from her, too. It was a bit like in my mum’s DVD of Saturday Night Fever when the dance floor clears for John Travolta and his bird. If it hadn’t been for the sound of our rape alarms and the protestors blocking their ears the vision through my mind’s eye would have been perfect.

She stood there all alone with her beret tilted to the left, grinning back at me as if to say, “Hello Adam, my name is Eve.” It wasn’t half obvious where the alarms were sounding from. I knew at that moment that very soon I could be getting beaten up, thrown in jail or losing my virginity. A few pro-hunt thugs came back and wrestled the alarm from my coat pocket then frog marched me across King’s Road and down the steps onto the beach. Pamela was carried kicking and biting and screaming like a fox being torn apart.

“Arseholes!” she screamed. “Why don’t yas hunt each other and make everybody happy?!” By this time the ten thousand strong crowd were chanting “Right to hunt! Right to hunt!” and blowing horns and whistles in response to the God-like voice emanating from high above on the platform. Straightening my collar and tucking in my shirt I walked over to her.

“You must be Pamela!”

“Yeah, that’s me, did you see my rape alarm plan on the web-site?” She looked around in amusement. “You must have been the only one then!”

“I’m Wes Trantor, I live here in Brighton.”

She dusted off her beret and placed it carefully on her head.

“Here, let me straighten it for you.”

“No, no,” she said, sounding annoyed. “I always wear it tilted – I’m an existentialist.”

“Oh, right,” I said, as if I understood.

Four grinning policemen appeared and ushered us along towards the West Pier. “Come on, folks, keep moving along, let them have their say. They’ll all be home by nightfall!”

We moved along sheepishly, shoulder to shoulder as if we’d known each other for years.

“It’s like a Nuremberg rally up there!” she yelled.

“Yeah, but they’re saying Blair is the Hitler because he’s taking away their freedom to hunt!”

She laughed her head off. “Yeah, every bastard thinks every other bastard is the Hitler. Hitler thought every other bastard was the Hitler!” She stopped walking and turned to the police. “O.K. Robo-Cops, you’ve chased us out of town. We’ll just ride off into the sunset now!”

One cop laughed and said, “O.K. Love, just don’t make any U-turns – we’ve still got plenty of vacancies in our no-star hotel!”

As we approached the West Pier, two pro-hunt women were holding up cuddly hounds to a T.V. camera. Pamela sauntered up between them and sneered, “Bloody sadists!” into the camera. I was in love.

A crowd was gathering around a lamp post. A man in a suit had climbed to the top and had attached a noose to it and placed it around his neck. He was ranting in the direction of the Conference Centre.

“Come here now, Blair, and apologise for what you did in Iraq!”

Pamela was more interested in what the crowd was doing than the man with the noose around his neck.

“He won’t jump,” she said calmly. “He’s got too much to say. Sometimes I go to art galleries without looking at a single painting – the spectators are what’s important. See those five guys over there? They’re pulling concerned faces but they want him to jump. This is the highlight of their week – they’re probably IT workers! If the crowd here was bigger those guys would be standing right at the front, egging him on – a big crowd makes everyone invisible.”

As we walked onto the beach I heard a cheer and I thought that he’d jumped, but it was people playing that daft game with the silver balls amongst the gravel. We sat down on the pebbles amongst the rusted pylons. She smoothed her hair behind her ear.

“The last time I saw this pier was nine years ago. It’s incredible how it’s completely falling apart, yet its skeleton is still standing perfectly upright, retaining its dignity. It’s like that bloke at the top of the lamp post. He’s completely desperate and gutted but his moustache is neatly trimmed and his shoes are polished.”

I offered to buy her a coffee – she said she only drank filtered water, then she lit up an unfiltered cigarette. Midway through exhaling she yelled, “Come on, Wes, I want to see the Brighton Pier!”

The merry-go-round was being repaired. Three of it’s horses were laid flat out on the pier. It looked like they had gold harpoons stuck through the middle of them.

“I saw the dumped horse on Queen’s Road this morning,” I said, “It was horrible, someone had hammered a stake through it’s heart.”

Pamela shook her head, “Who needs us here when pro-hunters like that have come to town!”

We walked to the very end of the pier. A line of cumulus clouds moved across the horizon. Though I’d only known her half an hour, if she’d decided to swim to France I would have followed.

“So is your family here in Brighton too, Wes?”

I took out my mobile and showed her some video images of my parents and baby sister.

“I never knew my father,” she said as she scrolled through the pictures. “I only ever saw one photo of him. He was sitting on a big white horse – he was a hunt master.”

“Shit!” I said, pointing at the Conference Centre. “So your Dad could be just over there in the crowd right now and you wouldn’t even know it! Are you sure you’re not just chasing these events in the hope that you’ll see him?”

Pam let out a scream. “Oh shit, Wes! Your phone just slipped straight through my fingers and into the water! – Oh God, I’m so sorry!” She held my face in her hands. “I’m so – so bloody clumsy!”

It had been such a mad day already – I was getting used to the unexpected. “It’s alright, Pam. I can get another one.”

She planted a wet kiss on my cheek. I drew back in shock then I went back for more but she leaned back over the rail and looked into the water. “I’ll send you some money for it – I promise I will. Bloody hell, I’m clumsy!”

“Are you a Pisces, Pamela?”

She looked around at me. A few seagulls were squawking mid-air for us to throw them some food.

“No.”

“A water sign then?”

“No.”

She touched the bridge of my nose with her index finger.

“You have an interesting face, Wes. Your nose has a lot of character.”

“I broke it last summer in a school cricket match. Neville Blight, a fast bowler from Hove served up a bouncer when I was expecting a –”

“I hate cricket,” she groaned, evaporating my enthusiasm. I should have said a motor cycle accident or a police truncheon smashed across my face.

So how long have you been interested in the anti hunt movement, Wes?”

“I saw a hunt once when I was a kid, it gave me nightmares.”

A seagull landed on the handrail at a safe distance and paced back and forward.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “I think nowadays some animals do need to be culled but when human beings enjoy the extended duration of the fox’s suffering – it’s the pleasure of the chase that pisses me off.”

We started walking back. Suddenly she got excited. “I loved that sixties film `Quadrophenia’ when all the kids were charging down the street, I want to see where it was filmed. Can you show me, Wes?”

I corrected her. “It was actually a seventies film about the sixties.” I wasn’t sure if this knowledge made me sound like a sixties cool anorak kind of guy or a film geek anorak. “Come on Pam, I’ll show you where the riot was filmed.”

I took her up the narrow alley where the two stars had made love during the riot scene. In the distance, we could still hear the fracas from the protesters on the sea front.

“Why is there a CCTV camera up there, Wes?”

“People come from all over the world to do it here. It was getting out of hand so they’re trying to put a stop to it.”

I looked up into the camera’s eye. “No one will be watching today, though. Every copper in Britain must be down there on the seafront.”

Pamela was checking the footpath for stains. “So the film was art imitating life. Now when people come here to bonk – it’s life imitating art imitating life. Have you ever bonked here, Wes?”

“What?”

“Have you ever bonked here?”

I didn’t have time to make up a story.

“You haven’t bonked anywhere have you, Wesley? Shall we do it right here and now – just for the fun of it?”

“What?”
She was beaming into my face. “Shall we do it right now – just for a laugh?!”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, it would be hilarious wouldn’t it?”

I glanced down the alley to East Street, the whole world was passing straight by. “Yeah, if you want to.”

She laughed out loud. “God, Wes. I was only joking. You were really up for it, though, weren’t you? You’re a funny one, Wesley, you really are.”

Walking back down to East Street she took a hold of my hand. By the time we got back to the seafront a small crowd of anti-hunt protesters had gathered outside the Grand Hotel.

“Took ya bloody time, didn’t yas?” shouted Pam.

I was elated at first to see some allies but when she gave the leader a long affectionate hug I started feeling like a loser again. One of the girls tried to take a placard from a passing pro-hunter whose wife started screaming to leave them alone. The man jostled the girl out of the way and I stepped in – something I’d never done before and probably won’t be doing again. That bastard must have been working the land since he was five. He only hit me the once. Blood gushed from my nose and mouth. The anti’s shepherded me away to safety. Pamela was screaming, “Look what they’ve done to my Wes. Did you get that on video, Nicole?”

I loved the way she said “my Wes.” I had martyred my nose for the good cause. I hoped that it would point so far to the left now, that anti-hunt protesters would know me the world over. Blood dripped all over my polished shoes, blotting out my nerdishness. I was a warrior now. At Pool Valley bus station I asked her for her address.

“I’m always travelling these days. The closest thing I have to an address is the anti-hunt website.”

As the bus pulled away she blew a kiss and waved through the window, then she signalled with her hands for me to telephone her. How could I telephone her when she didn’t have a phone? An uncomfortable feeling came over me. I went to the phone box and dialled my own mobile number. She answered, roaring with laughter, “Hi, Wes. I’m under the pier. No I’m only joking! The bus is just leaving Brighton now.”

It must have been sleight of hand earlier on. She must have just dropped a rock or something into the sea.

“I need this phone a lot more than you do Wes, and anyway, you’ve got a job and everything – oh and by the way, I am a Pisces! You can chase me up on the website.”

Then she hung up.

On the way to work the next morning, I wandered back down to the beach. I sat on the stairs that we’d been thrown down together. I started feeling really lonely. She probably wants me to chase after her. Everyone in the world is chasing after something and everyone in the world is getting chased by something.

A fox darted around the pylons beneath the pier looking for scraps left over by that enormous crowd.

Rob Paraman

I oppose foxhunting but I went down to the Brighton Conference Centre to see the Pro-Hunt Rally. Somehow, I got swept right into the middle of it. I was appalled at a man’s enthusiasm for killing but kept my feelings to myself. Then I saw a solitary woman screaming obscenities at ten thousand people! I thought she was mad or a saint – or a bit of both. I hope she reads this story. I am originally from Australia and have lived in Brighton for four years. Brighton Nightwriters Press are publishing an anthology of my stories soon.’

The Obadiah Ethic
by Kjell Yri

The inhabitants of the upper echelons of English football had guarded the secret for generations. But towards the end of 2003, the Obadiah Ethic was brought to popular attention by a best-selling novel. And a previously obscure Brighton clergyman was catapulted into the hall of fame of historical superstars.

To enable us to understand how ground-breaking Obadiah Partrydge was in his thinking, we have to recapitulate the history of football. Absolute fanatics believe the game was created by God. On the first day. More rational minds lean towards a Darwinian evolution theory. They typically cite as the first recorded match result the inscription on a fragment of scroll that was unearthed during sewage repairs in East Grinstead in 1982. Carbon dated 142 AD, it read: “Verulamium XIV, Camulodunum VI”. (The Romans invaders were never given road maps, so they made up their own names. Verulamium = St Albans, Camulodunum = Colchester.) Some scholars say the alleged final score was nothing of the sort, but that it was in fact a snippet of military intelligence, identifying the legions stationed in the two towns. Yes, perhaps, say the sports statisticians, but, they continue, Colchester’s consistent failure to impress in the modern game could be explained by a crucial early set-back.

References in a parchment otherwise devoted to the Gregarius family’s olive groves and wayward sons and daughters, indicate that the odd centurion or two brought back to Rome, at the end of their tour of duty in the misty Britannic provinces, the idea of what passed for football. However, in Mediterranean lands the notion was destined to stay a sleeper for an awfully long time because gladiator sports had a firm grip on the entertainment industry. And there was a language complication: the stylish and intricate Latin, best known to us in the English translation spoken by Charlton Heston (no relation to Charlton Athletic), declined and fell, and then degenerated into a staccato pidgin edition of itself. They called it Italian, and anything of substance was put on hold.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, the resident Saxons, Jutes, and Angles, in their disarmingly unpretentious way, continued to develop the game. It was played not with a ball as we know it, but with a pig’s bladder or, more commonly, with animal body parts tied up in a bundle. Which accounts for the fact that the past-time was known as “foodballe”. The drawback with these projectiles was that their durability was disappointing when they were subjected to meaningful kicking. They burst routinely during matches between robust peasant teams. The resultant mess on the pitch became known as “offal slide”, a term more familiar to us in its abbreviated form, “offside”.

A great leap forward was leapt in Brighton around the turn of the millennium. It was there and then that local foodball officials discovered air and thought of blowing it into a leather pouch made airtight with liberal applications of whey fungus, toad slime, and other contemporary sealing agents. The Domesday Book records that a shed belonging to Nathaniel Osprey in Ovyngdeane contained “Two score balles for ye purpose of playinge foodballe.”

The frisky bounce of the new ball revolutionised the game. For one thing, the crossbar was raised from 4 feet to 8 feet above the ground, and the green-shirted dwarfs were replaced with tall goalkeepers.

The Anglo-Saxon national side had a rollercoaster season in 1065/66. No sooner had they beaten Norway at Stamford Bridge (the first ever international at that venue) than they had to travel south to face the Normans at Hastings. The home side lost. The pundits in the Brighton taverns blamed the defeat on the shocking condition of the pitch and the blindness of the referee. (Sloppy reporting and lazy memories have combined to persuade trivia nuts that the result and the year were the same, 10-66. In reality the score was a lot closer: 2-3.)

On the Continent, the church hijacked football and imposed on Europe a scripture-inspired version for the duration of the Middle Ages. Trinity Football had a goal in each corner of a triangular field, and three teams played at the same time. The only thing vaguely holy about it was the almighty muddle into which every game invariably turned.

Football was now being played in most parts of Europe, but the rules, such as they were, varied, not only from one country to another, but from county to county, and from village to village. For example the French, preferring their pleasures in quick bursts, divided each game into nine, 10 minute spells, interspersed with breaks for vichyssoise soup and fromage. In contrast, 5-day football test matches were the exhausting norm in Glamorgan. Between these extremes were a myriad other ideas, all different, and each claiming superiority over the others. The cracks were starting to show. Football was in danger of being pulled apart by the very people who loved it most.

This was when our hero, Obadiah Partrydge, arose and, quite miraculously, created order out of chaos. Anyone who has not spent the last year on another planet is now aware that from Obadiah has flowed all things football (the Premiership, Posh, Rooney, Brazil, etc.). What is less widely known is that it is also thanks to him we have most other things (automobiles, floss, Iraq, txting, etc.).

The immediate family background and early childhood of this unique man remain unclear. Some biographers have suggested that, owing to an indiscretion by a prince of the realm, there was more than a drop of royal blood pounding through Obadiah’s veins. Be that as it may, his mother, a poor servant girl, named the boy after the lead singer in a chart-topping wandering minstrel group. By the age of six, the lad was living where he was to remain for the rest of his life, namely East Moulsecoomb, which was a rural backwater, a long, muddy walk from The Lanes, that area itself pretty much a rural backwater then.

Young Obadiah’s days were filled with all the usual boyhood activities of the age, such as toiling in the fields, sweeping chimneys from the inside, and just being an urchin. He was quite a timid urchin, and he had an unusual trait, which his mother noticed early in the piece. It was that, no matter how he was employed, Obadiah always had his nose in a tattered copy of Homer’s Iliad. (Note to younger readers: this was the original Homer, not Homer Simpson.) And not only his nose, but also his eyes and mind. By the time he was ten, he spoke little English, but his Greek was fluent. (Note to self: check for possible connection with Euro 2004.)

The local squire (name suppressed: descendants currently suing for royalties) spotted the academic seedling and took young Obadiah under his wing. The lad caught up on his English, excelled in economic studies and, of course, Greek. So he was a natural for the church. When faced with the theocratic career ladder, he wasted no time climbing it – to rung 2, where he peaked and settled.

By 1634 he was the parson of East Moulsecoomb, and it was here, on 23 October 1637, that he was struck by a sudden inspiration. If physical shapes can be ascribed to inspirations, this one was ball-shaped. Obadiah started pacing up and down in the drawing room of the parsonage. When he stopped pacing, he exclaimed: “Yes, I must do this!”

“Do what, dear?’ asked Mrs Partrydge, looking up from her embroidery and thus securing herself a five-second appearance on the world stage.

“Oh, nothing, dear,” he replied absentmindedly as he hurried to the solitude of his study.

Behind the closed door, he sat down at his desk. He had written dozens of sermons in that room, prayers to move the coldest heart, profound letters to believers and heathens alike, and, course, tracts on a wide range of subjects appurtenant to human salvation. But, he thought to himself as he sharpened his pens, he had never written anything resembling what he now had in mind. He started with a full inkwell and a stack of blank sheets of paper. And he began writing. His mind was on fire and the words flowed. He hardly looked up when Mrs Partrydge brought him his supper, and he hardly looked down when he twice had to leave the room for calls of nature.

When he had finished writing, it was a remarkable document that saw the light of day. (Or rather the dark of night, for Parson Partrydge laid down his quill only at 03.14 a.m.) The full, formal title is a mouthful. Reciting it unaided is a compulsory section in the Jeremy Irons tribute competitions that have swept the country since the actor starred as Obadiah in the film of the book. It is also seen everywhere on t-shirts, beer mats, and other merchandise from the movie: ‘Rulles and Regulatyons for ye Beautyfulle Game of Footballe and an Outlyne of ye Boddies Required for ye Adminystrationne of ye game with an Appendyxe on Transfer Fees and also on ye Vexed Questyonne of ye Dysposall of Clubbe Dyrectors’ Allocations of F.A. Cuppe Tyckets.” Now known as the Obadiah Ethic, the document, the original of which was sold to a Japanese collector earlier this year for US$39 million, forms the basis for football to this day, right down to astonishingly minute detail, e.g. club colours and programme layout.

Intriguing though the details are, the most important masterstrokes lie in the plans Obadiah drew up for the infrastructure for football in England. For example, he identified a certain field adjoining the cattle track that is now Old Shoreham Road as the ideal ground for the local club, which he envisaged being called “Ye Seagulles”. He made detailed plans for the Goldstone Ground and for many of the other main stadiums, among them “Anne’s Fylde” in Liverpool with its characteristic “Ye Koppe” stand. And, of course, his “Whembellie” with its staircases for the winning teams “to runne up and down to collecte and brandyshe ye F.A. Cuppe.”

He outlawed Trinity Football, got the French to buck up their ideas, and rejected the tedious test match concept. The Glamorgan committee members, made, as they were, of stern stuff, did not take the rebuff to heart, but stuck with their vision and refined it into a new game they called “cryckette”. It has met with some success. Full credit to them.

Although the Ethic was quickly adopted by the football fraternity as the constitution-to-which-everything-must-be-referred, modern historians recognise it as nothing less than a turning point in history. Association football became the catalyst, first in Brighton and its hinterland, then the rest of Britain, and eventually Europe and the world at large, for all human endeavour. For example, the steam engine was invented specifically to make the trip to away games easier. Bismarck united Germany with an eye firmly on the World Cup. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace to fund his take-over bid for Dynamo Kiev. President Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the moon purely to divert public attention away from his nation’s footballing uselessness. And Albert Einstein, a life-long Everton supporter, formulated his famous equation came during the second leg of a League Cup quarter final at Goodison Park, when he calculated that Everton were worth 121 Manchester City players: E=MC2.

Despite his immense achievement, Obadiah was a humble, self-effacing man. Uncomfortable in the limelight, he declined the many honours that were offered him. The Brighton and Hove City Council has taken cognizance of this. It has approved only a token public celebration of its greatest son. So let the French build their Eiffel Tower in his honour, the Egyptians their Suez Canal, and the Australians their Sydney Opera House – all we have is a small plaque above the “Star of India” sign on a very ordinary building in Appledore Road. The inscription reads simply: “On this site stood the house in which Rev. Obadiah Partrydge wrote ‘the Obadiah Ethic’ in 1637.” (The restaurant’s ‘23. Chicken Ethikka Masala’ is a favourite with sightseers.) An uncomplicated and unadorned statement of fact with which, one imagines, he would have been pleased.

Kjell Yri

‘I was born in Norway, and spent the first third of my long life to date there. Then to England, where I married Loiuse and worked in a bank. And I discovered that football and history are beautiful things – hence my story.

Imbued with high hopes, boundless energy, and no money, we moved to New Zealand in 1977.

I work for a government department in Auckland. I write in my spare time, with varying degrees of success.

Our two adult children have left the nest, so Louise and I now share our rural home with an array of pets.’

The Metropole Bombing
by Joe Young

‘Hello Beautiful, how ya doin’!?’ said the red-haired man at the bar of the Grand Hotel. He was checked in for three days, two nights and planting a bomb in his hotel room. ‘So like I said, how ya doin’?’

‘Oh, I’m fine thanks’ said a blonde-haired lady.

‘Well that’s great…you know what, I’m tired…I gotta get to bed.’

Alfie had been at the bar for one hour now and had drunk one too many whiskies. He stumbled into the lift, pressed the brass-plated lift buttons, leant on the brass-plated handrail, stumbled out of the lift, walked into his room and set the bomb timer to detonate in fourteen hours.

The sun rose the next morning to start a new day. Alfie woke to a seafront view and a terrible hangover, but he still got up and dressed and prepared to check out. In the grand hallway Alfie saw a woman. She was rooting through her bag in frustration. In the end she threw the bag away and kicked the door.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ asked Alfie.

‘I forgot my key!’ she wailed. ‘Reception said they’ll get back to me and my meeting starts in ten minutes!’

‘Don’t worry, give me your bag and I’ll have a look.’

‘OK, but it won’t be any…’

‘Is this it?’

‘Oh, um…yes I suppose it is.’ She smiled, and Alfie smiled back.

‘Well, I must be going’ the lady stuttered, and she brushed past Alfie, putting her hand on his shoulder as she walked past.

‘Um, Miss, don’t you need to get ready for your meeting?’ Alfie asked.

‘Oh yes, you’re right’ she said as she walked into her room.

‘She was nice’ Alfie thought, ‘maybe after the bomb blows up I could get her number and…the bomb!’ Alfie ran into his room and pulled a knife from his bag, kicked down the side of the bath and set to work cutting the wires. After he cut the last blue wire, the timer showed sixteen seconds till detonation and counting! ‘Oh no, now what am I going to do, I’m going to die…the window!…that’s it!’ In a panic Alfie opened the large clear windows and threw it out…

The bomb ricocheted off of a lamppost and landed in a nearby skip pick-up truck, which was about to pass by another hotel called the Metropole, with three seconds and counting…

The skip truck was right in front of the Metropole when it blew up. All the Metropole’s front windows smashed with tremendous force, cars swerved to get out of the way and pedestrians ran for their lives. When the cloud of ash settled, the gathering crowd saw a tremendous sight. There was a huge crater in the middle of the road and the front of the Metropole was pitch black.

Meanwhile in the hotel room Alfie was getting ready to leave. ‘Ah…well, time to check out I think’, he murmured, picking up his suitcase, ‘but first.’

Alfie went back into the grand hallway and knocked on the lady’s door. She answered it this time in a business suit and with a briefcase.

‘Hello, it’s me. You’ll never guessed what I’ve done!’ Alfie exclaimed.

‘What have you done?’ she asked.

And so Alfie told her the story of how he threw the bomb out of the window.

‘But wait, why were you planting a bomb in your room anyway?’ she asked.

‘Well, it was my mission, but that doesn’t matter, the thing is that I stopped the bomb for you.’

‘Your…mission…? You mean you‘re part of a criminal organisation?’

‘No no no, not a…’

‘You are, aren’t you! I never want to see you again!!’

And with that she turned away and walked briskly down the hall.

Alfie went back to his room to wait for the fuss to die down. After a few hours he came out and took a sad walk along the seafront. A large crowd had gathered now, the police were there too, and a small fire had started in the Metropole. Alfie didn’t notice much of this though, he was looking at a newspaper stand. From where he was standing he could just make out what they said.

‘Apparently, there was only one casualty of the explosion; a young student driving the skip truck was taking a summer job in England. He suffered a fatal injury. The student was from Saudi Arabia, his name was Osama Bin Laden…’

Joe Young

I am a year 6 pupil at Saint Pauls C E School. I am ten years old. When I wrote the story, called ‘The Metropole Bombing’ I remembered a programme I saw on television. It was about the Grand bombing so I wondered what it would be like if that had never happened. I like writing stories because you can create whatever you want and make it happen.

All in all I enjoyed writing this story and hope you enjoy reading it.’

The King of Upper Gardner Street
by JR Sellers

Somewhere between the Brighton Tavern to the north and the Heart in Hand at the south end, in amongst the parked-up vans, the never-ending building works and the clutter of the antique and junk stalls randomly placed along the street, somewhere in there… sits The King of Upper Gardner Street. Upper Gardner Street isn’t a road you would necessarily notice. Unless you live nearby, you’re most likely to encounter it by trying to avoid the bustle of the North Laine when you’re in a hurry, by cutting across to the west of Kensington Gardens. But if you do, you’ll see him there, his embroidered silk gown flowing long, almost down to his slippers, rings on every finger, his mane of white hair draped long around his shoulders, his tobacco pouch placed neatly in front of him at his little school table, perched next to the kerb.

He sees them come and go, The King of Upper Gardner Street. He’s seen it all. “Son,” he said to me once, “If you ever see a pigeon carrying a piece of red lace wrapped around its beak, there’s sure to be a war.” I’ve seen wars all right. I’ve seen them on the six o’clock news, I’ve seen them on the platform at Victoria Station, I’ve seen them outside the football on a Saturday afternoon. But I’ve never seen a pigeon carrying a piece of red lace over its beak. Not that I doubt his word, mind.

Another time he remarked, “When a dog wags its tail at you but won’t look you in the eye – that’s murder”. Now I don’t know about that. I can’t disprove it, but someone, somewhere is being murdered right now in a prison many miles away, or on the end of a bomb, or in the street where you live.

He tells me lots of things, The King of Upper Gardner Street. One day, he was folded into his armchair on the side of the street, and beckoned me over. He was sucking on a mint. I leant my ear towards him, and he looked at me. He drew briefly on the end of his roll-up and tossed it aside. “You see that building site over there? Under there, under the shell of that old place, there’s gold. But they can’t touch it see. They can’t disturb it.” He scratched a few days’ worth of beard and continued. “In the days of Brighthelmstone, when the town was just a little fishing village… down there.” He offered a dirty, bitten thumb, “There were pirates. They’d come ashore at night and bring their bounty and whatnot, and bury it all up here in the woods. Well, they brought all sorts of trinkets from the far east, beautiful crowns from European royalty, horse brasses…”

“Horse brasses?”

“Yes,” he continued, waving aside the interruption. “Anyway, it all came up here. All documented, full itinerary like, with maps, the lot. Worth more than the Royal Pavilion, it was. But what happened was, when the piracy laws came in, in 18… 18 something, they couldn’t come ashore anymore. And at the time, the woodlands were protected by an act of Parliament, and they’d buried it all so deep, nobody ever found it. And then, of course, they started building round here and the whole thing got forgotten about.”

“So how do you know…?”

“About the treasure? Oh, it’s well-known, son. Right there it is,” he pointed a slippered foot across the road. “Yes, many a time I’ve thought about it. We’re almost standing on it. All that lovely wealth. Still, it means nothing in the end. Where your real wealth is,” he continued, giving me a look of weather-beaten wisdom, “is up here,” tapping himself on the temple. “Learning”, he dragged out the word. “That’s where the real treasure is.” The King of Upper Gardner Street sighed, seemingly lost in his thoughts for a moment. He glanced at his table, tapped his pockets, and curled an eyebrow my way.

“I say, son. You haven’t got a fag, have you?”

J R Sellers

‘The author of this piece was born in Middlesex in 1965 to a good mum and dad. He’s been walking along Upper Gardener Street for four years now. Left school at 16, fell into music. Played odd-shaped rock’n’roll, and wrote about the people who inspired. Still loves it but knows that hardly anybody decent makes a living out of it. Wrote about films too, and football. Things he loves dearly. Very fond of Brighton and its strange and beautiful people too, so decided to write this piece. The King is there, and he’s everywhere.’

Both Grin
by Barnaby O’Rorke

Both Grin 1

As a wave pulls back there is a rush and the pebbles crash into each other. Then, in a drawn out crackle, they introduce the new wave. Back and forth the pebbles move just under the surf, applauding every new venture from the sea.

In the nascent darkness under the pier bodies can be seen starting to move. The charred remains of a fire still smouldering like their squiffy heads. The movement stops and the bodies’ return to stillness; chrysalises, parcels of last night’s debris.

Not far off, in another cavern, in the basement of North Road P.O., men are sorting the mail. Their hands deftly swooping letters into the correct box. A radio plays. The letters gather in flocks and leave the cavern. They fly to people all over the city.

I watch them. None of them are free.

Parked beside the main entrance to the technical college, two women have a cigarette. One talks. The other, sitting in the back seat, watches the few people that are out at that hour. They have just finished their cleaning shift. The smoke dribbles out. Towering over the narrow street the college windows start to collect the morning light.

Back on the beach men in fluorescent shirts have started moving. They exit from under the pavement and boulder along, slowly becoming distant from each other, their picky-sticks pecking at the pebbles.

A story happens in the minds of the inhabitants. Some say it’s the underlying rhythm of the incessant sea. It’s a light blanket that softens all the lines. The salt air has chipped off all the hard angles.

The crumbling palace of Sussex Heights is having its right angles re-instated. The sea stole them all and left her dreaming; a massive cottage of marzipan. Overlooking the beach she pulls in every wandering Hansel and Gretel, eventually.

Someone said the small story stayed even after the saxophonist, playing into the wall of the groin, had moved to another town. He left it in the green rocks of the groin. Others say it was the sea that got under his fingernails. This is not the truth.

I know the small story for what it is.

A dog jumps the low metal fence that surrounds the Hove angel and settles down. Her front paws pushed forward and her nose buried in the short grass. She looks up and yaps. The yap is just a shake of her body, almost soundless. Her owner trails behind dreaming. Staring at the island made by the angel’s plinth and patch of grass in the tarmac, the dog’s master wonders why the angel faces inland. Surely the danger is out there. At sea.

___________________________________

The danger is inland. In the city. It has been there for an age and it lives in the minds of the inhabitants. It has many faces and creates many wonders.

I know the small story that lives in the minds of the inhabitants for what it is. It is like a dot on the horizon. From far away it is a friendly sun. Close up it is a raging furnace that fills the sky. It masquerades as a pleasant breeze or a sunset. The story is the danger.

The dog leaps up as her master finally arrives and tears off after the ball disappearing down Hove lawns. It knows of the danger but lives without fear of it. Her master provides food and throws the ball and that is enough for the dog. She is queen of her world.

The sun decides to reveal to the city its full self. All the letters are arriving, each with a name. The beachcombers are swinging their metal detectors. Inside their headphones they listen to the story the danger speaks.

Traffic is happening more and more now. Its hum and rumble will accompany all stories until well into the night. Some say that this is the danger. Some say the danger is not there at all. But they have simply edited it from their own stories. So, for them there is no danger.

The danger is a sprawling network of ideas.

In the canteen at the P.O. some of the postmen catch sleep, draping their bodies over the soft overstuffed orange chairs. The big telly screen crumbles the morning, already old with statements. At one of the tables two men are reading a poem and one is explaining that because of his faith he has no worries. He says that this is the world of god and that means everything is going to be all right. The other is unconvinced but is enjoying the notion. He spreads his hands out on the cracked formica and lets the sun into his head. It’s coming over the rooftops now through the grime of the canteen windows.

Motors come to life in the cemetery. The head gardener drives away as the three men set to. Slowly they move through the gravestones, a procession of strimmers, their faces protected and their knuckles scarred. Under their headphones all sounds are distant except the story of their minds, which has the loudest voice of all. The grass falls and clumps. The men can see the rooftops of the city and the sun starts to heat their backs. They tramp past grey stones full of numbers and dates.

Three musicians finally heading home after spending the night on a friendly floor pour in through the café door. The softness of their big coats fills the room and lays up barricades against the traffic’s song. In here its all warm tea and runny eggs. Their heads tip forward still singing. Deep in the crunch of the sugar bowl echoes of the beach gravel through their sleepy minds, singing to them. Saying the words of the story to them. Wrapping them in the danger.

The danger is a beautiful and beguiling thing.

The sea air devoured the paint here too. In an upstairs apartment people sway, hardly able to stand. Others are asleep, curled up like mud. The music throbs with enough energy to keep the dancers still upright. Loose hands hold bottles and in the euphoria of dawn one of them dances furiously for a few moments before falling amongst her fellows on the floor.

Next door a woman keeps her night eyes all day as she nurses a newborn.

A truck pulls up and the gang jump in. A pickaxe falls off the back and a few of the men shout. The brick dust filling the corners of their eyes. Such a longing in the hard hands and a spirit happens in the journey to the site. They shout at the cyclists and laugh like drains.

The danger feeds from our every move. Its massive depths devouring our lives.
I now see all of these things. I watch the people. They do not see me. What they see is the danger. The sweet danger that gives everything it’s meaning.
I was once like them.
___________________________________

Both Grin 2

This is what I recorded as Both Grin came into being:

Everyone has become a great deal more sensitive.

We gather on hilltops and read poetry. We sneak into damp basements and tremble in the new delight.

The world is evolving us into what we create.

Things are different. I can remember when I read my favourite story and remained still. Now the clouds have crept into my bloodstream and the rivers have poured through my mind. Words mean what they say. To be reading of flying is to be flying. To be speaking the story is to be living it. That is the new sensitivity.

Words have become what they mean. A story becomes a world we can inhabit. No longer the realms of imagination, stories are now the kingdoms of reality. They lift off the page and rearrange perception.

Many of us have gathered together to explore this new wonder. We have made a new town of Both Grin. When one is smiling the other is smiling too. We share stories.
___________________________________

Over time the principles of our community have been forgotten in the waves of what we sort. The sensitivity, the new power of words, of song and ultimately our own imaginations have become a stifling horror.

In the freedom we gave our selves we explored our gifts. The danger came as we immersed ourselves in our literature. It overwhelmed us. Now our streets are full of people who do not recognise each other. Each of us drinks deeply of a different poet and it colours our worlds. We no longer see each other. We see the characters of our dramas.

I am an engineer of change. I now work in Both Grin watching the floundering inhabitants. I watch for slips in their reality and when it cracks I am there to help them wake from their exquisite dreams.

Here comes a tribe of Ginsberg, Irving Walsh and Coelho, Grotowski and Kerouac. They perform the right of rave at Black Rock. Some times Sven Hassel and Wilbur Smith tribes descend on them. Then there are arrests and sometimes fighting. I stay in the shadows and watch. Sometimes in the height of their dancing faces crack and they need somewhere to fall.

I listen to them talk when they seem to accidentally meet. They say, “funny I was just thinking of you…” It’s sad because inside their own stories they could not be thinking of anything else. They cannot perceive of any one outside their stories. Whoever they meet will slip into one or other of their characters; the characters that they live with in their minds; characters that populate their stories. So the truth is they could not be thinking of anything else. They are trapped in the endless repetitions of their favourite world.

Here’s Scarlet O’Hara bidding Rhett Butler a good day outside Puccino’s. There’s Luke hurrying across North Street to confront Darth. Here’s a dusty Walt Whitman merrily reciting poetry in Churchill Square. Agatha Christie readers hurry by hoping to remain unnoticed, news-papers clutched in lavender hands. The light burns in the eyes of the Prophet, and Barbara O’Hara victims stare from taxi windows.

Haggard Stephen King fans spend hours in the BurgerKing cinema, watching hours of MTV, their mouths sore from the food. Their hearts thumping as closing time approaches when they have to go into those streets. Streets that for them, are full of nightmares. At the checkout a lover of The Wasp Factory nervously tries to figure out which of her fingers to cut off first. A Richard Brautigan stuck inside Watermelon Sugar loves the hand of a passing woman whose head is full of Jeffrey Archer epics.

And on it goes. There are a few others like me. We have become free of the danger. We fell unwillingly, as everyone does. We nod in recognition when we pass in the street. Our safe house is deep underground, reachable principally by the Madeira Drive Lift. It provides a welcome relief from the madness. And it’s getting worse.
___________________________________

High up in Sussex Heights a man sits staring at the sea. Having read half of Lord of the Rings he accidentally picked up a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Then in his confusion reached for Hello. The story lines fray and bare themselves. His overly sensitive mind puts them together as best it can. Splicing together burning ropes and string.

The danger in full bloom.

Now he is one depressed Saruman. An anger is building up behind his sternum. A confusion is lifting the top from his head and when the storm breaks the police will have to drag him screaming from the balcony,” WHERE’S MINE!”

That was I.

When they take you away one of two things can happen. You realise your true nature, or your mind starts eating the body, trying to make sense of the senseless.

Now I work the streets and watch.
___________________________________

Both Grin 3

I stand in the street. I am a big man. I approach the people going by. They do not recognise me, yet. I ask them for money. I used to say, “Can you spare a penny?” I would make myself as small as possible and sometimes disappear in their eyes. Now I ask for 10 pence because in their world everything is losing value.

If they recognise me I know its time for them. Outside of fiction we all know each other. Separation is an invention of imagination.
___________________________________

I once saw a man speaking his drama into the afternoon sun. He painted great battles in the sky. People would avoid his eyes, but I knew the signs. His mind was ready to split. Somehow too many stories had built up in his head, too many conflicting lines of reference. Though we can function with a certain amount of contradiction there comes a time when we either learn to hide the indigestible or are sick. Sick from the core. Spuming great tracks of knowledge. He stood before a huge crowd in the Brighton Centre. He was their leader, their first minister. He was there to win their hearts. They were mostly a collection of Tolkien addicts. And this gathering, a kind of slowed down rave, was called to announce the overthrow of the Dark Lord. Their leader stood before them coming apart. Too many stories occupied his mind. The danger was revealing its face. Its hidden structures were sticking out. Many worlds could crash and burn. But something happened.

The collective mind held him together.
___________________________________

I see great cows, white bulls feeding in Churchill Square. They stand twice as tall as the Clock Tower. They plod down Western Road and in the evenings will gather in Queens Park or around the perfume garden in St. Anne’s Well Gardens. They feed on the collective mind and I see them. Such is the nature of true sight.

When the individual mind cannot support the reality it has created it gangs up with other minds to hold each other up. This takes vast amounts of energy. The energy grows grass for the giant cows to graze on.

The people become weaker and the cows grow more solid. They roam freely. Nourishing themselves on the summer crowds that lie, eat and jostle on the beach. They surrender to the sun and give up their hearts to the collective mind.

The collective mind is one of the danger’s faces.

The collective mind has renamed the town and given everyone a place to escape from. London. It is an imaginary city to the north that people can complain about and measure their dreams against. Stories need a dark side to become exciting.

In the real world there are only experiences. There is no judgement. There is no place called London.
___________________________________

The tribes of Evoh settled down in the early days to the west of Both Grin. They brought Dante and Hughes. They piled into the story pipeline Shelley, Bronte and Lawrence. They read glossy magazines about themselves and seduced the tribes of Both Grin with wedges of polemic thought.

At that time Both Grin had already developed many stories. What occurred in the meeting of the Evoh and Both Grin would bring about the greatest disaster of mind we have known.

As the Evoh ascetic seeped into the thrill hungry minds of Both Grin, a massive wave of distressed readers stole from their sci-fi attics and discovered self-help at the borders of their ideas. The border between the Evoh tribes and Both Grin. The Evoh, wielding their sticks of Shakespeare and Conrad banged heads with Adrian Mole and The Little Prince. In the battle of thought, Grisham and Welsh, Rushdie, Okri and graphic novels were born. The mass of invention, the subversion and the clash of ideas, the struggle for supremacy until the tribes merged. In the fighting all names were destroyed and remade. Both Grin became B-right-on and Evoh became Hove. And together they became the city of the danger.

So is our story.

A wondrous edifice of thought is born. Carefully maintained by the sleepers that inhabit it. The collective mind.

Then the cows came to feed from our energy. They grow stronger and we become weaker.

Can you see into the danger now?
___________________________________

As a monument to that battle ‘Borders’ remains a depository for all the ideas. A place for ghosts to seek sustenance for their crumbling world.
___________________________________

I love the stories. I miss them.

I am still too weak to read. My teachers give me simple sentences to rebuild my strength. My mind still would like to descend into that madness.

I am an engineer of change, now.

I plant ideas, notions. We stretch the limits of the collective mind until, we hope, it bursts. Sometimes they are pleasant thoughts, and other times they are like heinous crimes. It matters not. There is only experience.

We have invented Terrorist Threat. It is an idea that we hope will destroy the collective mind and free all of these souls from Brighton. So many of them want to leave now, but do not know how to realise their impulses. They have become too weak. The giant white cows are multiplying. Soon all that will be left of us will be the grass that they feed on.

Maybe, when we are free of this mind we have built, then we can return to the principles of Both Grin. When one is smiling the other smiles too. The heaven of BEING.

Without the danger.
___________________________________

Both Grin 4

I stand in the early morning light.

I am an engineer of change.

The people of the city are starting their days in a myriad of ways.

A white van nearly knocks me down. It is carrying a gang of builders laughing like drains. I step back onto the curb. I can feel the spray from the fountain on my face. Through the gap in the buildings I can see the sea starting to shine. The clear air brings everything into focus.

The cars are starting to circle the fountain. They create a metal stream that goes all day. I cross the stream and look up at the black metal cat stapled to the wall, splashed there perhaps by the metal stream. In the yard people imagine themselves into waiting for a bus to the airport.

Others are on the beach thinking themselves into being beach pickers and café owners. Sleepy musicians and late night ravers have crashed under the pier. Their stories growing stronger with the sun. Postmen deliver words to give strength to stories all over the city, and in the cemetery all that’s left are the simple words written in stone. Stories reduced to time and date.

A passing dog pulls at its lead and barks fiercely at the ideas that I am carrying in my bag. Its owner apologies and forces the dog on. The morning light makes him squint. He does not understand his dog’s impulses. I do.

The collective mind grows and the danger becomes stronger.

I engineer the ending of stories and the beginning of truth. I place the terrorist threat into a bin on the seafront and walk away. I can hear the pebbles applaud under the incoming surf.

We all can be free.

Barnaby O’Rorke

‘I arrived ’89 to study Visual & Performance Art at Brighton Tech. I play the cello, piano and write poetry. It was me, the naked cellist in “The smallest room” Brighton Festival ’98, seen by thousands of Brightonians. I have been postman, bin man, busker, student, teacher, receptionist, dancer, homeless and a self-employed composer, all in Brighton. I have performed my compositions in living rooms all over town, thanks to healthyconcerts.com (ongoing). Both Grin is my first completed short story. Presently I am living six months of the year in India. I love Neruda.’

THE UNFORGIVEN
by Michael Acton

Steven could feel the heat of the approaching flames as they swept toward him.

The building began to shake as if on the point of collapse, and from beyond the inferno a piercing scream added to his terror.

“STEVE, STEVE, come on baby, you’re having a bad dream. Wake up” Linda shook him vigorously, and at last he woke from his reverie, and sat upright .In the soft glow of the bedroom light she could see the rivulets of sweat pouring down his cheeks, and held him in her arms.

“Its ok babes, its over now.” she whispered to him as she soothed his brow.

Steven Metcalf was a popular police officer, and looking forward to being seconded to the CID in his home city of Brighton.

He was always cheerful and diplomatic even with the most difficult ‘customer’ and was relishing the possibility of getting involved with some ‘real’ police work.

Although his nightmare of the previous evening had been disturbing he put it down to nervousness about the new placement, and placed it firmly to the back of his mind as he kissed his wife goodbye. He parked in the station car park in the space reserved for CID, straightened his tie, and climbed the steps into the building. Sunday was traditionally a quiet day, and he wasn’t expecting anything too strenuous to start his new career.

On nearing his allocated desk, however, he noticed a buff file with the words MISSING PERSON – URGENT sprawled in black felt tip.

“Oh well, straight into it I suppose” as he began to leaf through the neatly typed enquiry forms.

The initial report had been made at 3.30 pm on the 21st August.

‘John Paul Magnier, a French tourist board official, was reported missing by the proprietor of the Anglia Hotel on Marine Drive. In a statement taken by WPC O’Brien, Samuel Hall said that when he went to enquire if his guest wanted any breakfast, the room was empty, the bed not slept in, but items of luggage and clothing were still present. Further enquiries revealed that Mr Magnier had left the hotel at around 10 p.m. the previous evening (the 20th) after taking a telephone call. No one has seen him since.’

“Ah, Steve, welcome aboard: I see you found some work. Meant to brief you but got called away.” The voice of his new boss, Detective -Sergeant Clark, boomed. “This one’s got the powers-that-be in a flap, so it needs urgent attention. You’re a local so I thought you would know the best places to look,” Clark continued.

“Why the panic, boss? Statistics indicate most missing persons show up within 72 hours.”

“I know, but he’s here to forge links between the Brighton and French tourist trades. Doesn’t look good if it’s thought we can’t look after our guests. So, off to the hotel, and have a look at his room. See what you can find.”

It took PC Metcalf ten minutes to search, under the eagle eye of the proprietor, but the only item of interest was a red leather-bound diary. He sat on the bed and started to read the entry for the day of Magnier’s arrival in Brighton.

‘August 19th. Arrived 9pm after a trouble free flight from Paris. Taxi waiting for the trip to Brighton… but… but… did it really happen? I am recording the following event for my own sanity’s sake, and for evidence should anything untoward come about. I sat in the rear of the cab, and was convinced I was alone for the beginning of the journey. After some ten minutes, however, I noticed a dank earthy smell, and heard a rustle of garments next to me, yet I was sure I was alone. A voice came …, no it was not an audible sound, but a sense of a voice in my head and it was chilling…

“Help me…,please help me.”

I sat as far away from the presence as I could, and with great relief arrived at our destination. I was about to pay the driver when I saw an object glint in the dim light of the taxi. Cautiously I picked it up. It was an aged coin with a face I recognised from my history books. It was of the French king, Charles V, but why …what. had left this treasure. I put it in my pocket even though I knew I would regret it.’

Steven leafed through the remainder of the diary. Finding nothing of interest he tucked it under his arm, and returned to the station.

“Steve, there was a call for you while you were out. There’s a number on your desk – sounded urgent,” Carol the station receptionist called out.

He tapped in the local number and was surprised to hear, “Millview Hospital; charge nurse speaking, can I help you?”

“I’m returning your call.”

“Ah yes; are you the officer in charge of the Paul Magnier case?” After receiving confirmation the nurse, who identified himself as Tony Jackson, explained they had found the Frenchman mumbling incoherently at 3 am, wandering along Rottingdean High Street. At first it was thought he was just another drunk, but it soon became clear he was in mental distress, and admitted into the hospital.

“He has been asking to speak to someone urgently and… well, I know this sounds odd… he asked to speak to a police officer. He knows it will be the right one as only he would understand. Does it make any sense to you?”

“Not at all, but as he obviously has something on his mind, I’ll come down.”

The buzz of heavy holiday traffic faded into tranquillity as he entered the grounds of Millview after the short drive through the City. Steven was shown into a small room. Shortly, the swish of an internal door announced the arrival of John Paul Magnier accompanied by a nurse. The Frenchman cut an imposing figure; six feet tall and piercing blue eyes but his face pale, drawn and etched with lines of antiquity.

The trio sat round the table as John Paul broke the silence.

“Before you speak Monsieur may I ask you to hear my story? It is incredible, but God will strike me if I tell a word of a lie.”

Steven braced himself. Was he about to hear an admission of some terrible crime?

John Paul continued.

“You will have read my Journal which I deliberately left, hoping you would read it”

“Me?”

“Yes, please let me explain. After my encounter with the.. the fantôme …ghost as you English call them.. I was shown to my room, and immediately struck by the same terrible stench of decay I came across in the taxi. I knew my tormentor was still present. I could not see it, but its presence was all around …an unnatural chill invaded the room.. and all the time cries for help and piercing screams of terror pulsated in my head. I was sure I had been struck by madness, until I felt the cold metal of the coin in my jacket. I knew that I could not rest until I’d solved this ghastly riddle. Again, I know this must appear to be the delusion of a mad man, but I was compelled by a force I cannot explain to leave my room and allow myself into someone’s… something’s… nightmare.

I arrived, by what means I do not know, in a small village to the East of Brighton, which I now know is called Rottingdean. It was surreal, wandering along the narrow High Street, amongst the sights and sounds of the 21st Century and all the time some ancient horror was replaying in my mind.

I was drawn to the church of St.Margaret’s, but… when I attempted to enter it, it was as if some invisible barrier was in place…a man in dark clothing approached me. At first I thought it was the fantôme, but he was of modern appearance and in the garb of the Pasteur…It was then I realised the answer lay in this small place of worship, but still so many questions…”

John Paul stopped, and sobbed gently before taking a deep breath to continue.

“I explained to the clergyman as much of the story as seemed sanely explainable, and he appeared attentive but, strangely, not surprised. He told me to return to my hotel, and he would contact me that evening with, hopefully, answers to the horror I was enduring. He kept his promise, and on receipt of his call I travelled back to the village by taxi. On entering the imposing vicarage I was led to the study where a large book, pages yellowing with age, lay open. I could see at the head of the page an inscription;

AN INCIDENT AT ROTTINGDEAN IN THE YEAR
OF OUR LORD 1377

It is a story which I will not recount in full as the pain is too much to bear but in essence on the 21st August 1377 a gang of French sailors, armed to the teeth landed on the shore at Rottingdean. Their aim, on the express orders of the French Monarch Charles V, was to capture the Prior of Lewes, one John de Cherlieu, who was regarded as a traitor and instrumental in the English invasion of Calais. The invaders though, met with unexpected resistance from the villagers. In an act of frustration at having his progress impeded the leader herded the inhabitants into the church tower, and …burnt them alive. The leader was Michel De Magnier”.

Each word resounded like a gunshot in the silence of the room.

“So… so, what are you telling me? This was your ancestor?”, queried PC Metcalf.

“I have been entrusted in recording the long history of the Magniers and De Magniers. I know Michel served Charles the fifth who reigned from 1337 to 1380. I also know he was given a silver coin in recognition of his services. The coin was mislaid many years ago…until I discovered it in the cab. Its appearance meant nothing to me at the time, but now it all makes sense. Michel was a God fearing man and I suspect his spirit has been in torment over the evil perpetrated that terrible night. He wants my…our help in laying him to rest…for forgiveness.”

Steven’s mouth felt dry as the memory of the previous night’s dream returned; the screams of terror… the nightmarish fire…being trapped in hellish flames. Was it possible that a mutual invisible force existed, enabling John Paul to know they were the only two people who could help Michel?

All Steven knew of his own family history was that his ancestors had been farmers on the lands of the Earl of Arundel, which would have included Rottingdean, between 1300 and 1400. Was it possible his own forbears had been victims of this terrible crime?

Two weeks later John Paul Magnier and Steven Metcalf stood on the hill overlooking Rottingdean, to the West lay the throbbing heartbeat of Brighton and to the East the urban sprawl of Saltdean.

They could only imagine the scenes that the villagers and Michel had witnessed that day. Maybe it had been a similar day, weeping skies and ground slippery with cloying mud.

John Paul took the misshapen coin and held it in the palm of his hand before handing it to Steven. He dug a small hole in the ground, buried the coin and clasped John Paul’s hand.

No words were necessary. Time held its ceaseless breath as the sun chased the clouds and both men smiled as they heard “Merci… Merci…”drift on the gentle breeze across the centuries.

Michael Acton

‘The Unforgiven is based on a real event that still lives in local folklore. I visited St. Margaret’s Church on a hot August afternoon and while absorbing the tranquillity of the church it was hard to imagine the horrors the villagers had endured all those centuries ago.

I had my first writing success in 1982 winning a national short story competition with Seaboots.

I have had local history articles published and in 2002 published a compilation of short stories. In 2003 I was short listed for another competition and November 2004 chosen as writer of the month by UKAuthors.com.’

The Catch
by Joanne Dearden

Peter was just an ordinary boy, living in an ordinary house, in an ordinary part of Brighton. He went to a school behind the church down the road. He had a small circle of friends, just like any other twelve year old boy.

There was a wild rumour going round his school that someone had drowned in the sea at the weekend, and that the next day a fisherman had gone out to catch some fish in the same place, and had caught a beautiful big fish. He had attempted to kill it with every method he knew of, but he just couldn’t. Then, suddenly it started transforming into a pale, translucent figure of a child. The fisherman had staggered back with shock, and had fallen into the sea. He came swimming back to the shore, having abandoned his old boat, and had come into town hollering at the top of his voice. Several of the children at school had heard him, and the story got more and more drastic every time it was retold.

‘I heard,’ one boy had said, ‘that an old gentleman had a sudden urge to jump into the sea from the end of the West Pier. He did so, and landed on the back of a Great White Shark. It immediately turned into a real live boy, just like you and me!!!’

Peter and his friends scoffed at the story, and they all agreed that, if it was true, the fisherman was ‘a nutcase, and should be banged up.’

The next day in the playground they agreed to meet up at the beach on Thursday afternoon to try and find the fisherman, just to have a laugh. But a laugh is something that it wouldn’t be.

The weather had not been nice all day, and it was quiet enough down at the beach. The gang of boys strolled along looking for the fisherman. Descriptions of him were not exactly in short supply, and they had chosen the most sensible to go by. He should have been easy enough to find. Indeed, it wasn’t exactly difficult.

There were only so many fishermen’s huts down at the beach. He was the youngest fisherman, in fact he was the only one under forty, the only one with no nets drying outside. Outside his hut was his new boat, which he washed and polished tenderly and lovingly every day. It gleamed in the sun, and even Bill, the toughest of the boys, stopped to admire it. Just then the fisherman came along. The boys whipped around, and Bill immediately pounced.

‘Well, well, well, look who it is!’ they jeered. ‘Mystery man himself. Did the nasty ghosty boy fwighten you?!’ And they walked away laughing.

Now, this particular fisherman happened to have a very quick temper, and a criminal record as a result.

He managed to grab Peter’s collar and yank him towards him, nearly throttling the poor boy. His ‘friends’ ran for it, so as not to be punished themselves.

‘He was real I tell you, he was!’ spluttered the fisherman. He shook Peter, staring at him wide-eyed willing him to believe him. All Peter could do was let out a terrified squeak and attempt to wriggle away, but the fisherman had a firm grip on him. He shoved him towards the boat, which stood innocently waiting to be pushed over the pebbles into the sea yet again.

‘Get in the boat’ he grunted roughly.

Peter stood bewildered. Surely this man wasn’t taking him fishing?

‘I said get in the boat!’. Peter climbed in, trembling. The fisherman pushed the boat into the sea and jumped in. It rocked worryingly.

The fisherman didn’t look at Peter until they were far out to sea, and the land was just a shadow on the horizon. He turned to face Peter, and advanced on him. Peter backed away until he could go no further. He was painfully aware of the depth of the sea.

‘You really should have taken lessons in running and swimming before you came and messed with me. Turn around, now.’

Peter was too terrified not to. He turned and stood staring at the sea, grey and choppy beneath him.

The fisherman yanked him up by the back of the collar and walked over to the very edge of the boat.

‘Goodbye’ he whispered in Peter’s ear, and let go. The boy screamed and fell into the sea with a splash. The boat sailed over the top of the boy, and stayed there until the fisherman could be sure that the boy would not be bothering him again.

Many years passed. The fisherman grew old, as did his boat, which he still kept. As for Peter, well, the police never found his body. His poor mother still likes to think that he is still alive somewhere, leading a happy life.

As it happened, our particular fisherman chose to go fishing in the exact same spot where Peter met his end. Suddenly, there was a sharp tug on the end of his rod. He reeled it in with great difficulty. On the end was a beautiful, big fish. It was unusual, and the fisherman didn’t recognise it, He picked it up, and dropped it heavily on the wood floor in an attempt to kill it. Suddenly a semi-translucent figure started rising out of the fish’s gaping mouth. The terrified fisherman’s eyes widened with horror as he realised it was the boy that he had murdered all those years ago.

The ghost of Peter haunted the old man for many weeks before guilt and fear finally drove him mad. And the ghost of Peter stood by and watched the old man take his last breath.

Joanne Dearden

‘I go to St. Pauls C.E primary school. I am 11 years old, and have lived in Brighton all my life. I was inspired to write this story by looking at pictures on the Internet of the old fishing huts down at the beach. I love reading, and have been writing stories for a long time. I have won competitions for my writings, and was a young critic for the Brighton festival last year.’

Mental Disc Selecter (Slight Return)
by Neil Palmer

Late one summer’s afternoon in Hove Public Library, reading about St Anne’s Well Gardens, I followed some interesting diversions. As is the custom in local history collections, there are a large number of pamphlets, monographs, typescripts and photocopies on diverse topics produced by amateur historians: geological surveys of the South Downs, genealogies of past mayors, legends of Anglo-Saxon Hove, histories of Brighton and Hove Albion. Local histories have one thing in common, being the work of devoted localists they represent the object of their devotion as distinctively omphaloid and, usually being the work of autodidacts, they generally claim to be definitive. Each word produced on local subjects distils the knowledge of previous writers. Every word presents itself as the last.

The last tome to attract my attention was a thin pamphlet outlining the profound geomantic significance of Shoreham. With five minutes before the library shut I had no time to read it, so I photocopied a diagram, an aerial photograph and a contextual map. On removing the pamphlet from the photocopier, a neatly folded sheaf of papers fell from between the last leaf of this booklet and its blue card cover. I quickly read the first few paragraphs as the librarian tidied up. Its contents, written in green ink in tiny capital letters, were unusual. I don’t expect to read anything like them again. Of course, I took the papers with me when I left. They weren’t catalogued and I reckoned no one would miss them. I reproduce the contents here in full, altered only to suit standard typography.
I have always lived in the Brighton and Hove area. Frequently, when it’s raining, I walk down to the sea and feel at one with the wind and water. I can smell possibility as I smell memories and dreams. It is an expression of the experience of time. I am usually calm as the sea in August, except when I talk about the past.

As a young man in Brighton, after work, by night and at weekends, I forgot my job as a pox doctor’s clerk and visited pubs and coffee bars, meeting like-minded youngsters whose main pleasure was talking, mingling and dancing to amplified beat music. Where this urge towards idle interaction came from I have no idea. My father worked all day long and sat indoors until bedtime. My mother looked after my dad. My mother’s name was Mum.

The years in between then and now are crystal clear. I remember all the group names as if written on a flowchart, or scrolling down a page of text. Parochial beat groups writing their monickers everywhere in indelible ink and reciting these names amongst each other at school, work, sport. Mystery adhered to numerous Prowlers, Phantoms, Druids, and inevit- able genuflections towards the Far East showed in Pyramids and Fenmen. I remember fighters and bombers, both Axis and Allied. There were precious stones, card games, times of day, body parts, overlords, numerous kinds of inclement weather – inevitable perhaps for a town involved in the fishing industry – makes of car, states of mind, big cats birds of prey, ancient and mythical beasts, and insects.

Ancient war-tribes were invoked: Vikings, Saxons, Vandals, Hittites and Incas, and there were also unspecified Invaders, Outcasts, Rogues. There were Kults and Kriminals, also Krusaders and Kut-Throats. I don’t remember any sea creatures, plants or global conflicts, perhaps some emerged for a while before vacating the stage. Some local groups made it into the studio, but most avoided success, preferring the freedom to fail. These have all passed, leaving a heritage trail and many questionable historical annotations and musical footnotes.

I have tapes in my possession, tapes the whole pop culture industry would like to suppress. I own computer discs and other evidence, too. These recordings don’t just replay quaint sounds from yesteryear, they provide actual evidence, realised for years by adepts, that it’s the unknown greats who have changed and progressed pop culture, not the famous few, nor the consuming masses, nor steering committees of academic experts.

I have proof positive, as if any were needed, that QUALITY is quantifiable as a reverse coefficient; that the less rock’n’roll you produce the BETTER it is. Or, the less POPULAR you are, the BETTER you are. The ‘album’ banished all the best tunes to the dungeon reserved for that purpose by those with Taste—just like Christianity destroyed Keltic magic. All the really great rock’n’roll tunes are by UNKNOWN or TALENTLESS groups who generally produce less stuff than the so-called ‘successful’ hordes! Also, early work is better than late stuff.

But my tapes and discs and electronic archives will give little comfort to the music industry, and no hope at all to smug materialists eager to separate the warp of uniqueness from the weft of ubiquity. For my great work, my struggle, shows that only individuality counts, only self-creative spurts.

I came slowly, piecemeal, to understand that I was a real-life time traveller. You see, I own work by a thousand groups, all signed and dated, each tune better and more UNIQUE than the last. And I am responsible for hatching every one of them. I made them, with hindsight gone mad, by infiltrating myself into the past, where I worked for years producing unknown unknowns for a future hungry for novelty and heritage.

I shall not trespass upon your valuable time for long, although fruitful digression is yet another proof of my work. Let me briefly mention that at Shoreham yesterday I wished to progress from the promenade towards Worthing along the A259, but a gang of workmen was crowding the harbour, impeding my progress westwards. I was forced to return home without completing the necessary cyclical journey I had planned. I, of all people, know how infuriating it can be to be re-directed, re-routed, sidelined. I will revert to the matter in hand, I have no choice; temporal movement proceeds by volition, so the point will always be made, but never directly.

Of course, I was already aware of certain differences in myself as early as November 1964. Presently, I seemed to know what was coming next, to experience tunes before the fact. Such as the moment I first heard “Move It” by Cliff Richard and The Drifters. I had created the very same guitar part in my head weeks before. The first time this thing had happened was when, at the age of 13, I heard The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. I experienced a tingling, as if a battery were held to the tip of my tongue—but located in my prostate—and realised that I had made up the melody line earlier that same day after listening to Johnny and the Hurricanes’ “Red River Rock”, from which source The Beatles undoubtedly lifted their own tune.

Eventually, I saved up and bought an electric guitar, a serviceable Fenton Weill, and a useful amplifier—a powerful Elpico—it was several months before I managed to save the cash necessary to buy a Grundig tape recorder. Only then was I able to back up my remarkable discoveries with physical proof of my prowess. My first triumph was the composition of a slowed down version of The Tornadoes’ ‘Telstar’, which turned up later that year, done by someone else, as the theme tune for Doctor Who, ironically a new television drama about a fictional Time Lord.

I recorded every one of my compositions, diligently cross-referencing them with new discs as they appeared. In a matter of months I had enough evidence of my peculiar ability and I prepared to reveal my visionary talent to a wider audience.

My first initiation into my own temporal mystery came in the Heart and Hand public house on North Road, one evening after work. I took my pint to an unoccupied table, picked up the Daily Mail left by the previous drinker, whereupon a slip of paper fell from the inky pages. I sprinted to the door of the pub to catch her, but she had disappeared. The contents of her note, however, left me in little doubt that, having seen me enter the boozer, and liking what she’d seen, it would be to my considerable advantage to get to an upstairs flat halfway down Waterloo Street in half an hour. I saw off my pint and sprinted across town to a vivid sexual encounter.

Pinned to the door of the building was a letter from myself dated September 1999, making it clear that what I was experiencing was not an unconnected series of events. It seemed that the bizarre precognitions I had experienced were instances instigated by my future self and presented as concrete evidence to convince me that I had returned to the past. The knowledge of pop tunes yet to come had been given to me by adroit whistling in the street and by recordings replayed whilst I slept. In both instances my latter persona was pursuing his historical self with glimpses of the future.

Naturally, I was cock-a-hoop. But I was told that on no account should I reveal my findings to anyone. This censure caused me little pain, for immediate fame was not my goal. Pop music had conferred celebrity on crowds of entertainers, and several young men were now increasingly stinking rich. Phil Spector, Andrew Oldham, and many more, were in clover, and I simply waited for my turn. The readies would come in handy, but for the time being I craved only creation.

St. Anne’s Well Gardens are a delightful contrast to the bustle of central Brighton, a place of tranquillity where OAPs can drift and un-employed men and women may rest a while between the beach and home, snorting perfumed blasts from rose-scented hillocks. The site was, for many hundreds of years, famed for its chalybeate, or mineral spring, and in the early 1800’s Brighton serviced metropolitan visitors with re-animating seaside waters.

Saint Anne, or Áine—or even Annwn, a diminutive form derived from the spirit place whence she came and went—was tossed down the well that bears her name. The ones who offed her regarded death as a personal epiphany and a collective rebirth. Christianity wasn’t such a big surprise for them after all. She is now a residual part of the low coombe there, leeching into its waters, through retrospective association with the infant English Church and the inhabitants of Hove through time.

Later on, the gardens were very nearly enclosed by an entrepreneur who wanted to cap the source and bottle the water. I thrill to imagine the scented gardens, subsequently planted for the benefit of the blind, contained and regulated within a glass-roofed Victorian factory, the valuable mineral spring sucked through copper pipes and glass tubes into green bottles. Brass, leather and plush velvet. In my mind this speculative structure is always associated with the Brighton Dome, and a fine glass and cast iron Victorian jam factory demolished some years ago by property developers at Histon, north of Cambridge. Presently, all three buildings will be removed to my mind: vanished, imagined and refurbished.

In the early 1900’s a motion picture industry flourished at Hove, and St Anne’s Well Gardens was the site of a massive studio built by the renowned film pioneer George Albert Smith. Once the gardens echoed to the shouts of staged fights. Once the Hove film industry matched the productivity of the dusty orange groves of rural Hollywood. All gone now, crumbled decades past with the flammable stock.

In Hove, Smith made saucy shorts and shockers, later destroyed, or lost, to use the wistful euphemism of arts administrators. That’s lost, as opposed to acquired, which means stolen when applied to distant folk items. What vast stores of knowledge were torched at Alexandra? What legendary riches relocated from Palestine? And all the folklore stifled by organised religion. Imagine what Henri Gaudier-Brzeska might have achieved had he not been gunned down on the Western Front fighting for German Imperial expansionism. And Eddie Cochran died at 21, Buddy Holly at 23. My gran died at 76 and she still hadn’t finished her important work. There’s no end to the losses.

Smith’s corpus has since been redefined as respectable heritage product. But it’s his negative, as in vanished, porn experiments that exercise my mind. Underpaid bellies slapping together in the ancient grove of St Anne’s Well Gardens, caught on acetate, the oiling of Victorian engines and sluices resounding throughout the vast glass-roofed sound-stage and out into heavens, into space.

Anyway, there, in that hallowed place, I spent an afternoon, an evening and a morning, flitting from toffee wrapper to divot to upturned flowerpot. Finally, having read all the clues ingrained in these cleverly hidden sources, I discovered a piece of writing carved, as it were by tooth marks, into a piece of chewing gum. So, following these cuneiform instructions, I proceeded to await evidence of the mode of my transference from my future self, in whatever form I might deem necessary. And while I waited for enlightenment I busied myself with recording rough versions of songs of which I had some prior knowledge. These I sent to publishers and groups alike, thinking I had handed myself the keys to a veritable goldmine.

Wherever I looked, my canny future-days presence had left reminders for my unwitting eyes. Notes and clues in blocked u-bends, cereal packets, trouser pockets, cat food, dog turds, cigarette cartons. If I discarded them unread, he returned them, ironed, with new writing added in different colours, insisting that I work harder. There was little I didn’t know about the sounds of the era through which I was living. I told myself I couldn’t fail. However, my tapes were discarded amid mirth and misunderstanding, according to certain of my associates in the biz. My letters were returned unopened. More worryingly, my studio was never broken into, no demos were stolen, nor did my enemies rifle my personal effects.

Of course, some of my songs made it onto record, but momentarily and infrequently. It became obvious to me that the function of popular music lay in satisfying other desires than pure delight, where startling personal innovations and revelations count for everything. In the country at large creative genius counts for nothing. I crept along a dark path more sombre than the one trod by the doomed famous.

Fame is transient, diaphanous and brazen, a rickety public edifice kept upright only by whispers. I tried to build long-lasting monuments, and therein lay my fault. Far from producing instant hits, I was being driven to create music that pre-empted later phases, music which employed novel ideas, but remained stranded without the necessary cultural context in which it might survive. I was an alien organ, my host was rejecting me.

It seems that my time-travelling mentor never intended that I should succeed in my own time. Instead, he caused me to produce tunes for another time. In short, I was churning out bad numbers built to last, genre-busting marvels that could only survive in a market of their own; a market yet to be established; a collector’s market that he, my temporal clone, my future self, controlled some thirty years in the future. He once referred in a secret missive to “cult classics”.

The authentic sound I forced myself to create – cryptic dumb fuzz crud – was achieved at the expense of my peace of mind. I effectively condemned myself to live a life doubled in pain, working twice as hard as any normal man, but for diminishing returns. My task was a solitary one. No one seemed to care, and the bands I initiated quickly dispensed with my services. My experience of rock ‘n’ roll could be likened to working a ghastly treadmill. I was constantly with the wrong people. I’d prefer to forget the whole thing.

Most weeks I’d locate yet more instructions informing me of which tunes to find, and where, and which songs I should plunder to achieve perfection. But these notes were entirely cryptic, and I was tired. By the middle of 1965 I’d stopped trying to make sense of my temporal puppet-master’s hints, preferring to go with my own instincts. As my understanding of my condition deepened, I delved deeper into the byways of rock, searching for ways to scupper my future success, in which it seemed I had no stake.

I began deliberately to write material based upon the most outrageous, gross and simple-minded tunes in an attempt to ruin his whole sordid venture. By utilising the most out of place intros, the most gut-wrenching effects, the gauchest chord progressions and key changes. No one would buy the primitive abortions I’d hatched.

I snapped up Glenda Collins’s ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ and my heart leapt with joy. I began experimenting with altered speeds, pitch and tape-effects, echo and vibrato, backwards and reversed noises, phasing and compression. Phasing’s easy, just play two tapes at the same time, alter their speeds, and record the results. It sounds majestic and it’s a powerful ambient. The military use something similar to strengthen radio signals.

Who on earth, I thought, would be able to make capital from such grotesques? I’d beggar myself rather than submit to being my own slave. Nevertheless, I loved to select mental discs. And I continued to produce more ugly beat music.

Playing all the parts alone, and financing the entire deal myself, led to my increasing isolation from society and everything. It’s just that I was forced to create. In my darker hours I imagined myself a cultivator of rare orchids, mutating what was once strange enough into a million permutations of perversity. In lighter moments I simply thought myself mad. The more I tried to ignore my overlord’s coercion, the keener his urging became. The nights I awoke with a tune sweating in my brain…

I used to run down to the beach, where waves imposed a different rhythm, in order to lose these interlopers. But every time I turned around, there was another exhortation to produce more unearthly hybrids. I even glimpsed, while bathing in the sea, hurried notes scrawled in the sand with a lolly stick, or spelled out in derangements of pebbles. I continued receiving hideous musical instructions until February 18th 1972. It was then that the past ended, and since that day I’ve been waiting for the future.

This morning, at 4:15 a.m., as I was walking home, I noticed how fine and grand the Hove seafront is. This surprised me so greatly that I yelped and scared seven gulls who took flight immediately. And yet, even though the massive white forms of old Hove appear to endure, through the morning sunlight I can see that they shall be gone soon, as shall everything I have ever known or done, except my tunes. Hove is almost vaporous, as fluid as the Himalayas.

On June 21st, my torment shall at last be ended. For me, this is the moment at which the future will begin. On the night of the 20th I shall go to bed a tramp, the next morning I will wake a vindicated man. The loop will be severed at the very point it was started. Although the rule of volition suggests I’ll have changed a bit.

My future self informs me secretly that we shall become one at the original site of the Gor Stone—an ancient meeting-place, or site of ritual revelation, according to antiquaries—on the hill above the Goldstone Valley. Then I shall know precisely where I am. I have only a short while to wait for my terrible work to be recognised. After I release my music archive the history of rock music will have to be rewritten. They are all there, all the songs I ever made, indexed, with copies of that week’s music press, or Dalton’s Weekly, or Exchange and Mart, containing small ads and hidden references I once placed as clues for my former self, ringed in green biro, alluding, secretly, to my tunes’ titles.
A lesser man would have stopped, having stumbled upon what I have found, but not I. Soon the world of pop culture, always ravenous for novelty, will hold its breath as its newest and most important phenomenon emerges. As our Druidic forebears visited psychic pain on their enemies, so I will destroy all self-proclaimed pop experts and scientists alike. When we become one again, that is.
My astonishing discovery will change everything. Within the year we shall see proof that our Keltic ancestors intended the British landscape to remain sacred. I have intimations that labyrinths and barrows shall soon open of their own accord, revealing evidence of my descent from Bel himself, via Ambrosius and Boudicca. And all straight lines, except Leys, the flights of birds, and cursuses and avenues of ancient stones, will be abolished.

Already I feel immanent convergency. The two separate, conjoined places, Brighton and Hove, themselves have been made one. Musicians, film-makers, non-specific creatives, psychics and their attendant gulls are once again flocking here. As above, so below, and as before, so now. There’s money in the æther. The place I love is overgrown with fleshy weeds.

And so I delay my enlightenment, daily growing weaker, awaiting unity. Soon it will be OK. By night I cross and re-cross the ancient lines of power that intersect in virtually every twittern and street of Brighton, and in most of the avenues of Hove. During the hours of daylight I coax an almost endless bloody flux from my bowels. And without my affirmative perambulations at night the place will never be ready. My pure discharge foretells great changes.

Neil Palmer

Neil Palmer moved to Brighton in 1988. Since leaving school in 1983 he’s been employed in many different jobs, including bookseller, warehouseman, postman and Handsard reporter. He is proud to have published Billy Childish’s critically acclaimed second novel, Notebooks of a Naked Youth (1997), while working for Codex Books, Hove.

Over the years he has produced self-published poems, comics and fanzines, issued three LPs with the Fire Dept, a group, and is currently completing several interconnected written and recorded works.

PARK AND GLIDE
by Ed Bell

‘You’re late again,’ barked the supervisor.

‘Sorry, boss, heavy traffic – bus held up,’ mumbled Steve.

‘I thought you walked to work.’

‘Er, well, yeah – mostly.’

‘Now you listen to me, my lad; heavy traffic and increasing inflow are, indeed a growing problem in Brighton and Hove and we here at National Car Parks have a major role, a dutyeven, to provide ever increasing and, may I add, efficient facilities for that traffic to park itself.’

‘Are you reciting the latest N.C.P. business plan or what?’ replied Steve sarcastically.

‘No, I’m reading you the RIOT ACT. If you’re late just one more time you’re OUT. There’s plenty of people out there who’d be glad of £1.75 an hour to work for one of the country’s most progressive industries.’

This was typical of Brighton and Hove in the early 1980’s. Increased wealth led to greater numbers of private cars, more tourist and leisure pursuits, inflating property prices, demolition of old housing complexes in city centres to be replaced by shops, offices and, yes, CAR PARKS.

‘Call this an industry,’ muttered Steve as he wandered off to his booth.

‘It doesn’t exactly PRODUCE anything.’

Fortunately his supervisor had trotted off to his cosy office and missed these remarks. Steve suffered another day in his draughty toll booth in Regency Square issuing tickets and collecting more money that he’d earned in the three months he’d worked there

Steve trudged home from work, had a bite to eat and flipped on the telly. Being more manic than depressive in this particular phase of the shambolic parabola of his existence, he decided to burn the midnight oil. The late film ended, the T.V. closed down for the night and on went the stereo. Santana, Miles Davis and Fleetwood Mac helped to ease him through the night. The kettle boiled time and again and the coffee flowed sweet and strong. The minutes ticked into hours and another winter’s day dawned, stillborn and chilly.

Of course, he was late again, his ginger beard coffee stained and flecked with bread crumbs, his jeans ripped at the knees, his grubby anorak wafting with the odour of stale roll-ups.

‘That’s it,’ fumed the supervisor, ‘you’ve had your verbal warning, you’re a disgrace, a waste of space, get out of my face…’

‘Hey, man, that rhymes – you should do hip-hop, you know, like Grand Master Flash or something…’

‘You can hip-hop right out of here,’ shouted the supervisor, ‘get your cards and what you’re owed and GET OUT OF MY FA…SIGHT!’

Steve wasn’t that bothered – he hated the job, the boss, the whole set-up. And he had a plan. The previous week he’d stashed away a fluorescent yellow N.C.P. jacked and cap and a couple of books of parking tickets. He’d spotted an empty lot on Church Street, just up from the Corn Exchange. The old buildings had been demolished and cleared away but no fence had been erected, as yet, around the site. He trotted up the gentle slope of Regency Square, across Western Road to Upper North Street, through the graveyard of the ancient St. Nicholas’ church and down into Church Street, his heart lightening with every step, clutching the non-descript holdall containing his future employment.

There was nobody about at the empty building site. He donned his cap and jacket, borrowed a couple of cones and some red and white tape from a side street and, VOILA!, instant car park.

Steve had made more that sixty quid by late afternoon. He was happy – the punters were happy – he was cheaper than the multi-storey round the corner – and he wandered back to his bed-sit via a couple of pubs and several pints of Guinness.

He slept well that night and dreamed a lovely dream:

Brighton and Hove were restored to their Regency glory. All the ugly office blocks and supermarkets and multi-storey car parks were relegated to the outskirts of town, behind the – not particularly – beautiful bits of downland around Hollingbury and Portslade and Peacehaven. N.C.P. had been denounced by a green minded new government as being a major threat to our heritage and environment and Steve himself had been elected managing director of ‘Park and Glide’; for a nominal fee all incoming domestic traffic was diverted into parking areas and the people were taken to their chosen areas of the city on a fantastic network of cable-cars. Cities throughout Europe and further afield except, of course, the U.S.A., were adopting this system and the world was becoming a greener, quieter, healthier place to bring up your…

BLEEP! BLEEP! BLEEP! BLEEP! BLEEP!…

‘Oh Gawd, here we go again,’ groaned Steve as he slapped off his alarm, and then he remembered he no longer had to traipse over to Regency Square. A smile grew slowly under his matted beard as he recalled his coup of the previous day.
‘I will get off to work,’ he thought, ‘in my own good time, and make a few more squids to top up the coffers.’

‘Ho hum, ho hum, it’s off to work we bum,’ he whistled to himself as he set up in the same vacant lot for the second day running. Business was brisk but so, eventually, were a couple of figures in blue uniforms accompanied by his ex boss.

‘Sod it,’ thought Steve, ‘ I should have followed my dream and set up a car park OUT OF TOWN!’

Ed Bell

‘I moved to Brighton in 1970. I began writing stories about five years ago to alleviate the boredom of minding printing machines. Most of my story ideas come from life experiences in Brighton. ‘Park and Glide’ is based on the true story of a friend who worked for National car Parks in the early 1980’s, combined with a personal view of providing Brighton, a city of many hills, with a cable car system. I remain a confirmed luddite and regard petrochemical technology as a blight on the planet.’

Bunny Island
by Andrew Kearsey

“Remind me again why we’re giving up the first decent sunbathing day to spend time with people we neither care for nor even like.”

“You know perfectly well why we’re going.”

“Oh yes, to breathe some life into your glittering yet perplexingly faltering career.”

“You will behave, won’t you?”

“I shall be charm personified. I will hang onto every soporific syllable that your boss utters. I shall positively gush at the fascinating exploits of his children and drool over the gastronomic delights his wife has laid out for us. I do hope she’s got caterers in, partial though I am to finger food from Iceland which has not been adequately defrosted.”

“Oh dear, do you really hate me for this? I could always call them and tell them that you have one of your migraines.”

“What? And miss all the fun? Bugger Ascot or Henley! They pale into insignificance when compared with the annual barbeque of my partner’s boss. Undercover ‘Heat’ journalists will be out in force at the premier event of any self-respecting socialite’s calendar.”

“I’m regretting this already.”

“Oh shut up and get the Rolls out Parker. Lady Penelope cannot be kept waiting.”

“I wish you‘d learn to drive.”

“Then I wouldn’t be able to drink and quite frankly the prospect of enduring this afternoon’s festivities without alcohol appals me.”

We were among the first to arrive although it was an hour after the invitation stated. The barbeque and the Christmas party were the only occasions when the London and Brighton staff got together. I was beginning to relax when I realised that Martin was not going to follow through his threats of embarrassing me. He knew how important this was to me and how precarious my position at work remained. He scrubbed up rather well. I was proud of him. He schmoozed in a way which was alien to me. I knew he was going beyond the call of duty when I overheard him chatting to our hostess.

“So where did you find these exquisite doilies?”

“I’m so pleased you noticed them. I found them in a sweet little shop in The Lanes.”

“You must let me have the recipe for these vol-au-vents. They’re to die for. Although I must be careful not to over-indulge. Don’t want to look like a beached whale on holiday next month.”

“Where are you both going?”

“We’re off to Mykonos. I know it’s naff and overpriced, but it’s in the job description for us poor homosexuals. That and having C.D. shelves of show tunes and going on about our mothers.”

She laughed as she always did at Martin’s comments or asides in a way that communicated neither complete comprehension nor feeling at ease. She seemed relieved when the door-bell rang. Martin raised his eyes Heavenwards when she went off to answer the door and we exchanged smiles. It was at times like these that I loved him the most. I wasn’t short of witty things to say or snappy retorts. My problem was that I always thought of them too late. Martin had overcome the potential bullying at school and at home from three older brothers by developing the art of the withering put-down at an early age. He referred to himself as a child as, ‘Little Miss Precocious’. I could easily picture him. He wasn’t conventionally handsome. In fact he was what I had once called sexy ugly. All the features were wrong but somehow together they worked. I knew his face so well I could no longer be objective. He wore, what he would be the first to admit, distinctive clothes. I pretended to appear bored every time he mimed calling for the Fashion Police when I got ready to go out. On our second date he named me a blunt dresser. He was one of the few people of our generation who owned and wore a deerstalker and cravats. I had long since grown accustomed to sniggers from passer-bys as they gawped at his sartorial eccentricities. He had never said as much but I figured that any form of attention was accepted gratefully. His definition of Hell would be to be permanently ignored.

We managed to snatch a few moments together on the bench at the back of the garden.

“So how am I doing?”

“An Oscar–winning performance. Congratulations”

“Why, thank you Captain Butler how you do run on!”

“I was particularly proud of the feigned fascination you displayed when talking to Mike and Bob from I.T.”

“Eavesdropping were we? At one point I was worried that Bob was relating the tawdry story of his uneventful flat sale in real time. That man must have had a charisma-ectomy.”

“Do you think you could stand another hour or so? I need to spend some serious time creeping to the boss and most people have only just arrived.”

” Provided the booze continues to flow…..”

“He keeps threatening a merger and I’m hopeless at selling myself. I haven’t met my opposite number from the London office yet. He’s bound to have made a bee-line for the boss though and made out how indispensable he is. ”

“Don’t forget to lay it on with a trowel. Would you appreciate some moral support?”

“No, I’d better do it on my own. I’ll let you to enjoy a few moments of peace. I’ll leave the bottle”

“Good grief, I never knew that Zimbabwe was a famous wine-growing nation.”

Martin was not alone for long. He asked just the right questions of a woman who had recently undergone several non-specific gynaecological operations. He also provided accompanying sympathetic facial expressions. A casual bystander would have sworn he’d felt her pain. He seamlessly moved onto a couple from Croydon who talked at length of their new bathroom.

“Trying to lay your hands on champagne coloured grout sounds like a nightmare.”
He was fortunately spared further details by his mention of a weak bladder. It gave him the opportunity to nose around the house. He was also able to bear witness to a rather glamorous newcomer. She walked from the kitchen out into the garden and immediately shielded her eyes wonderfully theatrically yet unnecessarily, as it was rather overcast. She was not exactly beautiful in the strictest sense, she just carried herself well.

“Be a dear Jerry and fetch my shades from the car, will you.” Her clearly long-suffering spouse scuttled off to do her bidding. She reclined dramatically on the lawn by a bed of roses and proceeded to sniff each one individually. Martin approached, hoping he may have found a kindred spirit, yet sensing he may have met his match.

“May I join you?”

“Feel free darling. Love the cummerbund. Such a ravishing shade of magenta.”

“Thank you, one tries to bring a dash of colour into an otherwise grey world. May I compliment you on your brooch? The name’s Martin by the way.”

“Ciao, I’m Teri. The stones are beautiful, but the setting is a tad gauche. Belonged to my great-aunt. You’ll have to excuse me as I’m not firing on all cylinders this afternoon.”

“How come?”

“Was up ‘til four with my brother this morning. He’s just got back from his Grand Tour in his gap year. He was in Machu Picchu Thursday morning then a wine bar in Covent Garden with me the following evening. Quite surreal really. We demolished five bottles there, then pint-sized nightcaps at my flat.”

“Don’t tell me, it seemed a good idea at the time.”

“Exactly, that’s why I’m feeling marginally tarnished now.”

“Not a good example set by big sis.”

“You scoundrel, who said I was older?

They both laughed.

“It’s rather fun having a brother almost twenty years younger, unless I get mistaken for his bloody mother which pisses me off.”

“You could always introduce him as your toy boy or are they last year’s fashion accessory?”

“That’s so Demi Moore. Oh no Jerry, not those ones. I’ll do without.”

He scuttled back inside.

“What is it about straight men? They haven’t got a clue about what goes with what. How could I wear the tortoise shell ones with this outfit?”

“Why, you cut me to the very quick. Are you assuming that I’m gay? I’m most offended, particularly since I’ve been taking the extra strong hormones.”

“Are you trying to tell me that straight men would have the balls to wear your lilac contact lenses?”

“Touché Madame, or is it Mademoiselle?”

“I’m just not the marrying kind.”

“Snap! Something else we have in common.”

“What else?”

“Well, we’re both spinsters of the parish and………….we both know how to make an entrance. Yours was utterly superb by the way. It would have delighted my old drama teacher. Wicked old bat!”

“What was wrong with her?”

“I still haven’t forgiven her for casting me as the coroner in the Wizard of Oz. The coroner for God’s sake!”

“Did it not meet with your ego’s demanding standards?”

“Well, I suppose it was partly that, plus her supposed sweetener. She took me to one side and told me that obviously she could have given me any of the other roles, yet….why are you laughing?”

“I’m just imagining you in a blue gingham frock and calling for Aunty Em.”

“Ha bleeding ha! She had the cheek to call it ‘a delicious little cameo’.”

“I’m sure you were fabulous.”

“Ridiculous, isn’t it, how some things stay with you? Over thirty years ago now. Anyway, enough about me, thrilling though the subject matter is. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me? No, seriously, are you one of the London lot or are you one of the lucky ones who’s found the tunnel to the South Coast?”

“We’re living in Balham at the moment but we’re looking forward to relocating down here. Naturally we’ve spent the obligatory dirty weekends down here but…”

“How dirty?”

“Well, moderately grubby, after all, you’ve seen Jerry haven’t you? Are you single?”

“No, my other half is inside. He’s busy networking.”

“How deathly dull! Are these things always so grim or are they pulling out all the stops for my first time here?”

“This is as good as it gets. Have you just driven down for the day or are you making a weekend of it?”

“Haven’t planned anything yet. Perhaps a bed and breakfast. Jerry doesn’t really do spontaneity, so the idea of not knowing where he will be sleeping tonight is positively painful for him.”

“Poor love. If you do stay down and you’re at a loose end tomorrow, give us a call. Here’s our number. How was the journey down?”

“It was O.K. To be honest I spent the first part putting on my face. I needn’t have bothered because just before we got into Brighton I started blubbing.”

“Whatever did that brute Jerry do to you? I had him down as a gentle giant. Should I challenge him to a duel to defend my lady’s honour?”

“Nothing like that, although I do wish at times he’d stand up to me. It was ghastly. First there was this crunch and then I looked back and saw this patch of blood and fur. I didn’t think I was that sentimental but I started bawling. A real snotfest. Mascara everywhere. I suppose what really did it for me was Jerry not being terribly sympathetic. What set me off was when he said it was probably only a rabbit. Then he had to put up with me blithering on about my first pet when I was six. My uncle had built me a hutch which we kept by the shed. My mother said I’d lose interest in looking after a rabbit but I fed him every day and cleaned him out every weekend. I found him one morning, or rather his remains. My father said a fox must have got into the garden. Strange how it all came back to me.”

“Were you just coming into Brighton?”

“Yes, just by a petrol station.”

“Must have been Bunny Island.”

“What?”

“It’s a roundabout on the A27, just before you get into Brighton. Apparently two unwanted rabbits were left there some years ago and they’ve bred like….well, like rabbits. Every now and then one must make a break for it and I guess this one had a death wish or was just plain unlucky. Locals are always chucking carrots out of their car windows for them. My partner’s family call it Rabbit Roundabout, but I prefer Bunny Island.”

“Yes, it sounds cuter.”

“Here he is now. This is Teri, darling. I’m extolling the virtues of living down here.”

“Lovely to meet you. Please can you excuse us a moment there’s something I need to tell Martin.”

“No problem, I’d better track down Jerry and another drink, although preferably not in that order.”

She sashayed towards the kitchen humming.

“That was rather rude of you. At last I’d found someone decent to talk to and you just….”

“That cow has just been given my job.”

” What? I thought you said your counterpart in the London office was a bloke.”

“I did too when I heard the name Terry.”

Andrew Kearsey

‘I am 41 and have lived in Brighton for over seven years (I made the move from London, like so many people). As a child, the highlight of the Summer holidays was our trip to Brighton and I have found memories of visiting the West Pier. I used to be a teacher but now am concentrating on writing. Brian, my partner edits anything I write. I can’t remember who told me about Bunny Island, but it made me smile.’

The Wreck of the West Pier
by Grace Judge

I was so glad I was wearing shorts today, it was boiling. I couldn’t believe how sunny it was. I was walking towards the Brighton Pier.

‘Grace! Me and Dad are sitting on the beach, you go on Brighton Pier. Just don’t talk to any strangers!’

I went towards Brighton Pier but as I drew closer I squinted in the sun and saw that, it was incredible, it was the West Pier…it wasn’t broken! It looked as though it was brand new!

I slowly walked across the bridge and walked in the entrance of the West Pier. It was amazing. There was a beautiful theatre, and a lovely restaurant, it was all excellent and very clean. I couldn’t believe my eyes, last time I saw it, it was a wreck. At first I thought it was a dream but no, it wasn’t a dream, it was really happening. As I was looking around I noticed all the people were all dressed up looking their best. I went in loads of cool shops and there were lovely sweets in one shop and in the Souvenir Shop there were beautiful china dolls. It was just amazing.

After about half an hour I thought I should go and find mum and dad so I went to the exit but couldn’t get out. The door was locked. I tried asking people how to get out but they just ignored me. I tried smashing windows but the glass was too thick. I sat in a corridor crying, but then a little girl came over to me.
‘What’s wrong? Maybe I can help.’

‘You won’t be able to get me out, you’re just a little girl.’

The little girl grabbed me by the hand, ‘Come with me, I can help you.’

I went with her, praying that she could help me. She took me down some stairs and opened a door. I could see the sea quite a way down.

‘I didn’t see that door or the stairs before!’

‘That’s because I’ve been here since it was made. I know every part of the West Pier. Now jump in the sea and swim to shore! You went back in time. This is the only way!’

I gulped as I looked down, but I had to jump, so I could see my parents again. I held my nose and jumped in the deep sea and swam as fast as I could to shore.

‘Grace, why are you playing in the sea?!’ yelled Mum.

‘It’s OK Mum, I fell off the pier into the sea, but I’m OK really, just wet.’

‘Are you sure? You look freezing.’

‘Yes Mum, I’m fine’. As I looked back at the West Pier, it was wrecked. I was feeling very confused, but I didn’t say anything. When I closely looked at the Pier I could see the little girl leaning on a plank of wood in the sea. I waved at her, she waved back. I never told anyone as I thought it was a dream – but did it really happen?

Grace Judge

‘I am 10 years old. I go to St Pauls C.E school, and I have lived in Brighton for four years. I was inspired to write this story by the sight of the west pier being destroyed, and imagining it as it was when it was in use. I started writing stories when I was 6 and I’m hoping to do more.’

Edna’s Angels
by Rachel Grant

The voices downstairs had softened into a slow roll. His rough, low, and hers smoother than its usual creak and whine. Muffled by the floor they now seemed almost comforting after the earlier door bangs, glass shattering and loud screams. Sometimes when they go quiet like that I don’t move in case I make the boards creak. Once I heard them say, “Listen to the old bitch, she’s hit the frigging deck.” It was the girl I think. At least I can tell where they are when they’re fighting or breaking things. But then sometimes, in the middle of a row, they will stop suddenly. Kelly says it’s when they’ve taken their drugs. That’s when I wonder if it’s safe to turn off the telly. So, I adjust the volume first, one or two green bars at a time, nothing too sudden, until finally all I can hear are the herring gulls on the roof. Kelly says they make such a racket, cawing and then crying, but I’ve got used to it. Anyway too much silence makes me jumpy, and the traffic noise doesn’t count either, so I am glad for them. Now that they’d gone quiet I could start running the water. I’d just got time for my bath before Jean was due round.

I’d only been soaking for a few minutes but was drifting off to tell the truth, when I heard a crash – it sounded like a window – coming from the kitchen. I don’t like this at all, I thought, so I got out of the bath as fast as I could. But I daren’t rush, I’m not as young as I think I am sometimes. My hair was all sudsy but I wrapped myself in a towel and put my housecoat over the top. Then I heard what sounded like a scream. It shook me up, I could feel my hair prickle. A loony’s broken in, I thought. I can’t even get out or call the police because the phone and the backdoor are in the kitchen. When I went in to the kitchen it was a gull, not a madman. I shooed it out, but my fruit bowl was smashed in two big bits on the floor. Grapes were everywhere and Jean was due round for our take-away and scrabble in ten minutes. Now I had this mess to tidy up beforehand, Jean would never believe it. Still, that’s the trouble being on the first floor. They sit on the steps down to the back garden and if I don’t keep a look out they mess all over the washing.

She laughed when I told her about the gull, “It’s your own fault Ed. You give them your crusts and the rind off your bacon. Now they think they can come in and help themselves.”

She was making me feel peckish talking about bacon, then she said, “I think the Chinese is here. I can smell something. It’s making my mouth water.” The takeaway was our treat so I decided not to get too upset about the bowl. We never ordered it too late, Jean said you wanted it early, so it would be fresh.

“I’ll get the plates ready”, I said. “We’ll have it on our laps shall we?” We’d already got the card table out with the board on it so why not slob out for a change? I wouldn’t have done when Roy was here but I’ve changed a bit since then. It’s too much bother laying the table when it’s just takeaway for me and Jean. Usually I warm the plates up in the top oven but I thought I’ll just run them under the hot tap – that does the trick. Saves on the gas too. But I didn’t hear the doorbell ring. I was filling the washing up bowl, that’s when he came in, bold as brass through the back door. I didn’t shout out. I just dropped a plate in the sink. It splashed all over the side.

From the sitting room Jean shouted, “Need a hand?”

He wasn’t looking at me, this man, he was looking at the wall behind me. But I recognised him instantly, he was one of the drug gang from the ground floor flat.

I said, “Who are you?” But I knew his face from looking out the window at them. All night they’d sit outside the front of the flat making the windows shake with their shouting and swearing.

“What?” he said. “Where’s Caz. Got any milk?”

I wasn’t scared. “That Chinese ready yet?” said Jean from the other room.

That’s when I felt scared, I shouted out, “Jean, phone the police! It’s a burglar!”

Then she came in the kitchen. She shouted, “Get out. Get out you bastard! We’ve got nothing worth having.”

I needed the lav and I think I heard the doorbell go. But he didn’t seem to hear anything, and then he came towards me. I was stiff with fear but Jean had a tray in her hands and she brought it up under his chin.

“Oh Jean!” I said, “You’ll get us killed.” But I still couldn’t move, I just couldn’t move. He stumbled backwards and grunted. There was blood on his lip. Jean pinched my hand, it hurt. I turned to her and she said, “Come on Edna get down those stairs to the front door. Come on! Come on!”

I did what she said. I hate those stairs and I moved so fast I slipped on the wet lino. I sort of crumpled into Jean’s legs and she went over and knocked the man out the back door. Right down the stairs. He didn’t shout out, he just made a clump clump sound and then he was gone.

I couldn’t lift Jean up so she shimmied over to the unit on her bum. “I’ve hurt my bloody knee,” she said, “the bad one. Where is he?” Jean looked out the back door but she said she couldn’t see him. The gulls had flown off and we couldn’t hear a peep from downstairs. The doorbell rang again. I was relieved to see it was a girl that had brought our Chinese. I said to her, “We were so scared –”

“You’d forgotten all about us!” Jean shouted down. That was rude, I thought. Then she threw a £20 note down the stairs and shouted, “Keep the change love.”
I just took the bags and shut the door. “No point in telling every Tom Dick and Harry what’s gone on is there?” said Jean.

How daft, I thought, shouting out like that. That hooligan is probably going to cut our throats when I get back up stairs. But when I did make it up, Jean had stretched herself out across the couch, on account of her knee. “It’s like a marrow,” she moaned. Had I got some frozen peas or broad beans?

“Its oven chips or a long wait in Casualty,” I said.

“Probably scarpered any road,” said Jean, “No point doing anything till we’ve had this.”

I couldn’t believe her to tell the truth. But then she is diabetic and needs to eat at the right time each day. For all we knew, a sex-maniac was still in the flat but that didn’t seem to be bothering her.

I said, “I’m phoning Terry. He’ll know what to do.”

“Know what to do with what,” said Jean, “a corpse?” She’s having a hypo I thought, I’ve got some Lucozade that’ll do it – safer than trying to force down a penguin or digestive. “I’ll just fetch you some Lucozade and a biscuit love.” I said.

“No ta the chow mein’s fine for me,” she said. “I’m not barking mad you know and I’m not having a hypo. He’s dead, that chap. His neck’s broken I reckon. We’ll call an ambulance presently. But we need to eat …for the shock.”

Well, I thought, she doesn’t sound mad, a bit slow maybe, but not floaty-tipsy like the last time she had a turn. I sat down, she passed me a prawn cracker. “He is dead Edna. I managed to get down the back steps when you answered the door,” Jean said, her mouth full of sweet and sour. “I shouldn’t have strained my knee, I know. His head was looking at his back and his feet were up the wall. I couldn’t move them and he just stared at me. I thought, is he going to land one on me? So I kicked his side. He didn’t do a thing, not a dickie bird, but it made my knee throb. His head rolled to the side but his eyes stayed open. Horrible really, and I could smell him too, not at all like Chinese when I got up close.”

Her voice sounded normal through the food but I didn’t fancy my dinner after that. “I’ve gone right off my food Jean.” I said. “Is there nothing we can do?” Still it’ll keep, I thought, in these little plastic trays. I think she might have been having a bit of a hypo after all because she’d gone pink and was too concentrated on loading a forkful of chow mein to answer me. I got up to put my lot of the takeaway in the fridge, so I thought I’d have a look for myself. I might have been able to do something to help him.

Despite what Jean had said I didn’t even stop to think about what he’d look like. His head was facing the wrong way – Jean was right, it was horrid. I dropped the Chinese. The plastic containers hit the steps like firecrackers and then burst all over his chest and face. I’m going to be sick, I thought and I went back in to use the loo. I couldn’t keep a clear thought for long enough to decide how to put one foot in front of the other. My head was swimming with bits of ideas; call the police, call Terry, put a blanket over his head, sweep the mess up, fetch the ice-pack for Jean. And then the blooming gulls started screeching and calling as if on purpose. If only Roy had been around, he’d have known what to do. “Have a Brandy girl and stop fretting.” I know that’s what he’d say, something like that. But I hadn’t got any brandy, I’d got some funny vodka pop of Kelly’s in the cupboard but it was so sickly – tasted to me like lemsip.

I came back from the bathroom thinking, I’ve got to clear this Chinese up off the floor or we’ll have another accident and that really will be the last straw. Well, one of the gulls was in the kitchen – this time I didn’t even think about it I just barked, “Get out, get out!”

It had a spring roll in its beak. Steam was coming out of a crack in the brown skin. It looked quite comical really – like it was smoking a big fat cigar. I shooed it to the door. But there was another there too. I looked out, there were at least half a dozen of them all down the steps, eating the Chinese I’d dropped. Waste not, want not, I thought. It was getting dark but I could see that there were three of them sitting on this chap’s chest, fighting over a spare rib. Only it wasn’t a spare rib. But I didn’t know that then. I tried to wave them off but no – all together like that – they weren’t having any of it. One of them looked at me and dropped a prawn cracker on my shoe as if daring me to pick it up. Then another came flapping down off the roof right above me. I could feel the breeze from its wings, made my hair move. Another followed straight after it, and then another. The kitchen light lit them up from below – they looked like angels to me. They made the air cooler and softer. Something brushed against my glasses. I must have shut my eyes for a moment because one of them had stopped on the window ledge in front of me. Slowly I shifted my gaze to take it in, it was as big as a duck. I was a bit frightened but it didn’t move away. By now there must have been about a dozen on the steps. I wanted to shoo them away but I just knew that they’d go for me if I did. “Are you going to chuck that Chinese Ed? I could put away a bit more probably.” Jean shouted from the sitting room. I didn’t say anything. I daren’t move.

“Edna, I said I could manage a bit more of that Chinese if you’ve gone off the idea.” I jumped, Jean had come into the kitchen and was standing just behind me. She couldn’t see the gulls.

“What you looking at? Has he come-to or something?” She said as she pushed past me through the door. I was just about to say to her, your knee seems alright all of a sudden, when a gull swooped down straight toward her. I grabbed the door handle and pushed us inside just in time. “What’s going on Ed? Mind my knee, for Pete’s sake,” she said, remembering to wince this time. “You look awful. Come on we’ll phone the Boys in Blue now love. You sit down I’ll make some tea.”
I pointed at the window – she just looked at me. “Do you think you’ve had a stroke love?” she said. But that wasn’t why I couldn’t speak. I slapped the pane hard. A gull shrieked and flew up to fill the frame. It hovered there a moment. It had something in its beak that looked like a length of expensive red ribbon, shiny, heavy.

“Whatever has that brute gotten hold of?” said Jean. “Looks like a piece of liver.”

“Look at him!” It came out of me funny. It was like a whisper but a scream too. It made my throat hurt, made it sting and the sick feeling came back at the same time. “Look at the man! Look at him! Look at him!” Jean looked at me, then looked out the window downwards. The window reflected her glasses so I could tell that she could see him. A little thing twitched in the back of her neck. She turned to me.

“Strewth,” she said, and then she was sick all down her skirt. Her skin went grey – I thought, she’s going to go over. I pulled the chair to me and pushed her shoulders down and then her head into her lap once she was sitting.

“Its cannibalism, is that!” she sobbed. It wasn’t but I knew what she meant. I know I shouldn’t have, but that did make me laugh. “Oh Jean,” I said, “Of course it isn’t, we aren’t eating him are we?”

She looked up, her face was pale and her lips had gone a funny blueish colour. “I mean murder.” she said.

“We didn’t do that though did we?” I said. “It’s not our fault he fell down the steps. He had no business being in the kitchen did he? We are two old girls having our treat and some yobbo wants to come and rob us blind and lord knows what else, Jean. I mean, we may be old but we are still women. You never know what he might have done to us.” Jean was sitting up now and looking at me.

“You’re right Ed. It’s just a shock seeing them like that all over him. Really turned my stomach, sorry about the mess. We should phone the police.” We stared at each other for a minute.

Then she said, “Oh no, look at my frock. I’m covered in it. I can’t see anyone like this.” She was right. We needed to pull ourselves together and I needed a sit down. I yawned – all the palaver had worn me out. A short round of scrabble would calm our nerves. Yes, we’d phone them presently, Jean would want a bath too I thought. And I still hadn’t had a bite to eat.

Rachel Grant

‘I am 36 and originally from Sussex although I have lived in Brighton for about 10 years. I am intrigued by the locals who have endured while the city has evolved. My story comes from a current interest I have about getting older, becoming more vulnerable but also less visible. On my way to work I sometimes pass a woman who feed the birds. As she tips out her bag of bread a transformation takes place. She changes from a small unremarkable figure with a quiet energy into a frenetic mass of wing flaps and shrieks.’

The Diary
by Bryony Cleary

10th February 1886

What I get for all my hard work is something very simple but very treasured – a diary. It is a most beautiful diary red with a black ribbon tied around it and it is pure satin. Ma gave it to me she said it was for all those special thoughts of mine and my first thought is where to put this amazing diary? I KNOW!! Under my bed where my no-good little sister would never think of looking and for no other prying eyes that lurk beneath the shadows either.

Oh how uncourteous of me, my name, it is Elizabeth, Elizabeth Thornswallow but only Ma calls me Elizabeth, my friends Thomas and Edward call me Thornswallow. Now, I only have boys as friends because all the girls at my school in Brighton are all stuck up and snooty but not me I act as a regular normal girl so other girls think I’m common which isn’t true either. They also think that Thomas is my one true love which can’t be true, he’s too good a friend to love, although I have some sort of deep relationship with him which is so strong that it would never shatter or turn into love for that matter or could it? I don’t know, but even if it did turn into love I would never love him as much as my Henry. He’s a dog, my dog. He has beautiful white curly hair with splotches of creamy brown. He’s scared of the sea so he won’t run away and when I take him for a walk on the promenade he won’t move an inch off it. I wonder why Ma gave me this diary? Oh well, perhaps I shall find out tomorrow.

11th February 1886

Turns out Ma gave me this diary for one simple reason, my thoughts as a maid!! Yes a maid. I screamed at her NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!

How could she do this? Sending me to work at Preston Manor is simply cruel. She says I need to learn how to cook wash and clean. Five hours of each. It’s simply horrible. How could she? She’s deceived me – its work of the devil I tell you. I shall be worn out by the end of each day and there will be but one comfort in my life and that’s Henry. The Manor takes dogs (luckily) but he has to go in the garden whilst I work and he can sleep on my bed at night. Whilst I was crying Pa came into the room he said that Ma was cooking a wonderful roast chicken and had bought tickets for Romeo and Juliet at the West Pier. I tried to resist but I couldn’t. Romeo and Juliet is my all time favourite play and Ma’s roast chicken is the best in Brighton, so I gave in. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did. Christmas is the only holiday I get off. I have to work at Preston even on my birthday. Oh! Pa’s calling me to come down and say sorry to Ma and eat my food. I just can’t wait. I wonder what the West Pier’s like?

Easter Sunday

Apologies, apologies, I am deeply sorry I have not spoken to you in a while. It’s just I’ve been so busy working I haven’t had the time to write. Anyway I shall bring you up to date. Bad news I’m afraid. The man that played Romeo works here and keeps looking at me like he is a tiger waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting prey, though I’m not unsuspecting am I.? Mrs Potters is my boss. She cleans our rooms though. Oh dear!! I hope she does not find this book whilst cleaning, for every book she finds she reads. I know because a girl who started working here about two weeks ago wrote bad things about Mrs Potters in her diary and she found the diary under her pillow and read it! She fired the poor girl and she hasn’t been very happy ever since. I have made a very good friend called Mary. She’s lovely and has a dog as well, which meant that Henry had puppies with her female dog – Kittens. Do not ask me why she is called Kittens for I do not know. But I got to name the puppies, the males anyway. Their names are Twig and Bark (he’s barking all the time). Mary named the females Burberry, Ivy and Vicky (after our queen). Oh dear! Mrs Potters is coming. I must leave for now.

30th June 1886

I just don’t have time to write anymore. It’s really difficult to squeeze it in, plus there are only a few pages left in this amazing diary and I should really save them for special occasions. But this is a special occasion for me, not anyone else, just me…. it’s my birthday!!! I received many letters and parcels from Ma, Pa, my little sister and a couple more from my dearest friends Thomas and Edward. Ma got me a darling pearl necklace which I don’t know how she afforded. Pa got me a book called Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Amelia got me a special music box that had Romeo and Juliet inside and played my favourite lullaby from when I was a mere child. Thomas and Edward sent me a parcel together. It was a wonderful present. A book on the Pavilion and George IV. I shall read it soon. Now for Mary’s present. Encased in two tiny boxes were ruby earrings and a sapphire ring. She must of spent all her wages on them. I hugged her tightly wishing I could repay her kindness but her birthday is near Christmas and she lives in Worthing, so I won’t be able to get her a present as wonderful as this. Then she handed me another box, but this one was big really big. I heard a small squeal, I lifted the lid and there sitting in front of me was Ivy, I hugged Mary even tighter and then went for a walk with the puppies and Henry and Kittens. Then I went to the dining room. There I found a letter from Mrs Potters and a small chocolate cake. Mary and I ate every last piece.

1st July 1886

This is not a happy day. I have just received news that my sister has caught the cholera and is on the brink of death. On top of my sisters illness Henry died this morning. I woke up fresh as ever and shook Henry. He wouldn’t move, so I shook him again and again and again. It was no use. I hated to say it the word. Dead. He’s dead. I asked the lady of the house if I could bury him under the ivy tree in the garden and she agreed. At 2:00 o’clock he was buried and gone, gone forever. He’s joined all the other families that have passed away and I fear my sister shall be joining them soon.

Christmas Eve

Yes I am back home with Ma, Pa and AMELIA!!! Yes, my little sister pulled through and is as fit as ever. Thomas came by earlier. He said he’d been working at the Pavilion. I looked at him in disbelief. My dearest friend Thomas working at the pavilion! Surely he jested, but no, it was true. I hugged him dearly and said I’ve never had a friend like him – but if only he felt the same way that I feel for him. Yes it is true. My love for him has grown deep and strong and whenever he is around there is joy in my heart, though he probably does not love me the way I love him. Anyway, we went up to my room and we talked and laughed and cried all these things and more. Then Thomas asked the question which I hated to answer. Where is Henry? My happiness suddenly turned to sadness and my laughter shattered like a mirror. I told him the truth and he looked quite sad. He said he always wished for a dog and Henry was the closest he ever had to having one. I thought perhaps I could give him Bark!! Bark would be the best puppy ever, especially for Thomas. I gave him the cute little pup and he thanked me dearly. Then he left and said he would give me the best present tomorrow. I can’t wait.

Christmas Day

Ma says I don’t have to work at Preston Manor anymore. But its more of my home than it is here. Do not get me wrong. I love my family, but its just Mary. Mary is one of my good friends and if I leave she will not have a friend to be happy with. I will have another year there and then leave and have a family, my family. I got the most wonderful presents: a lovely book from Ma and Pa, Romeo and Juliet my favourite, from Amelia a simply darling ruby necklace and from Edward an extremely expensive dress made of silk. Now that is expensive. Thomas’s present was the best of all, not the most expensive, not the most grand – a letter confessing his love for me. I was over the moon. I ran to his house in the snow with Ivy and Twig at my side and when I got there I hugged him so tight I couldn’t breathe or think. It was the best Christmas ever.

New Years Eve 1899

Over a decade has passed since I last wrote in my diary and as we plunge into a new century I’ll remember the sweetest year in Brighton, my year at Preston Manor.

Bryony Cleary

‘I am 11 years old and have been writing stories since I was 6. I love horse riding, and I like writing stories about horses the best. I got the idea for this story from my sister, who had worked at Preston manor. I had been reading loads of stories about maids, and my favourite was Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. The dog is based on my Grandma’s dog, which had to be put down a month before I wrote my story.’

A lake in the park
by John Bourne

Like many Grandfathers, George loved telling stories to his grand-children. When they wanted a story, they would climb on his lap and demand, “Story, story.” Grandad would soon give in and always asked what they wanted a story about; they could choose any subject they liked. Some of the stories were true, most were fiction, made up spontaneously. He told stories of all manner of things like the sun and the stars, a seagull, a garage, a table leg and a worm. One day his 5-year-old granddaughter Rebecca jumped on Grandad’s lap and demanded a story, and, after a little persuasion, he gave in and invited her to choose a subject. She asked for a story about the lake in Queens Park in Brighton, which they had walked round previous day. This is the story he told.

When I was a little boy, I went to school at Queens Park School just down the road from the park. The area looked rather different then, the school looks very much the same but the area around it was a bit of a state. The war hadn’t long been over and some bombs had fallen in the area destroying several houses. The local people wanted something done about the bomb sites, but the council couldn’t afford it for the time being, so they had to put up with a lot of rubble and mess in between some of the houses. Fences had been put round the sites and notices saying ‘Keep Out – dangerous and unstable surfaces‘. At the school, we were all forbidden to go on the sites. If we did and got caught, we were in serious trouble. In those days, trouble meant being hit with the cane, a thin bendy cane that really stung!

My best friend was Jim, and Jim and I were both twelve and full of mischief. We had just started smoking, we thought it was clever then, we know now how dangerous it is, but no one knew then. If we got caught at school, or at home we would be in big trouble. We couldn’t afford many cigarettes just a few Players Weights, as they were called, and we used to smoke them round the back of the bike shed in the playground, where we hoped no one could see. One day, on our way to school, we met an old man struggling with his shopping. Being kind and helpful boys, sometimes, we offered to help the old man and carried his shopping for him. We got chatting and he told us how he had lived in the area all his life. He’d seen soldiers going off to the First World War and returning, well, some of them. He’d seen dogfights in the sky over Brighton in the Second World War and was there when the bombs fell. He told us how he hid in an upturned bath in his back garden, and how all the people in the house next door to him were killed. He talked of the fires and the search through the rubble for survivors. We were fascinated at his stories, forgot the time and were late for school, and I got the cane for that!

When the old man was telling us about the bombs, he said that one of the buildings destroyed had been a tobacco shop, and pointed to where it had been. When Jim and I met at playtime, we discussed the possibility of trying to get into what was left of the shop in case there were any cigarettes left. We decided to have a look after school. We were really excited about it and couldn’t concentrate all day long as we waited for the time to pass.

When school was over we left as usual, slipped away from the other children and hung around until the coast was clear. Then we climbed quickly over the fence and into the bomb site. Parts of walls were still standing and we had a good look around, getting filthy in the process, we found nothing. We looked for a staircase in the hope that there might be stairs down into a cellar. Eventually we found the bottom of the stairs but there were none going down. We were on the point of giving up when I put my foot down and it went through the floor. We were right at the back of the site against what remained of the back wall. We pulled bricks and rubble out of the way until we had cleared a gap big enough to get through. Then we lowered ourselves through the gap and, summoning our courage, dropped down into the darkness. It was absolutely pitch black down there but being smokers we had some matches. We looked round and found some old files, some boxes of sweets, all ruined by water now, but no cigarettes. Then we saw a wooden cupboard, a big cupboard stretching right up to the ceiling. It was locked, but we found some pieces of old pipe and broke the lock. Inside the cupboard were cigarettes, thousands of cigarettes. Mostly Player’s Weights, but some John Player’s as well. Water had got into the cupboard but because the packets were all wrapped in cellophane most of them were fine. We stuffed our pockets with as many as we could carry and then tried to get out. We couldn’t reach the gap we had got through and there was nothing to stand on. In the end, we had to get the bits of pipe and make holes in the wall to climb up. Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard because the plaster was rotten and the wall already damaged. We had just enough matches to light our way out.

As we climbed out we could see through holes in the wall into another part of the cellar complex, it was very dark so almost impossible to make anything out, but we thought we could see something metallic and big, we just couldn’t see it well enough. It could have been part of an office chair, or a gas cylinder, but it could have been an unexploded bomb! Being children, we thought it had to be a bomb and were very excited about it. We wanted to tell everyone about the bomb but keep the cigarettes to ourselves. We decided that we had to suppress our excitement, the bomb, if it was a bomb, wasn’t going anywhere, no one was allowed on the site and we had the opportunity to make some money with the cigarettes.

The next day in break time Jim and I flashed some of our cigarettes around and it wasn’t long before some of the others asked us about them. We told them we had a good supply and were willing to sell them at a good price. Then cigarettes in the shops cost about one shilling for 10, (5p in today’s money). We had an assortment of packets in 10’s and 20’s, which we were prepared to sell for nine pence for 10 and one shilling and six pence for 20. We soon did a roaring trade and ran out very quickly. We took orders then, promising delivery the next day. We went back into school very pleased with ourselves. Trouble was some of the Teachers noticed the profusion of cigarettes and were not pleased. Our Form Teacher came in and said if he found out who was selling cheap cigarettes they would be in serious trouble! We know what that meant and my backside tingled at the very thought of it.

As we needed more cigarettes, we had to go back after school. We decided to meet after tea when it was getting dark, and take a torch with us. We managed to get out of the house at 7p.m. and made our way to the site. Things were much easier at the site with a torch. We had to be very careful when we opened the hole up; there was so much rubble and debris that it was dangerous. We dropped down and with the aid of our torch, counted up the cigarettes, about 40,000 in all. That was great; we should be able to make a fortune! Stupidly we hadn’t taken a rope so had to make the precarious climb back up the wall, using the footholds we had made. With the aid of the torch, we looked through at our bomb. It really was a bomb, a great big grey coloured bomb with fins at the back. It had gone through the floor and was wedged in a small gap in what was once a stairwell. There was nothing holding it up, the slightest movement of the rubble supporting it might release it to fall some 8 feet to the concrete floor below. We were really frightened then, we could have so easily been killed when we were climbing about down there. We had to tell the police and not go back down, it was just too risky. Trouble was we would have to admit to everyone that we had been there, we would lose our money-making opportunity and we would get in all sorts of trouble. We walked off home to hide our booty and try to decide how and when to call the police.

What we didn’t know was that two other lads, Frank Pope and Barry Major, had followed us. We never saw them in the dark; they wanted to find our source and had overheard us arranging to meet. These two boys waited until we had gone, uncovered our hole and jumped down into the cellar. They had no torch and only a few matches, which were soon used up. They had seen the cigarettes all right but in their joy over finding them, they hadn’t worked out how they were going to get out. As they were trying to climb and jump in the dark, Frank fell, landed awkwardly and sprained his ankle. After a while they realised that no one could hear them, they couldn’t climb out and they were stuck until help came, or at least until the morning when they might be able to see better.

Jim and I decided that we would do nothing until the morning. We would meet up at 8am and go down to the site. If we thought we could, we would rescue a few more ‘fags’ and then call the police and take the consequences. We were both going to wear at least three pairs of pants in an attempt to reduce the pain of the caning that seemed to be inevitable. I put that thought out of my mind and watched a little TV (black and white of course) before going to bed.

When Frank and Barry didn’t come home, their parents rang round all their friends and then called the police. Officers did what they could and looked everywhere anyone could think of, but no one thought of looking in a bomb site near the school. They came to my house, and my dad woke me to ask if I’d seen them, but I hadn’t, it never occurred to me where they might be. I went back to sleep, trying not to dream of canes and the pain they brought.

Promptly at 8 a.m., Jim and I met up and went down to the bomb site. As soon as the coast was clear, we were over the fence and moving quickly to the back of the site. To our surprise, our hole was uncovered. We shone a torch down as we heard a faint call for help. In the beam of our torch, we saw two very dirty boys, Barry standing and Frank sitting on the rubble. “What you doing down there?” I asked them. “Trying to get out, ain’t we,” came the reply. “You’re trying to nick our fags.” “No, we’re not, we’re just looking round, anyway they aren’t your fags.” “You must have followed us, you dirty sneaks.” (We used to talk like that then!) “The police are looking for you.” “Oh hell, we’ve been here all night, Frank’s hurt his ankle, help us out.” “Jim and I got out ok, ok, but then we are clever and nimble, not like you two bozos.” “Please?” “We’ll think about it.” They carried on begging us to help them, we told them to wait, and we would get help. As we stood talking to them, Jim shone his torch down on the bomb. It had moved! Frank and Barry’s attempts to get out had caused the bomb to shift so that it had slipped further down and hung even more precariously above the drop to the cellar floor. We shouted at them to remain still and ran off to get help.

There was a Telephone Box along from the school and we ran there and excitedly rang 999 and called the police. The woman who answered sounded doubtful, as if she didn’t believe us, but they would have to check it out. We ran back to school, into the sports hall and collected one of the long thick ropes that were attached to the ceiling for us to climb. We rushed back over to the site with the rope ready to rescue our friends. Trouble was what could we fix the rope to, we weren’t strong enough to hold it, and everything else was unsafe to fix it to. As we stood there thinking and looking around two police officers arrived. They shouted as us to come out of the site, but we stood our ground and they came in to us. I thought they were going to drag us away without listening but we managed to point down to Frank and Barry, and having got their attention, we showed them the bomb. “Bloody hell,” one of them said. He stayed with us and the other one went off to get help and to evacuate the area. The policeman who stayed with us wrapped the rope round himself and we helped to pull Frank and then Barry up out of their hole. An ambulance took them off to hospital for treatment and for reunion with their parents. We all retreated to a safe distance, which was right round the other side of the school and then some.

The police called out the army bomb disposal unit; they attended quite quickly and assessed the situation. It was impossible to safely defuse the bomb in the dangerous situation it was in, nor could it be safely moved, it would have to be detonated on site. The bomb was 500lb and was going to make a mighty big bang, and was going to destroy quite a lot of nearby property. The police made sure that everyone had been safely evacuated from surrounding roads, the roads were closed off, the school evacuated and nearby windows boarded up. Then the bomb squad did what they could to contain the blast and finally they detonated the bomb. It was a wonderful big bang that felt like an earthquake, shaking every building and the ground under our feet. Smoke and ash filled the air and Jim and I couldn’t help thinking that in the smoke and ash were our cigarettes and the profit they represented, oh well.

When we were allowed back we went to look at the site, the houses either side had gone and where our site had been there was just a great big hole in the ground. The neighbours found that the leader of the Council was there; they soon gathered round and had a real go at him. If he had sorted out the site years ago, this might not have happened, what was he going to do for them now etc. He promised that those who had lost their homes would be re-housed and everyone would be fully consulted about what to do next; people from the press were there to record his promise. It was of course a big story in the local press and made the main evening news on our little black and white TV.

Jim and I were heroes, our pictures were in the papers and we were interviewed by the local radio. It was Saturday the next day, but by the Monday all four of us were back at school. It wasn’t long before we were summoned to go and see the Headmaster. Frank and Barry went in first, we could hear them getting a good telling off, and then there was the telltale swish, crack, as they were given the cane, three strokes each. We trembled in our boots as we waited our turn. We did have a little chuckle at Frank and Barry when they came out; trying to look as if the cane hadn’t hurt. Then in we went. The Head was standing in the middle of the study with a cane in his hand striking it on his other hand as he looked at us with a fierce stare. I gulped as we awaited our fate. “If ever anyone deserved a real thrashing, it’s you two, you went on the site against school rules, you took cigarettes which didn’t belong to you and you had the temerity to sell them in school. By my reckoning that means you deserve six strokes each.” He paused for effect and then continued, “Against that, you raised the alarm and saved two boys and perhaps the whole area, including the children of this school. People will remember the events of the last few days for a long time, and I want them to remember the part children from this school played as positive and good rather than as a school that produces rule breaking, money grabbing, risk taking young tearaways. Now as Jesus once said, ‘Go thy way and sin no more.’ ”

The council decided that they would ask everyone who lived around the area for their thoughts before deciding on their course of action. They held a big meeting in the school sports hall to invite opinions. Almost everyone going into the meeting went past the new bomb site, where the deep crater was now filled with water; presumably, the bomb had fractured a mains water pipe. The water-filled crater looked rather nice and gave the people a good idea, a pond would be lovely, but where could they put it? It was suggested at the meeting and was eventually agreed to extend Queens Park almost down to the road opposite the school and to incorporate a lake with an island and perhaps with some swans and ducks. They got to work almost immediately and within a few months had built a lovely lake right over the old bomb site, incorporated in an enlarged and very nice park. Everyone agreed that it was a very good use of the site and all the people who lived round about were very happy with it.

Rebecca took her thumb out, “Is that a true story, Grandad?” George smiled. “Well Rebecca, there is a lake in Queens Park, and on a stormy day, when the water in the lake is stirred up, if you look closely, they say that you may find a cigarette or two floating on the lake, perhaps some of the 40,000 cigarettes we found that exciting day, long, long ago.”

John Bourne

John Bourne is 55 and lives in Seaford with his wife. He was a Police Officer for 18 years and then a Church of England Vicar. Ill-health led to early retirement, which has given him the time to write. His first book, about his police days, has just been published by Authorhouse. It is called “Coppering The Cannon” written under the name of James Cannon.

John grew up in Brighton and knows the Queens Park area. The idea for the story came from the memory of local bomb sites in his schooldays, together with rumours about undiscovered wartime cigarettes.

Sense of a Seaside Town
by Mark Wilkinson

At first it had seemed as if the night was on fire, a murky orange light hung over the entire town. Ten thousand streetlamps conspiring to convert darkness to light. The stars could barely be seen against the sodium bulbs of the city. Breath frosted in the air, and voices echoed, hollow and unreal.

There was a sharp smell in the air, a mixture of winter and the sea. Air so fresh that it hurt to breathe it in, pure enough to choke on. Seagulls wheeled in and out of the light cast by the streetlamps, white ghosts flitting from one island of light to another. Their voices cry out with a mournful sense of loss as they one by one disappear into the gloom.

Orange fades to black as the city reaches the sea. The reflected glint of water and the sound of wave on stone are the only clues to what’s out there. The sea greedily sucks in fresh pebbles to feed its insatiable appetite, and returns the diminished cores of those digested to shore.

Down on the promenade the breeze ruffles hair, brings goose-bumps to the skin, and snatches words from the mouths of those trying to speak. Entire conversations are blown downwind. The pebbles on the beach are cold and moist, their hardness made bearable by their sea-shaped smoothness. All sharp edges are gone, each stone a unique combination of curves and gentle indents.

Seaspray, mingling with the breeze, leaves a salt taste dissolving on the tongue. Lips become numb with cold, cracked and sore from their relentless coating of salt. Licking the lips brings brine and the sharp tingling pain of broken skin.

The water itself is icy. Late night revellers dare each other to swim, wading in up to their knees then turning to flee, laughing and screaming with the cold. Brave souls dive in from the sea walls and immediately become stricken with shock, stomach and leg cramps. Hearts beating like lump-hammers and skin turned to ice, sobered in seconds, they come crawling back to the shore.

The sky begins to lighten, a deep blue visible on the horizon. The sea gains colour, gulls reawaken. Night is fading into day. Lights appear on the promenade, the seafront cafes are opening for business. The smell of frying bacon drifts lazily over the breeze, tempting the early morning dog walkers, enticing the joggers to leave their diets behind.

Slowly the town is waking, the sounds of the gulls drowned out by the traffic, the promenade busy with those who have leisure during the day. The streetlights are replaced by the sun, drunkenness by sobriety. Commerce reawakens and fills the time between sunrise and sunset. Then the day has rolled around and we may resume our lives, in the halflight of the evening.

Mark Wilkinson

‘I was born in 1975 in Brighton, and have lived here ever since. The piece included in this collection of short stories was inspired by a strong feeling of isolation that I encountered after the death of my mother.

I couldn’t feel anything, it was as if I were viewing somebody else’s life rather than my own. While that sense of isolation has receded from me now, I wanted to record it, and I had particularly vivid memories of a nocturnal seafront stroll one night. Hope it’s worth reading, you know who it’s for.’