The Marples is gone.
The cinema on Norfolk is gone.
Bramall Lane, Atkinson’s Department Store and the entire top of Angel Street: all gone.
Nine pubs, two breweries, eight schools and the Woolworths.
The Spiritualist Church is replaced by a hole in the ground, which immediately begins filling with water.
The lot where the kids play cricket and rugby, or threaten each other with imaginary concealed weapons, or sit on each other’s chests and rub the backs of their heads in dog shit, is ripped entirely from the Earth, where the pockets of soil coalesce into a flock of birds, an octopus, a steam engine, and later—years later, of course, once Chris Eaton’s father realises his calling, and the little hero himself is, at the very least, alive—is developed into the Kelvin Flats, a housing development for people who can barely afford it but are convinced anyway.
Change. It takes so little time. For centuries, England has been an island resistant to outside influence. They are the ones who spread their ideas, their discoveries, their philosophies. Their Earl Grey. A cultural exporter. Civilisation is what you call it. Just imagine where the Americas would be without them. But war brings the world together. Especially a World War, which by its very name belongs to everyone. This isn’t just a case of England vs. Germany. Or even England vs. Germany and The Soviet Union. They have The World Cup for that. They have the Olympics. This is just the world—and mostly Europe, really, at this stage—returning Britain’s favour. Here’s your salad bowl. Your casserole of colonialism. The seeds of change, carried across the North Sea on the wings of giant, misguided, post-historic birds that buzz like insects and are easily distracted by bright things. KABOOM! There goes the tannery. KABLOOIE! Two tasteless bakeries and a sweets shop; a cobbler that specializes in galoshes; a boutique that sells nothing but marmalades; his father’s elementary school, just days after he started attending it. No one has any idea what’s going on. Neither, coincidentally, do the Germans. Their ponderous, humming birds have been trained to follow the river but are caught in the gleam of the streetcar tracks below. When they let their cargo fall, they believe they are somewhere else entirely.
Maybe even in a different time.
Of course, on the Sheffield outskirts, near the Firth Browns Steelworks and the factories, they’re expecting this. They realise things have to change. Sheets of armoured plate, for the boys at the front, are abandoned on their assembly lines, and the employees lie like corpses under the stairs, and pray that no hit will be direct. Closer to the centre, in those downtown areas where wars are not supposed to touch, the air raid sirens fall on deaf ears, particularly in the movie theatres, where half the city’s high society has spilled out to forget about such things, to catch one of the year’s best hopes at an Oscar, Chaplin’s Great Dictator. But just as the little tramp is first mistaken for the enemy Führer (“Strange, and I thought you were an Aryan.” “No, I’m a vegetarian…”), there’s an announcement from Heeley Bottom, and then Sheff Park. The projector switch is clicked, and the screen flickers spastically to a white so bright the audience has to shield their eyes.
Outside, the city is ablaze with new growth. Those who dare to venture forth from the cellars and underpasses are caught up in shoots of brick and mortar that project upwards faster than they can furnish each floor. They’re trapped somewhere around the fifth floor and can’t see the ground for the shoots of fire that spread like canal grass. Anything wood, which is out of date stylistically, is coming down faster than you can say bangers and mash. The city’s remaining men—the ones unable to fight on the mainland—surround the blaze with buckets of earth and sand, making sure those seeds are buried good and deep. Here’s where Meadowhall Centre will erupt from the ground like an urgent sapling. Here’s where they will rebuild the football stadium. This spot directly under our feet, after a little over a decade of near-silent germination, will be the site of the Kelvin Flats. At thirteen floors and a third of a mile of solid depression, it will be one of the most popular suicide locations in the area.
Back in the 1940s, they have no trouble finding ways to die. His grandfather left with his brothers to make sure this import-export business, this trade of bullets and bombs, was not unilateral. And oh, how they died! The eldest never even saw battle, drowned during training procedures at Ford Ord when he convinced one of the tank drivers to let him take one for a spin, steeping the Crusader in the river. The next, Great Uncle William, who was schooled as a mining engineer, was selected by a special missions unit to tunnel under German lines and set off charges beneath the enemy trenches, just like they did at Messines Ridge in WWI, but with nothing but a pick-axe, a canary and a compass; he had already succeeded in undermining the fronts at CLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED, and was making his way towards CLASSIFIED, when his compass was attracted to the iron deposits of the mines in CLASSIFIED, and he mistakenly created another underground effluent for the nearby river. Exhausted during the rainy march to the front, Great Uncle Nelson pitched face first into a mud puddle and never looked up again, although most likely he would have died from the venereal disease he picked up from a prostitute in London before even shipping out. And Great Uncle Timothy, the youngest, who liked to collect exotic fish and sail paper boats down the canal behind the steelworks, constantly devising special folds in order to create more and more elaborate rowboats, lifeboats, and double-ended sailboats; dinghies; Turkish caïques; Irish currachs; cobles and coracles; kayaks and umiaks; punts and junks; luggers and nuggars; galleons, battleships and aircraft carriers; and gradually perfecting his kraftmanship to create everything from a catamaran and trimaran through septamaran to dodecamaran, halted only by his inability to find a sheet of paper large enough to fold into a vessel with thirteen hulls side by side; Great Uncle Timothy, the sensitive artist, who managed before he was even twelve to harness the power of the nearby creek to power a small generator his sister could use to power a tiny oven for making small cakes; Great Uncle Timothy, the innovator, who tumbled into a pool when he was three, and subsequently wept at any attempt to teach him to swim until his parents simply gave up; Great Uncle Timothy, the crybaby, was captured in France in 1941, and deported to Germany a year later, where he spent fifteen months in captivity before being shot because the camp was running low on rations. When news of the first three deaths reached their mother, the poor woman refused to take another bath, or even go out in the rain.
She only dies after the first of her sons—the drum major—returns alive from the continent, standing at the curb and wringing his hat in his hands.
When his grandfather returned from his post in the war, planting his drumsticks in the front yard like they were a flag, like he was marking this part of Sheffield as his territory and god help anyone who so much as stared cross-eyed at it, there was a hole he could not fill. A hole he could not explain. Something was missing. So, he started with the roof, and the ceiling in his mother’s room. Then he filled the holes made by the incendiary missiles in the fields behind their house. Against the recommendations of friends and neighbours, he packed the entire bomb shelter with soil and covered the entrance.
This made him happier.
Still, it was not enough.
Luckily, there were even more holes in London, which were then being filled with American greenbacks, provided to the UK through the Marshall Plan, which was created as much as an American PR stunt for repelling communism as it was a European rebuilding fund. A similar financial offer was made to the Soviet Union, provided they follow a list of demands that would lead to their political and social reform, but the American government was so afraid the Russians might just take the money and run that they made the list almost impossible to meet. Boarding the train to London each morning, Chris Eaton’s grandfather shovelled dollars into ditches and sat back to watch the American seed money grow in the only way it knew how: straight up, blossoming into residential towers and high-rise flats, great plumes of brick and reinforced concrete that weighed heavily on the soil and choked out the skyline. Chris Eaton’s grandfather was elated, having long since begun to feel the oppressive weight of the holes he could now feel in the sky above him. Then someone wrote a study that said high-rises made people depressed. It was the birth of the suburbs. Discouraged, he stopped boarding the train.
Around that same time, the government started up a programme for vets, facilitating the transition to civilian life by training them as security guards, cross-walk guards, valets, mailroom management, mailroom operations, couriers and dispatchers, weigh-scale operators, managing complaint desks and wildlife control. He chose the parking lot because, once again, although it wasn’t the most exciting job in the world, it involved more space to fill. Then, towards the end of the seventies, the average car length dropped from twenty feet to somewhere closer to seventeen. He repainted his lines and found he could fit another dozen cars; fifteen if he parked them himself. Throughout the eighties, another two feet fell to history, and this time he discovered that pivoting the entire layout, running it parallel to the street instead of perpendicular, brought him another four vehicles. (By this time, he parked everything himself.) Whereas he used to spend half of his days reading the newspaper or playing solitaire, he now used all of his time arranging and rearranging the cars in the lot. Parallel, perpendicular, diagonally. In star patterns and spirals. In 1611, Johannes Kepler challenged himself to discover the most space-efficient way to pack oranges leaving as few gaps as possible. Mimicking the stacks of cannonballs he witnessed on ships, he found he could make the exotic fruits occupy 74.04% of the total space. So Chris Eaton’s grandfather tried that, staggering the cars, alternating rows between cars that faced north-south and east-west, producing even more space in some cases depending on the particular makes and models. He also tried parking them in self-contained squares: two cars parallel followed by two perpendicular. And by the end of it all, he’d found space for another five cars. On a good day, six.
It just made it harder to get them back out.
He spent more and more time at the lot, requesting overnight shifts at the locations where he knew people parked overnight, for maximum time with the same vehicles. Sometimes he’d fall asleep at his calculations and Mr Chisolm, who came around at midnight to collect the cash from the register, would have to poke him with his cane through the box where he accepted the money, or shake the entire booth. There were normally only a few people who would pay to park after that time, and it was the unspoken rule that whoever worked the late shift could keep that extra money as a tip.
In the February 8 edition of The Sheffield Star (1992), the name of the war veteran who was knifed for twenty-seven pounds as he was getting ready to head home for his job at the car park is not even mentioned.
Chris Eaton’s grandmother, Cordelia Eaton (née Barratt), hated Sheffield until the day she died, popping and snapping down the stairs like a bag of doorknobs, arms and legs forgetting their place and going everywhichwayatonce. She’d been legally blind for two years but had refused to tell anyone, preferring instead to sit still when people came to visit, and when she was alone, accompanied by nothing but the high-pitch squeal of her malfunctioning hearing aids, crawling across the countertops to press her face directly against every box of cornstarch and dried soup mix. The only one she confided in was Arthur, the mysterious stranger who showed up at her funeral and shook quietly in the back of the new modern Lutheran church, of all places, which was best described—and was described by several of Corrie’s more distant and Anglican relations—as looking like a child had made it with a gigantic shoebox and scissors. Corrie saw the razing of Sheffield as its true nature finally revealed. The place was rotten, she often said. With its lack of cultural arts and its goonish football thuggery. And she was constantly reminding them of her idyllic youth near Newcastle-under-Lyme, dressed in her favourite cream-coloured frock with a wide and heavy straw hat, quietly kicking her foal-like legs against the wall. In Newcastle, people would greet her as they passed. In Sheffield, they had eyes so heavy they rolled down into breast pockets. In Sheffield, their noses were like weathervanes, twisting their faces whichever way the wind blew.
To Chris, who had always had aspirations of being a writer, and who would help her with the crosswords on Sundays, she left her entire collection of books, including:
This was Bennett’s first novel about the Potteries, a name given to the six communities that spread to the east of Newcastle like a fantastic, shimmering child’s soap bubble. The town of Fenton was lost to Bennett mostly because he found the word five much more euphonious than six. The volume is signed.
Inspired by the evolutionary work of Charles Darwin, Bennett was part of the naturalist movement in literature, whereby the lives of characters were greatly influenced by heredity and one’s social environment. Bennett believed, like Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola before him and John Steinbeck shortly after, that the lives of ordinary people had the potential to be the subject of interesting books. He also took on the less popular stance that the same could be achieved with the other, inanimate minutiae of life, and his books contain prosaic and wearisome lists of pottery and ceramics tools and processes, from the blunger to the sagger or the muffle, sculpting scalloped lambreqins with a half-inch Acacia thumb tool and then applying the most delicate glost with bundled Japanese hemp palm stems. At parties, he was known to entertain people by reciting a quite comprehensive list of the most famous makes of china and porcelain: Adams, Belleek, Bow, Bristol, Chelsea, Coalport, Copeland, Crown Staffordshire, Davenport, Dresden, Goss, Limoges, Longton Hall, Meissen, Minto, Rockingham, Rosenthal, Royal Copenhagen, Royal Doulton, Royal Worcester (thank goodness for five Rs in a row), Sèvres, Spode, Sunderland, Swansea and Wedgwood.
Cordelia’s own father was said to have been an inspiration for one of Bennett’s characters, to which the signature and inscription—To a great friend—can attest. Every day, Great-Grandpa Barratt stepped gingerly across the West Coast Main Line railway and the A500, from Newscastle-under-Lyme to Burslem, past the crimson chapels and rows of little red houses and amber chimney pots, and the gold angel of the Town Hall. For centuries her father’s family—the Barratts—had worked making felt hats, an industry that at one point employed nearly a third of the city’s population. Then in the late 1800s, for reasons that were initially blamed on resentment towards the upper class, they suddenly went out of fashion and the whole family was forced out of their livelihoods. Similarly on her mother’s side, the Hanleys (for whom the area known as Hanley Green had been named) had been employed for generations in the fashioning of clay pipes, until the industrial revolution effectively made the hand-carved puffer an object of historical interest rather than purchase. Without a family business to inherit, even through his inlaws, Corrie’s father was forced to sink beneath his station and find something more menial. The youngest of nine children, he’d never been properly prepared for making hats, anyway, and so was possibly more disposed than his siblings to taking on something else, several of whom must have turned to stealing loaves of bread and/or dysentry. The only thing holding him back was the optimism he’d been raised with, spoiled for so long by all his siblings that he was sure some fine job would eventually come his way. Once Cordelia was born and he discovered pessimism to be just as agreeable, he was able to take a job sweeping floors at the Wade Ceramics company in Burslem and be just as satisfied.
For young Corrie, things could not have been better. Her father was permitted to accidentally break two pieces per fortnight without anyone’s docking his pay. Instead, he broke nothing, and rewarded himself by bringing two unbroken pieces home inside the pockets of his coveralls to his daughter. In those days, Wade Ceramics was just shifting its focus from traditional pots to the burgeoning industry of collectibles: mostly small animal figurines but also Biblical scenes, and during the first World War, comical caricatures of the German Kaiser in compromising positions; so every second week he absconded with a hippo or a wise man, and once or twice, a British Mark IV tank.
Corrie only left the area after meeting Burnell, who entered her life by securing a position as a driver for one of the country’s first fleet of rubber-tired trucking companies, acquiring finished work in the Potteries and transporting them safely (on a cushion of air) down the A500 to London and beyond. This was the first thing the Germans dropped on the UK, the Daimler and Benz companies, no more than half a day from each other in Canstatt and Manheim, both independently releasing lightweight trucks in 1896, and hitting British shores by 1900 with the five-tonne model. Burnell Eaton was not always the best driver—on his first day on the job, he backed the truck out too soon and took out the passenger door on the side of the garage—but he showed an immediate aptitude for cramming more goods into his van than anyone else seemed able to manage. Most of her figurines were destroyed in the move to Sheffield, crystallized beneath the dance of a large gilt mirror that she hated. It, of course, emerged undamaged.
The author’s signature is a forgery, crafted by a friend of great-grandpa Barratt to impress his daughter on her sixteenth birthday.
When Cordelia Eaton first became disenfranchised with the extravagance of the religious establishment, her son loaned her this book and she never gave it back. An American architect of Lutheran faith, Edward Sövik is held responsible in many circles for the unwarranted torture and systematic disfiguration of sacred architecture. This book, the one that started it all, is about the state of contemporary sacred architecture in the West, and how the period between the Norman conquest of England and the Reformation lured both Roman Catholic and Protestant church architects away from God’s original intent with the promise of their own personal immortality. In the book, Sövik begins with the three natural laws of that middle period, used in evaluating local churches: verticality (reaching to the heavens), permanence (transcending space and time), and iconography (the building itself as art), and then dispels them as counterproductive to the original tenets of Christianity. Naturally, early Christians had worshipped in homes, fearing persecution from the Roman authorities. But after its legalisation under Constantine and gradual adoption as the Empire’s official religion, one-room wooden sanctuaries sprung up across Europe. In the middle ages, just as advances in building technologies allowed more and more spectacular feats of construction in the name of God, the separation of man and ministry became even more distinct, dividing the worship space into the nave, for the meeting of the congregation, and the second was the dominion of the clergy, where Mass was observed, while the parishioners observed from afar. Returning to the religion’s roots, he claimed, and restoring the idea that God was everywhere, Sövik re-imagined the church as a one-room meeting place again, in the most unassuming structures one might ever imagine. Only God can make a building a Church, he said. And He could make it out of anything He wanted.
Attached to this book by an elastic band is a small Moleskine notebook. Cordelia had become obsessed with Sövik’s theories, and had nearly filled this notebook cover to cover with small sketches she’d made of her own hypothetical churches, each one dated carefully in the upper right corner so that they knew she’d been working on them for decades. When her husband had been off counting cars at the parking lot, Corrie had often spent her days hunched over the miniature collapsible linoleum kitchen table, beginning with ideas much like the professional designs of Sövik—albeit much cruder—but then building on them to become even smaller and more speculative. If God could make a building a Church, could He not then do the same for small boxes, or whisky tumblers, or bathtubs, or even objects with no insides, like trees or clothespins, or abstract concepts like sorrow or happiness. When her husband died, for example, she made a Church out of her sorrow, which she depicted in her sketchbook as an area of complete emptiness, devoid of anything, because that was what she felt; she’d never shown the sketches to Burnell because she was afraid he might not understand, and laugh. Similarly on another page, there was only the spot that was left when she pressed the pencil so hard against it that the lead snapped, leaving an uneven smudge with no room for any sort of extravagance or personal baggage.
Slightly out of place at first glance, a children’s book with the story told in large letters read phonetically in the place of words (e.g. See the bee!), this book also contains an inscription: C, I ♥ U, A. After her husband was murdered for pocket change, Cordelia would sometimes play bridge at a nearby church, which happened to be a Catholic survivor of both wars, trying her hardest to ignore the flashiness of it because she needed the social benefits. She was still immensely healthy for her age, however, in body and mind, and she found the competition levels wanting. But before she could stop, she was recruited by one of the supervising parishioners to deliver “meals on wheels” to less mobile seniors, and it was here that she met Arthur, who was not invalid so much as he was afraid to leave his home. He wouldn’t even come to the door when she rang the bell, but would wait behind the curtains until he could see the automatic lock on her car doors click down. One day she left him a note with his bowl of stewed prunes, asking if he might like to accompany her to the end of his block and back, which was something he had not imagined in years, and he accepted. The next week, she sat beside him while he wrote a letter—he had no one to write to, but he didn’t want to tell her this—and then walked with him to the end of the subdivision so he could drop it in a post box. They sat on a park bench without speaking. They read the marquee outside the VUE cinema at the Meadowhall Shopping Centre and then just kept walking. She showed him her church sketches, and he didn’t laugh. At the blank page, he cried.
The book was the only one Cordelia could read in her final years, a gift from Arthur, and she read it daily.
At the funeral, Arthur introduced himself as their grandmother’s lover. His satchel was full of Wade figurines he’d been collecting off eBay and waiting for the right time to give them to her. For the next year and a half, Chris Eaton’s parents invited Arthur over every Sunday for dinner. On a handful of occasions, he brought wine. But most of the time he brought nothing.
Then, one day, Chris Eaton’s father received a call at his office:
“I loved her so much,” the man sobbed into the other end of the phone.
“…”
“I miss her so much…”
“Me too.”
Several hours later, Robert Eaton was called to come down to the police station. To identify the latest body at the base of the Kelvin Flats. None of the figurines in his pockets carried even a scratch.
Chris Eaton is a writer and musician from Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, living in Toronto. His novels and his music (he’s the Rock Plaza Central guy! the one who wrote the critically-acclaimed sci-fi concept album about robotic horses who think they’re real horses!) have both already been studied on university courses in Canada and the US. Hungry Generations will also be included in Chris’s forthcoming ebook from Joyland/ECW, due in the fall of 2010.