Adventures In A Difficult World (chapter Two) part one

CHAPTER Two (part one)
Hull

Do-do-dodo-do-da! All this do-doing is just to show you ghost readers, that I am really in a very good mood, that is, until I start talking about something that will probably rake my guts out from beneath the fingernails... My unhappy beginning.
Well, where shall I begin? The big bang? The Logos? No? What brush strokes of recall shall I paint for you -- to rebuild my now demolished past from slippery mind stuff into a palpable reality on paper? And to show you the brush strokes of my passed decisions that have painted my very life.
In the beginning was the word.... O ghost of memory. Time, time -- the luxury of gods. Time is like a wind that blows away the chaff and leaves what we call memory. Like the sculptor, the writer must also chip away to reveal what is significant.
The time is my time -- the sad millennium of my childhood. A time when clocks charmed and alarmed. And we were the people of the clock that tick tocks, and the tick-tocking, that was in every household kept the pace of the plodding life of the Isle of Blighty – Englishshire, Regina, Albion, this Jerusalem....
It was a slow sand-glass-time, that slipped and fell, and yet, flew by on unseen wings. A time when the map of the world was still stained -- but fast fading -- with that British Empire-pink. A time when the flag was still the religion, and every congregations like automata still got quickly to their feet on hearing the opening plaintive bars of 'God Save The Queen'. A time shortly after what the Celts poetically called 'the weave of men', when bombs had fallen like rain from the skies over Europe. And the hate of men with horror in their wake sought out some to kill, but mostly they were indiscriminate. A hate, which only finished when we were kicking and banging at the doors of hell with the big penis-bomb, with its mushroom ejaculation -- the scientific orgasm -- the ultimate ego trip. It was a time still poisoned by the effects of that war, which had contaminated everything: people, feelings, places, objects, religions. And it was a time, another time, pre TV, pre jet-planes, pre calculators, pre-PCs, pre-youth culture, pre, pre, pre.
And the place, was the fish-dockside slums of Hull -- yes, you may well ask, where is Hull -- only two hundred miles from the centre of the British Empire, yet, as forgotten as an unwashed armpit. A place that had been trod on by Greville's 'black ox'. A place that is fixed in in my mind. A place where happiness and unhappiness both seemed to come from the same old bottle.
When I look back at the slum through my smoky recall, I think of it as an immense masticating gob -- slowly grinding everything down. With human psyches rolled and chewed up with it. A slow, foaming, rasping gob of decay, with its very own stink and filth, which contrived its way into the mouse-houses, regardless, and in spite of the great and constant efforts of most of the women, as they, with my mother among them, swept, scrubbed, and scraped at the ten types of shit and dust with the patience of a Job or a Sisyphus.
The decaying slum stretched with cancerous, trifid like fingers West from the city centre. Where maybe twenty terraced streets stood arse to scabby arse on both sides of the Hessle Road, which ran parallel to the fish-dock and the River Humber. With only a pair of railway tracks and a single line of fish-factories and timber-yards separating the streets from the docks.
I lived in Gillette Street, aka, Razor Blade Alley, at the bank-end, which was closest to the docks -- so close, you could see the mask tops of the moored trawlers above the roof-line of the fish-factories, etched against an, oh-so-often, soul sucking led-grey sky. As a child I would lay listening throughout the night to the tugs on the river blowing their noses like crying whales: haunting; truly haunting.
They say the sense of smell is the most primitive of the senses; thus, the most evocative! And so it is a hot Summer's day that is fixed most firmly in the mind when I think of that unfashionable fish-aromatic part of town. When the sun shined and burnt up every exposed corner, the stench of spoiling fish from the factories and the docks would drift over the streets and cloy the air. Then every breath you took, every meal you ate would co-mingle with that vaporous bouquet of rotting fish! The fetor came and left with the whim of the wind. Easterly winds blew it away over the sea, then the air for a while was fresh and rare as silver. But, it would always return with a vengeance when the wind dropped or blew over from the docks.
The greatest stench came from the ever growing mountains of rotting fish-offal which stood waiting to be turned into pet food and fertiliser. For the seas were plentiful then, unlike now, after we have raped and violated them -- like we violate everything. But back then, in the fifties and sixties, the ships brought fish in abundance -- it poured in, it tumbled in, it almost swam into the hungry jaws of the slum. And was the only work for the people, who, along with their houses like holes, and the stinking factories, only existed in fish-town, .for fish, and of fish.
When I close my eyes and picture that airless and embroiled street in the weary heat of that slum-summer day, I see a hectic madhouse of traffic -- a helter-skelter of chaos. I see a stream of lorries heavily loaded with ten stone barrels of fish coming from the docks, passing through, or going to one of the numerous factories in the street. And always returning later loaded with evermore of that god dam stinking fish-offal. There are also the cars of the office workers going to work, and the fat overfed fish buyers passing through after the early morning fish market. Returning to the over-world in their big expensive shiny cars. There are the fleets of taxis, in tune with the tides, going to deliver, or pick up the fishermen arriving home after their three or four weeks in the Arctic fishing grounds of Norway, Iceland, or Greenland. Or ferrying them around for their three days at home. And I see vehicles of all shapes and sizes carrying, hither and thither, the myriad of paraphernalia involved in the fishing industry: pieces of large machinery, mountains of ice, food-stuffs, miles and miles of fishing-nets, etc. And I see, there are still a few horse and carts on the roads, though they are quickly disappearing.

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