A Year With the Brighouse Stars Walking Club - Farewell Our Lionel

Warning. Readers of the previous adventures of the Brighouse Stars Walking Club may find that the following episode induces feelings of overwhelming sadness.

A Year With the Brighouse Stars Walking Club – Farewell Our Lionel

The time had come for Lionel and Sarah to depart.

The assembled crowd sensed it.

Beers had been supped, wine had been slurped, hands had been shaken, and hugs, pecks and kisses had been exchanged. Heathcliff had played the basic chords from Rocket Man, newly learned and just about recognisable, on his euphonium.

St John wandered off into the undergrowth, ostensibly to have a pee, but in reality to give himself some time to compose himself after getting a good old blubber out of the way. These last few months he’d grown very fond of Lionel, which made his leaving – and knowing that he’d never see him again - that much harder to bear.

What a remarkable last few months it had been.

Lionel (his self-styled given name) had landed in West Yorkshire from the planet Mexidon in May. St John and a few of the other lads in the walking club had met with Lionel and his planet’s executive at the edge of our galaxy and successfully secured the future of planet Earth by – and there’s no other way to put this - getting the Mexidon representation pissed.

The lads in the club had been surprised at first that Lionel had chosen to return to live among them in Brighouse (they thought that perhaps his humungous brain had some form of wiring fault) but they thought that all in all he’d made a decent fist of living on a new planet, what with his extraordinary features - the huge head and the one large eye and all. His internal plumbing was all but sorted and as far his new appendage went, well he’d certainly put that to good use.

He’d a good bunch of mates at the walking club and being domiciled in West Yorkshire he was assured of living quietly among the locals, many of whom at first glance would appear not to hail from this planet either.

The turning point had come when Lionel had met Sarah, the girl destined to become the love of his life.

Eli and Fannie Hershberger had arrived in England from Ohio towards the end of the last century. Their elders back in Holmes County had given them specific instructions to find the wildest, most God forsaken place they could, and to put down their Amish roots there. They had of course gone directly to Lancashire to try and establish a community there, but they had been driven ever eastwards by the various warring tribes they encountered. They had eventually reached safety and managed to secure board and lodgings with a group of cattle rustlers in Mankinholes.

Sarah, their only child, was born in 2000. The first twenty or so years of her life proved to be singularly unremarkable as she lived among the now thriving Todmorden Amish fellowship established by Eli and Fannie. Then Sarah, who had been growing ever more desirous of experiencing more of what life had to offer, had fallen in with a bad crowd at the Todmorden Mecca Bingo Hall and had started drinking regularly at The Short-Sighted Labrador post the last Speed Bingo game.

There she met Lionel. Sarah immediately thought him somehow different to the available male population of Todmorden. Not so much in his physical appearance of course, but more that he had little interest in whippet racing, ratting and fine dining involving rabbit cooked four ways. Lionel struck Sarah – being a dreamer at heart - as being well just plain other worldly.

They were soon besotted with each other.

The elders in the fellowship didn’t hold with fraternising with anyone outside of their own community, never mind a space alien, so Sarah was excommunicated and she moved in above the pub.

Lionel didn’t own a vehicle (if you discount his interplanetary craft) and in any event hadn’t been able to acquire a provisional driving licence. The jobsworth at the DVLC had seen to that when Lionel – notwithstanding any amount of cropping – simply could not make the photo of his oversized head fit within the border parameters allowed on his driving licence.

So Sarah got to picking him up after closing time and going for drives up to remote spots overlooking the lights of the Upper Calder Valley. They would spend hours in Sarah’s horse drawn buggy, marvelling at the lights, talking about the universe and that, and kissing and cuddling. Their embraces began to last longer and longer and soon the inevitable happened.

Sarah was already moaning the word ‘yes’ as Lionel held her even tighter and whispered in her ear, ‘Sarah?’

‘Yes please now Lionel’

‘I must tell thee summat’.

‘Yes but quickly please my love’

‘It’s only reight that tha’ knows, but ah’m from another planet.’

Without in any way wishing to ruin the eroticism of the moment, a note by way of clarification here. Lionel – coming from a distant galaxy – had been fitted with an internal language convertor to enable him to converse while on planet Earth. The programme developers back on his planet had used the recordings of millions of hours of speech from Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Parkinson, resulting in Lionel having a thick Yorkshire accent together with a technically flawless forward defensive stroke, should that ever be needed.

Any road up, to continue……….

‘Oh’, said Sarah.

‘And ah want thee to consider comin’ back wi’ me to t’planet as me missis, if tha’ll ave me that is’.

‘And can I ask how far away your planet might be?’ enquired Sarah.

‘13.5 billion light years, gee or tek’, answered Lionel.

Now up to this point in her life Sarah had never been further than Lytham St Annes. One of her ambitions had always been to travel, but in her own mind she was thinking more European City Break rather than a journey of more than 13.5 billion light years to a planet that she was sure wouldn’t be found in any travel brochure.

‘If it ‘elps swing it, ah thinks tha’t best lookin’ lass this side o’t Pennines’, said Lionel.

Sarah blushed, ‘Oh go on then, you sweet talking space creature you’.

That’s not to say that Sarah didn’t have a million and one questions.

Will we have our own house?

What’s the chemical structure of the atmosphere on Mexidon?

How many pairs of shoes should she pack? And should she pack her Dr Martens in case the gravitational pull proves to be too weak?

What’s the luggage allowance on the spaceship?

Lionel simply batted them all away with a simple ‘Be reight love’.

The lads in the club had known that as soon as Lionel had met Sarah, it was a question of when and not if he would take her back to Mexidon. Even before he had met Sarah, Lionel had been growing more and more restless. He’d travelled 13.5 billion light years and yet he was warned against travelling outside the boundaries of Yorkshire.

Wolfy had taken to building fires in his back garden in the evening and over sizzling sausages would regale Lionel with tales of when the lads had walked outside of God’s own county. Lionel was entranced by magical names such as Oswaldtwistle, Great Cockup and Old Man Bottom.

Wolfy even drove them both to within sight of Checkpoint Charlie Cock on the M62 at the border with Lancashire for a glimpse of that strange, mysterious land beyond.

And there were other dangers emerging. 

The Daily Mail had got wind of an extraterrestrial being living in West Yorkshire and had a reporter sniffing around. The sub-editors had the sensational headline all prepared and ready to go when an alternative story came to their attention concerning a woman in Barnoldswick who was fraudulently claiming disability benefits for her two gerbils. In fact video evidence had shown the two rodents were perfectly healthy, working away furiously on their running wheels, so – fortunately for Lionel - the Mail’s reporter was quickly diverted to this other sensational headline grabber.

However, that fateful decision day that the lads knew was coming arrived when St John decided to take Lionel along to the One Day International cricket match between England and Australia at Headingley.

They had seats on the Western Terrace which meant that Lionel, with his strange alien features, would at least blend in with the vast majority of spectators seated there. They took their allotted places with Lionel sporting a newly purchased Cricket England bucket hat perched precariously atop his huge head.

St John had always considered cricket to be something of a metaphor for life, and coupled with his interest in Buddhism, he was curious to know how Lionel would interpret the day, despite him not yet being fully conversant with the concept of human suffering.

He didn’t have long to wait for that to change.

No sooner had they started to get stuck into the Chicken Balti Pies that St John had brought along in his cool box, when a group of Aussie supporters in the East Stand caught sight of Lionel. They quickly struck up a chorus of ‘What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking hell is that, what the fucking hell is that?’ (trad arr., lyrics by Cole Porter).

‘Are yon lot on abart me?’, asked Lionel.

‘They are lad, but pay them no mind’, replied St John.

But as he stole a look at his friend and glimpsed the tear rolling down his nose from the large central eye, he knew in that moment that Lionel had made his decision.

**************************************************************************

St John stepped out of the undergrowth – adjusted his zip fly for effect - stood and addressed the small throng. Were there tears in his eyes? Hard to tell behind his Reactolite lenses but the chances were odds on. He wasn’t alone.

‘The time has come when I, St John, last of the de Bottoms of Brighouse, and on behalf of the Brighouse Stars Walking Club, must bid bon voyage to our good friend Lionel and to dear Sarah.’

The Hello! Magazine photographer continued to fuss around the crowd.

St John – unbeknown to the rest of the lads in the club – had struck a deal with Hello! Magazine. If Lionel was leaving – never to return – then what was the harm. Additionally, in his own mind he justified the selling of Lionel’s story in the knowledge that he would be using the fee received to buy stuff for the walking club that had hitherto been seen as novelty items, such as maps and compasses.

Lionel and Sarah – standing in separate recesses in the spacecraft - held hands across the intervening wall.

Sarah smiled nervously and Lionel shouted ‘It’s been real. Ah’ll sithee’. Having spent his time on Earth in Yorkshire, Lionel was a space alien of few words.

The nearside space of the craft materialised into a solid wall and then the spaceship was gone.

A stillness descended on the crowd. They all knew at that moment that life would never be the same again.

‘Do you think he’ll send us a postcard’, asked Heathcliff. St John rolled his eyes and struck him across the back of the head with a laminated Ordnance Survey map (OL 21 South Pennines purchased courtesy of part of the fee secured from Hello! magazine).

It started to rain……….