Digging for Victory

All these postage stamp gardens had once been part of something grander. Long before they were divided, bordered by trellised fences crawling with exotic creeping vines, they had constituted the grounds and gardens of a long-gone house that stood up on the highest point of Decarion Grove, where the featureless post-war flats now stand, knocked up over the bomb craters and broken bare walls of the shattered houses. Those blocks stand out like an inkblot on a Breughel painting but even the surrounding Victorian homes, crammed into terraces for the poor, now owned by the affluent, are an insult to the majesty of what they usurped. The big old house, it’s footprint would have smothered one of these new-born crescents, spanning the width of a cul-de-sac, the length of an avenue. It had stood empty for a generation, before it had burnt down, mysteriously, which is often the way; no mundane conflagrations for the big houses.  

A sandstone block or three may have been recycled, incorporated into the building of the new houses, but the interloper dwellings were mostly built in bricks of London red.  All the little patchwork gardens, however, behind all the little back doors, contained the same old soil, rich with the same old exudations. 

Nowadays, the after-work soirees, the November firework gatherings and the high summer barbecue garden parties are tame affairs, behaviours clipped by expectations and social mores, revellers acutely aware of being watched from a dozen similar little surrounding plots.  

Language kerbed. 

Times kept to. 

Clothes kept on.  

Back when it was all of one, high walls and hedges kept it secure and secluded. Separate. There was no-one to judge, or witness; the locals could only see – from afar – the lights, and hear the singing, the howling, the ... screaming.  

Everyone parties differently.  

And the last Lord knew how to party, as his legal team would have it. His proclivities saw him banned from his clubs, drummed out for nefarious practices, while suffering lazy accusations of devil worship, despite him laughing at the notion of such a creature and its imaginary foes. His riposte that he was no Christian did nothing to win over his enemies, or renew his membership.  

“What is it then?” said Carstairs, his only remaining friend, in their last conversation.  

“What is it, exactly, that you’re bothering?’ 

“Something older,” said the Lord, “Something from before the farmers, and the hollow hills and standing stones.” 

Nothing beyond what any child can conjure up, for children come fresh into the world, unhindered by convention, not steeped in stories of how things were, are and will be. Unfettered as they are, they are free to wander, to drift, to be blown into corners of the world not looked into, if the wind blows in the right direction. And the wind was blowing now, out from before and into the now.  

He was rich enough, titled enough, to be deemed eccentric rather than insane, until even his inherited wealth dwindled to the point of embarrassment, for rather than speculating in trade, land, slaves and gold, he had invested in science, and untrammelled experience. Necrophilia and new hats. Sex-magic and silver-topped canes. Raising gods and riding to hounds. The rewards were limitless, but afforded poor financial returns. The house was crumbling. He was poor enough to be declared deranged. But he still had enough of the folding to blag his way out of St Cecil’s for the Dangerous Upper Classes and make it back to the big house for one last hurrah.  

A garden party.  

And everyone knew what that meant. Shackles and cages were loaded into handsome cabs by overworked manservants. Girls and dogs and boys and cats and anything else caught wandering the poorer quarters of the capital and nearby towns and villages, were snatched up and transported to the grounds of the big house on the hill, in what has now been swallowed by South London.  

But on the big night he walked grim-faced amongst the depravity, concentrating, watching, occasionally stopping to encourage his guests to go further, perform that act, commit that atrocity, wallow in the aftermath, go beyond... 

Until there was... a rent in the fabric, a gaping hole in what the world is made of.  

His guests were oblivious, although many suffered later, from headaches, nightmares, visions, bleeding. But the Lord stared hard into that space, and the raw energy, willing it to form, to his wishes. No-one recalled watching him doing any such thing. No-one remembered much. No-one could say where he went after that. The house was left abandoned and the Lord was forgotten about.  But the land remembered.  

Children here were from better homes, banned from computers and pushed outside to recreate the golden age of their own parents’ childhood, but with crash helmets and knee protection, free to wander but only under close observation in memorial parks, out of sight only when visiting friends, and keeping constant radio contact. So, a back garden offered a rare opportunity to play outside freely, with minimal surveillance. To play. 

To dig. 

In earth saturated with agonies and ecstasy, passions and confusion, torture and sky-bound joy. Soaked in blood and other emissions. Tainted. Infused. Empowered.  

They got it under their fingernails. They got it in their mouths. In their heads. They dug beneath fences, like foxes. They dug down.  

When little Harry Moreton came in from the garden, his mother knew there was something wrong with her son. 

“Look!” cried Harry, “A bone!” 

His first thought was that a previous owner’s dog must have buried it. Then, maybe it was a piece of that previous dog’s skeleton, buried here by grieving owners. And as he turned it over in his little hands, his thoughts turned to darker options, possibilities that would not coalesce but cast a shade over his countenance. He showed it to his mother and she snatched it away so the next one he found he kept to himself, smuggling it up to his bedroom, thinking things that had never occurred to him before. 

Sunday morning, and Jack and Jocasta Moreton rose late, gifting themselves the stay-in-bed luxury despite body clocks waking them at the go-to-work 6am.  

Jack liked to draw back the curtains with a cinematic flourish, which is why he’d chosen them over blinds. He did so now, revealing his half-dressed self to the world and vice-versa... and saw that all the fences were down, so that all the back gardens, all the private little spaces that lay between one side of Tredegar Street and the adjacent side of Capstan Road, were no longer divided.  

And standing equidistant from all sides and corners, was a man dressed in what Jack guessed might be called morning dress. He’d never understood the term; why would anyone dress so formally for their cornflakes. But there the man was, centuries-old dapper, leaning on a silver-topped cane and looking straight up at Jack with a quizzical look in his eye. And there they remained, locked into a staring contest like the beginning of a Hollywood gunfight, until Jack heard the back door slamming, and looked down to see little Harry running from the house, as were all the other children, leaving by other back doors to converge upon the man in the morning suit. He smiled and winked at Jack Moreton, holding his arms out to welcome his congregation as they clamoured round him. And Jack could hear some unholy sound, an animal howl, unending, a deep drone, getting into his bones. He finally broke away from the window, and the trance he had seemingly fallen into, fled the bedroom, clattered down the stairs, through the house and into the garden, shouting his son’s name. But, of course, the children were all gone, along with the chap in the morning dress. And all the other parents had gathered in what none of them realised were the old grounds with its old stories and memories, decrying the loss of their loved ones and making calls to the police. And of course a couple of the alpha chaps made noises about taking charge of a situation about which they could not hope to have a clue about, but who are we to criticise their innate drive to stand out as the man in any given situation no matter how detrimental it may be to any resolution. And true enough, none of it did any good. 

It wasn’t until the police had departed, and they’d all gone back in, ceasing their tramping over hallowed ground, that the children returned, as if by magic they said later, to the bosoms of their families, and they were all whisked off to counsellors in search of assumed trauma. But none of them scored high or low on spectrums and charts, there were no markers to measure their adventure, of which they had little to say, when in danger of being overheard.  

Yet they were, undeniably, indefinably changed. Their childlike carefree wonder had been supplanted by strange concerns, questioning their parents about the nature of matter, turning away from their parents’ unsatisfactory responses, back to their own arcane games and preoccupations. 

 And sometimes, when the children were out in the gardens, now that the fences had all been erected along their arbitrary lines, their parents could once again convince themselves that all the little postage stamp gardens were not connected and part of something larger, grander. And they could look upon their children and believe that they were not all connected, part of something larger, grander.  

Stranger.  

Older. 

But all these patchwork gardens and little red-brick houses were no more substantial than spider-webs laden with morning dew, or frost patterns on glass – ephemera glazed over a deeper substance, only to be burned away like the sun. But what the children had brought in, it didn’t shine like the sun, it seeped up, dark and strange. 

And over time, lives lost meaning, dismantled to constituent parts, made-up meanings falling away. Leaving only shells along Tredegar Street and Capstan Avenue.