Baildon Moor - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Bradford, Early 1990s

Sullivan and Billy lived with their mum; their father had passed on three years ago when Sullivan was fifteen and Billy barely ten. A week before he died agonisingly of lung cancer, his father made Sullivan promise that he would look after his younger brother come what may. Sullivan accepted without a murmur and from that day on was dad and big brother to Billy, all wrapped up in one.

For his part, Sullivan could do no wrong in his little brother’s eyes. He was Billy’s hero; the one he looked up to an admired, and the person Billy wanted to be when he grew up. Billy’s ambition was to go to university and form a band too; maybe even join his brother’s group when he was old enough.  Sullivan and I did our best to encourage him to work hard at school - not very rock and roll I know, but despite the edgy student veneer we were both good middle-class kids underneath who knew the value of a good education.

We gave Billy a place to stay the time he fell out with his mum when he was fifteen and pushing boundaries by staying out all night drinking. We were the ones he phoned in tears when he got dumped by his first girlfriend. We were there when he picked up his GCSE results and the day two years later when got his A-Levels.

Despite his earlier ambitions Billy hadn’t bothered to apply for university.  He did badly in his mock A-levels and had only been predicted to scrape though the real exams, so you can imagine everyone’s surprise and astonishment when he got three B grades. By lunchtime on results day, Billy was on the phone to Bradford uni trying to get a place on a course, any course, via Clearing and by the end of the following week he’d been accepted on a Computer Sciences degree.  Sullivan posted him the “Accommodation to Let” pages from the Telegraph & Argus and Billy found himself a place to live in a shared house in Baildon with a second year Philosophy student.

The years passed in the blink of an eye. Graduate careers were hard – if not impossible – for a Fine Art graduate to come by in Bradford in the early 90s but I’d found a job working as a junior in a tattoo studio on the Leeds Road. Sydenham Poyntz had made a name for themselves around Bradford with their uniquely modern take on 12-bar blues; they were getting gigs most weekends and had even played as far afield as Leeds and Halifax. We still lived in the basement flat in West Bowling and Sullivan had a part-time job in a comic shop to help keep body and soul together. We were young, skint and in love - life was good.