Once Upon a Time in England

  For you, Mum

  with love.

  And in memory of Kirsty Jones

  and

  Lidia Fiems

  and

  Lee Turner.

  ‘In your town … people see with their own eyes what they dread, the transformation during their own lifetime … of towns, cities and areas that they know into alien territory.’

  Enoch Powell

  ‘Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road – and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright – and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.’

  James Baldwin

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Orford, Warrington, 1975

  Part Two

  Thelwall, Warrington, 1981

  Part Three

  Thelwall, Warrington, 1989

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Orford, Warrington, 1975

  One

  Out on the plains, the icy urban plains, a flame-haired young man was belting down the street, his two-tone shoes sliding and skidding away from his knees. His eyes were slit to the freeze, and his elbows moved freakishly fast, punching and chopping a pin-wheeling path through the night, as though his crazed perpetual motion would keep him upright, outpacing the slick of the sodium-streaked pavements.

  An old lady out walking her dog heard his helter-skelter approach, saw the lad spin round the corner and flare right at her. She gasped and shrank back into a neighbour’s gate, snatching up the pooch and drawing it tight to her bosom. The ice sprinter did not even see her, barely took note of the dog’s startled yelp as he blitzed past in the steaming slipstream of his own breath. He was hardly dressed for the weather, wearing just a thin black shirt rolled twice at the cuffs. The top two buttons remained undone, revealing a flash of flesh as white as the snowflakes gathering in his curls.

  On sight of his wild red mane the old lady’s heart returned to normal, the dog was returned to the ice-bound floor. There was only one man around there with hair that hue – Jimmy Fitzgerald’s lad, Robbie. There he went, running, running – always running, whatever the weather, too hot or too cold. But where was he running to? Or from what? She watched him rip round the next corner and out of sight, stood and stared at his footprints. The snow smothered his skidmarks so that soon there was no evidence of him having been there at all, only a tenuous ribbon of panic lingering in the air. The dog poked its snout up, sniffed at it and ran in little revolutions, yapping madly.

  Robbie Fitzgerald was running for his life. He peeled another corner and at last the squat silhouette of the building lurched into view. The windows were blacked out and bore no testimony to the wildness that pulsed within. But as Robbie drew up outside and gathered his breath, the night reverberated with the rampant din of stamping feet and screeching fiddles and the braying spray of laughter. This was Orford’s Irish Club, Saturday night. This was make or break. Robbie grinned to himself, took one last deep breath, swung the door wide open and plunged inside.

  The heat and disorder slurped him up in one muddled flush. It was chaos in there – people were whooping and howling and whirling one another around. Dark slicks of spilt Guinness sloshed on the floor in contrast with the white of the night outside. To his right, a group of drunken men, arms draped affectionately around one another, belted out ‘The Fields of Athenry’. On the small stage beyond, a fiddle quartet struggled to be heard above them. Robbie stood back and soaked it all up. He allowed himself a small smile as he stayed rooted to the spot for a moment, shaking his head at how little the place had changed. Then he got down to business. He needed those fiddle players. Without them, well – it would all turn to dust.

  He pushed himself up onto his tiptoes and scanned the room for Irene. His heart kicked out with giddy relief as she ducked up from beneath the bar and flipped open one of those bumper- sized bottles of stout. She laughed her dirty, infectious laugh as she poured, propped up on one elbow, holding court to a gaggle of travellers, her huge freckled bust splayed across the bar top.

  ‘Irene!’ he yelled, and hoisted his head up so she could see it was him. He stepped through the black puddles, edging his way through a maelstrom of flailing elbows and thumping feet. ‘IRENE!’

  Irene O’Connor did not hear her name being yelled across the roof of noise. She couldn’t hear a thing in there. It was the crimson brilliance of Robbie’s hair that caught her attention. Red-haired men were two a penny in her club, but Robbie’s mop was such a magnificent red it almost glowed. School bus red she called it. She swivelled to meet his gaze, instinctively raking a hand through her hair. Robbie launched himself up and onto the bar. His face, his head, his hair were wrung with sweat. His eyes were big and crackling with some intense energy.

  ‘I need you to help me,’ he shouted. His words were drowned out, sucked back over his shoulder into the roistering din. His eyes flickered all over her.

  ‘What you saying, our kid?’ She moved right into him, lent her ear to his hot smoky mouth.

  ‘Irene, this is serious, love. I need you to help us. There’s been an emergency.’

  She pulled back, and for a moment her stretched, anxious face ironed out its furrows, revealing the beautiful girl she once was. ‘Good heavens no, Robbie. Not Susheela? Has she started?’

  ‘No, love – no. Susheela’s fine. The baby’s still cooking nicely. It’s not that …’

  ‘Vincent? It’s little Vinnie, isn’t it? What’s he …’

  ‘Vincent’s fine, Iye. It’s nothing like that.’

  ‘So?’

  He paused, drew himself right up and prepared himself for the inevitable rejection. He looked Irene flush in the eye. ‘It’s like this, Iye. I need to borrow a couple of your entertainment.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Your entertainment …’

  ‘Aye-aye, love, I heard you first time …’

  ‘This couldn’t be more serious, Irene. I need you to loan us a couple of your fiddle players. Yeah?’

  She just stared at him.

  Realising she hadn’t laughed in his face yet, Robbie leapt to ram home his advantage. ‘It’ll only be thirty minutes, darlin’. Not a minute more. That’s all’s I’m asking of you. Thirty minutes of your entertainment’s time.’

  Irene realised then, he was not joking. She also realised she was powerless to resist. His burning green eyes were all over her, beseeching her, giving her nowhere to go. She tried to play hard to get, pulling down the corners of her mouth, arching an eyebrow, but Robbie could scent victory. He grabbed her chubby wrist, pulling her face close.

  ‘I can tell you the whole story start to finish later on Irene, love – but this is an emergency. Everything’s hanging on it. My whole life depends on it. The baby’s life, the baby’s whole future. I promise I’ll have them back to you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’

  She looked right past him into the delirious hub of the room. Robbie knew exactly what she was thinking, and she was right. There would be a riot. But he couldn’t let this opportunity slip away – not now, not with the chance of a lifetime so close he could taste it. He took her head in his hands so her nose was almost touching his, as though transmitting the urgency of his crisis to her by shortwave. He gave it one last go.

  ‘Irene, do us a favour – listen to me, will you? I need them fiddlers, yeah? Whatever profit you lose tonight, I’ll treble it for you. I’ll come and sing for nothing. Do you get me? I’ll do five Sundays in a row. I’ll do all your favourites – whatever the punters want. I’ll do a frigging Elvis night if you like …’

  She didn’t bite. A resigned sadness came over her face a
nd, recognising it, Robbie let her go, slumping back down onto the flats of his feet. He turned to go. Irene spoke to the back of his head. She knew full well what this was about. It was Dickie Vaughan. It had to be Dickie Vaughan.

  ‘You’ve got half an hour, Robert Fitzgerald. Not a minute longer. And you’re to bring back my men in person, no later than …’ She consulted her wrist, but Robbie was no longer there to hear her out. She watched him bob and weave his way to the stage and silence the lead fiddle with a hand on his forearm. As he pointed across to their boss behind the bar she nodded her consent and mouthed ‘good luck’ to Robbie. If that boy was not a star in the making, then she’d learnt nothing through all her years in the trade. Robbie Fitzgerald was not just a prospect: he was the real thing.

  Susheela perched on the cold Formica of the kitchen table, and fixed her sleepy gaze on the kitchen clock. Robbie was fifteen minutes late. She glanced at the oven where the plates were warming and wondered whether she should take them out again. Absent-mindedly she patted her globe-tight belly, then took her weight on her slender, fragile wrists and pushed herself up from the table. She held her breath. Beyond the subsonic hum of the fridge there was only the deadweight of silence. Was that snow she could sense out there? Clicking off the kitchen light, she padded over to the window above the sink and, bending forwards, pressed her face into the darkness. She was right. High above the fence in the back yard, a miasma of snowflakes whirred madly in the aureole of the street lamp. She prised herself up onto her tiptoes and unhooked the window, her belly jutting over the sink. She fed her arm out into the cold night air and just held it there. The majesty of a new snowfall shot her through with the same childlike amazement as the first time she’d seen it, when the sheer magic of that midnight blizzard had taken her breath away. She yielded tenderly to the memory, drawing her hand back in and draping it around her hot neck.

  It was December of 1971, not long after she had started her training at Warrington General. She’d just clocked off from a gruelling shift down in A&E. She’d barely made it back to the nurses’ home before she collapsed into deep slumber. But something jolted her wide awake – some foreboding, a powerful sense that all was not right. The room was cold, so all she could see was her own breath – and hers was the only breath she could hear. At first she thought something terrible had happened to the other girls. They hadn’t come home. They’d been involved in some accident. But then she heard a muffled cough; someone turning over in their sleep – Mata, from the obstreperous groan that accompanied it. And as she adjusted herself to the familiar acoustics of the dormitory, she managed to count the rise and fall of six pairs of lungs. She sighed her relief out loud, but still the gnawing sense persisted that something wasn’t right.

  And then it hit her. Outside on the streets, an eerie silence had descended. Where was the usual soundtrack to a Wednesday night? Where were the taxis, coming and going to the hospital? Where were the ambulances? What had happened to the wail of sirens, the shriek of girls fighting over men? Her heart bounced against her rib cage. All those sounds which had fed her insomnia those first few nights in the nursing home – the thrum of long- distance lorries on the motorway; the drone of the factories, pumping their bilge into the night; the low giddy puttering of the generator outside – none of this was audible. The whole symphony had seized up. Trembling, she wrapped her bedcover around her shoulders and tiptoed to the window. She hovered there, one hand lingering on a curtain, afraid of what she might see. The timorous young Malaysian girl, already adjusting to the shock of the new on a daily, an hourly basis, pictured scenes of mass destruction. In Warrington, any horror was possible. Some deadly nuclear fog could have descended during the night, sucking the life out of all who moved.

  She took a deep breath, screwed her eyes tight and yanked back the curtain. When she opened them she almost passed out. Everything was white. White and velvet and stock still. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  Now Susheela looked out from her kitchen window at the falling snow and smiled at the memory of the dark-skinned girl in her flannel dressing gown, waking all the nurses and racing down the stairs to dance in the snow. She was just a girl back then – not so long ago. A few nights after the snowstorm, Robbie Fitzgerald had been carried onto her ward and into her life. She smiled again and slid her hand across her heaving belly and thought that one day she would recount this story to her unborn child; the story of the brown girl spinning and gambolling on the pavement, trying to catch the snow on her tongue, baffled each time it melted to nothing.

  Susheela closed the window and clicked the light back on. She hoped it would snow hard and blanket the landscape white. Make it all pretty. Yes, even Orford could look pretty in the snow.

  Two

  Flicking a clot of fringe from his damp freckled brow Robbie Fitzgerald tried to suppress the glee wrought on his face. Catching his breath, he stood dead still, stage centre, trying to revive the cool that had carried him through his performance.

  When Robbie had spotted Dickie Vaughan earlier that evening he’d dropped his pint. He’d never believed that could happen – a fresh, foaming pint of Best and it had slipped right through his fingers. But it wasn’t every day that Dickie Vaughan walked into your local working men’s club. There was no doubting it was him, though. The legendary talent manager was sat right there in the centre of St Stephen’s lounge bar, chomping contentedly on his cigar. His famous paunch took up the entire table, and Robbie Fitzgerald was rooted to the spot. Only a month ago he’d asked his young wife to read out the profile in the MU magazine, where Vaughan was bemoaning the death of outstanding new cabaret talent, and predicting the slow and sad demise of the working-class social club scene if things didn’t change. Robbie agreed with every word. At the age of twenty-four he was already a veteran of that selfsame cabaret scene, and he’d witnessed at first hand the shabby trail of bad comedians, pub warblers and novelty acts passing themselves off as The Entertainment. Robbie could sell out any one of the clubs in the Greater Warrington area – and beyond – on reputation alone, but it was getting harder to win a crowd over. They wanted it on a plate, where he liked to build up an atmosphere. They wanted Jack Jones and Tony Bennett soundalikes, smooth easy listening, where he revered the dark, aching soul of Van Morrison and Robert Johnson. It was Robbie’s dream to team up with a big-hitter like Vaughan. With a manager like that, he could go all the way – he knew he could. His bruised fusion of soul and blues with the maudlin strains of folk was not to everybody’s taste, but Dickie Vaughan would see beyond the labels, right to the heart of Robbie’s genius. And there could be no doubting that Robbie was exactly that – a spirit, a genius. A star.

  Robbie had stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t even notice he’d let his pint slip until Barney tried to usher him back out of the room.

  Barney was St Stephen’s Concert Secretary, a role that brought him a certain prestige, not to say considerable power in the world of Warrington cabaret. Barney booked the Turn, compered the night, ran the show in every sense – and he could never quite resist showing he was still as good as any singer, especially after a few large Whyte & Mackays when he’d cap off a perfectly good night by treating the crowd to a Sinatra ballad. At first, Robbie thought that was behind Barney’s blundering attempt to stop him performing. If there was one turn he couldn’t follow, it was Robbie Fitzgerald’s splintered sweet soul voice. Barney had pushed Robbie back out of the lounge, reaming him some yarn about a charity night he’d forgotten.

  ‘Serious, Rob. Pure slipped me mind. It’ll just be the stand-ups tonight.’

  Robbie craned his neck round Barney’s shoulder, eager to make sure that it was Dickie Vaughan. ‘What? You’re looking to raise money for charity and there’s no music on?’

  Barney shrugged, beseeching him with his ‘what can I tell you’ face. Robbie humoured him with an eyebrow. He was too overwhelmed with terror and excitement to get angry. The biggest talent scout in the North was h
ere in Orford, sat right there in his frigging club. Of course there was going to be fucking music!

  ‘I’ll be going on as usual, Barney mate. Fifteen minutes.’

  Barney shook his head, panicked now. ‘Robbie! No.’

  ‘What you on about – no?’

  Barney slumped down into a cup chair, its vermillion arms singed by a hundred cigarette butts. He held his head in his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Rob. You can’t go on. I …’ He glanced up at Robbie, pink, foolish and found out. ‘I sent the backing band home.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Your musicians, mate. I paid ’em off …’

  Robbie’s heart slumped with his shoulders. There was no way Barney was lying. He could see it all now, and he understood why he’d done it – why Barney would have thought he had no choice. Robbie was mildly flattered. He almost felt sorry for the blustering Concert Secretary. Still, he couldn’t absolve him. It was a dirty world, clubland, but Robbie had to think about Number One. This was it for Robbie Fitz and his young family, and there was no way he was letting the chance pass by. Come hell or high water, Dickie Vaughan was going to hear him sing.

  He clipped the mic back into its stand and narrowed his glare into the spotlight. He bowed, once – not so much a bow as a brief incline of his head – then beckoned his backing band forward. Another swell of applause built from the back and ricocheted around the room as Robbie’s fiddler and banjo player stepped forward, joined hands and took a bow grinning like they’d never seen a crowd before, let alone been feted like this. People were standing on their chairs. Euphoria swooned around Robbie’s head. It hung there, dizzying him, raining sparks over the boisterous locals and then it hit him. He’d pulled it off. Whatever Dickie Vaughan thought of him didn’t matter now – Robbie Fitz had just given the show of his life.