Doggy-paddling in the lazy, undemanding currents of the ‘C’-stream, David just about completes six year-long pool lengths of his education without drowning. He secures one or two subsequently useless O-levels, fails all the rest and doesn’t see the point of going on to fail his A-levels as well. He doesn’t want to go to college, wants to have these years of pointless and demeaning prelude over with so he can get on with his life in something that resembles a real world. His dad is furious with disappointment. Nothing’s turning out the way that Bernard wanted. Back in Sierra Leone it’s military coup on top of military coup, with ethnic Limba Siaka Stevens finally ending up in charge and straight away revealing his true colours, executing his political and military rivals by means of a gallows on the Kissy Road in Freetown. Bad and getting worse, this is how Bernard sees the prospects for his homeland and his eldest son alike. Dave is demoted in his father’s estimations, although obviously not to the extent of his young brother, Andrew, who has never figured in those estimations. David doesn’t care. Being the chosen one has always been a burden, and he finds that he and Andy grow much closer in the cosy doghouse of paternal disapproval. Whispering and laughing in the darkness after lights-out they begin to plan their bold escape. Outside their parents’ dearly-won front door the 1970s are pooling even in the sump of Kingsthorpe Hollow, a fluorescent froth of platform heels and stick-on stars. The song lyrics are all chrome-dipped in science fiction and Jack Kirby has quit Marvel Comics to turn out a stunningly prolific flood of fresh ideas for their main industry rivals, full of warring techno-gods and revamped 1940s Brooklyn kid gangs. Meanwhile, a real local gang of vicious seventeen-year-old apprentice skinheads have, somewhat uncomfortably, rebranded themselves as “The Bowie Boys” and now wear eyeliner and carry handbags in Bay City Rollers tartan. The decade bowls into town riding a sequin blizzard and leaves drifts of glitter in the gutters. Flaunting its fantastic Biba clothes and Day-Glo hedgehog hair it flirts with the two brothers, finally enticing them to run away from home and join the circus. They move down to London just as soon as they’re both old enough to do so without needing their dad’s never-going-to-happen blessings and consent. It’s a completely different place now to the city that confronted Joyce and Bernard when they first arrived in Brixton twenty years before, and being black is almost fashionable now. This previously undreamed-of world embraces Dave and Andy in a way Northampton never could, finding them flats, finding them work. David commences his employment at a clothing outlet that’s the current talk of the black entertainment field, finds himself recommending gear for Labi Siffre, kung-fu fighting with Carl Douglas and discovering the fragrant world of girls in a way that would be unthinkable in Kingsthorpe Hollow — under Bernard’s gold-rimmed eye and quarantined from females at a same-sex grammar school. It feels to David like he’s living for the first time, dressing how he wants and getting a bit Funkadelic when it suits him, making it through the whole heady period without recourse to dreadlocks or an afro. He and Andrew sometimes pop back to Northampton, just to see their mum and so that David can catch up with Alma, but the atmosphere and barbed-wire silences around their dad mean that the intervals between their visits gradually grow longer. Even Alma is becoming harder to keep tabs on once her terraced row on Andrew’s Road is pulled down, in the final mop-up of the clearance operation that’s been going on down in the Boroughs since the end of World War One. The Warren family get moved to Abington, then Alma takes off on her own into a string of boyfriends, bedsits and addresses without telephones. Slowly the two of them lose touch but by then David has hooked up with Natalie, a beautifully-assembled girl from a Nigerian family who’s looking like a keeper. His life picks up pace until he’s skimming through the years as though he’s on a Raleigh bicycle, with his exhilaration only slightly curtailed by the stark fact that, in life, there don’t seem to be any brakes. You can’t stop and you can’t even slow down.
Henry and this place where he lives are running out of luck, he knows it, if they ever had any to start with. There’s a stiffness in the joints and hinges, there’s a rheumy quality comes in the eyes and windows, and a never-again feel to things. Some of the streets and plenty of the people what he’s been familiar with are disappeared. Around Chalk Lane where it’s all coming down and everybody’s moving out, he sees these ladies that he knows just stood there weeping and one saying to the other “Well, this is the end of our acquaintance”. He feels sorry for the fallen buildings, dust and rubble where it meant something to someone once, but they’re hard stone and it’s the people, what are softer, that get hurt most cruelly. It’s the bonds between them that are delicate and built up over years what get tore up, all on a stroke of someone’s pen at the town hall. There’s friends and families get scattered without rhyme or reason like so many billiard balls, sent shooting off to the four corners of Northampton with their whole lives gone a different way and Henry can’t but feel it’s all a shame. From how he hears it, it won’t be that long before it’s Bath Street, Castle Street and his own Scarletwell Street what are next for demolition and he knows a time will come when even the Destructor is destroyed, with all of this replaced by some variety of great big modern rooming-houses that he don’t much like the sound of. He allows that it might be a little cleaner and more sanitary round here after all the changes, but from what he’s seen of diagrams and drawings that get printed in the evening paper it’s not nowhere near as friendly in appearance, and he isn’t certain there’ll be a position for no deathmongers or crazy people such as Thursa Vernall; for the mooching kind like Freddy Allen or else Georgie Bumble; even for Black Charley with his funny-looking bicycle and cart. He drags his wooden blocks more on the roads now when he’s going down these tilted lanes for fear that if he picks up speed him and his vehicle alike will both be shook to bits. One day when Henry’s resting on the grass up by the stump of the old castle he gets into conversation with a nice enough young gent who’s well brought-up and seems like he’s been educated quite a bit in ancient history. This boy brings up the subject of Black Charley’s skin, but in a nervous way in case it’s not polite to mention it, when he says that it’s not the first time that these falling-down old stones have been acquainted with a black man. Then when Henry asks him what he means he talks about this feller by the name Peter the Saracen, a coloured man come from the Holy Land or Africa who’s living here around the year twelve hundred, working as a crossbow maker for who they call Bad King John, near seven hundred year before Henry himself arrives in these parts. On the one hand Henry will admit to feeling a touch disappointed that he isn’t the first man of his complexion hereabouts, but then that’s only prideful vanity, and on the other hand he’s pleased he’s got another hero what can socialise with Walter Tull and Britton Johnson in his idle daydreams. He imagines how he leads the three of them on his contraption with the rope instead of tyres, escorts the crossbow-maker, footballer and cowboy all the way back home to Tennessee and sixty years ago, so they can liberate all Henry’s people with their fancy shooting and their deadly silent crossbow bolts and their goal-scoring capabilities. He sleeps more these days and so has more time for all his flights of fancy. Meantime out of his front window and just over Scarletwell they’re taking down the warehouses and so on that are at the bottom, so that no more than that narrow terraced strip of homes is left on the Saint Andrew’s Road. A little way uphill The Friendly Arms is all shut down and boarded up, ready to vanish when its time comes. He finds out from somebody how Mr. Newton Pratt was taken ill and died some years ago with the pneumonia, or anyway that’s what he’s told. Of what befell Pratt’s legendary beast, however, Henry never hears a word and in the end he’s half-convinced he must have dreamt it, its existence being to his mind a more unlikely prospect than the get-together between Walter Tull, Peter the Saracen and Britton Johnson. Henry dozes while the world out past his doorstep comes to pieces.