Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

‘I see.’

Cooper stood outside for a few minutes, looking at the windows of The Oaks. He had no idea when family and community had started to fall apart, but he had a feeling his grandparents wouldn’t have recognized society the way it was now. In their time, old folk had been looked after, instead of being allowed to spend their final years abandoned and alone. He had known, deep down, that the disintegration of family life was happening everywhere — not just in the big cities, but right here in the villages that had always relied so much on a sense of community.

Of course, he saw the results every day among the people he had to deal with in his job. Children running out of control on the streets, young people walking away from home to lives full of drugs and destitution. Single mothers everywhere, trying to raise families on their own. Mentally disturbed individuals who either lived outside society, or ended up in prison. Old people dying, neglected, their deaths unnoticed for months by their family or neighbours, or even by the postman. It would never have happened at one time, he was sure.

Of course, people had died for quite different reasons back then.

Back in the town centre, the streets were full of light — the white bulbs of the Christmas trees attached to the buildings, the occasional orange streetlamp, the light from shop windows falling on the pavements. Beneath the lights, the last stragglers were on their way to the car parks, some of them setting off across the county after a day at the cattle market. School children were hanging around outside the chip shops with their friends, celebrating the last day of term.

The hotel on the square had a stream of smoke drifting from one of its chimneys, and a flashing tree in an upper window. It was a better display than the official tree in the park across the way. A yellow Sixes bus went by, the slogan ‘Be a dirty stop-out’ on the back.

It was really going cold now, and Cooper thought he felt the first touch of rain.

That night, Matt took his brother to their local pub, the Queen Anne. It was one of the oldest pubs in the Peak District, dating back to the early seventeenth century, it was said, and reputedly haunted by the friendly ghost of a landlord who died in the cellar tending his ales. But all the best pubs had at least one ghost, didn’t they?

The wooden bar was stained black, and a line of stools stood in front of it. The food at the Queen Anne was traditional enough to satisfy even Matt — home-made steak-and-ale pie, haddock and chips, chicken and chips, T-bone steak. There was practically dancing in the streets when T-bone steak came back on the menu after the BSE scare. The doom mongers had predicted it was gone for ever — eating meat off the bone being considered far too risky for men who spent their days operating high-powered machinery with sharp blades and handling bad-tempered animals that could kill with a single kick.

Ales were served on a rotation basis, and tonight the bar boasted Barnsley Bitter, Ale Force from the Storm Brewery at Macclesfield, and Towns of Chesterfield. Even a cask-strength whisky. Enough to drown your sorrows, whatever they might be. But a pint of Towns would suit, for now. It was good to get out of the rain.

‘I’ll get the first round in,’ Matt said.

‘I won’t argue.’

Cooper noticed they’d introduced lamb madras to the menu at the Queen Anne. There were two bars, one that had been a smoking area until the ban came in. Like himself, Matt had never smoked, but would probably have liked to see the smoking bar retained. Tradition again? Or a stubborn fondness for dangerous activities?

Ben remembered their great-uncle, who had farmed all his life, explaining that a farmer’s life and the lives of his animals followed an annual cycle that moved with the seasons and was influenced by natural elements, such as the weather.

‘Not these days,’ said Matt sourly, when he was reminded of it. ‘More like influenced by the price of milk and the latest EU regulations.’

An old milk churn stood near the doorway under an ancient stone lintel, and log fires burned in both bars. In the summer they often preferred to sit outside at one of the picnic tables in the garden, admiring the hills or watching the gliders pass overhead. But Matt wasn’t in a mood to notice the scenery, even if it had been daylight.

‘Some of the people who live in these villages now are on a different planet from what we are. If you meet people down at the postbox or in the pub, they don’t relate to what you’re doing at all. Their work and life experiences are so different from ours. They think we’re either mad or quaint.’

That night, the pub was filled with people in various stages of saturation and evaporation. It was like a Turkish bath where everyone had forgotten to take their clothes off. You couldn’t get near the fire for piles of drenched cagoules and plastic over-trousers.

‘It’s sheer ignorance. They think we’re all either grain barons or peasants.’

The smell of cooked food mingled with the steam from drying clothes, like the aroma from the kitchens of some exotic restaurant. If he closed his eyes, Cooper could imagine a genuine curry being prepared in the background, hot with cayenne and spiced with interesting herbs.

‘You know Geoff Weeks at One Ash? He has Right to Roam over part of his farm. Some ramblers complained about finding a dead sheep on his land the other day. They rang the police, even — can you believe it?’

Ben wanted to say that, yes, he could believe it. You only had to spend half an hour in the Call Reception Centre to get an idea of the complaints from the public that call handlers had to deal with. Three thousand of them a day. Litter on the pavement, birds stuck up trees. A dead sheep was nothing. Sometimes the actual nature of the incident wasn’t clear until response officers arrived at the scene.

But he said nothing, preferring not to interrupt Matt when he was getting things off his chest.

‘If you’ve got five hundred ewes,’ said Matt, ‘and you run them until they’re seven or eight crop, the way Geoff does, then a certain percentage of them are going to die. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?’

Ben nodded. Yes, death was certainly a fact of life in the countryside. It was one of the things that urban dwellers didn’t appreciate. These days, they ran special coach trips from the cities to give townies a chance to smell the difference between a cow and sheep. But you didn’t know about the omnipresence of death until you lived here.

Usually, a mention of the word ‘diversification’ was enough to spark a rant on its own. Tonight, Matt was abnormally subdued.

‘I don’t know if you remember Jack Firth, over near Chapel. It turns out he’d been running a nice little sideline, killing and burying unwanted greyhounds on his land. The rules say unwanted dogs should be euthanized by a vet, but breeders and trainers find that too expensive. It was much cheaper to use Jack’s services.’

‘What’s your point, Matt?’

‘He was meeting a demand, you see. It’s what the government wants us to do, find new ways of exploiting our assets, and providing services the public actually wants. Jack told me there are twenty-five thousand unwanted dogs produced every year by the greyhound racing business — dogs at the end of their racing lives, or that have never been particularly good in the first place. The rescue centres could never cope with that number, so Jack had found a niche market. His business would have been safe for years to come.’

‘Was he found out?’

‘Yes. But there was no evidence of cruel or inhumane treatment of the animals. Even when he was arrested, he could only be charged with failing to obtain the proper licences. He didn’t fill in the forms for the bureaucrats. So now he’s a criminal.’