Ann Pilling - The Pit

for David

1948 – 1986

in loving memory

Take him, earth, for cherishing

“Ring a ring o’ roses ,

A pocket full of posies ,

Atishoo, Atishoo ,

We all fall down!”

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY

AFTERWORD

KEEP READING

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Oliver Wright was walking home from the bus stop with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. You never knew what you might find in a London street. He’d picked a five pound note up once, all screwed up like an old sweet paper. He didn’t get much pocket money, and even for that he had to do jobs. That five pounds had been riches.

As he turned the corner into Thames Terrace a cold wind blew up suddenly from the river and made him prickle with cold. It felt like January, not June, and the coldest, wettest summer he could ever remember. July would be worse, August worse still because there’d be nothing to do, and no summer holiday. His father was in hospital, having a hip operation, and his mother was fully occupied, running the house like an army camp. He thought back wistfully to other holidays, several of which he’d spent with his cousins, Prill and Colin Blakeman. When those three got together odd and frightening things happened. Oliver and his curious hunches about spooks and hauntings usually started off as a bit of a joke, but he was the one who always got to the bottom of things, the one who always rooted out the reason for these strange adventures of theirs. Nothing interesting was going to happen this year though, not if he’d got to spend the summer all on his own.

The Wrights lived at Number Nine, the shabbiest house of all in a gloomy-looking old terrace. It was painted mud brown, and was full of old people, and it belonged to a special society that provided homes for the elderly. Oliver thought it was a ridiculous house for them to choose because it was so very tall and narrow, with fifty-seven stairs between the cellar and the attic. The old people never went down to the cellar, of course. It was infested with spiders and running with damp, and the attic was just a storage area, with one tiny bedroom for him.

He kicked gloomily at a stone and watched it bounce into the gutter. He liked their house with its views of the Thames and his bedroom under the roof, it was home. But on a wet Friday afternoon, with the whole weekend yawning drearily ahead, he wished there was another family in the street. Nobody lived there now, except the Wrights, and a few young trendies with their sports cars and their window boxes. The buildings opposite were old warehouses, shut up and abandoned, and at the bottom of their garden there was only the river. One end of the terrace looked out on to a little egg-shaped graveyard, neatly grassed over and raised up, almost two feet higher than the pavement. Its church, St Olave-le-Strand, had been pulled down last year, even though his mother had led the local campaign to save it. She enjoyed protests. Beyond the graveyard there was a demolition site filled with excavators and concrete mixers, and an enormous crane that swung an iron ball against crumbling walls and sent them tottering into dust. A huge warehouse was being pulled down and a new office development called River Reach built on the site. That would be something else for his mother to complain about. Why did she have to be so awkward?

Oliver was adopted, as Mrs Wright never failed to tell people. It was as if she thought they might ask difficult questions if she didn’t explain – she looked rather too old to be the mother of such a young boy. He didn’t much like the parents he’d landed with. Mother, with her iron-grey hair and wrinkled face, always so busy ruling Number Nine, and Father, so silent and always buried in exercise books, peering out at him occasionally from behind thick glasses. They were kind enough, in a remote sort of way, but they weren’t really tuned in to his world at all, and Oliver was lonely.

As he walked past Number Five he stopped to look at a black Porsche parked outside. It belonged to a young couple who had moved in last week. He smiled to himself. A car like that would mean parties, and doors banging in the middle of the night – another thing for his mother to complain about. He was just bending down to have a look through the window when a sudden noise at the end of the street jerked him upright again. It was a man’s voice, shouting hysterically, then other voices and someone yelling “Hang on mate, for Gawd’s sake, wait can’t you!” Then, round the corner and running along past the graveyard, came somebody he knew quite well. Ted Hoskins, who worked on the demolition site.

Ted was over six feet tall, and beefy, and he wore very heavy boots, but he came tearing down past Oliver like a bat out of hell. His eyeballs were rolled up, right back into his head, horribly, like something dead, and there was an awful noise coming out of his mouth, half a groan, half a scream.

“Ted?” Oliver shouted, stepping into the street as two men from the site pelted past him, then “ Ted !” He was always nice to Oliver, and he sometimes gave him things they found on the site. But now it was as if he’d gone both blind and deaf. He ran on, struggling to shake off the arms that clutched at him as the two younger men caught up, only stopping when he was brought down to his knees by a flying rugby tackle.

As Ted collapsed, and the two workmen bent over him, three more came hurtling along the pavement. Oliver crouched behind the Porsche, listening hard. He could hear the noise Ted was making quite clearly, and it chilled him. It was a moaning, sobbing noise, more like the helpless crying of a child than the voice of a grown man. He crept out from the car, stole along the pavement, and peered through a jungle of blue-denimed legs at the man lying in the middle of the road.

Ted Hoskins looked dead. His eyes were still open and staring, and his mouth had flopped open too, but the noises had stopped now and it was uncannily quiet. All Oliver could hear were the gulls mewing over the muddy river and, somewhere in the City, a muffled bell was ringing.

“Give him air,” someone shouted. “The man needs air. Don’t crowd him.” Oliver recognized the voice at once. It was Rick, the bad-tempered foreman. He’d told him off several times for hanging round the site. “I’m getting the boss,” he said. “Throw a coat over him, somebody, and leave him where he is. We need a doctor for this. I’ll go and phone.”

As he turned round he almost fell over Oliver who was crowding round with the others, unable to take his eyes from Ted’s face. “Clear off, can’t you!” Rick yelled. “Can’t you see the poor bloke’s ill? Make yourself scarce, and quick, or you’ll be in trouble. Now get !”

Oliver stood upright, and opened his mouth, but no words came out. He wanted to say he could help, that his mother was a trained nurse and that Rick could use their phone, but he couldn’t speak. It was Ted’s face. The look in those awful, rolled-up eyes had struck terror into him. Whatever had frightened the big kindly workman, down at the site, had stretched out a hand and was touching him too. Not just touching either, but plunging right down, down to the dark buried deep inside him, to the place where his worst fears were.