Alan Moore - Jerusalem

It had been Queen Anne’s death during 1714 that had prepared the ground for Philip Doddridge, then a lad of twenty-seven, to come here to Castle Hill one Christmas Eve fifteen years later to take up his ministry. Anne Stuart had, during her reign, attempted to stamp out the Nonconformists. When she’d died the minister who had announced it had said, quoting from the Psalms, “Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king’s daughter.” That was a signal for all the Dissenters and the Nonconformists to start celebrating as it meant that George the First, who was a Hanoverian and had vowed to support their cause, would soon be on the throne. All of them little groups — hangovers from the Independents, the Moravian Brethren, that tradition come down from John Wycliffe’s Lollards in the thirteen-hundreds — they must have been popping wine corks at the thought of all that they’d be able to do now to shake things up, and Doddridge coming to Northampton had been part of that. Looked back on from the present day, you could say it had been the biggest part.

Sauntering past the unkempt burial ground that evening, Tommy had supposed the town would have been an attractive proposition to a young dissenting minister back then, what with its long tradition as a haven for religious firebrands, insurrectionists and the plain mad. Old Robert Browne who formed the Separatists in the late sixteenth century was buried in St. Giles churchyard, and the town was filled by Nation of Saints puritans and Ranters with their fiery flying rolls during the century that followed. There’d been fierce radical Christians shouting heresies from every rooftop, saying there was no life other than this present one, that Hell and Heaven were nowhere save here on earth and, worst of all, suggesting that the Bible showed God as a shepherd of the poor and not the wealthy. By the time that Philip Doddridge stepped out of the snow that Christmas Eve, 1729, rubbing his hands with frostbite and with glee, Northampton’s reputation as a hotbed simmering with spiritual unrest would have been well established.

Doddridge’s Evangelism, nine years earlier than that of the more widely-sung John Wesley, was the force that by Victoria’s reign had transformed almost all of the Dissenting sects and the whole ruddy Church of England in the bargain. He’d accomplished this from what was even then one of the humblest places in the land, and done it in a little over twenty years before the TB took him when he hadn’t yet turned fifty; done it all with words, his teachings and his writings and his hymns. To Tom’s mind, “Hark! The Glad Sound!” was about the best of them. “The Saviour comes, the Saviour promised long.” Tommy had always thought of Doddridge writing that sat looking out from Castle Hill, perhaps imagining the last trump sounding in the heavens up above St. Peter’s Church just down the way, or picturing a ragged, resurrected Jesus walking up Chalk Lane towards the little meeting house, his bloodied palms spread wide in universal absolution. During the more-than-a-thousand years this district had existed it had seen its fair share of extraordinary men, what with Richard the Lionheart, Cromwell, Thomas Becket, all of them, but in Tom Warren’s estimation Philip Doddridge could be counted with the worthiest. He was the Boroughs’ most heroic son. He was its soul.

St. Edmund’s clock struck once for half-past two and snatched Tom back to where he was, stood outside the converted workhouse with his Kensitas burning away forgotten there between his nicotine-stained fingers. That had been a waste. He flung the smouldering end into the broader smoulder that surrounded him and let his mind return to February 1948 and to a night just as opaque and grey.

He’d come out of Chalk Lane past the newsagent’s where he sometimes bought his paper of a Sunday morning; that had once been part of Propert’s Commercial Hotel, and crossed the tarmac-smothered cobbles and disused iron tramlines of Black Lion Hill towards the pub the hill was named after. Pushing inside through its front door Tommy had been hit by a near solid wall of chatter, scent and warmth, the captured body heat of everyone who was crammed into the Black Lion on that chilly night. Before he’d took his coat off and stepped through the press of people to the bar, Tom had been feeling glad already that he’d chosen to come here tonight, rather than to have stayed with Frank at the Blue Anchor. There were always more familiar faces at the Lion.

Jem Perrit had been there, whose dad The Sheriff had run a horse-butcher’s business in Horsemarket, and who lived himself with his wife Eileen and their baby daughter by the wood-yard that Jem kept in Freeschool Street, just round the corner from the Black Lion and off Marefair. As Tom now recalled the scene, Jem had been playing ninepins at the skittle table up one corner with Three-Fingered Tunk — who had a stall in the Fish Market up on Bradshaw Street — and Freddy Allen. Fred had been a moocher who you sometimes saw around the Boroughs still, who slept beneath the railway arches in Foot Meadow and who got along by pinching pints of milk and loaves of bread off people’s doorsteps. The tramp had been narrowing his bleary eyes as he took aim and threw the wooden cheese, but it had looked to Tom as though Jem Perrit or Three-Fingered Tunk would probably be trouncing him. Propped up against the heaving bar there had been Podger Someo, locally famous former organ grinder, now retired, and everywhere that Tommy looked there had been grimy area legends nursing mythic grudges, a run-down Olympus full of sozzled titans spluttering filthy jokes through mouthfuls of foam-topped ambrosia, fishing clumsily as minotaurs inside their crisp bags for the blue wax paper twist of salt.

Tommy’s own family, at least the Vernall side of it, had been well represented in the pub that night. Tom’s uncle Johnny — his mam’s younger brother — had been there with Tom’s aunt Celia, and sat up one corner by herself with a half pint of Double Diamond and her battered old accordion across her lap there had been Tommy’s great-aunt Thursa, in her eighties by that point and even harder to get any sense from than she’d previously been. Tommy had said hello to her and asked if he could get her a fresh drink, at which she’d looked alarmed as if she weren’t sure who he was, but then had nodded in acceptance anyway. Thursa had always liked to play on her accordion al fresco, trudging round the Boroughs, although some years earlier during the war she’d taken to performances that were exclusively nocturnal. More specifically, she’d only gone out in the street to play her instrument during the blackouts, with the German bombers droning overhead and the ARP wardens threatening to arrest her if she didn’t stay indoors and stop that bloody racket. Tom had never heard, at first hand, his great-aunt’s Luftwaffe sing-alongs, having been stationed overseas. His older sister Lou, however, had described them to him with the tears of laughter running down her cheeks. “They sent me out to fetch her in, and honestly, I swear that she was standing there in Bath Row, looking up at all the big dark planes against the sky and playing little tootles and long drones on her accordion, as if the bombing raid was like a silent film and she was its accompanist. It was that awful engine noise, the way it echoed right across the sky, and there was Thursa doing little bits that fitted in with it, these little bits that sounded like somebody whistling or skipping. I can’t properly describe it, but her little tra-la-las sounding above the frightening thunder of the aeroplanes, it made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. Laugh, mostly.” Tom had pictured it, the skinny old madwoman with her mushroom cloud of white hair standing caterwauling in the blacked out street, the vast might of the German air force overhead. It had made Tommy laugh too.