Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Almost as soon as Henry first sets foot inside the Boroughs he’s Black Charley, like the title’s just been waiting for him to turn up and put it on like an old overcoat. He doesn’t mind. It’s not meant disrespectfully, the “Black” part of it being no more than the honest truth, while “Charley” is just something you call men around here when you can’t remember what their proper name is. In its way it’s almost like a mark of special standing, a way of acknowledging that he’s unique and that there’s not another place around Northampton can boast anybody as remarkable as Henry George. Though other coloured people drift into the town across the years, there’s none of them so well known as what Henry is. At least that’s true until 1911 when the local football team — what’s called the Cobblers on account of all the boots and shoes made here in town — they take on a black football-player by the name of Walter Tull. They make a big fuss in the local newspapers, which is how Henry hears about it, and that gets his interest fired up so that he wants to find out all he can about this new arrival threatening to steal his coal-jewelled crown. He even takes a ride up to the football-field that’s off Abington Avenue to watch Tull play, despite the fact that Henry’s never really taken to the game, and he’s forced to admit the boy can run like lightning and he sure knows how to kick a ball around. Good looking too, a young man about twenty-four years old, getting on thirty-five years Henry’s junior and with skin that’s a whole lot lighter in the bargain. Seems how Tull is born away down Kent where they pick all the hops, with his pop from Barbados and his mom an English girl. From what Henry gets told, both of Tull’s folks are passed away before he’s ten. Him and his brother Edward — the same name as Henry and Selina’s youngest boy — are raised up in a London orphanage until Edward’s adopted by a Glasgow family. He goes off up to Scotland and becomes the country’s first black dentist, if you can believe that. Walter, he plays football for some boys’ club that’s in Bethnal Green or someplace, where the talent scouts what all the big teams have take notice of him and before long he gets taken on to play with Tottenham Hotspurs, that they call the Spurs. That’s in 1909, and though Tull’s not the first black or brown man to play professional football here in England — there’s another coloured man in Darlington, Henry believes, who plays as a goalkeeper — Walter’s the first one who’s playing out there on the field and not just stood in goal. He doesn’t stay with Tottenham more than a year or two, though, and as Henry hears the story it’s because of how all the when the team plays off in another town, all the spectators there shout hurtful things at Tull, comments occasioned by his colour. How must that feel, Henry thinks, to be stood in a stadium of people with them hating you and ridiculing you; those hundreds of eyes on you and nowhere that you can go to get away from them until the whistle’s blowed? As far as Henry’s concerned something like that would be his worst nightmare, and he’s mightily relieved that he sees nothing like it those times when he rides over to watch Walter play at what they call the County Ground in Abington. Everyone seems to feel that it’s a pleasure having Tull here in the town, and Henry takes a sort of pride in his association by appearance. Then, 1914, that real bad European War breaks out and Walter Tull proves to be just as brave as he’s good with a football when he’s the first player in the town to join up in the army and go off to fight. From the reports what make their way back from the front it seems that he does pretty good. He fights in the first Battle of the Somme and they make him a sergeant. Then in 1917 when he’s promoted to Second Lieutenant and goes off to fight at Ypres and Passchendaele, that makes him the first officer who’s black in the whole British Army. That next year, the last year of the war, Walter goes back to France for what’s referred to as the Spring Offensive where he gets blew up and they can’t get his body back so that he never even has a proper grave. The night after he hears the news, Black Charley has a dream where Walter Tull’s with Henry’s western hero Britton Johnson and they’re dressed like cowboys, sheltering behind the stallions what they’ve shot for breastwork and returning fire as all around them circle whooping German infantry on horseback, wearing feather headdresses instead of bill-spike helmets.

Forty years or so into the afterwards, David gets on with things. He gets on with his newfound little brother, Andrew, and he gets on well the moment he starts school down at St. George’s in the heart of Semilong. So well, in fact, that David finds he must bear the full brunt of his dad Bernard’s proud, beaming approval and encouragement, something that David feels uncomfortable about when he begins to realise that the same enthusiasm doesn’t get extended to his younger brother. While their mother Joyce is scrupulously even-handed in showing affection to her boys, it starts to look as if her husband has already chosen which one of the children he would save in the event of household fire. Where Bernard comes from, this pragmatic attitude is not unusual. Sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes the only way to make sure any of your offspring will survive is to make brutal, terrible decisions and put all of your resources behind just one child. It’s a strategic, military approach where reinforcements are sent to the regiments already winning, never to the most embattled troops, the ones in most immediate danger of defeat. Why throw good effort after bad? The widening disparity between the brothers from their father’s viewpoint is just how things are, at least there at their Kingsthorpe Hollow residence. It isn’t mentioned and, after a time, is barely even noticed, is a thing that can be lived with. David loves his brother. Andrew is his constant playmate, not to say almost his only playmate. David isn’t really close to any of the other children, the white children, in his class at school. He’s cleverer than they are, for the most part, and a different colour, neither of these attributes contributing to social success with his classmates. There are other black kids that David and Andrew sometimes hang around with at the playground with the swings and see-saw on the Racecourse, but these are mostly the children of Jamaican immigrants and David feels as if there is some sort of barrier dividing them from him and Andrew, one that he can neither see nor understand. Part of it’s in the way their father clearly disapproves of their new friends, and part of it’s how he makes David and his brother feel that they should disapprove as well; that they come from a better background than their pals from the Big Island. David knows this isn’t right, this attitude, but somehow it creeps into things, into just playing on a roundabout, and makes an atmosphere, creates a distance — even between him and boys and girls of his own colour — as if David’s not lonely enough already. His dad’s class-based segregationist agenda at least pays off when it comes to David’s education. Lacking the distraction of companions he has little else to do but get on with his work, prepare for the eleven-plus examinations that will more or less determine, at this early age, the prospects for the rest of David’s life. The only break he gets from schooling, other than the time he spends mucking about with Andrew, comes in his discovery of fantasy, in dreams of noble-looking people with astonishing abilities. David has never heard of Henry George much less of Henry’s hero, black gunslinger Britton Johnson, but perhaps there’s something in his trading triangle-dictated blood that gives him a predisposition for the vibrant Technicolor dream-life of America. David begins to haunt the book and magazine stall, Sid’s, that’s in the ancient market square on Wednesdays and on Saturdays, where the eponymous proprietor with his cloth cap, his muffler and his fuming pipe presides over a marvellous array of lurid treasures. There are boxes crammed with yellowing second-hand paperbacks where the delirious jackets of science-fiction books seem to predominate, and hung from the stall’s upper reaches in the locked ferocious jaws of bulldog clips are men’s adventure magazines where naked-to-the-waist marines with gritted teeth are whipped by lovely women wearing only undies and swastika armbands, beneath blurbs which promise him THE KINKY KRAUT LOVE-GODDESSES OF TORTURE ISLAND! Even more enticing from David’s perspective are the rows of U.S. comics displayed cover-up on the bookstall’s front table: fluttering coloured butterflies held down by metal discus paperweights. Iron Man battles Kala, the Queen of the Underworld, and high above the thrusting skyscrapers Spiderman fights the Vulture. Superman and Batman meet when both of them are just young boys, how can that be? The constantly expanding ranks of costumed characters become the secret comrades of David’s imagination, a whole hidden world of friends that no one else but him appears to know about. He keeps the comics he’s collected in his room, sprawls on his bed and reads them while a world away downstairs his father fumes about the news from somewhere that’s called Sierra Leone, which somebody called Milton Margai has just led to independence. None of this is half as relevant or half as interesting as the Skrulls, the Human Torch, Starro the Conqueror. Despite the lure of his new passion David’s schoolwork doesn’t suffer and he passes his eleven-plus. This certainly pleases his father as it means that David will be sent to the prestigious Grammar School for Boys out on the Billing Road. Bernard is even more delighted when the Chronicle & Echo post a journalist and a photographer to cover David’s entry into his new seat of learning, with a picture showing David in his new school uniform, sat at his desk there in an otherwise deserted classroom, just in case he doesn’t feel sufficiently conspicuous or isolated yet. The headline reads FIRST BLACK PUPIL FOR GRAMMAR SCHOOL and David’s face in the accompanying image wears a look of wariness and apprehension, as if he’s got no idea what’s going to happen next.