Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Henry knew as it weren’t fair to judge all reverends by the sins of one, but it was just his trust in that profession had got shook. He wasn’t even rightly sure as he could fairly judge John Newton, what with all the contradictions as there was about his story, but he felt as all the same he had a right to be real disappointed in the man. The standard by which Henry weighed such things was that of ordinary folks, and he knew neither he nor anybody as he knowed had ever sold another living person into slavery.

’Course, nobody he knowed had ever writ “Amazing Grace” or been no influence on Mr. William Wilberforce and all that neither. There was that to think of. Rattling on the cobbles as he made hard work of climbing Horseshoe Street, the arguments swung to and fro inside of him without they come to any real conclusion you might call. Up at the top there where his route crossed over Gold Street was a big old horse-bus coming out of Marefair so’s he had to put his wood blocks down upon the street and stop while it went by.

Out one side of his eye while he stood waiting there he could see this young skinny feller, idling on the corner where they had the Palace of Varieties. The man was staring hard at Henry who, seeing as he was of a downcast turn of mind, decided that this was most likely on account of Henry being black or having rope around his wheels or some fool thing like that. He made out as he didn’t notice the young feller gawping at him, and then when the horse-bus had drug itself by and on up Gold Street, Henry stood upon his pedals and continued past the crossroads and uphill, by what they called Horsemarket. Dark was settling on the Boroughs like fine soot as Henry cycled up along its eastward edge, and there was gaslights burning in some windows now. The wagons was all firing up they lanterns, so that he was glad at least his hair and beard was white, and folks would see him so he didn’t get run down.

Horsemarket seemed to him more steep than usual, got all the doctors’ houses looking cosy to his left there and across the road it was all overhung with trees grew out the gardens of Saint Katherine’s. When he got up to Mary’s Street he turned along it. Clattering and creaking he made off into the greying tangle of the real old neighbourhood, what used to be all of the town there was.

As much as Henry liked the district where he lived, he couldn’t say as he much cared to see it in the twilight. That’s when things all lost they edges and they shapes, and what you knew weren’t real by daylight seemed a lot more possible. Hobgoblins, fiends and such as that, this was the time you seen ’em, when the paint peeled off a wood gate made a shape like someone standing there, or all the shadow-patches in a clump of nettles was a big face shifting in the wind, eyes narrowing with poison. Dusk played tricks like that all over, Henry knew, though sometimes it would seem to him as if the Boroughs was built crooked specially so’s it could harbour all the gloom and haunts up in its corners: nests where poor and ragged ghosts was bred. His rope tyres juddered on the stones as he squeaked through the evening lanes, where there was ugly fairies squirming in the water butts and ghouls crouched in the guttering for all what Henry knew. The bent-backed shops and houses leaned all round him, pale against the dusk like they was spikes of limestone growed up in a cave. Sweet in the mornings, lazy in the afternoons, come dark this was another place entire.

It wasn’t on account of this was somewhere you might get attacked and robbed, like Henry knew was the opinion of the Boroughs held by folks in better parts of town. To Henry’s mind there weren’t no safer place than here, where nobody robbed nobody ’cause everybody knew they was the same, without a penny to they names. As for attacks and beatings, there weren’t no denying they went on, but it weren’t nothing like it was in Tennessee. For one thing, what you had around the Boroughs was a lot of people who was all so angry on they insides, what they liked to do was just get drunk and fight each other so as they could let it out. That weren’t a pleasant thing to watch and it was hard to sit by while young men, and women too, they just destroyed themselves like that, but it weren’t Tennessee. It weren’t one bunch of folks got all the power taking they vengeance on a lot of helpless people what got nothing. This was poor folks who weren’t going to hurt nobody ’cept they own selves, although Henry owned as they could hurt they own selves something awful.

No, it wasn’t like the Boroughs was all full of cut-throats. It weren’t that what made it kind of frightening after nightfall, it weren’t nothing near as reasonable as that. Unearthly, that was what it was after the daylight went, the daylight what was holding back another world where anything might just about be possible. Children, of course, they loved it and you’d always have big squealing gangs of ’em run up and down the dim streets in the gaslight doing hide and seek or some such. Henry didn’t doubt the little boys and girls knew that this place was haunted, just like all the growed-ups did. The thing was, children was all at a time of life when ghosts was just about as natural as was anything in they experience. Ghosts was just part of the excitement, to a child. When you was older though, was nearer to the grave yourself and you’d had time to think on life and death a little, well, then ghosts and what they signified, that was all different somehow. That, to Henry’s mind, was why no one went out much in the Boroughs after it got dark, ’cept they was drinking men or little kids, or else police. The older people got, then the more phantoms what there was around, the shades of places and of people what weren’t here no more. These lanes run back to ancient times, as Henry was aware, so that he shouldn’t be surprised if all the spooks was built up pretty thick by now, like some variety of sediment.

He cycled up Saint Mary’s Street, where the Great Fire broke out a couple hundred year ago, past Pike Street on to Doddridge Street, where he dismounted his contraption so it could be pushed across the lumpy burial ground what run downhill from Doddridge Church. He manhandled his bicycle over the weedy mounds and wet black hollows of the wasteland, wondering not for the first time why it was they called this stretch a burial ground, and not a graveyard or a cemetery. He could see how possibly it was because there weren’t no headstones or no markers, although why that should itself be so when far as he knew it was human people what was buried here, that was what puzzled him. Best he could figure it, it was to do with Mr. Doddridge who had been the minister on Castle Hill, and was what people called a Nonconformist. Henry had heard tell of Nonconformist graveyards was elsewhere in England, where they also put they mass graves for the poor folk, them as was unable to afford a proper burying or tombstone. Could be that was just what happened here. Could be he wheeled his pedal-cart right now above bones was all jumbled up from people didn’t even got they names no more. Mindful of ghosts as he was feeling in the wasting light, he muttered some apologies to any skeletons he might be disrespecting, so’s they knew as it weren’t nothing personal.

When Henry was across the rough ground and in Chalk Lane, near the houses set back from the street they called Long Gardens, he climbed back up on his saddle and rode up the slope in way of Castle Terrace and of Doddridge Church itself, on his right hand there. Passing by the chapel, noticing that funny door set halfway up its old stone wall and leading nowhere, he considered what he knew of Mr. Doddridge, which of course made him in turn consider Mr. Newton.

Mr. Philip Doddridge, now, how people round here told it, was a man in poor health who was wanting that the worse-off folks could feel they had a Christian faith what was they own. When he come here to Castle Hill and started up his ministry, it seems like he took on the English Church by saying folks should have a right to worship as they pleased, and not just how they Bishops and that wanted it. He’d come here to Northampton when he was a young man in his twenties, this was round seventeen hundred thirty, and he’d stayed just over twenty years before his health took him away. He hadn’t lived long after that, but in his time he’d changed the whole way how folks thought about religion in this country, maybe in the Christian world all over. All of it done on the little raised-up mound of dirt what Henry was now riding past. Doddridge had writ hymns, too, just not so famous as “Amazing Grace”, and in the one old drawing of the man what Henry had once seed his eyes was clear and bright and honest as a child. There weren’t no shame, there weren’t no guilt. There weren’t no anything like that, save for a kindliness and great determination.