The village was, shall we say, not as picturesque as I’d been expecting. There were some older, cottagey type houses along Old Main Street, but the row of shops was a 1950s eyesore, and looked as though the only fresh paint it had received since then was graffiti. Along with the Ferrington mini-market was a hairdresser featuring faded posters of women showcasing their eighties’ perms, the pizza place that Daniel had been to the other day, a Greggs and an off-licence which also advertised ‘cheapest vapes on the Old Side’. The only vapes on the Old Side, I would imagine. There was the Old Boat House pub that advertised a riverside garden and local sausages, and a miners’ social club that looked like a cheaper version of the pub. Opposite all this was the dinkiest, quaintest old-fashioned church I’d ever seen.
So maybe not quite picture postcard, but at least there was no air pollution, hardly any litter, and I could hear ducks quacking along the riverbank.
I went straight into the shop, loading up as much as I felt able to hang off the back of the pushchair – a fairly even mix of cleaning supplies and food. The selection was basic, to say the least, and they had completely run out of bananas.
Not to worry. We had a good hour or so before it started to get dark, and that gave us an excuse to cross the river to try the shops on the New Side.
Or not, as it turned out. The bridge, which stood in between the pub and the shops, was blocked off with concrete barriers, low enough for me to see that the stone structure had completely collapsed in the centre, leaving a gap of several metres where the Maddon flowed thick and grey beneath it.
I checked the maps on my phone, but couldn’t spot another bridge anywhere in the village. A woman was scurrying up the road towards me, head down, woolly hat pulled low and chin tucked into her scarf.
‘Excuse me?’
She jerked briefly to a stop, shaking her head at the pavement before hurrying past and into the off-licence. The rest of the street was deserted, so, quickly deciding to dismiss her strange response as perhaps mistaking me for a chugger, I followed her in.
Wow. It was like stepping into a nightclub, more like the kind of place I’d expect to find back in London than a rural village in the East Midlands. All the shop fixtures – the display cases, floor and counter, plus the walls and ceiling – were black. Backlighting caused the rows of spirits to glow in varying luminescent shades. In the centre of the room a glitter ball spun, pinpricks of light whirling around it. Techno music pumped from enormous speakers hung in the far corners, and behind the counter a man dressed all in black bounced his baseball-capped head slightly out of time to the beat.
‘All right?’ he asked the woman who’d entered before me, without breaking his stride. He looked about the same age as my dad, with a long, bleached ponytail dangling beneath the cap and a pair of headphones the size of grapefruit around his neck.
She leant her head so close to him that I couldn’t hear her reply, but he bent under the counter and fetched her a packet of cigarettes. Realising that it would look more than a little strange to be standing in this shop without buying anything, particularly with a baby, even if she was transfixed by the light show, I grabbed a bottle of wine. Sidling up as if queuing to pay, I tried to act as though it was a total coincidence me being here, rather than following the woman in immediately after she’d made it clear she didn’t want to talk to me.
‘So,’ I said, going for bright and breezy but ending up more along the lines of potentially-inebriated-while-in-charge-of-a-baby. ‘Lovely day. I mean, for this time of year. Well. Not really a lovely day, but at least it isn’t raining! I mean, that storm the other day – phew!’
While I was jabbering on, the woman had paid for her cigarettes and turned to go, head still ducked like an armed robber avoiding the CCTV. I took a slight step to the right to block her path, and before she could object gabbled, ‘Anyway, so the bridge seems to be blocked off. What’s the best way to get across the river?’
The woman froze, eyes swivelling from side to side as if she was preparing to brandish a weapon and demand the contents of the till.
‘I just needed some cigarettes!’ she blurted. ‘The Co-op’s run out of Jase’s brand and I didn’t have time to go anywhere else. I’m not sticking around.’
‘Wait, are you…?’ the man asked, his eyebrows shooting up into his cap. ‘I mean, I’m an open-minded fella. The bank doesn’t discriminate against the source of my poundage, after all. But I thought you must be from Middlebeck or summat. We don’t serve traitors and scabs or their scabby women in ’ere.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘Better get back where you belong before I offer you a refund on them cigs.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. I’m leaving now!’ And with that, she pushed past me and fled. Utterly baffled, I dumped the wine on the nearest shelf and reversed the pushchair back out the door as fast as I could drag it.
‘You one o’ them too, are you?’ the shop assistant called after me. ‘Didn’t you see the sign in the window? No kids and no New Siders.’
By the time I’d manoeuvred the pushchair through the heavy door, the woman was scuttling back down Old Main Street. I ran after her, Hope’s wheels skidding on the damp pavement.
‘Hello!’ I called. ‘Hey! Can you please stop for a moment!’
To my surprise she did, although that turned out to be because her car was parked there. I upped my speed and reached her just as she wrenched the door open. ‘Please! I’m not out to have a go at you. If it makes you feel better, that guy just refused to serve me,’ I gasped.
She paused, her curvaceous frame half in and half out of the car. ‘You’re from the New Side, too?’ she asked, glancing around furtively. ‘And you came here with ababy?’
‘No,’ I replied, then added quickly as the look of alarm reappeared and she made to slam the door shut. ‘I’m not from any side! I’m from Windermere, and London, and I’m currently staying at Damson Farm.’
‘So, what do you want?’ she asked, clearly eager to get away.
‘I want to get across the river so I can buy Hope some bananas. The mini-market’s run out and besides milk it’s her main food group.’
‘You can’t get across from the village. Have to go back to the main road. It’s miles away, though. It’ll take hours to walk there and back. And there’s no pavement for most of it.’ She looked up and down, sizing us up while still half in and half out of the seat. ‘Stick her in the back, I’ll take you.’
‘I thought you were short on time. In the shop you said that you didn’t have time to go anywhere else…’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Course I had time. I was bored and fancied a mission. Plus, don’t tell anyone in the village I said this – like, literally, don’t or they’ll lob a brick through my window or slash my tyres or something – but who in their right mind can be doing with a stupid old feud anyway? And the pleasure I get from knowing Jase is smoking cigs from the Old Side is worth the risk. He’d choke on them if he knew.’ She cackled, eyes glinting, and I started to wonder if a lift was a bad idea. But then she looked me directly in the eyes and said, ‘Trust me, he deserves it. I’m Alice, by the way.’ Her dark eyes were so lovely that I felt like Icouldtrust her, so together we clicked the car seat part of Hope’s pram into the back of her Fiesta, loaded the frame into the boot and then I took my first voyage into the New Side.
‘So, I don’t know anything about this whole Old and New Side thing,’ I said as we sped out into the open countryside. ‘It seems a big deal, though.’
Alice grimaced. ‘It is a big deal. Or at least it was. See, Ferrington was a mining town. Apart from Old Main Street, New Road and a couple of the smaller side streets, every house in the village was built for the miners back in the fifties. Ferrington was just a bridge and a boathouse surrounded by a few farms before the mine opened. The pit is who we are. But in the strikes, back in eighty-four, the village was split. The Old Side of the river went on strike, and it was brutal. Some families starved. All of them froze. If it wasn’t for the help of the farms, who stayed neutral, whole families would have died. But the New Side, they wouldn’t strike. Said they needed to keep working to support their elderly parents, put shoes on their kids’ feet. And the worst part of it is, the entrance to the mine is on the Old Side, so every morning the New Siders had to cross the village to get to the picket line. It was their right to work, to keep earning a living, but the Old Side didn’t see it that way, so they thought it was their duty to stop them.’
