Children of the Night by John Blackburn

Author:John Blackburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2021-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

No, it was impossible. Such things just didn’t happen. Mott had rarely disliked two people as much as he did Bishop Fenge and his chaplain, but he felt he had to agree with them. Ainger must have been right round the bend.

And yet he hadn’t written like a madman. Mott scowled across the gloomy reference-room of the Tynecastle public library. He had read the typescript twice now, and he could see that a devil of a lot of work had gone into it. It was an almost complete record of every out-of-the-way occurrence that had taken place in Dunstonholme since the Norman invasion.

Much of the material had been taken from word of mouth of course; legends and folk tales of children and very old people.

George Bridger, an eighty-five-year-old farm labourer, told me that his grandfather was amongst those who had recovered Pounder’s body. ‘He came into the kitchen, and though an abstemious man, he pulled out a bottle of gin, and he didn’t put it back till it was a quarter empty. “It was no accident, whatever people tell you,” he said to my mother. “Somebody or something drove those sheep down the valley, and they’d almost trampled the poor devil into the ground.”’

A woman, Molly Carlin, had preceded Pounder’s intention of living out on the moor during the eighteenth century and had been stoned to death as a witch. Her body was buried just outside the churchyard under a plain slab of granite, and children still believed that, if they ran three times round the square and then knelt down by the slab, they would hear her screaming.

Ainger had got a lot of material from books too, though, and had indexed his references. Mott opened the first volume of Propert’s History of the North-Eastern Railway. The library had a fine section on local history and the attendants had been very helpful.

Work on the branch line between Welcott and Dunstonholme was finally abandoned in 1847. The generally accepted reasons for the company’s failure were constant labour troubles, caused by radical agitators, and lack of capital preceding the collapse of George Hudson’s ‘Empire’. The author has no wish to contradict these theories completely, but would like to quote a statement made by a foreman ganger named Allan Robson. Robson had worked on railways all over the British Isles and cannot be regarded as a nervous character.

‘All went well and smoothly till we started the cutting through Mossgill Moor, and then nothing was ever right again. The Irishmen walked off the job in a body after three days, and I can’t say that I blame them. It was just as bad with the local chaps, and I’ve seen grown men throw down their picks and walk off the job, though their families were well nigh starving. There was something not canny about that place. You had the feeling that you were digging your way through into Hell. Even the soldiers who came to keep order felt it.’

So much for the railway.

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