The
moors run high beneath a shot-peppered sky. Cold, wet, windswept, desolate,
eye-boring, heart-warming beauty. A brook slides down the huge grey-grassed
swells, gurgles like a baby in its sleep and is strangled by the
ever-stretching fingers of a psychopathic slag heap.
The
town’s master, a tall, angular, steel-grey figure, cringes and cowers against
the valley wall from the ever-present danger of engulfment by its own
droppings.
Below,
the town, once village, now injected with fixed humanity has spread its cobbled
roots upon the earth and its terraced canopy above. Figures flit between
cornered lights along the streets. Flat hat, tin food, voodoo lamp and grey
scrubbed faces. The shrill whip of a hooter beats upon them; they hurry to be
caged and plunged into the earth. Backbreaking toil in a creaking, gas-filled,
water-bound, black-lunged grave.
In
small coal-fired kitchens engineer’s wives prepare oat-milk breakfasts and
mentally list the jobs for today. Cook, clean, burnish, must tell Mrs Thwaites
what Harry saw Bill Holroyd up to, shopping, washing and whitening.
Children
still asleep, soon to be off to Chapel school, dream of swimming in sweets,
running on a golden beach, having two helpings, not joining the workforce at
twelve and being by yourself.
Mother’s
voice calls shrill and echoes through a bare-walled corridor, children wake.
The sun rises, officer of the day, to replace its silvery comrade-in-arms,
takes over the earthwatch and makes sure no one can ever escape.
(239
words)
Reference:
Woolley, A. (1981). Yorkshire Town. In R. McRoberts, Writing
Workshops: A Student's Guide to the Craft of Writing (p. 98). South
Melbourne: The Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd.
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