Dirty Little
Savages
We were little children then.
Innocent as
newborn lambs, wild with mischief and giddy as the day is long. Our days spent
roaming the secret hinterlands of childhood. Catching a glance of sun on our
backs, as if we might flare up in moments. Such delicate, flimsy creatures and
ripe for the picking like the scorched red berries of autumn.
Our youth
so fleeting, it hurt.
By the end of summer we were gone
in a blaze of fury and ephemeral colour.
Back then, was a time of tall tales
and high spirits.
We were
drunk on thin air – shrill as skylarks soaring above the clouds; trapped in a
buzz of heady excitement. Newly liberated by the school vacations, we stripped bare
to the waist; exposing our pale, unblemished bodies to the fierce sun. Wandering
over moor and meadow: thrashing through the corn stalks, tramping over the scorched
earth and the knot of withered heather.
We were
masters of our own fate; rambling far and wide without a care in the world. It
was 1976: the middle of a heat wave. Temperatures soared to 39˚ C. On
those listless sultry days we would canals. We thought nothing of the risks to
life and limb. Until that is, the girl with the blood-spattered dress stumbled
into town.
She took us by surprise, alighting without
warning. Her jagged mouth in a silent scream; face streaked with terror. All
eyes turned on the intruder, as if she were a trick of the light or an
apparition that just walked out of the heat haze.
And
then as she passed down the cobbled-stone streets between the rows of terraced
houses and derelict mills, they dismissed her as if she had never existed. Children
went dashing in and out of the burst standpipes as the sun stood over us in
blinding miasma. Water penumbras obscuring our view under a spray of
multi-coloured rainbows. For awhile, no one dared move, until some kid bowled
into her, screaming blue murder.
His shriek shattering
those halcyon days of summer forever.
There would
be no peace in our rural idyll again. No façade of childlike innocence. Only
the fleeting memory of her skulking through the screaming wake of children;
dressed in a white linen smock. She had a fine fleece of hair, crisp blue eyes
and pale lush lips. But most folk only saw the blood and simply stood there
staring. Until she wandered over the brim of Ribbelsthwaite Hill and slipped
out of sight.
Not long
after she was taken into care. Abandoned into the fostering embrace of Elsie
Branning the old spinster who took up residence near Gartside’s Mill. At first,
knowledge of the girl set tongues aflame in the village. Then, she attracted a
whirlwind of notoriety throughout the Dales. And without fuss or fanfare we
marched on down to her shop, hands and faces pressed up to the windows, purveying
the odd collection of dressmaker’s dolls and naked oriental mannequins. Each one
with an eerie resemblance to a wax-dipped woman that chilled me to the bone.
I recall we
spent our afternoons crowding into the hidden recesses of her shop, captivated by
the lure of the waxen-faced doll. And then there was the woman herself – a rare
oddity – this middle-class spinster, regally attired in her ornate turban and silk
kimono. Made all the more exotic, by her eccentric mannerisms and brooding
charm.
Old Elsie
Branning and her guest soon became talk
of the town.
On days when business was slow, she
retired into her dressmaker’s workshop to make the same dress she had been
working for twenty years – a white-lace wedding dress she would never wear,
having lost her husband to-be in the War.
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