The Stranger House (44 page)

Let’s start with Pam Galley coming over to Skaddale from Eskdale. That was in the autumn of 1960, not long after Sam Flood started here as curate. She came to the village school with the twins. She fitted in all right, didn’t talk a lot. We watched the way the twins treated her. That was the touchstone of survival for us lads. So long as you didn’t cross the Gowders, you’d be all right. They weren’t cruel to her or anything. They just treated her like she was some kind of animated doll. She did more or less exactly what they told her. Sometimes they’d play silly tricks on her, like telling her to stand out in the rain during playtime while the rest of us were sheltering. But it was too easy to be fun for long. Generally they just ignored her.

Not long after she came to Illthwaite, she started menstruating. The twins knew, living in the same house, and they told us. They were our sexual mentors. Living in the country, you pick up on the animal basics pretty early, but when it came to translating the facts of life from the byre to the bedroom, it was the Gowders who spelt things out. Sometimes their spelling was pretty terrible. If you did it standing up, the girl couldn’t get pregnant, and if you did it in the
churchyard, your willy would fall off, that sort of thing. But no one ever argued.

They stated pretty authoritatively that once a girl started bleeding, she was ready for tupping. Their word. Not that little Pam offered any incentive to tupping compared with some of the other more developed girls. And not that any of us boys had much real notion of the mechanics of human tupping, apart from some very confused and overheated fantasies. This was 1960. In rural Cumberland, it might as well have been 1930.

The Gowders I should say have never seemed very personally involved with sex, either as adolescents or grown men. Maybe it’s because they’ve always formed a sort of self-contained unit. They were only interested in sex because they saw how much most of the rest of us were fascinated by it, so being the acknowledged experts gave them yet another form of dominance.

Midway through December Madge Gowder, the twins’ mother, who’d been poorly for a long time, took really ill. It was cancer. They said reassuring things to the kids, of course, but all the adults must have known she was dying. It was a bright hard spell, lots of sun but very cold. We used to go up on Mecklin Moor to play. It’s a wild place, there’s lots of old stone circles up there, and lots of wild legends about what went on in them. And of course there’s the Moss, where on a dark and misty night they say the ghosts of every creature that’s drowned there come out to taste the air again.

Not far above the Foulgate track before you reach the Moss itself there’s a place where two rock slabs have rolled together to form a sort of cave, and this was the spot us lads thought of as our den.

That day in January 1961—it must have been the
first week, we still weren’t back at school—there were five of us up there. Me, the Gowders, Pam Galley, and Gerry Woollass.

Here in Illthwaite the squire’s children had always gone to the village school till they were eleven or twelve and then moved on to boarding school. There was no distinction made in lessons, but in the playground, maybe because I was the vicar’s son, Gerry and I often kept pretty close together. The twins could easily have persecuted us for being different. Instead, maybe because it demonstrated their supremacy even more, they made us subordinates in their gang. It was an invitation you didn’t refuse. In fact I felt quite excited and privileged as I swore a rather bloodthirsty oath of fealty and secrecy about all the gang’s activities.

We brought some bits of wood for a fire, knowing we’d not find much up on the moor, and soon we had a decent blaze going. We pooled what scraps of food we had to make a picnic—some biscuits, a bit of cheese, a bar of chocolate—and the twins had brought a bottle of beer and a bottle of cider and some cigarettes. With Foulgate being a house of sickness, they’d been able to raid their father’s drink store without being noticed. They’d also got a magazine which I presume belonged to him too. By contemporary standards, it was pretty innocuous, but the photos it contained of nude women posing with beach balls, that sort of thing, set our young minds swooning.

Then one of the Gowders asked if we’d ever seen the real thing. We had to admit we hadn’t. And he said, would we like a look? Not knowing quite what he meant, me and Gerry said, yes, we wouldn’t mind. And the twin turned his head and called to Pam.

We’d almost forgotten she was there. I think she’d been given some squares of chocolate and she just sat a little way behind us, dead quiet, waiting till the twins would take her home.

When the twin told her to take her clothes off, she looked at him blankly.

Then he said something like, it’s all right, you won’t get cold, here make room for her by the fire. And it was as if that was a kind of reassurance, as if the only thing to worry about was being cold. So she took her clothes off.

For me there was little or no connection between the women in the pictures and this skinny little scrap of white flesh shivering by the fire. I don’t think the Gowders were particularly aroused either. Like I said, they never showed much direct personal interest in girls. They were more like farmers showing off a prize yow at a show. But Gerry Woollass was different. Maybe he was more developed than the rest of us, or maybe he’d had more than his share of the cider and beer and tobacco. But it was clear that he was excited.

When they saw this, one of the twins said, “Would you like to touch her? You can if you like. You can touch her with your thing if you like.”

Again, I think it just amused them to get the squire’s boy so completely out of his own control and into theirs. The girl was just a means to an end.

After that things moved very quickly. Little Pam didn’t struggle, she just did what the twins told her. Gerry was so excited it didn’t last long. The mere act of pushing into her set him off. She screamed but not too loud, choking it back as if she didn’t want to anger the twins. Gerry made more noise than she did. In the space of less than a minute it was all over, Gerry was buttoning himself up,
Pam lay there quiet, but there were tears on her cheeks. And drops of blood on her legs.

I just sat and watched. I had a sense that something terrible was happening, but I wasn’t a brave child. I’m not making excuses. I was what they call nowadays a bit of a wimp. I suppose that was what made me willing to put up with any indignities the Gowders heaped upon me. Being one of their gang meant the other boys treated me with respect.

So I was very willing to let myself be reassured by the way the Gowders acted afterwards. They told Pam to get dressed, even helped her. And they gave her the rest of the chocolate and borrowed Gerry’s handkerchief so she could dry her eyes and wipe her legs, and they threw the rest of our little store of fuel on the fire, and talked about our plans for the rest of the day as if nothing had happened.

Gerry suddenly stood up and said it was getting late, he had to go home.

He didn’t look well. I think that maybe with him being brought up a strict Catholic, some notion of having committed a dreadful sin was already eating away at his mind. I could understand this. There was plenty of hellfire preaching in my upbringing, and behind all that reassurance I was letting myself feel, I think I too was already feeling the heat of those diabolical flames. I heard myself saying I was expected back at the vicarage too.

One of the twins said indifferently, “Off you both go then, long as you don’t forget the gang promise.”

Some threats don’t need to be spelt out.

But some guilt is stronger than any threat.

Gerry didn’t return to the village school for the following term. It was said his parents had decided he needed to be tutored privately to make sure he was fully prepared for
starting at his boarding school in the autumn. I was too naive to suspect then that it had anything to do with what had happened. All I knew was I was left without anyone to talk to. Worse, I was left without having in view someone I could think of as the real culprit, which was a thought I might have been able to shelter behind when I started worrying about hellfire.

As for Pam, someone might have noticed something if she’d been returning to a normal household. But Foulgate had been a house of sickness for some time. And on that dreadful day, from what I’ve been able to piece together, when Pam got back to the farm, she must have made her way straight up to Madge’s bedroom. Perhaps she wanted to tell her what had happened. Who knows? Certainly Madge would have been the only person Pam would have turned to.

It doesn’t matter anyway. All I know is that when someone else went into the room a little time later, they found Pam sitting by the bed, holding a dead woman’s hand.

Children back then were required to be seen and not heard at the best of times. At the worst of times, they were expected to be invisible as well. Pam Galley was always a particularly quiet child. If anyone actually noticed any extra sign of withdrawal or distress, they had more than enough explanation for it in this second grievous loss following on in pretty close proximity to the death of her own parents.

Me, I tried to forget. Things weren’t helped when some time later Sam Flood, our curate, insisted on bringing little Pam out of the Gowder house and settling her in the vicarage until such time as her future could be decided. I can recall overhearing fierce arguments
between Sam and my father and Mrs Thomson, our housekeeper. I would have put money on my father and Mrs Thomson winning any argument—they both terrified me—but Sam wouldn’t let himself be beaten down, and to my horror I came down one morning to find Pam sitting at the breakfast table.

At school, the Gowders didn’t talk about what had happened either, but they kept me pretty close, and made it clear that resigning from the gang wasn’t an option. To Pam at school they were as pleasant as it lay in their natures to be, but she didn’t even seem aware of their existence. Not that this was noteworthy as she didn’t show much awareness of anyone else’s existence either. The teachers and everyone were really worried about her, and when word got round that one of Mr Dunstan’s religious charities had found a place for her with a family in Australia, everyone was delighted, saying things like that was what she needed, a complete change of scene and a settled family background, weren’t we lucky that the squire was such a man of influence? Everyone except Sam Flood, that is. He was still asking questions, and raising objections, but finally even he got persuaded, and Pam vanished from Illthwaite.

You’d have thought that Pam’s removal would have made things easier for me but it didn’t work like that. On the contrary, I found things got worse and worse. At least having her around gave me the reassuring visual evidence that she appeared to be just the same as ever. But now she’d moved out of my sight into my imagination.

I would be woken in the night by the sound of that one scream she let out. And then I’d lie there listening to the silence. Her silence. Eventually I started to find that any silence that stretched for more than a couple of
minutes became her silence, as if she were close by, withdrawn, suffering, but always present.

If my father had been a different sort of man, I would have spoken to him. But I knew what to expect if I did and that was one fear I had no strength to overcome.

The obvious alternative was Sam Flood.

He was a man from whom loving kindness emanated almost visibly.

His concern in the business of Pam’s future was always to find what was best for the girl, what would give her the best chance of happiness. My father, on the other hand, urged on by Mrs Thomson, wanted nothing but to get her out of our house and our lives. As for Squire Dunstan, even then I had serious doubts about the purity of his motives. Fair enough, this Australian business might be a genuine opportunity for the girl, but it was also a great chance to move a potential source of embarrassment to his family to the other side of the globe.

Of course I had no idea she was pregnant, and I don’t see how he could have known either.

Sam was caring, involved, fearless, and also my friend. He was the first adult I knew who treated me as an equal.

Even with all this going for him, it took a long time for me to pluck up courage to speak. I could only guess at the consequences, and nothing in my guess was good for me. The anger of my father, the wrath of the Gowder twins, the possible involvement of the police—these were likely to follow and these I would have to bear.

If I could have foreseen the actual outcome, I would probably have held my tongue forever.

I looked for a good moment, kept on finding excuses to decide this time or that wasn’t ripe, and finally on that Sunday, almost without thinking, having seen my father
and Mrs Thomson leave for the church to take Sunday School, I went to Sam’s room and banged at his door.

It was Edie Appledore who opened it. I think if she’d stayed I would probably have lost my nerve and kept quiet. But she just pushed right by me and went straight down the stairs, and I started talking and told Sam everything in one incoherent burst.

At first he just looked at me blankly as if he wasn’t taking it in. But finally what I was saying seemed to register and he sat me down and made me go through it again.

He was very calm on the surface but I could see that, underneath, my story had had a powerful effect on him.

All he said to me, however, was, “Thank you for telling me this, but I wish you’d spoken sooner. Never postpone a good act, Pete.”

I felt hugely rebuked. I suppose I had looked for absolution, even reward for my courage in speaking. Not that I felt brave. The minute I got it off my chest, I started thinking about the Gowders.

Sam told me to go back to my room, he needed to be alone to think.

After maybe fifteen minutes, he tapped at my door and told me he would be cancelling the Bible class as he had to go out.

Fearfully I asked him what he intended doing about what I’d told him.