The Facts of Life and Death

4

LEGEND HAS IT that in AD 878, Vikings under the leadership of Hubba the Dane landed thirty-three ships right here, at the broad mouth of the River Torridge, and headed up the steep hill to launch an assault on Kenwith Castle. They barely got a mile before they met the English defenders coming the other way. The king’s men had the high ground and the raiders were repelled, but not before the battle claimed the lives of thousands of winners and losers alike.

The dead victors were carried back to Kenwith under the first Eagle standard ever captured, while the Danes were buried where they fell – in mass graves dug easily in earth so softened by carnage that it is known to this day as Bloody Corner.

Since then, not much had happened in Appledore.

For nearly twelve hundred years, the little village serried its way up that same hill like a much slower, more respectful invasion. The first row of cottages rose straight from the muddy estuary, and the tide lapped against painted walls and seeped into basements on a twice-daily basis.

Appledore had a post office, three churches and six pubs: the usual ratio. In summer, little galleries and gift shops opened in people’s front rooms, selling handmade and home-made gifts, although the hands and homes were mostly Chinese. Not like the Hocking’s ice cream, which was made right here in the village from great golden mountains of real butter, and sold from a fleet of vanilla vans.

And not like the ships.

Appledore folk had been building boats for generations, and at its peak Appledore Shipbuilders had employed over two thousand men: so many that one village alone could not satisfy the demand, and men had come from miles around, working shifts around the clock, and riding to the yard on cheap old step-through scooters that cut through sleep like 4am buzz-saws. For half a century the huge iron shed had dominated the river and made bonsais of the trees. Great warships slid from it and into the river, causing passing yachts to bob and pitch like toys. The dry dock had once been the biggest in Europe, and it had seemed that the good times would never end.

But everything ends – especially good times.

And when they ended in Appledore, fifteen hundred men lost their jobs.

Overnight.

Fifteen hundred breadwinners. Fifteen hundred skilled welders and fitters and carpenters and machinists, suddenly unemployed in a place where the job centre only regularly offered bar work, labouring and babysitting.

Many of the men never worked again. Not legally, anyway. They missed the work and the money, of course, but more than that, they missed their mates and the way men could be when they were with other men – which was not the same way they had to be when they were with women.

So they found other places to meet. Some of them met in the bookmaker’s, some in the pubs, some in the snooker halls.

And some of them joined the Gunslingers.

The Gunslingers were a loose group of maybe twenty men who, once a week, dressed up as cowboys and met at the George in Appledore – just as the Shootists did at the Bell in Parkham and the Outlaws did at the Coach and Horses in Barnstaple.

North Devon had its fair share of cowboys, that was for sure. All week they worked in banks or did odd jobs, but Cowboy Nights transported them for just a few hours to the Wild West, where men were men, women were buxom, and jails were made of wood.

When the Gunslingers had first appeared, the residents of Appledore had been a little nervous of the men in boots and black hats who swaggered down the narrow canyon of Irsha Street every Friday night. But after a while the net curtains stopped twitching every time a cowpoke passed through the little fishing village on his way to the pub, and it was left only to small gangs of teenaged boys to laugh and shout insults.

From a safe distance.

Once at the George, the Gunslingers got drunk and showed off and flirted with the barmaids, and talked in a cowboy way about cowboy things.

Like fashion.

They fell on any new item of cowboy clothing or equipment like Beverly Hills housewives – poring over it for style and authenticity. Funds and geography dictated that items usually failed on both counts. Nellie Wilson’s holster was from army surplus, Scratch Mumford’s poncho had been crocheted by his mother, and Blacky Blackmore’s cowboy hat had a Pixar logo under the brim.

The Gunslingers’ most authentic asset came when Frank ‘Whippy’ Hocking would ride his hairy skewbald, Tonto, through the village and tie him up outside the George. There, tourists took pictures, and small children fed him sugar and ketchup and any other pub condiments that were free. ‘No mustard,’ Whippy always told them. When he left, the worse for wear, the other Gunslingers would come outside and help to push Whippy up into the tooled leather saddle. It always took at least three of them to heave him upright, because Whippy was one of the ice-cream clan, and quality control was his life.

When they weren’t peacocking, the Gunslingers played a casual game of poker for pennies and bickered back and forth about old TV Westerns – wavering between Bonanza and The High Chaparral and The Virginian. Between them they had pirated all the box sets. In the films they were split between Clint Eastwood or Gary Cooper; John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart. Their jury was always out on Kevin Costner, who promised so much and so often – then somehow always managed to ruin things with gills or a bad haircut.

If a man joined the Gunslingers – and if he were not thoroughly unpopular – he’d be given a cowboy name. Whether he liked it or not. Mostly these names were bestowed for low reasons that barely troubled the imagination. Blacky Blackmore delivered coal, Hick Trick lived in the sticks, while Daisy Yeo mooed loudly and randomly, in a sort of agricultural Tourette’s; in the supermarket you could hear him aisles away.

Some men tried to join up with their cowboy name all ready to go, but the Gunslingers had no truck with that. Indeed, they were apt to punish such presumption, which was why Len ‘Pussy’ Willows’ membership had been short and fractious, ending in a brawl that had memorably spilled out of the George and all the way down Irsha Street.

Just like real cowboys.

It had happened six months ago, and they still worked it into at least one conversation a week.

As the night and the beer ran down, the Gunslingers would get reflective on how much better life would be if only North Devon were open of range and filled with cattle – preferably ones which needed driving from one end of the county to the other on a regular basis. They’d put Willie and Johnny on the jukebox in a mournful loop, and sigh into their empty glasses and empty holsters, and long for the good old days before varmints started shooting small children and everyone got so damned jumpy – even about replicas.