Sanderson’s Isle: 'A raucous, Technicolor scream' Sunday Times

By James Clarke

'[An] engaging, inventive literary noir ... full of neat twists and potent writing' Independent Book of the Month

'A feisty, subversive countervision of England's lost futures and buried longings' Rob Doyle, author of Threshold

A Burley Fisher Book of the Year 2023

1969. Thomas Speake comes to London to look for his father but finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts 'midweek madness' parties where the punch is spiked with acid. There Speake meets Marnie and promises to help her find her adoptive child, who has been taken by her birth mother to live off-grid in a hippie commune in the Lake District.

Forced to lie low after a violent accident, Speake joins Sanderson on a tour of the Lake District, where he's researching a book to accompany his popular TV series, Sanderson's Isle. Fascinated by local rumours about the hippies, Sanderson joins the search for their whereabouts. Amid the fierce beauty of the mountains, the cult is forming the kind of community that Speake - a drifter who belongs nowhere - is desperate to find but has been sent to betray.

This is the follow up to James Clarke's Betty Trask Prize-winning debut novel. It is filled with gorgeous nature writing of the urban and the rural, and its portrayal of the moment when British society was unsettled and transformed by the counterculture of the 1960s is visionary and electrifying.

'Psychedelic 1960s London, TV personalities, counterculture in the Lake District, a lost child! Wasn't I always going to read this book? Magnificent' Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Jul 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781782836148

James Clarke

JAMES CLARKE is a freelance writer and lecturer. His books include The Virgin Film Guide: War Films and Movie Movements: Films that Changed the World of Cinema and he has contributed to The Rough Guide to Film. He has worked extensively in community film-making and film education and several of his short film projects have played at national and international film festivals. He writes regularly for the magazines 3DArtist and SciFi Now. His writing has also been published by Resurgence and Country Walking magazines. James has taught at a number of universities, including the Universities of Gloucestershire and Warwick. James is currently co-writing a feature-film screenplay.

Book preview

SANDERSON’S ISLE

JAMES CLARKE

For my gran

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

PART 1:LONDON

1. Breakfast

2. Man at the Door

3. The Lost Heart

4. Sanderson’s Isle

5. The River

6. Green Punch

7. Knife in Hand

8. Full Spirit Mother

9. Digitalis

PART 2:LAKELAND

10. Close Your Eyes

11. Dead Moles

12. Jive Night

13. On Stone Hill

14. Slow Summer Midnight

15. Dream’s End

16. Taking the Stones

Acknowledgements

Also By James Clarke

Copyright

PART 1

LONDON

_____

1

Breakfast

______

when i was a teenager I became famous in my hometown for disappearing after telling a priest where he could shove his God. Long before that, I lived in a lockhouse by the River Lea, which, out of all the rivers I have known, is the most silent yet the least peaceful. I’ve been lodging back in London for about a week now, and I’ve been getting reacquainted with my surroundings. The swallows screaming at one another as they skim the river hawking for insects. The block-clatter of a local woodyard and a pair of factory chimneys unravelling smoke at all hours of the day.

I’m told that a couple of years ago a park authority was formed with the aim of transforming this part of the capital into a ‘green lung’ for the city, but if you ask me, they’ve a long way to go. I’m halfway down a stubble path cutting a scar into the marshes, and the weight of carbon keeps catching in my throat. I’ve passed a floating island of rubbish, wedges of gravel no-man’s-land and a car going to rust among the flattened rushes.

A security lamp glowers from the top of these new waterworks they’re constructing. Its amber eye illuminates the path I’ve taken but casts the way ahead in shadow. I’ve started jogging since returning to the lockhouse. Yes, jogging. There’s just something about the ritual of movement I find appealing. It’s become a way for me to function without having to think.

My first couple of runs took me along a stream dividing the Walthamstow and Warwick reservoirs, but the moment I got to the meander where an iron bridge crosses the water, it felt like a sense of unease had been poured all over me. I asked about and it turns out a rocket landed there during the war, destroying the boathouse and killing the watchman. Now I skirt the stream entirely, heading via the north-east flank of the reservoirs, but it’s become impossible for me to take this detour without thinking of the watchman being blown up as he slept.

There’s the stream. A hard sun flares in the east, creating a blushed effect that will transform the water into a rim of light, creeping up the bank like it’s trying to chase me. As if it’s trying to show me that the world has an awareness of its own. The sweat keeps going in my eyes, attracting tiny flies. Passing a rearing thicket, I beat a load of arid dirt from the brush. Here I am, I think to myself. Here I am alone in the south.

I must want my head examining, coming down to London like this. I guess I was looking for something to do. Days without purpose have cropped up in my life ever since I ran away from home all those years ago, and when they do, when the hours begin to open around me like a relaxed fist, it’s not been unusual for me to head out in search of … Oh, I don’t know.

Building work has been perfect for this kind of existence. Now that everyone’s got a car the government’s been investing in linking cities and towns, widening and building new roads. Guys like me who want quick money and don’t care where we get sent have found steady work.

Cash-in-hand subcontracting jobs. Hanging out at the meeting point with the other subs waiting to find out if you’re needed for the day. You pick the work up in the morning and you put it down as soon as you can. You dump the rubble bag, empty the piss bucket and you’re on your way. See you tomorrow, maybe. See you never.

Most recently I worked as a banksman crewing the Rugby to Leeds strait of the M1, a dense and roaring stretch of motorway connecting the north with the south. Before that I laboured on the Darlington bypass pouring and smoothing cement, among other things, and I’ll be looking to get my crane licence in the next few years. I admire those drivers, isolated in their cabs, perched above the rooftops steering gigantic sections of steel through the air. Despite the tricky nature of operating a tower crane’s latticed boom, the drivers’ skill tends to go unappreciated. But let this be said. There’s a perfection in pivoting those enormous weights into their singular constructions. They’re the only place on earth that load truly fits.

Most subs have done stints in London. They say it’s like prison. You do your time, make your money, get the hell out. In a way that’s what I’m up to with this undertaking. I’ll meet my father and see what comes of it. If he wants nothing to do with me there’s every chance I’ll quite literally be back on the road, destabilising the packed rock and earth, the marl and clay, helping to construct under- and overbridges, looped elevations and knotty intersections so that one day the commercial lorries can break the speed limit. At some point I’d like to hire a car and inspect my handiwork. I’ll speed up the motorway listening to the gummy scud of the tyres against the macadam, stop at a gleaming new service station for chicken and chips.

People are becoming apparent in the windows overlooking the river. A bleary guy in a dressing gown. An old dear feeding the cat. The streetlamp’s tangerine shimmer is undermined by the morning light, and the sourness of the drains furs the air. My lungs are rattling, too many cigarettes, as a bus growls past, plumes of steam funnelling from a nearby house. Here is where the city overlaps with what remains of the countryside. A dome of coal smoke caps everything like a distress signal left over from the war. The slow river, gravy-brown. The paddling ducks with their oily feathers. The tincture of a day to come. Where I’m heading, nothing much else is going on.

It’s a strange compulsion, this wanting to be outdoors every morning, because where I did most of my growing up there was plenty of countryside. Almost too much, in fact. There, a low sky the colour of beef tea darkened a chain of woolly hills topped by gruelling tussock moorland that curled around the region like an unwelcome arm drapes about a nervous shoulder. I’m talking about the town of Sarls Hyke, a small, conservative community embedded in the upper reaches of the Calder Valley like a bullet in a thigh. Sarls Hyke wasn’t a million miles from Rochdale, and it wasn’t far from Halifax. It was one of those towns that are notable for their lack of distinction. It’s a place where you can feel marooned even though you’re about as landlocked as it’s possible to be.

In that part of the world, they used to say that cotton was king, but there were no kings in Sarls Hyke, only subjects, and I was one of them. From the age of ten I lived in a breeze-whipped stone cottage named Top O’th Brow with a squat pensioner named Tabitha Henderson, known in the area simply as Tab. Tab’s house was poky and creaky and whenever you touched the walls you got whitewash on your fingers, but it was situated on a hilltop street that offered a fine view of a gritstone viaduct rising above the woods on the other side of the valley. Behind Top O’th Brow snaked a cross-Pennine turnpike built to accommodate trucks and the last of the horse and traps, each vehicle casting a romantic silhouette on its journey to haul flax and calico, cotton and cord between the various sewing shops and factories constellating the rose counties.

Tab took me on after my mother Muriel got the district nurse job in Sarls Hyke and moved us out of Manchester in the summer of 1945. Muriel’s new job had come with a house, an indoor toilet and ultimately a man, after she was courted by Tab’s brother Edwin, a poacher, dairy hand and church volunteer who never had much to say for himself. When Edwin and Muriel decided to shack up together, that was me out on my ear. They wanted to make a proper go of it, Muriel said, without me getting under their feet all the time.

Because Muriel had never publicly acknowledged me as her son, this raised few eyebrows. Her cover story was that my real mother, her sister, had been run over by a bread van, when the truth was that ‘Auntie Muriel’ was an only child, and I was actually the result of an affair she’d had with one of the senior doctors at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. My mother would later confess that in those days disowning an illegitimate child was preferable to losing your career and reputation, which is how, having left London and spent a few desperate years nursing in Manchester during the Blitz, she wound up in Sarls Hyke with me in tow, her constant source of aggravation. I still remember the day Muriel sent me to live with Tab, a stranger whose idea of a treat was a plate of tripe and onions drizzled with malt vinegar.

‘Tom,’ Muriel said, ‘one day you’ll learn the true price of happiness.’ Never mind that she had just taught me that very lesson.

I come to a stop and set my hands on my knees. A gust of wind is driving saucers into the reservoir. The ripples widen as if my inhalations are pulling them this way.

I step over the wall and sit on the flags descending into the shady water. Having caught my breath and rubbed my aching calves, I slip my running shoes and socks off and have a quick paddle. Oh, it’s cold. My shadow’s thrown across the ripples, fluttering like a spectre. A mirror version of me, poised as if waiting for me to explain how I ended up living such a different life.

I make better time having rested. On the final stretch of path leading to the lockhouse an evil hissing nearly sends me into the water. It’s a swan, neck like a saxophone, its wings massive as it comes at me from the bushes. I just about keep my balance, quickening pace until the swan and its horrid black feet are well behind. Eventually I pull level with an overgrown field hemming the river. Beyond that, a train peels off towards Waltham Forest, its rhythmic passage receding, trailing a buoyant almost-silence in its wake. I am very much at a remove from everything. It’s just me and my beating heart. The careless shifting element that is the river.

My run ends at a natural weir where the water distorts chevrons of rock, turning them into black moonstones. I grab my cigarettes and keys from under the dustbin and have a wheezy smoke by the merrily painted houseboats straining against their moorings.

From one of the boats a broken windchime hangs with nothing to make it sing. Below that a rotting acoustic guitar is decorated with psychedelic flowers. Visible too is the outline of a spooky dog conducting its regular vigil from the roof of one of the Compass Tenements about a mile away.

Officially known as Lea Heights, the four high-rises dominate the treeline. They’re not even that old but they’re already exhausted-looking and martialled by flocks of savage gulls with red stripes wrapping their bills like electrical tape binding thick yellow wires.

Each tenement is named after a councillor from the planning committee. At fifteen storeys high, Sharpley is tallest. Farrow at ten is next, while the eight-storey twins, Harris and Hale, are runts by comparison. The doors are all north-facing, which gives the tenements their nickname. From the lockhouse they have an interesting way of catching the sun, emitting a distinctive sheen on brighter days, like prisms. The sight’s really taken hold of me this past week. I’ve taken to poking my head out of the skylight so I can watch the towers until the light changes. It’s not difficult to imagine these buildings coming to life, heaving out of their foundations, sprouting feet and striding out to sea.

Listen to that dog barking. The gulls must be after its breakfast. The animal’s always up at this hour. Soon it will begin its routine of padding as far as its leash allows. It will describe a circle about itself until the tether’s wrapped around an iron stake set in concrete, then settle onto its belly and begin to howl.

I say howl. It’s more of a yelp. The dog knows exactly what it’s doing. It pauses between each cry as if concentrating on finding the right emotional note, directing its longing at the gravel pits and railway sidings overrun with knotweed and wildflower, at the bomb sites and industrial estates, the ugly civic utilities, peaceful wharfs and disused canals, the golf courses and greens, playgrounds and allotments, the rows of blackened terraces, and the lockhouse.

Nothing works properly in the lockhouse. It’s a stone box built without regard for harmony or sanctity that’s been run for many years by an off-key guy named Ivan Curd, a very opinionated person with nothing of interest to say. I have a feeling that Ivan was running the lockhouse when Muriel first brought me here when I was a baby, but understandably he didn’t recognise me when he showed me the attic, the part of the house, he gleefully informed me, that heats slowest and chills fastest.

Now almost totally bald, Ivan makes me think of a snail that has lost its shell. He breathes too heavily through his nose, he has a dirty-minded laugh and a work ethic that’s led him to this sporadic life of lock operation, of collecting rental payments from nomads like me. I’m sure that in the time that’s passed since I was last here, Ivan has done hardly anything with the place, despite somehow picking up a disappointed woman named Jill and persuading her to become his wife. I suppose people with similar standards tend to attract one another.

Jill is at the kitchen window mashing the tea. The electric fly zapper fixed to the wall lends her a serene composure, almost as if she’s lying on a granite slab in a morgue. Hiding on the other side of the glass around the corner of the house, I cup a hand over my cigarette because it isn’t often you get the chance to really examine someone up close like this. The sarcastic, put-upon woman I have come to know is easily dispelled in the time it takes me to finish my smoke. Within Jill’s blank expression I perceive her patience, her watchfulness, the exposed characteristics glittering like unearthed diamonds.

Tall for a woman and full-featured, Jill Curd has the soft, voluptuous sort of figure you get in old paintings, the kind they profile on TV shows like Monitor. She should have been born a century earlier, because that way she’d be thought pretty. Now she’s unfashionable. She wears her brunette hair clipped into a spiral at the back of her head, and her eyelashes are brittle with mascara. She’s as pale as it gets and she has a dimple in her chin that you could balance a shilling in.

None of this is to say that she’s unattractive. Jill is attractive in the same way that a person can be talented and good at something, but not clever. I do feel for her, shackled to a crass bottom feeder like Ivan. I found a load of pills in the Curds’ bedroom yesterday. Jill was zonked out on the bed next to them. I had to check her breath with a mirror from the dresser to check she was still alive.

Ivan will be upstairs waiting on breakfast. Flung on the chair will be the military camouflage jacket he always wears, a hat of some kind stuffed in the pocket. Ivan uses hats to disguise his baldness, but they make him sweat. Between the hats, his jacket and being too tight to run more than a single bath a week, the lock-keeper has a pickled odour that isn’t far off yesterday’s fish.

I’ve puzzled over how the Curds met. They have none of the casual intimacy of a happy relationship. They have no pet names, silly voices, gladness or routines. And they make few allowances for each other. As far as I can tell, they get by on piss-taking and pragmatism, which they’re at least endearingly aware of. Maybe this awareness is what sustains them. Certainly, Ivan seems to get a perverse kick out of the lockhouse’s crumminess. The barren frieze of maroon left on the half-landing wall where he’s given up painting it, the pained whine of the toilet whenever it flushes, it all cracks him up. Jill’s the same, except her subject is Ivan. She’s always making close-to-the-bone remarks when he’s in earshot. ‘You were in a tank in Operation Goodwood, weren’t you,’ she’ll say, as if Ivan should have been driving the damn thing. Or, ‘Never did leave the force, not in his head. You should see the tat he keeps upstairs, Mr Speake.’

This will be in reference to the cut-price militaria Ivan collects. He sources it from the hundreds of army surplus stores that sprouted up after the war. Canvas duffle bags, shell casings, flasks, flags and constables’ oilskin capes, Ivan keeps it all in a wardrobe on the landing.

‘Useless load of crap,’ Jill says.

I stamp on my cigarette and head indoors, where I’m instantly struck by the burnt, piggy stink of days-old lard. On the hob next to the lard pot is a swish new kettle Ivan bought Jill for her birthday. The kettle whistles in alarm as I come past, sending out a twist of steam that fogs the window. A box of powdered eggs and a tin of Spam are open on the counter, next to a saucepan of porridge. Jill finishes the tea and gets the unhomogenised milk out. She blurts a creamy dollop into the pan, porridge water splashing up her apron.

I select a glass from the kitchenette, then when Jill glances my way, greet her with a nod.

She doesn’t reply.

I offer her a Player’s Navy Cut. ‘Cigarette?’

‘Nah.’ She shrugs. ‘Too early.’

My gaze falls on the white circular dining table. An ashtray’s posed in the middle like a target, a cigarette’s dart extinguished in the bullseye, saliva coating one end. If I touched the ashen tip, I bet it’d still be warm.

‘You’d think I’m off brand,’ I reply slowly.

Jill shrugs again. ‘Always been more partial to a Senior Service.’

I halt at the entry to the hall. Jill smokes Player’s. This has been acknowledged. We’ve even smoked together, discussing Player’s, how much we like them, and she hasn’t bothered to remember it. Or she does remember and I am now the victim of a deliberate, insidious snub.

I’m wondering how to play this when Keith shows up. The Curds’ son is one of those ungracious little boys who looks about seven when they’re probably five, or they could surprise you by being nine. He takes a seat, his filthy legs swinging beneath him, so rather than disappear upstairs, I sit down opposite and spark another Player’s. I feel more than a little nauseous having only just finished my first smoke, plus the sweat’s going cold as I sit here in my running shorts and vest. Still, it’s worth it to see Jill’s back straighten at the realisation I haven’t left the room.

Keith starts humming to himself. I plug my ears, trying to get a laugh from him, but Jill barks at him to pack it in. Look at her going at the salt plate, scratching the powdered remnants fused against the china. Scrape, scrape, while my thighs stick to the leather ‘cushion’ in the wooden chair.

Now Jill’s running the tap into the porridge, making it twice watered by my count. The Victorian pipework groans as she sets the pan on the fired hob. Normally at this hour you couldn’t tell if someone was using the window as a looking glass, but the arctic glare of the fly zapper gives Jill away. There’s an over-conscious precision to the way she’s getting the Spam going in the frying pan. All the time she’s monitoring me, acutely self-aware.

I suppress a cough. The porridge’s membrane is making popping noises and Jill is facing Keith. ‘Go see if your dad wants breakfast taking up,’ she says. ‘Go on.’ She raises the spatula like a cosh.

With Keith out of the way, I lean against the counter. ‘Decent bit of meat, is that,’ I say, stopping short of making an explicit play for a free portion of Spam. Again, Jill doesn’t reply. She extracts the fried Spam with her fingers and lays the slabs across a brace of lard-buttered rolls, then uses the other half of the rolls to soak up the remaining pan grease.

‘Five minutes till porridge,’ she says.

It’s nippy in the attic despite it knocking on for eight and it being a decent spell of weather we’re having. I can smell damp wool from where I spilled water on the bedding as I got dressed in the dark.

I open the skylight, inhale a mouthful of coke-smelling London air. Today is the day I set my cap at the future. Am I nervous? Yes, I think I am.

I pop my head back into the room. Because I can’t be bothered asking Jill to warm the bucket, I sloosh my face and armpits using the washbowl and ewer, and try not to bump my head on the sharply angled ceiling. This whole room, ceiling and all, is decorated with beige wallpaper embroidered with pink creepers. I’m yet to have a day where I don’t feel like a poorly wrapped present.

Dressed, I pause on the half-landing downstairs, looking past the broken basin into the room I shared with Muriel all those years ago. It is the same. Tiny red insects live in the brickwork, spilling onto the dresser, and the window’s jammed shut. My conscious life must have begun early. How else can I explain the memory of being tugged from a highchair then dumped on some rough grey blankets, a woefully under-stuffed pillow by my side? I think I cried. I was always crying. The pillow would have been littered with Muriel’s loose hair, which stress played havoc with. I can’t help thinking that she’d be as bald as Ivan if she was around today.

In the kitchen, Keith kneels under the table mowing a figurine down with a toy crane. Set by the guest plate is a glass mug, and I have been treated to a few curls of dry bread for dipping in my porridge. With the sunlight streaming in like this, every fitting and feature has lost definition. That is until Jill tugs down the yellow blind, turning the room the enriching colour of a taxi light.

‘All right, Ivan.’

‘Speake.’ The lock-keeper finishes the article he’s reading about the impending moon-landing. ‘Plans for today?’

‘Same as usual.’

Closing the paper to turn the page, Ivan glances at me, the brim of his baseball cap touching the thick frames of his reading glasses. ‘Still looking for work?’

‘That’s right.’

Nodding, he reopens the paper, obscuring himself with a picture of Harold Wilson. This allows my attention to gravitate to Jill. Slopping porridge into my bowl, she seems shaky, anxious, possibly hungover. With very little enthusiasm, she goes back to wrapping a tape measure around Keith’s waist. A few pins are sticking out of her mouth, thin as fish bones. An oversized pair of kiddie’s trousers drape her shoulder.

This porridge is as thick and grey as cement. Muck, we call it in the trade. A bowl of ballast, sand and water to set me up for the day. Winking at Keith, I set my hands against my stomach, pretending this shonky breakfast is griping my guts, but there’s no time for us to trade smiles because his father has thought of something to say.

‘What you after then?’ Ivan’s cor-blimey accent makes him sound like he’s chewing on every word.

‘Sorry, work-wise do you mean?’

‘Hfff, hfff, hfff. Work, yeah. You know what that is, don’t you?’

Total disdain is written all over Ivan’s sweating face. I can’t tell if this has to do with his regard for work or if it’s more to do with the idea of someone like me having a job. Gypsy, Turk, Jew, Spic, Mick, I’ve had it all over the years. Between an undeniable swarthiness that I’m hoping my father might help me get to the bottom of, and some aspect to my character that seems to be apparent to everyone except me, I’ve had to put up with my fair share of snide attitudes. The people who take against me are usually men, but there’s been the odd woman. I suspect the guys find me desperate and glib, that I don’t belong, whereas the girls find me aloof and unreadable. They think I’m judging them, which of course I am. I assume that every one of these people sees something