Milltown

BY JOHN MORRISON

1

Bob was only five years old when his grandfather hoisted the lad onto his knee, eased the fob-watch out of his waistcoat pocket and - in a surprisingly deft move, considering his arthritic hands - prised the back off. He pressed the timepiece into the palm of Bob's hand and, for safety's sake, wrapped the lad's pudgy fingers around it. What a treasure!

The lad gazed into the innermost workings: the hairspring, the tiny movements of the gears and cogs, the ratchets, the fly-wheels and trip-hammers. Even a five year old had an instinctive understanding of how it worked. Cradling the tooled gold case, he lost himself within this small yet self-contained universe of chronometry. He put the watch to his ear; it sounded like the chiming of distant bells. Bob the schoolboy was entranced; now, thirty-odd years later, Bob the postman has parked himself on the very same bench, overlooking the town, to take a well-earned rest.

He's feeling rather sorry for himself. No-one seems to appreciate the great job that postmen do - day after day, week after week, year after sodding year. Bob's Christmas tips are down this year. People don't want to open their doors, especially when their postman is down on his knees, shouting festive profanities through their letterboxes. If they do say anything, it's usually just to moan about how much better the postal service was in the good old days. But why blame a hard-working public servant like Bob? It's not easy to get second-class mail to travel slower than first-class mail, and don't let anyone tell you it is. It's bloody expensive too. You have to run two sets of vans, to ensure that the differentials are maintained. What if all our letters arrived at the same time, bright and early the following morning? Imagine the chaos: the class system that underpins our postal service would be fatally compromised.

Bob has laboured up the steepest hills in Milltown, his sack laden with Christmas letters and parcels. He'd been tempted to lob them into a rubbish skip. The thought flickered briefly, then died... like one of the suspiciously cheap Christmas candles that Cath has wasted her money on. Bob eases his aching feet out of the black brogues that postmen are required to wear, and gazes down into the valley. What a view! It fills even a sourpuss like Bob with a grudging admiration. Milltown is spread out below him, wedged corset-tight into the steep-sided valley by a trio of hills. Bob inspects the intriguing geometry of Milltown's roofscape, still dusted with hoar frost. The pale winter sun is reflected in the river and canal, making them shine like slim and sinuous ribbons of silk. Smoke drifts lazily from the chimneys of the terraced houses stacked up the hillside opposite.

It's present-buying time. Milltown is hosting the Christmas Shopping Festival: a modest event dreamed up by the local Chamber of Commerce to attract more shoppers into the town. It doesn't take much organising: just knocking up a few posters and placing an ad in the Milltown Times. The shopkeepers don't have to do much either: just open up, as usual, wear a silly hat and listen to the festive ker-ching of their cash tills.

Tiny figures weighed down with shopping bags make slow progress along Conciliation Street, stopping every few yards to chat and exchange Christmas greetings. Anybody who can walk from one end of town to the other without trading smiles, gossip and pleasantries is either a stranger in town or owes too many people money.

Bob likes to observe Christmas. That's observe in the sense that he watches, through the wrong end of a telescope, as other people spend money they haven't got on things that no-one needs - but he feels no great compunction to join in the frenzied orgy of spending. He's repelled and fascinated, in equal measure, by people who genuinely seem to love Christmas, and feel the need to keep telling him. Christmas may have originated as a way of getting through long winters without going mad, but it's got seriously out of hand. At the risk of bursting that big festive bubble, Bob would be happy if Cath buggered off to her mother's for a few days, and took Ben and Sophie with her, so he could wake up on the big day with a couple of eager and agile prostitutes. Now that might be a Christmas to remember. Cath has other ideas, of course.

Bob and Cath's kids are getting pretty excited about Christmas, but that's only because they don't bloody well have to pay for it. If it's got to happen at all - and he's still not convinced about it - Bob would prefer an old-fashioned Christmas: tangerines and nuts for the kids, while maintaining his own blood/alcohol level at an analgesic eighty milligrams or more throughout the holiday, thus postponing his hangover until Twelfth Night. But Cath has other ideas about that too.

As he gazes down into the labyrinthine streets of Milltown, Bob thinks back to his grandad and that lustrous fob-watch. This is a town with its back taken off; even a buffoon like Bob can see what makes it tick. There's a transparency about the place, despite it being built, mostly, from millstone grit (one of the least transparent materials known to man). Perhaps it's people's motives that are transparent. In Milltown you can see what they are up to, which means that they can see what you are up to as well. This is vaguely reassuring, unless there's a secret you want to keep. In which case, good luck to you. You value your privacy? Why? What have you got to hide?

A city, on the other hand, is too big to take in all at once. Bob doesn't really understand how cities work; he can't just prise the back off to see what's going on inside. He has no idea, for example, how it's possible to make money by building huge office blocks and then leaving them empty for year after year. There must be a host of byzantine tax breaks that regular folk like Bob don't understand.

City people want to maintain the differential between the haves and the have-nots; without it their ceaseless strivings would make no sense. Alienation is good for the economy; it keeps the electorate paranoid, fretful and in spendthrift mood. It's getting harder, in the city, to meet and relate to people, so they settle, instead, on lusting after possessions and status symbols. If Bob were to walk along a city street and smile at everyone he met - an admittedly unlikely scenario for a postman - he would probably just get himself arrested as a public nuisance.

We've spent years making cities look the same - knocking down everything that makes one city stand out from its neighbour. Then, attacked by guilt, we have second thoughts. The usual move is to commission a crap artist to produce a public sculpture, in the hope that this will confer upon the place a spurious kind of uniqueness. We're trying to revitalise Northern towns by getting art to replace coal and steel. Milltown, thankfully, has so far escaped this tawdry fate, though a 'site-specific artwork' (a sculpture of a man wrestling a gigantic marshmallow, symbolising the problems of dealing with local government officials) was rejected only by the chairman of the Pointless Gestures Sub-committee using his casting vote.

At every moment in the town's history when the town planners were ready to demolish every building of character, and replace them with concrete boxes of uncompromising severity, there was never enough money in the kitty to do it. Hooray! In Milltown's case there was only enough money for a few cans of petrol and a box of matches... but more of that later.

It's easy to get nostalgic for the Milltown of the past. Yet Bob's grandfather would have been able to enjoy this bird's-eye view of the town for just one week each year - Wakes Week, in July - when the steam engines juddered to a halt and the millhands fled to the seaside resorts for fresh air and freedom. For the other fifty-one weeks the town was hidden beneath the pall of yellow smoke that issued from the mill chimneys and hung in the valley like an ugly rumour.