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BY JOHN MORRISON 3 The very first settlers to see a viable future in a small, defeated Pennine town were Arthur and Martha Fustian. They had met each other in 1968, during the student demonstrations in Paris, while manning adjacent barricades. The moment Arthur saw Martha, he was smitten. If he didn't get her top off sharpish, he thought he'd explode. Which is pretty much what happened. Over Molotov cocktails they came to realise how much they had in common. They were both single, and they were both in Paris. In that feverish atmosphere - when every student grant application could have been the last - this seemed to be enough. Their courtship was both passionate and furtive ("Fourplay... At a time like this? I don't think so...", Arthur had said, trying to inject some urgency into the proceedings). They first made love, joyfully, lovingly... quickly... in a patisserie on the Bois de Boulogne, during a lull in hostilities. "Is this the first time?", Arthur asked, tremulously. "Well, it's the first time with you, I suppose", Martha acknowledged, as she lay spreadeagled on an assortment of madelaines and brioches and lit up a post-coital Gitanes. They had differing views of that first occasion: while Arthur saw himself as a heat-seeking missile, the image that lodged in Martha's mind, and refused to go away, was of a lorry shedding its load. Arthur and Martha snatched intimate moments whenever they could - as they dodged the tear-gas and the water-cannons - inadvertently creating the link between sex and danger that was to lend their relationship an erotic piquancy in the years that followed. It was pure sex, raw sex... neat, undiluted sex. They were drawn to make love in places where they might be discovered. "He touches me in ways that other men don't", Martha said, once they had returned to England. "He touches me in places that other men don't. Like the frozen food department at ASDA." Arthur and Martha came North and made a picaresque journey around the semi-derelict houses of Milltown - even spending a clandestine week camping out in the soft furnishings department of Great Clews Mills - before finding a squat to call their own. They prized the boards off the windows and changed the locks. They turned the water back on, and risked life and limb by wiring the house up to the mains electric cable outside; their hair stood on end, whenever they tried to make toast, and door handles melted. Word soon filtered back to Arthur and Martha's friends in the city, stuck in their dreary bedsits, with nothing to look at except stained wallpaper and posters of Che Guevara. Letters with Milltown postmarks were dispatched, extolling the quality of life here. Of course, these letters were written by people who had yet to experiences the full horrors of a South Pennine winter, so Arthur and Martha's opinions deserved to be taken with a pinch of salt. Though they never actually said that the streets of Milltown were paved with gold, they painted such a beguilingly utopian picture that their city chums were encouraged to come and see for themselves. The visitors slept on Arthur and Martha's floor. Over meals of tofu and mung beans, served on stripped pine tables and washed down with home-made elderberry wine, they listened to tall tales and drug-addled reminiscences. Having arrived with nothing more than a sleeping bag and the clothes they stood up in, some of these visitors went native and never returned to the city. Those who shared Arthur and Martha's tastes for late nights, loud music and non-prescription medication were welcomed with open arms. "That's good shit", Arthur would acknowledge, nodding his head a couple of dozen times to emphasise the point. "Really good." When Arthur and Martha had met in Paris, they wanted to change the world through radical activism. By the time they'd settled in Milltown, however, they settled for changing the world by taking drugs and talking gibberish. For many people in Milltown - including Martha - cannabis was a harmless diversion: a recreational high, a relaxant at the end of a stressful day, a welcome pick-me-up at the weekend. Unfortunately, Arthur wasn't one of them. His favourite day in the calendar was Hash Wednesday - which differed from Hash Monday, Hash Tuesday, Hash Thursday, Hash Friday, Hash Saturday and Hash Sunday only in that it fell on a Wednesday. Arthur's intake of illegal narcotics could best be described as 'heroic'. "I was busted by the fuzz. Man, what a bummer. At least they didn't find my stash". Yes, Milltown was one of the few places on the planet where this kind of dialogue could still be heard, delivered without the slightest hint of irony. And, Lord love us, it still is. Arthur and Martha refused to be hide-bound by society's conventions - especially the ones about making an honest living by going to work from nine o'clock in the morning until five o'clock in the afternoon. And Milltown looked like a place where they might be able to scratch a living, of sorts, by harnessing their rudimentary skills with beads and tarot cards. Where they could become potters and astrologists (or 'unemployed', as we would probably say today). Having spent their formative years avoiding gainful employment in the Northern cities, they relished this heaven-sent opportunity to continue avoiding gainful employment in a more congenial, semi-rural milieu. After years of wandering in an urban wilderness, they came to Milltown and found a place that felt like home. Following Arthur and Martha's sterling example, the early settlers picked up little 'top & bottom' houses for little more than loose change. They did them up, in a Blue Peter kind of way, with sticky-back plastic to hold things together, and scrunched-up newspaper stuffed into the holes in the roof, to keep out the worst of the winter rain. Their efforts saved many terraced houses from the demolition mania that prevailed at the time, until such time as their poorly-maintained houses were able to fall down of their own accord. The settlers brought with them the essential accoutrements of alternative living: Afghan coats, loons, three-button tie-dye T-shirts, 2CV cars, VW camper vans, wood-burning stoves, incense, Grateful Dead LPs, patchouli oil, outsize cigarette papers, meditation tapes, wind-chimes, tarot cards, I-Ching books and a penchant for eastern philosophies - the more bizarre the better. For lifestyle inspiration the settlers looked to Arthur and Martha. In the spirit of 'make-do and mend' that prevailed at the time, they were a most resourceful pair. What they couldn't afford to buy, they made. Martha ran up clothes on her old Singer sewing machine (the curtain rings were always a giveaway), while Arthur made pin-money from grouting. He even created his own contact lenses by sucking Rowntrees Fruit Gums until they were so thin and flexible that he could slip them into his eyes. While they did little to improve his eyesight, the orange ones proved to be effective in bright sunlight. Arthur and Martha made a colourful pair, in every sense of the word, and their taste in clothes was to influence the next generation of non-conformists. Their dress code was more than relaxed, it was comatose. Martha became a role model for the women of Milltown, inspiring a number of the convention-defying fashion looks that would make Milltown such a colourful place: wild child, waif, gamine, indian squaw, earth mother, Gypsy Rose Lee, Sappho, Snow White, Tinkerbell, Tank Girl, Heidi, the Wicked Witch of the West, Xena the Warrior Princess, bag-lady, mad bride in the attic, pantomime dame, drag queen, Pippa Longstocking and Morticia from the Addams family. Arthur's fashion sense, on the other hand, relied on benign neglect. He never washed his socks; he just rotated them, like car tyres. The only thing he inspired other Milltown men to do was to wear their shirts inside their underpants. With fewer fashion templates for men, Milltown filled up with bearded blokes like Arthur who, at a pinch, could all get by on a single passport photo. It was a golden age. Men fermented revolution and women made coffee. Digital watches were indescribably cool, dope dealing was a more gentlemanly pursuit than it is today and a Vesta packet meal for two was reckoned to be an exotic luxury: a tantalising taste of abroad. Milltown in the Seventies was like a hippy studfarm. What a great time it was to be young, free and in single-minded pursuit of consequence-free pleasure. Perhaps a more innocent time, too, when opening doors for women and faking orgasms for men were considered simple courtesies. Arthur and Martha flirted, briefly, with monogamy, before giving up the struggle. They were rampant. In the sexual olympics they set a punishing pace, leaving everybody else gasping in their wake. Their bedroom had a revolving door; there was even a visitors' book on the bedside table. It was a time of unbridled promiscuity, a sexual free-for-all, with AIDS yet to cast its long, dark shadow over the land. With the pill freely available, what was the worst that could happen after a one-night stand? Carpet burns? Living together was seen, at the time, to be a thrillingly rebellious notion: putting two fingers up to the forces of comformity and sexual oppression. After a few years, of course, the distinction between 'married' and 'just living together' became eroded to the point where the labels lost all meaning. The bed still had to be made (or, more likely, repaired), and those tarot cards wouldn't turn themselves. Arthur and Martha only ever had one serious argument. Unfortunately it lasted for twenty years, and it centred on what the fuck Bob was going to do with his fucking life, apart from sitting around the house on his fat arse, getting stoned all the fucking time. With their open relationship, Arthur and Martha created a family so grotesquely extended that on Father's Day they used to hire a hall. For years, thanks to a casual disregard of both contraception and all notions of sexual fidelity, the town's principal export was single mothers. Yet there was a certain innocence about this era too. With the ubiquity of porn in today's sex-obsessed society, we have become inured to the simpler pleasures of the flesh: a perfunctory hand-job, for example, or a discreet threesome. Aware that more relationship fail through tedium than through sexual indiscretion, Arthur and Martha tried many ways to keep the spark going: from putting nylon sheets on the bed to inviting the neighbours round for a cocaine-fuelled orgy. They were a playful pair: Martha would sit on Arthur's face, and see if he could guess her weight. Yes, as Arthur and Martha would have been the first to admit, maintaining a lasting relationship wasn't easy. It was hard work. Hard, brutal, physical, unrewarding work. Arthur and Martha are still - just - with us. They even try to keep the sexual side of their relationship alive. But there's not much point; the spirit may be willing, but the flesh is weak. These days, Arthur's todger is as limp as his excuses. Even after half an hour of diligent fellatio, Martha's barely got the wrinkles out. Standing close to the speakers, at too many thrash metal gigs, has left Arthur a little hard of hearing. There's a constant, angry buzzing in his head, like a wasp trapped in a jar. His eyesight is poor too, and getting worse. Sometimes he mistakes Martha for a hat-stand, or an articulated lorry for the open road. And a lifetime of substance abuse has left him a little hard of thinking. Memories he's never had come flooding back - like stray richochets through the space/time continuum - bringing tears to his rheumy old eyes. Arthur's childhood was not a happy one; his earliest memory was of escaping from a hessian sack full of kittens and house-bricks. He 'remembers' gravity being invented. He 'remembers' playing polo with Joseph Stalin's head. He 'remembers' sailing in Noah's Ark (in a timber-hulled boat, as he keeps reminding us, those woodpeckers were probably a mistake).
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