The detour off the main road which had eventually brought me

below and to the west of Sunderland, through Hetton-Le-Hole

(& numerous other "holes" preceding it) had taken me through

an obstacle-ridden, hell-raising journey through countryside

I'd never even realized existed in any but the very poorest 

"white trash" areas in America’s Deep South - not that homes

were on stilts, and had boarded-up windows, & grubby little

kids running in and around the shacks and carcasses of the 

products that had at one time been the best that Detroit had

to offer - the rusted out metal shells providing additional 

shelter for those whose temperament could not abide being 

closed in a windowless, broken-down, termite-ridden, rat and

roach infested orange crate ... but that the grubby, brick 

four-roomed dwellings whose metal-framed rusty green windows 

opened out onto narrow pavements which separated one row 

from another by no more than an arm's length, the small 

spaces in between, tied together by clothes-lines stretched 

out from the window ledge of one building to another, 

enshrouded by graying linens and patched long-johns, 

hung out to catch the breeze and the gaze of passers-by ... 

the snotty-nosed little boys, dressed in short trousers 

with flys gaping open, and undone shoe laces dragging along 

behind them from hole-y brown oxfords which had seen much 

better days and had long since been thrown out and forgotten

by those who could afford them, their tatty school ties, 

frayed and faded by many wearings of preceding generations,

and their grubby gray pullovers, shrunk by hundreds of prior

washings, rising up over their waists, freeing yellow-stained

torn tails of their dirty white shirts, the braces holding 

up their little trousers - hanging in the breeze on the side

which no longer had any buttons, their mousy, straggily 

mop-top hair stuck together in places by confrontations 

unknown, and no longer covered with school caps, they being

tossed carelessly onto the ground, thereby acting as 

makeshift soccer balls for those who wished to play ... 

those who didn't, kneeling on the ground in ever-increasing 

circles, shooting huge orange, yellow, and green colored 

marbles, trying desperately to increase their skill ... 

allowing them to add to their collections the alleys and 

"cats-eyes" of the losing players ... the broken old bicycles

lying in piles here and there, between garages whose owners 

could no longer afford to repair them, & who now concentrated

solely on motorcycles - their bright blues and reds a seeming 

abstraction amongst their otherwise dull surroundings ...



Excerpt from Berwick-Upon-Tweed 

(submitted for publication 1979) 



Copyright 1978, 1980, 1997

Christopher Wyndham Thomas

All Rights Reserved