In This Block There Lives a Slag…: And Other Yorkshire Fables

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Bill Broady. In This Block There Lives a Slag…: And Other Yorkshire Fables

In This Block There Lives a Slag… And other Yorkshire fables. Bill Broady

Table of Contents

Wrestling Jacob

In This Block There Lives A Slag…

Songs that Won the War

My Hard Friend

Mr Personality in the Fields of Poses

Coddock

Tony Harrison

The Hands Reveal

The Kingfishers…The Distances

A Short Cut Through the Sun

Bouncing Back

The Tale of the Golden Bath-Taps

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

To Jane Metcalfe

There are angels!

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I went into the living room and picked up my dad’s old dictionary: it stood where the television used to be. SLAG: I looked up the word. It came from slagen, middle low German, meaning to slay. ‘Has many senses or nuances, all pej’. Pej, I decided, could only be an affectionate diminutive for pejorative. It wasn’t only a slattern or a prostitute, then: it could also mean rubbish or nonsense. It was a limp, a watch-chain, a bully or a coward; flux, scoria, gangue, pyrites – whatever they might be – silicates or pigs. It was soft moist weather, a quagmire or a slough. It was to pain with severe criticism: to lag, to idle, to spend recklessly or eat voraciously. It was a dottle: dottle! What a wonderful word! It meant the unburnt remnant of tobacco at the bottom of a pipe bowl. I’d kept my dad’s old black bone briar: if I put it to my ear I’d seem to hear the distant echoes of his coughing, if I stuck my finger into its bowl I could feel something rough at the bottom – the last dottle, his soul. Language is power, he used to tell me: if you know a word it can’t hurt you – which was strange because I was pretty sure that he’d known the word cancer.

A slag was carny slang for a punter who looks at the free attractions but avoids the paying shows. In Australia it meant to spit. A slagger was a brothel-keeper; a slaggering was a row – but was that a great commotion, a trip on a lake, or a line? It meant unwashed, useless, a petty criminal, a third-rate grifter. It was a slack-mettled fellow, one not ready to resist an affront…the word seemed to encompass everything. I myself was a slag, living in a city of slags – in a country, a world, a universe of slags, in an infinity of pej.

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