Stickle Island Read online

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

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  Copyright © 2018 by Tim Orchard

  ISBN: 978-1-944700-54-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962795

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  Cover Artwork by Alexander Vidal

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

  For Elma

  With many thanks to: Danielle Svetcov, for her trust in me; Chris and Olivia, for all their work; Wylie O’Sullivan, for her editing skills; and Lee de Montagnac, for opinions and help over the years.

  The World is an uncertain place. Best not to have too many fixed ideas.

  —Hugh Farrell

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  1

  It was 1980 and Margaret Thatcher was attempting to turn the ship of state around by making massive cuts in social services. To those ends a representative from Kent County Council came over to Stickle Island, and a meeting was held in the church, to which the whole island had been invited. Most came. The blow-ins and the locals, including the island’s two farmers, John Newman and Henry Stick. The vicar, Julian Crabbe, had never in his five-year sinecure seen his church so full and wondered briefly what it would be like to live in a truly Christian country.

  The councillor had come to tell the residents that the grant for the ferry to the mainland was to be cut. Although there was still one working fishing boat, the ferry was the island’s lifeline. It took the children to school and the farmers’ produce to market, and brought the dole money to the post office.

  Kent County Council, like most others, had been placed under strict financial restrictions, and the councillor explained reasonably, as politicians do, that the islanders were going to be screwed and there was nothing they could do about it. They weren’t alone; cuts were pretty much across the board and anything that could be was to be sold to the private sector. In fact the ferry was already privately owned but had survived since the 1950s only by dint of the council grant. He made it plain: if the islanders wished to stay on Stickle, they must fund the ferry themselves. Otherwise, they should move to the mainland.

  Like most people, the Stickle Islanders took things for granted; they did not expect drastic change and weren’t ready for it when it came. They received this disastrous news in a kind of stunned silence. It affected every single person there directly and dramatically, and the sudden shock was momentarily too much to take in. They looked around at one another and screwed their faces up in question. They were not a cohesive group. They hadn’t come prepared. They weren’t organized. A few put up their hands and then, like children, took them down again, realizing they didn’t quite know what question to ask.

  The first to stand up was one of the farmers, John Newman. An easygoing man in his fifties, John just wanted the facts. “Exactly how much is the grant to the ferry?”

  The councillor murmured, cleared his throat, flipped through his papers. He knew it was £35,000 a year—not a huge amount, but it went against convention to talk in real terms about council funds. So instead he talked of the council’s need to balance the books and of how cuts were countywide and they were not a special case. He smiled all the while and held up his hands as though he had nothing to do with anything. Responsibility wasn’t his. Cuts were cuts, and what could he do? He was just a cog in the wheel, and if it wasn’t him it would be someone else.

  When the man had finished speaking, John Newman sighed and shook his head. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Probably every word the councillor had uttered annoyed someone in the audience, and a general hubbub was growing.

  D.C. jumped up and shouted, “Have you ever talked to the guy that owns the ferry?”

  The councillor shook his head and stuttered, “Well, er, well…”

  D.C., one of the first of the blow-ins to come to the island, eight years earlier, carried on. “Yeh, well, you haven’t, but I have. Most of the people here know him. He’s been running that ferry for years and his dad before him. He doesn’t want to stop, and neither does his son, who works with him now. You won’t shut us down that easily. Maybe we’ll make a deal with the ferry owner. Maybe we’ll start a co-op and run it ourselves.” It was a daft idea and he knew it. Most of the island inhabitants were on the dole or a pension, but he didn’t let that stop him. He jabbed a finger. “What are you? You come here and want to close down this island because it’s no longer convenient. You want to take away people’s livelihoods and try to tell us it’s all out of your hands, it’s the cuts, it’s orders from above and all that. What are you, a man that opens the doors to the gas chambers and claims no responsibility because it’s orders from above? Only following orders, yeh, do you get me? Come the revolution, we’ll put you up against a bus and shoot you!”

  D.C. was being ridiculous; everybody knew there wasn’t a bus service on the island, but it got people going. A few seconds of confused silence fell over the church before, in fits and starts, the whole assembly got to their feet and began shouting and gesticulating and all for their own reasons, and Julian Crabbe, standing beside the councillor, waved his arms and tried, uselessly, to call for calm.

  On one of the front pews, the island’s other farmer, Henry Stick—strident, slant-eyed, and ready to strike out in any direction—jumped up, grabbed the council’s representative by his lapels, and bellowed, “You can’t do this! My family have been living on this island since 1066. We owned this bloody island! I pay my rates! I pay my taxes! I bloody well—”

  He raised his fist, but his son, Dick; D.C.; and Police Constable Paloney rushed forward and together grabbed him and wrestled him away down the nave.

  Henry Stick’s outburst provoked further uproar. People left their seats and crowded forward. Their raised voices rung around the church. The councillor backed off behind the altar, arms held in front of him like a man in a church full of zombies. Julian Crabbe hopped this way and that, begging for moderation without hope of getting it.

  Meanwhile, halfway down the nave, Henry Stick pulled D.C.’s hand off his shoulder. “Get off me! It’s people like you who’ve helped ruin this bloody island! Bloody hippies and bloody communists and bloody, bloody drug-taking bloody anarchists! You’re all a bunch of freeloading bloody time wasters!”

  Henry Stick was a big bull of a man gone to seed and, with a few drinks in him, tended toward easy aggression.
From behind his father, Dick, a post-punk left in the New Wave backwash, pleaded with his eyes for D.C. to let it go. The trouble was D.C. couldn’t—never had, never would.

  “Fuck you. What are you when you’re at home then, eh? Lord of the manor? More like king in your own kitchen, if you’re lucky,” D.C. sneered, sweeping his hair off his face, flaring his nostrils, and sniffing at Henry Stick’s mouth. “Been at the cider, have you?”

  Tension rippled through Henry Stick, but before he could move, Dick grabbed his shoulders and PC Paloney moved deftly between the two men. “Let’s calm down, shall we? I don’t want to have to arrest anyone.”

  PC Paloney was twenty-four, with cheeks so red they looked freshly slapped. When he looked in the mirror in the morning, even he had a job to take himself seriously.

  With a smirk, D.C. shook his head and then, almost like a gentleman, stepped back. “And what you going to do with us once you’ve arrested us? Keep us prisoner in your living room?”

  A vision of the police house and the total mess it was in flashed into PC Paloney’s mind. He sighed and said, almost hopelessly, “There’s no need for cheek. I am the law here.”

  The two men looked at each other over Paloney’s shoulders and both began to grin. Paloney sighed and pulled a face. He’d been on the island for three years and had yet to make an arrest. Despite any personal animosity, when it came to the law, the islanders stuck together. He’d seen it time and time again. It seemed to be the natural order of things and not worth arguing about.

  Although there was still a vocal air of resentment, the vicar had managed to calm the islanders down enough for the councillor to explain that the cuts wouldn’t come into effect until the following April. April was eleven months away, and when he’d finished speaking, he watched his words sink in and most of their eyes soften as time pushed the urgency of change into the nebulous future.

  The councillor loved people—they were mostly gullible idiots—and, confidence regained, he decided to get out while the getting was good. He pushed his way through the islanders’ ranks toward the door. At the entrance, Henry Stick stood with his son and Paloney. As he passed, the councillor straightened his tie and squared his shoulders. He had a few words for that lump of a farmer and his 1066 and all that.

  With an oily grin, he said, “People like you make me sick. Don’t you realize you, this island, means nothing? You’re finished! 1066? We at the council couldn’t care if you were here with the dinosaurs, the ferry is going to be cut and that’s an end to it and to you. It’s a foregone conclusion. Attack me if you like, but it won’t change a thing!” Then, with a nod back toward D.C., said, “Co-op? You lot couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery!”

  He strutted away from the church into the fading May evening, job done. He didn’t have to worry about the ferry, for the council had chartered a launch. It was waiting for him at the jetty.

  2

  Uninhabited and insignificant ever since the dawn of time, Stickle Island wasn’t even worth naming for a thousand years. Situated a mile or so off the Kent coast, almost opposite Dymchurch, the island was a little over four miles long and less than a couple of miles wide, and as D.C. said, when he moved there from London in 1972, “You could walk around the whole place in a day.” He bought himself a bike.

  Stickle’s first historical mention was in the Domesday Book (1086), where it was called Stivell Island. The island had been a giveaway, an act of generosity to a minion by a newly enthroned king. After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror gifted it to his favorite harpist, one Alain Stivell, for penning a charming little ditty about that loser, King Harold, getting an arrow in his eye.

  Although from a humble, rural background in the north of France, Alain Stivell wasn’t an inbred idiot, and aware of the fickleness of kings, he moved to the island within weeks and never left again. Alain’s aim, having been lucky once, was to stay lucky and to be forgotten. This was a family trait that persisted down through the generations. By 1086 Alain had built a modest manor house, and the Domesday Book notes the island to have sixty serfs, fifteen milk cows, a bull, a warren, and numerous sheep. Alain paid his due taxes, sent his quota of men, when asked, for whatever war was current, but he kept his head down. The island produced wool, mutton, milk, and beef, and slowly over time, as the family became anglicized, their name along with that of the island became Stickle.

  By the early seventeenth century, like many another country squire of that time, the family’s fortunes had sunk so low they were forced firstly to mortgage the original manor house and later to sell some small parcels of the land to stop the banks foreclosing. As Stivell had down the years become Stickle, so with their diminishing fortunes it seemed their name contracted again, until by the late 1670s it had become Stick, the name the few remaining members of that ancient family still go by to this day.

  The family fortunes were revived somewhat in the eighteenth century, when the island became a staging post for smugglers running brandy, wine, and lace between France and the Kent coast. They say the Sticks and Dr. Syn (the Scarecrow) were hand in glove for many a year. The contraband was hidden from the revenue men in cellars beneath the old manor house. With the new money, the Sticks flattened the ancient manor house and built a new one, but for obvious reasons the huge cellars beneath the old house remained intact but hidden. At that time more than three hundred people lived on the island, mostly involved in agriculture, fishing, or the more nefarious trades.

  Although in most ways the industrial revolution passed the island by, it didn’t pass its inhabitants by. The search for a better life began and, with it, the slow drain of the island’s population to the mainland. The decline and depopulation continued, hastened at the beginning of the twentieth century by the First World War and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Without sufficient manpower to work it, swaths of the island became, by default, common land.

  It was hard times. To keep afloat the Sticks, in the late 1930s, sold over two hundred acres to the Newmans. The Newmans were a hardworking family, mostly interested in milk, with a few sheep on the side. The Sticks didn’t dislike the Newmans, but it hurt the proud remains of Alain Stivell’s family, small as it now was, to accept the changing times and fortunes. Come the onset of the Second World War, the Stick family owned only the one farm, a few laborers’ cottages, and a couple of houses in the village.

  Historians say, at the end of the Second World War, the soldiers wanted to come back to a quiet life by home and hearth, but in fact, few came home to Stickle. Once they had seen the world, Stickle didn’t match up. It was a backwater. Most of rural Kent was a backwater.

  Through the 1950s and early 1960s, places like Dymchurch, St. Mary’s Bay, Margate, and plenty of other south coast towns flourished from the boom in family holidays, but Stickle, even with a twice daily ferry from Dymchurch, offered nothing. No trailer parks or campsites, guesthouses or hotels. There wasn’t even a pub.

  By the late 1960s Stickle had become a bit like one of those islands up in the Hebrides, St. Kilda, or the like, where the population level had shrunk so far as for life on the island to become almost unsupportable, but people lived on anyway, the way they do.

  The ferry still came and took the handful of children to school in Dymchurch, the two farms still survived because a milk truck came twice a week to collect the milk, and the farmers took the rest of their produce to wholesalers on the mainland, but the church was empty and the shop/post office hung on by dint of the fact that it was the only shop on the island.

  Then, in the early 1970s, the blow-ins (people like D.C.) started to arrive—the alternatives, the ex-hippies on a new route, the embryonic proto-crusties, the organic ne’er-do-wells, the macrobiotic custard-tart eaters—some clutching a copy of John Seymour’s Self-Sufficiency. But those were the times they were living in, and anyway, they were bringing new life and the island revived a little bit.

  D.C. didn’t really fit into any of the above but had come to the
island for Petal and his Julie, come because he didn’t want to lose them. The idea had been Julie’s, but then most of the good things that had come to him had come from Julie. It hadn’t been easy at first. The pace of life was so slow he’d felt like he was speeding all the time. He’d walked too fast, spoken to quickly, sneered when he could have smiled. He still walked too fast and sneered once in a while, but now Stickle was his home and he had his place in it. The idea of leaving wasn’t even an idea.

  3

  The spring of 1980 was a strange spring. Some analysts maintained the extreme and weird weather patterns over the UK were the onset of the coming new ice age, while others claimed it was the beginning of global warming and we would all soon be living desert style on the periphery of the new Sahara. Then again, to many familiar with the vagaries of the English weather, it was just another dodgy summer. The truth was, even for England, the weather went beyond atrocious.

  Yorkshire and the far north were plagued by a drought so severe the reservoirs dried, rivers and lakes became muddy puddles, fish floundered and drowned on air, livestock died of thirst in the fields. Bushfires burned, laying waste to forests and moorland alike. In the cities, factories and businesses closed, and the army was drafted in to distribute water from pump stations and to keep the peace.

  In Lincolnshire, through the months of April and May, every kind of frozen water pelted from the sky. It was spring but snow, ready-made into balls, splattered down against everything moving or still. The sleet was like buckshot and the gelid rain was like having a slushy thrown in your face. Then, come June, hailstones the size of penny gobstoppers plummeted to earth at the speed of meteors entering Earth’s atmosphere, smashing greenhouses, office windows, and car windscreens, bruising and breaking bones. Ice-cold winds straight from the Ural Mountains came next, freezing the new potatoes in the ground and burning the burgeoning winter wheat into mush. The county was a mess.