Holme Valley

Summary:

Nestled deep within Yorkshire's green rolling hills and moors, parental abuse, fear, and self-loathing are daily realities for eleven-year-old Dale Didier, with despair as constant as the clouds. He finds his only escape and hope for salvation from his troubled home life in Kyra, the "pretty girl" next door, only to learn that she has a liking for foul play, and enough of her own self-doubts to deal with. But at least "one thing was pretty back then." 

Despite betrayals from almost everyone out to clamp down on Dale's truant outbursts and cries for help, and with his younger brother Rory to protect from it all, Dale's summer infatuation with this rough girl next door will change them both and everyone and everything around them forever. And for the better. As they grow out of and back into each other with each passing season, Dale and Kyra discover in each other a hope that can be even more constant and affecting than despair.

HOLME VALLEY is 214 pages. Perfect-bound paperback. $9.00 US (+S&H).
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Excerpt:

Chapter One 
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HEY I’M DALE. I like to sit by the oak tree. It makes me happy. I like being happy I guess. A life like mine is not easy to be happy about, but whatever. I’m an “eggshell broken on a battlefield” (or whatever that old tart just said I was). I’m just your average bloke. She said I had to write this, that it would be good for me, so where to begin? I suppose I’ll talk about my childhood. It was never easy for me, but I guess that’s just how it goes, and it’s best to just get used to it. I’m not going to go carping on all mardy bum like, because what good would that do? I’m piss poor when it comes to writing, but they said it would be good for me, so let’s just get it over with. Right?

     Let’s see, there’s not much to remember, just a lot of days and nights of things going on and folks doing things beneath the same old dowly sky. I guess I want to talk about the sky now. The thing about the sky, see, is it’s always up there. The sky was our only escape from the world. It was always stuffed up like the whole world could’ve been wrapped up in a suffocating blanket. And no, there weren’t ever any shadows or silver linings to be had (no matter what they say). But whenever the sun did poke out, that’s when this beam of light would seem to hold the whole roof of it up. The funny thing is we valley kids used to think that whoever ran out to stand under that beam would have good fortune, so then we’d all run to it from our places on the hills and untuck our sarks and soil our sneaks on the way. That’s the kind of stuff I remember I guess. Nothing special.

     Also, when you got so far up a hill and looked out over all you had climbed, it always seemed like the hill on the other side was gawping you down, taunting you. The moors were so starkers out there you could almost make out the little folks upon the other. At the right time of day, you’d see the farmer’s sheep out in the field doing their roaming about. They looked like little pieces of rice scattered on a green countertop, stinking up the air and grouping around each other for protection from the dogs that would run around barking off. I always wanted to investigate whenever we heard that one had been downed. My mother would tell me not to go to the rock wall but I would anyway just to see that paggered old fart of a sheerer man drive out in his knackered old truck to haul the dead thing away with a bundle of hay. I just wanted to rest assured that it was a very grotty thing indeed. I fancied a lot of blood and guts. On other days it was always a good show to see the farmer’s sheepdogs run around the field to round things up well and right. They’d slice those dumb yows apart like a ship cutting through the water, but then the old fart farmer man would yell at us, “Ayup theur bairns! Gerroff t’ wall!” Those times wor eur riot thee wor! Yup yup! Ain’t that how we sound? This was all back around 2002 by the way, when I was just your common dog-loving brat.

     We lived in this clustered valley town in the hills—this Yorkshy doorstop called Holmfirth, in Kirklees, just smack between Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the thousand-acre spat of green moorlands all around. I lived in a rain-soaked brick terrace built in the 1800s for the dye mill workers, which had a ginnel out back behind our walled-off spat we called “the yard” (always on a slope and always collecting water). It was relatively the right size though, for my parents and my brother soon to be. It was enough, and we got by the best we could. I lived there up till then and nowt ever really happened.

     Oh yeah, the bricks in the building used to fall out! They were blackened and mustard, coated in soot and moss, and once I built a small fort with them in the yard for my toys. Everything was made from the same bricks everywhere you looked, from the yard walls to the tops-and-bottoms and hillside terraces like ours. To keep water collection at a minimum, drain pipes ran every five to ten metres that all connected to a central gutter we used to send leaves down like boats, and then we’d leg it to watch them get carried off in it. Everything wanted to escape.

     My childhood was … damp. From out my hazy rain-stained window on that second floor bedroom I could always rise in bed to gander out at our hill’s line of terraces cut by the road and the river, and then Cartworth Moor’s own cottages winding up theirs on the other. Beyond them stretched the endless mires, heaths, hills, and like, grass and sky everywhere. Just grass and endless, endless sky it was! Always a damp scene it was too, even with the sun out, but I had grown accustomed to that rolling green mud world of ours. The house was narrow, cramped and creaky, and I didn’t like the yard because I couldn’t see over the walls, so as soon as I could open the back gate I was off and never looked back. Yes, I had respect for other people’s property but I was always trespassing somewhere, because frankly anywhere was better than back at home …for a lot of reasons. So the open hills and fields were far more exciting, sitting up on top of us. Once outside, Upperthong Lane was just big enough to fit a car through, which was a fair amount more than some others in town that could scarcely fit one! So we had a rather puny car, which was not a sight for me because I fancied nice cars, preferably fast ones with lots of shiny parts. Ours was grumbly and sputtered like a card in a bike spoke.

     But anyroad, water always seemed to run brass monkeys and the pipes always froze in the winter and then I’d have to shower in my garbs or skivvies or in the silin’ rain to get them un-plothered (depending on how parky it was). The ground was a sponge for the sky and always smooshed around underfoot like mud even when it hadn’t rained and would soil owt it touched. At night I could hear the plinking of water on the stains in my ceiling. It seemed a good thousand tears collected in the valley every night. They’d flow down the sloping streets and snickets and group in massive puddles at the bottom drainages which would, like the emptying sink when I pulled the plug, take their time to go completely down. Tears always took their time to go completely down too, but I don’t want to talk about any of that. It was what it was and I don’t want to. I can’t. So that’s the ways of it. I don’t know what else there is to talk about… 

     Okay, so I guess when my brother Rory was born everything did take a turn for the worst. Dad got angrier and mam got lazier just as I was growing sturdier, on a light and full of beans. I kept to myself and helped out but it was impossible to please anyone. I took after my dad with my brown hair and blue eyes. Mam said they weren’t blue like the sky but heavier like the ocean. She once told me I was like the ocean, turbulent and sweeping, and constantly slamming itself on the rocks with no mind to pain. She said I was like dad. Yeah I never remember being bothered by pain much. I don’t know. Mam said I was like the tide. When I slept I slept and when I woke I broke, and usually upon the rocks. Dad said pain made us strong.

     I never saw the sea up north (odd considering I’d always been told we live on an island) because I hadn’t ever left the valley, but I heard an awful lot of it. I lived in a nice place to fancy a childhood though, as places go, despite my sordid home life. Self-contained, somewhat artsy, there was always a feeling of belonging with the folks you knew and they all seemed to want to meet those they didn’t, for the most part. I heard it said that it was all “pretty like and picturesque,” being all hilly and whatever, but I don’t know, I have no eye for such things. The only thing I ever found pretty was Kyra Elpida. I always thought she was pretty, even if she was kind of like me (which is not a compliment!). At least one thing was pretty back then.

     She was the girl next door, and always a bit touched in the nog I’d say. Mam tried to get me to wag off laikin’ with her, but I never wanted to at first. She was the only one of those females I could stand long with, and other than her the opposite sex always seemed silly and pitiful to me, and yet Kyra still loomed large on me as we grew up. Our houses connected, she was just a door down. We’d yell back and forth over the wall when we were out back in our yards but I always kept my hollerings brief. I couldn’t speak properly, and I really mean that. I’ve always had a speech impediment and could never talk to anyone.

     Anyroad, I did see Kyra often, even though we barely ever actually got on together back then. One morning when I was five I was standing out against the bricks in front of the house just shining my good shoes with a blathered up old rag, trying to make a good show of myself. Content with my job of it, I placed the shoes on the rack behind the open door. I was barefoot or else the street would’ve soiled my socks. The wind was blowing, I remember, and the sky was blotted up behind a thick skin of clouds, but you could still see the sun behind there somewhere as if scared to come out. This is one of my first memories.

     I stopped to gander at the sun and extended my small arm out its farthest in front of it to block it out, then lifted my hand to let it shine as before. It seemed like I had blocked it out for everyone when I did that, so I did this many a times, blocking it out and revealing it again with my thumb, as if stupefied.

     “Wots you doing?” came a girl’s voice.

     I turned in her direction to see her, Kyra Elpida, that Greek girl next door in a rainbow spring hat and short cut hair. She wore a sky blue spring dress, and I remember wanting to touch her, or just be rolled up in there somewhere on her body, just so she could take me with her. She couldn’t have been more than five at the time as well. We were always the same age.

     “N-N-Nothing,” I said, fearing she couldn’t understand.

     She looked at me maddled and then her mother came to her on the walk up, grabbed her by the hand, and pulled her along the promenade and back into their house. She told her, and I remember this to this day, never to talk to “boys.” I remember because she didn’t say “dun talk to strangers,” but “dun talk to boys,” and I wondered why, as if there were something infectious about us or something—something rotten about being one of them “boy” beasts. Sorry that, miss.