It’s Autumn half-term week this week, that strangely oppressive moment when the clocks go back and the leaves start to fall and the streets start crawling with the horrible children of a hundred thousand working class mums. It is a time for terror like no other.
I’ve been sent to the small town of Maylandsea, a small working class town set adrift among the marshes of the Dengie. It’s where the farmer’s send their workers to live, so that they don’t have to look at their contracted faces all evening as well as all day. For a man like me, it is one of the most incomprehensible landscapes on this Earth. A world of monstrous urges left out in the open instead of hidden safely away behind the walls of our houses.
There’s a boy on a driveway, maybe ten years old. his bike turned upside down. He’s standing astride the front wheel, his crotch placed gently on the rim, and he idly spins the wheel forward with his hands. He sees me looking at him, my face undoubtedly aghast. “Have you ever tried this, mister?” he shouts. “It feels so good.” Behind him his mother stands, her shirt pulled up, twin babies clamped to her breasts. And what breasts! Flesh flowing out in every direction, wanton and obscene. You don’t see breasts like this in London, at least not outside in the harsh light of day, and not for free. Behind her in the yard her washing line spins lazily in the breeze, sickening dried semen stains on the inside-out pants looking like the trails of slugs and snails. In a way I suppose they are.
I walk on, past the rutting dogs and the kissing teenagers, past the underwear laying forgotten in the gutter. At the edge of town, condoms caught in the branches of the bushes flap in the wind like so many flags caught in the maelstrom of lust that roars through the lives of these lascivious and lubricious
people, their passions forever requited, no matter how base. I step beyond the town’s boundaries, and try to leave my shivers of revulsion behind.
Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior correspondent. His sobs can be heard even in the North.
