Crusaders Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a changing room for school sports. Its front doors were bolted but a quartet of boys sat outside, smoking, on a railed concrete ramp. Even from twenty yards Gore could smell something acrid on the air.
    And now, unavoidably in front of him, was the Crossman Estate. A more grimly gimcrack construction he could not haveimagined: brick and clapboard buildings, erected with what could only have been a callous disregard for time and weathering – dreadfully rotted window frames, low wooden fences hardly worth kicking down, front doors with numbers chalked or painted on. Stupefying amounts of rubbish were strewn about the place – not merely foodstuff and discarded wrappings, but industrial pallets, broken-backed recliners, a knackered fridge, a punctured ball. Pigeons clustered and strutted about with an air of proprietor’s ease.
    It was sensory overload of a sort – more pure bleakness than Gore could fully assimilate. There had to be lives going on behind these terrible facades, the actual condition of which he was going to have to determine. But the evening chill felt much the harsher now, and he decided for the time being to suspend his enquiries into the condition of the English working class.

Chapter II
FACTS OF LIFE
    On secular occasions when it was asked of John Gore quite why he chose the vocation of Anglican priest, he had two responses ready to hand – one for such inquisitors as seemed to respect the life of the spirit, the other for those who appeared, affably or otherwise , to be taking the piss. Parties of the former were favoured with his best recollection of a moment in his early twenties when, breaking rocks in the Auvergne region of France, he had – for want of a less worn expression – ‘felt the call’. As for the piss-takers , Gore told them that he came from a little village in County Durham by the name of Pity Me, and so resolved from an early age to go forth and pity others.
    It was a one-street town within the parish of St Cuthbert, and John grew to know its contours as well as the nose on his face. Northward sat the more populous Chester-le-Street, and ten miles on lay Newcastle, as much as he could then imagine by way of a metropolis. But to stray a mere mile south was to enter the environs of Durham City, with its grand Norman castle, hallowed cathedral and esteemed university college. Pity Me and its near neighbour Framwellgate Moor had been founded on Front Street in the nineteenth century, per the needs of the coalmining industry , for both squatted over St Cuthbert’s share of the vast Durham coalfield. But local mining had dwindled to a halt by the 1920s, the workers forced to shift to nearby Bearpark or to Easington on the coast. By the time of John’s adolescence, Framwellgate’s ‘Old Pit’ was buried far beneath a fenced depot belonging to the County Council, and the villages were mere dormitory suburbs of the city.
    The Gores lived but a stone’s throw from Front Street in a tidy red-brick close, their semi within sight and earshot of a thundering bypass that carried cars and lorries down to Darlington and, further yet, to that other place called THE SOUTH . And yet John always bore the vague conviction that he had received a rural upbringing. From his bedroom window he would spy on two languid chestnut mares kicking their heels in a secluded field. Many a local estate bordered on woodland that could turn surprisingly thick, albeit scythed through by bridleways. This much John learned of County Durham from the seat of his Raleigh Grand Prix bike, and he grew fond of the way in which invisible borders were traversed and works of man receded, while fresh vistas and tracts of green space opened up – stretches of field and farmland, fences of post and wire, horses and shabby-fleeced sheep.
    He found Durham rich, too, in place names that struck him as novel and fantastical – Craghead, Monk Hesleden, Quaking Houses. One evening over the family’s tea he stated his