Crusaders Read Online Free PDF

intention to cycle five miles out to Sacriston, the invoking of which seemed to fill him with an instinctual piety. But his father Bill only creased his brow in a familiar manner that cancelled all debate. ‘Whey, it’s just a bloody pit village, John.’ And from the far coast of the kitchen table Susannah let out a short scoffing laugh.
    Only Granddad Alec ever saw fit to indulge the boy’s fancy in this area.
    ‘Have you ever been to no place , bonny lad?’ Such was his stock query. John would giggle, only for Alec to make a great show of rueful head-shaking and produce from his pocket a square of yellowing paper, unfolded carefully into an Ordnance Survey. And there indeed, at the end of Alec’s fingernail – and really no further than another five-mile jaunt up the road – was NO PLACE, CO. DURHAM .
    *
    Alec was broad-shouldered and forthright in any social gathering. Bill was whip-thin and pensive, prone to the silent chewing of a thumbnail. Alec’s capacities looked to be distributed evenly about his sturdy physique, while Bill’s seemed to have migratedentirely upward, to that furrowed brow beneath a helmet of prematurely silvered hair. And while Bill was perennially unkempt, living in cardigans and corduroys far past their good wear, Alec clad himself always in a three-piece of black gabardine with a pressed and collarless white shirt, the fine strands of his own snowy hair brilliantined back across his scalp.
    John knew in his bones that Dad and Grandad were very different men, but the grown-up world mystified him such that he couldn’t quite see why. The facts known to him were that Alec had worked in a coalmine for twenty years, his cheeks pockmarked by tiny shards of anthracite, before he was granted promotion to a managing role in the pit welfare fund. Whereas Bill drove a yellow van all round the locality, and made people’s telephones work. Why one job for money bested another was unclear to John. He assumed only that if people worked hard then they got their just desserts, but Dad and Granddad seemed not quite to concur on this point, at least on those evenings that they spent supping beer and disputing matters in the parlour by the three-bar fire.
    Their regular schism was over the Labour Party – which, if Bill was believed, embodied all things slovenly in the world, even though he had once subscribed keenly to his local branch. But Alec still lived and breathed Labour. And as far as John could see, the very facts of life in the region were Labour through and through. This, though, was precisely his dad’s point.
    It seemed to have a perplexing amount to do with houses – how they were built, and then allocated, by the Labour council. ‘Rotten,’ Bill decreed. ‘All out for themselves.’ John thought he would never hear the end of T. Dan Smith or Alderman Andrew Cunningham. If Bill was believed, scarcely a new home got built in the north-east but for Smith profiting by the very bricks and mortar. ‘He pays them who decide what gets built,’ Bill fumed, ‘then the bloody builders pay him for the job.’
    ‘How is that allowed?’ was John’s falsetto contribution.
    ‘Aw, it’s not against the law, son. Would you credit that? A blind man can see it’s all wrong. But owld Smith, he gets away with it, see, cos they’re all rats. All in each other’s bloody pockets , man.’
    This was where Alec would clear this throat heftily and remark that not all parties should be tarred by the same brush. Bill, though, was merely warming to the topic of Alderman Cunningham – the ‘Baron’, as he was known, and John pictured a caped and moustachioed villain trussing a damsel to a railway track.
    ‘How many jobs has that bugger got, eh? He’s running Labour in Durham. Running General and Municipal union. Twenty-grand house he’s got in Chester-le-Street. And his bliddy son ’s an MP. How’d he fix that up, eh?’
    ‘He was elected , Bill. Him and his lad.’
    ‘Whey, Dad, man,’ Bill