The World is What it is – Cannell’s Guide to Battrick: Part 1
The world is what it is. I could describe the town viewed from the southern hills above the river. A square with a statue not of the founder, mounted on a heavy charger facing south, away from the sea, the river and the events of the town’s early history; colonnaded on one side, the cathedral dedicated to the local saint. Along the river sprawl the wharves and fishermen’s shacks, and in the distance, beyond the Dutch colony, the new shipyard, that even now, some are calling “Petrus’ Folly”. At the bend in the river, where it slackens before the rocks, boys swim, smoke, and make unkeepable vows in solemn mendacity to slow-eyed girls whose small breasts press against the cotton of checked blouses, this year’s fashion. Anybody could draw a map, find their way to the covered market whose stones retain the damp reek of rotting vegetables, fish and urine; find the chemist Barthé, at the café watching children tormenting one of their number with an abstracted fascination.
I could tell the story of the founding of Spicy. The spoiling of the land between one country and another and the difficult journey to a country, split by a river, of which it was said “the south is for Argentina and the north for Brazil.
“The ploughland has gone to bent
and the pasture to heather;
gin the goodwife stint,
she’ll keep the house together.
Gin the goodwife stint
and the bairns hunger
the Duke can get his rent
one year longer.
The Duke can get his rent
and we can get our ticket
twa pund emigrant
on a C.P.R. packet.”
I could iterate the difficulties of raising flocks in a pampas, burdened by the nostalgia “To see the bracken choke the clod the coulter will na turn? The bit level neebody will drain soak up the burn?”. The dissonance of languages, Saxon, Spanish and a pidgin derived from work, misery and deprivation. It’s easy to describe economy of Spicy, in a country that is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labour could be dissected, the role of the police described, the attitude of the Dutch, who may be the prime beneficiaries, the role played by the descendants of the original Lambburgers, or some of them.
Nobody would believe that a Spanish-speaker with a woman’s name, Juan-Maria Brausen, caused the town council to found and fund a cricket club named for the descendants of a depopulated land denuded of trees since their ancestors first used iron tools on Brough Law. Far less could it be credible that Brausen would trust a man with a name like an imprecation, met in a bar, the former manager of a nightclub moored on a derelict staithes, to take charge of his fabulous enterprise.
