Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace Read Free Book Online Page B

exit of the M1.
    It came out of the dark at me like I’d been asleep my whole life:
    Tall yellows and strange oranges, burning blues and real reds, lighting up the black night to the left of the motorway.
    Hunslet Carr ablaze.
    I pulled up fast on the hard shoulder, hazard lights on, thinking the whole of fucking Leeds must be able to see this.
    I grabbed my notebook and bolted out of the car, scrambling up the embankment at the side of the motorway, crawling through the mud and bushes towards the fire and the noise; the noise, revving engines and the thunderous, continuous, monot onous banging of time itself being beaten out.
    At the top of the motorway embankment I pulled myself up on my elbows and lay on my belly staring down into hell. There below me in the basin of Hunslet Carr, just 500 yards beneath me, was my England on the morning of Sunday 15 December, in the year of Our Lord 1974, looking a thousand years younger and none the better.
    A gypsy camp on fire, each of the twenty or so caravans and trailers ablaze, each beyond relief; the Hunslet gypsy camp I’d seen out of the corner of my eye every single time I’d driven into work, now one big fat bowl of fire and hate.
    Hate, for ringing the burning gypsy camp was a raging metal river of ten blue vans churning seventy miles an hour in one continuous circle, straight out of speedway night at Belle fucking Vue, trapping within the roaring wheels fifty men, women and children in one extended family hanging on to each other for dear life, the intense flames scolding and illuminating the sheer stark fucking terror upon their faces, the children’s cries and mothers’ howls piercing through the sheets and sheets of noise and heat.
    Cowboys and fucking Indians, 1974.
    I watched as fathers and sons, brothers and uncles, broke from their families and tried to charge between the vans, to punch, to kick, to beat on the metal river, screaming up at the night as they fell back into the mud and the tyres.
    And then, as the flames rose higher still, I saw who the gypsy men were so desperately trying to reach, whose hearts they had their own so set upon.
    Around the entire camp, in the shadows down below me, lay another outer circle beyond the vans, two men deep, beating out time with their truncheons upon their shields:
    The new West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police putting in a spot of overtime.
    And then the vans stopped.
    The gypsy men froze in the firelight, slowly edging back towards their families in the middle, dragging the injured back through the dirt with them.
    The banging of the shields intensified and the outer ring of police began to advance, one big fat black snake sliding in single file between the vans, until the outer circle became the inner, the snake facing the families and the flames.
    Zulu , Yorkshire style.
    And then the banging stopped.
    The only sounds were the fire cracking and the children crying.
    Nothing moved, ‘cept my heart at my ribs.
    Then, out of the night and away to the left, I could see a van’s headlights approaching, bumping across the wasteground towards the camp. The van, maybe white, suddenly braked hard and three of four men tumbled out. There was some shouting and some police broke off from the circle.
    The men tried to get back into the van and the van, definitely white, began to reverse.
    The nearest police van jerked into life, churned mud and hit the van full on in the side, nought to seventy in half the metres.
    The van stopped dead and the police descended on it, drag ging men out through broken windows, exposing flanks of white flesh.
    Sticks and stones set about their bones.
    Within the circle a man stepped forward, barechested. The man lowered his head and charged, screaming.
    Instantaneously the police snake sprang, moving in and swal lowing up the families in a sea of black and sticks.
    I stood up too quickly and toppled down the banking, back towards my car, the motorway, and out.
    I reached the bottom of the banking,