‘Those blocks were rubbish, though,’ I said.
‘They were as good as any system-built block in London,’ he said. ‘And it’s not like they’re going to replace them with country cottages, is it? The trouble with people is they’ve got a romantic view of the past.’
I doubted that I did, but I was enjoying the garden and the beer and it’s rude to stop people talking.
‘I’ve lived here for over forty years but I can still remember what it was like before,’ said Jake and then proceeded to tell me in great detail, including with statistics, about the outside toilets, the damp, the overcrowding, the bomb sites and just how vile a sublet terraced can be when there’s a lot of you sharing the same bathroom. Assuming there is a separate bathroom and not a bath in the kitchen that serves as a table when not in use.
Bath in the kitchen? I could hear my mother saying. Luxury! In Sierra Leone we used to dream of a bath in the kitchen. Only obviously not in a Yorkshire accent.
For Jake, the problem was not in the design but in the people.
‘People were proud to get a flat,’ he said. ‘They appreciated having all the mod cons.’ This being the proper working class who did a day’s work with their hands and scrubbed their front step. Who understood the importance of education.
‘If you went into the library in them days it was full of men who’d just come off the morning shift,’ he said. ‘You could have heard a pin drop in there.’ And they were all diligently improving their minds and occasionally buying the Daily Worker on their way out.
‘I used to sell half my copies outside the library,’ said Jake. ‘That’s the kind of working man who used to be allocated a council flat. Back then it was a privilege, not a right.’ He finished his beer. ‘Not that decent housing shouldn’t be a human right, you understand? But in those days people appreciated what they had.’
And what they had were streets in the sky with indoor plumbing. High above the noise and smell of the traffic, where the elongated artist’s impression of young white mothers with strollers waved to their friends from improbably clean concrete walkways under a sky of Battle of Britain blue.
‘If we’d had the right political structures in place,’ said Jake, ‘proper local democracy, we could have kept the communities intact. Now everything’s handled at arm’s length through contractors and agencies.’ He practically spat the last word. ‘There used to be people you could hold to account. But now it’s all call centres explaining that your job doesn’t seem to be on the system. Nobody is accountable any more.’
‘Contractors like County Gard?’ I said. Normally I’d have tried to avoid asking such a direct question in case it garnered suspicion, but I didn’t think Jake would notice. He was one of those people who constantly seems to be having a conversation with someone other than the person he’s actually talking to — presumably someone much more politically committed. And interested.
‘Lackeys of the capitalist class,’ he said. ‘Although it has to be said they are full service lackeys, offering a comprehensive range of products and services designed to keep the working class in their place.’
Because they didn’t just secure the flats against squatters. They were also the debt collection agency responsible for collecting rent and poll tax arrears. ‘Although you only find that out if you’re willing to spend some time in Companies House,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole series of nested shell corporations it takes ages to work through.’
‘Suspicious,’ I said.
‘Par for the course really,’ said Jake. ‘All part of the tax avoidance merry-go-round.’
County Gard, along with the companies behind them, were desperate to get the development going. ‘There’s no commercially owned land this close to the City that wouldn’t be so expensive it would cut into their profits.’ So instead they looked to gull cheap land out of local councils desperate for cash.
‘Why pay full whack when you can get it off the back of the lorry cheap?’ said Jake. ‘Council land is essentially cheap land because the councils are desperate to increase their housing stock, but don’t have the funds to do it. All these developers have to do is promise to have some so-called affordable housing and it’s money in the bank.’
‘They must have been pissed off when this place stayed listed,’ I said.
‘That was down to the trees, that was,’ said Jake. Because English Heritage, being a bastion of middle class privilege, were that much more concerned with rare trees than they were with common people.
‘But they’re just plane trees,’ I said.
Apparently not, because we got through another beer on the subject of the local arboreal diversity before I could make my excuses and leave. I did wonder whether this diversity had something to do with the presence of our favourite wood nymph. Or vice versa.
Once I got back to the flat I called the inside inquiry team at Bromley MIT and suggested they check to see whether the recently cooked-from-the-inside Patrick Mulkern had any connection to County Gard. It was a long shot, but the rule of a major investigation is always throw everything into the pot. You might not find that bit of okra tasty, but somewhere deep in the bowels of the investigation some DC on a mission might snap it up.
I remote-checked my messages at the tech cave and found that I had three. Two from my mum re: my dad’s teeth and one from Professor Postmartin who, having trawled through the list of Stromberg’s books provided by English Heritage, had found one that was of interest.
‘It’s called Wege der industriellen Nutzung von Magie,’ said Postmartin when I called him back. ‘I’ve already asked them to deliver it to the Folly.’
‘What does that translate as?’
‘Towards the Industrial Use of Magic,’ said Postmartin.
‘Have you read it?’
‘Never heard of it before,’ said Postmartin. ‘But, by a stroke of good fortune, we’re listed as having a copy here.’ Here being the semi-secret stacks of the Bodleian Library. ‘I thought I might spend today and tomorrow reading it so I can give you a precis. Although I believe I can make a wild guess based on the title that it’s a treatise on the industrial uses of magic.’
‘Impressive deduction,’ I said.
‘Merely an outgrowth of my mad academic skills,’ said Postmartin.
‘Indubitably,’ I said.
When Lesley hadn’t returned by early evening I decided I might as well get some practice in. I figured that casting in the flat, with the consequent effect on the surrounding electronics, would be anti-social. So I went downstairs to what I now thought of as Sky’s garden. That way it would be a combination practice, dog walk and wood nymph observation.
Having been lectured by Jake Phillips on the arboreal variety of the gardens I’m fairly certain that I correctly identified the shorter bushy rowan trees, including a couple of small ones that looked like they’d grown from seeds. And the crab-apples were easy to spot, with their purplish bark and hairy buds. I was also pleased to note that what I thought earlier were silver birches were really silver birches. Nightingale would have been proud of me.
I chose the dismantled children’s playground, making sure I stood with my back to the cherry trees so I could keep an eye on the tower and avoid accidentally shredding the blossom.
When I first started my apprenticeship, practice was a slog. And, while my appreciation and skill have improved, running through your formae again and again as you strive to perfect them is never going to be a laugh a minute.
And you don’t even get to do cool martial art stances while you do them. Although me and Dr Walid have speculated that the formae somehow represented the interaction between our electrochemically powered nervous system and the magical — field? Subspace dimensional manifold? Banana flavoured milkshake? — that creates observable effects in the material world. If that was the case, then surely it might be possible to generate the same effect through gesture, stance and movement. Certainly it seemed natural to enhance a spell-casting with gestures. Even Nightingale had his quirks — the little flick of his hand for impello, the admonitory finger wag for aer and the opening hand movement that accompanied the first spell I ever learnt — lux.