Attercliffe

Nicholas Spice

• Present Times by David Storey
  Cape, 270 pp, £8.95, May 1984, ISBN 0 224 02188 5
• The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle edited by Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin
  Open University, 296 pp, £15.00, December 1982, ISBN 0 335 10181 X
• The Hawthorn Goddess by Glyn Hughes
  Chatto, 232 pp, £8.95, April 1984, ISBN 0 7011 2818 6

In the press box of the Morristown football ground ‘the stockily-built, the tousled-haired, the pugnaciously-featured Attercliffe’ – 47 years old, father of five, separated from his wife – takes notes on the Saturday afternoon match. One eye on the game below, he chats to his fellow journalists: ‘the pug-nosed, the pug-eared Morgan’, Davidson-Smith (‘overcoated’, ‘deerstalker-hatted’) and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post. After the match, in the Buckingham Bar, Fredericks introduces Frank to Phyllis Gardner – eyes ‘long-lashed’, teeth ‘pearl-buttoned’ between ‘brightly-fashioned lips’. Phyllis is an actress, and Fredericks’s idea is that Attercliffe should interview her for the Northern Post. Maybe it’ll help him get interested in writing plays again. Maybe it’ll be the start of a new romance.