Arrived at the new foster home on the Yorkshire Moors. It’s a similar sort of stout country pile to those I’ve lived in and destroyed several times in the course of my young life. It’s called “Wuthering Heights”. Priceless!
“Wuthering”, let me tell you, was the name of a wildly popular drug back on the streets of Liverpool. It was invented by my gang mate Percy. Percy, before he died halfway up a chimney, was an enterprising semi-invalid who developed Wuthering by mixing 15% low grade opium, 10% tobacco, 40% dehydrated mare’s urine, 20% factory effluent and 5% fish stock. The remaining 10% was comprised of some anonymous tar-like substance which Percy called “Dark Majesty”, and whose provenance he kept to himself. It was all boiled down into an aromatic treacle which me and the boys flogged to sooty Liverpudlian street urchins like ourselves for 2d for an emaciated fistful.
Shove a single sticky globule of Wuthering up your hooter and, provided your lungs don’t froth up and drown you on the spot, you are transported to a world of sweetness and light where the angels sing and buxom matrons ply you with custard and declare you “a very good boy”. Anticipating boredom and compulsory afternoon walks t’up moor in’t rain, I stashed a neat parcel of Wuthering in the handkerchief I fastened to the end of a bent stick, along with a pair of clean undies and a small tobacco tin filled with gunpowder.
Having told my foster-father Mr Earnshaw that I would knife him “repeatedly” if he attempted to send me to the local community school, I am content to spend my days on the back terrace, dismembering beetles and the occasional barn mouse while laughing manically. In this I have an eager accomplice in Cathy, the feral girl-spawn of Mr Earnshaw who declares her favourite books to be “tha’ evil ones ’bout murder an’ incest an’ jesters an’ stuff” and her favourite food to be “raw pig meat wit’ tha’ blood left in”. There’s also Mr Earsnshaw’s pimply boy-spawn, Hindley, but he’s a timid little turd and is usually scared away by a casual threat from Cathy that she would gladly inflict “great ’arm on ye face wit’ broom ’andle”.
I thought it might relieve the more tedious afternoons to get Cathy hooked on Wuthering. It was a doddle: the little missy will chew or inhale anything provided it’s dark and pungent enough. There we sit, divvying up the filth on the kitchen table next to the mutilated beetle corpses – and no sooner does she bung a wodge of Wuthering up her freckled nostrils than she bolts through the door, leap-frogs the gate and scampers across’t moor. Wuthering heights indeed!
Cathy’s ecstatic shrieks and wails echo through half of western Yorkshire, and I am always close in pursuit, balancing a flask of gin and a tin a stale pies for our merry picnic. After her shrieks have given way to phlegm-corrupted gurgles, we collapse on a stretch of heather and begin swilling gin and fondling each other’s “evil parts”, as Cathy is want to call them in feverish tones. We vomit periodically and strategically, and it usually begins raining at some point. Et in Arcadia ego.
I am growing accustomed to the rustic manners of the Yorkshire countryside in ways I had not anticipated. Drug-fuelled picnics with posh country totty easily beats nicking carriages with my gang mates in Liverpool or offering favours to bearded sailors at the slave docks. I rather fancy myself as lord of Wuthering Heights one day.
Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights, Yorkshire, 1771
