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.
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, puking:
Eddie Dunford, North of England Crime Correspondent, with my hand upon the Viva’s door, saw the flames reflected in the glass.
I ran along the hard shoulder to the emergency phone, praying to Christ that it worked and, when it did, beseeching the operator to summon every available emergency service to the Hunslet and Beeston exit of the M1 where, I breathlessly assured her, a ten-car pile-up was fast becoming more, with a petrol tanker ablaze.
That done, I ran back along the motorway and back up the banking, looking down on a battle being lost and a victory that filled my whole body with a rage as impotent as it was engulfing.
The West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police had opened up the backs of their vans and were throwing the bloodied and beaten men inside.
Within the big wheel of fire, officers stripped gypsy women and children of their clothes, throwing the rags into the flames and randomly striking out with their clubs at the naked white skin of the women.
Sudden and deafening shotgun blasts punctuated the horror, as petrol tanks exploded and gypsy dogs were shot, as the police took their shotguns to anything that looked remotely salvageable.
I saw in the midst of this hell, naked and alone, a tiny gypsy girl, ten years old or less, short brown curls and bloody face, standing in that circle of hate, a finger in her mouth, silent and still.
Where the fuck were the fire engines, the ambulances?
My rage became tears; lying at the top of the banking I searched my pockets for my pen, as though writing something, anything, might make it all seem a bit better than it was or a little less real. Too cold to fucking grasp the pen properly, scraw-ling red biro across dirty paper, hiding there in those skinny bushes, it didn’t help at all.
And then he was right there, coming towards me.
Wiping the tears away with mud, I saw a red and black shining face tearing straight out of hell and up the banking towards me.
I half stood to greet it, but fell straight back down into the ground as three black-winged policemen grabbed the man by his feet and greedily took him back down into their boots and clubs.
And then I saw HIM, in the distance, behind it all.
Detective Chief Superintendent George Oldman, illuminated behind the sticks and the bones like some bloody cave painting against the side of a police van, smoking and drinking with some other coppers as the van rocked from side to side.
George Oldman and friends tilted back their heads to the night and laughed loud and long until George stopped dead and stared straight at where I lay 500 yards away.
I threw my face deep down into the mud until it filled my mouth and small stones cut into my face. Suddenly I was ripped free of the mud, pulled up by the roots of my hair, and all I could see was the dark night sky above me before the fat white face of a policeman rose like the moon into my own.
A learner fist went hard into my face, two fingers in my mouth, two blinding my eyes. “Close your fucking eyes and don’t you speak.”
I did as I was told.
“Nod if you know the Redbeck Cafe on the Doncaster Road.” It was a vicious whisper, hot in my ear.
I nodded.
“You want a story, be there at five o’clock this morning.”
Then the glove was gone and I opened my eyes to the black fucking sky and the sound of a thousand screaming sirens.
Welcome home Eddie.
Four hours straight driving, trying to outrun my visions of children.
A four-hour tour of a local hell: Pudsey, Tingley, Hanging Heaton, Shaw Cross, Batley, Dewsbury, Chickenley, Earlsheaton, Gawthorpe, Horbury, Castleford, Pontefract, Normanton, Hem-sworth, Fitzwilliam, Sharlston, and Streethouse.
