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dream, seven lean years and seven years fat.
    *
    Allegedly Bill too had been book-smart as a boy, but his schooling was curtailed at sixteen, whereupon he drew his first wage as an apprentice at Bearpark Colliery. He never took to it: not the place nor the people, nor the noisy, filthy, ill-rewarded graft. Instead he had the wit to sign up for and cycle to a night-school class, and won a trainee position as an installations engineer for Post Office Telecommunication.
    In John’s eyes his father appeared the consummate workman in helmet, overalls, belt and boots, climbing toolbox in hand from his Bedford utility van, emblazoned with a decal of a fat orange parrot in a vest exhorting passers-by to MAKE SOMEONE HAPPY . Whenever John peeked at the innards of that van he would boggle at the unruly forest of drop-wire, the hanging baskets of insulators , gravity switches, surge arrestors and sockets. The truly daunting fact was that his father operated solo, beginning work out by the pole on the street, up a ladder with a dispenser drum, and concluding it within the hour by the skirting of the customer’s hallway. Granted, Bill was less adept at conversing with these customers, many of them wary of what he might do to their paintwork with his drill. John couldn’t imagine how his fretful father managed such exchanges.
    But these were only a portion of the complaints he would hear from across the kitchen table. It was a source of inordinate ire to Bill that, ‘in this day and age’, the nation’s telephone network should still be part of the Post Office – that the poles up which he shinned each day were government property. ‘You see that?’ Bill would jab a finger at the black bakelite phone on the Gores’ hall table. ‘ That’s not ours. We rent that. It’s bloody Soviet , man.’
    ‘Why don’t you tell them then? Give ’em what for?’ Such was the view of Susannah, very much her father’s daughter, fifteen-year-old Saturday girl at Boots the chemist in Durham.
    ‘Whey, you’ll never ever change ’em, Sue. Not the jobsworth brigade.’
    In Jubilee Year the Gores moved to a three-bedroom house on Durham Moor Crescent, closer still to the city. Bill’s fierce proficiency seemed to be getting its due. In only one small respect was he a little unmanned before his family. On certain mornings after he had stepped from the house, as John and Susannah dawdled over cereals, the golden van remained stationary in the driveway for some minutes, until Audrey dropped the latch and dashed to the driver’s window. Apparently Bill would sometimes climb into the front seat and jam the key into the ignition only to discover he had forgotten entirely where he was going. Audrey began to fret. She spoke of her worry to John now and then. She had tried confiding in Susannah, who merely informed her, with seeming sangfroid, that telephones emitted microwaves and could yet fry Bill’s brain over time, if it were not already toasted.
    *
    One pale autumnal Sunday John strode forth ahead of Audrey, from Durham Market Place down cobblestones and past the shopfronts of Saddler Street, a short distance thence to the narrow steep-winding path of Owengate which drew the pilgrim toward the broad enclosure of the Palace Green. As he trudged directly up the middle of the road, he began to hear a deep-reverberating peal of bells. Then Durham Cathedral revealed itself, sat in colossal assurance over its surroundings, five hundred feet wide from east end to west.
    This, by John’s estimation, had to be what was commonly known as a work of art. And yet he could just as easily suppose the Cathedral had always been there, rising but gradually from the earth over a thousand years – like an iceberg, its sculpted summit a mere fraction of a truly awesome depth. The almighty clang of bells persisted, their shudder and judder lording over the Green, tearing the air, dispelling any rival claim. Everything in John hammered and resonated in