The tannery was a collection of stained, smoke scarred, stuck with blood buildings. It oozed thick, unctuous odours; smells and vapours that contorted the face, pulled the nostrils apart, wedged them open, and insinuated dread, fear, and primordial horror into the naïve olfactory senses of our incomplete bodies.  In the winter this wasn’t a problem, the cold air deadened the dead, but in the summer, the languid passive aggressive heat, slow-cooked the edifice. Passing the Tannery en-route to school necessitated a two-hundred-yard sprint along a rough track that ran parallel to the factory, and was invariably accompanied by attempts to trip each other, with the aim of leaving one of our merry troupe squirming, laughing and puking, held in the miasma of long dead animals.

On those days when the wind direction and air temperature allowed a more leisurely stroll past the tannery, we would often pause and look beyond the weatherworn “Trespassers will be prosecuted” sign into the forbidden, mysterious tannery scrubland.   Through the barbed wire fence we could see the lime pits…. solid black pustulated ponds that generated many a scare story for us as kids; fabricated, excited child, bravado laden stories of bodies being thrown in, left to sink and dissolve; stories of narrow escapes, of being pulled from the pits before disappearing without a trace. Occasionally, we would be able to launch hefty lumps of rock over the fence and into the nearest pit. The rocks would hit with a resonant “perdunch”, rest for a moment on the rippleless, tar-like surface before slowly descending. They didn’t sink, they were eaten by the pit, the thick, black, viscous lime jaws savouring its latest inductees. 

More often than not, our activities were curtailed by the muffled, smoke choked, garbled ranting of the caretaker who we nicknamed “Peggy”. We knew little of him other than that he was, to us, incredibly old (in reality, probably mid to late 60’s), he had “fag” on the go constantly, a club foot (possibly due to childhood polio), and he walked with a profound limp. This combination meant he was not the most agile of caretakers, wheezing his way round the perimeter fence with a “Capstan full strength” or “No6 untipped” plume of smoke in his wake, uttering guttural and threatening noises directed at potential (and hypothetical) ingressors. Once “discovered” we would switch our primary school limbs into “run mode”, let fly a volley of abuse, each member of our gang trying to outdo the other in terms of the quality and offensiveness of our tirade, and then scarper … making our way either on to school or home.