Open Writing

It is odd that such a short commandment, ‘Love thy neighbour,’ constantly proves to be the undoing of those seeking to exercise Christian virtue, and its honouring found wanting in so many of us, especially when it permits us to do harm to others under the guise of protecting our own interests as good Christians ought to do.

Robert Sutcliff, a poor and quite elderly weaver of Blackshaw, a district of old Halifax, was so often and so badly injured by his spiteful neighbours that he took their treatment of him to signify that an evil spirit dwelt in his rented room that attracted evil intentions and hard usage at the hands of his neighbours.

Although he was a skilled weaver, he was so poor a student of the human condition that he was unable to recognise their malevolence, not his haunting, was the cause of their bitterness and bad treatment, and so he engaged the services of one John Hepworth, who was known as the Bradford Fortune Teller, who was supposed to know about these things, and how to be rid of them.

Hepworth arrived at the house in which Sutcliff lodged, and on being let into his room and having received his fee, wisely, as it turned out, in advance, he opened his valise and took out the various implements of his art.

Placing a large iron bottle on the rickety table at which the weaver was wont to take his meals, Hepworth uncorked a glass bottle that contained, he said, human blood. He poured it all into the iron bottled, and helped himself to some of Sutcliff’s thinning hair, that he peremptorily and without announcement or three weeks written notice wrenched from the ancient’s pate, much to the consternation and discomfort of his client, and stuffed it into the bottle to commingle with the blood.

Robert, rubbing his scalp at the point where the conjuror had plucked him like a chicken, but also wondering at the advances made by the scientific community since he was a lad, watched as the iron flask was sealed with a large cork bung that Hepworth drove into the vessel’s neck with a cobbler’s hammer, and then watched in utter amazement as the practitioner of occult arts of divers kinds stoked up the fire with the poker and then deposited the bottle on the coals, nestling it down into the hottest part of the fire with his foot.

The fire, being hot, took but little time to superheat the liquid inside the bottle and then it produced a powerful head of steam that soon made significant changes that were not the transformation that the roomer expected and for which he had paid.

It is not known if Mr Hepworth, as folks were careful to call him after this event, had produced such spectacular results before, or whether this was a departure from his customary practice, but from that day on he was considered a powerful man on whose good side it was held to be wise to remain.

Contemporary reports indicate that the sorcerer, referred to as ‘the impious exorciser,’ was ‘utterly astonished,’ the rented room was ‘utterly demolished,’ the rest of the house was ‘greatly damaged,’ and the aged weaver was rendered beyond the reach of his neighbours, medical assistance, and his demons, having been despatched without benefit of farewells or funeral rites into eternity prematurely but decisively and in smithereens by fragments of the exploding metal carafe that were propelled at terminal velocity in his direction, chiefly striking him in the head and chest, but not neglecting to visit any part of his person.

The tragedy is that none of this would have been necessary had the man and his neighbours lived the Golden Rule. It isn’t very hard to do but you have to avoid selfishness as if it were a hot brick – or an exploding cast iron bottle!

Copyright © 2011 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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