The blessed beauty salon and the closed Kwik Save

All seems calm and quiet in Longhill, a post-war leafy housing estate right at the very edge of the city boundary north of the long Holderness Road. And in the Longhill Link-Up Trust Cafe a calm, warm and thoughtful conversation with Peter Harrison, an ex-clergyman in the city of Hull who has bucked a trend by choosing to retire to Hull rather than from it. We are joined by others. Jill, a bright young woman who works at the cafe, offers us flapjack and chats easily about this estate which she’s lived in for some time and thinks of as a safe, secure, settled place, and gives me an insight into local culture (the preferred food of Hull, she says, is patties, potato ones). A member of the local genealogy group chips in; the vicar Maggie and an ordinand on placement from Durham arrive for a meeting; and an elderly lady eating a toasted teacake at the table nearest the door addresses a key theme which concerns them all: the recent closure of the Kwik Save opposite which has meant long, difficult journeys for the likes of her to the large shops outside the estate. The lady wants the Trust to get a petition going, to reinstate a store here.

Soon another local issue rears its head: the sinister nature of a well-known council house, whose many tenants over the years have been scared away by all manner of demonic apparitions and whose present occupier, a woman with mental health problems, is becoming troublesomely dark and devilish in her behaviour. Part of the house’s infamy is due to numerous well-publicised attempts to exorcise it which all failed. The house’s current troublous tenant has been uppermost in the thoughts of a young woman who has joined us at our table, who works with her mum at the beauty salon over the road. She’s been losing sleep, she tells us, because the last time that woman visited their shop her behaviour and language was erratic, aggressive, threatening. And she was due to make a return visit this lunchtime.

Here events take an unexpected turn and prompted by Peter (who may be quiet but is very persuasive) I find myself being invited by the beauty salon girl to come and ‘say a blessing’ in the salon in anticipation of the troubled woman’s visit. It’s the sort of invitation which is impossible to refuse, so at 11.30am I find myself snug in a cosy cream-coloured leather chair chatting to the two salon staff and their customer and, once she’s been taken to a side room to have a manicure (or something) done, I say a prayer there, beneath the nail varnish shelves, for peace, protection and blessing on the place. It’s not what I’d thought I’d be doing when I set out on the 56 bus this morning.

Later Peter (who’s been telling everyone that I’m walking the M62 praying for people I meet on the way) walks me around the tidy homes and gardens of Longhill. We tut at the excessive armoury surrounding the new Children’s Centre; we note how (in contrast to North Bransholme) there are all generations of families settled here; we talk about youth work provision and the pros and cons of fundraising; and we comment on how quiet it is, despite the secondary school pupils still being on holiday.

But I’ve already begun to think that it’s perhaps always calm and quiet in Longhill. At least, that is, on the surface.