If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will

One Wakes Week Dad had an exciting surprise for us. He told us that we were going to Blackpool for four days. To say we were delighted would be putting it mildly. For us Blackpool was our Shangri-La, our fairyland wherein it was Wakes all the year round.

John and I had never been on a train before, so having a compartment to ourselves on the Blackpool train didn’t register until Dad said he thought it would have been crowded during Wakes Week. Mother and Dad sat opposite each other by the window but we didn’t sit anywhere as we were too excited to be still. There were so many things to see: hedgerows whizzing past, meadows dotted with cows intent on cropping the grass, some raising their heads to glance curiously at the train, a black horse in the next field; and in the split second it took to vanish behind us we searched frantically for a white one, which was worth a toffee in one of our competitions that made the journey more exciting, as if we needed more excitement.

Then my father bent towards us and pointed to the horizon, and together we screamed, ‘Blackpool Tower.’ This was the highlight of our journey and we staggered and lurched on to the seats as we began to slow down and soon the train huffed importantly into Blackpool Central station. We were overawed by the sheer immensity of this austere Victorian building, with arches high above the concourse and hurrying passengers alighting from the train. It had never entered my head that there were others besides us making their way to Blackpool, so wrapped up were we in wonder in our own private compartment. As we passed the engine driver, Dad said, ‘Thank you’, and the engine driver, leaning out of his cab and wiping his hands on an oily rag, nodded and winked at John and me, while behind the engine driver a huge sweating man in a singlet, shovelled coal to feed the insatiable appetite of the boiler, his face lit by the glow. I backed out of the station, my eyes never leaving the old train driver enjoying his pipe, and I decided there and then that one day I would drive the Blackpool train.

Dad determined to take us along the promenade so that we could get a closer look at the fabulous tower, but unfortunately as we turned into the Golden Mile we were targeted by the screaming wind, which made progress almost impossible as we made our way to the boarding house. The waves were hurling themselves at the sea walls, flinging white spray into the air that was gleefully accepted by the wind and helped across the road to drench anybody stupid enough to be out on a day like this.

Without hesitation, Dad lifted John into his arms and Mother grasped my hand, and we all staggered into the shelter of the nearest side street. The calm and peace not ten yards from the frantic onslaught of the wind and sea were unnerving. As Dad wiped John’s face with his hankie, a policeman strolled across to us.

‘Been swimming?’ he enquired sarcastically.

Dad puffed out his cheeks and replied, ‘It’s a force-ten gale out there.’

The policeman shook his head. ‘Bit of a blow, that’s all. It’ll be all right tomorrow.’

Well, he was certainly correct in his weather forecast. On the morrow there was no wind to speak of, just the odd gust; but it was quite cold—‘bracing’, the landlady said. So John and I paddled in the pools by the sea wall left by the receding tide. Mother kept a watchful eye on us while Dad took a tram to a place called Uncle Tom’s Cabin to see if any of his mates were there. This was a favourite watering hole and he may well have met someone he knew: after all, it was Oldham’s Wakes Week and visitors to Blackpool would most likely be Oldhamers.

The next day Mother took us down to the Pleasure Ground on the south shore. This was ten times bigger and more awesome than the travelling fairground that toured the Lancashire cotton towns. John and I rolled a penny each down the slots but won nothing, and Mother yanked us away before we got the bug. We had a ride on the prancing horses in between eating candy floss—we didn’t eat any supper when we got home and in fact during that visit we ate enough candy floss between us to stuff a medium-sized mattress. Dad spent the day at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and so we only saw him long enough to say, ‘Bye, Dad.’

On the Wednesday Mother took us by tram to Bispham and I had the feeling that if it hadn’t been too expensive we would have gone as far as Fleetwood, where Dad said you could get the best kippers in the world. Incidentally he wasn’t with us, as he spent the day at Uncle Tom’s Cabin again. On the last day it absolutely threw it down—the rain was unbelievable—and against the rules of the boarding house we were allowed to stay indoors and play draughts and snakes and ladders. We would have played ludo, only we needed four players and Dad wasn’t present as he was at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By and large we had a marvellous holiday. Even Dad was over the moon, as he’d won a shilling at darts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And so our wonderful few days by the sea came to an end, and now my ambition was to be a train driver on the promenade at Blackpool.

One Sunday Mother got John and me ready and told us that we were going to Grandma Stacey’s for tea. It was the first I’d heard of Grandma Stacey, but in those days little boys didn’t ask silly questions like ‘Who’s Grandma Stacey?’ We took the tram to a much posher part of Oldham, a world we’d never seen, and I remember thinking that the further we travelled the more austere our surroundings were. When we finally arrived at our destination, I was overawed by the quiet, aloof elegance of the Victorian terraces. We were aliens in a land of privilege as we walked furtively uphill to the address of Grandma Stacey.

The front door was opened by an old lady whose bottom jaw trembled as if she was cold, with a long black dress ornamented only by a cameo brooch at her throat and hair swept up at the back and held tightly in place by a large comb. This turned out to be Great-grandma Wilson. She didn’t speak, even after Mother’s ‘Good afternoon’; she just opened the door wider, turned and floated along the passage, to disappear in a room, and after a moment she reappeared and looked at us, whereupon Mother ushered us forward and we went into a more cheerful atmosphere.

A fire was burning brightly in the grate and an old man in a pillbox hat with a tassel was seesawing slowly back and forward in a rocking chair, busily puffing on a white clay pipe, which had a lid on it, his eyes never leaving the burning coals. We three stood around, hardly breathing in case he turned to look in our direction. In front of us there was a table covered by a startlingly white cloth and on it a small plateful of sandwiches and three bowls of prunes. Then the little old lady with the quivering jaw entered with a jug full of hot custard and poured it over the prunes, after which she made a silent exit and we never saw her again on that visit; nor did the old man in the rocking chair interrupt his quiet vigil over the fire. When we’d finished we stood around in silence, which was oppressive and broken only by the hissing and spluttering of the fire and, more dominating, the sonorous ticking of an old polished grandfather clock sneering down at us. Mother said, ‘Well, er…we’ll be off then,’ and glared at us until in unison we said, ‘Thank you for my tea,’ and that was the end of the ordeal.

On the tram going home Mother told us that the old lady was not Grandma Stacey: she was not at home today, and neither was my brother Vernon. The old couple we’d met were Grandma Stacey’s parents, Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Wilson. She also explained why they didn’t speak: it was simply because they were both in their nineties. I must confess that this remark had me puzzled for days. If you were over ninety, were you not allowed to speak? Or, more worryingly, perhaps at that impossible age they’d forgotten how it was done.

Subsequently we went to tea for three more Sundays. On the last visit I think Mother must have taken John to the lavatory for I was left alone with Great-grandpa Wilson, still rocking, still puffing and glaring at the fire. I just stood and watched him. I was good at standing and watching—I’d had enough practice at home. Then Great-grandpa Wilson took the pipe out of his mouth and the old man I’d previously thought incapable of speech broke his silence, but it was as if I wasn’t there—I’d had enough practice at that as well. Taking the pipe out of his mouth, he said, ‘Last night she didn’t come home till after nine o’clock.’ He put his pipe back in his mouth, puffed for a while, took it out again and said, ‘I reckon she’s got a fancy man somewhere,’ and that was the end of what could scarcely be described as a conversation—in fact I wouldn’t have dared open my mouth. I just stood and watched, and his stare never left the fire. Many, many years later, when I was working for my living, Great-grandpa Wilson’s words came back to me, and with a flash of insight I realised that he had been referring to Grandma Stacey, who was seventy-two at the time; and on mulling over those awful prunes-and-custard ordeals I realised that Great-grandpa Wilson must have been born in about 1836. What a wealth of memories must have been staring back at him from the fire! Victoria was Queen when he was young, but did Great-grandpa Wilson know this? After all, there was no such thing as a wireless in those far-off days; he would have been middle-aged before it had been invented. He must have been aware that Prince Albert, Victoria’s consort, was German, but when Albert died an early death and the whole country mourned, how would Great-grandpa Wilson have learned of this tragic event? There were few newspapers and probably none at all in Oldham, which in those days was mostly forest and grassland, and certainly there were no newsagents. Perhaps information was conveyed by the town crier, but then would Oldham have been big enough to warrant such a luxury, and how did the town crier get the news in the first place? Questions, questions, questions. In the middle of the nineteenth century there were no such ‘get-abouts’ as the motor car, trams were yet to come, and there would have been no roads for them to travel on; horses and coaches were the only means of transport and then only for the gentry. To be abroad at night when there were no lights to illuminate the paths was to make oneself vulnerable to rogues and vagabonds. What a rich tapestry of first-hand knowledge stared back at Grandpa Wilson from the fire! I would have sat at his feet just to listen, anything, yet the only time he spoke to me was to slag off Grandma Stacey, his seventy-two-year-old daughter who hadn’t come home till after nine o’clock. What was he afraid of—a highwayman? Oh, what a missed opportunity!

The next time I saw Great-grandpa Wilson was when Grandma Stacey took me by the hand and led me into a quiet bedroom to pay my respects to him as he lay peacefully in his coffin. Other people whom I’d never met stood around in quiet groups, but no one seemed particularly upset. When Grandma Stacey took me back downstairs, a different drama was taking place. I was fascinated as I watched one of the mourners—a large, untidy man in a bowler hat, with a large pointed nose with a large dewdrop hanging on the end of it reluctant to leave home—rummaging in the shelves of a magnificent bookcase, occasionally stuffing his pockets with anything that took his fancy. It later turned out that he was one of the uncles—so my father told me about a week after the funeral. Staring into the fire he said bitterly, ‘Your Great-grandpa Wilson promised me the harmonium.’ As there were only the two of us present, I assumed he was addressing me. After a time he went on, ‘Your Uncle Albert pinched it,’ and, as if to clinch his case, he added, ‘He was seen pushing a hand cart up Waterloo Street and that harmonium was roped on to it.’ I remember thinking, ‘Thank God for Uncle Albert’: the last thing we needed at our house was a harmonium, and Dad struggling to play every night when he came home from work, his feet going up and down on the treadles like a demented cyclist on an exercise bike, his head bowed over a sheet of music he couldn’t understand.

Some days later Dad’s words came back to me. ‘He promised me the harmonium’, he’d said, and he’d stressed the word ‘me’ as if he was entitled to it, but to my knowledge he’d never met the Wilsons or Grandma Stacey; nor did he accompany us for our prunes and custard. More importantly, he hadn’t gone with me to look at Great-grandpa Wilson in his coffin. So why should the old man promise him the harmonium? I gave up there, and I still didn’t know who Grandma Stacey, Great-grandpa Wilson and Great-grandma Wilson belonged to.

Children when I was young were generally predictable. For instance, if we were walking sedately anywhere with a solemn expression on our faces it would be almost certain that we were on our way to school, church or the doctor—in other words a destination that was mundane, dutiful, boring or simply somewhere we weren’t keen to arrive at; but if our target was pleasurable, we ran, and we enjoyed the run, full of excited, pleasant thoughts of where we were going.

So it was with John and me every Tuesday during the summer holidays, when Grandma Ashton baked bread and muffins. From home to Royton seemed to us like miles, and for little legs it was, but we ran all the way, up Featherstall Road, turning left at the Queens, along Oldham Road past Boundary Park Hospital and Sheep’s Foot Lane, which led down to the workhouse next to the lunatic asylum and Boundary Park, the home ground of Oldham Athletic Football Club. We were now halfway to Houghton Street, where the Ashtons lived at the foot of Oldham Edge. As we turned into Houghton Street we could smell the warm loaves and muffins, which gave us a fillip for the last fifty yards. Breathless and flushed, we raced through the open door, John to fling his arms around the knees of Grandma Ashton, who held her arms wide so as not to embrace him in her flour-caked arms.

Grandma Ashton wasn’t thin and austere like Grandma Stacey but dumpy and warm, always with a tired smile on her face, wearied by years of caring, feeding and bringing up her daughters, Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edna and of course our mother, Florrie. Her only son, Stanley, had been killed at Mons during the Great War and I don’t think he had been twenty years old. Grandma Ashton was the rock upon which the whole family depended. Granddad Ashton always seemed to be sitting by the fireplace, even in summer, and like Great-grandpa Wilson, staring into the glowing coals, a lopsided grin on his face.

The fireplace was the focal point of most households then, and even some of the poorest managed to find coal. During the winter our mother and father sat on each side of the grate, us children standing, the gas mantle flickering behind us as the wind whistled malevolently through the keyhole of the back door. Sadly in the present day the fire has been replaced by central heating, paradoxically warm yet heartless, and the fireplace is no longer the focal point of a room. Again regretfully families now sit grouped round the television set and this modern world is no better for the change. In the burning coals you could see whatever picture you wished, but from a television you only get what you are given.

Now I’ve got that off my chest, back to Grandma Ashton’s. Whenever she baked, there was always a small lump of dough for John and me, which we shaped into little men; currants for buttons and eyes, then into the oven with them. I really looked forward to going to Grandma Ashton’s. It was fun, especially once when John and I stayed the night. It was a great adventure, sleeping in a strange bed, and when the night lightened into morning we were yacketing excitedly together when the door opened and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edna, still in their nighties, sprang into the room, Auntie Edna wielding a sabre. We dived under the covers, shivering with fright, and screaming for Auntie Edna to spare us, while Auntie Emmy was laughing fit to bust.

The memory of that sabre has always fascinated me. I took for granted that it had once been issued to Granddad Ashton. It was the weapon of cavalry; ergo Granddad Ashton in his youth fought his battles on horseback—that is, if he had ever seen action. Perhaps he had been too young for the Charge of the Light Brigade, but surely he must have been in some other battle. Come to think of it, I never ever heard him say anything. In any case, I wasn’t old enough to think of a question.

Apart from John, the only other person I’d ever really taken to was Auntie Emmy. She always looked upon me with kindness and understanding. Whenever I visited the Ashtons with John, Auntie Emmy invariably greeted me with a warm smile, as if we were two conspirators with a hidden agenda, although such a highfallutin philosophy never entered my head, let alone crossed my mind. Auntie Emmy must have known about my real mother’s death; in fact everyone was in the know—except me. I was a rowing boat adrift on a foggy night in the busy shipping lanes of the channel. Perhaps that is why she took a special interest in me, though not, I must add, out of pity, and the rapport between us was genuine.

On one occasion when I had a raging toothache it was Auntie Emmy who took me to the dentist, an old man who must have gained his degree in the nineteenth century when possibly the only dental appliance was a pair of pliers. His surgery was the front room of his house, lit only by two gas mantles. He wore an old cardigan and a shirt fastened at the neck by a stud but with no collar.

Pushing his glasses on to his forehead, he gazed short-sightedly into my mouth. ‘Which one is it?’ he asked.

I looked across at Auntie Emmy.

‘You have to show him,’ she said helpfully.

I was at a loss for a moment. For most people visiting the dentist the toothache seems to disappear the moment they step over the threshold, and so it was with me, and I was afraid that I might point out the wrong one.

Luckily he put his finger in my mouth and waggled a tooth, and the pain was instantaneous. I jerked violently.

‘I thought it was,’ he said complacently, blissfully unaware of how close he’d come to losing a finger.

However, it was a quick, efficient extraction and triumphantly he held out the molar for me to see. There was a dark hole in it, no wonder it had caused me so much suffering. I was delighted and amazed that it had all been so quick and painless. I smiled at Auntie Emmy and was even more amazed when the dentist patted me on the head, called me a brave little man and gave me a toffee—a toffee of all things! He was probably looking forward to seeing me again in the very near future.

When we returned to Grandma Ashton’s, I gave the toffee to John and then we had tea—well, they had tea, but I had to make do with a glass of milk because I was in no condition to eat. But my day wasn’t ended. It was dark when Mother, John and I got on the tram. Mother was between John and me and I was squashed between her and a dozing old man. Why we had to sit there was beyond me; after all, apart from us and the conductor the tram was empty. No one spoke as the tram buckled and clattered up Oldham Road, and then almost imperceptibly the old man closed his eyes and began singing softly to himself in a cracked, tuneless voice. I was intrigued, and I turned my head to observe him more closely. Immediately Mother put her hand under my chin and whipped my head smartly to the front. After a short time I slowly turned to look at him again furtively and what impressed me most was his nose. It was large, round, extremely red and pockmarked, but before I could take a closer look my head was jerked back to neutral. The old man was still singing when we got off and straight away as the tram disappeared I asked Mother what was the matter with him, but Mother was reluctant to answer and I wondered if she’d heard me. Then she said, ‘That’s what you get from eating too much pork.’ This explanation, brooking no argument, knocked me flat. I was so impressed that I never got round to asking about the man’s nose; and it had such a profound effect on me that I avoided pork until I was well into my twenties, although I must have consumed buckets of alcohol since Dad bought me my first half a pint on my sixteenth birthday. The lesson to be learned here is: don’t muck about with the truth when dealing with children.

Now in the year 2003 I’m at my desk wearing headphones as I listen to a programme on the radio. I sit back in my chair staring at the ceiling wherein lies inspiration when, half listening to the disembodied voice from the radio, a man is urging us to clean up our rivers. This doesn’t particularly concern me as I don’t own one but his next remark has my full attention. The voice mentions Manchester Ship Canal. Immediately my mind races back to when I was about ten years old and standing on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal, clutching a damp towel round my thin white shoulders, my lips blue with cold, teeth chattering like a pair of demented castanets, and looking round occasionally in case there was an approaching bobby, because swimming, splashing about and especially diving or jumping off the lock gates were strictly forbidden. We weren’t too bothered, though. In the event of a constable hurrying towards us, we’d simply jump into the water and swim to the opposite bank, and scrambling out we would pull faces at the sweating arm of the law, the width of the scum-laden, smelly canal protecting us. The police must have been aware of this tactic and wisely kept away—they had better things to do.

Deciding it might be warmer in the water, I was about to jump in when I noticed a small black object floating through the half-open, decaying lock gates. As it moved slowly towards the shrieking, juvenile, splashing mêlée, I was able to see what it was: a poor, dead dog floating majestically along, legs stiff and pointing to the sky. I quickly shouted a warning. I had to shout twice over the hullabaloo, pointing at the dog. When they realised what it was, there was panic as they parted to allow the dog unhindered passage to its Valhalla—just another incident on the turgid Manchester Ship Canal.

Returning to the present, I turn up the volume of my radio to hear the news that now at last the Manchester Ship Canal has been cleansed and purified, oxygenised or whatever, and for the first time in living memory can be enjoyed by the natural inhabitants, fish. But then the marine expert goes on to say, ‘In the old days, anyone found frolicking about in the oil-scummed waters of the canal was unceremoniously hauled out and rushed off to hospital to have their stomach pumped.’ On this note I switch off, and once again stare at the ceiling, recalling the dead-dog incident. It wasn’t unusual—sometimes dead cats, rags of clothing and unmentionables floated calmly along—and when the weather was unusually hot there was always a gang of young herberts splashing about among the jetsam. To my knowledge none of us went down with malaria, typhoid, yellow fever or beri beri. The only real threat was hypothermia, and certainly no one was hauled out and rushed off to the infirmary to have their stomach pumped. I can only assume that in those days our bodies developed an immunity to diseases not yet known to man.

It’s a good job my father didn’t get to hear about my frolicking in the Manchester Ship Canal. He had never chastised me physically before, not even a slap round my bottom, but if he found out he would be driven to break the rule of a lifetime. Luckily for me he never showed any interest in where I’d been, who I’d been with or how I’d managed to rip my jersey. If he’d asked me, I would have answered him truthfully—we lived in a moral climate. However, I was apprehensive that day when I returned home from the Manchester Ship Canal, hair all damp and spiky, that he would say something like ‘Where the dickens have you been?’ and like George Washington I would have to tell him.

One Saturday morning I came running into the house, not because it was cold outside, nor because it was dinnertime. The explanation was simple: I hadn’t been out for more than a couple of minutes and was idly chucking stones at the lamppost just outside when Jack had lolloped out of the ginnel and barked at me. Jack was a wirehaired brindle dog and we had a mutual dislike for each other. He’d never forgotten that I’d once hit him with a stick when he’d had his back to me. He’d been more shocked than hurt and, ashamed of his cowardice, he’d been after me ever since. It was an unfair contest, as he had teeth and could run faster than me. Luckily I wasn’t too far from our vestibule door, but even as I slammed it on his slavering chops he kept up his barking and frantic scratching on the door.