The North
Page 5
Even though by the time you arrive on the edges of this major northern city and see the buildings, new and old, that tell its story, that announce its entrenched character, you may have been in the north for a fair few miles, nothing will have seemed so dramatically different since you were in the obvious south. It takes a city, or at least a town, to clarify that you are indeed in the north, where the highest buildings tell their own story of religious presence, commercial ambition, social purpose, ideological clashes, commemorative pride and consolidated residential organisation. The north made up of cities and towns split into definite if intangible sections by roads, waterways, lines of communication, places of work, green spaces and spaces just left over, and especially by dynamically straight railway lines. If you follow these lines it doesn’t take long before you detect the past and pass right through it. This is the north that has cut itself into the national imagination, the north that has bullied its way, or entertained its way, or bought or conned or stolen its way into history, or shaken history apart through glittering genius.
Plenty of the north is rural and secluded, much of it not built on, where you can walk for hours without having to enter a town or village or cross a road or railway line. But the north of England would not be the north of England without the city, the crushing together of layers of old and new, a network of nowheres seeking a proper place, with its fine upstanding town hall, majestic churches, stony-faced civic structures and a dense jumbled inner series of spaces folding in on themselves, slanted roofs, dislocated ghettos and secretive turnings that disclose a sense of what the city was like before it was a city, before it expanded and spread itself further out, until it was so big, filled with so many turnings, so much space and density, that it constantly broke its own borders. It spread out so far bits of it needed their own names, and suburbs formed, and towns and villages nearby felt its gravitational pull and themselves grew into bigger places.
Heading south, at some point in this relatively untouched countryside, long after you have left behind a major city, or a nearby town – the mighty industrial city in rough, hopeful, closely related miniature – you feel you are leaving the north behind, as though it was something foreign, a colony, a collection of colonies, England twisted into elsewhere, and dropping into the south – the neutral plains, stately homes and gentle order that radiates from London, the centre of the south, the imagined levels of entitlement that reach as far as the midlands, before they are shaken off, cast aside, rejected, not quite in a northern way, but in ways that are more northern than southern. It does seem as though you arrive in the north at a different level from where you leave it: higher up when you first find it, lower down as you leave it.
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As the impressionistic French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said in ‘History and Dialectic’, the final chapter of his 1962 book The Savage Mind, historical facts are no more given than any others. It is the historian, or the agent of history, who constitutes them by abstraction and as though ‘under the threat of an infinite regress’.
The Savage Mind was published in the same year that the Beatles released their first single, that Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was published, based on the nattily dressed weapon-wielding Moss Side street gangs he grew up around in the 1920s and thirties, and L.S. Lowry painted Station Approach, a re-imagining of Manchester Central train station. The station, built among the notorious slum dwellings written about by Friedrich Engels, opened to passengers in 1880, featured a magnificent single-span arched roof and was where serial killer Ian Brady met his final victim, Edward Evans, on 6 October 1965. Manchester Central was one of the city’s main stations for most of its existence, with the Midland Hotel built on adjacent land in the early part of the twentieth century – the grand hotel once allegedly coveted by Adolf Hitler as a northern HQ for the Nazis, an early meeting place for Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce as they planned the foundation in 1906 of Rolls-Royce Limited, and where the Beatles were turned away from the restaurant, described by W. G. Sebald in the mid-sixties as like something you’d find in Warsaw, for being inappropriately dressed.
The station finally shut on 5 May 1969 after a last burst of life in the sixties as the northern home of the luxurious Blue Pullman service to London King’s Cross, and was sold to National Car Parks in 1972, before slowly decaying and becoming a symbol of the dismal decline of the railways and the once proud northern industrial towns.
Lévi-Strauss wrote, ‘What is true of the constitution of historical facts is no less so of their selection. From this point of view, the historian and the agent of history choose, sever and carve them up, for a truly total history would confront them with chaos. Every corner of space conceals a multitude of individuals each of whom totalises the trend of history in a manner which cannot be compared to the others; for any one of these individuals, each moment of time is inexhaustibly rich in physical and psychical incidents which all play their part in his totalisation. Even history which claims to be universal is still only a juxtaposition of a few local histories within which (and between which) very much more is left out than is put in.’
1961
Castleford housewife Viv Nicholson won £152,300 on the football pools. At the time Viv and Keith Nicholson were just about at rock bottom. On a seven-pounds-a-week trainee miner’s wage they were bringing up three kids in a tiny terraced home in Castleford, Yorkshire. Just trying to make ends meet was a constant battle. ‘We found out on Saturday evening that we’d won the pools, but we couldn’t find the coupon. We weren’t sure if we’d sent it off or not, but then the winning ticket turned up in Keith’s trousers. It’s unbelievable that I remember the exact amount we won so clearly – it was £152,300, 18 shillings and 8 pence. Back then, even the eightpence meant something. That night we walked into town and had a couple of halves of beer each, and we got the bus back home, but we couldn’t sleep. My mum and dad came round with some cans and we had loads to drink and smoke. We did that for a couple of nights, before getting the train to London to collect our winnings from Littlewoods. There were so many people at King’s Cross station, all rushing towards my particular compartment, I thought, “Oh, I didn’t realise there were so many people who wanted to catch a train.” That is how naive I was. They were reporters, and they all asked, “What are you going to do now?” And there I was, wearing a pair of tights I had to borrow from my sister, and I said I was going to “Spend, spend, spend!”’
George Formby suffers his second heart attack and dies in St Joseph’s Hospital, Preston. His funeral takes place at St Charles’ Church in Aigburth, Liverpool, and over 100,000 people line the twenty-mile route to Warrington Cemetery, where he is buried in the Booth family grave.
In Manchester at the Embassy Club Bernard Manning booked the big northern acts of the day, including, he claimed, the Beatles. ‘They were fourteen quid and they just did a one-off show,’ he recounted. ‘All nice boys, got there dressed, went on and did the show and then buggered off. That John Lennon drove me potty because he wanted a dressing room with a washbasin. What did he want that for? You come here to work, not to wash.’
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I write as a ten-year-old and as a fifty-four-year-old and everything in between. I write across distance and so much time. I write about a walk, a number of walks making the streets near me my home, which I would take as a bony nervy fair-haired boy between the ages of about seven and about twelve, hands stuck in trouser pockets that seemed all holes, wearing a torn hand-me-down duffel coat that was turning into an idea.
A walk that helped me become a northerner, and that helps me, as I look back on that walk, and where it was during what period of time, work out what being a northerner means. A walk that ends with the north that is inside this book, which is a north that explains how, between the ages of seven and twelve, which is between 1964 and 1969, I became a northerner, and then through my teenage years, as I grew into what I was to become, I became someone because I was that northe
rner. I walked in the same spot, until a path appeared.
I didn’t think any of that at the time. I was not aware of the southerner as a category, certainly not as any sort of enemy or competition. I didn’t have any sectarian connection to where I lived, almost the opposite, and I didn’t feel explicit romantic loyalty to any sort of traditional or progressive northern spirit, nor feel any need to build up my role – to play up my accent, which sounded like no accent to me, and make a defiant case for my glamorised provincial setting by adding edge to whatever attitude I had to whatever it was I felt about being dragged into life and then set for some reason deep into the mucky, broken or transcendent, fantastically complicated north of England.
I have not lived in the north since the late 1970s. I started the seventies at the age of twelve and finished them at twenty-two, which means that during this decade I became a teenager, struck by abrupt, disconcerting changes in my mind and body, and then left home, on the way to becoming an adult. I spent most of this time planning how to get out of the north, sometimes vaguely, but occasionally with real purpose, especially if an argument with someone older and with power over my destiny went badly wrong. I didn’t think about it as leaving the north, but simply as leaving where I was at the time, which seemed intent on fixing me in place and stopping me working out who I was, separate from my family and where we lived.
I didn’t think about being a northerner so much as think of myself as someone who happened to live in a series of houses, all of them within a few miles of each other, all of them containing everything I was. All the houses I lived in as the sixties became the seventies and I became sexually aware if not active – leaving aside my night-time interest in myself – were in the north.
I was not then imagining myself as a northerner, not necessarily fighting a southern enemy, not knowingly accumulating and cherishing exclusively northern heroes, not admiring the views around me that let me glimpse with pride and awe hundreds of years of northern spirit, not planning on continuing various northern traditions that I now imagine I could hear in the voices and see in the faces and bodies of those who lived all around me. I was where I was, and this happened to involve the occasional massive building that rose up above my head totally out of scale with those around it like some sort of squat, commanding parody of a pyramid, quietly humming with secret knowledge, built to devour everything near it, or protect everything, people who spoke with a certain sort of tough, scuffed and striven fluency, and all that there was within a couple of hundred yards.
All of me seemed contained inside my head, which was contained inside a bedroom, my very own room to some extent, which was contained inside a house, which was always set in a row of other houses. This row of houses was set inside a number of other rows of houses. I never had any idea what was happening inside these houses, which were very close to me, and then less close, laid out in fixed, straight or crooked patterns, pinning me in and then stretching away into the distance but which might as well have been on the other side of the planet.
I did not notice at the time that I was being worked on as I walked around the small fragment of the north where I had landed, influenced by something I do not want to say was ‘a something in the air’, a floating of words into the mental air, an elaborate entwining of history actively seeping into me, penetrating my mind and even coating my tongue with something that affected how I talked.
I was picking up on things not only to do with how I talked, which an expert could no doubt have pinned down as being very specifically the accent and vocabulary of a boy being himself in the 1960s, going to a school five miles south of Manchester city centre, three miles east of Stockport’s bus-laden shop-heavy Mersey Square and therefore very close to where the River Mersey itself formed, a school filled with kids who came from the dingy changeless tightly packed streets of Longsight, Gorton and Denton – streets at the same time distinctive and indistinct. These low-slung dead-end areas spat out at the edges of Manchester were not soot-slammed slums, they were not on the whole dangerous and forbidding, give or take the occasional breath-taking horror that crept along the cobbles soiling history and draining whatever subdued colour had made it through the fussy flat-cap-targeting damp and drizzle, but it would not take much of a nudge or many more years of neglect for these places to end their days in defeated damned disgrace.
In the 1960s these places, with common names handed down to them which had to be used, were in limbo, held in waiting between one momentous event, which had already happened and had determined the details of an immediate murky reality, and another, which had not yet happened and which could not be imagined, because everything seemed piled up in the past. The past – most recently a war, the physical and mental signs of which still hung around, given unflappable support by the rain and wind and mocking skies – had beaten the north into submission.
The signs of the future that made their way into this present – logos, vehicles, brands, building materials, clothing, TV programmes, DJs, pop stars – as novel and flash as they seemed to be, were all rooted in the mountainous past that had moulded the houses packed between front doors and alleyways, inside which people got used to the fact they were in limbo. What there was of the future was represented by the spread of spindly television aerials sticking up at gaunt angles above endless exhausted-looking roofs. Even the shapes and sounds of a lively, consoling and rapidly changing modern world brought into those tight inbred streets through those bits of wire were really part of the debris of an event that had happened over one hundred years ago, an event historically described as a shock, a shock that was still vibrating, still releasing its esoteric power, still allowing a certain form of continuity even in punished, humbled areas so far removed from where whatever action there was in the world was actually happening.
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1961
In Anthony Burgess’s novel One Hand Clapping – ‘dashed off to make £100 or so’ – published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell in 1961, he describes a working-class couple from the north of England, Howard and Janet Shirley, whose leisure time is spent eating food out of tins and watching game shows on television. A bitter satire on the modern media and a fierce defence of the eternal values of literature, the novel aimed to show that such lives are artificial and detached from ‘real’ life, ‘real’ food and traditional forms of culture.
1960
The first Coronation Street concept was offered to the BBC in 1957 as Our Street, to be rejected by the aloof upper-middle-class broadcaster, and it was Granada TV under its more down-to-earth chairman Sidney Bernstein who accepted it after initial reluctance. In a memo to Granada executives, creator Tony Warren – born Anthony Simpson in Swinton in 1936, child actor and model – wrote that his new programme’s purpose was to explore ‘the driving forces behind life in a working-class street in the north of England’ and ‘to entertain by examining a community of this kind’. A colleague at Granada, Harold Elton, had suggested that he develop something based on a working-class street after Warren complained he was not a fan of the crime and adventure series he was then involved in. He developed an idea based on a street located ‘four miles from Manchester in any direction’. Warren said, ‘Northerners have an enormous curiosity about everything. They’ll also tell their life story – as long as the listener is prepared to do the same.’
The working title of the show was Florizel Street, named after a character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s detective short stories The Suicide Club, who was perhaps named after a character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, but a tea lady named Agnes remarked that Florizel sounded like a brand of disinfectant. The choice of new name was between Jubilee Street and Coronation Street, with Granada executives Harry Latham, Harry Elton and H. V. Kershaw plumping for the latter. The look of the street was based on one side of Archie Street, in Ordsall, part of Salford, close to the River Irwell border with Manchester, home to the Salford Lads Club. The street was built by the Groves and Whitnall Brewery and officially opened
in 1904 by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Scout movement four years later.
At first, reactions inside Granada were sceptical, even hostile – neither a comedy nor a documentary, said one insider, not funny or informative – and Sidney Bernstein was concerned the programme presented a disagreeable even dismal image of the north-west he was hoping to promote as a region of purpose and optimism. The series was reluctantly given a six-week trial, replacing a serial based on the Biggles stories, and first broadcast on 9 December 1960, with a melancholy theme tune echoing the north’s traditional ethereal but gutsy brass-band music. The new soap opera eventually appealed on a number of fronts: it harked back to a friendlier time when everyone knew their neighbours but also connected to a newly discovered ‘northern cool’. By May 1961 the Salford East MP was praising its realism and noting its increasing popularity. It was said to be an ‘eye opener’ for middle-class viewers, as to ‘how the other half lived’. The first swear word heard in the series was ‘bloody’, said by Ken Barlow in 1961 in an argument with his mum, Ida. Seven years later, hard-drinking Liverpool builder Len Fairclough – played by Peter Adamson, who was made an honorary member of the Master Builders’ Association – used the word ‘bastard’.