The North

by Paul Morley

  For me, before there was a wider world, and wider spaces, and the thought of something out there, there was Reddish, and it’s where I feel I came to life. Actually, there was North Reddish. South Reddish was in the direction of Stockport, and therefore in the direction of the big mucky town, and in the direction of where things were happening, at least locally, in the direction of main roads and big bus squares and stations that could take you all over the north, and even to the south, or its closest northern representative, Cheshire, which some considered the northernmost outpost of the genteel and posh Home Counties.

  When Morrissey – whose songs tell very evocative stories about the combination of battered cobbles, magical Manchester rain, shady inner-city mystery and enchanting but gloomy and even dubious country in the middle distance – heard that I grew up in Reddish, he was immediately keen to establish that I was not from South Reddish, which did not quite have the same credentials as North Reddish in terms of establishing unstained honest-to-goodness northern-ness. The thought of South Reddish caused his lip to curl in distaste, perhaps purely because of the word South, perhaps because he knew more than anyone that nothing had ever happened in South Reddish, and nothing ever would. And if it ever did, how would you ever know?

  22

  1956

  Granada House was the first commercial building to be built in Manchester after the war. That chairman Sidney Bernstein chose the city as the base for Granada Television and specified such a large and impressive building was crucial in Manchester’s post-war regeneration. With its illuminated sign in then-fashionable Stymie Bold Italic typeface, designed in 1931 by influential designer Morris Fuller Benton of America Type Founders, Granada became an important landmark on the Manchester skyline, in direct modernist opposition to Alfred Waterhouse’s old-style, garnished and gothic bustle. The four-acre site surrounding a basin on the Manchester Ship Canal had been purchased from the city council for £82,000.

  It was only in 1956 that the government actually set about using the legislative tool it had created seven years previously. Work started on a short experimental motorway to bypass the industrial town of Preston in Lancashire. Preston was a major bottleneck on the road between the industrial heartlands of Lancashire and Scotland, the meeting point of traffic from Liverpool, Manchester and the Colne valley on the way north, and the only way to the thriving resort of Blackpool. Its bypass had been in planning for many years, and in many ways it was fitting that the town was to benefit from the first motorway push.

  It was at the age of seventeen in 1956 that John Ravenscroft first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ – played on Two-Way Family Favourites – and bought the record the very next day. As he later explained, ‘Everything changed when I heard Elvis. Where there had been nothing there was suddenly something.’

  1954

  In 1954, after visiting Texas and recoiling from the materialistic post-war ‘affluent society’, J. B. Priestley coined the term Admass. ‘This is my name for the whole system of increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high-pressure advertising, plus mass communication, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man. (Behind the Iron Curtain they have Propmass, official propaganda taking the place of advertising, but all with the same aims and objects.)’

  In the same year Priestley’s essay ‘They Come from Inner Space’ presented a critique of science fiction as he saw it at the time. Priestley argued that the interest in outer space was a move ‘in the wrong direction’ and maintained that SF should instead be ‘moving inward’ to explore ‘the hidden life of the psyche’. He singled out American writer Ray Bradbury as a pioneer of inner space and added that although Bradbury used traditional SF motifs such as spaceships and Martians, he did so in order to ‘show us what is really happening in men’s minds’. Priestley held that men are not as rational as they like to think they are, but are also driven by the desires, urges and irrational instincts of the subconscious mind. For Priestley, the idea that people’s actions are dictated solely by their conscious selves was akin to the equally fallacious assumption that ‘what can be seen of an iceberg is all there is of it’. Priestley of Bradford thus becomes the missing link between Charles Dickens and J. G. Ballard.

  1953

  It was television which finally dealt the death blow to music halls in the 1950s, although the tradition lived on in the new medium with performers like Tommy Cooper, Ken Dodd and Morecambe and Wise, and most of all in the sentimentalised version of the halls provided by The Good Old Days. The first programme was broadcast from Leeds on 20 July 1953, and the series ran for thirty years.

  Actress, entertainer, scriptwriter and comedienne Victoria Wood was born in Prestwich in 1953, and attended Bury Grammar School for Girls. ‘If they like you in the north of England they won’t say, “You were wonderful, darling!” They’ll say, “You weren’t bad” or “I didn’t mind it.”’ For a sketch with a continuity announcer she wrote the line: ‘I’d like to apologise to viewers in the north. It must be awful for them.’ For another sketch she wrote:

  Kitty is about fifty-three, from Manchester and proud of it. She speaks as she finds and knows what’s what. She is sitting in a small bare studio, on a hard chair. She isn’t nervous.

  Kitty: ‘Are you familiar with Marks?’ she said. I said, ‘Well, I think their pants have dropped off.’ She said, ‘I was referring to Karl Marx, who as you know is buried in Highgate Cemetery.’ I said, ‘Of course I knew! But were you aware,’ I said, ‘that Cheadle Crematorium holds the ashes of Stanley Kershaw, patenter of the Kershaw double-gusset? To my mind a far bigger boon than communism!’

  1952

  Actor, socialist, singer, poet, provocateur Ewan MacColl was born James ‘Jimmie’ Miller in Salford in 1915, to parents Betsy and William Miller. William was an iron moulder, militant trade unionist and communist from Stirlingshire. Betsy Hendry was from Auchterarder in Perthshire. When William was unemployed she supported the family, cleaning houses and offices, and taking in washing. Jimmie left school a week after he turned fourteen and worked briefly at a number of jobs, including factory hand, builder, mechanic and street entertainer. During this period he wrote for and edited factory newspapers, and for a short time wrote and performed advertising jingles for small businesses. In March 1930 he was made redundant. He then joined an amateur drama group, the Clarion Players, which later changed its name to the Workers’ Theatre Movement.

  Miller became Ewan MacColl in 1945, reflecting his Scottish roots and the fact he needed an alias after deserting from the army during the war. In 1952 he released the 78 rpm single ‘Dirty Old Town’, a folk song he had written about his hometown in 1950 to cover a set change in the Theatre Workshop production of his play Landscape with Chimneys. ‘Dirty Old Town’ seems to set to music the opening pages of Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole. When MacColl first wrote it, the local council was uncomfortable with a direct reference to Salford, and after considerable criticism this was changed, a Salford wind becoming a less specific smoky wind. He was singing how for working people their surroundings may have been awful but were still special when in love. The awful slum dwellings he refers to were peeled away like layers of decay in the 1960s to make room for Salford’s very own brave new world, which in turn became the high-rise nightmare that a mere thirty years later needed demolishing itself.

  In 1952 Alan Turing, the founder of computer science, decades ahead of his time intellectually, philosophically and emotionally, was arrested and tried for a homosexual relationship with a young man from Manchester, where he had settled to research the theory of growth and form in biology. His only defence to what was then ‘gross indecency’ was that he did not think that he had done anything wrong, which was both naive, considering the times, and completely sensible. Turing avoided prison by agreeing to have yearly synthetically produced oestrogen injections to control his libido – chemical castration, a savage punishment even when male homosexuality was ill
egal in Britain. After having to endure the humiliating hormone treatment and the subsequent loss of his security clearance, which restricted his secret work for the government at the beginning of the Cold War, Turing took his life at his home in Wilmslow in 1954, aged forty-one.

  His cleaner found him dead in his bed. Turing had died the day before, rumours suggesting it was from eating an apple laced with cyanide, a method inspired by one of his favourite films, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (It has been suggested that the Apple logo of the half-bitten rainbow-coloured apple was Steve Jobs’ way of paying tribute to Turing.) Some have attempted to build a conspiracy around the tragedy, although the coroner’s verdict of suicide seems plausible, the persecuted, desperate and then relatively obscure genius and war hero dying after swallowing cyanide, with the apple a mordant joke left behind to confuse matters. His mother rejected the verdict, suggesting he died after eating the apple with fingers contaminated with cyanide following a chemistry experiment. Some felt he had with convoluted last-minute kindness arranged it to look to his mother as though that was what had happened, that his death was an accident. It was a complicated, sordid and theatrical end to one of the century’s most original, independent and questing minds.

  23

  Despite my home being North Reddish and close enough to danger, or existential grit, or a blazing, smoking, consuming industrial history, to satisfy the extremely picky local historian Morrissey, at the corner of Westbourne Grove stood the relatively imposing Reddish Conservative Club. It was an ugly misshapen brick building featuring a tangle of pseudo-turrets, stern arches and fussy windows that needed a lot of curtain material, surrounded by a rutted stony car park that had never been smoothed over with tarmac, the big gates of which were goal posts for scrappy street football between the Westbourne Grove kids and those from nearby Sykes Street. The opposite goal posts were on the other side of the road, a little off to one side, and were formed by an alleyway that went nowhere down the side of a couple of battered garages.

  These lopsided garages were next to a modest, largely unchanging and often closed shop on the corner that sold bicycles, tyres, Airfix model sets and puncture repair kits. The shop was called Jones, which led to an exciting rumour that it was owned by fairly close relations of the jockey-sized lead singer of the Monkees, Davy Jones. This wasn’t as unlikely as it seemed. The dinky Jones had been born in Openshaw in 1945, not far up the road from Reddish between Droyslden (where the first machine-made terry towel in the world was manufactured, and where Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the British Communist Party was born, son of a cotton spinner and a blacksmith striker, fifty-five years before Davy) and Gorton.

  The son of a railway fitter, Davy grew up near Debdale Park, which contained a rudimentary nine-hole pitch-and-putt course which, at the age of ten, playing with my dad, I completed in twenty-seven shots, which is probably par for the course but seemed to me up there with Arnold Palmer and Gary Player. No one at school believed me; they thought I was showing off. When I went with them, under severe peer pressure I took forty hopeless shots. This seemed to satisfy them, and put me in my place as nothing special. They would soon forget all about me, as I seemed pretty forgettable. At the time Debdale Park, a couple of miles from Westbourne Grove, was about as far as I would go. It was the limit of my world for a year or two.

  Davy Jones began acting in church plays in Lees Street, Higher Openshaw, and first appeared on television as consummate battleaxe Ena Sharples’ grandson Colin Lomax in Coronation Street. This one-episode appearance led to him playing the Artful Dodger on stage in London. He then went on to appear on Broadway, New York, resulting in him being cast in the new Monkees television show, put together in 1965 – going on air in 1966 – as a mocked-up childishly subversive money-making Hollywood rival to the original Beatles of Liverpool.

  The Conservative Club was the other side of the Gorton Road from the Essoldo Cinema, a big square block of brick with heavy brass doors that sucked you into darkness and light and the plush red seats that set you in front of most of the glamour that made it into Reddish. I think the first film I saw there was the widescreen epic Zulu, starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker, released in 1964, which had at least twenty vivid colours never before seen in Reddish exploding from the screen, and clear signs of the existence of another (highly unlikely) continent. I saw Lawrence of Arabia there, another surely impossible continent represented, and Peter O’Toole dying at the beginning of the film, followed by the rest of the story, which was his life. I was very taken by this unexpected structural trick, and sometimes wonder if this was the moment something entered my mind that made me want to write – the fact that when you write, you can play around with time, and just by thinking about it create life after death.

  The combination of the Davy Jones bike shop, the decorative Essoldo and the nearby dingy sweet shop jammed with treats next to a busy and basic brightly lit fish and chip shop, gave this end of Westbourne Grove a heady aura of excitement, a fuzz of fantasy, as if you might find treasure buried nearby, and an endless desert broken by the sudden insane emergence of the Suez Canal. The large forbidding Conservative Club, the size of a knocked-about pirate ship and with the presence of a cobwebby haunted house, actually helped. If the ball ever went close to the big front doors during a football game, I wasn’t keen on going to fetch it – not that I remember ever seeing anyone enter or leave the building, which seemed dormant during daylight hours. The club was founded in 1899 by a group of individuals who up to then had met in rooms above the Reddish Post Office. The building they acquired in 1912, Summerfield House, had been constructed in 1870 as a home for the Shawcross family. Mr Shawcross was a partner in the hat-makers Barlow and Shawcross of Pink Bank Lane, Longsight.

  For me, approaching ten years old, it was part of a world of play and adventure, at the end of my street, by the main road, and the sweet shop a first sign of choice, of possibility, just a few steps from my house. Its shadowy, taciturn owners, who were on the dark side of Dahl, even a whiter shade of Poe, were slowly drawn from the dark back of the shop by the bell that tolled as you pushed open the door. Once the bell sounded, and the door shut behind me, enclosing me in balmy fantasy, I would pause, for incredible thought.What to have?

  Lots of jars, and boxes, and layers of chocolate bars, all laid out in front while the owners loomed over me waiting for me to hand over, say, two sweaty dark brown pennies, which had a certain amount of buying power, leading to the deliciously stunning sugar rush, and how could I ever decide what I wanted like a kid in a sweet shop faced with rows and rows of: dolly mixtures, pear drops, pineapple chunks, Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, mint imperials, fruit-flavoured Polos, iced gems, Love Hearts, Spangles, spine-tingling Smarties in space-age tubes, coconut mushrooms, aniseed balls, Pontefract cakes, sherbet dabs, liquorice allsorts (allegedly created by accident in 1899, when clumsy salesman Charlie Thompson, representing Geo. Bassett and Co. of Sheffield, tripped up, jumbling up all the different sweet samples he was carrying, creating an almost psychedelic mix of sweets), liquorice bootlaces, Victory Vs, chocolate-covered cinder toffee, four-to-a-penny Fruit Salads and Black Jacks, which meant a farthing (from the Anglo-Saxon forthling, or fourth part) each, but the farthing was dead by the end of 1960, flying saucers, Penny Arrow chew bars, silver-foil-sealed Kit Kats (invented in 1935 by Rowntree of York – fifty-four years after they launched their sugar-coated fruit pastilles – as the two-fingered twopenny Chocolate Crisp following a suggestion from a worker that they produce ‘a snack a man could have in his lunchbox’, becoming Kit Kat in 1937 and then also four-fingered, snapping with such satisfying intent), multicoloured boxes and tins of Quality Street way beyond reach on the top shelf at the back of the shop (launched in 1936 by Mackintosh of Halifax, celebrated toffee makers, inventively blending brittle butterscotch with soft caramel, founded by self-styled King of Toffee John Mackintosh in the late nineteenth century, who also made the more accessibly priced and packaged Rolos t
wo years later, and in the early sixties the Toffee Crisp, crisped rice made into a chewy chocolate bar), and then there were Jubblies, fist-sized triangular blocks of rock-hard vaguely orange ice inside a cardboard wrapper fused to the ice so that it was hard to peel away, and you sucked at the corner until your lips were numb and stained, and your fingers ached, and you wished you’d chosen some gluey chewy Jelly Tots or been able to afford a sixpenny bar of Galaxy, which would need a neat silver tanner, or the unimaginably huge almost mill-sized ninepenny version, but you knew that you would never in your life ever get to have a shilling, twelve big brown pennies, or one weighty silver coin, called a bob? A shilling could take you into the chip shop next door, a vinegary blaze of white and sizzle, which smelled of something fishy that wasn’t necessarily food. A shilling would never happen before at least eleven years old.

  In the grocer’s there was wanly pink boiled ham sliced so thinly you could see right through it and even thinner slices of corned beef that instantly disintegrated once they were unwrapped, which probably contributed to me eventually turning vegetarian. Other meat regularly served in our house included glum liver the consistency of decay, gummy, fatty chops with enough bone-splintered meat on them to fill a matchbox, bitty sausages that split open like raw wounds, death-like mincemeat that wept for humanity when fried, and occasional shrivelled joints of beef the texture of polyester from cows seemingly killed centuries before. The memory of cheap, slithery margarine the colour of pus roughly spread on woolly slices of pallid white bread still makes my tongue beg for mercy. Eggs and chips were fried in a pan so old, permanently home to a congealed white pool of ancient lard, that the food came to the plate sprinkled in fragments of burned fat resembling iron filings and tasted as metallically gritty. For years I thought this was normal, in a world pre-pizza, pre-mayonnaise, even pre-curry, in which as a family we never once ate in a restaurant, dinner time was solidly situated in the middle of the day, and later there was tea, and then something posh never really experienced called supper.