by Paul Morley
All this food was prepared by my mother, although she wasn’t really prepared, best at opening tins, baking rustic pies, knobbly crumbles, sloppy ground rice with a glum spot of jam in the centre, and relatively pleasing, because they were sweet, sponge cakes. This food was echoed at school, where daily dinners combined solid pies dense with ooze, vague vegetables and soggy sugary puddings encased in claggy custard that seemed to be breathing or at least wheezing.
I don’t remember my dad making anything other than a pot of tea, eccentrically spreading marge on his Weetabix and dousing his Kellogg’s Cornflakes in milk and sugar, but it was on our annual holiday with his mother by the sea in Margate where we ate our most formal family meals. Her small, austere semi-detached house, unmodernised since the war, two miles from the seafront, smelled ripe and sour at the same time, a blend of boiled sweets and dismay. At the time, she was known to me as Granny Morley, to separate her from my mother’s mother, the gentler, wilder Granny Young, and as a Methodist, which meant that this was how I would describe my own religion. I had no idea what it meant to be a Methodist, and we never went to church, but I interpreted the idea of Methodism through the chilly, reproving demeanour of my Granny Morley, and the fact that at any given moment I would expect a rap on the knuckles for some perceived act of insolence.
We would solemnly eat together at a table complete with fancy tasselled chenille tablecloth and ominously laid-out worryingly polished knives, forks and spoons with well-used handles the colour of glue. The meals painstakingly prepared by my grandmother were basic and influenced by the rationing years but the most methodical of any we would have during the year outside Christmas dinner. To leave the table before the end of the meal would mean having to say ‘excuse me,’ although this rarely guaranteed permission. For a few years, my father would continue this tradition in his own home, until he just couldn’t see the point any more.
The way Granny Morley fastidiously spread rich yellow butter – never margarine, proper butter was one of her personal treats – on her ritualistic teatime bread, smoothly covering all of the surface, from crust to crust, unlike my mother, who would scrape the thin marge roughly into a coarse blob in the middle of the slice, seemed to me the height of sophistication. The butter itself, which I occasionally had on a piece of freshly sliced white bread, coated my mouth like chocolate, and left me feeling vaguely giddy with something somewhere between pleasure and wonder. Nothing like that seemed to exist back in the north. Not one of her kitchen skills was passed to my dad.
Our summer holiday trips under endless sun-stirred blue skies to Margate, then a relatively refined seaside resort, perched on the tip of the Isle of Thanet, looking out across the English Channel, at the edge of the flat green Kent countryside, strewn with dignified orchards, labelled the Garden of England, made me feel something I could never quite put my finger on – it was so far removed from where we lived in Reddish, which seemed completely landlocked – until I read the writer Richard Hoggart (born in Leeds, 1918) describe how, to George Orwell, the north was a stranger place than Burma. Back home after a fortnight in Margate, Reddish always took some getting used to. Everything seemed smaller, darker, dirtier, sadder, colder, and lardier, with houses pressed into the ground not watching the skies. Dashing sea air was replaced by stale air. I grew up never knowing our relative proximity to both the North Sea and the Irish Sea – the English Channel over 200 miles to the south was the only sea I saw for years.
There were another couple of shops on the modest parade of commerce by the Reddish Conservative Club – a subdued, ordinary newsagent and a dead-looking shop which sold I cannot quite remember what – it might have been wool, cotton, scraps of material and lace doilies, it might have been something a little more sinister. I never went inside. Or, if I did, one version of me went inside, and another version came out with something else altogether on my mind, and more walking to be done. More walking, leading to new territory, to the creation of my surroundings, because there was so much time to fill in, and so many things to make present.
24
After the war the British government, keen to increase the available workforce in the country, invited West Indians to come to the ‘motherland’. Of the so-called Windrush Generation – the first boatload of Caribbean immigrants was carried by the Empire Windrush in June 1948 – many settled in Moss Side, two miles to the south of Manchester city centre. Those from Jamaica moved from an island described by Christopher Columbus as ‘the fairest of them all’ to a crowded smoky place where ‘darkness was made visible’ and where it really did seem to rain all the time. Fog got into their chests. The surroundings were semi-derelict. The locals seemed poorer than they were, with their unimaginative fatty food, and were immediately suspicious of ‘these people’.
Hope that they would be eagerly embraced for their sparkling energy and welcome talents soon turned into bitter defiance as the new arrivals were faced with indifference and much worse as they found themselves banned, rejected, and shunned. They brought with them a distinctive set of skills and stunning new forms of exuberance and style, but ran into barriers, distrust and plenty of brick walls. They were largely left to fend for themselves, and improvised an outside community within their unpromising new circumstances. New churches, clubs, gambling dens, shebeens – unlicensed establishments selling alcohol to those working unsocial hours, a reaction to the local drinking hours – and music venues catered for spiritual and earthier needs. Vegetables and other foods much less plain than English post-war rations, familiar to West Indians but not seen before in Britain – yams, salt fish, black-eyed peas, spicy ways of fighting the wet and cold – began to appear in the shops. They set out to make themselves at home as best they could, made the best of what were often insulting and intimidating conditions, and contributed to a considerable change in local consciousness.
The area became vibrantly multiracial, spawning fragmented, mythical and obliquely influential music scenes springing up inside once-sturdy derelict houses that had been left to rot. The newcomers showed the locals how to party and made themselves hard to ignore. In the 1920s Anthony Burgess had lived as a child in an off-licence on the corner of Moss Lane East and Lincroft Street to the east of Princess Road in Moss Side, and thirty years after he sat in the family’s combined dining and sitting room behind the shop listening to his crystal radio, the shop became a Jamaican shebeen, not far from a Rastafarian gift shop. He wrote in his autobiography of Moss Side in the 1920s being a respectable if ugly district with decent houses but already with ‘the scent of coming seediness’, where undernourished means-tested locals lived on bread and an egg every two days.
Walter Greenwood described Blackpool’s distinct appeal in his 1951 book Lancashire: ‘No other county than Lancashire could have produced Blackpool. It is a product of unconscious revolt, revolt of the masses against the horror of living 51 overworked weeks in hideous industrial towns. They want a holiday place in which they can give vent to their hysteria. Blackpool caters for this . . . Blackpool is unique.’
After the war George Formby found himself out of fashion. After George in Civvy Street (1946) the film offers dried up, but he continued to tour, and found a new outlet as a stage actor. He’d always loved pantomime: ‘I look forward to it all year. It permits you to go crackers. You get to wear comic clothes and give vent to your feelings.’ In 1951 George starred at the Palace Theatre in London’s West End in the musical comedy Zip Goes a Million, which became a huge success. The show’s extended run took its toll on Formby’s health, which had already been weakened by his wartime exertions. While being driven home after a performance in 1952, George suffered a massive heart attack. He wasn’t wearing well, as a man or a star, and perhaps there was something about him that sensed somewhere in the country, perhaps in the north-west not far from where he was born and bred, some kids who in ten years’ time would become a musical group perfect for the times were mixing up their identity, energy, sense of humour and rebellion with flash
y American input in just the right proportions to eventually completely replace him.
French writer Michel Butor taught at the University of Manchester from 1951 to 1953 in between stints in Egypt and Geneva. Jacques Revel, the narrator of Butor’s novel L’Emploi du Temps ( Passing Time), fulfilling a year’s contract as translator for an English firm, largely detested his time in Manchester, which Butor called Bleston, specified only as an industrial town in the north of England. This reflected the miserable time Butor himself spent in Manchester, even though Butor said that in his early writing especially he wanted to have characters as different as possible from himself. As a writer, Butor tended to hide behind narrators and characters – the individual as a succession of individuals. Revel is ‘dwelling in transit’ in a city that is . . . ‘a fusion of space and experience, a space filled with meaning, a source of identity. It is also a specific context for our actions, a configuration of objects and events filled in space, a milieu, as the French say. It is outside and inside us, objective and subjective, universal and particular. We live our lives in place and have a sense of being part of place, but we also view place as separate, something external.’
As 1950 approaches, it is over a hundred years since Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his novel Conningsby, ‘From Hellenic Athens and classical Rome, to renaissance Florence and Georgian London, history is rich with examples of towns and cities which embodied the best of urban tradition. There were places that stimulated new ideas and transacted knowledge. They inspired generations in terms of their design, their economic strength and their cultural diversity . . . By contrast, more recent urban history has been dominated by a severance in the relationship between people and place. It is the philosopher alone who can conceive the grandeur of Manchester and the immensity of its future.’
1950
While some hoped that new technologically advanced manufacturing would take over with the decline of the old industries, this was not happening. By 1950 industrial decline was evident, and Manchester had lost its hold on its economic base and began to take on the appearance of what would come to be known as the deindustrialised city.
The Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra’s regular conductor, Maurice Miles, suggested that a visit to London’s Royal Albert Hall would be a prestigious, morale-boosting change from concerts in Armley Baths Hall or the Ritz Cinema in Doncaster. ‘Nay, nay, Mr Miles,’ barked one councillor on the orchestra committee. ‘If London wants an orchestra, let them do what we’ve done and get one of their own!’
Alan Turing published ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence in Mind’. It was another visionary paper from his fantastically inventive mind and seemed to anticipate many ethical and technical questions which would arise as computers developed. He studied problems which today lie at the heart of artificial intelligence. It was in this paper that he proposed the Turing Test, which is today still applied in attempting to determine whether a computer can be intelligent.
25
I was surrounded by the north, embedded in it, on top of it, breathing, touching and receiving something northern that had been circulating since long before there was any sign of me. The north was waiting at the bus stop, on everyone’s lips, sighted explicitly in the largest buildings that loomed up at the edges of my vision, towering over the houses that surrounded them as if they were on their knees, eyes shut, worshipping these high and mighty symbols of prosperity, or ego, or function, or ingenuity, or decline.
The north was right up my street, in my next-door neighbour Mrs Wilson. On her own, wrinkled, pointed and bent like a storybook witch, stubbornly resisting the modern world and kids with their comics, TV and sweets, getting in her way, clearly planning a world that would require more and more electricity, more and more frivolous comforts, and more and more television, which ruined everything, all her past, which she had saved up, like a miser, and was all she had. She would have worked at a mill, and knew all about the great noise of the girls’ wooden clogs sparking on the cobbled streets as they all left for home at the end of a working day, or remembered such a thing through a golden haze of memory, as if such a thing really happened. She was so old in my eyes that now, thinking about her, she could easily have featured in the introduction to the northern mill towns in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.
Living on the other side, a couple, Mr and Mrs Brown, Christian names kept well away from me, who would never know what to do with such familiarity – elderly, less forbidding, but still bringing with them in shadowy form what I was slow to realise consisted of such things as the Second World War, Victorian hymns, Edwardian pride and an idealised view of a northern atmosphere that Lowry would turn into a smoky broken tragi-comic vision of brick togetherness and isolated souls crowding around each other on flat, forlorn and framed streets which contained great truth, fabricated memory and a riveting myth that draped a golden haze over the rancid, immutable business of poverty.
Here I was, in Reddish, of Stockport, near Manchester. Stockport was regarded as one of Lowry’s favourite towns, if favourite is the word – one close enough on the bus or train to his house, where he found the basis for much of what he liked to paint: a landscape stuck in or to time, attractive to him because it was gathering dust, and rusting, and darkening from within, where proud, stubborn, grumbling people were engaged in a stable and affectionate but corrosive and imprisoning relationship with the environment that had been built around, below and above them, a new sort of bound and belted reality, which drained and distorted colour, which adjusted what it was to be human and have a soul, and move from place to place and moment to moment, day to day.
Stockport, filled with sudden turnings from the present to the past, truncated streets leading to truncated streets, and sudden worn-down grey stone steps that seemed to drop into the ground, for Lowry a depleted wonderland of mill, pavement, lamp post, chapel and watchful post box – and in the background a severe sense of loss: cryptic alleyways, tilting walls, weeping gutters, people with nowhere to go other than their own front door and the inside of their thin-walled house, which was filled with secrets, or relative hard-earned cosiness, or death, which is where cosiness ultimately leads, a life that he viewed as beautiful, and inevitable, and for something so plain and everyday and even ugly, he spotted poignant, even awe-inspiring signs of grace.
There is a photograph of a glum but content, heavyweight and overcoated L. S. Lowry hanging around on some steep steps in the centre of an early 1960s dependably overcast Stockport, and he seems very much at home, phlegmatically breathing in the soot, in a grounded world tipping over the edge of grey-washed black and white that still seemed as much made of smoke as it was of brick, populated by people who were clearly made up mostly of bones and the sheer effort of living. It’s the sixties, but this is someone deeply entrenched in an early-twentieth-century north, where you layered shirts, waistcoats and trousers, many-pocketed for possible valuables and sundry possessions, as a psychological barrier against the clobbering of a hard world, and simply for warmth. It’s a holiday snap of a doomed but self-possessed transient furtively revelling in the shady ruins of vigour and doing a bit of specialised snooping.
Stockport, beginning in the north as soon as south Manchester petered out, in the west as soon as Cheshire lost heart, in the east within sight of Yorkshire, and in the south up to and almost including the northern reaches of Derbyshire. Near enough to Manchester for the Germans to drop bombs on the place during the Second World War, perhaps unused ones as they were flying away after hitting the city, lighter than when they arrived, making a different noise, satisfied with the destruction they left behind and their contribution to the turning of a city, a town, into something else, into broken bits of itself.
Stockport was, for me, at six and seven, off in the distance, the next step, a considerable change in circumstances, an opening of the mind, rarely visited with parents for the shops or nothing special on an echoey double-decker bus the size of our house patrolled by a restless, purposeful u
niformed conductor, a complicated metal ticket machine slung jauntily around his neck, up and down the stairs from his spot in the corner of the bus, the wooden platform open to the road and the pavement as it sped past, which as you got older and bolder you would jump on and off as the bus moved away from or arrived at the bus stop, incurring the wrath of the squinting conductor, the bus drawing us down into magnetic Mersey Square, the restless shop-tangled centre of town.
Stockport contained Reddish, which contained Westbourne Grove, which was a small road containing two rows of small nondescript flat-fronted semi-detached houses built seventy years before, enough houses to home about thirty families, some of which I knew the names of. Reddish was where I came to, where I began to think there was such a thing as thinking, and therefore of remembering. For a while I had very little to remember, but slowly I banked up my memories, and five decades later these memories of experiences I was having as my mind formed at roughly the same time as my body, seem stronger than they did at the time, if lacking a newness, the robust, acquisitive newness that fills in the sort of details that made the experiences seem real, and not, as they now seem, dreamlike.