The North

by Paul Morley

  Even as City fulfilled our belief that they were the team to follow – not Manchester United, who were legends but somehow not local – United carried on in their bullying way justifying the original reason I had decided to support City: United seemed too monolithic, too intimidating. My bold choice, as instinctive as the feeling that led me to Orwell and Garner, paid off, as though it was actually my support and loyalty that had enabled their success. My regular attendance at their home games sprinkled Garner-esque magic over the previously struggling club, and City knocked United into second place with such flash and swagger I swear it illuminated Reddish itself. Reddish was within walking distance of the City ground, Maine Road, although it took an hour to walk and we usually went in my dad’s car.

  I knew it could be walked because sometimes Dad had no car or money for petrol, and no money for the coach that left Houldsworth Square. I took this lack of money in my stride. I didn’t really know where his money came from anyway, or where it went, and sometimes there was none, and not even my mum going to work up the road at the sweet factory seemed to make money appear – although tins of rejected sweets would. He never had much and towards the end of his life seemed to have even less. He perhaps feared this end so much it inevitably happened: ending with nothing after all that concentration, and tension, and walking through northern streets on the way to more northern streets past doors that seemed shut for ever.

  The walk to see City play, an opportunity for some pre-match reflection for us both, took us east along the Gorton Road, left at Longford Road down the street from my school, along which, amazingly, a City player actually lived – Mike Doyle, lean aggressive number 4 right half in the League-winning side – and into the Barlow Road, then up the Stockport Road to Dickinson Road through dishevelled Longsight towards the hard-working Wilmslow Road. We were in Rusholme now, near where some of the streets in Victoria Park contained substantial houses exuding unexpected Victorian grandness, once, as Manchester grew in confidence, the homes of eminent locals such as Charles Hallé, Emmeline Pankhurst, Ford Madox Brown, Richard Cobden and Elizabeth Gaskell. Among the many distinguished-looking houses giving the area a discreet even serene splendour there was a building designed in the early years of the twentieth century by Middleton’s romantic proto-minimalist Edgar Wood for the Christian Scientists, a blend of sinuous art nouveau and austere modernism that looked as though it was out of something written by the Grimm Brothers and filmed by Ingmar Bergman.

  When we drove to the ground, this was where my father liked to park, away from the dense football traffic the other side of the Wilmslow Road, the Kent snob in him perhaps fancying Victoria Park as the type of area he would like to live in, close to the disordered city centre but full of spacious institutional and religious signs of prosperity, sealed off from the surrounding disintegration, a lot of it broken enough to be classified as slums, and the commotion of match days. Whether we drove or walked, we would then cross the Wilmslow Road amid the chattering crowds draped in sky blue and white that told us we were close to the ground. For a few miles before that, when walking, we were on our own, crossing the invisible borders from one ward to the next, occasionally spotting as we got closer the ground’s floodlights scraping the sky like medieval metal warriors above the surrounding crouched houses bunched up in terror. The walk was worth it to see City win, which, for a few years, into the early 1970s, they usually did, in the sort of style that meant I would crave a repeat for the rest of my life.

  Never for a moment thinking I would within a few years be without a dad, who seemed more permanent than bricks, more certain than rain, if as unpredictable as smoke, I would have three heaped sugars in my tea too, like father like son (within reason), piling up the cup with spoonfuls, a habit which took about fifteen years to lose, and now, forty-odd years later, I don’t take sugar, having finally shaken off this particular parental direction. On a school day, by the time the morning fire was really alive and on top of itself, hot enough to burn my face if I bent close to the fireplace because I needed its heat more than usual to give life to my fingers and toes, it would be time for me to leave and walk through Reddish, which was the world to me, in a world of my own.

  The outside world was doing all that you would expect it to do as it charged through the 1960s full of revelation, revolution, space travel, hippies, regeneration and protest. I was more interested in picking the crusty scabs that always seemed to form on my knees and elbows, or suddenly breaking into a mindless sprint along the pavement as though I was in a race against whatever car was alongside me and reaching the bus stop first meant untold riches, or going into the sweet shop on my dreamy way home from school, sticking my head into a transporting stench of sugar and spiked fruit, and spending the grubby coppers I’d got on some chunky puff candy or a handful of sticky Black Jacks, four for a pre-decimal penny. Then you still got 240 pennies to a pound, in a past now falling away into the last century, just as the last century is falling away to join the century before it, which for so long seemed so long ago. The 240 pennies and the chunky ha’pennies, which could actually buy a couple of sticky sweets, showed how close the 1960s really were to the 1890s, even though enough had changed to mean the smoke had cleared, the local buses were dressed in hippy orange and new city-centre buildings pretended to be as modern – encased in glass, steel and opaque purpose – as anything in Europe or America.

  Sometimes, sat on a sadly orange bus heading towards the increasingly seductive shopping centre, I might even have a threepenny bit, a twelve-sided brass coin which would occasionally date all the way back to the 1950s and looked eccentrically ancient enough to have been around for centuries. Threepence was about one and a bit post-decimal pennies. I remember once having one dated 1966, and it was so shiny and new it felt as though it had been handed to me by the captain of England Bobby Moore himself. I spent it, though. In 1970 with a couple of extra pennies it would have got me a Mars Bar. By 1971 it was gone, as dead as a farthing, as if such an eccentric coin, as English as a knighthood and with such an intricate shape, could never survive in an age when men walked on the moon for hours at a time and Stanley Kubrick’s ultra-violent futuristic A Clockwork Orange, based on the novel by industrious, self-admiring Manchester genius-charlatan-fantasist-wit Anthony Burgess, was released.

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  1853

  ‘Paradoxically, it was after Manchester officially became a city in 1853 that interest in it slackened. Writers might occasionally continue to focus attention on the city, but they were no longer “excited” or “shocked” by what they saw . . . Manchester was beginning to be taken increasingly for granted, a fact rather than a symbol, just as Chicago began to be taken for granted after 1900 and Los Angeles after the Second World War. Cities usually have only a relatively short “shock” phase. The problems which they seem to “incarnate” may persist but the issues become increasingly abstract and generalised, less attached to particular and specific local situations.’ Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, 1963.

  1851

  In the year of the Great Exhibition, a year in which the term Victorian was increasingly being used, Queen Victoria visited Manchester. For the town’s corporation this was an opportunity to show off the municipality to the world. They planned a mass pageant, which was to be performed in front of vast crowds and enhanced with ritual – even if the ritual was invented for the occasion. After the Queen had visited Salford, the royal party, conducted by the mayor and high sheriff, both wearing ceremonial dress for the first time, passed through the city-centre streets. ‘The streets were immensely full,’ the Queen later recorded in her journal, ‘and the cheering and enthusiasm most gratifying.’ As a sign of her gratitude, the Queen knighted the mayor, John Potter. Behind the scenes she was also being canvassed for something more.

  The corporation saw the visit not just as an opportunity to project Manchester to the nation, it was also after city status. Manchester had good reason for thinking it should have this, but coming as this did at
the beginning of two decades or so which saw civic rivalry erupt on a scale never previously witnessed in England, the events of the next couple of years came to symbolise the growth of civic pride more generally. The transformation of ‘city’ from a term designating a town with a cathedral to a symbol of status began in Manchester with Queen Victoria’s visit in 1851.

  Marian Withers, the third novel written by the 39-year-old Geraldine Jewsbury, another of Charles Dickens’s protégés, was first serialised for the Manchester Examiner & Times and appeared in book form in 1851.

  Chapter 1

  It was a regular Manchester wet day of more than ordinary discomfort! The rain came down with a steady, heavy determination, aggravated from time to time with an emphatic energy by gusts of winds, which swept down the streets, rippling the puddles which had gathered in the uneven flags, and rendering all attempts to shelter under an umbrella entirely vain. The atmosphere was a murky composition of soot and water, which rendered the daylight only a few shades brighter than night. Nothing could be discerned beyond the distance of a few yards, the sky and the earth being seemingly mixed together in a disorganised fog. Few persons were in the streets, for nearly everyone had sought refuge in the vain hope that the rain was too violent to continue.

  In the fourth chapter, Jewsbury talked of a hidden world that existed just before the railways made previously inaccessible places easier to reach, places in Lancashire and Yorkshire that seemed as distant as anywhere in India, which were somehow ashamed at being discovered.

  The country towns of Burnley, Colne, Clitheroe and Accrington lay in a country which had not been penetrated to any distance by public conveyances, and individuals journeying across the country were generally obliged to provide their own conveyance and depend on their own resources both for going and returning. About twenty years ago, the traveller leaving Accrington a little to the left would find himself upon a very rugged highway, in a wild country, so surrounded on all sides by a labyrinth of hills, that he would, if a stranger, be apt to wonder how he came there; followed by the more anxious wonder of how he was to get out again.

  By 1851 the population of Manchester had reached 186,000. Later in the century the population was boosted by the arrival of Jews fleeing persecution in eastern Europe.

  1850

  On 23 April, St George’s Day, aged eighty, William Wordsworth caught a cold on a country walk and died of pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining around the lungs. His friend Thomas De Quincey estimated that in his life Wordsworth had walked about 175,000 miles, walking with purpose, for enjoyment, without a care in the world, for necessity and duty, to purposely get lost, get the post, or for inspiration. Coleridge liked to compose walking over uneven ground or broken branches, Wordsworth while walking up and down a gravel path. De Quincey never rejected the idea of the city or of modern urban life, and, unlike Wordsworth, Keats or Shelley, couldn’t permanently settle in isolated or rural circumstances. De Quincey needed an abundance of buildings, streets, squares, bridges, false doors, glowing lights and secret alleyways, which he could flow through like thought. Where Wordsworth wanders among the daffodils, De Quincey strolls through crowds and markets, chasing smells, noises and experiences most poets would have considered repugnant.

  A few months after Wordsworth’s death, his widow Mary published Poem to Coleridge, a work now known as The Prelude, an enormous wandering epic that starts on the ground and climbs to the top of the mountains. Wordsworth had asked for this long, autobiographical poem to be published only after his death. Recording Wordsworth’s spiritual transformation, it is now considered his masterpiece.

  A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved

  All over this still Ocean, and beyond,

  Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves

  In headlands, tongues and promontory shapes

  Into the sea, the real sea that seemed

  To dwindle and give up its majesty

  The literacy of the working class was advanced considerably by the Public Libraries Act of 1850. There was much hostility to the bill when first introduced, the Conservatives claiming that the upper and middle classes would be paying for a service that would mainly be used by the lower class and that ‘the more education people get, the more difficult they are to manage’. The bill was eventually passed, though with many modifications. One of the first authorities to establish a public library service was Manchester, and one of the main campaigners for the innovation, Edward Edwards, was appointed its first chief librarian. A former bricklayer, he had educated himself at the library of the local Mechanics Institute and in 1839 had become an assistant at the British Museum. He was dismissed from his post at Manchester in 1858 for his radical political views.

  1849

  ‘The traveller by railway is made aware of his approach to the great northern seats of industry by the dull leaden-coloured sky, tainted by thousands of ever smoking chimneys, which broods over the distance. The stations along the line are more closely planted, showing that the country is more and more thickly peopled. Then, small manufacturing villages begin to appear, each consisting of two or three irregular streets clustered around the mill, as in former times cottages were clustered round the castle. You shoot by town after town – the outlying satellites of the great cotton metropolis. They have all similar features – they are all little Manchesters. Huge, shapeless, unsightly mills, with their countless rows of windows, their towering shafts, their jets of waste steam continually puffing in panting gushes from the brown grimy wall. Some dozen or so of miles so characterised, you enter the Queen of the cotton cities – and then amid smoke and noise, and the hum of never ceasing toil, you are borne over the roofs to the terminus platform. You stand in Manchester.’ Angus Reach, Morning Chronicle, 1849.

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  I don’t remember the specifics of what I learned at North Reddish Infants and Junior School between the ages of six and eleven. I walked to and from the sprawling dark-red-brick building breaking up patterned rows of narrow houses along the busy-with-cars-and-buses Gorton Road or the humble Harcourt Street for years, unknowingly soaking up the north without really thinking that I was anywhere else but the absolute centre of my own unique if tiny universe. I would go on my own, joining a class of forty for hours of facing a blackboard and a capable-seeming older person with an occasional need to smack me on the back of the legs, and then go home, again alone, occasionally finding a less familiar winding back route that meant I missed both Gorton Road and Harcourt Street. When I was about ten I told some friends that I lived so far from the school I needed to catch the bus – on my own – an act of significant independence at the time, but it wasn’t true. They were not impressed when they found out I was lying, and another of my erratic attempts to impress others with my apparently unique skills, to elevate myself above those around me, had failed.

  It took me about fifteen minutes to walk home, and I remember when I was about eight, before Carol was born, when my mum must have been working at the sweet factory near Houldsworth Square and Jayne playing at a friend’s house, I would arrive home and be on my own for an hour or two. If I was lucky there would be a bottle of orange squash and some rich tea biscuits, maybe some sliced white bread and jam. If not, a wait for someone to come home, and more time to be filled in.

  Also without thinking much about it, just accepting it as so, I was at the top of that class of forty kids in most subjects, and feeling a little superior because of this. I sulked tremendously when the sports teacher put me in the football team not as the swift-dribbling star left winger I fancied myself as, but as a common centre half. Number 10 or 11 was where I dreamed of playing, scorer of goals, deliverer of dangerous in-swerving corners, possessor of dazzling agility, but he wanted me at number 5 or 6, in defence, and this broke my heart, the heart of a young boy who for some reason fancied himself a believer in flair and originality with a commitment to the creation of surprise, as demonstrated by my favourite footballers, and a complete indifference to
the mundane function of the hard-man defender.

  I eventually realised he had put me in defence simply because I was one of the taller boys. He was not interested in or aware of how fast I might be, or (due to my solitary back-garden games with tennis balls) how skilled I was at dribbling. He wanted me to be strong, a scrapper, but this did not fit in with the picture I was forming of myself. It was the beginning of a painful understanding that football was a physical game – you were expected to fight for the ball, bang into players and fly into tackles, leaving bruises and scratches – and my avoidance of contact and cowardly reluctance to head the ball made me a weak and almost useless team player. Fantasies I had about being a key player for the North Reddish team in my last year there, scoring great goals, even captaining the side, were abruptly ended by my position in defence, a position I never played in the playground, where I was officially known as a goal hanger and it never occurred to me there was any point helping out in defence. My role was as hero winger with electrifying pace and a future as the George Best of Manchester City. He didn’t look like he was trying either, but was memorably effective.

  My favourite City player, inside left number 10 Neil Young, never, ever tackled an opponent or headed the ball, and often seemed to finish a match, even in gluey goal-line-obliterating November mud, pitch rained to a corrugated mulch, without a mark on his angelic sky-blue and white kit. He was frail and skinny-looking, like me; he hung around the halfway line when City were defending, but he scored goals from twenty-five yards with a glorious left foot, and he made things happen but didn’t need brute force to do so.

  My sports teacher compounded his grave error of judgement by then not choosing me to bat at number 3 or 4 in the cricket team, but at number 10 – the number I wanted in football not in cricket – because this meant he saw me as a slogger, and he didn’t want me to bowl audacious subtle spin – me, someone who had spent time at home, alone, working out how to deliver the batsman-bewildering googly – but bowl as fast as I could. The dreadful disappointment I felt that he had got me so wrong – ignoring my unique abilities, seeing me merely as a fairly anonymous tall lad who might be some use as battering ram or hurler – resonated for years. In many ways I am still dealing with it.