Another curious trade developed when the council began demolishing houses: people kept discovering old swords hidden behind the fireplaces, apparently left over from the Crimean War. The soldiers, the story went, would return from the fighting and hide their swords and other weapons up the chimney, presumably to keep them out of harm’s way. As well as the demolitions, there was a fashion in the sixties for people to knock out original tiled Victorian fireplaces and put in horrible electric fires with glowing plastic coal. When people ripped out the fireplaces they’d often find these swords, sabres, daggers – all sorts of things – hidden away during the wars of the nineteenth century. The kids would collect them, creating a thriving local black market in vintage weaponry. I remember being in the wrong place at the wrong time once and being chased by a gang of kids all waving sabres. It was dangerous stuff but, when you’re a kid, you feel as if you’re immortal. Some of the things we got up to and the scrapes we got into were frightening when I look back now, but it was just so much fun we didn’t notice any danger.
I think the only truly dangerous thing that happened to me as a kid was going to the dentist. I must have been very young, because I think it was the first time I’d ever been, and it turned out I needed no less than seven fillings. My grandfather used to bring home a bar of chocolate every night – to have chocolate suddenly freely available after the end of rationing must have been amazing for that generation, so my grandfather would buy a lot of it – and I’d help him demolish it, along with, it seemed, most of my tooth enamel. I didn’t really know what a filling was, so I had no apprehension about what lay in store and went in quite happily. I was almost looking forward to it. They gave me gas and knocked me out and the next thing I remember is waking up with the dentist and his assistant holding me upside down with my head in a big sink, slapping me hard in the face and running cold water over me. When I looked down I could see blood washing down the plughole. I started shouting, demanding to know what was going on, and they said that I’d started screaming and they couldn’t get me to stop. Something must have gone dreadfully wrong, because they both looked pale and very panicked. Once I’d recovered a little bit, the dentist drove me home – I remember he had an E-type Jaguar – but for the next few days I was very poorly, with blood constantly seeping from my mouth. I think they must have given me too much gas or got the mixture wrong, and they’d nearly lost me.
By this time I was a pupil at St Clement’s Primary School, which was only a short walk from where we lived but still far enough for me to be late most days. I’m one of those people who just seems to be late for everything. I remember one of my teachers telling me, ‘Bernard Sumner, you’ll be late for your own funeral.’ I didn’t do particularly well in my school career and I think the way I was taught at primary level is largely responsible for that. I wasn’t good at maths, for example, and the way of educating you if you weren’t very good at a subject back then was to make you stand on a chair and bombard you with questions or demands to recite your nine times table or somesuch. When you didn’t get it right the teachers would deliberately make a fool of you in front of the class. As academic motivation goes, it was a pretty bizarre philosophy. Primary school was a pretty horrible experience, one that set about destroying from a very early age any self-confidence I might have had. It was education through fear, but it didn’t toughen me up, it didn’t make me learn, it just made me more and more anxious and created a self-perpetuating downward spiral from which I’d never really recover. At least, not during my school years.
There are only two things I can say for my time at St Clement’s: I learned to read, and I loved anything to do with art, especially clay modelling. The school had its own kiln and I was never happier than when I was making things. We had a teacher called Mr Strapps who taught us how to work with clay but, instead of a potter’s wheel, he used a record player. It was sculpture at 45rpm – unconventional, certainly, but it worked for me.
The downside was that Mr Strapps was an absolutely terrifying man. His name alone sounds like something out of Dickens and he could certainly have stepped straight out of the pages of Hard Times. He taught the eldest year at primary school, so you grew up with this dread of the inevitability of Mr Strapps becoming your class tutor. He caned me once: it was raining at playtime and we were all kept inside and I knocked over a bottle of milk. Even though it was clearly an accident, he called me straight to the front of the classroom and thrashed me on the hand as hard as he could with his cane.
My abiding memory of Mr Strapps isn’t being caned, however. It’s something far crueller.
It was another rainy breaktime, so we were all inside trying to amuse ourselves as best we could. I’d picked out a book of poetry from the school library and was sitting there quietly reading when I sensed Mr Strapps walk up behind me. He looked over my shoulder and when he saw what I was reading, he said, almost in a growl, oozing contempt, ‘What are you doing reading that?’ I looked up from the book and said, ‘What do you mean, Mr Strapps?’ He put his hands behind his back, bent down so his mouth was next to my ear and sneered, ‘Listen, where you come from, you’re just going to end up working in a factory, so there’s no point in reading anything like that. Just put it back. Now.’
I’d been brought up by my mother and grandparents to respect authority. He’s Mr Strapps, I thought, he’s my teacher, so he must know what he’s talking about. So I did put the book back and I did stop reading. What a terrible thing for anyone to say to a kid, let alone a teacher.
Despite the efforts of Mr Strapps, remarkably, I did manage to pass my Eleven Plus. I’d been promised a new bike by my grandfather as an incentive, but I think the main reason I passed was fear, and not of Mr Strapps for once. There were two school options beyond the Eleven Plus: if you passed you went to Salford Grammar School and if you failed you were sent to Lower Broughton Modern. One of my cousins had warned me how hard it was at Lower Broughton: if you went there, he told me, you got the shit beaten out of you every week for the entire first year without fail. In reality, it was probably no worse than my primary school, where we had our share of kids from hard families, but my jaw dropped and I was determined not to end up at Lower Broughton Modern. So I studied like mad and went into the exams praying that I’d pass. I missed one part of the exams because I had measles, and when I’d recovered I had to go in on my own, sit in a freezing cold classroom while all my mates were out playing and do the exam I’d missed. There were a few fretful weeks waiting for the results, but when the headmaster read out the names of those who’d passed and mine was among them I felt a fantastic mixture of relief and genuine happiness. Passing my Eleven Plus felt like a real achievement, because I’d had no confidence in myself; it had been destroyed by the teachers. The moment my name was read out that day, however, I did get a real boost. I’d also, of course, earned myself a new bike, and I spent the long summer evenings bombing around the streets among the lengthening shadows and looking forward to starting at Salford Grammar. I knew things were about to change. I had absolutely no idea just how much.
Chapter Two
Youth
‘Come and sit down, Bernard. There’s something we need to tell you.’
My mouth went dry. What had I done this time?
I had an inkling something was going on. For a few weeks, there’d been times when I’d go into the living room and the conversation would stop dead, or I’d be up in my bedroom and I’d hear a murmur from downstairs, my grandparents, my mother and Jimmy talking in low voices. I’d wracked my brains, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what I’d done. It was obviously something serious, as there’d never been a build-up like this before. I sat down, picked nervously at the seam of the seat cushion and looked from my mother to Jimmy and back again, a familiar creeping fear chilling my stomach. My mother paused for a moment.
‘We’re moving out of here, Bernard,’ she said. ‘You, me and Jimmy. We’re moving to our own flat in Greengate.’
It took
a moment for me to process. My first feeling was a wave of relief that I didn’t seem to be in trouble, but that was soon replaced by an overwhelming sense of confusion. I’d prepared myself for punishment, but this, this was something completely unexpected and I didn’t know how to react.
‘It’s a nice place,’ she continued, ‘in one of the new blocks. It’s got a bathroom and everything. It’s not too far away, so we can come back here and visit any time.’
I just looked at her, not knowing what to think, let alone say.
‘Also …’ She paused and looked at Jimmy. ‘Also, Jimmy’s going to be your father now. We’ve made it formal. Jimmy’s adopting you. From now on, your name isn’t Bernard Sumner, it’s Bernard Dickin.’
I still didn’t know what to say but in any case it was clear that the matter wasn’t up for discussion. They left me alone in the room and I replayed what my mother had said in my head, trying to make sense of it. Moving to a flat – well, that was quite exciting. I remembered how much I’d loved the view from my great-grandmother’s place, and we weren’t moving too far from Alfred Street. That part sounded like an adventure. The announcement that Jimmy would be my dad and that I’d have to take his surname – well, that was a different proposition altogether and much harder to take in. I’d always been a Sumner, from the day I was born. It was my mother’s name; it was the name I shared with the grandparents I loved and whose house I’d grown up in. It was my family name, part of me; it was effectively the most tangible expression of my identity I had. Yet now, without any kind of consultation, I was no longer a Sumner, I was a Dickin. As for Jimmy being my father, I’d coped perfectly well without one of those for eleven years and, suddenly, here I was having one more or less thrust upon me. I thought of my grandfather, the man who had always been the closest to a father I’d ever had: not only was his role in my life being usurped, so was his name.
I was determined that it wasn’t going to happen; the more I thought about it, the more I resented having been presented with this fait accompli. I didn’t blame Jimmy, it wasn’t his fault. My relationship with him was all right, but he’d come into my life too late to take up any kind of paternal role. As a person he was OK, if very quiet, and the two things I remember most about him are that he had an incredibly strong right hand and he was very good at chess. He had an extremely hard life, too: despite being quite badly disabled himself, he had a job as a cleaner in a cotton mill, which must have been pretty rotten. I respected Jimmy, but I didn’t feel emotionally attached to him – there was no bond, we didn’t even really speak to each other that much.
To his credit, Jimmy did a really good job of looking after my mother, but I remember them having blazing rows when they were first married, real shouting matches. My mother was the same with Jimmy as she was with me, insofar as she didn’t like him going out. If he ever came home late from work they’d have these huge arguments. I’d be in my room with my fingers in my ears trying to block it out, but I could still hear this yelling and shouting coming up through the floor and I found it very distressing. Things calmed down a bit when we moved to the flat. Maybe having their own space helped; I think that was probably the idea behind the move.
Once the excitement at the prospect of moving had died down I realized just what a wrench it was leaving Alfred Street. Of course I understand why my mother decided we should have our own place: for all her health issues, she was a married woman in her mid-thirties still living with her parents, but I had to quickly get used to it being just the three of us – me, Jimmy and my mother – and it was a huge adjustment to make for a small boy who’d known nothing else but living in a house with his grandparents.
At first I thought our new home was fantastic; it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. We lived quite low down in the tower, so I didn’t have the same breathtaking view my great-grandmother had, but we had a proper bathroom with a bath, which we’d never had at Alfred Street. We also had a boiler, so we even had an airing cupboard for drying clothes. I soon learned that when you turned up the heating you could go and sit in the airing cupboard. It was like being in a sauna.
From my bedroom window I could see a little spindly tree and a patch of grass in front of the tower block. I used to look at it and think how great it was, how lucky I was to live there: we had a tree and a lawn, an airing cupboard and a bathroom with a bath. It blew me away at first. But of course, after a while, reality set in and I realized that what it had in amenities, it was lacking in so many other ways. There was no community there, the tower blocks just isolated people, especially the old folk who’d lived such social lives before. There was nowhere to put a chair out and sit in the sun chatting to the neighbours, no street for the kids to play in, no hosepipe for those summer fountains. The towers were probably a great idea on the architects’ drawing boards and at the town planners’ meetings, but they didn’t meet the needs of the people who lived there. They were an economical solution but at too great a social cost. And of course the architects and town planners didn’t live in the tower blocks.
Around the time we moved into the flat the family began to experience some more serious health issues. My grandfather developed a brain tumour and had to have a major operation to remove it in the Jewish hospital that used to be close to Strangeways Prison. I don’t know why he was in a Jewish hospital – he wasn’t Jewish – but although we were very concerned for a while, thankfully the operation was successful. Unfortunately, it turned out to be just the start.
Soon after my grandfather had come out of hospital my grandmother had to go in for what should have been a routine operation for glaucoma. It was a straightforward process; hospitals performed them all the time, and still do. On this occasion, though, something went disastrously wrong and my grandmother was left completely blind. She didn’t see anything again as long as she lived. As well as being a genuine tragedy, my grandmother’s blindness had knock-on effects throughout the family. She had always done a lot to help my mother and, although we’d moved out and now had Jimmy, my grandmother had still helped but could no longer do so. It also meant that my grandfather – not long recovered from his brain tumour – was now the only able-bodied person in the family. My grandmother had worked as a cleaner, but obviously had to give her job up when she lost her sight, which made things even more difficult back at Alfred Street. It was an awful time, but I think to a certain extent the family kept the full implications of what happened to my grandmother from me. I don’t remember it being discussed when I was around. I do vividly recall her becoming upset talking about it, though, about how this stupid doctor had cost her her sight. I suppose, these days, you could sue for medical negligence, but back then you pretty much just had to put up with it. We were a poor working-class family, so what could we have done?
My new school should have provided a welcome respite from everything that was happening at home, but things weren’t great there either. The school may have been different, but the story remained the same: I struggled academically as much at Salford Grammar as I had at St Clement’s. Maths was still my particular weakness, and I think in the first year maths exam I only got something like 5 or 6 per cent. The self-confidence I’d developed through passing my Eleven Plus was soon in shreds again. Despite my clear lack of aptitude for maths, the staff still tried to force it into me. It was pointless. I was much better at art than any other subject – I was top of the class, in fact – but instead of nurturing that, all the focus was on how bad my maths was. People are good at different things, and I think education should reflect that. School should give you a basic grounding in the subjects you’re not so strong in, but surely the role of education is to find out what you’re good at and embrace that, encourage it. After all, you wouldn’t take a kid who’s a weedy, skinny academic wearing thick glasses and drum it into him that he’s got to be a super athlete and captain of the rugby team. That would be utterly ridiculous. Surely by that logic, taking someone who is artistic and clearly talented in that area
and forcing them to become brilliant at algebra is equally futile?
Not being a high-flyer, I was one of the kids who’d sit at the back of the class at school. At Salford Grammar, just like any school, there were the good boys and there were the bad boys. The good boys sat at the front and the bad boys would gather along the back row. I was always in the back row, not because I was stupid or a bad kid, but because I found the curriculum and the way it was taught incredibly dull. I just wasn’t stimulated. Even history didn’t do anything for me, and I love history now. I’m convinced it’s to do with the nature of the syllabus: I wasn’t interested in the Corn Laws or the Spinning Jenny, none of us were, but these were the things we had to learn. For all the years I spent in history classes, the only thing I remember was the time a spider suddenly dangled down from the end of the teacher’s nose while he held forth on nineteenth-century bread prices or something. That’s it. That’s all I took away from the subject at school, yet today I devour books about history.
Science wasn’t much better either, but then our science teacher, who died years ago, was very strict, and very peculiar. We were warned about him in advance; people would say, ‘God help you, he’s a nutter.’ He was certainly very eccentric, to say the least: in our very first lesson he instructed us that we had to spell everything the American way – they used fewer letters, so we’d save on ink.
He drove a little three-wheeler car that we could see parked from our classroom. One day near the end of the school year we were in the science teacher’s class when, through the window, we saw some of the sixth formers, who were leaving school and so were demob happy, go over to his car, lean in through the window, release the handbrake and start pushing the car out of its space. It was parked at the top of a slope and, before long, these lads had set it rolling down the hill right outside our classroom. The science teacher was completely oblivious, because he had his back to the window, but we had a grandstand view of his three-wheeler trundling past the window, bouncing down the slope and crashing into a wall. It was pretty hilarious from where we were sitting, but we were so terrified of him that not one of us laughed. We were all biting the inside of our cheeks, staring hard at our textbooks, whatever it took not to react to the unfortunate demise of his little car.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 3