I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  I was seven months old when we made that move. Clearly, I have no memory of the time I spent in that terrace, but what I do know is I came to consciousness in Little Hulton thinking, I don’t come from here, a mental default I would carry with me for ever. I’ve spent my life enjoying being a stranger in places. It’s one of the main things I love about acting, being an outsider in a town. I’ve done it in Los Angeles, I’ve done it in Austin, I’ve done it in Melbourne, Leicester, Nottingham, Glasgow. I never to this day say I’m from Little Hulton. Salford overrode any time-hewn attachment to LH. I grew up hearing conversations about how ‘we’re not from here’, reinforced by the fact that anybody visiting us came from Salford and if we visited anyone we went the other way. All the tales, all the anecdotes, were about Salford. I’d hear about my mum’s sister Olive, attractive, busty and red-headed, who worked in the ticket booth at the Ambassador Cinema, known as ‘The Ambass’, and how, before Ronnie met my mum, all the lads used to try it on with her. ‘We couldn’t get a smile out of her,’ my dad said. My mum later explained it to me – ‘Olive just thought they were all common.’

  For all its distress and dirt, Salford, to me, had a sense, and still does, of being Camelot. All my values, all the stories, all the honesty I saw in Mum and Dad’s work ethic, come from there, passed on to new generations. There was a story oft told about my Uncle Bill, made unemployed, like so many others in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and not coming home, the family sending out search parties before he was found crying in a doorway. I first heard that story as a 6-year-old. It gave me a value, so when, ten years on, I was watching Boys from the Blackstuff, and making the connection, ‘1930s, 1981 – hang on’, I knew exactly who I was from. In our house, we had a shared ethos of ‘This is who we are’. Salford was my domain, and maybe, when I got older, that was why it was so easy to leave Little Hulton – I never really felt like I belonged there. Yes, there was a real sense we’d moved up in the world because we were in a better house, more room, but at the same time it felt as if the people in Little Hulton were very different, rural in a sense, far less inner-city. It seemed they felt it too. There was a bit of a class thing going on. Even though everyone was in council houses, Salford, as it always has been and always will be, was seen as rough. So our family was seen as rough. To add to the interloper feel, the families that came to Little Hulton from Salford were officially called overspill – a charming phrase. That same term was used again when there was another wave of newcomers in the ’80s, except this new influx were much more socially challenged in terms of employment and drugs after several years of Margaret Thatcher. There was more criminal activity. That dignity and sense of morality that comes from having a job wasn’t there; the old thing about people keeping their gardens right, and then, before you know it, they’re full of fridges and broken-down vans. All of a sudden there were lads in baseball caps hanging about on the streets. Thanks to the Tories’ social and economic policies, people were skint and they started nicking. Having never had any problems in twenty years, my mum and dad were broken into four times in a decade. They shared a sense of bemusement that somebody of their own could come and rob them. Hurt pre-empted anger – ‘We don’t do that to each other.’

  That’s not to say Little Hulton was previously an idyll. It was a typical working-class estate. When I was a kid, I was frightened of the skinheads. A load of them used to go out in a white Bedford van and jump out and batter people. It was possibly an urban myth, but there was a story that one bonfire night some skinheads had stabbed a Guy Fawkes dummy, only to discover there was somebody in the disguise. But Little Hulton had never been a place where people turned on one another. In the end, lack of opportunity and austerity in a decade, the ’80s, where others were making an obscene display of their wealth eroded natural working-class pride.

  We were never overwhelmed with visitors in Little Hulton, but New Year’s Eve was always a big get-together. Mum and Dad wanted it to be all-encompassing, not something owned by one age group, and so my brothers would bring all their mates. Mum and Dad adored the twins’ friends and the liveliness they brought to the house. They didn’t want everyone sitting around on chairs; they wanted a proper do, a good old-fashioned knees-up. While my mum piloted the cooker, doling out pies – beef and mince, steak and kidney, cheese and onion – as well as potato hash and beetroots that she did in their juice with sugar, and my dad cut open another Watney’s Party Seven, my brothers and their girlfriends would be dancing away in the front room watching Rod Stewart’s Hogmanay special. Younger than anyone else by some distance, I’d stay up, observing, taking it all in – the documentarian. Those were the happiest times.

  Mum and Dad would also have a Boxing Day party. When the pubs emptied, everyone would come down to ours and the house again would be filled with laughter and noise. Dad never drank shorts – the one and only time he’d done so he’d fallen down a hole on Salisbury Plain (he also felt that in a man it indicated getting above your station, being a bit pretentious). But for women it was different, and on big occasions such as these, Mum would drink gin. She was always sociable, but gin totally transformed her. At parties, my dad and his mates would gather in the backroom, the result being there’d be a fair bit of blokeish non-PC humour. My mum would walk right into the middle of that banter and invert it so that all the women were laughing at the men, all that schoolboy sniggering turned on its head. My dad’s face would be one of embarrassment mixed with huge amounts of admiration. He could play the game, but because of my mum’s incredibly strong feminine influence, decided he wouldn’t. I watched this scene unfold, fascinated. I knew I liked it more than the boys’ club. I was a big fan of my mum, and her ability to own a roomful of men was something to behold.

  Dad beheld it too. Witnessing life through Mum was such an important part of my dad’s relationship to her. He would delight, absolutely, in watching her pleasure. My brother, an upholsterer, once made her a chair. It was beautiful and she was a little overwhelmed. ‘Oh, Alan, I don’t know what to say.’ Myself, being the watcher, wasn’t looking at the chair; I was looking at my dad’s face. He wasn’t looking at the chair either; he was watching her, again vicariously living her happiness. He did that a lot. His first reaction when anything funny, positive or momentous happened was to look straight at her.

  Dad had a fantastic laugh, which we called ‘the guffaw’, and we’d hear it ringing out at parties. He loved people and he was a great audience for a joke, but wasn’t somebody who would stand up and entertain. He’d defer that role to my mum, or Alan, them both being the main source of humour in the house.

  Dad’s humour was more inadvertent and came from his bizarre way of doing things. For instance, he didn’t like to ask people to do something for him, so would find a roundabout way of doing so. I’d be sat watching the TV with him – ‘Are you going upstairs?’

  ‘No, Dad.’ He’d go back to the telly.

  ‘Why?’ I’d know where this was going.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re not going up so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Why did you ask?’

  ‘Well, if you were going up, I wouldn’t mind you turning the immersion heater on.’

  Why he wouldn’t just ask, I don’t know.

  Other times, me, Alan and Keith would be watching something on TV when he’d walk in and turn it over.

  ‘What’s this?’ he’d ask.

  ‘I’ve no idea, Dad, we were watching the other side.’

  Occasionally, he’d borrow a fiver off one of us. A couple of weeks later, it still wouldn’t be back.

  ‘Dad, can I have that fiver?’

  ‘Fiver? What are you on about, fiver?’

  ‘I lent you a fiver.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ We’d get it back in the end.

  There was a genuine eccentricity in there, like him asking where his glasses were only for them to be on his head – all this very muc
h pre-dementia. We all used to watch Fawlty Towers together and I felt then and know now that the four of us were laughing at Basil because we too had one in the house. He half knew that, I think. It fitted in with his ability to be self-parodic.

  ‘France,’ he’d say, ‘they should build a concrete wall around it and fill it in with concrete.’ He had another fate in store for the Gauls – ‘All the French should be made to swim home and those that make it should be shot on the beach.’ We knew he didn’t believe it. It was just Fawlty Towers moved from Torquay to Salford.

  There were certain things I loved watching with Dad because his reaction was so joyous. Me and him loved the Fred Quimby Tom and Jerry cartoons. Occasionally there’d be a sequence where Jerry would run through an open window only for it to come slamming down on the pursuing Tom’s neck, at which point his mouth would open and his tongue shoot out three feet. That made my dad laugh more than anything. Laurel and Hardy we loved, too, not so much for the slapstick, more for the interplay, Oliver’s looks to camera, his sheer unadulterated frustration. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the subtlety of the relationship between Bob and Terry, was similarly massive for my dad. We also used to watch The Black and White Minstrel Show because Dad loved the singing. Even if the overt racism was noted, it was certainly not mentioned. Of all entertainers, though, Eric Morecambe, without a shadow of a doubt, was the ultimate favourite. When Eric came on the telly, it was as though he was my dad’s personal friend. If Eric was on, you knew Dad’s mood would be good.

  Dad found his pleasure in being with Elsie, reading his newspaper, or watching something good on TV. Unless it was a party, he rarely drank at home. If he did fancy a drink, he wasn’t one for dragging me along, giving me a bag of crisps and sticking me in a corner. My mum wouldn’t have that, and he wouldn’t have been comfortable with it either. If I did happen to be with him when he went for a drink, generally I’d wait in the car, as happened when he had a pint in The Raven with my Granddad Pop and my Granddad Shaw. I spent that particular half-hour messing around with the lights, and when he came out they had to give him a jump start because I’d run his battery down.

  Before the twins came along, Dad spent a lot more time in the pub. Granddad Pop demanded that all his sons be there in the Red Lion, in Irlam, known as ‘The Cat’, on a Friday night. But when Alan and Keith arrived it was full-on hard work for my mum. Endlessly, she’d be washing, feeding, cleaning. In the end, she put her foot down.

  ‘I can’t do this, Ronnie,’ she told him. ‘It’s not just the work; we haven’t got the money for you to go drinking.’

  Dad listened. I can either be in the pub with this lot, he thought, or I can be at home with my wife and twin sons.

  From that moment on, the other lads at the pub called him Cinderella because he was always missing the ball. Dad wasn’t bothered. He could be a real man’s man in the boozer, but Elsie allowed him a richer emotional life at home. He loved being a father to the babies. He knew also, from a tough upbringing, where hunger was a constant companion, that money was tight and was to be respected. Like many working-class people, Mum and Dad feared money and its power to dictate life in the starkest of ways. It’s a hard habit to shake. To this day, waste of any sort upsets my mum. Worth remembering when we see elderly people rooting around in their purses at the supermarket that they really did come from a background where every penny counts. Mum and Dad, for instance, started out in a rented room with orange boxes for furniture in a house in Eccles Precinct. From there, they would set out every morning to the same bus stop to go to work at Colgate-Palmolive, the factory where they’d met. I asked them about that moment once when we were out in a restaurant in Manchester. Dad had dementia at that point, but he still had a keen memory of the encounter, although Mum gave it a rather more filmic quality. She’d already heard about Dad when one day the lift opened and there he was on his stacker truck, typical Ronnie, with one pallet too many. ‘He never took his eyes off me as the lift doors closed,’ she told me. ‘I thought, He’s tricky.’

  ‘If it had been any of the other blokes I’d have told him, “Eh, silly old, you’ve got too many pallets there,” but I thought, He won’t take that very well.’ Instead, she told him, ‘Oh, I’m not sure you’re meant to bring two.’ She was astute. She could see there was a fragility of confidence.

  Elsie finished with a bloke to go out with my dad. Her spurned beau later became a professional footballer and wrote to her trying to get her back. She chose Ronnie. They had a church wedding. Dad had a very questionable haircut, Mum looked beautiful in a subtle, understated wedding dress, a locket round her neck. I am looking at the photo now – she looks gorgeous. You were punching above your weight, Dad. They couldn’t afford a honeymoon. The nearest they got to a treat was when his brother Pete, his best man, stuck a fiver in his pocket at the end of the night. From Eccles Precinct, eventually Mum and Dad got hold of their first Salford council house in Stone Street, moving on to Blodwell Street, and Little Hulton, raising their three kids as they went.

  Salford itself embodies Mum and Dad’s determination to rise above adversity. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, penned in 1844, Friedrich Engels, who spent much of his life in the city, describes it as a ‘very unhealthy, dirty and dilapidated district’. Little had changed when in 1931 a major survey concluded that while parts of Salford contained some of the worst slums in the country, infested by rats and lacking elementary amenities, inspectors were ‘struck by the courage and perseverance with which the greater number of tenants kept their houses clean and respectable under the most adverse conditions’. People had nothing, but their homes glistened.

  Salford actually became a pioneer. The Royal Museum and Public Library, opened in 1850, was the first unconditional free public library in the country, a link perhaps to the fact that so many notables who emerged from the area did so through a radical use of culture and words. Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the suffragette movement, spent her early years in Pendleton, and her father owned a theatre in Salford for several years. Her ability to engage a crowd can be attributed to that very stage. Walter Greenwood, author of Love on the Dole, and the dramatist Shelagh Delaney, whose play A Taste of Honey questioned an array of social mores and prejudices, were both from Salford, as were Joy Division founders Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, their non-conformist DIY outlook shared by fellow Salfordians the Happy Mondays and punk poet John Cooper Clarke.

  Current Master of the Queen’s Music and prominent gay rights campaigner Sir Peter Maxwell Davies also emanates from Salford, as does Alistair Cooke (whose Letter from America was broadcast for decades on Radio 4) and the actor Robert Powell. I’ll reserve special mention for Albert Finney, the greatest of them all, although the footballer Paul Scholes runs him close. Indeed, one of the best moments of my life was when I met Scholes in Starbucks in Manchester, sat at a table with his wife and baby. In situations like this, I generally give people their space, but, on this occasion, I took the opportunity. I had to – I respected him as a footballer so much, watching him in the Manchester United reserves right through to his incredible performances in the first team. Equally, I loved the fact he could have earned loads more money by putting himself out there, doing adverts and the like, but wouldn’t do it. He was the best player on the pitch but did the least press.

  I sat myself down. ‘All right, mate?’ I said, with great originality.

  ‘All right,’ he replied.

  His wife then interjected. ‘Eh, you!’ she said. ‘You went on a date with my mate and she said that when she walked into the place you were reading a book. You were reading a book on a date! And you never rang her back.’

  I saw a smirk on Scholesy’s face, which only broadened when I started trying to dig myself out of the hole.

  Thankfully, my all-time hero, possibly registering my discomfort, delivered a subject change. ‘What was that thing you did about a schoolteacher?’

  ‘Hearts and Minds,’ I told him. ‘It
was on Channel 4.’

  ‘It was good, that,’ he noted. My favourite player had just given me a decent review.

  My career meant that I got to meet, and very nearly play, several on that list of Salford greats. I took great delight in reciting John Cooper Clarke’s poem ‘Evidently Chickentown’ in Danny Boyle’s film Strumpet. We filmed that scene in a pub in Collyhurst. As Alex Ferguson once said, ‘Collyhurst, where they take the paving stones in at night.’ It was an audience of regulars and extras and the energy in the room as the poem went through the gears was incredible.

  I was invited to ask a question of John Cooper Clarke for an article in The Observer. I knew straightaway what I wanted to quiz him about. I’ve always been obsessed with First World War poetry and had happened across a poem called ‘Oh! Fucking Halkirk’.

  He was obviously aware of ‘Oh! Fucking Halkirk’ when he wrote ‘Chickentown’ and had modernised the form to create another poem of incredible power.

  The film director Michael Winterbottom, meanwhile, wanted me to play Peter Hook in 24 Hour Party People but I couldn’t because I was committed elsewhere. Ralf Little did a brilliant job, but I can’t help feeling I’d have been great as Hooky, matching both the attitude and tonality of voice. I pleaded with Michael to shoehorn me in and he came up with Boethius, who was Tony Wilson’s favourite philosopher. I had this extraordinary experience of sitting under Victoria Bridge – the same bridge where I used to get off the bus, the 38, the 31, or the 91, from Little Hulton to Manchester throughout my childhood and adolescence – relating Boethius’s Wheel of Fortune.