It’s my belief that history is a wheel. ‘Inconstancy is my very essence,’ says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.
All my ghosts were under that bridge, and all my experiences were in that speech, the bizarre nature of the situation heightened by the fact I was delivering those words to Steve Coogan pretending to be Tony Wilson, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the real Tony Wilson who’d come down to witness that particular scene being filmed. The same Tony, an absolute cultural icon, who saw Shaun Ryder as W. B. Yeats – Shaun who was from my road, Coniston Avenue. And the same Tony who not long after would interview me on the set of The Second Coming, only for us to end up talking about Nobby Stiles (he was a mad Manchester United fan). The last time I ever saw Tony was outside Waterstones on Deansgate, appropriately enough for another lover of words, a man who allowed the disaffected a voice.
I saw Morrissey, actually a Mancunian, but whose photo with The Smiths outside Salford Lads Club is perhaps their best known, in exactly the same place. I had just voiced a documentary about the icon called The Importance of Being Morrissey and was talking to the producer outside a café, when I stopped mid-flow.
‘You have no idea who’s walking towards us.’
‘Is it Morrissey?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Go and talk to him.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Go and talk to him!’
He walked past me. I got on my bike and followed him. He’d just walked up to Waterstones.
‘Excuse me, Morrissey.’
‘Oh, hello.’
‘My name’s Chris Eccleston.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Oh, right . . . I just want to say thank you.’ I stuck my hand out. He shook it.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ And walked off.
I’m fairly sure it was a more remarkable experience for me than it was for him, and the reverse anecdote doesn’t appear in his own autobiography. But the significance of Morrissey knowing who I am will never be lost on me. I had been that classic callow youth sat in a bedsit listening to his plaintive tales of working-class existence. And there I was saying hello to him outside a bookshop that now (I rather blithely assume) has both our stories on its shelves. It’s things like this that bring me up short sometimes.
Having little never means having nothing.
3
RED DEVIL
‘Duncan Edwards, he was a player, eh?’
‘Uh. Uh.’
‘Legs like tree trunks, isn’t that what they used to say?’
‘Uh. Uh.’
‘Those were the days.’
He didn’t say anything, but there was a glint in his eyes.
I never wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a footballer – to play for Manchester United. I still do.
The first thing I committed to memory wasn’t the lines of a play, it was the names of the Busby Babes. There was a drawer in my mum and dad’s bedroom and whenever I got the chance I’d go rooting. I’d find sets of false teeth, ties, photos, watches, United programmes, leather lighters from the ’70s, all sorts. It was fascinating. Boredom was our ally back then – we had nothing else to do so exploring the house was an inevitability.
I also found a Manchester Evening News special from the end of 1958, a commemoration of the desperate tragedy that unfolded on the tarmac at Munich Airport and the subsequent run to the FA Cup final with the team the club somehow cobbled together.
The Munich air crash was a huge event in our house. Mum and Dad both felt it deeply. Dad had been going to Old Trafford since the 1930s, while Mum actually worked at the ground during the Babes era, pushing a cart round the outside of the pitch, selling pies and beef tea, the money being passed down through the crowd before the refreshments went back the other way.
‘We all fancied Roger Byrne,’ she told me of the United captain and England international, one of eight players who perished in the accident, ‘but you could tell he was moody.’ Roger Byrne, as it happened, was the spit of my dad.
‘Everybody fancied Big Dunc too,’ she continued, referring of course to the prodigious talent that was Duncan Edwards.
My dad would talk about them as footballers. ‘Roger Byrne never tackled anybody, Chris,’ he’d tell me. ‘He just used to jockey wingers into a position where they couldn’t go anywhere and take the ball off them. He was that good.’
Duncan, meanwhile, was the best player he’d ever seen. ‘Man at sixteen. Legs like tree trunks. Never seen anything like it.’ His respect for Duncan went beyond his ability; it was wound up in him being masculine in a way Dad admired.
Dad didn’t just watch football, he played it, centre forward. People would tell me all the time, ‘God, your dad was a good footballer.’ And he was. The army asked him to stay on beyond his two years’ National Service purely to represent Southern Command. At that level, scouts from professional clubs came to watch, but my dad’s attitude was rigid. ‘I’ve done my National Service, now I’ve got to get back to Salford.’ Because that’s what young men did. They went back to what they knew, what they’d been conditioned to do. They were expected to go home and put money in the pot. My dad wouldn’t have wanted to shirk that responsibility. He was always very firm about paying his way. One of his first life lessons to me was ‘Always get your round in – stand your corner.’ So wedded to this attitude was he that it was difficult actually to buy him a drink. ‘I’ll get this,’ he’d say as soon as the glasses had been drained. I’d have to stop him. ‘No, Dad – you already got yours. I’ll do it.’ That kind of social minutiae was very important to him because it said something about values and character. ‘If a bloke doesn’t get his round in, that tells you all you need to know.’ And he was right. If you’re in the trenches and you want someone you can trust by your side, it’s not going to be the bastard who ducks his round, is it?
With that background, Dad never had the chance to say to his family, or to himself, ‘I’m going to see where football takes me.’ Instead, where it took him was the amateur leagues. By the time he stopped playing, he’d been heading heavy leather footballs for twenty-two years – in fact he was renowned as being great with his head. I’m convinced, as was proven with the West Brom striker Jeff Astle, such constant impact contributed to his eventual dementia. After an eighteen-year professional career, Jeff Astle’s brain was shown to be more like that of a boxer. But it wasn’t only professionals who headed the ball.
Dad grew up in different days. When I came along, the idea that working-class people could become something was far more accepted. Albert Finney was a case in point. Mum and Dad knew his dad, a bookie – Albert had been a bookie’s runner before finding acting success.
Four years previously, he’d made his name in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, part of the ‘kitchen sink’ movement that portrayed vividly a generation no longer willing to accept the preordained drudgery of working-class life. My dad was born in 1929 and was making his life decisions immediately after the Second World War.
I grew up believing I had choices. And my first choice was to be a footballer. But this wasn’t a simple ambition; there was a psychological complexity behind it. More than anything, I wanted to be a footballer to please my dad, to strengthen the connection between me and him. I was always conscious that my older brothers hadn’t bothered with the game, being more into catapults and generally messing about with the readymade pal who’d arrived in this world alongside them. I was eight years younger and football was something between me and Dad alone. He’d come and watch and, as I tried my utmost to impress, I’d be so, so aware of him stood on the side lines. Not that he was vociferous. He was very much the quieter type. He stood on his own away from the competitive dads, which taught me another valuable life lesson and mad
e me love him even more.
Often, he didn’t want to come. He’d been working all week, it was Sunday morning, and he just wanted to sit in his chair and read his papers. I’d badger him and badger him. I feel bad about it now, knowing how much he would have relished a rest, but the result of my nagging was he’d be there. It meant an unimaginably huge amount.
We’d play all over and sometimes I’d get a lift with another lad who was a much better footballer than me. After the match, we’d pile into his dad’s car and listen as he lavished praise on his son. ‘You were absolutely brilliant.’ Me and my mate would be sniggering in the back as our pal, to his credit, became more and more embarrassed.
My dad never operated like that. He’d say nothing to me while always making a point of telling the other lads they’d played well. It didn’t bother me. In fact, I admired him. I was proud of his democratic spirit, and I felt he was teaching me something. I know when the time comes, and my son Albert and his mates get in my car, I won’t start telling him he’s great – I’ll be saying that to the other lads. Another tiny life lesson, but a very important one, and I can’t help thinking that it, like so many others, comes from Salford, a city with an ethos running through it – ‘Think of other people. Don’t get too ahead of yourself.’
Of course, there might have been another reason he didn’t praise me – I was probably the worst player on the pitch. At school, I was one of the best and captain of my team, but when I then progressed to Salford Boys I was struggling. Trouble was, while I inherited Dad’s determination as a footballer, I lacked his gift. I was always in and out of the team. I was the fittest, very vocal (surprise, surprise), and worked really hard, but had very little actual ability. My first touch, pace and turning let me down – although at the time I couldn’t see it. It was left to my dad to point out.
I had a Nana who ran a boarding house in Blackpool. I was sat on the floor in her living room and from her armchair she asked me the classic question, ‘So what are you going to do when you grow up?’
There was only one answer. ‘A footballer.’
‘Yes,’ my dad interjected, very gently and very obliquely, ‘but if he doesn’t improve a bit in the next year or so we might have to think about that.’
I felt disappointed, but at the same time relieved. My dad knew what it was to be a talented footballer. He had a good eye. More than that, though, he’d picked up that my ambition wasn’t entirely for myself. He was letting me off the hook while at the same time letting me know what he thought. He was, as they’d say now, managing expectations.
Trouble is, while football had been ruled out as a career option, very little else was being ruled in.
From the very start, I’d felt held back in the classroom. Bedtime with Mum and Dad meant that, by the time I began reading at primary school, I was already familiar with, among other books, Black Beauty, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and, equally formatively, The Boy Who Was Afraid, by Armstrong Sperry, an incredibly emotionally layered story that tells of a young Polynesian boy conquering his fear of the sea and the loss of his mother. Books were ever present in our house. The library was only half a mile away and Mum and Dad were both in and out of there, she for her romantic novels, he for his thrillers, as was I and the twins. When I then entered the classroom, they gave me Janet and John. After the world of adventure I’d experienced, ‘Here is a cat’, ‘Here is a dog’ was of no interest to me. Janet and John is also extremely class-bound, with middle-class kids who had nothing to do with my experience or my view of the world. If they were trying to get me to be aspirational for that kind of life, it fell on deaf ears. Thankfully, the teacher introduced me to the Doctor Seuss books, which I consumed, loving their colour and clever use of language. There was also a book club at school where I read Stig of the Dump, The Borrowers, everything I could get my hands on. Back home, meanwhile, I was watching Sesame Street, education by stealth. I’d also read comics, obsessed with The Numskulls, now in The Beano but previously in The Beezer and The Dandy, about a group of little men who lived in somebody’s head, one controlling the mouth department, another the brain, and so on. The strip has many similarities to the Disney film Inside Out, which, coincidentally, my children are now obsessed with. I also read Battle comic, pretending to be Major Eazy, a character I now realise was based very much on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. Later I would get into all the usual suspects, such as The Lord of the Rings, while also going through a phase of reading ultra-violent sexual and skinhead stories and the Hell’s Angels books by Richard Allen. Naturally, I hid those from my mum and dad.
Secondary school, especially, was a turn-off. I was never happy there, worn down by a culture, as I perceived it, whereby if you did your homework and worked hard, aspired academically, talked about university, or volunteered for sports teams, you were deemed a creep. Essentially, a communal fear of looking or sounding different, of being honest about ourselves, meant we were all colluding in holding each other back. I don’t know what a sociologist would say about that, but we certainly weren’t rebelling against the system; we were allowing it to define us in the exact way it wanted – ‘Forget ambition, you lot are headed for the factory.’
Instead of following my instinct and doing what I thought was right for me, I got caught somewhere between the two positions. My education went to shot and yet at the same time I was made head boy. There was one reason for my elevation and one reason only – manners. Unlike my communication skills, they were impeccable. From day one, Mum and Dad drilled it into us about respect for other people. I am now engaged in that with my own children. They probably feel I’m a bit oppressive with the pleases and thank yous, but for my money they’re the first step towards civilisation.
My dad put it slightly more bluntly – ‘Always say please and thank you to someone because, if they don’t say it to you, you know they’re a bastard.’
Typical Dad. But he backed up those words with actions. If they went out, Mum and Dad were more polite to waiters and waitresses than they would be to the person in charge. Position and authority, per se, didn’t warrant respect; there had to be more to it. Whenever we went to a guesthouse, my mum and dad’s manners and respect for the people waiting on us was immense. There was none of that horrible inverted snobbery that remains so prevalent and was so hugely impactful on me as a child. I loved them so much because they could always put themselves in the position of somebody else. They treated people equally and I’ve always tried to do the same in a job that is full of levels of politicking and power-gaming.
At school, however, my considered manners backfired. All I wanted was to be one of the lads, but as head boy all the lads saw was a proxy teacher. The school, on the other hand, saw a child who was definitely not a rebel, was well turned out, had a bit of presence, and tended to be good at sports. I had a leg in both camps and a foot in neither.
Unfortunately, if the school hoped to gain any educational kudos from my position, they were to be very sadly disappointed. There was one area in which I excelled and that was English. At everything else, I was just dreadful. I felt it was a huge embarrassment to the school that the head boy was in the lowest set for maths, in fact the lowest set for pretty much everything. My head boy duties were suitably undemanding. Occasionally, I would have to speak in assembly, otherwise it was just giving out registers and the like. Even then I was lazy and let the deputy head boy do all the work. I should have been sacked and think the only reason the school didn’t wield the axe was because of the embarrassment. Seemingly nothing could get me deposed, not even getting drunk on a school trip to Haworth to see the Bronte sisters’ house. The headmaster went wild and carpeted me for it, but still I carried on in the position. How I held on to that job I’ll never know. There’d be one or two other occasions where I’d think the same thing down the years.
I got seriously lost at secondary school. My reports weren’t great but there was a subtlety in my mum and dad’s reaction. They didn’t come down too hard on m
e because their perception of themselves was that they too weren’t intellectual, so for them to give me a hard time would, in their heads, be hypocritical. I never had the big ‘If I’d had the education you’d had . . .’ speech. They laid off me, a generosity that was misplaced. I could have done so much more but only wanted to do the things I was interested in: English, drama and sport. I loved drama, but we only did it until the second year and then it disappeared from the curriculum. I only reengaged with it when I went to Eccles Sixth Form College to re-sit my O-Levels, which again I failed. I was looning around the communal area one day when the drama teacher pulled me up – ‘If you’re doing that, you might as well do it in here.’ At which point, I entered the drama department. It wasn’t the huge moment of realisation it would be if I was in a US teen drama. I didn’t suddenly ‘find myself’ and see a path laid out before me. But I did find myself in Lock Up Your Daughters and met Pooky Quesnel, one of my greatest friends, with whom I now co-star in The A Word. She would talk to me about Stanislavsky and Brecht, at which point I’d become very self-conscious and we’d end up having a row.
I moved on to a two-year drama foundation course at Salford College of Technology. My early forays into the subject at Eccles had made me realise that with acting I could show off and use my physicality. The course was based at the Adelphi Building on Peru Street, a huge white stone structure, converted from a chemical factory, now knocked down. My mum told me on her first day of work, when she was fourteen, her initial task was to deliver a message to that same building. Every day when I walked up the steps I thought of my mum as a girl doing exactly the same.
Escaping from secondary school, first to Eccles College and then on to Salford Tech, meant entering a more reasoned environment where you didn’t get battered for expressing yourself. I felt I could throw off the shackles and become more the person I wanted to be. The teachers only added to this newfound sense of discovery and freedom. They had no inhibitions and spoke openly, honestly and passionately about their fields of expertise. I still remember vividly an English A-Level teacher, Ms Sorah, saying to a classful of Salford students, ‘I think there’s something very moving about the sight of a ploughed field.’ I know in isolation that sound pretentious, but I’ve never forgotten it – an observation about nature I would never have considered had I not gone to Salford Tech. Ms Sorah, so passionate, opened my eyes to poetry, its beauty and brutality, and its ability to educate and move. She was central in particular to my fascination with the war poets, which continues to this day. She so brilliantly revealed the depth of message, the disillusionment, the journey from valour to desperation.
I Love the Bones of You Page 4