I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  War poetry was my way into art in every sense, in particular Siegfried Sassoon’s journey of conscience from a man deeply taken with the notion of spilling blood for king and country to an absolute abhorrence of the hideous slaughter he saw on the Front. There’s a poem of Sassoon’s that was deeply influential on me and what I thought theatre, poetry – the arts in general – could be. Sassoon came back from the Front and saw for himself the asinine approach to the war as represented in a weak and sickly West End review.

  In his disgust and despair at this gross misrepresentation of war, Sassoon, in his poem ‘Blighters’, visualised tanks crushing the audience. He wanted to pull back the curtains on the reality, expose this contrivance as a sham, an insult to those lying dead in the mud.

  Sassoon, Robert Graves too, opened my eyes to what theatre, poetry, could be. Rather than distant, the preserve of an elite, they could be used to fight a battle. Ms Sorah woke me up to that fact and I felt excited, emboldened, by it.

  Twenty years later, I would find myself back on that self-same spot filming for The Second Coming. Right there, on the Croft outside the Adelphi Building, as Steven Baxter, the second coming of the drama’s title, I would preach the New Testament. Strange doesn’t quite describe the feeling I had that day. When I walked into Salford Tech, I never imagined I would become an actor. To be a lead in a landmark TV drama would, in my head, have required a miracle.

  4

  A VISION DENIED

  I was a 52-year-old man lying on my old bed in my old bedroom in my old house, the semi-detached in Little Hulton where I grew up. I’d been there for weeks, just me, my mum, and massive doses of medication.

  One day she pushed open the door – ‘I’d like to go and see where we scattered your dad’s ashes.’

  She was trying to get me to do something, anything. I was obviously in a very bad way.

  I wanted to say no.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll drive you.’

  We were on a bridge above a river near Clitheroe. These acres had meant so much to Dad. During the Second World War, the nearby Whiteacre Boys’ Camp was home to dozens of children evacuated from Salford. Dad was one of them. Overseen by the headmaster, Mr Targett, Whiteacre, opened in 1940 by Salford Education Committee, was run along the lines of a public school – dormitories, sport and a considered in-depth education – but, instead of a privileged elite, with working-class kids from the back streets of the north-west. It was part evacuee refuge, part social experiment.

  Dad would come alive when he reminisced about Whiteacre. Suddenly, there he was, Ronnie Ecc, in the middle of the countryside, a raggy-arsed kid from Salford in beautiful rural Lancashire. He’d talk about walking mile after mile, drinking in the freshness of the air, plunging into rivers. He was captain of all the teams – rugby, football, the lot – and head of his dorm. In that environment, Ronnie was recognised as a bright and sporting child. He was given responsibility and respect. The teachers perceived him as a leader, the result being he got an improved sense of himself.

  Previously, Dad had been struggling for visibility in a big family in Salford. Peter, his eldest brother, was the most handsome, and because he was the firstborn, he always had a special place. Then Jack came along. A 12lb baby, he was mutilated, disfigured and blinded at birth by the mauling and wrestling of the forceps. He had a perfect half division facial birthmark – the same, I would one day discover, as that of De Flores in the Jacobean drama The Changeling. Ironically, considering his size at birth, Jack would end up smaller than his siblings, and clearly, because of the consequences of his birth, he too had a special place. Then my dad came along – plain, unremarkable Ronald, nothing of note there – before my Uncle Roy appeared, very fair and shortsighted. Sheila was the only sister, and then twenty-five years later came Paul. Dad was very much lost in the morass of the middle. A baby raised in the Depression. Then, when the world emerged blinking from those depths, it was straight into war.

  Throughout their long time together, Dad would tell Mum that Whiteacre was the happiest time of his life.

  ‘Wasn’t that hard to hear?’ I once asked her.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘I understood it. He was loved, but there was a lot of them in his family, and Salford was rough.’ She wasn’t wrong. Money was thin on the ground, employment hard to find, food scarce, and homes bare. People’s health suffered accordingly, and children often suffered from lice infestations and other hygiene-related diseases. The 1930s and ’40s in Salford were akin to Victorian times.

  For Ronnie, Whiteacre had an incredibly intense impact. The focus was on him – and he excelled. This ordinary child, once ignored, blossomed. He read prolifically. He wasn’t bookish as such, he wasn’t a Herbert, but he liked stories. Again, maybe it was the middle child thing. He was slightly overlooked so he found his stimulation elsewhere, including acting, featuring in school plays. Years later, the lines would still come rolling out. ‘Cor, stone the crows,’ he’d mimic a cockney accent, ‘if it ain’t Charlie. Move another inch and I’ll blow your bleeding head orf.’

  He boxed, he told me, earning the nickname Will-o’-the-wisp Eccleston. Forced into the ring with his best mate, he refused to take part – until his pal landed a blow. Dad punched him back, hard, and won the fight.

  Not only was this working-class lad from Salford building a sense of self-worth, but he was actually listened to. At one point, he came home to Irlams o’ th’ Height, looked in a sports shop window, and spotted a billiard table. He went back to Whiteacre and told one of the teachers. In any other school, he’d have been laughed at or told bluntly to shut up, but at Whiteacre the teacher actually wanted to know more – ‘Where was it?’ He told them, and Whiteacre bought it. They put it in one of the dormitories. My dad always told that story, pre- and post-dementia – Whiteacre and Duncan Edwards were touchstones untrammelled by the illness – with such a sense of pride because it was his suggestion. He was listened to. He witnessed the manifestation of an idea he’d had. He loved that sense of comradeship, joint ownership, between him and the teachers.

  I would listen to these tales at the knee, loving the vitality they brought out in him. Vocally, and in his eyes, he’d be transformed. Everything about him shone, sung, as if physically he was back there and he’d taken my mum and me too. I fell in love with his love for Whiteacre. To see that passion in him was quite remarkable. When I think of him talking about Whiteacre, I still feel the self-same deep emotion it brought out in me.

  It was more than talk. When I was a kid, Dad would take me and Mum to Clitheroe.

  ‘We used to stand on them stones there’, he’d point out, ‘and jump in the river. We swam in the water. Can you imagine that?’

  Mum was already familiar with the spot – Dad had taken her numerous times during their courting days, having told her about the area and what it meant to him. He had a love affair not just with her, but with that place and time. My mum and that period of his life merged and Elsie became very important to Dad in the same way as Whiteacre.

  That closeness was reciprocated. From very early on in the relationship, Mum knew my dad. Really knew him. Not surprising really – emotionally, Mum is very generous and giving, empathetic, and acutely observant. I expect at that point Dad would have been giving it a lot of the Salford swagger, but I imagine what a woman would really be interested in would be ‘Does he go to work? Does he turn up on time? Has he got manners?’ Only then would she look for the tenderness, and that’s where Clitheroe came in. When Ronnie talked about Whiteacre, Elsie would see the little boy in him, the man who, before he’d fallen in love with her, had fallen in love with nature.

  For a lad from Salford, to be pitched from an intense urban experience to an intense rural one must have been like taking LSD. Dad wasn’t walking past factories; he was walking past byres and barns. He wasn’t staring into the dead murk of the Irwell; he was peering into crystal-clear streams. The air wasn’t fouled by chimneys; it was a sweet confection delivered
fresh from the trees. Trees – something else he loved for the rest of his life, to him the purist expression of life a person could ever see.

  And it didn’t stop there. Ronnie wasn’t sleeping in a house any more; he was living in a dormitory. He wasn’t held back by class; he was on an equal footing. He wasn’t lost; he was found. Ronnie flew. It took a war to make it happen, but he flew.

  He wasn’t the only one. After the war, the British Medical Journal published research comparing the health and well-being of boys evacuated to Whiteacre to those who remained in Salford – the social experiment. The Whiteacre boys were found to be significantly ahead, not just academically, but in terms of weight, growth and nutrition. No doubt about it, the expectations of these children were raised far higher than had they stayed in Salford. I expect that the teachers were much more relaxed and stimulated in that environment as well. They too, after all, were living in nature, living in peace, far removed from the social injustice and deprivation of the city.

  Dad always maintained a little piece of Whiteacre in his head through his enduring affection for reading and words. Working at the Colgate-Palmolive factory, he won a dictionary in a stacker truck competition. No surprises there – he used to say to me, ‘Chris, I can make a stacker truck talk.’ He’d jump on board and off he’d go, pushing this lever, pulling that. If Dad hadn’t been best that day there’s every chance I wouldn’t be writing this book now. Another huge step towards becoming an actor came from him winning that dictionary, because through it my dad transferred his absolute astonishment and love of words to me.

  ‘Association,’ he’d announce. ‘What do you think that means?’ And then he’d read out the whole definition. ‘All those meanings for one word – it’s marvellous that, isn’t it? Marvellous!’ His childlike wonder made it a moment of intimacy. This was the man I wanted to be part of.

  ‘Scholarly,’ he’d ponder. ‘A gentleman and a scholar.’ It was one of his favourite phrases. ‘What do you think that means?’

  ‘I’ll give you that one, pal,’ he’d say if I got one of his questions right. ‘Where did you get that from?’

  He’d also have his pristine Manchester Evening News. My dad was a great man of papers. He’d get three on a Sunday – the Express, Mirror and People – while in the week he read the Mirror, until it became illiterate and, like many working-class people, he swapped to the Daily Mail, also taking the Mail on Sunday. He also had the Pink football paper on a Saturday evening. Always a paper. He never had them delivered, though – you had to pay more for that. He loved the whole business of ‘I’m going for my paper now’. I’m the same; I love going for the papers, another bond that lives on, perpetuated also by memories of the crosswords we’d share, especially the giant ones at Christmas. Crosswords were our thing. They were how we expressed our love.

  Dad read novels too – Jack Higgins, Desmond Bagguley, and then he alighted on the early Robert Ludlum thrillers. With Ludlum there was an existential element that took his enjoyment to another level. He loved John le Carré for the same reason and obsessed over Alec Guinness’s TV portrayal of George Smiley. Books, dictionaries and newspapers surrounded his throne. This was Dad.

  He and Mum also passed on their love of nature. Mum’s family had a little hut on Pickmere Lake, near Knutsford, where, as a girl, she would occasionally be taken, so she shared Dad’s nostalgia for adventure-filled childhood days. Their memories bonded them, and when it came to their own children they wanted to recreate that same deep attachment with the natural world. No way were they ever going to use their fortnight’s holiday to go to Blackpool. They wanted to instil the values, not of the amusement arcade, but of open fields, big skies and unpolluted air. Blackpool wasn’t unfamiliar to me. My auntie Sheila had The Alhambra guesthouse on Palatine Road and Nana had The Sunset on Hornby Road. But I was so influenced by my mum and dad that I was a little bit snobbish about the town. I sensed what they were thinking – So this is what the working class aspire to, is it? Well, not this working class. We aspire to be in nature. They’re not taking our money through those slot machines. We’re not wasting money like that. When my mum and dad took us on holiday, they were telling us that life should be led according to simple values – people, the natural world, not possessions.

  We’d go to either Cornwall or Devon and stay on farms – I do the same now with my own children. More often than not I would get headaches on the first day because the air was so fresh. We weren’t far from the seaside, but we didn’t want to go to the beach; we wanted to stay on the farm and help the farmer. I’d get the cows in for milking or collect the eggs from the chickens. It wasn’t just the fluffy stuff; I saw the reality. I went with the farmer once when he took a cow to the abattoir. It was hung upside down and a short metal bolt put through its head. It didn’t seem odd or callous; it was simply part of the experience. Stay on a farm and you see it through the farmer’s eyes. Another time we drove all over killing rabbits infected with myxomatosis. The farmer would shoot them and then it was our job to get out and finish them off. Some kids, tougher kids than me, couldn’t do it, but I’d pick them up by the ears and chop the neck. I didn’t enjoy it, but I had the mentality of not wanting to be embarrassed by looking soft, so I role-played it. In my head, it wasn’t me doing the chopping, it was the farmer.

  My dad was a man at his best on holiday. He would always make a big effort to get friendly with the farmer who generally wouldn’t be hugely enamoured at his house being used as a B&B, but, like any working man, needed the money. The farmer would initially keep his distance, but my dad, very cleverly, would charm him. He could see there was tension, that this was a working man, and would approach him as such. Inevitably, they’d end up getting on, which also offered some welcome male time for my dad.

  As the days passed, Dad would leave work behind and slowly relax. The only part of life at home he brought with him was his love of papers. In every picture of him on holiday, he’s got a paper in his hand. More than anything he wanted to spend time with my mum. He really loved her, really enjoyed her company.

  Years passed since Ron’s divorce from Whiteacre until one night the relationship was unexpectedly resumed. I was sat in the front room and my dad was reading his Manchester Evening News, back to front, as he did every night, when he sprang to life.

  ‘Elsie! There’s a thing here saying, “Anybody who attended Whiteacre School, and is interested in attending a reunion, please ring this number.” ’

  He was glowing. ‘Ring it, Ronnie!’ she urged.

  Knowing what a big deal Whiteacre was to him, we stood next to him as he picked the phone up and dialled the number.

  ‘Hello, is that Mr Targett?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hello, sir. This is Ronald Eccleston.’

  We listened. Surely after all these years the headmaster wouldn’t remember.

  ‘Ah, Eccleston,’ he cried, ‘the footballer!’

  It was incredible. Like the decades had been reduced to but a few months.

  Dad loved those reunions, a reminder of such happy times, a life that had vanished as abruptly as it had begun when he returned to Salford, a city that, along with its own inherent deprivations, had now seen 2,000 homes destroyed or damaged beyond repair by the Luftwaffe while almost 30,000 more had suffered to a lesser degree.

  At that point, Dad was plunged back into the reality of a school that recognised him only as a mark on a register and dismissed, often with a violent hand – him and hundreds of others as a mere nuisance to be herded on their way to the factory gates. Even when he had dementia, Dad used to talk about a teacher called ‘Snuffy’ Johnson who repeatedly singled him out as if he had a chemical reaction to his presence. This horrendous individual hit Dad again and again. He terrified him through violence, and, years on, Dad would clearly recall the Dickensian detail of his wooden thumb.

  ‘Snuffy Johnson’, my dad would say, ‘was a bastard. If I could find where he’s buried, I’d dig him up and kick him a
ll round the cemetery.’ Or ‘cimitery’ as he said it.

  ‘Ronnie,’ my mum would berate him. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

  ‘I would,’ he’d continue. ‘He was a bastard. He hated me.’ It was said with a lot of force.

  Before he knew it, Dad was on the working-class conveyor belt. He had a milk round and then worked on the railways – he always said the best eggs and bacon he ever had were cooked on a shovel put in the firebox. He would tell me how women alongside the line would lift up their skirts and show the drivers and shovellers their knickers, and how in return they’d throw them some coal. He told that as a joke, but when you think what’s going on there it’s not quite so funny – poor people being reduced to flashing at passing trains, to humiliating themselves, in return for a basic necessity. He also used to tell me how on a Saturday afternoon they used to stop the train on a line that ran along the top of Bolton Wanderers’ Burnden Park ground and watch a bit of the game.