Autobiography (2 page)

Nannie remains of Moore Street in Dublin, of astounding memory and continual disgust; her past as the leader of Dublin’s first all-female Queen’s Theater Revue had been unexpectedly nipped in the bud by the unexpected bud of Dorothy, followed by Elizabeth (my mother), Patricia, Ernest, Anthony, Jeane, Mary and Rita, and from thereon self-deflationary battles with life’s important truths, plus the usual Irish companions of shame, guilt, persecution and accusation. Nannie is afraid, and appears older than her years. Her every hysterical observation is steeped in the fear of God (a God who will not save her at the end of it all), and although her life is entangled in love, Nannie doesn’t know it, or cannot show it. Nannie is married to Esty, but she does not like men, or indeed any gooey evaluation of family life. At Christmas dinners Nannie will eat last, setting a place for everyone but herself, yet she will rise first to clear away and wash the dishes. Most fun when most grave, she will play the upright piano for anyone who will listen, her too-long finger nails clipping across mock-ivory until Uncle Liam inevitably tells her that she is murdering music, and thus Nannie will step aside as
Pretty flamingo
by Manfred Mann lashes the lino. A few years older than Jackie and I, Rita screams at music, and every male singer is ‘gorgeous’. Family life is chaotic and full of primitive drama as everything is felt intensely. There are no electronic distractions and all human endeavor takes place face to face. We are stuck in the wettest part of England in a society where we are not needed, yet we are washed and warm and well fed. The dull-yellow street lights have none of the eye-crossing dazzle of modern illuminating flash. We are fascinated by shop fronts that remain lit up into the night, often the only form of light for miles. The switching on of street lights each evening tells us all that we ought to be at home, or heading there, for where else? There is nowhere else to be. It is the Nelson Riddle intro of
The Untouchables
that orders me directly off to bed each night, and I wonder what it is about the frozen Eliot Ness that I shouldn’t see. The clumsily cut transition of
The Wolf Man
from sane to savage sends me darting with fright, and
Dr Who
, with its lasered x-ray synth swirl, disturbs me just as much. The happy bubble of television shows me the earth and its fragile moments of fantasy, and I, with all the petulance of the pipe dream, am allowed to engage.
In childhood and early youth there is no such thing as 24-hour television, and the two and a half available channels play the national anthem at each evening’s
Close Down
, which shows a ticking clock – as if ushering us up to bed with the burden of our own thoughts. Television is the only place where we banish ourselves from the community of the living, and where the superficial provides more virtue than the actual. We watch in order to find ecstasy, for at last we can survive in someone else. Our conclusions are our own, yet the landscape is infinite. Cross-legged, I sit on the floor and lean into the screen for
Champion the W
onder Horse
,
where a boy and his horse find sunlit adventure in an America that permits everything, just as
Skippy
introduces us all to Australia, where a boy and his pet kangaroo find similar sunlit adventures in a world where adults are understanding and have time to explain and to sympathize with the peach-cheeked kids – none of whom resemble anyone that I know. Quicksand and rattle-snakes are passing dangers, but both boys in these shows never remain at the same point for very long, and are rarely discontented or fenced in. Where, I wonder, can such stylishly fitted jeans be found? Not in Manchester Play Streets, where children can only encumber. Where are there such boys who are fully and entirely content with simply
being
? Not in Manchester by-streets, which are exactly what they sound like. Schoolboy misadventures with
Just Jimmy
are the British version of boy-prank subterfuge, as Jimmy Clitheroe apple-raids, catapults, conkers and water-pistols his mother’s nerves to blustering fussiness. These, though, are giant leaps on from the slapstick of
Mr Pastry’s Pet Shop
,
Deputy Dawg
, and the pop puppet piglets
Pinky and Perky. Fireball XL5
calls my bluff, and each day brings five full minutes of
Captain Pugwash
, where paper characters shift across a screen of painted backgrounds, and where only left-to-right eye movements signify reactions aboard the sea-faring Black Pig. The French
Belle and Sebastia
n
once again shows the world beyond England as a better place for kids, and I am already ripe for disappearance. Funniest of all is
Batman
, so glamorous against our homegrown
Ask the Family
stodge or
Candid Camera
humiliations. Television is black and white, so therefore life itself is black and white. Gasps of color can be found only at the Odeon, the Gaumont, the New Oxford, the Trocadero or the Imperial, where the cinema screen gives you the hope of other people’s happiness. Television flickers and fleets, and must be watched closely lest what you see is never seen again. Whatever you see you will never forget. I know so little compared to Canada’s
The Forest Rangers
, whose lead boy is unleashed and free and stylish in his manly kindness. I sit on a stool by the fire and I watch the kids called the Forest Rangers who moralize and are never accountable, and who are too self-assured to ever think cruel thoughts. They heartily shake the hands of adults – something I have never once been called upon to do. Turn and look at me – in affectionate childhood distress, the last in the asylum, by a frosty Manchester fire. Could there be hope?
Animal Magic
offers none at all, and conjuror David Nixon smiles an honest half-smile.
Orlando
is played by Sam Kydd, a boat-builder on London’s docklands where kids run wild and are given credit for being funny.
It’s a Knockout
offers international games in madcap costumes, and
Honey Lane
is the damp bed-sit drama of East End market traders – our squatty England against America’s
The Big Valley
, where, even in the Old West of 1870, Victoria Barkley has no trouble kitting herself out in Christian Dior. An annual flash of glamor is the
Eurovision Song Contest
,
whose voting system is heart-stopping, as is the Grand National turf accountant’s dream of
Miss World
, as all of England places their bets on the beauty of young women whose full human potential is limited to one frozen expression; their bodies are for others, but not for themselves. Live from the Lyceum Ballroom (could I possibly know that, several lifetimes hence, I would one day become a someone on that very stage?),
Miss World
is unmissable high drama, a spectacle of heaven in Eva Reuber-Staier (Miss Austria 1969), and Marjorie Wallace (Miss USA 1973), never-to-be-forgotten world rulers. Breathing lulls throughout
Miss World
transmissions as British families ram into chocolate-strewn settees for a genuine glimmer of glamor, where cabaret battles the convent as the finalists huddle together backstage awaiting the announcement of the juicy winner in a severed condition of meaningless tragedy. The seconds prior to this announcement cause wet heaps of tension throughout Britain. It is magnificent, and its results are the talk of the entire country. In telly-land,
Miss World
and the
Eurovision Song Contest
are the highlights of each passing year, not only because they are competitions, but because we who know so little are allowed a view of the greater world. I recall Miss Brazil in 1970 waving at the camera as she walked into the final, and it was she alone who made me wonder about Brazil. I recall Spain beating the United Kingdom by one vote in the dying seconds of the very last count in the
Eurovision Song Contest
of 1968, and thus I wondered about Spain – my jotter on my knee, my own private scoring system profoundly at odds with the final result. There is no such thing as
Mr World
,
perversely enough
.

Little Big Time
with Freddie Garrity shows kids in a pop-opera fizz, and slaps us all back to where we live and how we live. The wretched kids who sing on
Opportunity Knocks
make my heart bulge with jealous rage, and I know I must molder in silence for many tears to come.
Tarzan
is Ron Ely, a dimple-smile of warmth from a man who lives without electricity and sanitation, with a chest broad enough to safely land a 747 on. Tarzan is a far cry from
Torchy the Battery Boy
, but he emphasized once again that all action and adventure with moments of meaning happen in a place called elsewhere, and never in the sad soil of Manchester. James Darren wears the same sweater in every episode of
The Time Tunnel
,
but
he’s the one for me to be, and it is he I shall be when bedtime casts out all light.
Thunderbirds
are an international rescue service operating from a private Pacific island, where doll-brothers Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon and John are anything but problem kids. How could a boy possibly be named Virgil? Thunderbirds launch their space and sea crafts with a shout of
‘F. A. B.!’
and their fearless London Agent is Lady Penelope. They are, of course, animated puppets, yet they are as real as I am. But how real am I? The introduction for supersub
Stingray
warns how
‘anything can happen in the next half hour’
, and, of course, it usually does. Troy Tempest and his partner Phones battle the evil Aquaphibians – terror fish who menace the oceans. Marina is a mute girl from an undersea world who swims her way through the seductive opening sequence making even the misfortune of muteness seem well worth having.
Mystery and Imagination
is
sixty foggy minutes of rattling drama so unsettling that I can sleep only with the bedroom door open wide to the landing light – the light! the light! the light! – my heart’s lighthouse.

My sister and I would play every day in the attic with great blocks of chalk and strips of colored Plasticine. Mother is a critical guide, and Dad is playful although fist-ready with the outside world.

He is constantly called upon when family feuds demand the physical, and he is always there and always unafraid in the days when physicality ironed matters smoothly, and recipients backed down without offence. Often the scrapper spirit is thought crude, but it solves the problem when there is no one else to protect. Mother is Mother, and never Mum (or the ghastly Manchester ‘Mam’); she is glamorous foremost, and then she is other things. Dad plays amateur-league football and enjoys a laugh, whereas Mother does neither, yet her glamor stops traffic whenever she walks me to school. Wolf-whistles follow us as we walk through Hulme, past the fastidious little BBC where Billy Fury and the Beatles have played, and past the Hulme Hippodrome where Mother will work for a while – a hall of theater cocktails and glamorous speculations. The new Hulme Library is where Jackie and I prowl each day once St Wilfrid’s pulley raises its drawbridge, and books transport the mind until Mother appears to cart us homewards. Around the flashy library, the cobbled streets of terraced houses are dark cabins with their lights out, with windows like eyes facing downwards, awaiting the chop.
Asphalt, dust and diesel fuel wrap around the dismal Victorian grandeur, for someone in a distant place has decided that this close-knit community must be dispersed, and that the wishes of the hard-working elderly, who would much rather remain where they have always been, must be ignored. With all of its consequences, redevelopment has its cold and set way through Bold Street and Preston Street, and all the way to Royce Road where perilous St Wilfrid’s shall not be moved. Bonsal Close and Burchill Close are both encroaching, and Hulme is set to be re-made with curved Bath-style crescents, the like of which we puddle-doused pygmies are certain to enjoy. I approach school each day with renewed fear, over the asphalt, treading underfoot the flattened remains of people’s lives, and bigger and blacker the school edifice rises above its bludgeoned parish like a rat refusing to die. We small kids see no warm lights to welcome, and no hope in the literal darkness. The flashy new maisonettes that elbow their way across Hulme are tatty and stained within their first year. Winding our way around them, we are scuttled off to Leaf Street Public Baths, so thankless and cold and pitifully cheap; the chlorinated stench turning the stomach. It is here we shall be taught how to swim – in ice-cold water where shadowy old Manchester once allowed its street-traders a sanitary dip in a slipper bath, or use of its crack-tiled showers. Now lifted out of humiliation by the Manchester Education Committee, the authoritarian and patronizing attitude frightens all of the children, who see the experience as excessively destitute. Leaf Street Baths opened in 1860 as the first public baths in England to house a Turkish bath. Its iron columns and exposed drainpipes dripping with condensation proved fully resistant to heavy bombing in 1941, and its 75-foot pool and public wash house scrubbed and soothed the Hulme poor until 1976, when, surrounded by sunless derelict streets, there were no longer any rain-sodden locals to take the icy plunge, and the tired doors bolted their last. At Trafford Park Baths I had gone to watch my father swim. Whilst cheering from the sides, I am pushed into the deep end by a brutally sallow teenage boy, whom my father then neatly chinned. I was small and I couldn’t swim, and the panicked roll to the corn-plastered depths terrified me for years after. This ringing hum of panic returned at Leaf Street Baths on our induction day, and I refused to jump into the pool. Ever-present Miss Dudley made no effort to understand the secret agony of a troubled child, and I was lifted up and thrown into the water in an act that, these days, would count as extreme physical and psychological assault. 1960s working-class education remained in 1930s desolation. In the great public buildings of Lancashire there were few rights for children, and there was thought to be no need to protect children against violence or assault from educators since such things were not thought likely to take place, and human history moves along.

The industrial city has a teeming imagination, and Manchester was rife with what were known as tramps. Of these, too, most small children were frightened. The tramps were always men, usually in de-mob suits, no longer required as World War Two cannon-fodder, they have survived the manic eccentricities of Churchill and Hitler and are now untreated sewage of the urban dark, throwing strange shadows in city squares. They always approach children and they always ask for money, their faces discolored with dirt and their clothes brewing with meth-stench. In the midst of their wretchedness it is said that such tramps are happy only in the company of men, and in seeking such an impossible domestic arrangement they gather with their like under battered roofs in deep cellars, huddled around low fires, awaiting the rise of the bolt on the bath
-house door. It is said that tramps are allowed use of Leaf Street Baths, where I and others float in dismal dignity. Many children cry because the tiles beneath their feet are so cold and pockmarked with stains, and my experience of St Wilfrid’s is sealed as a secret agony. There is no chirpy friskiness as we wind our way back along Jackson Crescent, Miss Dudley’s pale frown a map of lovelessness. As each member of the family leaves the school for standardized secondary placings – Jeane first, and then Mary, then Rita, followed by Jackie – I am the last of the flock, further alone in an area now bereft of its narrow and once-crowded streets, and stripped of its maze of illuminated corner-shops. Dark crimes return to a wasteland where there is now no street lighting since there are now no streets. There is no street traffic, and the hum of Stretford Road is distant. It has all been wiped away, and the church once pressed upon by houses now looks like a pathetic creature of pointless endurance. The
Three Legs o’ Man
and the
Unicorn
call in the last of the old crowd, who will tell you that life was so much better when things were slightly worse. There is a sense that something terrible has happened to this district even though they of scant resources welcome the promise of luxury – miles away from the knots of houses and narrow passageways of old. See the slums and the tramps and read of murdered children – beyond, where the bleak moor lies. An ultraviolet magnetic shock goes through the blood as the parents of the missing children over-hope. A swarm of misery grips mid-60s Manchester as Hindley and Brady raise their faces to the camera and become known to us all; nineteenth-century street life right here and now, with 1970 but a spit away. It is factual Hindley and Brady, and not our spirited Lake poets or cozy tram-trammeled novelists, who supply the unspoken and who take the travelling mind further than it ever ought to have gone, sealing modern Manchester as a place of Dickensian drear. Of Hindley and Brady there would be nothing to give you heart in their complicity, as children of the poor,
who had lived short and shaky lives, were led away to their tortured deaths, and the social landscape of Manchester warps forever with further reason to cry. Tormentedly, everyone appears to know someone who knew Myra Hindley, and we are forced to accept a new truth; that a woman can be just as cruel and dehumanized as a man, and that all safety is an illusion. Nannie rails against Hindley and Brady with a hatred skirting terror, and our thunderclouds part only for the obsessive details of football results and the success stories of our world-famous local teams. Arbitrarily illiterate, football players remained in the stuckness of their own dull social units until George Best spoke and teased and joked and made sense. Best was clever and witty, and he had found a variety of ways to make his life glamorous. The old mold of the at-home regular fellow smashed forever as Best diversified the image of the football player, now suddenly capricious and disorderly but led by no one. Demonstrating the life of success, Best is of course penalized for enjoying too much, yet he is a revolution effecting overwhelming change on how sport is viewed because he is blatantly contemptuous of the press and of governing sporting associations whilst also, incidentally, being an extraordinary player. Catch him if you can. Conventionalized noblesse oblige such as Bobby Charlton would show disapproval of Best because Best is the shocking new against Charlton’s 1950s pipe-smoking discipline. It is the physical and facial glamor of George Best that gains him so much love and hate, for everybody wants what he has. My father takes me to see George Best play at Old Trafford, and as I see the apocalyptic disturber of the peace swirl across the pitch, I faint. I am eight years old. Squinting in the sun, it is all too much for me, and I remember my father’s rasp as he dragged my twisted body through the crowd and out into the street, causing him to miss the rest of the match. Another form of church, football was all that stood between earth and God. Mike Summerbee’s central Manchester boutique was destiny fulfilled, and George Best’s space-ship house in Bramhall attracts more visitors than Lourdes.
But I?
Am I to be saved? And, if so, for what reason?

Watches and clocks are set to mark the sound and vision of ice-cream vans, whether Gerrards or Mr Whippy. This is still the old and weathered Manchester where people carry deep bowls to ice-cream vans, and load them with scoops, or carry dinner-plates to fish and chip shops where their supper is dumped onto their own trusted china which is then covered by a tea-towel for the walk home. All that you consider hip and happening will also tumble into nostalgia just at that moment when you finally come to realize where everything is, and how things ought to be. It is a race to the grave.

Nannie drops a knife and shouts
‘Man to the door!’
– a somber and fearful predicament in a family and house where men usually represent trouble. 1967’s major investments are
Simon Smith and his amazing dancing bear
by Alan Price (who sings ‘well excepted everywhere’, which surely ought to be ‘well accepted everywhere’),
Peek-a-b
oo
by the New Vaudeville Band,
Bernadette
by the Four Tops.
Everything I am
by Plastic Penny has the line ‘got my feet on the ground|you’ve found some good in me’, and the sad lilt jabs. I am fascinated by
I’ve b
een a bad, bad boy
by Paul Jones, because it is so loud and so strange, and there it is at number 6 in the charts, hooray. These small black discs are the first things that are truly mine; my choice, paid for with my own scraps of cash, reflecting my own stubbornness.
In a dream, I watch them spin and spin, calling out, pointing
the way. These are the days when very few people collect records, so therefore whatever they might buy defines their secret heart. Everyone scratches their name on the paper labels because in the event of the discs being brought to parties it’s important that the owner leaves with whatever they arrived with. This becomes irrelevant in the 1970s when the value of records is beginning to be understood, and any defacing will reduce trading prices. In the 60s, of course, it doesn’t occur to anyone that they might one day sell their collection, for who would want such throwaway items?

In our abyss, Jeane falls in love with Johnny, who is teenaged and tattooed and dispossessed. Johnny governs Jeane’s heart, and the family becomes a battleground since Johnny swells disfavor within everyone. The tornado of Nannie’s life erupts further as Johnny clambers up the drainpipe to bang on Jeane’s bedroom window; Dad chases Johnny and beats him up; Johnny laughs it off with Hulmerist ferocity; Jeane becomes pregnant with the first of three; Nannie’s house is broken into – filchings are sorrows, and buckets in the front parlor collect the rain. One bright Saturday afternoon I patrol Alexandra Road with Nannie and Jeane, and here comes Johnny in the oncoming traffic, hands in pockets, tattooed neck and Rat Pack sunglasses. He swiftly uppercuts Jeane as he zaps past, Nannie falls into a mad Irish panic, and we race backwards towards Loreto Convent where, for reasons unknown to me, Nannie bangs on the door of the nuns’ lodge begging holy assistance. We are within their high, spiked walls, and a slum nun greets us but blocks the doorway with her overfed bulk. Nannie pleads for refuge, pointing to Jeane’s battered face, and fearing the threat of immediate stabbing. Imprisoned in her own clothes, the nun knows only the world of make-believe, and she slams the door in our faces. In fear and trembling, Nannie leads us back home through a maze of mean and narrow streets, paralyzed by the thought that Johnny might strike again. But he doesn’t, and instead, Jeane reunites herself with the lover who punched her face in public, but who also has the power to make her happy.

1965 had brought Grandad’s death, so suddenly at 52. In the dark November air his eyes close for the last time, his still body discovered by Jeane. Grandad is called Esty and is loved by all, now as then. Mother and Ernie attend the mortuary to identify Grandad, and as they leave, Ernie says
‘Well, if I look that good when I go,’
and six weeks later, Ernie is dead at 24. Leaving his office job around the Tib Street area, Ernie heads for home only to collapse and die in the street, and we are all lost, faith denied, but with no one groping for an answer. The deaths of Grandad and Ernie are so keenly felt that no one can mention their names for the ten years that follow.