Autobiography (3 page)

Lying in hospital with a broken leg, Nannie is told that her second son has died, and as Mother had identified her father’s body, she then identified her brother’s body in the same mortuary six weeks later. Mother turns against the church as her father and her last surviving brother are lowered into the same grave in gravely unpleasant Southern Cemetery. Life is now beyond logic, and a new nightmare fleshes out against the commands of the church. Mother screams loudly at an immobilized priest, and all of our lives thus far are lost in the lap of memory. Manly in bearing, Ernie was my true uncle, my Mother’s favorite, and just three years her junior. In one photograph (because this is what people become), he cuts a warm figure as he holds up a picture of James Dean. Ernie would prophesize how he, like James Dean, would die at 24, which he did, in the year that his favorite song,
All over the world
by Françoise Hardy, crept into the charts. I shared my birth date of May 22nd with Ernie, a harmonica in a box scrawled with Ernie’s handwriting my eternal possession once he is no more. Throughout his short and angered life he ached, like most people, to find something of value to do, and he cursed Manchester, and he cursed England through mists of pain, and he cursed the Christian Brothers who had blackened his eyes once too often in the name of heavy-handed holiness. Ernie sank into the army for identity, but lost his, and returned home to Manchester, unhappily. Nannie’s first boy, Anthony, had a pitifully short Dublin life, slipping away after nine difficult months of exertion, buried unpleasantly at Mount Pleasant in a grave full of strangers (even in death another family might be willing to take you in). How do these things happen?
Was this 1712? In the 1990s we locate Anthony’s grave, neatly placed in a cemetery loaded with secrets, and I am convinced even now that he is not too deep to be rescued and raised to his parents’ plot in Manchester, but such meddling is fearfully dismissed by family members who can barely manage the truth of the horror as it stands, without lifting child-size coffins into the air. Nannie moves from Queen’s Square to a condemned house at 10 Trafalgar Square, a short walk just further along Augustus Street. The execution of Queen’s Square is delayed no longer, and our lives are flattened before our eyes – as if the local council couldn’t wait a minute longer for we pack rats to gather our trappings and transistors. During my final year at St Wilfrid’s I am called upon by Mr Coleman to accompany a boy named Patrick Keane to his home, twenty minutes away in darkened Duke Street. Patrick is ill and cannot be left to walk by himself. Once we arrive at the terraced house, so shadowed in somberness, Patrick lets himself in with his own key as he waves me away, smiling and fully cured of the sullen glop of St Wilfrid’s.

I return to school and Mr Coleman seeks me out for a full medical prognosis. I explain that Patrick is now home and seemed very well.
‘You!’
roars Mr Coleman.
‘Y
ou idiot!’
he swells, eyes frenzied with over-reaction,
‘and what if he collapses? Why did you leave him alone in that house?’
Mr Coleman’s punished face reveals the monster for all to see. I am eleven years old and had crossed many main roads and junctions to ease the journey to Duke Street, but in the fashion of the day, the fault of desertion was all mine, without my own safety being an issue. The duty forced upon me, and the rocketing hysteria of Mr Coleman, both answered a vital question, and I would never again assume that any figure of authority automatically held any intellectual distinction. I am unafraid.

Minus her husband and her son, Nannie settled into 10 Trafalgar Square even though the local council had already chalked it off as unfit for human habitation. Every house has a face, and the eyes of 10 Trafalgar Square were already closed. The square itself was not unattractive, and prior to the seething rot of 1968 it surely sheltered the faithful very pleasantly. Backing onto the lodging houses and breweries of Moss Lane, events piled up around the Trafalgar Square house – in which we all somehow lived, or passed through, as the family began to fray and snap. I would spend many nights sleeping at the foot of Nannie’s bed, the impossibly loud tick of her alarm clock preventing any rest, yet Nannie is gone to the world with a satisfied Embassy wheeze whistling in rhythm to the bedside clock, her night-light pointing the way to cough-sweets, holy water, milk of magnesia, and Germolene – the vital accoutrements for anticipated midnight peril.

On a driving jaunt to Liverpool with Dad at the wheel, we are smashed into by an amber-gambler, and passenger-seat Mary has her face shattered with glass. Seated nervously in Liverpool General, we hear Mary’s screams as stitches are forced into and pulled out of the left side of her face. Weeks later we are in a second crash as a blown tire forces the car to swirl and whirl across Wilbraham Road in Whalley Range, in a playful roustabout with death, leaving the car about-face in someone’s garden. The gentle householders of old take us in to sooth our nerves, whereas today’s indignation generation would pellet writs at us from upper windows.

The oldest of the Dwyer sisters is Dorothy, and she works in central Manchester and has a life. She is generous and vocational and dances whenever she can – making the first flutter to virtuous and green Stretford, where real air might be breathed. Number 17 Norwood Road is a house of distinction, leading to Edge Lane, so prim and unhurried all those years ago. Dorothy is closest to Nannie, being Nannie’s firstborn, but with so much clash and clamor passing through Trafalgar Square the shrillness never dies. Friday evening always brings Dorothy to Trafalgar Square, and never is she without an imaginative gift or goody bag that will amuse me for days. Teenaged Mary stands with the back of her legs to the open fire, balancing on the hearthstone, the fireguard folded away. Her blonde teased hair is part-beehive, and, as the second youngest, she, too, is led by music and makeup and the itch of life beyond. In the half-light, I follow Mary out of the square as she meets whomever it is she meets, and I do the same secret-
agent undercover work with Rita as she slips out at darkening 6
PM
to a youth club on Bangor Street, where the untamed restives smoke cigarettes and flirt their fractious proposals. Here, the local scruffs loiter to amuse themselves in youth club fashion, bursting with the secrets of yearning maturity and rough serenade. All Manchester boys are mad, and they shout, and they laugh loudly, and courtship is a question of aggression rather than gallantry. I am unwanted at the youth club – being far too yearling young, and Rita orders me home.
Luring me is the advent of a new crowd who have no connection to school, and who frighten and fascinate me in equal measure. Who is this gang, known only to Rita, who shout as they bolt into the blackness of sleeping Tamworth Street? I return to Trafalgar Square, to Nannie and the central focus of the television set, under which sits the cat with her litter of newborns. But already the houses on the square are being abandoned. With parlor-leaks and darting mice Nannie will hold on, fuming and fussing at the fractured lives of her six daughters, and cursing my mother for working and buying glamorous clothes. Nannie bricks together the traditional Christmas for all to gather and disagree. My sister and I head out to the Pot Shop and the Jubilee Shop, both crumbling and cluttered corner shops wheezing their last goodbyes to an indifferent world, their elderly and bluntly rude shopkeepers plagued and tormented by the lengthy time it takes my sister and I to methodically choose our sweets.

Rita now works at Seventh Avenue in Piccadilly and buys expensive Planters cashew nuts. Mary works at a Granada showroom, but is ready to leave it all behind. Crumlin summers of childhood are spent on Clonard Road, fagged out on the beach and dead beat by 5
PM
. Safe and wide, the dry streets of Crumlin are empty of cars, and the houses cackle with the droll of the extended family. Bustle and fluster pad out these Dublin days, but as each year passes my sister and I are less willing to leave Manchester. Ireland is our soaring past – ruddy and cheerful, yet somehow the past. My parents will never let it go, and it is not difficult to understand why. All around us the Irish deputation mourn the loss of the land, and how British liberality hobbles in comparison to the hearty warmth of Dublin’s outstretched arms. Dublin kids are active and animated, quick and streetwise, and always in force. A nearby sweet kiosk is operated by a man who is blind, and we watch in awe as his hands follow each request.

Dublin Catholics are spiritual but not saintly, faithful but not strict, godly but not exact. Devout and good, they are also loosely at large with a blunt and sincere grasp of what the human frame requires. I feel no pull towards the church, but I understand that there is nothing else. Catholicism has you tracked and trailed for life with an overwhelming sense of self-doubt, and every church churns with painful pews and mourners’ stalls. Jackie enlists at the harrowing Cardinal Vaughan School in Stretford, now that we have mobilized from Queen’s Square to Kings Road. Here in Stretford we are the young intruders against the settled late-middle-aged Mr and Mrs brigade – each gentle and smiling long-standing residents for whom the war was just yesterday. Firswood is lending libraries and parks in almost-posh Lancashire, each New Year’s Eve bringing swarms of neighbors to their garden gates to shake each other’s hands – well wishes and smiles as time rips at them in its march. In the background, Old Trafford factories hoot their salutes, for people were thankful to have made it through. Nannie remains back at Trafalgar Square, housing the homeless, sometimes Jeane, sometimes cousin Eileen Sullivan (who arrives unexpectedly and will then be discovered dead in Nannie’s back bedroom). Sometimes Jackie and I are the refugees, as Rita flits in and out with her secretive social whirl. There is only ever a sense of change and of slipping away, but never a sense of security or stability. Tomorrow is already a jigsaw. Nannie’s cousin John Joe Rahilly will arrive from Dublin and will anchor himself around the house in his irremovable heavy overcoat. He is another pleasant slice of yesteryear Dublin, a lifelong bachelor who will propose marriage to Nannie without regard to the ancestral bloodline. We had waved goodbye to Mary at Manchester Airport, a US emigrée in her nineteenth year, and to never again be a Manchester lass. We all cry uncontrollably as Mary’s flight is called – a loved branch hacked away.

As Nannie’s brood reduces, hers is suddenly only one of two houses occupied in Trafalgar Square, the rest all boarded up, their duty done. Even during the day we are surrounded by the dark. The back of the house leads across to a builder’s yard, where one Saturday afternoon a group of Moss Side boys are stoning a rat to its death. The rat is large and Manchester-tough and manages to crawl halfway up the wall of the builder’s yard, but the mob is relentless and suddenly the rat falls back on itself and surrenders to death in the rubble, whereupon the boys stroll off, itchy for the next amusement. Nannie is alarmed because, hearing a scuffle in the abandoned house next door, she has unwisely investigated and discovered a man standing naked before her – the sight of which delivers a knockout blow of senselessness, leaving Nannie tranquilized with gibberish for the rest of the day. Our lifeblood Alexandra Road is also now boarding itself up, so that we now rely exclusively on the gasping Off Licence – a beacon of bacon with the wonder of Wonderloaf. It is important never to walk by the forsaken houses lest a strong arm should pull you in and you become minced meat. When Nannie is offered a flat in Gorse Hill, it is Minnie, a mousy Victorian woman in her eighties who will now be the very last lone resident of Trafalgar Square.

I, of course, stand alone with Nannie as she says her goodbyes, and it is too much to bear as the small and shrunken Minnie waves us off from her cramped corner-house, to return within as the last lit lightbulb of life in this already forgotten corner, where she will climb the darkened stairway to rest her head – not from the whirring day, but from a lifetime now closing, all the madcap marriages and births of Trafalgar Square now gone, the swirl of life now meaningless in the friendless dark. The only tap running is hers, and the awaiting move is to a new flat that time or fatigue will scarcely allow her to enjoy as history overtakes her. It is with the wave that she gives on that day to Nannie and I that her light fades, and even though I hardly know her, I am in tears at the pitifully wizened figure giving a salute of good luck, all life spent, with nothing remaining but the brusque knock of a stranger intruding with instructions of where to go, how to sit, and how to die. Absurdly, Nannie has placed Blackie the cat in a brown paper shopping bag with string handles in readiness for the bus journey to Gorse Hill, which is possibly thirty minutes away. I am explaining to Nannie that this idea will not work, but she looks away each time I protest. On Cornbrook Street, Blackie leaps from the bag and tears her way back down the street in the direction of the junkpile scrap heap of written-off Trafalgar Square. I am, once again, fraught with shock, but Nannie marches on.
‘No!’
she says, ‘
leave her. Minnie will feed her.’
I know this is not true, and that nothing and no one will look after either Minnie or the cat.

Nannie’s cousin Jody Keating is a small huffing and puffing Irish woman of rasping tobacco-voice, who rolls in on a cloud of Embassy and reflects as only the Irish can in five parts curse and five parts prayer. It is kitchen-table mourning for time gone, and for people of hushed scandals half-forgotten. It is recognition that they, now, have shifted to the end of the queue, and are suddenly life’s trusted historians when once they were gadabout girls of slender means. The Sandymount of my mother’s birth, the Pearse Street of childhood, and over to North Great George’s Street where the half-told is tale enough. Jody and Nannie are the last of the old crowd, and guardians of morality. Inside, Jody is dark and unhappy. At 11 years old, her only son Billy had accidentally set fire to himself in the backyard of their doleful terraced house in Rye Street in Chorlton-on-Medlock. Moving slowly, Jody nonetheless manages good humor and charitable smiles, returning by bus to Rye Street’s ghosts and outcasts in a house of visitations and imaginary sobs of children. Crime historians would later name Rye Street as having been patrolled by Hindley and Brady, and although Billy had escaped them, his remains now lay in Southern Cemetery (close to those of Ernie and Grandad), beneath a featureless stone inscribed
Our Billy.
Years on, there is no one left for whom Billy is ‘ours’, and the only flowers frequently left at his grave are from me.

The magical properties of recorded noise had trapped me from 1965 onwards. Song made a difference to everything, and permitted expressions that otherwise had no way through. The Paul Marsh record shop on Alexandra Road had been my Eton, a temple of Holy Scriptures and evangelical hope. Nothing else could be worth knowing, and the whole world fell away as I surrendered to the words on the page and the voice that sang. Paul Marsh is a small shop with exposed wooden floorboards; pop singles lodged upright in pigeon-holes behind the counter and LPs conveniently racked for small boys to study in occultish ways.
Record Song Book
is an expensive magazine that prints the lyrics of famous or bubbling songs of the month, and I practice with invented melodies on the songs that I haven’t heard. It is only the singing voice, I decide, that tells us how things became how they are, and
You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’
by the Righteous Brothers had led me to the light. In this duet between Bill and Bobby, the language of despair becomes beautiful, and the final forty-five seconds hit such call-and-respond excitement that I am now in danger of feeling too much. Bobby’s rooftop falsetto is the fire in the belly, whilst Bill’s deep-chested leveling is the full invasion. Suddenly everything else in life is in question. From yesteryear I discover
Good timin’
by Jimmy Jones, and I am beginning to feel something that no one else has brought to my attention. Tony Orlando’s surfs-up voice leaps on
Bless you
, and I am spirited away watching and watching as these discs spin, calling up to me. How is the voice imprinted on the cheap plastic? Paul Marsh is revelation and prophecy, and every effort is made to evoke enough pity from anyone with cash to take me along Alexandra Road and to pause at this temple. My very first disc had been
Come and stay w
ith me
by Marianne Faithfull, acquired after howls of insistence from beneath the kitchen table. The howls worked and my parents gave in, and the five-and-six eased my soul like God could only know.
Top of the Pops
began its life in Manchester, and although we are not easily intimidated we allow
Top of the Pops
to tell us where it’s at. All human activity is fruitless when pitted against the girls and boys singing on pop television, for they have found the answer as the rest of us search for the question. I will sing, too. If not, I will have to die. But again and again it is the sight of the Righteous Brothers singing
You’ve lost t
hat lovin’ feelin’
(to each other?), gazing into their own separate distances. I cherish each glimpse that television allows – so unrepeatable, and God forbid that anyone should talk too loudly or meddle with the sound. Yes, there he goes again – Cherub Bobby swooping up into a female scream, and visual art unravels before me. At a crofted fairground on Stretford Road the sights and sounds and smells are alive with harm and hellborn pleasures. I catch sight of Margaret, who is in my class at St Wilfrid’s and who has a red birth mark on her right cheek, and I wave a wave that she returns, but the brimstoned boy that she is with rockets towards me and lands me an upper-cut so fierce that I am unable to see for a full minute. When my senses return, I am voluntarily rescued by Billy O’Shea, who is also from my class and who whomps the boy with a swing that I am assumed unable to deliver. Smiling Billy returns this duty some weeks later at school when I find myself singled out for a ferocious whack in the yard. As a blow lands, I fall, and from nowhere Billy O’Shea shazzams and rips the head off the ass-backwards assailant. And the world turns.

Before leaving for America, Mary had once again escorted me to Paul Marsh, where I had chosen
Rainbow valley
by the Love Affair, a group led by impish Steve Ellis, who has a mannish voice. I am thrilled to death whenever the Love Affair appear on television, as I am with the Foundations, who are led by Clem Curtis in cheap-looking high-waisted trousers, smiling all the way through
Back on my feet again
with a chorus that never ends.
Lazy Sunday
by the Small Faces is an urgent investment, and their singer is Steve Marriott, another puckish working-class runt, yet naming Noël Coward as his hero, and the canvas for investigation broadens out. Sandie Shaw had a vacantly indifferent expression, not especially willing to please. I like her single
You’ve not changed
because of its barking brass and simple lyric. She, though, is almost lifeless – a Saturday afternoon girl at Marble Arch. Lulu trips up over her own niceness, with drama-school wide-eyes and cutely dimpled nods to the camera, rolling her Rs on
I’m a tiger
, a brilliant slab of froth. Mary and Rita own the most entrancing single in
Heart
by Rita Pavone, a boyish Italian girl with a rising belt of vocal power. The room spins and spins. Jeane favors Elvis Presley and Billy Fury, whilst Rita repeats the same
as-I-peer-through-the-window-of-lost-time
Supremes single over and over again – twenty times on any given night, until Nannie’s nerves erupt, disgorged and worn. Sometimes I dance around the room with Rita as
I’m livin’ in s
hame
wags its finger, until the day Dad tells me I look embarrassing, so I stop. Rita writes
‘Wilson for ex-premier’
on all of her discs. The self-help manual passed around to all is
The Best of Timi Yuro
,
a long-player in a black sleeve from which the New York-Italian singer glares with petite toughness. Timi Yuro was born Timothy, and although she is not as well known as Dorothy’s beloved Shirley Bassey, Timi Yuro’s voice rattles the bannisters with little effort. I scramble from cheap record player to cheap record player. It is considered odd that a boy so young should care so much. At Norwood Road, Dorothy and Liam own a fancy stereo-cum-cocktail cabinet, misused, I thought, by the rack of James Last LPs. Here and there my eyes and ears are caught only by the solo singers; town-crying to all people at all times, television troubadours minus jingle-jangled nodding musicians. The song bears witness, the body weaves, and there are no camera cuts to blandly smiling session-players when all we want to see is the sculptured singer – alone, carrying all, sub-plot and sub-text, the physical autobiography; simultaneously, subjectively and objectively at the same time. There is no way out for the solo singer; introduction, statement, conclusion, quick death – all conveyed in the pop sonnet, with no winking glance over to guitarists in order to ease the setting. There are visions of divine things: Tommy Körberg sings
Judy, my friend
,
Matt Monro sings
We’re gonna change the world
and Shirley Bassey sings
Let me sing and I’m happy.
I still don’t know what it’s all about, but like the science of signs, I am called to, because the song is the art of using language as persuasion, and with that allowance and this hope, I want to cry. I am caught and I am devoted to a fault. Snobbery jumps in. If I can sing, I am free, and no legislation can stop me. Sacha Distel, of course, has everything except a strong voice, whilst Matt Monro has a propelling voice, but not the physical poetry. Shirley Bassey fires a certain bolstered timbre that lifts her out of the Rose and Crown, and the Maria Callas history-of-human-torture
facial expressions certainly appear to be additional value for money (even if, during brief interviews on television, she is unable to relax, as if desperate to conceal an extensive lack of personality). The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and no singing artist seems to be in possession of the complete bundle. Even the royal Elvis Presley does not write the songs that he sings – not that this matters much, yet it is noted how someone with such masterly vocal direction must await the patchwork and paste of songwriters in order to alight the gift.