Day 2 oh to be a country boy
Talking about root which we are (well I am anyway) my home town of Manchester sits in a sort of bowl surrounded on three sides by hills, not mountains just hills and you can get to any of them within an hour by car. If you have spent any time with me you will know I appreciate a view although I seem to have spent the last 12 years living in flat places so maybe my desire for a scenic location is just me harping back for that view I had as a child. I remember you could see the hills, you rarely went out to them but they were always there. Rainy days hid them but they were still there just hiding behind the drizzle.
Manchester the place of my youth was a fairly grimy town then. probably due to the fact that it was at the heart of the “Industrial Revolution” (you should have concentrated more at school that bit was important). The first cotton weaving mills were in this area due to the climate which is always slightly damp; It’s nickname was “Cottonopolis” and Manchester is still famous for being damp with an annual average of 32 inches of rain and 185 rainy day a year which means it rains slightly more often than not. (You could rightfully ask if they have developed webbed feet yet and the answer is possibly).
It was typical dirty smoky place in those days even though it boasted some world events, the first passenger railway went through Eccles (my town). Karl Marx and Engles spent time there but don’t blame us for Marxism it was his idea honest. We had an ocean going seaport 32 miles inland via the Manchester Ship canal and the world’s first moving viaduct (A canal over a canal with a bridge which moved. The largest industrial zone in Europe called Trafford Park a name adopted my favorite Soccer team for their ground “Old Trafford” sometimes known as the theater of dreams J.We had the first motorized fire truck in England. Oh the excitement of it all I could go on for hours like this.
Historian Simon Schama (he is on the TV a lot) however noted that “Manchester was the very best and the very worst taken to terrifying extremes, a new kind of city in the world; the chimneys of industrial suburbs greeting you with columns of smoke“. An American visitor taken to Manchester’s blackspots saw “wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature, lying and bleeding fragments“. Not sure I remember it being that bad but then again I was young and it was my home town so perhaps I am biased.
There was a typically grim film made there “A taste of Honey” a sample of which you can see on this link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4Q5OqJp4b8 The music from “The Smiths” is modern the original song was a Beatles tune. The film gives a harsh but real view of the place. The plot is simple, young girl with abusive drunken mother befriends homosexual and gets pregnant by an itinerant seaman who wanders off. All normal stuff then, although I don’t remember my youth being in black and white I though there were spots of gray around as well.
I lived on a council estate a couple of miles west of these clips in Eccles which did not seem that industrial through my adolescent eyes. We had a brook (stream) at the end of the road, a cricket ground beyond that (although you got chased off if you tried to play there) a forest, well Worsley Woods about a mile away trips to which were rare but exciting. There was Cleavley’s playing field where on weekends 15 to 20 soccer teams would play games alongside each other. Pitches separated by only a yard or so of once grassed but now beaten down by the linesmen’s boots into muddy ruts. Looking across the field you saw a riot of colors with teams in stripes, hoops and other frightening combinations. All the colors of the rainbow were represented.
On Saturdays those groups of players who still retained ambition to rise to the heights of perhaps a professional or semi professional league and on Sundays by the “Pub team” made up of people from the various hostelries’ around the area. Some old some young, some rotund some actually fat, with more hope than skill or more optimism than ability. You watched football on a Sunday for a laugh then you went to the Pub to talk about it.
Most of my brothers played here at one time or another (Saturdays and Sundays), I watched, John, Jeremy, Philip, Patrick, Bernard and possibly Joe go toe to toe with these weekend gladiators. I never played there myself my body would never faithfully obey the commands of my mind enough to actually play successfully but I loved to watch. The only team I ever made was the schools inter-house team and that only because I was house captain and chose the team. (Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely);
The reason I am setting the scene is to try and show the impact of where we are travelling to. Bamford in Derbyshire is the opposite of where we lived. It was green dotted with a few buildings rather than the buildings which were dotted with green (well brownish). It was the real countryside and the hills were closer so close you could actually walk up them. It was the archetypal English countryside of postcards; I have subsequently seen prettier places mostly with vineyards and sunflowers as the backdrop but then when the furthest I had ever been was Liverpool or Blackpool (both around 50 miles from home) this seemed like paradise.
It is only now that I can look back and see the influences all these things had on me. My mother used to tell me “all these experiences server to add color to your life” and as usual it is 50 years on that I begin to understand and appreciate the words. It is probably true that “Youth is wasted on the Young”.
Tomorrow the road to my maternal homeland (steam trains included)
PS: I remembered this last night and though to include it
I took a rare trip home late last year for a birthday party and whilst there purchased a book of “Old Eccles” you know the type full of pictures from the past showing the development of the town through time. The reason I mention it is because I could remember the town as shown in the pictures which possible makes me older than I would like to think I am. Quite a shock so remember not to buy these things if you are older than 55 as you might be in the picture yourself.