A few reflections of growing up in Preston, more about me than the place, it’s not a bad spot and, recently, I’ve come to appreciate it more than I have done in the past…but not that much! I haven’t edited so there will be odd bits in it. This is my story, I’m sure others will see events differently, who cares.
Deepdale
I was born ten weeks prematurely. Not physically, in that respect I was right on time and a strapping 8 pounder at that, but just the wrong side of the calendar line. Another seventy odd days and I would have been born in the 60’s and not the 50’s which might have changed things, it would certainly have added a bit of colour. Why is it that the former era is all pinks, purple and paisley while the latter is soot? Like all history it is conditioned by perception and maybe this one is misplaced.
49 Holmrook Road was the address I found myself screaming in, a house devoid of male presence, unless mine counted, which it didn’t. Actually that’s wrong my grandfather was still there, I need to think about this. Tyrannical grandmother yes, factory worker and barmaid mother yes, sister yes, father no, any other boyfriends or suchlike no. But I have no memories of my granddad other than his death.
They wouldn’t let him smoke anymore. He was in bed, downstairs, in the front room looking outside to the pavement where I was playing out, before I had started school. He either called me in from outside or I had come inside for something, the door to the front room was the first on the left after the vestibule, the front door was big, bright red, with a black door knob shaped like a Mr Whippy ice cream. Two or three houses down, on the same side as ours, was a shop, only a house made into a shop really, but it sold sweets and cigarettes. I remember the woman’s face but can’t recall the name. I remember two of the others in Deepdale, Bagot’s and Fazackerly’s but not this one. He asked me to go and buy him 5 Senior Service, he gave me some money and told me to be careful with the change.
It was three Senior Service. Hard to believe now that a shop could sell cigarettes to a child, or that a pre-school age child would be allowed to go on its own to a shop, but maybe the oddest is that shops sold cigarettes singly. Folk had little spare money and often, by the end of the week, only a few coppers, and virtually everyone smoked, so if you couldn’t afford a packet you could buy a couple to keep you going. My grandfather probably could afford a packet, maybe he just wanted a few last puffs – who wouldn’t if you were a smoker – so he sent me for three. He died soon after, throat cancer. This left the house devoid of a male presence.
My grandmother was careful not to get wet, venturing no further than the vestibule, other than to take a look at how the rain had washed away the mustard yellow dolly stone on the front step. Everyone did that, got down on their knees and scrubbed away with a stone to get the steps clean, even though the streets were coal-stained and stank of dog piss. She stuck her head out, saw the rain, asked me if I knew they way and told me to keep near the houses so as not to get too wet. Off I go then, first day at school, new sandals, looking about for my friends.
I knew where Russell Morgan lived so I headed there. His house was directly opposite the gates of the school so I couldn’t go wrong. No more than five minutes away it was still a long way for a kid of that age, especially as I never ventured that far when playing out, much too far away. The other kids were making their way to school too, from all directions, around corners, along streets, through ginnels, all going the same way. Russell Morgan’s mum always looked old, dark rings surrounding her eyes, she was probably still in her twenties but she could have been his granny, I thought. She stopped me from being friends with Russell, said I was crude and used the F word, down a peg or two then. He got a good job at BAC, then became a policeman. His dad was Welsh and liked rugby union.
The story is that my dad, Jonathon Parker, left my mother when I was three years old, this may well be the case, however, I have no memory of him living under the same roof in Holmrook Road. And why would my grandmother be living there, supposedly looking after me, from birth?
He worked in a factory, almost everyone did at various levels of status. My dads wasn’t great for whatever reason, he had a club foot due to childhood polio, maybe that was a factor, who knows. What I can be certain of is that he was an accomplished singer who, with his friend Wilf Griffith, made a few quid at weekends as the duo The Avalon Brothers. It is a great pity he was never around when I was growing up as the lack of parental influence resulted in certain disadvantages. He asked to return to the relationship when I was a toddler but was refused another chance, so I was told. Throughout our lives we lived only a few miles apart and I cannot comprehend any reason why he never have visited, took me out, called round at birthdays, christmas, or anything else. Actually I remember one time, I must have been about five or six, he took me to see a minesweeper on Preston docks, that’s it, just the once. My father had a brother, bigger than him, six foot or so. I never met him, of course, or know what he looked like, but his name was Leo which is my middle name.
Preston is in the heart of Lancashire, which is in the middle of the big island. The way it looks today, the way the people still are, the parks, streets, shops, are a legacy of the mills, weaving mills, mainly cotton. Everyone worked at producing a tangible product, a cloth of some kind, spun by looms operated by weavers, maintained by tacklers, delivered by drivers to and from the docks. The infrastructure of the town grew around this industry and the culture – working class culture – developed symbiotically from the work and the places people frequented after the work.
By 1960 weaving sheds were closing like someone was rubbing them out with an eraser at periodic intervals. There were still plenty though, big ones like Courtaulds in Ribbleton making rayon, and specialists like J.R and A Smith making velvet for, among others, the House of Lords. The latter was situated off New Hall Lane, as many of them were, and it was this mill that my mother worked at until 1976. My grandmother had three sisters, Miriam, Nora and someone else who lived in Salford. All of them worked in weaving sheds around the same area and, not surprisingly, they all lived around there too. And drank there.
What else was there to do? Along Ribbleton Lane and New Hall Lane there were dozens of pubs, all full to bursting at weekends and probably doing a robust trade during the week too. They went there regularly, the sisters, but also to pubs slightly nearer, The Deepdale, The Garrison, The Sumners. Many times I was on the steps waiting for someone to come out and take me home, occasionally some fucker would throw me a bag of crisps to keep me occupied for another hour or so. They eventually showed, I generally knew they would as everyone else was coming out, still sat on a step adults to me were all legs and knees.
Who looked after me during the week when my mother was a barmaid at The White Hart in Brookfield is anyone’s guess. My grandmother was in the house, I suppose, because my sister needed looking after, but really looking after is a term that should be considered in a broad sense when it came to me. I never had a babysitter and recall many times being left on my own. As for material considerations, food clothing etc, I don’t suppose it was that bad, but what does count for neglect was the, perhaps complete, lack of care. No one brushed my teeth or taught me to brush them. I had them all taken out when very young as they were rotten, all through my life I have had a self-conscious smile due to inhibition caused by poor teeth. My sister has very good teeth and her first job after school was as an assistant to a dentist.
Saturdays saw me carted off to Auntie Nora’s house in Dodgson road off Skeffington road. I can’t remember walking there on my own – at six or seven years old – but I do recall walking back, trying to walk along the raised pavement of the Remploy factory without losing my footing. Beech’s Chocolates on the opposite side of the road had a pungent smell, not pleasant. My mother was probably working or shopping or with my grandmother in the pub so I was sent there. Nora was an old woman in the monochrome picture from the 1950’s, toothless, hairnet, hair sprouting from moles, pinny. Nasty too, not violent but bitter and lonely. The front room was off the street without a hallway and the only thing in it apart from chair was a big radiogram, I can’t remember it being on. In the kitchen there was a large wooden table filled with god knows what, she used to cook beetroot, lots of it, and there was always scraps on the floor. In the yard there was a wooden mangle she used for drying washing, in the kitchen she used some big contraption for cleaning clothes but, in all weathers, she used the mangle, and made me use it too, it was hard work, wrought iron handle worked with one hand and cold, grey washing fed through with the other. I sometimes played outside with a tennis ball until her neighbour complained about the banging. There were no other kids round there.
That photograph was taken in 1972 a few years after I stopped being sent to Nora’s. Walking to the top of Holmrook road (we used to buggy down the incline at a fair old lick from top to bottom) turn right and this is the point you’re at. Occasionally a train would come, hardly ever, and the pavement continued to the nearside of the barrier. Ahead for about half a mile was Dodgson Road, it seemed a long way at the time but it would for a kid. Turn right and walk down the rail tracks for a bit, past the coal board yard, there was a small factory reservoir, Brian Gardner and me used to fish this for gudgeon. I went on my own once and a lad from Deepdale school, my friend so I thought, robbed me with the help of two bigger lads. It sounds like it was a tussle and I put up a fight, it wasn’t and I didn’t, he kept me talking while they pinched stuff from my bag. A few minutes later he brought the stuff back, just a few floats and other tackle, and said sorry. His name was Tony Wolstencroft.
I forgot how many pubs there were then, not just on the main roads but in the middle of ordinary streets, there is one just visible – a Lion house – called (I think) The Deepdale Mill Street. Lion beer was piss.
I think Deepdale junior/infant school is just visible to the right of PNE football ground in this picture. Although born and raised as a Preston ‘cockney’ in Deepdale, and a lifelong football lover I never had an affinity to my home team. As I write this in November 2019 North End are at the top of the Championship, threatening promotion to the biggest, hardest league in the world – The Premier – and I am only vaguely interested, yet I have watched three live games this week with another one, Chelsea V Palace tomorrow. Don’t quite know why this is, although there are undoubtedly good reasons lurking somewhere.
It’s not as if I didn’t used to go on. Walking back from Nora’s every other Saturday along the Deepdale Mill Street the crowd could be heard from the ground, groaning or erupting depending on the flux of the match. I never knew the exact time but the match was still on and it was after 4pm when Nora told me to go so well into the second half. They opened the gates at the back 10 minutes before the final whistle so I could sneak in and watch the last bit.
Between the school and the ground was a ginnel, high on one side with the Town Lane end and on the other with a concrete fence separating the school playing yards. It was a rat run, cinder underfoot that grazed your knees and arms if you fell, which you often did when bigger lads were chasing you, they wouldn’t let you go if they caught you unless you cried. I thought I would be too fast for them when I got my first bike but they caught me anyway and took my chain off.
The ginnel came out at the other end of the ground. To the right was the PNE training ground with concrete walls easily high enough for us to climb over after school or at weekends for a game of footy. At the far left of this you could climb again and walk along the fence ( a fair way off the ground) weaving in and out of a few narrow gaps eventually finding your way into the actual ground itself. We did this a few times until they caught us and blocked the entry. When I was older I paid to get on sometimes, on my own, I have no idea where the money came from to do this, but I remember going on, making my way left to the Town End or sometimes to the Kop. The meat pies were good, can’t remember anything about the football though.
Canary Islands
This is what the area in Deepdale I grew up in was called. It was a common nickname rather than a formal district and came about as the streets were named after birds – Holmrook (where I was born), Linnet, Goldfinch, Hawkhurst, Dove, etc.
Deepdale Mill Street (the road to Nora’s) ran along its eastern perimeter while the football ground blocked its northern route. Cutting across and through it were Deepdale Road and the railway line to Longridge. The photograph above shows the old station, at the south end of the ‘isles’ adjacent to the bridge where the line ran under Deepdale Road. A few hundred yards along the track towards town ran the ‘Miley Tunnel’, a dark, rat infested underground route exiting near Strand Road. This was a right-of-passage during teenage years that I did a few times. Once, with Brian Gardner, a train actually went past us and we had to stand straight still in the pitch black until it passed. The noise was incredible and if we moved – which we wouldn’t have done – then that would have been that. Gardner banged his head on a steel rail or something near the exit and had a ‘boiled egg’ lump that required some explanation to his mum.
Our house on Holmrook Road was in the middle of the ‘Canaries’. When I had just started school a new corner shop opened on the corner of Holmrook and Kingfisher Street, this was Fred Lee’s shop (more about this later). Round the corner was a butcher and opposite this was a milkman’s shop which sold dairy products till about twelve o’clock. Once, when my grandmother sent me for a jug of milk the bloke behind the counter asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a long-distance lorry driver, he laughed at me, someone else in the shop laughed too, at me.
A community was what it should have felt like. Similar people, living in similar houses doing similar jobs, shopping in the same places, sending their kids to the same schools, their children playing out with each other in the same streets and ginnels. But it never did, not to me, I never saw it like that and I don’t remember it with any closeness, warmth or safety. Collective activity was done in the factories or in the pubs, indoors were for eating, sleeping, bumping into each other and growing bitter. In Holmrook Road my grandmother used to leave me in my pram outside the front door in summer, feeding me and changing my shitty nappy when she remembered. Sometimes she used to sit outside drinking tea and pinching snuff from the back of her hand. If someone asked about the baby she would say it was her daughter’s child but that it didn’t look like one of the family, that it wouldn’t surprise her if they had swapped babies at birth. My mother liked this story and told it endless times when I was growing up. When I stopped eating baby food my grandmother gave me a treacle butty to munch on, I loath stickiness to this day.
The toilet was in the back yard, the last on the right before the back door. It was flushable unless the winter froze it, a wooden handle hung from a chain that must have been silver once but was always dark, grimy brown. I usually came in through the back way. If the door was barred from the inside I just climbed over the door, into the yard, dodged the dog shit and the metal mop bucket, and into the kitchen. I can’t remember if there was a television, there must have been, neither can I recall when or where we used to eat our food, or who used to make it. There were no family activities.
In the kitchen there was a shelf just within my reach, on it was a record player, small and red with a cream top that came down to make it look like a case. Next to this was a record, I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch it, if I scratched it I would be in trouble. I know every track of this record from start to finish, it has had more effect on me than anything else. The Beatles first LP, Please, Please Me.
Mr Price was the headmaster at Deepdale infants and juniors. In assembly he used to play a short section of classical music in the forlorn hope that it might permeate into the sensibilities of the young pupils. With me it sort of did and it didn’t. He had a competition one week – advertised on the wall in the assembly/indoor games hall – whoever could hum the main refrain from Beethoven’s sixth symphony would win sixpence. I won it, and I still know the whole piece of music from beginning to end, the only piece of classical music that I have ever understood or enjoyed.
My mother had won at bingo and we were up town flushed, she said I could have a present and I said I wanted a record, Beethoven’s sixth symphony. My sister, with her bags of clothes said I didn’t want it, that I didn’t even know what it was, she told my mother not to buy it. We were near the Miller Arcade opposite to where the Guild Hall entrance is. On the other side of the road there was a record shop and my mother went inside and bought it. The sleeve had a picture of nature, the inner sleeve was just plain brown, and the middle of the record was dark red, Polydor. I don’t remember why I wanted it but I played it many times, other recordings of the same piece never seemed as good.
Writing this has enabled me to recall where the books came from. Previously I thought my mother might have acquired them or that they just turned up, neither is true. Our neighbours were an odd couple, private as most people in terraced houses are, but I did find myself, for whatever reasons, in their house quite often, and I remember it. She had jet black hair, over shoulder length, ragged and curly. Her legs were slightly bowed, rickets, and she wore dark velvet clothes with fingerless mittens. I don’t know what he looked like, she was left on her own as, I think, he died. That might have been it. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses, I remember the talk amongst the women in the house saying that if they had an accident they couldn’t be saved with a blood transfusion, I think he might have had one. He had a train set that took over the back room, proper job with working signals and hand painted trees. My mother took me in and I had a ginger wine, it disgusted me and I couldn’t drink it, it might have been then when they gave me the books.
When he had gone she stopped us playing football against her wall, with hindsight I can’t blame her it would have been a right annoyance. Once I tried to centre the ball for someone to head in when I sliced it straight into her back yard window. We ran, where too who cares? then we had to come back, I lived next door after all.
I learned to read from comics. Every Saturday morning, best time of the week, keep going downstairs to see if they had been delivered, when they had straight back up again, private, into my own world. Beano, Dandy, Whizzer and Chips and a football one, slowly the actions of the drawings married to the words in the balloons then it became a flow. The books took it from there.
The first volume opened up to reveal a three dimensional frog with flaps, like an advent calendar, open them up and there was the skeleton or the muscles, arteries and nervous system. If I was inclined to that it would have been a good science foundation. Volume Three, the stories. Greek myths, adventures, Robin Hood, fairy tales, all with illustrations. Volume 4, art and sculpture. Volume 6, nature. Read them, re-read, fifty times, a hundred and fifty. When I was ready for something else Preston gave me a library.
It was a big deal the first time I went to the Harris on my own, well it wasn’t on my own at all, what I mean was that it was the first time up town without being dragged around by one of the women. After school, juniors it would have been, probably eight or nine at the time, myself, Vicky Eastham, Anne Fisher and Tony Wolstencroft (who tried to rob me later on in life) decided to meet up outside the entrance of the building.
To get there I had to walk along St Georges Rd across Deepdale Rd and turn left at St Pauls Rd, then straight into town. It wasn’t dangerous, these were safe areas, no bullies or unknowns lurking to give you a smack on the nose or steal your money. Tony Wolstencroft lived along Deepdale road down a side street near the post office, he was one of my school friends who I actually felt on a par with, or even a bit superior too. He was small, which helped, and, like me, he didn’t have a dad. I don’t think his mum worked or if she did it wasn’t a good job, his house was poor, a step down from ours. Anne Fisher’s was a step up, one of the garden fronted terraces along St Georges Rd, before the church on the corner of St Pauls, she was a tall girl, clean, well dressed, blond hair and pretty. Vicky Eastham lived just around the corner from the church, in a shop. Well it used to be a shop but they never sold anything. Above the big bay window – the curtains were always closed – was a green tiled sign – EASTHAMS – who had that above their house? She was a nice looking girl too, not as pretty as Anne Fisher but funnier, too good for me though, we all stayed friends until secondary school.
Linnet Street
Around the corner from Holmrook Road was a side street where my friend Andy lived. He had a younger sister Deborah and a toddler brother Mark. His mother was called Eth and she didn’t hang around long because one day her husband lost it and chucked all of her clothes out of the front bedroom window and into the street. It was a bit of a commotion and people came out of their own houses to have a look. She took Andy, Deborah and Mark away with her to somewhere in Ashton and although it was less than a couple of miles from where I lived it might have well been in France.
I can’t remember when my mother moved in with this man – Thomas Knowles – but it was soon afterwards. My sister lived in the old house with my grandmother for a time, I recall there were lodgers as well, which must have meant that we had moved out, the house then must have been sold but I obviously don’t know what happened to the money from it, if there was any that is.
I felt alone in Holmrook Road but not lonely, my comics came on Saturday morning and they took me all week to read, I had the Pictorial Knowledge books as well which filled me with glorious wonder, then other books from the library. I was beginning to know things that the people around me didn’t, they didn’t absorb ideas like I did, their information was pragmatic, geared to material satisfaction, slick to discourage anything not immediate.
In Linnet Street I was isolated. It was a smaller house, not by much, but smaller nevertheless, and it was his not ours. I don’t fully understand the effect this had on me apart from the feeling that I did not belong in this place, other than provision had to be made for me, a room, and I had to be fed. No one asked me about anything and when I tried to talk it usually ended in arguments and them silence.
The sense of negativity was powerfully oppressive, whatever you had could be lost, whatever worked could break down, fear was in the air and the wolf was at the door. But I wanted to know how to do things, get good at stuff, practical skills that needed to be taught, not just specifically but as an overall skill. How do you think through a problem and then apply yourself to achieve, not to give up at the first hurdles. In that house other people were always better than us, if they could do something they were more skilled, full stop. Better job, better house, good at this and that, they were better than us. I began to assimilate this as part of my character. No became a default word. What is the point of trying if someone is better than you, you will lose and then you will be embarrassed at your failure. Better not to try.
The phone rang. My mother picked it up. She told him that it was his kids asking if they could arrange to come round and see him. He told her to tell them it wasn’t convenient, I remember the words he used…”tell them we’re decorating Bet and that we’re in a right mess”. What was worst about this true episode was not that a father refused to see his children, but that my mother did what she was told.
Brian Gardner and me used to wait for his bus to come after junior school every day. We used to sit on the platform of the ambulance station which, although it doesn’t look like it from the photograph, was on the main road only a short distance from the old bus depot. I didn’t catch the bus because I lived near the school, in fact the short walk to the bus stop was in the opposite direction to Linnet Street, but I always went with him because he was my best friend.
He used to live further along Deepdale Road just before the prison. His mum and dad were much older than other parents, his dad was quite active – he used to play football and cricket with us – but he was old, almost like a granddad, not quite, but almost. They didn’t talk with the same accent either, from somewhere else in the north, or even the midlands, I would be able to pin that down now, but not then obviously. They moved to the top end of Brookfield – hence the bus ride – past the barracks at Fulwood and just before the bend at Ribbleton. It was a council house I think, a nice one, but not their own home. It was good fun waiting for the bus we used to get sweets and pop, he paid for them as his parents were generous to him, adopted kids usually have it okay.
Ashton on Ribble Comprehensive School
Brian Gardner went, as did Russell Morgan, I can’t remember any of the other kids going, I think Anne Fisher got a place at grammar school. By the time junior school finished I was holed up in Linnet Street with a step-dad who thought life was an existence just to get through and a mother whose alcohol intake increased steadily with the years. The other kids in the area went to different schools and the early part of my childhood just fizzled out. Brian Innerdale – another adopted kid – went to Temple, Stephen and Terry Lee went to Tulketh, Alan Stapleton went somewhere else, as did Melvyn Heyes.
The bus to town was 2d from opposite the Deepdale pub near to the bank of shops with the newsagents in the middle. There was a girl who lived there, her parents owned it, I can’t remember her name but she got the bus with me on the first day. Her blazer was as crisp as mine with the school emblem sewn or stuck onto the breast pocket. Sometimes I would walk nearer to town across Deepdale road and wait for the bus there, it was always much busier, most of the kids got on here and, as it was only three stops to the new bus station, the conductor often didn’t get time to collect the fares. I hated the rowdiness, the noise, throwing things, flicking ears, we weren’t even there yet.
We played football with a tennis ball round the back of the school before the bell went. The goals were long benches no higher than a knee, the idea was to keep the ball down when you shot otherwise there was no chance of a goal. Regularly the ball went skywards and onto the flat roof, nothing else for it someone had to go and get it, leg up to start then the drainpipe to the top. We played in all weathers, more often than not we were shit up and wet before school even started. Teams were picked according to skill, I was generally about in the middle.
Of course I did make some new friends and there were many laughs, but I only remember it as an oppressive sentence. I learned nothing. One moment comes to mind. In the third year we were taught the periodic table in chemistry and I got it straight away, I was enthusiastic and even took a book home to complete the homework. Eventually I became the best at chemistry by far and loved the class. Then the teacher left, I can’t recall his name or the name of the young bloke that replaced him. During one lesson he made a mistake with the periodic table, I knew it was a mistake and told him; even if it wasn’t he had no justification for making me come to the front of the class and introduce me as the new chemistry teacher, thanks a lot Mr whatever your name was. I stopped trying after that.
The fighting, the bullying, the rugby team, the caning, all of these and more I could have done without. The school was next to the Savick estate, one of the bad areas of Preston. I don’t know what it is like now but then you had to watch yourself. At dinner time – when I stopped having school dinners – we used to go to a pie shop or chippy in the area and it was usually fraught with the possibility that there would be a scrap, you just hoped it wasn’t you in the melee. There were kids from the estate who were okay, Alan Mair was very smart, he must have done well for himself in life. Brenda and Paul Sargeant were twins, I remember sitting directly behind them one day and seeing head lice crawl around in their hair, they were both okay, normal kids. I saw Brenda when I was working in the bed shop, she told me she had played netball for England, also that Paul had suffered from depression and had taken his own life.
Gary Moss and Stephen Moss weren’t related. We became good pals, with the occasional bust ups that kids that age have. It was the period of glam rock, fantastic exciting music with fashion an important consideration. Gary was the one girls fancied, Stephen didn’t do too badly either, but my confidence was not great so that undercut my chances, and of course the harder you try, well. We all had tartan on the cuffs of our school blazers, with penny and half-penny round collar shirts. Gary’s mum was a seamstress of sorts and she made us all massive bell-bottom pants out of brightly coloured corduroy. They lived off Bow Lane just out of the town centre, poor really, worse off than we were, crappy little terraced house, probably rented. I spent a fair bit of time round there, it was much more fun than where I lived, the family seemed real, lively, funny, and they had neighbours who were the same. One bloke in his mid-twenties was a kind of Hell’s Angel, he even had a Harley Davison chopper in his kitchen, Gary just used to walk in and talk to him. There were rows at our house and bad atmosphere when things were quiet. My mother never got involved in the slanging matches but she made it clear whose fault she thought it was. After storming out of one bout I waited outside the Deepdale pub – the one where I used to sit and wait for them on weekend nights – for a bus to town. I could see him coming and was glad that there were other people waiting as well. He called me something, he never called me by my proper name, usually ‘Charlie’ for some reason, and asked me if I was going. I said I was. He told me not to come back.
Stephen Moss – ‘Mossy’ – was a close friend. He lived in a terraced house on Brook Street, one of the tributary roads into town from Blackpool Road in the Ashton area. His dad was in the building trade and, at that time, it wasn’t good, so he seemed to be rarely in work. Mossy had a younger sister and a brother younger than her, they were a good looking family with a nature to match, sunny is the word to describe it. It was with him that I started to nick off school. Metalwork and woodwork, what twelve year old kid wants to learn that shit for when you don’t have to? The classes were in the afternoon, usually after dinner, so we got our names checked off and then just walked out of the school gates. Depending on the weather we either went to the park or did something else, many times we went back to my house – never his as his dad was often in – and just sat around having a laugh.
He used to come to our house at weekends too. On Sunday evenings we played cards, three or nine card brag for money. It probably wasn’t a lot but it seemed so to me and I used to hate losing, not for the fact that I had lost a game but because I had lost money. I have never gambled since. Mossy used to like to play the game and he liked to come to our house, he said it was better than his, less crowded. I think his dad was frustrated with hanging around the house and gravitated, as many men did then, to the local pubs, for one or two at dinner time, to split the day up.
Mossy came with us on holiday a couple of times, once to Port St Mary in the Isle of Man, where we fished for wrasse and coalfish off the breakwater. One evening we went night fishing for conger eels and he caught one, a huge thing about 30lbs that we just about managed to haul up the side. We were sixteen by then and school had finished. When we got back I went with him for his interview at Liquid Plastics on London Road, he told me I couldn’t wait inside so there was no point waiting for him. I don’t remember seeing him after that. I bumped into his brother many years later, I think when I was working at Greenwoods Menswear in St Georges, he told me Stephen had been ill with serious stomach problems, I asked him to pass on my best wishes
Across from the bus station apron – which is now a pleasant walkway for pedestrians – is the St Johns shopping centre, a small group of shops in a covered avenue leading to the markets and the Victorian centre of town. In 1973 the store on the corner of the shopping centre was Kwik Save, now defunct but then quite a bustling little mini-supermarket. The 167 Ribble bus from Blackpool got into the bus station about 3.30, a terrifying journey that must have been a nightmare for the driver. Brian Gardner and me then walked under the subway to the shops.
He looked older than me, I think by then he almost had side-burns, and with his blazer off he just about got served. His parents still doted on him and were generous enough to give him enough money so that, maybe twice a week, he could afford to get us a big bottle of cider and ten fags. Sometimes I could contribute, whenever I saved enough pocket money or stole some out of my mothers purse. Then back to the bus station, up the piss-stinking lift, to the top floor. There were hardly any cars then, and the ones that used the massive car park over the station hardly ever went to the fourth floor. It was open-air and had the best views over Preston, no- one there, quiet. On Saturdays we used to shoplift around town, mainly Woolworths, and we kept the proceeds in a locker on the bus station. One day I went there with my key and everything was gone, he said he hadn’t taken it but who else could have?
It was around this time that I had my first drink in a real pub. I was 13 and shitting it, me and Brian Gardner, again, on a lovely summers evening after school, dressed up as old as we could, walking into the Fox and Grapes on Ribbleton Lane. Someone at school must have told us they would serve you so we persuaded ourselves we would try it. I was never a risk taker, still not really, not when the consequences of the action could be punitive. I hated shoplifting or walking through the disused railway tunnel and, much as though I loved the taste and feel of alcohol, I did not like the feeling that people were staring at us, grinning. “Two halves of mild please” Brian asked as I moved away from the bar to a corner where the dart board was, he came with them and we lit up a fag. After my third or fourth I was getting pissed and I knocked a drink over, the landlord said he though we had had enough and asked us to leave.
Lostock Hall and Moor Nook
The house in Holmrook Road had been sold, where the money went to is a bit of a mystery although I can piece together some aspects of what followed. I was in my early teens when we moved out of the house and into Linnet Street with Thomas Knowles. His wife and children had moved out before that and, as I have said, were living somewhere in central Ashton. But there were two other people in Holmrook Road, the sister and the grandmother, and they did not move with us.
My mothers daughter had a child when she was seventeen to an individual from the Moor Nook estate. They were about the same age, seven or eight years older than me, which placed them in the ‘out to work, get a house’ category. The baby’s first year was spent in Holmrook Road, I remember when it got got sick and the doctor – Doctor Korn – visited and thought it had pneumonia. The atmosphere in the house at the time, in my recollection, got worse. There were lodgers in the interim period between moving into Linnet Street and moving fully out of Holmrook, a young couple from down south who were trying to make an easier living up here. They brought their dog with them, a mongrel bitch, which had a litter of puppies that were given away or got rid of soon after the birth. I recall playing with them in the front room, the one Alfred, my grandfather, died in.
Moor Nook and Ribbleton are two areas in the north east of Preston. From Ribbleton Lane the road that connects the two is called Grange Avenue and ends at Miller Road leading through Moor Nook towards Preston. They all sound pleasant, the areas and the road names, but they aren’t, or at least they were not then. Along Grange Avenue, for instance, was an estate of prefabricated houses dating from just after the war, not terrible, but standing in stark contrast to the much better houses across the road. It was in one of these prefabs that the father of the child in Holmrook Road, my niece, lived.
On the day of the wedding between him and my sister he turned up without a front tooth, having had it punched out on his stag party. They moved into a cul-de-sac in Lostock Hall, a district a few miles out of Preston to be nearer the place he worked, Leyland Motors. She worked as an assistant to a dentist. I had to go on regular weekends to babysit and I hated every minute of being there. It is a surprise that I have managed to live a normal life. One event in particular has had a lasting effect on me. I think it was because Leyland Motors had gone on strike, it was a Friday and I had arrived probably straight from school. My sister was in the kitchen making a meal and he came in drunk. I wasn’t sure if they were play-fighting or not but it became apparent that they weren’t when she started screaming. I recall a hand on a door handle holding a knife. Then he grabbed me and started hitting me in the face, we were both in the front room and my back was against the window that looked out to the garden.
The next thing I remember is waiting in the back of Thomas Knowle’s car with my mother in the front. My sister was in the police car next to us and there was another police car parked in the cul-de-sac arresting the bastard. We all went back to the house in Linnet Street. On the journey back she called me a coward, I was about thirteen. They stayed in Linnet Street for a few weeks until the dust settled, I remember being turfed out of my bedroom and sleeping on the settee during the period. She finally went back to the house and he, unbelievably, moved back in. No one apologised to me or even mentioned the incident. The first weekend he moved back in I had to go and babysit. Over the years I believe that this, and other episodes, were forgotten by my ‘family’ and that they thought that I had forgotten them too. Have I fuck.
A short distance from the prefabs along Ribbleton Avenue, to the east, is Moor Nook. It is, or at least it was, an amalgamation of quite decent council houses, although the estate as a whole was regarded as being a bad one. At its northern end – near to Ribbleton – there was a bank of shops set off along the main road where the bus from town had its destination. Two stops from here was where I got off to visit the grandmother who rented one of the houses after Holmrook Road was sold. Needless to say I hated going, much the same as being forced to visit her sister Nora when I was a bit younger. Worse still was that on regular occasions I had to stay overnight, filthy place, no television and with an old lady that I have no recollection of ever having said anything nice to me or about me. I don’t have any doubts now that the reason I was sent to these places was to get me out of the house at weekends so that my mother could have drunken parties. There was a back garden that I could look out at that some wild rabbits used to visit in the earl mornings.
The road into town intersected Blackpool Road and at the junction there were a selection of shops and a popular bingo hall. My mother and grandmother were keen players revelling in the temporary ups that a welcome win gave to their lives. It must have been tedious for the grandmother to live in this area, given that she had lived her life in the hub of a community. Here there was nothing for her. Regularly she would make the trip to play bingo, walking more often than not, and probably making a detour to the pubs at the top of Ribbleton or New Hall Lane. My mother didn’t like visiting and did so at irregular intervals in the car with Thomas Knowles. I can remember her going on the bus there only once, she didn’t stay long.
Between her house and the bingo hall, along Miller Road, is Preston Cemetery. The large black Victorian wrought iron gates were open every day including weekends. Walking along the main path, with the gravestones of varying wealth on either side, brought you out along Ribbleton Lane, an equal distance between Blackpool Road and Gamull, the latter being a bank of shops and an eponymous pub marking the terminus of Ribbleton. To the right of the twin set of cemetery gates on this side was a chemist and, much more importantly, the small shop that made and sold Cuff’s ice cream. Long before Mr Whippy descended onto the planet selling whatever it was they sold, Cuff’s sold ice cream, real ice cream. On late Sunday afternoon you would disperse regardless of the game you were playing and hot-foot it home. Probably you heard the jingle a few streets away so the quicker the better. In either Linnet Street or Holmrook Road they rarely said no to a small tub with a flake, they all had one as well and we used to eat it together in the house. Then back out to play. When we moved to Ribbleton we used to get the ice cream directly from the shop, but it didn’t seem as good, somehow.
Head towards town from the cemetery gates, across the junction with Blackpool Road (the bingo hall is on the left) along what was a thriving tributary of shops and pubs. Before the prison the Fox and Grapes pub, where I had my first pub beer, is on the left hand side. Across Ribbleton Lane is Skeffington Road off which Nora lived. On the same side, between Ribbleton Lane and New Hall Lane, was the mill heartland of Preston. Scores of small weaving factories producing cloth by the ton, until it all stopped that is. By this time – the early 1970’s – they had nearly all gone, but the area was far from derelict, people still made stuff then, or fixed things, like cars. One weaving factory was still thriving, making high quality velvet instead of cotton, my mother worked there as a weaver. She was good too, as was her female relations who preceded her at the looms. The factory was called J.R. and A.Smith, I used to meet her sometimes after school, not sure why, probably because I didn’t want to be in the house on my own when her husband got in from his job.
On one occasion I left school in the morning and went to the factory to get the door key, thinking on that must have it, no key. This time though I had a prominent black eye. I was badly bullied at school, not always physically but, because my confidence was shattered, I wore it like a target, so even the lads who normally wouldn’t had little digs. I hated fighting so, as this is usually the suggested response to being picked on, it wasn’t a good option. Sometimes I would try to pick on someone weaker than myself as a protection in the pecking order, but this just made me feel bad for them, and it still does in a way. This time I was hit hard by a new lad in the school called Harry. he was from somewhere around Liverpool and he fancied staking a claim as the ‘cock’ of the school. I remember it clearly, I had just walked through the gates and was in the front play area talking to Eddie Gardner and a few others, Harry came up to me and said I had called him a name, then bop. I found out later that Eddie Gardner was part of it which didn’t surprise me because he was a caustic little shit, I hope he’s dead.
I could feel my eye swelling and could taste the blood in my mouth. Of course there were no teachers around and certainly no recourse for reporting it, so I got the bus back before school had even started. When I got to the factory I asked to see my mother and the gate keeper, who I sort of knew by then, let me sit in the little office. She came out and wasn’t happy about being called out, I think she was on piece-work so she would probably have lost money. She saw my face and asked if I had been fighting, I said I hadn’t which was true, in a way. She gave me the key and went back to work.
He did have hobbies, Thomas Knowles, although he was so negative and tentative that he scarcely got through mediocre at any of them. He did, however, introduce me to fishing, and he taught me how to be mediocre at it which, unsurprisingly, I have negative feelings about. If he had a bit more resilience, a bit more of a positive attitude, more personal ambition, some intelligence, he could have been alright, but that would have made him someone else wouldn’t it. He did take me fishing though and being outside in nature was something to look forward too. I have fished on and off all my life more so since retirement, I have overcome many of the mental blockages established during this upbringing.
People then, and I only speak about my own experiences and impressions, were worried about things breaking down or not working. It was serious if the television packed in, or if the car broke down or, as was just as likely, it started to rust. It was a time when run-of-the-mill working people started to fill their houses with stuff and, once acquired, they didn’t want not to have it. If the bomb dropped then everyone was in it together, no distinctions and no need to worry, fuck all you could do about it anyway. If the car went bad then that was no good, no good at all, because next door’s was alright and the bloke down the road had got something better. There was no spare money, no credit line, no breathing space.
Fred Lee, the owner of the shop on the corner of Linnet street and Holmrook Road, became best friends with Thomas Knowles. His wife Shelia became equally friendly with my mother. Both women were alcoholics and heavy smokers, the former woman died of the addictions slowly over the years. They were better than us, the Lee’s, although using the term’us’ is misleading, they were better than ‘them’ for the insurmountable reason that they had a shop, self-employed, money, things. They could get stuff fixed if it broke down, or even better, buy new. Fred Lee had a Ford Zodiac, I remember seeing it parked outside the shop, then a Triumph Dolomite with overdrive and then, from nowhere, a bottle green Rover 2000 Vanden Plas. Thomas Knowles could never keep up with that and never realised that trying was an excruciating process, bound to fail. He bought an Austin 1100 and when we went fishing in it Terry Martland’s son, Ian, put a bankstick through the cloth interior. It was as if the bomb had dropped.
We all went on holiday together, once. The Lee’s had three children, the youngest was Stephen who was just a year younger than me and was a pal for a while. Terry, who was a year older than me used to play out with us but became a bit of a tearaway, I don’t know what happened to him although I wouldn’t be surprised if he went off the rails. Stephen became an electrician or something, a tradesman like his dad was probably at one of the big employers in Preston, BAC or GEC. Linda Lee was the oldest, fat ugly and opinionated, she wasn’t around much but was in the car with us when we came back from the holiday two days early. I don’t remember much of the holiday itself other than being disappointed at being told we were leaving, I travelled back in ‘uncle’ Fred’s car with his kids.
I can only recall one other holiday. This was a week in Lincolnshire, fishing along the River Witham. Thomas Knowles read the Angling Times, as I did, and it contained reports of matches being won with staggering weights of fish by anglers such as Kevin Ashurst or Ivan Marks. He probably saw an advertisement and enquired about it, the next thing we knew we were heading across country in a car full of tackle. We didn’t catch much because he didn’t know how to fish properly, didn’t think about it or try to gain a bit of knowledge that he could use to make us both better at fishing. Just kept on doing the same old thing, blaming the weather, the bait, the tangles, anything but trying to get better. The good fishermen were better than us you see. There were no other holidays until the Isle of Man in 1976, no days out either, other than fishing, usually on the canal, at Galgate.
W.R.Tuson College
I have read that some individuals have a similar experience on hearing Wagner for the first time. The shattering sensation of newness exposing a glint to another dimension of experience. It happened to me, of course not through Wagner, but with the first onslaught of punk rock, sometime in the summer of 1976. It was the hot dry one when the River Ribble nearly stopped flowing at certain points and I walked across it. Ashton on Ribble Comprehensive had finally spewed me out, I remember the final few minutes clearly; relieved that the tension of the place was over I was just glad to get out of the gates. There were a few of us walking through the smaller opening to the side of the road, me, a lad named Karl who lived next to the school, Winters, Mark Robinson, Raymond Kenny, Stephen Moss, Gary Moss, Peter Lawrenson, maybe Brian and Eddy Gardner, John Thomas the huge black lad who had been with us since primary school, and Dilip Patel. I don’t think any of us had a clear idea of what we were going to do. We all got on the bus and went upstairs, it was mayhem as usual, John Thomas made a comment about my teeth being bad, I knew they were, that was why I never smiled freely.
And then what? The day after I went to the job centre to see a career adviser, this was in the town centre near the Miller Arcade, the place were you actually signed on was behind the bus station, on Pole Street. Somewhere between the two I bumped into Mark Robinson and he explained to me that he was going to sign up for a course at W.R. Tuson College. He asked me if I was interested in doing it, I told him that with two CSE’s I wouldn’t stand a cat in hells chance of getting on, he told me that the rules had changed and anyone could get on and they gave you a grant. This was good to hear, no need to struggle finding a job for another couple of years. But then again it would it be like going back to school, not really, he told me it looked like a doddle, you could wear your own clothes and even smoke if you wanted to. He told me the course he had signed up for was Social Administration with English Literature, Biology and Sociology ‘A’ levels. It meant nothing to me, but I signed up anyway which meant the whole summer on the dole and something to do at the end of it.
That summer we moved house. Thomas Knowles was working at Courtaulds in Ribbleton at a place called Red Scar, I think by then that my mother was working there too, so they sold the house in Linnet Street and moved to a semi detached house on Fir Trees Avenue in between Gamull Lane and Red Scar. The only thing I remember about the move was that our dog, Dougal, jumped straight out of the downstairs window and I caught it by the tail so it didn’t run off.
So there we all were, Ribbleton, much nicer house, with a back and a front garden and a decent sized bedroom for me. The only job I had that summer was collecting glasses in a bar up town that my sister worked in, the manager gave me £5 a shift, begrudgingly. Courtaulds Angling Club owned a short stretch of the River Ribble at the back of Grange Park which was about a mile or so from where we now lived. I liked to go there very much and, because he was a member, I was allowed to fish the stretch. Stephen Moss used to like fishing too and we used to go together regularly. One day he put a live-bait minnow on a big hook and cast it into the middle of the weir, almost straight away he pulled out what to us both looked like a massive chub, it was probably about three pounds or so but, then, that was a big fish.
The bus to college picked us up from the corner of Ribbleton Lane and Grange Avenue – the road where my sisters violent husband was brought up. I asked Mrs Robinson, our course leader, if there was some mistake as I had arranged to enrol with my friend Mark Robinson (no relation) she informed me that he had enrolled on the course but a week or so before term started had pulled out because he had joined the Royal Marines. That wasn’t great for me, not at all. I had no confidence and was in a school-like environment with hundreds of strangers. To top it off Mrs Robinson rebuked me in front of all my new course students for not filling in the right forms. I recall the incident clearly, she said that she had actually driven to the address I had put on my application form and was told that no one of that name lived there. We had, of course, just moved. She said that, as far as she was concerned she wasn’t interested in having me on the course. Great.
I spent most of my first year with my head down. I wore two pairs of trousers, even during the hot early months of term, because I thought my legs were thin. Gradually I became vaguely interested in some of the things being taught. Sociology had theories that I understood. English literature had ideas about people that I could see in the text, Shakespeare had themes. Biology was a block to me probably because of the experience in the chemistry class as school, who knows, but there was a block there nevertheless. At some point in the early weeks of the first term I bought a record, I think it was from Andy’s record shop in the upper market. I used to go to the market regularly. it had a pet shop with banks of tropical and cold-water fish tanks. We actually kept tropical fish and even bred them, it was a decent hobby to learn and I still know the names of a few species. It was exciting when we got new fish, getting them home in a plastic bag before the temperature changed too much and the putting the fish into a small holding area in the main tank so that the other fish got used to it. I think I might even get back into it in later years when my other pastimes need an addition. The record I bought was New Rose by The Damned, in the new year, 1977 I bought the first punk LP, by the same group, Damned Damned Damned, and that, as they say, was that.
There was another pet store in Preston, Halls Pets on Church Street, I used to go in there a lot too. Hobbies were something that got me to think about stuff without having to communicate too much with other people, I used to think that I would like to work in the pet shop but, with my low self-esteem I wouldn’t have been able to, unless someone would have shown confidence in me. One day they were throwing out some staff t-shirts and I asked if I could have them, they said to take what I wanted. When I got home I ripped the sleeves off pegged them to the washing line and splashed them with paint. I thought they looked great, no-one had seen anything like it and, of course, I looked and felt like a right twat.
College was no fun. The course I had stumbled on was called a vocational course which meant that as well as taking ‘A’ levels we were required to learn about social work and, gulp, do placements in care homes/old peoples institutions and the like, I was a punk rocker, anti-everything, with no confidence and no-one on my side. And I lived in Preston where there was no scene at all. Everything was happening in London or, at best, in Manchester, but that still seemed light years away. Thursdays and Fridays were music paper days, the NME and the Melody Maker. I read them, especially the former, from cover to cover and, because I got a grant, I could afford to buy records, which I did. The Clash, Television, The Jam, Buzzcocks, 999 and many others. It was so exciting listening to the new sounds and the new ideas, electric. I was reading too, all sorts of stuff in addition to the theories I was being fed at college. I couldn’t understand the point of what people strived for, in careers, I would never have one, I knew that for certain by then.
I had no friends, no-one to confide in, nobody to relax around, so I turned inwards. The neighbours complained about the music, when I was on my own it went on full blast, I couldn’t care less, I imagined myself as a guitarist in The Clash or in Television, the music was alive, like a film, with me centre stage. Real life couldn’t do much to compete with this, nothing going on. I began smoking a lot, not drinking regularly at this point, just the odd binge, but fags yes. And reading too, still delving through the pages trying to lose myself or – more to the point – find the answers.
I had my first proper girlfriend in the second term, a quiet mousy haired girl called Helen Jenkinson. What she must have made of me I’ll never know because, although I managed to get up and do the daily necessaries, I was barely connected to real life, not unhinged, but not quite hinged either. I remember the Christmas of 1977, we went to Marina Close for the meal and Helen came round after she had had her meal. I don’t know why but we started kissing heavily and it became embarrassing for the others so they asked me to stop.
College lasted, as it does, for about two years. I can’t say it was a complete waste of time because it opened up a chink of light suggesting that I might be able to express my ideas through text. But it was only a faint chink, my mental blockages were, if anything, becoming more ingrained, I was completely alienated from my family, the arguments in the house were getting worse, always my mother took sides against me and even now, with hindsight, I cannot convince myself that she did not like me. I know for certain my sister didn’t.
I was still looking after her daughter while she and her violent little husband went drinking around Lostock Hall on Saturday nights. One Saturday afternoon we got the Fishwick bus together and got off at the stop on Leyland Road just before Marina Grove. She asked me why I was like I was, why I dressed so scruffily, she told me to my face that she thought I was useless and that nobody liked me…nobody. I remember her words clearly and I can see her face now as she spoke them, no mistake. I was not yet seventeen years old.
Courtaulds
The reason we moved to Ribbleton, well the main one, was for them to be nearer to the rayon factory at Red Scar which was literally round the corner from where we lived on Fir Trees Avenue. Just over the M6 motorway bridge the factory was a major employer in the Preston are having, at its peak, about 4000 workers. Thomas Knowles was a semi-skilled worker, a nothing type of individual, above cleaners or sweepers but below those who could call themselves by a trade. He drove a fork-lift truck or something, maybe operated a crane, who knows? To me what went on inside was a mystery and of no interest to me, she worked in one of the main sheds doing spinning.
What the place did have was social integration. A range of hobby societies and a sports and social club where everyone who wanted to could go and get pissed on Friday and Saturday nights. My mother loved it. The fishing club was good, it had its own stretch of the River Ribble at the back of Grange park which I mentioned earlier. It held matches during the season both on the river and on the Lancaster Canal. During the winter the club organised day-trips to various spots along Morecambe Bay estuary such as Arnside, Silverdale, Grange, Kents Bank, and Ulverston. Occasionally they had matches in exotic places like Coniston in the Lake District. I enjoyed these trips very much and appreciate that he took me with him on them. The coach stopped off at Condor Green to dig small ragworm called ‘creepers’, it was cold, muddy and dangerous if you weren’t careful but I liked it, it felt real. I couldn’t enter the matches, of course, so I got myself a peg at the end of the line of anglers. I still remember the names of many of them, Gordon Turner, Joe Dale, Norman Watson Alf Barrett, good fishermen too unlike Thomas Knowles who – like his job title – was semi-skilled.
At the start of summer 1977, when the college term had finished, I had to do something. On the last day I took the bus into town and went to the job centre. It was very different then, jobs were just not available, it was normal to be on the dole, scraping around, you were very much at the mercy of what the job centre staff told you. When I informed whoever it was that interviewed me that my stepfather and mother both worked full-time at Courtaulds they said that a casual job through the summer holidays was a strong possibility. At nearly £70 a week it was a fortune. All I had to do was to attend an interview the following week and tell them I who worked there and it was little more than a formality.
It didn’t go well. Since birth I have what is known as a ‘lazy eye’. My first understanding of this was in primary school assembly, I had a patch over my right eye which, in theory, would compensate my weak left eye to work properly. Being very young I didn’t get this and all I knew was that I couldn’t see the numbers on the board for the hymns, so I took it off. Nobody told me to put it back on, the people in my house either weren’t interested or, more likely, weren’t there, so I became virtually blind in one eye.
They did an eye test before the interview which I failed. My mother came home first, I was sat in the living room, probably smoking, and she asked me how it went, I didn’t need her to tell me what she thought. I believe now that if I had packed a backpack and just left they would have been scarcely able to contain their relief. Well, unfortunately, I couldn’t give them that little pleasure for a few years yet. If it were possible the episode shook whatever confidence I had left right out of me. It felt as though it were my fault that I couldn’t see out of one eye, that I was a failure, not part of what was expected. Stephen Moss had a good job, earning good money, buying clothes, saving up. I was still reading books. They couldn’t throw me out though.
Shortly after this they made my bedroom into a bed-sitting room. I remember clearly going with them to furniture stores to buy a chair and a desk. They must have hit lucky with money because they also bought me a moped to get around on, a Yamaha FS1EDX. It was brand new and must have cost quite a bit, I don’t know why they did it, still don’t, but I do know I didn’t look after it. You had to mix the petrol with oil or else the tiny engine didn’t lubricate and it would burn out, not my thing engines. During the summer I used to park it on Grange Park and go fishing on the Ribble along Courtauld’s stretch, one day I got back and it had been nicked, I couldn’t have cared less and they got the insurance money. I walked to fishing after that.
It seemed a long way especially with all my tackle but I was young and the second I got out of the house I felt better. There was an undulating field behind the high-rise flats with a stream running along its length. At the far end, just before Ribbleton Lane, there was an RSPCA shelter mostly housing dogs but, if I remember rightly, there was a donkey as well. My walk to the river took me away from this towards Grange Park at the far end of Moor Nook. The choice then was to walk along the left side of the park – with Courtaulds stinking away further to the left – and then down the precipitous steps down to the river, peg number one of twenty seven along the Courtaulds stretch. After a match the anglers had a similar choice, to walk up the very steep steps or to come up at the other end along the slightly easier path and then cut across the car park where my moped was stolen. The men seemed much older than they actually were, probably in their thirties or early forties, but it was unusual then not to smoke heavily, and they were drinkers. They weren’t fat or even overweight, it wasn’t the thing then, but fit they were not, as I remember it. Thomas Knowles, like the rest of them had to take several wheezy stops up the steps but, although I smoked as well, I never thought it that daunting. My legs hurt more than my lungs and I think I realised then that I could comfortably get to the top in one. When I was with the club – as a spectator – I never tried to, but on my own I always managed it. I never thought about it till writing this but this must have contributed to my capacity for long-distance hiking that I took up with gusto in my forties.
Occasionally I fished the river with Mossy but after the summer of 1976 it was always on my own. I liked the solitude and hated it when I could hear another person walking along the bank or see them in the distance heading my way. One day, a beautiful serene morning, warm and calm, I set up on one of the middle pegs and cast out into the gently undulating water. I got a chub first cast, then another, only small but chub nevertheless, not dace, eels, small roach or minnows. I should have caught a lot more with careful feeding and more skill but I didn’t. I remember feeling frustrated, knowing I was better than that, under-performing, not doing well enough. I muttered out loud to the river that I would be back – long before Arnie immortalised the term – and I knew this was a promise to myself that I had to do better.
I couldn’t stand it when I heard the gate clank at quarter past four meaning he had finished work, straight away it was upstairs to my room. In all the years I lived under the same roof as him there was never a meaningful conversation, not one. I can’t recall what caused all the arguments but they were bitter and never with any useful resolution, just bitterness and, on my part for sure, hatred.
University
It was in sociology class that Mrs Robinson – Christine – suggested that some of us could apply to the polytechnic to get a degree. I have never forgotten the feeling, a degree, wow, now that’s something, but not me surely. Two ‘C’ grades would get us in and I was certain for at least these in the exams so why wouldn’t I apply. She sold it well and I was enthused, I would get a grant – even though I was living at home – and another huge plus was that I didn’t have to find a job, so I applied.
Pre-social work was the title of the course I did at Tuson College, by accident and thanks to Mark Robinson. One day per week during term was allocated to placements, which meant visiting institutions to learn about how the vocation worked. Helping people, or even watching them being helped was the last thing I wanted to be involved in, still don’t, and it was little more than a nightmare to go through the process. Almost any course other than accountancy would have been more beneficial than this. One of the placements was in a children’s home directly opposite to our new house in Fir Trees Avenue. I forget her name but one of the employees was a young woman who tried to take me under her wing. She was probably in her early twenties and, to me then, was very lovely, but, of course, I had no confidence at all. One evening she introduced me to her boyfriend who was visiting. They sat close to me and paid me full attention expecting me, I think, to say something interesting. My teeth were still bad which made my smile look false, words wouldn’t attach to my thoughts and I said something stupid or inappropriate. When I went back each time after he moved a chair to the far side of the room and turned away from wherever I was, he was an artist of some kind and painted or drew with his back to me. Her name was Marion, it’s just come to me, and one day, when he wasn’t there I asked her why he didn’t like me. She agreed that he didn’t and told me that, because of his artistic leaning, he liked beautiful people. Walking to college along Sharoe Green Lane one morning I saw him across the road, and he saw me too, there was just the two of us, I had to cross the road at some point so I stopped and waited until he walked a distance preventing us from having any contact.
The grant was bigger, over three thousand pounds a year, enough to have a good time and to pay them something for my room. The course was another stupid choice, ill-informed and just an extension of the previous stupid choice I made with the college course. This one – BA (hons) in Social Administration was fundamentally wrong for who I was other than allowing me to actually be in an academic environment, it allowed me to gasp for air. The modules were turgid and I took no interest in them, but not being a complete quitter I stuck at them and did the absolute basics in order not to get expelled within the first few terms. Really the lecturers couldn’t give a shit what we did, it was a red brick polytechnic, newly created by a Labour initiative to educate in the left-wing model creating thinkers that self-replicate like organisms. Now that I think about it this might not have been such a bad thing. Obviously it could do me no good in terms of employment, but in the development of my critical ability, it allowed me to aim a few low punches.
Extra money in the pocket meant extra smoking and extra drinking, especially the later. Almost from the off we piled into the pub on Heatly Street opposite the building we were ‘learning’ in which was Livesey House. The pub was The New Britannia, and I loved it. Dinner time and pints of beer, two, three, four, talking, smoking, and then piling back in half-pissed and not giving a fuck. Pauline Pennington was, I think, the only one to come with me from college, I can’t remember if Helen came too, she might have done but we had split up by then.
Although I was still into music in a big way punk had lost its vitality for me. The Clash were now writing songs about Spain or other stuff that meant nothing to me but The Jam were now the thing and they dressed more decently so, in turn, I didn’t stick out so much. Everyone had cottoned on to punk fashion by then anyway.
Chris Brown was in the halls of residence when I met him we were introduced, I think by Eric Garbett, a Welsh lad who I had somehow got to know by us both hanging around in the same pub. Eric and Chris were friends and I remember well going to his room with Eric and knocking on the door. He wanted to form a band and I said I could play guitar so we did. From day one, for month after month, year after year, we rehearsed, played gigs, wrote songs, recorded songs and we were terrible. Most of it was my fault probably, still I had no confidence at all regardless of how much the drink made me funny or clever, I was tentative and nervous. My brain had to convince my fingers that they were in the right place on the fret-board instead of it being second nature as it should be. And I never really wanted to do it, be in a band that is, nevermind all the posing in front of mirrors I was still doing, pretending to be Mick Jones or Tom Verlaine. Chris was doing a mechanical engineering course but his heart and his head were not in it. He did want to be in a band and he was a much better player than I was and he was the front man too, trouble was he didn’t quite have enough talent and he was in the wrong place to find a break. Like most of my experience at university this episode was an embarrassing waste of time.
It is accurate to say that we became good friends. He got kicked of the course after the first year and decided to stay in Preston, what for I have no idea but many ex-students did. Jobs were not easy to find then but he got one, a good one too, working as an insurance clerk at Norwich Union who had a big office on Winckley Square. With money coming in he could afford to rent his own room, which was a good job as he had to leave his room in halls as well as the uni course. The room was in a shared house with Eric and a lad from Liverpool called Steve Spence who for a time became our drummer.
I got through University, learning almost nothing apart from Marxist theory, a weak degree in hand and more messed up than before. Still living in Ribbleton, still playing with the band, still smoking and drinking, but now with no money and nothing to do. My sister by this time had left the dental practice and was working as a warrant clerk in a bonded warehouse/bottling plant in Walton-Le-Dale which is at the south outskirt of the town centre. She got me a job there helping out as a forklift truck driver in the warehouse. Mr John Muter, they all called him Mr John, called me into his office one day and told me that, because I had a degree, I could be doing some more useful work at the company and encouraged me to hang about the office and get a suit of clothes. I was confused as to how this would work, was I being given another job? it didn’t seem like it as I still had to do the day-to day physical work in the warehouse, how was I supposed to do that in a suit of clothes? And there was no extra money either, I remember clearly the amount 1979 £50, absolute shit. It was enough though to tide me through.
Muter said it would be useful if I could drive so the firm paid for lessons. I failed two tests in a row. Walking to the bus stop after the second disappointment I looked at all the cars at the junction of New Hall Lane and London Road and felt like an outcast. I knew inside I was a capable young fella but all the evidence about where I was and what I was doing suggested otherwise. The third test did it and at the end of the day I told George Bamber, who was general manager of the firm, that Muter had told me I could use the company runabout for personal use. I don’t know whether this was a bit of a white lie but it didn’t matter because he fell for it. And now, for all intents and purposes, I was the owner of a shiny red Ford Escort 1.6 estate, S reg. None of the other staff were pleased with this the day after, including my sister, but Muter still let me use it. I was nervous as hell driving to Ribbleton that evening.
So I stayed at Haworth and Airey for about eighteen months until one day when Muter called me into his office. He told me things were not working out as he expected and that he didn’t think this job was for me, he gave me two weeks notice. Now this was 1983, unemployment was three million plus and life on the dole was commonplace among young people. I had a shit degree, still no confidence, played in an awful rock band, lived at home in a sour atmosphere and had bad teeth and one good eye. But I was still reading, still thinking, still unhappy with my lot, not beaten, not by a long fucking chalk, Muter.
When the last day came we went to the pub at dinnertime and I had about five pints. I opened a bottle of whisky and started drinking it. I walked out of the place at about three o’clock. At the river bridge I bumped into a person who was on my course in college, she might also have gone to University as well although I can’t remember, Wynne her name was, her family had the large house on the corner. I was very drunk and I can recall how I must have appeared to her. I walked to Deepdale Road and sat on the little park drinking the whiskey until the pub on the corner, can’t remember what it was called, opened up. They wouldn’t serve me so I walked into the pub yard looking for a drink, they said they would call the police if I didn’t leave. I phoned home and Thomas Knowles picked me up, I went to bed. They never said anything about it, never mentioned it, in fact they didn’t speak to me at all, properly that is, offering a bit of support or advice. She would have talked to her daughter about it I’m sure of that, but nothing to me.
Beds
So there I was, 1982, mind not in the right place at all, scared of the future, with no confidence to speak of, all my family still doing what they always did. Well at least I had a roof over my head, food to eat and fags to smoke. It was on the dole then.
It is an unnecessary exaggeration to say that there were no jobs but it was difficult to get one. My week was punctuated between signing on (Monday), going to the Job Centre (Tuesday and Friday) getting the job section of the Lancashire Evening Post (Thursday night) and receiving the unemployment cheque through the post (Wednesday morning). I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living, never did, but I knew I had to do something, anything, to get going, get myself a vague sniff of independence.
I thought that by having a degree I was equipped for something a little bit better than drudge work, that somehow I might be able to get a job in the civil service or something, maybe even the Post Office, not a hope in hell. Even if I was taught to fill the application forms in correctly I would have lasted about three seconds in an interview. It didn’t stop me though. Thursday nights post usually had one or two interesting jobs but by the time you had applied for them about five hundred others had as well. Labouring or manual work was scarce too and filled by word of mouth. Then I saw a job for a bed salesman at Bold Street Beds, near Queens Mill in Ashton. I got it and started a week later.
The store was in an old mill building, a smaller one of the cotton weaving sheds specialising in a finished product rather than the raw cloth. The beds were stored underneath the first floor together with the delivery vans. All the beds had to moved up the flights of stairs by hand every day, it was hard work. I was used to working physically at the wine warehouse but this was a different sort of graft, muscular pushing and lifting, at it almost all of the time. It was about four o’clock when the owner asked me to deliver a single bed to Fulwood in the brand new Mercedes van, his pride and joy in the ‘fleet’ of three. There was a young lad on a training scheme called John Griffiths and he was told to go with me. By coincidence he was the son of Wilf Griffiths who was partner to my father in the singing duo The Avalon Brothers in the fifties and sixties. It was early winter and dark, raining too, I have never really liked driving but I said at interview that I though I was good at it. On the way back from the delivery, on Plungington Road opposite the Coop, I scraped along side of a parked vehicle. The damage was little more than a scratch but the owner was not pleased, he gave me a dressing down and sent me home early. Well, I thought that was that and my heart sank, out of work again was the expectation and it depressed me.
I didn’t get sacked and I worked there for a few years, I can’t say that I enjoyed it but it was secure employment in a time when there wasn’t a lot of opportunities for unskilled people (I don’t count a 2:2 Social Admin degree as a skill). But it obviously wasn’t good enough for me so I did the only thing that I could do that would help, I kept reading, all aspects of knowledge, literary works, some science, history, ideas, whatever engaged interest at the time. Not easy though, no-one to talk about it to, no-one to share the enthusiasm or the discoveries. What was the use of it? waste of time! these were the reactions I would get whenever I tried. It was enormously frustrating. Times were easing off, people were getting more affluent, money achievement was all that interested people, especially the people around me. My sister eventually divorced the violent creature she married although he was still an ever-present at family gatherings. To say I harboured a grudge against the things that were done to me would miss the point, I wanted revenge.
There were a few practical benefits to working at the Bedding Centre, it got my stamina up for one. The owner tried to expand the company into other towns. Firstly Lancaster, then Widnes, Warrington and finally Bolton, it all came down like a deck of cards because he was a useless businessman with two blood-sucking sons who saw it as a cash cow. It was work though and I spent a period helping to manage the warehouse on Red Scar, at the site of the old Courtaulds factory. I also managed the shop in Bolton in a furniture store called Rutland Mills. I also learned how to drive vans, up, down and across the North West. There are many images that I could have placed in this section but the one I have chosen is the New Consort pub on Aqueduct Street which was on the corner of Bold Street. I must have past this a thousand times, more probably, but I never went in once, it is one of those places that is always there but with a story of its own.
Money is always important. For a person as deeply insecure as I was it was a sure bet. A few memories should help explain my relationship with it. Going back to when I was sent to my grandmothers sister, Nora, at a young age, I remember having a box there, in the front room next to the window. It was made of wood with a tight fitting lid. When I was stopped from playing outside – solitary kicking a tennis ball about or practising my spin bowling – by the neighbour or the rain, I used to come in and open the box. In it were coins, pre-decimal of course, pennies, half-pennies, threepenny bits, shillings and an odd shiny sixpence. I used to count them, hold them, count them again, they were mine, never, ever, for spending but just for having, looking at, possessing. Nora used to insult me, calling me a miser in the making.
At about the same time the school had a holiday to a place called Hammerbank in the Lake District. All my school friends went and although I didn’t have any boots or suitable footwear I remember it as being okay, even when we were marched to the lake every day for a swim. On one of the days we went for a trip out, to Ambleside or Keswick, a place with shops so we could buy a souvenir or some sweets. Mr Price, the headmaster, had our pocket money locked away in his room and he called each of us in so we could get the last of our financial rations. When I went in the box with my name on had nothing left in it, I couldn’t believe it and I thought that I had been robbed, I actually recall saying it and the teachers being not best pleased that I did. Out of pity he gave me sixpence from his wallet, I have not forgotten the shame.
When I enrolled at university the big banks were all there with good offers to catch the students and their grant cheques. Previously any work I had done was paid by cash in a brown envelope or, if it was a dole payment or college grant, by cheque cashed at the Post Office. The university grant, however, was too big for that so you needed a proper bank account. By the end of the second term I remember going into the Midland Bank on Fishergate with Chris Brown to withdraw some cash for another night on the piss. The girl at the counter said there were no funds available, my heart sank, what the hell was I to do? it was ages before could get any more. She suggested an overdraft which I applied for and got, but again I never forgot the sinking feeling of being without funds.
The Midland Bank was on the corner of Lune Street and further along that street was the Leeds Permanent Building Society. I opened an account there in order to save up when I started getting paid at the Bedding Centre. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was regular and it was mine. Occasionally I would dip into it, for instance when I bought my first car (Mini Clubman estate, white, bought from a bloke down Factory Lane for £330) but generally it was there just to make me feel a bit more secure. It also meant that I had enough deposit for a house.
St Andrews Road
The road to Bold Street from Garstang Road was along Ripon Street. This whole little area contains a lot of memories for me. Halfway along, near its junction to Plungington Road was a student house lived in by three girls, two of which were on my course at University and no it wasn’t like that. In fact I was a right pain in the arse at the time and I used their house simply to kip down after nights out to save the effort of getting to and from Ribbleton. Sometimes I stayed there for day after day until one time when they asked me to leave, I still didn’t get the message properly as I was so self centred. The other truth was that I was very lonely in Ribbleton and there was lots going on around Plungington, lots of drinking, pubs within yards of each other, student union building with bands on etc. But that all turned bad near the end and it all eventually fizzled out.
So all of my intake of students either went home to their home towns or stayed in Preston trying their hand at making a living around here. Christopher Brown was doing okay at Norwich Union, he had a little promotion and now had a ground floor flat across Garstang Road next to Moor Park. We were still good friends, still doing reckless things I didn’t feel comfortable with (how we managed not to get nicked is remarkable), still playing in the band. Sometimes after a days work at the bed shop I would walk along Ripon Street to his flat and we would try to write songs or go out. It didn’t happen more than once or twice a week as we were both working and he had a regular girlfriend who he was getting serious with. Her name was Fiona and they actually arranged to get married until he called it off very close to the day. After one on our gigs, another bad one in all liklihood, we got back and two girls in the flat above poked their head out of the window and asked us what we were doing. Of course we said we were in a band and, for some reason, we started playing them a song. I asked the girls their names one of which said she was called Sharon, the other one – who I liked better – said she was called Tracie.
We had our first row over a meal she made, spaghetti bolognese. I walked from work along Ripon Street and stopped at the chippy and bought fish and chips which I wolfed down in quick time. When I got to the flat a minute or so later the meal was nearly ready and I forgot she said she was making it. She went barmy. I was used to domestic ding-dongs, not that they happened all the time, but when they did they didn’t cause any unease and I joined into this one thinking it was the way things were. What was really going through my mind was the money I had wasted at the chippy when, if I had waited, I could have eaten here.
The property got sold, it was actually a nice Victorian detached house adjacent to Moor Park, and Chris had to move out as did, of course, Tracie and Sharon. My future wife had been kicked out of home at sixteen for an accumulation of minor teenage offences, yet she bore no animosity to her mother for doing so, just the opposite. Her character was resiliently fragile and moving out at an early age did her no harm. Fortunately the benefits system was more generous to young people then, she wasn’t working and received both dole money and full housing costs. She got a flat on Deepdale Road, near to the town centre and opposite what was known as the ‘Little Park’. This was a small area of grass and trees with a few benches that contained underneath a wartime air-raid shelter.
I used to walk past the bank of large terraces opposite the ‘little park’ regularly when we were at Holmrook Road and Linnet Street. Ted Carter’s fishing tackle shop was on the corner of Church Street just past Preston Prison and almost opposite Halls pet shop. The area was, perhaps, a little less run down than it is now but, nevertheless, I spent a great deal of my life around this part of Preston and I know it well. Her flat was on the second floor and then you could park outside the building. I was now working in Bolton at Rutland Mills and driving there everyday in my new car a piece of absolute shit called a Morris Ital. It hardly ever started and had to be pushed regularly to get the engine moving, the stress it caused me was unbelievable. Going uphill, for instance, its power just seemed to go, like a wheezy old smoker, and sometimes the throttle cable used to disconnect requiring me to put it back on by hand. It’s no wonder I don’t like cars.
Every Friday morning I stopped off at the Leeds Permanent Building Society branch along the main road to work in Bolton. I had a little red paying in book in my hand and a pay-packet in my pocket. The girl behind the counter wrote the amount in by hand and then a total next to it. I think I knew at the time that somehow this little book was going to be my best friend, I certainly treated it as such, hardy ever calling on it to perform any onerous tasks. Soon there would be enough for a house deposit.
I stayed in one of three places. By then Chris Brown had bought himself a house, it was actually the one he had arranged to live in after he married Fiona, but that fell through and he was left to pay the mortgage and the bills on his own. It wasn’t easy for him and, for a time, I moved into his spare room, sleeping on a camp bed and giving him a tenner a week. It helped him out but it wasn’t enough so he had work behind the bar at the Withy Trees on Garstang Road. I used to pick him up after work two or three times a week so I must not have been drinking every night by this point, but I do remember it being a right pain in the arse as was waiting till he was ready for work the next morning so I could give him a lift into town. One day I just packed my stuff up without telling him and moved back to Ribbleton, I don’t think I told them either which didn’t go down very well.
Chris was dating a girl called Debbie who he would eventually marry, with me as best man. Tracie had two brothers and a sister the latter living in Deepdale on the other side of the main road from the Canary Isles. The number of the house – which I should be able to remember – was, I think 20, yes it was, 20 St Andrews Road, Deepdale, Preston. I was still at the Bedding Centre but by the time we moved in Tracie had a full time job at Thorn EMI Lighting in Kent Street about half a mile away from our new house. It cost £13,750 and the rates wer £94 a year, with the mortgage and the rest of the bills it was affordable but, of course, it still felt like a push at the time. It was a house though, about what I was expected to live in, a terraced house with a wife who worked in a factory and me a salesman/delivery man working at a local bed shop.
I kept reading. Everything that interested me but it had to be good, everything by Orwell, Robert Graves, literature, poetry, snippets of other stuff, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Montaigne, Pope, Dickens…One day, when I was at the shop in Bolton, the owner came visiting from Preston. He sat at the desk and I sparked up a cigarette, he was an ex-smoker and I could tell he wasn’t happy about me doing that. He wasn’t happy about the shop either because it wasn’t selling a lot. What did they expect, really? opening a bed section in a run-down carpet/furniture store down a side street in Bolton. But, of course, they blamed me. When he was sat down his feet kicked something under the desk, he looked to see what it was and discovered a big box of books. He went mad, accusing me of sitting down reading all day and ignoring customers, well he was half right but there were no customers. I would like to say that I didn’t give a fuck but I actually did, most of my life then was an extension of the nervous confusion that I had gradually come to accept as normal. I was fearful of losing what I had, the weekly pay packet, the roof over my head. I didn’t like spending any money and demanded that we save incessantly, every fucking penny, counting it in the building society book just like the coins in the box at Nora’s house, as if it would make me safe.
I didn’t mind spending money on booze and fags though. On Lovat Road there was a home-brew shop run by a bloke called Adrian, his wife ran a fancy dress business in the same premises, on the way home from work I started calling in for a few take-away pints, maybe twice/three times a week. It wasn’t cheap though so this option was replace by nipping to the off license on the corner of St Thomas’ and St Stevens road for one of the new two litre cider bottles, not the really cheap wino stuff but the product with Somerset or something else on the label to make you think you were drinking good stuff. Then on Friday and Saturday we used to go to the pubs on Garstang Road around the Moor park area but never the Moor Park pub.
Each one had its clientelle and, accordingly, its specific character. The Moor Park was rough and we were not rough. We worked, we wanted better, edging our way by increments to something that was not like the people in pubs like the Moor Park tended to want. It was a reflection of who we were, how we were brought up and where we thought we were going. There was a myriad of divisions within what might have been termed a working class, still is probably, and they were formalised by where you went drinking. We went to The Unicorn first, usually early around seven ocklock. It had a good pool table and we used to enjoy a game, people would start to arrive in dribs and drabs and put 10p on the table, it was winner stays on and I was a good player so usually stayed on a bit. Then next door to The Millbrook, the across the road to The Mitre Tavern, then chippy and home.
It is close knit living in a terraced house. Next door to the left was a couple with three young children, man and woman good natured but thick as shit, like us they used to row a lot. To the right was Mrs Mitchell, an old looking woman who we treated as posh but, if she was, what was she doing there? She banged on the walls when we argued. Across the road was a clan of Scotish people who we used to say hello to but that was all, they didn’t get on at all with Mrs Mitchell and the young men of the household were not nice to her. Once or twice I tried to stand up for her but they tried turning on me, it wasn’t worth the trouble. They used to drink at The Moor Park.
During this period of my life I started weight training at Gerry’s gym on Deepdale Road. It was probably insecurity that made me want to have a muscular body, power myself up so that people couldn’t get at me, or leveling the playing field up a bit. No doubt there was a lot of that stuff going on in my head at the time but it wasn’t quite a new thing. I remember when I was much younger, still living in Holmrook Road, I saw an advert on the back of a magazine or comic for a body building course by Charles Atlas, literally the ‘don’t let them kick sand in your face’ one. I must have been about nine or ten and I wanted to send off for it but didn’t know how, so I cut along the dotted lines and asked my grandmother how I did it. She got some cardboard from the back of a cereal packet wrote our address on it and stuck the advert on it with syrup then, without even a stamp, I posted it. I waited and waited.
Arnold Swartzenegger started it off. I bought his autobiography/training guide and that was that. Press ups by the dozen, bulking up with the new protein mixes and pumping away two or three times a week. I put the muscle on and I got stronger, much stronger. It was not time wasted, that’s for sure. The photograph below is of a barbers on Deepdale Road, I couldn’t find an old snap of the gym, not surprising really as all it was was a big house with the rooms turned into fitness areas, below ground were the heavy weights. I had to train for about six months before I could go down and ‘pump iron’. The barbers was where I used to get my hair done before I started shaving it short, never liked it in there or the bloke who ran it.
She left me after about a year of living in 20 St Andrews Road. I wouldn’t spend anything on the house, every penny had to be saved except, as I have said, on booze and fags. We went to Spain once, Magaluff in Majorca, before we moved in, and I can still feel how it felt, warm, sunny, colourful, easy. Back here, selling beds, delivering beds, terraced houses, shit cars, bad food, drinking to get happy, well it wasn’t so good, not for me. I don’t think I was much fun to live with and it bothered me. I didn’t want to live like that, narrow living, Coronation Street living come to life, rowing, watching life unfold for others somewhere else. But it was all I had, it was my set of cards, what could I do? The day she left I got home, washed up, and went into the front room, ‘I’m going to make this place pleasant to live in’ I said to myself, ‘Without her’.
I didn’t manage it, practically that is, I was still a young man in my twenties and it was obviously too young to be thinking about giving up. Finding another partner was out of the question, my confidence hadn’t changed much although I had learned to put a bit more of a show on in public. On my weekday off from work I used to time my visit to the newsagent on St Pauls Road with the time that she finished her shift at that factory. We used to say hello but not much more than that. One day she told me her step-father – who worked at Halliwells outfitters on Lune Street – had an Arran sweater that would fit me and that I could have it for free. I called round for it at her mums house that evening and we arranged to go for a drink.
The vicar of St Jude’s church on the corner of St Paul’s and St George’s road was a decent bloke called John Robinson, he married us in 1988, what else was there to do? Chris Brown was the best man and he gave me a tenner – in addition to a present – to buy a bottle of champagne on our honeymoon in the Isle of Wight, I never bought one.
Bold Street Bedding centre went bust soon after the wedding but I got out a few weeks before. I got a job, suprisingly, as a bed salesman for Bensons Beds. They only had about twenty or so stores then, all around the north west, but the owner had his sights on bigger things. The shop on Friargate opposite C&A was a goldmine and they thought to expand in Preston by franchising a department within the new Debenhams which was the flagship of the equally new Fishergate Centre. Brian Orford was the area manager for Bensons and he did the set up and the training in Bensons corporate ways, of course I hated it, every single minute, but it was work and the alternative, well, there was none, at least not within my field of vision, at that time. On the first day of opening an old lady came to get a price for a Burgess Buckingham bed base only. Bensons prefered to sell what they had in stock as it generated greater profit but they did have the facility for special orders from most of the other manufacturers. Orford quoted a purposly inflated price and, when I tried to correct him, he motioned me away. I knew then that this whole buisiness was just about money, profit for the company and commission for me. Well then so be it.
The branch in Debenhams that I was manager of didn’t do anything like the turnover either company expected but, for Bensons, it was about the company profile so they opened more of them within the department stores. None of them did much good. However, companies being as they are, they tend to blame the staff, especially in the business of selling. So I got moved on, as a salesman in the Frargate Branch. The manager Dennis Owen (a bit more about him later) got promoted to a newly acquired furniture store – still owned by Bensons – called Squire Bancroft, in Lancaster. The manager of Friargate was a bloke called David Hays who had worked as salesman at the store for many years. It looked like a demotion for me but the job nearly doubled my income so things were looking up, at least in terms of money.
We were trying for a baby and it is no joke or much fun when you don’t seem to be able to have one. We went for the tests which fortunately conformed that neither of us had problems in that area. I used to wait at the bottom of the stairs when she shouted down from the loo that another test was negative. Then one wasn’t. It didn’t seem real, a baby was on its way, we were both relieved more than excited. Opposite the hospital on Watling Stree Road there was a public phone box, there were lots of them then before the era of the mobile, most of them stunk of piss and I dread to think what germs were on the mouthpieces, but they were different times. Anyway it was from this phone that I called my mother to tell her that Tracie had lost the baby. The bleeding started in the afternoon, just an odd spot but they sent her home to get some rest, when I got home we sent for the doctor. The house wasn’t up to much in terms of decoration and we were both, her especially, a bit embarrased about the doctor going upstairs. He confirmed the miscarriage and sent her to hospital. She, of course, was distraught, like she had lost a real flesh and blood baby, but I didn’t feel like that. When I rang my mother I felt disappointment and, again, a general sense of failure, not being up to it. She didn’t say much.
A few months later Tracie was pregnant again. We started to decorate the house starting, of course , with the nursery, I remember doing it, the two lots of wallpaper divided by a strip in the middle that was in fashion. Things remained the same in the marriage though, the tension and the rows. One Sunday morning, she must have been about six or seven months by then we had a loud disagreement and I just had to get out of the house. I got my cycle from the outhouse in the back yard and wheeled it through to the front door. The inner door was new and had about thirty individual panes of glass in wooden panels, I tried to stain it but made a crap job of it, another failure. She yelled at me as I left telling me that if she lost this child she would blame me. I cycled along Garstang Road to the canal then along it to Ashton where I got a puncture. I had a repair kit but didn’t know how to fix one properly, I was in a bit of a panic. I pushed the bike home. Katie was born in June of that year, on the 25th, 1990.
A month or so before then we decided to take a short break, in Blackpool of all places. Probably the reasoning was that we wouldn’t get much of a chance when the baby was born and, given she was heavily pregnant, we wouldn’t have wanted to travel far. We still argued of course, it seemed constant but it couldn’t have been, we were just pulling in different directions. What do you do in Blackpool? She wanted to go to a show, which I hated (still do) and which cost money. She wanted to go to Madame Tussauds, which I hated and cost money. Everything was a frustration to me other than the couple of hours we spent in the pub smoking and drinking, although I think she only had a half. We only went for a long weekend, Thursday till Sunday, but it was terrible. The guest house was to the south of the Pleasure Beach and the evening meal was on a table shared by other people. This was another kind of torture for me. Meals eaten with other people have always been a problem for me, I believe this stems from the horrible atmospheres I grew up in, I used to bolt my food in order to get away as quickly as possible. In Ribbleton I just went downstairs when the food was ready and took it back upstairs. Thomas Knowles used to make comments when I was a kid about eating with my mouth full, calling me his nickname while he said it, ‘Charlie’. Some people find it difficult to eat alone, I don’t.
We travelled by train, to Blackpool north and then walked along the front to the guest house. It was a fair way but no taxis for me, even on the way back it was straight from the station to the bus station, on foot. I had to call in at the shop for no reason other than I hoped that Hays and the part-time woman – Sylvia I think her name was – had sold fuck all. I knew that if there had been some sales it would virtually all be in his name, we were both greedy but he was without shame, and a staunch methodist as well. The shops were closed on Sundays but I had a key so I walked to the desk while she waited outside with the cases, I opened the order book and there was page after page of good orders, thousands of pounds worth, loads of comission, all lost to me. What a mood I was in on the way home.
Bensons changed people around all the time. Dennis Owen who was manager of Friargate when I was at Debenhams was now in charge of the one-off flagship furniture store in Lancaster. In a few years I would end up there and Owen would end up in Kirkham open prison. Hays was manager now and I was the salesman but he left after about a year to start his own auctioneering business which left me in charge. I never liked the idea of managing anything for other people and this was no different, but the money was good and we had a family now so things needed looking after. The shop also needed a salesperson and they employed a bloke a few years younger than me, about the same age as Tracie actually, called Mike Fox. He lived in town just off Grimshaw Street in a small terraced house with his girlfriend Helen and his new baby Sally. We became close friends, partly through similar circumstances but mainly through our love of beer. We drank a great deal and, whatever the rights or wrongs of it, we had a great deal of fun too. I was still cautious about people, inhibited to new friendships and prickly with criticism, Mike was more positive and we did other stuff as well as getting smashed. He also had a wide group of friends many of who I got to know quite well. I don’t know though was it me, really?
Throughout all of my time at Bensons the money was alright, a good wage really, and for doing virtually nothing. It made you lazy though, and it also made me think, constantly, that I was better than working in a bed shop. But what do you do? It wasn’t just about being clever enough it was about being the right kind of clever. I tried teacher training. Night school for two years and then a qualification allowing you to teach at college level in your subject area. Pauline Pennington, a girl who I went to university with was already teaching at Tuson college and, I have to admit, I was quite jealous. Every minute of doing the training I hated, and I never for a second thought that I would actually be a college lecturer. It just wasn’t me. The whole process just sent me on a backwards loop to the unpleasant experience of leaving school in 1976. I didn’t go back for the second year.
I had an idea. Most people bought beds because theirs were uncomfortable, and when they got the new one it was sometimes harder than they expected and a bit uncomfortable, We used to sell a product called a mattress comforter by a company called Burgess. They were the forerunner to the very succesful product we now know as mattress toppers. My idea was to leave Bensons and go on my own selling these and making a fortune. It might have worked too, if I had been an entrepreneur or had any idea of making a living under my own steam. I thought about selling them to old peoples homes so I made a list and I went round trying to flog them. If I had only a touch more perseverance I would have done it too. On the first day I had over ninety quids worth of orders, in one day! But then I had a couple of average days and then a blank, then I sort of gave up. Tracie went to work, I took Katie to the nursery on Moor Park, then I went back home to St Andrews Road to have a couple of brews some breakfast and a quiet read of a very good book. Now that was me.
Masters
Find a job again, money needed. Tracie was working at the hospital as an auxiliary nurse, she hated it in the factory and, like me, wanted to do something with her life that felt right in her own skin. She applied to work in care homes and got several job offers, then nursing at the hospital. We had some savings, not much, but this was being eaten up with childcare costs and I had nothing coming in. I went back to Bensons with my tail between my legs after I saw an advert in the Lancashire Evening Post. They had tried a few managers at Preston none of them proving any good. It’s worth remembering that the Friargate store alone had a turnover of over half a million pounds a year and any reduction in that sent alarm bells of in the MD’s office. So back I went, for about a year, then the itch started again, too good for this want something better. Stupidly, I handed my notice in again and went self-employed (it was all the rage then) selling cleaning products on my own “area” for a company called Certified Laboratories. Well that lasted a few months and I ended up giving the stock back and on the dole again until, yes, I saw another advertisment for Bensons Beds. Not Preston this time as David Hays had come back to Friargate and was doing well. They offered me Lancaster branch, the large bed section within Squire Bancroft, the store that Dennis Owen defrauded. It meant travelling up the motorway/A6 everyday but I have to admit I was very glad of it.
We had a car by then, I think I bought it when I decided to sell mattress comforters and it was the first one I owned that was any good. I remember seeing the advert (again in the LEP) and ringing the garage to ask them what it was like and, of course they said it was the bees knees. The showroom was in the dip before the hill on Longridge Road just before Gamull village in Ribbleton so I knew where it was. Mike Fox seemed to know a bit about cars as he worked previously at London Road motor auctions. The car was a silver-blue metallic Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6L hatchback and it was £2,000.
I had a couple of good years in Lancaster, on the whole I was left alone, it wasn’t a premium store but it was a very good one, especially as it was a one person store…well almost. As mentioned Bensons owned the store on Brock Street, in the town centre of Lancaster, and it was a big place, on three floors and commanding a fair old footprint in a good spot. Lots of people passing and within a stones throw of the main drag, with M&S just on the adjacent corner. But it was a furniture store as well, the only one Bensons owned and, as such, was run as an independant affair. The bosses at Bensons knew beds but not furniture so, as long as the profits were good, they let a lot go unseen, so to speak. That was the reason Dennis Owen got away with lots of cash but, eventually, ended up in the nick. His replacement was a decent enough bloke called Mike Lumb, and ex drop out who had ‘found’ god and was in the christian community with a nice bible dusting wife. mortgage and kids. Actually he was a slimy little fucker who I didn’t trust and who scarcely contained the fact that the false life he was leading was a sham. His salesman was a proper story, a Preston lad from me who, like me travelled to Lancaster every day. Interesting chap Alan Porter.
He wore make up, not the 80’s new romantic trend but subtle make up to conceal something. Everyone knew it but it always remained unsaid, well unsaid to his face obviously. Eventually we decided to share the transport to Lancaster meaning that I picked him up from Lea and dropped him off again. He didn’t drive as yet so he gave me a tenner a week or something but it wasn’t worth it and I regretted doing it. He was the ultimate bullshitter, unsure of half of what he said but brazenly confident without any basis, people fell for it, all the time. Of course it made him a succesful salesperson but sharing a car with him, then most of the day (although we were in separate departments) was hard work, and, at that time, he had atrocious bad breath. He was hiding something behind the make up and the fake bravado personality. I was insecure, nervous of many aspects of life, unskilled in areas that I wanted to be good in but I did not want to bullshit my way through, so the only way is to learn, train, get better, make mistakes, make more mistakes, cringe about them then learn not to dothem again. It’s a hard process. Porter took another route, convincing others he was something he wasn’t. What was different about him was that he was unprepared to settle for the unskilled working life that a terraced house boy raised in 1960’s could expect. He tried to bluff his way out of it and, some might think he succeeded.
I had to wait for him every morning in his house while he got his face on. His wife Jan, who jumped in Preston docks with a backpack full of decorative garden stones in 2015, was always ready before him and the wait was frustrating and embarrasing. Eventually he learned to drive and bought a Vauxhall Nova, we then shared the driving. He was an awful driver, nervous, taking decisions without knowing why, not understanding how traffic works, I hated going with him but, money being important, it was helpful to the coffers. The wage was good, Tracie was back working full time, the bills were comfortable and we were saving up. It still wasn’t enough though, something not right for me, unsatisfied, bad tempered, unfulfilled. The evening post on Thursday nights was a must, jobs advertised, you never know. My eye caught an advertisement, I can still remember it now, not for a job but for a University course, but for an Masters of Arts in Literature and the History of Ideas, that’s interesting I thought.
I didn’t even know how to fill an application form in properly. That is one of the differences in upbringing, how you are taught to do certain things like that. I was left alone to read and think which I am good at, but how to do stuff, nah, you need to be shown, and I wasn’t, either at home, school, college or university. Actually my university application was done in class at sixth form to ensure we got it right. No doubt the college got something out of it financially or otherwise. I wasn’t good at writing either. My thoughts were original but unless you can get them down, or express them in some other way you are bunged up. My grammar was poor, spelling bad, and diction only just alright.
So the application for the MA didn’t go well, I knew when I was filling it in that I wouldn’t be seen to be able to do the course even though I knew I probably could. When I went for a preliminary interview (I think they had to see everybody that applied) they turned the sheets over like they didn’t quite understand what I was doing there. Brian Rosebury and Shauna Murray. A week or so later I phoned Rosebury up from the kitchen of St Andrews road, I remember the call with precision, and he told me that I was an unsuitable candidate and that I would struggle with the course. He went on to suggest a foundation course in philosophy starting in September. Another knock back then, oh well I thought, maybe they are right, I’ll do the foundation and see where we go from there. The phone call confirmed something else though, that they were there and I was not and never the twain.
I set about learning philosophy systematically, from the Greeks upwards. I know now that the right way to do this is probably from now back to the Greeks as we don’t seem to have made many inroads since then, apart from the Kantian thread possibly. But I attended the classes every Tuesday evening after work and I found them useful, at last I could delve into a world of ideas, thinking about the grander picture, so to speak.
But the immediate picture still needed painting, dead end job, Coronation Street life, future prospects wrongly projected – and difficult to attain. All of this caused strain and anxiety. I wasn’t engaged in any of it other than the joy I had in watching my daughter grow up. The need to do something else in terms of a job was still there and this time it didn’t help that Mike Fox had my ear.
I always listened to his opinions, we were after all what might be called best friends. I still didn’t go out much drinking in pubs with ‘the lads’ but we did, as I have said, go out as a couple on Friday or Saturday nights. I can’t quite recall if by this time I had finished my friendship with Chris Brown. I know he had a baby with Debbie, his wife, she had a miscarriage then gave birth to a little girl who had slight heart problems. I was actually, of all things, a godfather to the child the name of who I can’t remember. But the friendship – if you can call it that – had to go and it was a relief to do it. We used to go out together as a foursome and Chris and I still occasionally played music or had a game of snooker, but I would have chosen not to have done them prefering even then, a quiter life. But there was still the disquiet in me that wanted something else and I though it could be found by going out, getting pissed, having a ‘good’ time. It was a dichotomy that’s for sure. What I didn’t like, neither of us did, was the thought that there might be a knock on the door just when you wanted a nice night in, at times we resorted to pretending we weren’t in.
It was a bit different with Mike, he is an engaging person and we had a lot of fun, maybe the person he knew was an aspect of my personality that became egagerated through the ‘drinking buddy’ relationship. Perhaps there was an element of Falstaf/Hal, but without the age gap or paternialty, I don’t know. What I do know is that he advised me on certain things and I listened to his advice one of which was to leave Bensons, again.
Mike eneded up as manager of Bensons Friargate when the store was heading downhill. Town centre were chaning then, retail was undegoing a revolution with the advent of ‘out of town’ shopping. It wasn’t all his fault but he got the brunt of it, he couldn’t stand the pressure and upped sticks as he was inclined to do. He went to work as manager for Houghton Reproductions in Oysten Mill on Strand Road. That type of furniture was all the rage and they were doing great business so he convinced the owner – a dim Irishman with a savvy wife – to open a store in Lancaster, round the corner from where Bensons furniture store was and where I was working. He talked a good fight and the owners bought it and guess who he had in mind to manage it?
I should have had the alarm radar on. Only a few months prior he convinced them to open a shop in Kirkham which failed dismally but he thought that Lancaster would be the place. It wasn’t and I really shouldn’t have done it. Alan Porter was angry because he heard me planning it with Mike on the phone, and he was right to be mad because the store would be in direct competition to theirs, and of course Bensons. Nobody should have worried. The place Hoghton Reproductions moved into was off the main thoutoughfare, always a bad sign, people are creatures of habit and the busuiest hight street can have the quietest of offshoots. It took hardly any money, my wage collapsed, I was bored so much everyday that it was like being in solitary confinement. Inevitably it closed after a few months and I was back down shit creek. Initially they gave me a job at the Preston shop but that was never going to work, the wage was not enough and there wasn’t enough to do. Dreadful time. Eventually they had to let me go, strangely though, at the time, I didn’t blame Mike even though he convinced me it was the clever thing to do.
What next? Well drink some more for one thing that sometimes helps. I was in my mid-thirties still very much short of social confidence evn though my outward character seemed otherwise, I had no job, some savings, an unsympathetic wife, a lovely daughter, a terraced house, and only the prospect of trying desparately to maintain what I had. During all this I had been accepted onto the MA course and, I think, it was the catalyst for me to start recognising that I did have something and that it was worth searching for.
It cost a lot of money did that. £399.99 from Argos in the town centre. I remember bringing it home and setting it up in our bedroom on the dressing table inbetween the wardrobe. It had a hard disk that entered through the side so that you could back up your work, very important that, and a spell checker so that you could be confident about not making any embarrasing mistakes. When the work was ready, put the A4 in and press print, magical. I was thinking all the time, about ideas, amassing theories, criticising great works, preparing thoughts of my own, begining to tentativly apply these to how people lived. Ideas, the most important factor in higher consciousness, and no-one else cared about them other than the other students on the course and the lecturers.
I worked upstairs in the bedroom. It was hard. Daily considerations left me with just about enough energy to apply myself to the task, and there was a lot of reading too. fortunately working at Bensons and then at the furniture store in Lancaster gave me plenty of time to do this but not any more. I had to take any job I could, my CV was woeful, warehouse worker and bed salesman with a couple of weak shots at self employment. I ended up in an electrical appliance shop in Accrington, Tandy as it was then called, driving there everyday and knowing fuck all about what i was supposed to be selling. My heart was sinking fast with this job lark and I didn’t know what to do. We were just about managing financially as Tracie was working at the hospital full time but it just wasn’t any good. I felt terrible stress and axiety about this which didn’t make my mood swings easy to deal with. Alcohol helped, no doubt about it, we had both given up smoking by then, I think, but I had started brewing my own beer and wine which made everynight drinking a welcome light at the end of dreary days.
I applied for two jobs before we left for two weeks holiday. Both of her brothers were in the army, one stationed in Cyprus and the other, who I think had just left, was living in Finland. I seem to recall it was the borther in Cyprus who we were staying with although we did go to Finland too. The jobs were an internal transfer from Accrington to Preston, still with the same company, and a new job at Greenwoods menswear in St Georges shopping centre Preston. I took the later job because it was slightly more money and, at least, clothes were something you could quickly learn to sell, electronics always made me look like a bulshitter when I was selling the stuff which I hated. The job didn’t pay much, certainly not compared to what I earned at Bensons, but I was glad to get back to Preston so I didn’t have to drive to work. I must have been just about to graduate from the MA course as the photos from the ceremony show me in Greenwoods clothes. I did well overall, looking back, a distinction in the Post Graduate elelement but just missing a first in the MA itself. I rushed it, I know I did, eager as I was to get mine in before everyone elses. I received a letter from Brian Rosebury which I still have somewhere stating that, though comendable, my thesis fell just short of the mark. It knocked me for six. I thought this one was going to put my head above the shit, give me the confidence I was sorely lacking, but it didn’t. All it did achieve was to show me somewhere else that I didn’t fit into, somewhere else that didn’t welcome me or want me. It knocked me for six, no doubt abot that.
Rosebury’s letter also stated that my performance on the course showed clear evidence of the ability for further study and that he would say so in reference. I was pleased with this but not sufficiently to prevent a long lasting deflation of confidence, just what I didn’t need. So now I had a better attired bum job, still with a Coronation Street wife, an MA that nobody gave a crap about, and nowhere to look to. I was drowning no mistake. She said she had seen a house, a new build on a cul-de-sac, detached with a garage and gardens at the front back and sides, it was £78,000 and I thought she had gone round the bend. With two wages coming in we were managing quite nicely, even though my job was taking me nowhere, this seemed like a pipe dream at best and, at worst, like a financial catastrophe. She said it would work out and I belived her, the sums would be tight but not impossible, it was a distraction and, for a time, just what I needed.
The process of selling the house was stressful. I was still in a permanantly agitated state, low on confidence, not doing anything – apart from reading and studying – that I really wanted to do, with a new job, still low paid, and having to learn a new set of rules. I can’t remember the managers name but he was young, in his late twenties, loads of get up and go, good looking lad, personable too. He travelled a fair distance to work each day, from a place called Sabden Fold. Even then parking in the town centre was almost impossible and, because he didn’t know Preston he was parking his car in some unlikely spots or, failing that, paying through the nose on a car park. I showed him where I parked and he was very pleased that I did. Saying that now I can hardly believe that I actually drove the short distance from our house in Deepdale to Meadow Street and then walk to town. But I wasn’t quite that lazy as Katie needed to be taken to nursery school, by that time, I think, she was at a place in town that Tracie’s sister was running so I had to get there and then get to work. Before we got that car – a little Citroen AX that Mike Fox convinced me to buy – I used to walk to her sisters house in Ribbleton and then get the bus into town.
Gary something or other his name was and he was difficult not to like but I got there in the end, his assistant manager was a little fellow – equally personalable – called Peter Crook, given different circumstances you could have seen him presenting a TV game show, he would have done well at it too. The other people in the shop were a middle age lady who worked part-time called Maureen, a fat girl who did the office and the shop called Jo and a saturday girl called Vicky who was a hairdresser by trade. The area manager was a real wanker called Roper who eventually lost his job through doing something we all suspected him of. Surprisingly the job toughened me up, they were bullies Gary and Pete and they bullied me, not maliciously, and, of course not physically, but through banter and quick wits. It took me a while to get up to speed, months really, but when I did I turned the tables on both of them because I didn’t give a fuck. It gave me confidence to out talk them, put them down verbally, push them to the point of breaking, good fun in the end and I looked forward too it.
Yes, as I said, the selling and buying were traumatic. One evening I remember sitting in the car, parked up, outside Deepdale nursing home near to where we used to live in Linnet Street. They put my grandmother in there when she couldn’t cope in Moor Nook on her own and, eventually, she died. The reason I was there wasn’t sentimental I was probably just passing, or I had gone to the chippy or the off license, but I do remember with clarity that I thought my heart was going to pop. We both wanted the move so much, you do when it’s decided on, but the surveyors reprt had come back saying the damp course was faulty at the front of our house. Hassle. It needed to be sorted but would the buyer pull out? would we lose the house we wanted? Of course it all got sorted and we moved in, Mike did the move with me, it wasn’t far and he hired a biggish van so we did it in a day and got pissed at night on 24 cans of Stones bitter. The photo is of the cul-de-sac we moved in to, our house was on the corner, detached, gardens, garage, wow the dream eh? well it was alright but things generally, were not.
The house was open plan, in the front door and straight in the living room. The stairs were also in the living room and at the far end to the right, looking out to the garden through patio doors, was a small dining area adjacent to the kitchen. No separation. It looked okay on the outside, and I suppose it was, but to me it was not a thing to be proud of – which didn’t stop me telling people I lived in a new detached house. The money started to go down with no immediate possibility that it might go up again, we still had some savings left but, as I say, diminishing. I dug a pond in the far corner of the garden and built a kind of rockery nearer the house, it was my first garden and it got me out of the house so that was a plus. One Friday, just as we were getting ready to attend one of her family events, I saw a huge grey heron (it looked bigger close up) stalking the pond and pulling out my newly bought goldfish as if it were the best takeaway in town. I should have shrugged it off. On the way there my mind sort of turned inwards, what was the point of trying to do all this if something can just fly down and take it away? Playing the jokey husband couldn’t be done that night I’m afraid, not possible. The function was at a club along Deepdale Road near Meadow Street and I just couldn’t talk, I saw everyone there as idiots, gabbling fools with empty heads, She was getting angry with me, it was her family and I was showing her up, people were telling other people to leave me alone, mute. I didn’t even drink that much. At the end of the night her mother told me that she was staying the night at her house and I went home. The day after was just as black but it was work so you had to pull through, I have done a lot of pulling through.
Even then, with all the rows and unhappiness, I still thought that this was it, no alternative, what alternative could there be? Mike Fox was still my closet confidante and god knows what was said on the regular Sunday nights when I used to go to his and get smashed, how I got through Mondays I’ll never know but I did, again and again, toughened me up I guess. He convinced me to buy another car, the tiny Citroen was bought primarily so she could learn to drive but she never got past a couple of lessons. Big cars were the thing he argued, classic cars, so I bought one, a Mercedes, it was only a further attempt to cover over the cracks.
Shortly after we moved in my mother and her husband moved from Fir Trees Avenue in Ribbleton to Fir Trees Avenue in Lostock Hall. By this time my sister had divorced the violent little thing she married and was living in a cottage in Whittle-le-Woods. Lostock Hall was still the centre of their existence though, he still lived there, her bottling hall was in the vicinity, her daughter was just up the road and the social club – the British Legion (guess) – was full of the same type of people. My mother wanted a bungalow as she struggled with the stairs, my belief is that this excuse blanketed the twin facts of her idle approach to life and her alcoholism. The move didn’t go well. They sold the house in Ribbleton but there was a problem on the moving day so their furniture was put in storage and they came to stay with us. How old would they have been? late fifties for him early sixties for her and it was like accomodating a couple of decrepit old crones. What a downer, it just reminded me what a depressing pair of nay-thinkers they were, feeding doubt off each other until the slightest negative built on their doom laden world view. In truth I was still a fair way from begining to try to shake off such aquired blockages, what can you do, go along with it.
I was still at Greenwoods at the time but I might have been just about to leave. I remember one Saturday Pete and Joanne asked me to go for a drink after the shop shut. By this time he was manager and I was the assistant and he often went for a half after work with one of the girls in the other shops. Although he was a good looking bloke and, as I have said, personable too, there was never anything in it, he was happily married and living in Southport. A half after work was no good to me, four or six maybe and then some more when I got back, that’s why I never went with them, that and I didn’t like them much either. But I did on this occasion so maybe it was when I was leaving, when I got back Tracie was furious because she had to make the evening meal for everyone and I had been in the pub. It was only just after seven oclock but it was Saturday so you had to have eaten by half-six to get ready for the telly to start, so obviously things were not right. It was sausages.
Her other brother lived in Finland and he decided to get married. The obvious choice of best man was his brother but, for some reason, he not only declined the invitation but also decided not to attend the wedding. Everyone else did, her mother and step-dad, her sister, husband and kids, and her, me and Katie. I was best man too, why? I have no idea other than that I was available and, I suppose, we were friendly of sorts. So off we pop to Finland for a week, early summer 1997 if I recall. When we were there literally all the women announced they were prgnant. The brother’s two wives, her sister, and, when we got back, she told me she was also.
So I left Greenwoods to work in another bum job, albeit slightly better paid, at a warehouse store near the Ringway called Tradex. They thought I was great because I had plenty of menswear merchandising skills from working at Greenwoods but, like all of the other bum jobs, it was just to keep the wolf from the door. Thirty eight years old with an MA and nowhere to go, yet I never felt finished, not for a second, this was just how it was, circumsatnce. I tried to get all ‘professional’ with teaching and hated it more than I thought I would (never got past the first hurdle really). I even thought about the law but then I read how much Bob Mortimer hated it and, well, that was that. They made a mistake at Tradex quite early on, they tried to get more out of me than they were already getting, tried to get me in a management tie and be called Mr. This only meant another ten hours a week and more stress so I told them to stuff it, they then tried to bully me into it and, again, I told them to stuff it, then they just kind of ignored me. Tracie was working at the hospital still training to be a staff nurse and she was embarrased by my job. She thought the object in life was working and getting on, well, of course, so did I, but not in the same way. She refered to thinkers as ‘gobshites’, oh dear.
It was a warm day I seem to remember when I got the message from reception that there was a phone call for me. Fiona I think the receptionist was called and I came through the mini turnstile from the trading area to the front desks. I had my white, short-sleeve shirt on and my Tradex tie and, of course, my little badge, Mike Parker, Menswear Supervisor. The call was from Tracie, she had been for an appointment, a scan or something, at the hospital. She told me it was twins. When I put the phone down I wondered if I would ever have the chance of becoming myself in this life, it seemed very unlikely. She knew I didn’t want more children, my argument was that I had focused all of my love to Katie and, selfishly perhaps, I did not have any more to give. That didn’t stop her. On Sunday nights I got home from Mike’s as pissed as a fart and she knew I was never a falling down in the street type of drunk so, bearing in mind that she was never going to settle for just one child, she came off the pile and that was that.
It wasn’t fair, I knew it in my bones and blood, now there was no way out from this that I could see, the crap job, the snuffling about, ideas still unexpressed, frustrated, skills blocked, having to say and do the things that everybody expected, sinking. It was terrible, just carrying on, making plans, still arguing, that is until I stopped talking to her.
The letter was waiting for me when I got in from work, in a large brown envolope on the dining table near the patio doors. From a solicitor, saying that she wanted a divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. Two reactions at the same time. Firstly, a chink of light for me, a new start escaping from the screaming tedium of living under the same roof with a person like that. Second, wanting to hang on to it.
I didn’t get a solicitor, we worked the details out for ourselves, but it was not easy. Two more children on the way, a young daughter that needed attention and all the rest of the stuff. Katie was distraught when we explained that mum’s new baby was two babies, she had such a bad reaction that it took both of us by surprise, but she got over it, I think. We agreed that the priority should be that she bought a house for the children and her, which she did when the house got sold. I got £13,000 out of our joint assests of around a hundred thousand. I wasn’t really concerned until the dates started to be talked about which, I think, would have been in the middle of 1998. I had nowhere to live, I couldn’t afford my own house or get a mortgage for one. In my lunchhour one day I took a trip for Tradex to a place I had seen advertised in Freckleton, Lamaleach Residential Park. It had not age limit and allowed children to stay over, the owner showed me two or three statics and I settled on one, there and then, leaving a deposit of £200.
The time came and me and Mike did the moving. I had already moved most of my stuff to Freckleton so it was just her stuff and the childrens. She bought a good house, I thought, near to her mum’s in Holme Slack. It was a hot day and it was hard work, we were instructed by her mother to leave everything except the beds downstairs or outside on the drive, I asked her for a glass of water and she refused. That night I sat alone in the mobile home without a television or radio, just me and a book, quiet, for once I was no longer in Preston.
Freckleton
“You may find yourself, living in a shotgun shack,
and you may ask yourself, how did I get here”
(Talking Heads: Once in a Lifetime)
I’ve read a lot of great literature. One book, or it may have been an essay, that made a mark was A Room of my Own by Virginia Woolf. Clearly, the work stated two points that were, and still are, of fundemental importance to me. One, I need a place that is mine and, second, I need enough money to buy time to spend in it. I think I’ve mentioned previously the first night I spent in the mobile home, no electricity, no heating, no furniture apart from a bean bag, just me a candle some beers and a book. I had a mattress on the floor and I enjoyed a relaxing evening and a restful nights sleep. Mike Fox came round when I had got a bit more stuff in and we got smashed, obviously, played The Who at decent volume and had several neighbours knocking on the door to complain, not a great start.
Michael Leo Parker 