I was a mystery to my mum and dad, and they were a mystery to me. There was the world of kids, the world of women, and the world of men, with certain points of overlap: Easter and Passover, Christmas and Hanukkah, summer holidays, the usual annual set pieces of the Judaeo-Christian family calendar.
The prevalent attitude to parenting in my family was a form of benign neglect; there was never really any high-volume aggro with my mum and dad. In fact, the only things they ever said I couldn’t do were get a bike and make a living out of poetry. Other than that, they were quite encouraging.
My dad really only ever gave me four pieces of advice, which I’ve never taken the trouble to forget. Number one: ‘All the vitamins you’ll ever need are in the head of a beer.’ Number two: ‘Never leave a bookie’s with a smile on your face.’ Number three: ‘You’ll never get food poisoning from a chip shop – what could live in that temperature?’ Number four: ‘Never enter a game of cards with a man whose first name is Doc.’
My parents, George Clarke and Hilda Barnes, were both from Salford. Before that, who knows where anyone in my large and neglected family came from: County Tyrone, Vilnius, Kraków, Oldham, possibly even Wales! But we all had one thing in common – we were English.
My dad worked at Metropolitan-Vickers, a heavy-engineering firm in Trafford Park, as an electrical engineer – switchgear specialist. Twenty thousand people worked at Metro-Vicks, and that was just one factory among any number of a comparable size in Trafford Park. I don’t even know what they made there, nor exactly what my dad’s work entailed, but I imagine that during the Second World War they were involved in the manufacture of engines for Lancaster bombers. In any case, his work was certainly deemed in the national interest, and that’s why he wasn’t called up. He did his bit, however, in the Home Guard: Dad’s Army, literally.
In 1949, the year I was born, Dad was promoted to the position of foreman; he proved a charismatic leader of men, popular with his gang. Later, during my schooldays, he was often away during the week, working on the construction of substations and the consequent electrification of those benighted pockets of Scotland and Wales that were still in thrall to the steam age, delivering clean labour-saving energy to their erstwhile gloomy, unenlightened homes.
Before she married, my mum had several jobs here and there. As a cleaner; putting the pastry lids on mass-produced meat pies; and as a shop assistant in a high-end confectioner’s. During the war, she worked in the Manchester Metal Works munitions factory near our home making shells, bullets, and bombs. She also worked part-time as a barmaid. I’m no detective (unless you count those thirty years I spent working in Scotland Yard’s Forensic Division), but I imagine that’s how she met my dad.
When they got married, my mum became a professional housewife. My dad was on good money, and it was a badge of honour to have your wife at home. Owing to his absence during the working week, however, she retained a couple of her cleaning jobs, for the social aspect more than anything else: she liked the company.
There were a great many fatalities in my early life. Within one year, my mother lost her mother, her younger brother Sid, who died in a motorbike accident on his way to their mother’s funeral, and her sister Irene. It was heartbreak upon heartbreak – it seemed like a time of constant sorrow. That left my mum, her sister Winifred, and their cousin Dennis, who was brought up as their brother: his parents couldn’t afford to bring him up, so they just handed him over to my grandma, no questions asked. Uncle Dennis was quite a bit younger than my mum. He was in the RAF, then when I was about ten he was demobilised and for a short period came to live with us.
Aunt Winifred was married to Uncle Frank. They had two kids: my cousins Sid and Frankie. Sid’s real name was Dennis, but to avoid any confusion with Uncle Dennis, he was known by his middle name. They lived in Ordsall, down near the docks, and we regularly hung out together.
My mother’s Uncle Sid, a confirmed bachelor, was the manager of the Manchester branch of Jackson’s, the high-street tailor. He was quite an elderly chap, and was very popular in the pubs round about because he could play the piano. Not a bad bloke, but a real arch-snob, with a waspish, withering humour.
Nobody ever saw Uncle Sid other than at family set pieces: weddings, funerals, twenty-first parties. He would swan in for half an hour, immaculately attired, not a marcelled hair out of place, a pair of snooty-looking tortoiseshell glasses on the end of his beak, nursing a Scotch and soda, never a pint. Image-wise, think Clifton Webb circa Three Coins in the Fountain. If anybody wore a cravat with his pyjamas, it was Uncle Sid.
He didn’t like us kids much: you could tell he just thought we were a messy, noisy, bothersome presence to be tolerated but not encouraged, although he would always cough up a couple of bob for Sid, Frankie, and me. In this he was, as in every other department, extravagant. Uncle Sid had none of the tweed-’n’-flannel dependability of the professional dad; he favoured an inner-city sharpness. Blazers in previously unseen fabrics. A mauve pocket square here, an undone cuff button there. He was, after all, in the business – strictly front-of-house. Frankie reckoned he smelled like a lady’s handbag.
On my dad’s side, there was Auntie Marjorie, her husband Uncle George, and their daughter, my cousin Mary, who looked a lot like the late Princess Di. His other sister, Irene (popular name), was married to Uncle Dick. Uncle Dick was atypical of our family: a teetotal, white-collar motorist. He owned a Ford Popular, but he never went over four miles an hour in it. He was the first motorised family member since the demise of my maternal granddad, who drove a van for Lovells Confectionery. I never met the guy, but my mum backs up the photographic evidence: her father was a ringer for the late Spencer Tracy.
My paternal grandfather, George, had been a regular soldier in India until chucking-out time in 1948, and funnily enough bore an uncanny resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi (who apparently suffered from corns and bad breath, in other words a supercallousedfragilemysticplaguedwithhalitosis, as Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke almost sang). Seriously, though, my granddad gave me my first peach – even now my favourite fruit – and introduced me to the remarkable adventures of Rupert Bear and his immense social circle.
There was a whole load of neglected peripheral family that I never even met. We weren’t too fussy about that sort of thing. We did our best, but you know . . . lack of transport.
There was my mum’s cousin, Uncle Charlie, Dennis’s brother, for example. He was a bit of a charmer with lavishly pomaded hair and a million-dollar Pepsodent smile, a born schmoozer whose social finesse, although attractive, was not enough to keep him from utter penury. He was however in possession of a tuxedo and a pair of cufflinks the size of jaybird eggs. Despite being the schnorrer of the family, whenever Uncle Charlie showed up at any crucial birthday, funeral, baptism, or betrothal, draped in the finest Continental suitings, he impressed the fuck out of us kids; but then, he wasn’t hitting us up for any money. The only surviving visual evidence of the late Charlie Barnes is a single monochrome photograph which accurately captures his prodigious elegance and laid-back allure: clad in the aforementioned tuxedo, he is standing at a microphone fulfilling some indeterminate showbiz engagement.
Given his ignominious end, in Salvation Army hostels and flophouse bedsits, this photograph introduced a note of seldom-heeded caution to my embryonic world view: an unwelcome reminder of the possibility of failure and disgrace. The passing years have elevated this portrait to the status of cautionary iconography.
Finally, next door to Grandma Barnes’s old house, there was my unofficial Uncle Stan, Auntie Edie, and the rest of the Shepherd family: i.e. my mate Baz and his two teenage sisters, Florence and Joan, commonly known as Cat and Dog, owing to their mutual animosity.
I was born in Hope Hospital, Salford, in 1949, four years after the end of the Second World War. This was austerity Britain, but although I never saw a banana until I was five, I had no real sense of deprivation. To be honest, I’m hard-pressed to remember much at all from that early age – I was just five when rationing ended in 1954.
I’m from Higher Broughton. Higher Broughton is not the roughest part of Salford. A number of trees could still be found in one of the several Victorian municipal parks in the area, but posh would be pushing it a bit. Even today, in spite of Media City, Salford is not posh.
The front of our home looked out on the junction of two of the city’s main arteries: running north to south was Bury New Road, the Scotland to London road, and east to west, Great Cheetham Street, part of the A57, which goes from Liverpool all the way to the Lincolnshire coast, through Derbyshire and the Pennines via the Snake Pass, a biker’s rite of passage, strewn with hairpin bends and precipitous inclines.
Salford was bombed very heavily in the Blitz, especially in our area. From the cockpit of a Heinkel He111, our building would have looked very close to Salford Docks, and the munitions factory where my mum worked was only about a hundred yards away. Bury New Road, therefore, received more than its fair share of Teutonic ordnance: target number one. Bomb craters and collapsed buildings, real unsafe shit, that was our adventure playground.
Our apartment was contained in a villa built in the Italianate style befitting the taste of the affluent Victorian high bourgeoisie: a mock-Palladian edifice notable for the crumbling splendour of its applied ornamentation and the flaking stucco of its lavishly fenestrated facade. What would once have been an entire three-storey dwelling had been hastily and badly converted into three self-contained apartments. Slums to anyone who didn’t live in them, perhaps, but grandiose nevertheless, and at some point, we lived in each one of them.
At the rear of the building, the exterior was zigzagged by a fire escape. Its iron steps and balconies provided the setting for any social intercourse and it was out here, back of house, where most of my dealings took place. When I was an infant we occupied the top-floor apartment, but then one day I fell down the fire escape, saved only by the wooden drying rack, which prevented any further descent. My near-death experience must have left my mum in trauma, and we consequently exchanged with Mr and Mrs Korn, the elderly, childless couple on the ground floor.
The middle apartment was occupied by a chap called Jack Jordan, one of my dad’s regular drinking pals. Jack had achieved a measure of celebrity as a professional pianist and the composer of ‘Little Red Monkey’, the main title theme to the 1955 Cold War espionage thriller of the same name starring Richard Conte. He was resident pianist on the popular radio programme Have A Go, starring Wilfred Pickles and his wife Mabel. On his fortnightly professional visits to tweak the finer points of the show, Pickles would occasionally join Jack and my dad in the pub, where he adroitly managed to avoid ever getting a round in. Rightly or wrongly, my father put his meanness down to the traditional tight-fisted nature of the Yorkshireman. ‘He wouldn’t give you the steam off his piss, that bloke,’ was his considered verdict.
At some point after Jack moved out, we took over his vacant apartment, where my parents remained until they were rehoused in a modern high-rise in the early Seventies.
It was a kind of Three Bears situation: top floor, too dangerous; ground floor, too dark; central floor, just right. In spite of its grandiose floor-to-ceiling windows, the acreage of our gargantuan front room in the first-floor flat required the illumination of not one but two chandeliers, which hung from a stratospheric ceiling. A picture rail encircled the walls three feet below the elaborate plasterwork cornicing.
Each of the utility rooms, however, was an ergonomic fiasco. The kitchen wasn’t even a kitchen, merely a passage from one area of the apartment to the other, with a four-ring electric stove, a grill for toast and bacon, and a sink bodged in. Somehow my mum managed to cook a Sunday dinner there every week and a Christmas dinner every year. It’s a mystery how she did it.
Downstairs, as well as Mr and Mrs Korn was Mr and Mrs Freedman’s chemist’s shop. Next to that was our communal front door, which opened onto an expansive spiral stairway with filigree ironwork banisters, punctuated on each landing by a finial in the form of a torch-bearing nymph. The hallway, ill-lit by the grime-bespattered skylight, was painted in a dismal pre-war drab, and housed bas-relief statuary, friezes, and a fabulous bestiary of gargoyles – the furniture of most people’s nightmares and a place of dread foreboding to anyone in their right mind. Welcome home.
I hated having to come in through the front door of our building. I was a nervous kid, and the profusion of possible hiding places coupled with its easy accessibility from the street made our stairwell the ideal lurking spot for kidnappers and child-murderers, so I always used to go round the back and up the fire escape. Later, at school, whenever I mentioned the fire escape for any reason, the other kids had no idea what I was talking about until around 1961 and the movie West Side Story. I could then refer them to the publicity posters featuring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer running hand in hand through the Hispanic streets of New York, and prominent in the background the familiar iron zigzags of the tenement fire escapes. In the movie most of their romantic close-ups take place on these structures.
I remember instantly recognising that world because I was living in my own little bit of Manhattan, right there, in Higher Broughton. I felt I had more in common with those characters in West Side Story than the children I went to school with. Later, when Nico and the Beat poet Gregory Corso moved from New York to Higher Broughton, they too would comment on the familiarity of the neighbourhood ambience.
That was my very early view of the world: fire escapes, traffic lights, commercial transport, and Haredi Jews. Higher Broughton and Broughton Park were and remain a largely Jewish area. The Salford Jewish community was well established: merchant families had first come from Germany in the boom years of the nineteenth-century cotton industry; Hasidic sects had migrated from Russia, Lithuania, and Poland; and, of course, the most recent arrivals were those fleeing Europe and the horrors of National Socialism. Considering I went to a Catholic school, I was by virtue of my address regarded by my largely Polish classmates as a rootless cosmopolitan and one of Josef Stalin’s useful idiots: aka a Jewish Bolshevik. I don’t want to wave the victim flag, but the banter, at times, got savage.
The more assimilated of their number were all quite glamorous. Have I seen Schindler’s List? I was on Schindler’s list – Dr Schindler my dentist that is. He was a recent arrival from Germany and would say ‘goodbye’ in lieu of ‘hello’, and vice versa, but he remains nevertheless the only dentist I ever met who wasn’t an arsehole (apart from the late Dougie Green).
Mr and Mrs Freedman, who owned the chemist’s on the ground floor of our building, were a significant fixture in my life. Leonard Freedman was an extremely suave individual. A wearer of cravats, a drencher of colognes, he even affected a beard, meticulously topiarised into the then popular Vandyke style. Mrs Freedman, also a trained apothecarist, was pretty hot: picture an off-the-shoulder Breton-style matelot top, paired with pastel pedal-pushers and a pair of espadrilles, all totally St Trop. Given the location, this look occasionally seemed incongruous, even in the summer months. The dichotomy, however, worked in her favour.
Everyone’s home, for better or worse, has an odour, and the smell of one’s own home can never be known. This source of olfactory anxiety was obviated in our case, however, by the proximity of Freedman’s pharmacy, which meant that our place reeked of cocaine, its ethereal omnipresence at once aseptic, astringent, and clean. At that time most people would have recognised the smell of cocaine due to its use in dental procedures: you could choose a general anaesthetic in the form of nitrous oxide gas that put you in a coma, or you could opt for a local anaesthetic – invariably cocaine, injected into the gums – and remain conscious. Typically, I took the coma option.
As kids back then, we didn’t recognise cocaine as the recreational rock and roll stimulant we know today. No, for us cocaine was synonymous with the worst-case scenario in the world – the dentist. Each school was allocated a dentist: ours was called Dr Frankenstein. I’m not kidding. A date with Dr Frankenstein – the horror, the horror.
Back of house, from my vantage point high atop the fire escape, it was Coronation Street for a million miles, with sporadic church spires poking out of the smoky distance. These fading streets were home to almost everybody I knew.
But from the front windows of our various apartments I had a very different view of life. I would look out and see the busiest intersection of the entire pre-motorway North of England teeming with traffic from all over the UK, an endless stream of trucks, cars, coaches, buses, and bikes, all heading to destinations unknown: Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Hong Kong.
Rather than looking out of my front door and seeing another front door, I saw a parade of grand, if decaying, architecture. Nobody else that I knew lived on a main road unless their parents had a shop. And even though we lived in a succession of crummy apartments, to me they were superior to the other houses: we had a fridge, a bath, an indoor lavatory, and a fire escape.
Aunt Winifred and Uncle Frank lived in Ordsall, near the docks, two bus rides away from our gaff. Even though they had a TV before we did, my cousins Sid and Frankie used to have to come to my house every Friday for a bath, whether they needed it or not.
My only experiences of split-level living coincided with episodes of family illness. For a short time we’d lived at my grandma Barnes’s in the immediate period before her death. Later, when my mum went into hospital, I had to live with Aunt Winifred and Uncle Frank in Ordsall, where I was horrified to discover that Sid and Frankie were required to do the washing up after tea. One washed, the other dried. I was appalled.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I yelped in a tone of sincere inquisitiveness.
‘We’re washing up,’ they explained.
‘What’s Auntie Winnie doing that’s so important that she can’t do the washing up?’
That was my line of thinking, but they said it was only fair because she did all the cooking. ‘Of course she cooks your tea!’ I protested. ‘She’s your mother, for God’s sake. It’s a legal obligation.’
This allocation of labour seemed a pretty rum deal in my opinion – you know, child exploitation, or something. I don’t think I ever recovered from that.
Upon her return home from hospital, I regaled my mother with this tale of injustice, and made it clear that although I was very fond of Sid and Frankie, any future sleepovers were out of the question until they reformed their regime.
By contrast, on another occasion when my mum had to go into hospital, I went to stay at my Auntie Marge and Uncle George’s house, where I was treated like fucking gold. It was a novelty for Auntie Marge to have a lad in the house, and I was consequently spoilt rotten. The most lavish prefabricated desserts were served up on a daily basis: Bird’s Instant Whip (a precursor of Angel Delight), Betty Crocker’s Pancakes, Symington’s Table Creams, and, my favourite, Royal Lemon Meringue Pie. These delights had one thing in common: they all came out of a box and were heavily advertised, with flattering full-colour serving suggestions, in women’s magazines.
My short stay at Auntie Marge’s was like what they said in the After Eight Wafer Thin Mints advert: ‘Luxury – pure, unashamed luxury’ – and with no help from me, dishwashing or otherwise.
When it was time for my mum to leave hospital on that occasion, I wondered whether it would be best all round if they kept her in for further observation. In so doing, I cleverly convinced myself of my own altruistic concern:
‘They’re not letting her out yet, are they? What? No aftercare? Shouldn’t they keep her in another week?’