‘Come on, let’s go and look round the old places …’
You were dressed for a walk in September, stepping from the college flat’s living room where a ruffled sofa bed had been made up under the window.
‘Jean’s still asleep, by the sound of it,’ you said, proffering me my jacket. ‘We can be back before lunch.’
Never able to get a good night’s rest on an unfamiliar sofa, I had given up pretending to sleep before dawn and was sitting over one of Jean’s books in her kitchen when you finally appeared. Jean Walsh, you remember, the playwright; we got to know her during that year she spent as a writer in residence at the Art College. Jean had been offered the post after her series of fringe successes culminating in the West End run of her first hit satire, Money for Jam, about the deregulation of the City. She was coming to the end of a two-year stint as a community theatre fellow in our old university town. It was almost fifteen years since you and I had left. The council was starting to sandblast the house-fronts and lower the housing density towards the end of our three years in the place. Now the transformation appeared all but complete.
Still dominating its skyline of sloping slate roofs was the Mill tower: a slender imitation of an early renaissance campanile. It had been saved by preservationists, and was part of the town’s industrial museum. Trying to keep up the idea of a future in exhibition organizing, Alice had volunteered to work there when she came back from New York. The historical displays in the museum were just beginning to be put together. She typed up labels, cut out large squares of hessian sack to use as the ground for object displays, all in the hope that a vacancy would come up, but it quickly transpired there’d be no salaried positions for years—and, besides, she had no museum curator qualifications.
One Saturday afternoon those years before, we three had climbed to the eighth floor of the main university building. Up there, in a large empty space used as a practice room by student bands, a not-quite-in-tune piano stood open in the corner. Immediately after catching your breath, you wandered over and started to pick out the Labour Party Anthem with one finger; Alice managed to conjure some of its words from the air. Below us, smokeless and still, lay the panorama of that threatened Victorian townscape. It must have been only a few days before she left for London. Suddenly the prospect seemed emptied of purpose, the painted flats and props of a flopped kitchen-sink drama.
‘All this can be yours!’
It was just such a view of the place that had prompted your professor to make that remark. She meant, of course, the rashes of social problems breaking out all over those streets of terrace houses. But that day, up there with you and her, our university town had felt like the stage set of the Mill which Jean’s agit-prop students were building out of cardboard.
The evening before she’d showed us around the theatre’s deserted auditorium.
‘What’s the play about?’ you asked, walking up to centre stage with a faint squeak from the floorboards at every step you took.
‘The Chartist lock-out,’ Jean replied from the middle of the front stalls. ‘It’s a documentary dramatization.’
‘When was that? What happened?’
‘In early 1849: Bester, the mill owner, brought in blackleg Irish labour, shut out the work force, and broke the strike.’
‘Not exactly a happy political message,’ you said.
‘No,’ Jean agreed, ‘but though the Chartists were defeated, their lessons weren’t forgotten, and it was then that the Trade Union movement in this industry really began to gather momentum.’
‘Reminds me of all the school plays I was in,’ you said, near the wings now, in a stage whisper.
‘Oh your paws and whispers!’ I could still remember Alice saying.
The student stage designer had attempted to represent the imposing mill tower and factory in a squat and corrugated form.
‘Doesn’t look much like the real thing,’ my voice came from down left, a smear of black powder paint on one index finger.
‘That’s not the point,’ said Jean. ‘We couldn’t possibly make the flats look like a realistic factory even if we tried. So I’m getting the kids to work on alienation effects, symbolic tableau, direct addresses to the audience by narrators, using historical documents, rapid shifts from scene to scene on stage at the same time and picked out with lighting changes … You know the sort of thing.’
But looking out from Jean’s kitchen window that morning, I had gazed a good while at the real campanile. There it remained, with the aura that an artwork could attract. Stripped of its function, that complex of buildings represented nothing but a value, the meaning to something that no longer existed. And it was just such a magical aura that Jean’s student play seemed designed to dispel—as if the only thing which prevented life turning into virtual art was the unending effort of historical memory, as if the only way to forgive and forget was exactly to remember.