Autobiography (9 page)

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.

I ask myself if there is an irresponsible aspect in relaying thoughts of pain as inspiration, and I wonder whether Housman actually infected the sensitives further, and pulled them back into additional darkness. Surely it is true that everything in the imagination seems worse than it actually is – especially when one is alone and horizontal (in bed, as in the coffin). Housman was always alone – thinking himself to death, with no matronly wife to signal to the watching world that Alfred Edward was now quite alright – for isn’t this at least partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental all-clear to a world where how things
seem
is far more important than how things
are
? Now snugly in eternity, Housman still occupies my mind. His best moments were in Art, and not in the cut and thrust of human relationships. Yet he said more about human relationships than those who managed to feast on them. You see, you can’t have it both ways.

Who on earth is Patrick MacGill, who in 1916 wrote:

Over the top is cold, matey –
You lie on the field alone.
Didn’t I love you of old, matey,
Dearer than the blood of my own.
You were my dearest chum, matey –
(Gawd! but your face is white)
But now, though reliefs ’ave come, matey,
I’m goin’ alone tonight.
I’d sooner the bullet was mine, matey –
Goin’ out on my own,
Leavin’ you ’ere in the line, matey,
All by yourself, alone.
Chum o’ mine and you’re dead, matey,
And this is the way we part
The bullet went through your head, matey,
But Gawd! it went through my ’eart

Partial disclosures of male closeness fascinate me, because it’s something that is nowhere in the life around me. All males are adversaries in muggy Manchester, and it is now my grim intent to break spells. Meanwhile, I live my life in slow motion. And what drove Oscar wild?

Lily-like, white as snow
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone
Lie on her breast;
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, peace; she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet;
All my life’s buried here
Heap earth upon it.

As the world’s first populist figure (first pop figure), Oscar Wilde exploded with original wisdom, advocating freedom for heart and soul,
and for all –
regardless of how the soul swirled. He laughed at the squeezers and the benders and those born only to tell others what to do. Tellingly, a disfigured barrister and a half-wit in a wig destroyed Wilde in the end, and in doing so one lordly barrister and one lordly judge deprived the world of further works from Oscar Wilde. Solitary confinement was deemed judicially right for the man who had brought more positive change and excitement and fun to the London literary world than anyone else – dead or alive. With childish exuberance, an abstract High Court judge with the full force of jealousy issued a judgment equivalent to the death sentence, oh so inflamed and burdened by correctness was Justice Wills. Out of sheer envy of Wilde’s genius, Wills got at that genius as best he could, for judges in high-profile cases want to be remembered
somewhere
(anywhere!) in history’s grubby footnotes.
Rather than say something helpful, the judge’s only way to out-shadow Wilde was to present a sentence that was internationally gasp-worthy in its excess, and thus came the ruling that killed off the writer who has yet to be matched or equaled, even now, one hundred and ten years after Wilde’s death. The law is often wrong, but Justice Wills – who killed Oscar Wilde with the most severe sentence that the law allowed – knew exactly what he was doing, and acted with the dubious belief that Wilde must be destroyed in order to save the world from homosexuality. It was only by this that Justice Wills nailed his place in history. Float the Wills name through judicial records and you will find it unconnected to anyone but Wilde. It is important to judges to believe that their chosen profession is a difficult one of ‘difficult’ decisions, but this is how they themselves describe it only in order to make a plea for any impoverished decisions that they might clumsily make along the way. But it is they who choose their profession and it is they who allow themselves to be led by the unrestricted freedom that their profession allows. How does British society identify wayward judges? It doesn’t, because it isn’t allowed to. Identification can only be made by yet another judge, who is unlikely to point the finger at a colleague lest suspicion is returned from whence it came. When is a judge ever asked to account for his own words? Never. Barbarity might mount upon barbarity, but the British public has no legal right to question a judge on the grounds of bias – not even in a democratic society. But what if a judge
could
be proven to have been biased? One would need to convince another judge of this first, and no judge would ever be prepared to blow that particular whistle. If one fell, they’d all fall.

In her agony my sister walks home from school each day near to tears. She, too, cannot take one shadow more of her teachers – most of whom are children of the 1920s. Jackie is hounded and hawked by one teacher in particular, whose name is Miss Lewis, whose obsessive persecution of Jackie has a daily determination that never tires. The world has now moved on, quite naturally, from the draped and hooded heap of black that were 1970s schooldays, and the harrowing harassment by 1970s schoolteachers of children in their charge would now quite rightly be identified as criminal behavior. The Manchester Education Committee themselves were their own critical guide, which equals the Metropolitan Police dealing with complaints against their own officers (well, there are
unlikely
to be any charges made). The Manchester kids of my circumstances learned a sense of humiliation as a priority before they learned anything else, and it is perhaps this that separated them from the generation that followed, and we all find ourselves antiquated at some stage due to the irascible march of time. My years at St Mary’s may have damaged me forever, but warm to the skin was that final July when St Mary’s slithered its last heave of hatred, and freedom held out its hand for me to take it. Full of faulty development, I walked away, not an hour richer, with boyhood’s fire doused, yet determined not to drown.

Jon Daley walked along Great Stone Road towards the Hardrock wearing silver knee-length boots, tight sky-blue jeans, blouse open to expose hairless body and flat belly, his spiked yellow hair expertly snipped, his eyebrows shaven off; nail polish and thin silver bracelets completing the dare. He looks sensational, as if plucked from the interplanetary beyond, living the trans earth Bowie reflection as beautiful creature – fearless and resolute. So striking is he that a passing lorry slows down beside him and gruff voices call out in order to throw Jon off balance (well, this
is
the north) – a compliment, of sorts, since it proves just how much you are getting at people, pinging their own self-doubts. Jon doesn’t flinch. In this year of
Aladdin Sane
, Jon is the cover artwork in living form. The afternoon sun burns as Jon makes his way alone. I have no hesitation in approaching him – so fascinating is his appearance against the walls of Old Trafford Cricket Ground. We instantly have much to discuss, although my own slavishly dull school uniform is wretched compared to Jon’s intergalactic grace. Jon is five years older than I, but shorter and thinner, and lives at 12 Reather Walk in Miles Platting (or Collyhurst – if you must) with his extremely Irish parents and his two giddy sisters. He is, without doubt, my first glimpse of modern art in motion. In fact, he works for a catalogue company somewhere beyond Piccadilly train station, and he tells me that he generally minds his own business. I am astounded at his survival in child-eating Collyhurst, so unforgiving and Jack Smethurst blunt. As I approach Jon’s house an enormous dog bounds towards me from nowhere, jumps up on my head and knocks me to the ground, and then runs off with a mouthful of my left trouser leg.

‘Oh, hello,’
smiles Jon. Somehow he sails through – laughed at by children and pitied by adults. How does he do it? And where, in Newton Heath, are silver knee-boots to be found? Well, evidently
somewhere.
Although the brain is well-stocked and the conversation plentiful, Jon has no friends at all. We meet every weekend in central Manchester (or ‘in town’, as locals will say) and we walk for hours; through Back Piccadilly and Tib Street’s underbelly where blind mice are stacked pathetically in pet shop windows – ready to be sold as your pet snake’s soup. Wherever we walk, heads turn to examine Jon, who is neither loudly burlesque nor gay-faced, but is instead quietly unassuming and mildly oblivious to the cage of Manchester. Every inch of the city center is marked, every sunless side street, every tired shop front measured; from Grey Mare Lane eastwards, over to scuttling Salford, and everything in between. For almost two years Jon and I will be occupied with each backland enclave of Victorian Manchester (especially since Manchester remains almost exclusively Victorian), like Betjemanesque church-steeple fanatics we wonder at door cases of Corinthian plaster, or at narrow seventeenth-century passages, and we lust over neo-gothic rain-sodden yards. On tiptoe we would stretch to examine bits of glass on fortress doors, anciently engraved as the last of the old land. A timber staircase down an alley off Great Ancoats Street leads us nowhere; helpless against Edwardian decay and war damage. The scars of Hitler remain evident in 1970s Manchester where businesses somehow continued in rooms of drear on semi-derelict streets. Beyond leftover Shudehill and the deathbound dark shadow of Victoria Station, Jon and I would encircle Strangeways prison, still leaned on by slum streets and courtyards, and we wonder at the bored-stiff inmates, lost in a cauldron of quiet questions. We would sit in sunless turn-of-the-century pubs and ponder the slowness of distant days – of bodies dumped by the Quality Street Gang, ghosts and outcasts and diseased lovers of 1888 – and how we too are part of the process of time frittering away. Queen Victoria had visited Manchester in the 1840s and had remarked upon its destitution as despair previously unseen, and she also remarked upon the sickly look in the faces of Manchester folk (even though she herself was without doubt the most unfortunate-looking woman on the planet). Manchester repaid her unflattering comments with a fat, black statue in Piccadilly Gardens. Why did they bother? What had she ever done for Manchester but criticize it? 1840 was a time when Manchester’s poverty and violence outstripped even London’s hard-as-nails East End inferno.

One day a large wooden gate falls open into a walled yard somewhere amongst unmarked backstreets behind Deansgate, and there before us stood what was the original outdoor set for television’s
Coronation S
treet.
It is a grubby façade of pretend houses and a shabbily stark corner shop – carelessly stacked with yellowing cornflakes boxes with their brand names sloppily hidden behind hastily applied gaffer-tape. Misdirected, we walk in, squinting at the magical properties of television. The eye is detained by the smallness of the set and the surprising lack of realism. Behind us, the
Coronation Street
cast suddenly arrives in readiness for exterior shots, on a street where cobbles face the wrong direction, and where each house has identical off-white net curtains.

‘Have you noticed how the post-box is facing a different direction in each episode?’
smiles Julie Goodyear (who plays Bet Lynch).

‘Yes,’
I lied.

Julie Goodyear is dressed in her faux-leopard brassiness, and is linking Peter Adamson (who plays Len Fairclough). I am suddenly faced with Bernard Youens (who plays Stan Ogden), who looks at me oddly.

‘Oh, you are a nuisance, aren’t you,’
he comments, which confuses me since I hadn’t actually said anything apart from one simple-soul
‘yes’
. Jon and I realize that we are assumed to be extras for the afternoon shoot, which centers on Margot Bryant (Minnie Caldwell) struggling around on feeble feet. Hours pass, and nothing seems to happen, so we advance to leave, but I am stopped by a woman tumbling with a bundle of scripts.

‘Can you handle a bicycle well?’
she asks.

‘Very,’
I say.

‘We need a boy for Saturday. It’s a 7
am
start, no dialogue.’

On Saturday I am prompt for my first television appearance: an Edwardian drama of a brooding England rife with tuberculosis and fraught romances against the typical northern landscape of tug-of-war family ties and money worries. Ushered into the Granada TV makeup room I am forced into a chair where my shagpile moptop is shorn to the bone without my consultation. I am horrified, and then, thirty seconds later, I am thrilled. Habitual-criminal mismatched tweeds, a worn and torn debtors’ prison vest, the obligatory pit-boots and pickpocket’s waistcoat ... and the screen is mine. I am ordered to cycle through a conventional industrial scene of the frozen north of 1913 whilst in the foreground lovers tiff about whatever it is lovers tiff about. The day is naturally overlong, the weather naturally arctic, but the cycling chimney-sweep pulls it off. Avril Elgar is the main star of this production of
The Stars Look Down
, and I, a spot on the horizon, cycling in search of the Hollywood Bowl – a punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate. Even if you don’t blink at all
you will miss me.

When Lou Reed played the Palace Theater in 1973 I had befriended Hazel Bowden and Kath Moores, who are part of an east Manchester sect steeped in all the right noises. They all bound off to Leeds to see the New York Dolls, and they spend the night with the Dolls at the Dragonara Hotel – not as sleeping partners, but just sitting around saying not very much, as David Johansen throws Arthur Kane’s famous above-knee-length boots out of the hotel window and on to the street below – just for a hoot. Hazel wears a beret, is 1940s skinny, speaks in a full whisper, drinks whiskey, smokes impressively, and holds the eye. Hazel appears not to care about anything at all – which is a relief, of sorts. Michael Foley is impressed with this new glamorous syndicate and wants to get closer to the pizzazz of Elnette and Russian cigarettes. As we follow Roxy Music into the Midland Hotel in 1973 (where we are most certainly not wanted), Hazel returns insults to a passing roughneck who bats back the compliment with a bone-crunching whack to Michael’s face. It is an unfortunate but recurring Manchester wrangle wherein the female starts the trouble but is then protected by her femininity when combat kicks off, and the innocent boy-stander (Michael) gets the one–two punch to the blindside. I watch all a-wobble as Michael’s face expands.