Paul Malpas

No sooner was I home from my sojourn in Bordeaux, then I was off again to Manchester to attend the funeral ceremonies of one of Longsight’s and St. Robert’s parish’s greatest women.  A woman born and reared in Denaby in South Yorkshire but who made Longsight and its environs her home.

Ellen Connor (nee Wilkinson) was born into a different world than the one we know today, a world that only knew hard work, plenty of it, done well and for no reward.  She was born on 12th August 1914, eight days after Britain had declared war on Germany, when the British Army were mobilising to face the threat of the Kaiser.  350 of Ellen’s neighbours, who had enlisted for the York and Lancaster Regiment and who had lived in that triangle of Pontefract, Rotherham and Doncaster  were transferred to the green fields of Ireland and the Connaught Rangers 5th Battalion, who were undergoing basic training at Kilworth Camp in Fermoy in Cork because I suppose the York and Lancaster 2nd Battalion was stationed in Limerick only a few miles away and were oversubscribed and the newly founded 5th Battalion Connaught Rangers were in need of drafts.  Many of this gallant 350 were killed at Gallipoli in their first taste of action in July 1915.  I have the great honour of being the General Secretary of the Connaught Rangers Association which serves to remember the sacrifice of the dead comrades of that pernicious conflict, the Great War.  Ellen might well have known the families of some of those men.

So Ellen grew up and went into service in Nottingham and then came to Manchester as housekeeper for the priests of St Edward’s parish in Rusholme and met and married the caretaker’s son, Jim Connor, in 1939.  Jim was an electrical engineer at Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park, where my father and mother worked.  They lived in Urmston close to Metro’s which was the biggest industrial complex certainly in England, employing at that time about 30,000 people.  In 1948 Ellen and Jim moved to Kelstern Square on the Anson Estate for their first taste of life under the avuncular yet despotic rule of Fr Vincent O’Shaughnessy.  Already they were nurturing four daughters, Sheila (1940), Joan (1943), Pauline (1945) and Angela (1947).

As was the way with life in those hard post-war years, small groups of women got together and supported each other through pregnancy, infancy and early school days of their families and that was how I came into contact with Ellen.  Ellen Connor, Margaret Mackie, Teresa Robinson and my mother Margaret Malpas formed a quartet that could not be broken, all parishioners of St Robert’s, all members of the Union of Catholic Mothers, all having gone through the war in their early years of marriage and all facing the stresses of spartan existences in those rationed years of the late 1940s and early 50s.

Ellen went on to have three more daughters Eileen (1949), Mary (1952) and Rita (1954).  Pardon me if I have got those dates slightly wrong but they were wrought from a memory that is old and obviously frail.  By now nine of family and with seven daughters, they gradually realised that their little council house in Kelstern Square could take no more, so they moved into a large three storey Victorian semi round the corner, No 17 Birchfields Road in about 1960, which easily coped with the nine of them, which soon became 11 when Jim’s sister died leaving two children, Teresa and Robert.  These two cousins were seamlessly added.  The house also coped with Jim’s burgeoning property repairing business, which he had inherited from his father and Sheila’s hairdressing salon that coiffeured the matronly heads of the Union of Catholic Mothers amongst many others.

My first memories of the Connor family was when Rita was born in about 1954, I went with my mother to Kelstern Square to visit the new born child and that was the start of my constant link with the family, I was however, from the age of four, in the same class as Pauline.  When I was about 15 or 16 Jim gave me part time work at weekends and school holidays, working with his brother Frank, painting most of the ecclesiastical institutions in Victoria Park.  It was like the Forth Bridge, it never stopped and for years after I continued this nice little earner at 2s 6p per hour which financed my early drinking career.

In fact during my late teenage years I was hardly ever out of Jim and Ellen’s house, reporting for duty, watching TV and generally learning how to deal with a family of good looking women.  To the worldly wise it would and must have been like heaven, surrounded by this plethora of beautiful girls but oafish and ungainly me could never measure up and the girls all went eventually their separate romantic ways.  The one constant was Ellen, always putting a plate of food in front of me, she was like a second mother to me for years until I also eventually moved on to seek my fortune.  Since then in the middle 60s until now I used to meet up with each and everyone of them from time to time, there was never any awkward silences, we just took up where we had left off, it was as though we remained in those early 1960 years, so tightly bound together.

So it was with great joy and anticipation that I made my way to Manchester to take part in the celebration of Ellen’s life.  There is little sadness when a person of nearly 98 dies, just happiness at the long, fruitful and deeply fulfilled existence.

At the church of St Winifred’s, where Monsignor Michael Quinlan is OIC and who would not be too happy knowing I was sat in his benches, there appeared many still recognisable faces. Those that had hardly changed in the 50 years of my wanderings were Ellen’s seven daughters, easily recognisable because they all carry some aspects of Ellen’s countenance.  They all retain the fine chiselled features of their mother, none look older than 40 yet I suspect if my maths are correct some of them must be older than that.  Two of the Power girls from Montgomery Road were there, Geraldine and Aileen. Jean Gay and her 94 year old mother, her father is still going strong at 97.  There must have been something in the water in Longsight all those years ago because my father at 94 was also striding up the aisle alongside my two brothers Kevin and Michael, Kevin in need of a haircut and Michael clean shaven and trimmed to match his elevation in life.  Another blast from the past, Miss Wallace was also there still recognisable although well into her 80s.  I did not introduce myself because the palms of my hands were still smarting from the edge of the ruler she wealded with such gay abandon on our ten year old palms and my mind still stunned by the negativity she tried to instill without success into our baby booming confidence.

Above everything else was the mass of the Connors.  Ellen had seven daughters who spawned 20 grandchildren with space and time for many more who again bred 26 great grandchildren with hundreds more to come and also two great great granchildren were present with three more tucked into their mothers’ bellies for deliverance later this year.  Fecundity is without doubt the family’s middle name.

At the funeral breakfast, tears of joy, happiness and a few of sadness mingled with the lump in my throat and I found it hard to talk.  I was just so glad to be there and experience the waft of memory as it rolled over me and the delight of a life that had been well lived.  Ellen and her husband Jim, who died in 2005, were as generous as any two people could be.  In the words of her first grandchild Anthony, Shiela’s son, who offered up the Eulogy at the end of Requiem Mass, Ellen’s “legacy is one of wealth, not of money, but of showing how to live your life through selfless love for other people”.

In the few years I have still to live she will never be forgotten, nor will she be in the minds of two of my daughters, Katy and Louise, who accompanied me and knew the family.  Katy weighed down with her two year old twins who were as good as gold until the eulogy and then started shouting like a Manchester City crowd in full voice drowning out Anthony’s well chosen words.  Louise weighed down by a child yet to be born but at 38 weeks cannot have long to go.  They were massively impressed with the whole celebration.

May Ellen rest in peace.

With all the comments I have received lately about a piece I penned over two years ago, I thought I would continue on the same theme and write of more thoughts I have about life in Longsight and especially life attached to St. Robert’s parish and school and try to invigorate our selective  memories.

I was born in February 1946 and anybody with a glimmer of simple mathematics can work out that my conception was based on celebrations attached to Mr Hitler’s demise, nine months previously in May 1945.  So I am the only man I know that rejoices in that horrible man and his fortunate death but I doubt that my parents were the only ones celebrating in early May that year.

I was born into a family that had virtually nothing, having been bombed out of their house in Miles Platting during the Christmas Blitz of 1940.  They were at the start of the long weary trail of putting one foot in front of the other and building from scratch.  But in other regards I was born into wealth, into Longsight and its many characters and more importantly into St Robert’s parish, centred on Hamilton Road.  The Catholic Church then, as opposed to now, put its arms around its families and guided us through the hard times.  It seemed to cater for more than pastoral care, it actually managed our existence in times young people now will never understand.

I started school after the 1950 Christmas holidays; I was four years and ten months old and I could read and write in a fashion that was probably better than my script today.  I entered Miss Standen’s class, an old lady who retired shortly afterwards but not before she put me on the road.  My memories of her say she was a kindly woman endowed with lots of patience, ideal for the task in hand.

The following September I moved up to Infants 2 which I think was in the care of Miss Willoughby and then onto Infants 3 and that ended the soft times.  They thought at eight we had certain responsibilities in life and one of these was to accept punishment rather than chastisement for any misdemeanour. Junior One started for me in September 1953, in the newly built prefab adjacent to Farrer Road, built for the first of the baby boomers of my generation.  It seemed the war ended and love started in 1945.  Our teacher in Junior One, a young decent woman who was shortly to get married, decent in that she could control her class by a mix of sternness and niceness, a mixture that was missing in some of the teachers.  Her very presence calmed you and made you listen.

Then onto Mrs McGrath’s class, Junior Two, and it was in this class that the powers decided punishment was the answer to all problems.  Mrs McGrath was the Headmaster, Paddy McGrath’s wife and must have wanted to keep her husband in shape so that any murmur at all was sufficient to send us down the corridor to her husband’s office for a dose o0f his feared strap, which he summarily dished out outside his room for all and sundry to see.

We moved up to Miss Wallace’s class as we approached 10 years old and the punishments got worse.  Miss Wallace, so the rumour went, was attracted by Paddy McGrath’s punitive muscles and always dressed smartly when he was around, tidying up her make-up and recoating with lipstick if Paddy was due for inspection.  It was thought that her and Paddy were close,  but how close in those Catholic days, I don’t know.  Miss Wallace had a grim countenance, only  brightened by Paddy’s frequent visits.  She was always calling me big-headed and far to cocky, always beating me over the hands with the edge of a ruler.  Her possibly unrequited love affair with Paddy might have had something to do with her dissatisfaction of me, but I for my part could not understand her grievances against me because my examination results were always top class and I always wondered what I had to do to escape such duress.  Confidence was not the thing authority respected those days.  Control and subserviance were the qualities to attain.  My reports, which I still have, tell me that I was top of the class of 47 children and still getting beaten to within an inch of my life.  I suppose trying to control 47 Longsight kids was a task in itself, if you were not on top of your game, without trying to teach and vexation did rise to the top more often than not.

I have to say that punishment never ever taught me a lesson either at St Robert’s or at St Bede’s where I went after 11+, it only made me more determined to plough my own furrow.  I think we thought of punishment as a necessary evil, something to be endured, like cutting your knees whilst playing football in the school yard.  A means to an end.

The senior class before the 11+ examination was Junior Four and Mr Groarke’s class.  A fine and fair man, a good teacher, who could dish out punishment just the same.  When he punished you , you felt that you had deserved it.  With Paddy McGrath and Miss Wallace hitting you, you wondered why.  People I remember in that class, most of whom went on to Senior One (there was no secondary schools for most in those days and comprehensive education had not been thought out), were Pauil Richardson, Barry Mannock, Stuart Robinson, David Evans and Alan Morris, David Duffy and Anthony Fahey.  I seem to remember more girls as they were more competitive in the exams, Pauline Connor (one of seven daughters of Jim and Helen Connor), Pauline McGhee, Belinda Maloney, Mary Leydon, Rosemary Keogh, Marlene Moran and Maureen Smith from up North Road, Maureen Sargent and the Swiss girl, Helen Vogeli who did not seem to mind the change in language.  It is funny how you remember some but not others, but there was another 31 kids there somewhere and probably a little reminder and they would all come flooding back.

I was co-opted onto the altar boys at St Robert’s when I was seven, my mother bought me the cassock from John Neville’s in Manchester and my Aunty Kath made the cotta with some fancy lace trimmings on the sleeves and round the hem and Fr Dwyer instructed me in the Latin rites and made me know how important and special was the role of an altar boy.  A few years ago whilst writing my Memoir, a 400 page tome, which I did for my children rather than for publication, I discovered a photograph taken prior to an altar boys trip to Blackpool.  The photograph is strange these days, there was a group of men and boys about to go on an outing, all dressed up in shiny shoes, suits, shirts and ties, no leisure wear, anoraks, tracksuit trousers or trainers.  It must have been taken in 1958  because I was wearing my first year St Bede’s uniform, grey short trousered suit with school tie and blue shirt.

The two priests sat centrally, Canon O’Shaughnessy andf his curate Fr McCardle.  Some of the St Vincent De Paul Society stood at the back who were a lot older than us.  Reggie Singh, who chanced his arm with Evelyn Mellor who lived next door to us but who never stood a chance with the battalion of GIs, fresh out of Burtonwood who were queueing up to register their claim.  Next to him there was John Sparks, Bill Bagnall, Robin Clancy, the twins father, Mr White, John Shepard, John Walsh who became a dentist in Clare and  John Mulcahey.  Lads who were older than me at Bede’s, John Watkins who lives in Zurich now, Michael Power whose sisters , Aileen and Geraldine, I knew and Mike McPartland.  There were “Punch” Donelon’s two sons, Chris and Sean and Anthony O’Malley who went to Xaverian and ended up in Law.  The Harrison twins, John and Michael, Michael continued to serve on the altar until the church closed in 2003, devoting nearly 50 years of his life to the cause.  Then there was Stuart Robinson from Swayfield Avenue who went on to marry Cath Philbin who became Lord Mayor of Manchester, Anthony Millington who I continued to meet the odd time at Houldsworth Golf Club and his brother Paul who I last saw in his butcher’s shop on Meldon Road.  Paul Hopkins was there the son of Gabriel Hopkins, a local shop owner, politician and friend of my father’s, Paul became headmaster of a secondary school in North Manchester.  John Halloran I notice, John was the nephew of a famous Daily Mail journalist whose name at the moment escapes me. There was Tony Deacy who was making a name for himself in the construction industry until he was tragically killed on Longley Lane in 1973 aged 26. also I see Kevin Kelly, son of the church organist Mrs Kelly and his fellow skiffle group member, my brother Kevin, who the following year took up with the Holy Ghost Fathers, John Howarth, Michael Leydon and Robert Fannon.  The White twins , Peter and Paul, John O’Grady and a lad called Davidson (Jeremy, I think).  There are two boys I cannot name but I will do one day when I finish this process.  Whatever happened to most of these faces, they all look very serious and I doubt the 54 years will have changed the ones that are still living that much.

These lads and men formed the backbone of the parish at that time, serving at every church service.  I wonder how many, like myself, have drifted away because of the Church’s inabilities in reinventing itself.  Its power and control was great for the war weary 1950s and before but the Church had given us education and most of us eventually empowered  with this wisdom, realised the faults in its system.  For me its only fault, propagated by lowly priest, dandy bishop, aloof cardinal and disdainful pope was the massive corporative cover up of clerical abuse which has been in practice all my life and which they are still trying to conceal when they have been caught bang to rights as their suppurating corpse twitches on the altar of life.

But back to Longsight and St Robert’s.  Nowadays I wonder at the distances some of the kids walked to school, especially a school in an urban environment.  Marlene Moran from long gone Greenwood House flats on Kirkmanshulme Lane, must have been the farthest.  The Sacred Heart in Gorton or St Joseph’s in Longsight would have been nearer.  Barry Mannock who lived off Stockport Road, near Mount Road and would have been quicker going to St Mary’s and in fact all the St Richard’s children who had unfortunately no school to go to.  I understand the position as now reversed itself and all the St Robert’s children now go to St Richard’s.

It is strange also to think of shopping in those pre- supermarket days.  We lived on Duncan Road and except for occasional trips to town, all the shopping to satisfy our daily needs was done within a 100 yard radius of where we lived.  Mrs Bunting’s greengrocers shop was at the top of the road on Slade Lane, Ernie the butcher on the corner of Clitheroe Road and Dixon Street, Mrs Reynolds grocer’s shop opposite and the off-licence on Clitheroe Road where I used to go with a jug when my granddad was to poorly to stroll down to the Anson Hotel.  The jug would be filled with beer from a pump and I would head back down Dixon Street, having a few slurps to stop it from spilling .  All these shops would have been full if three customers came at once, so you just wonder at where the hundreds come from that fill the supermarkets 24 hours per day.

We were all surely an insular bunch, living in our own little cocoon that the parish had created.  We did not notice the poverty all round us; the only time we ventured further than the top of the street was when we went to the pictures.  Longsight and Levenshulme were well endowed with picture houses, from the flea-pit Queens at the Stockport Road/Slade Lane junction to the opulence of the Regal Cinema in Levenshulme, which does keep reinventing itself, from a cinema to a bowling alley to a showcase curry house.  Sometimes three cinema visits a week were called for to satisfy our needs in those pre-TV days and on the way home, a bag of chips in the previous days newspaper.  You could read the news off the chips, the type transferring itself from the newsprint onto the potatoes.

Well there is 2100 words fashioned out of nothing with still plenty to talk about in Longsight and its church of St Robert.

I retired at the relatively early age of 59 on the eve of my 60th birthday.  I retired because I did not like what work had become but I had assiduously applied myself to the task and had a modicum of success and vowed my next few years were for Helen and myself.  I was reasonably young and had most of my faculties intact but I was obviously needing something to do and I naturally knew what it was.  I wanted to write, not rubbish, but something with a little quality attached either in phrasing or ideas or both.

So after a period of thought and preparation I set about writing the memoir of my life, not a great life but one with some interest even to the casual reader, let alone my children for whom the tome was originally prescribed.  I started it in the winter of 2006 and quickly found out that I could write more easily at night time when it was quiet and there was no distraction.  So with a little planning and preparation I set to.  I was amazed; the words tumbled out of my mind onto the page almost quicker than I could write.  In those days and even today with some scripts, I had to put pen to paper first before transferring them onto the typed page.

So as England was trounced by Australia in five Ashes test matches over that deep dark winter, I crafted 130,000 words of my own to describe myself and my forebears.  I wrote it in about four weeks and then asked Helen, my devoted wife of 39 years, to type it out, because her earlier training, before she started on me, was in that direction.  She knocked out about 60 pages in quick time before she tired of the task, or possibly of me, who stood at her shoulder and glowed as she committed my words to the screen and she told me that I would have to finish the job myself.

For me the size of the imposition was gargantuan, never having used a keyboard previously but in true surveyor’s style, I split the work into sections and vowed to complete 20 pages per day, in double line spacing, about 6000 words per session.  I had it done in a little over three weeks and I was a proud man until I started reading and editing which then took me the best part of the next three years before I was happy enough to let others read it.  It was received well by some and not by others.  I could not help being critical of some stages and some characters in my life.  I was brutal but probably factual in parts but I knew I was not quite there yet.

Sometime between 2009 and 2011 my painfully typed memoir disappeared off my computer screen, why or how, I do not know but into the ether it went.  I had made a typed copy but for tinkering purposes I missed it.  I was always adding words or subtracting sentences and it was lovely to play with it.  I am no expert in computers and it probably is in there somewhere that the intrepid expert will  easily extricate.  One day I might give the task to some familial great in the field to find but I have kind of resigned myself to retyping and not without a little pleasure at the thought, because in retrospect some sections need revisiting and rewriting from a different angle.  However that is a promised duty for when I run out of steam and not now when I am so busy with other ideas.

So come the winter of 2009 I was in a writing desert, wanting to write but trying to find a medium, finding a way for others to read my thoughts.  The urge to write is an amazing need in one so struck.  You are impelled by some intangible force to get words on paper, not particularly to earn money, though that would be nice, but that others could benefit from or be critical of your fine turn of phrase and laugh or at least smirk at the humour of your thoughts.

It was then I was struck by an idea mooted by my son-in-law, although he was referring to it in a business sense.  Blogging and how it could help people in business.  I signed myself up as a non-paying customer of a symposium he was about to give on the subject and after 10 hours of education, I realised this idea was for me.  It also taught me a few insider tricks in how to make the blog more available to others.

Within a couple of days my daughter and husband had set me up with a vehicle to put my words on and after a very shy and tentative start I was into my stride very quickly, helped by the antics of the Catholic Church and the publication of the Ryan Report into clerical abuse in Dublin, which gave me an ocean to trawl through for ideas from the very start.

I realised  quickly the subjects to steer clear of.  My scrapbook was full of poison pen letters and anonymous phone calls and threats of all descriptions, including three from the local rag here in Boyle, who were considering suing me for defamation.  Funnily enough I also received a threat from a bumbling priest in Manchester who was going to sue me for “deformation”.  My mind has boggled ever since.  Certainly the parish pump is a no go area if you want a quiet life, especially in small town Ireland.  There are still people seething from stuff I wrote regarding the local scene two years ago, it does not matter that it was the truth but for them to be confronted with it, was not quite on.

So my mind and blogging moved to the international arena and away from the small minds stadium.  I wrote about anything and everything, little ideas wormed their way into my head as I lay, a supine insomniac, in my bed at night and the next day these thoughts displayed themselves onto my screen as I nodded off for want of sleep.

What cheered me and what drove me on was the choice of subjects, especially the Catholic church and its works and pomps for which I had a particular dislike, but the real driver was the feedback.  Over the last 27 months I have met thousands of people through this medium with readers from all over the world e-mailing me and posting comments on the site.  So far people from over 150 countries have contacted me to give me their point of view on a particular subject.  That is the real power of the blog, the fact that there are no boundaries, the whole world is your stage.  Once you have written your piece it is there forever, like an over-abundant fruit tree with a never ending crop waiting to be picked off 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by anybody who chances along.  In that time of 27 months, I have written 177 blog postings containing about 300,000 words with hundreds of thousands of people reading what I have to say.  A tool called Google Analytics tells you exactly how many people read my printed words and how much of it they actually read.  Really useful when you are looking for popular topics to write about, not that that bothers me because I write about things that jar my mind and if others agree or even disagree that is where my pleasure lies.

In all that time two people stand out as really influencing my thought process and making me think seriously about my topics but at the same time distracting me in the nicest possible way from my task of delivering words, having to construct and answer a daily crop of e-mails to them.  However their thoughts, ideas, cajolements and humour have turned me into a far better person.

One of this duo contacted me first out of a need to share his experiences with me after a piece I had written.  This single contact turned into an avalanche of daily e-mails, full of wit, innuendo and downright truth about the revelations coming out of the Catholic Church which certainly attracted the main butt of our humour at that time.  His constant hammering on my computer screen made our main construct into a viable cause and hopefully we will be friends for ever, even after this rash of clerical crap is over.

The main problem with my writing is my lack of subtlety.  My scripts are a blunt force, which makes the point to easily.  I needed  assuagement, like a car engine needs lubricating oil.  My problem was that I did not understand the power of the blog.  I did not realise that you could not just tell it as it was but as the blog became popular I knew that this bluntness could not last because I might be over-stepping that thin, hazy, grey line they call legality.

I was eager to learn because my wealth, however small it might be, was destined for Arthur Guinness’ pockets and not some sidewinding litigant hoping to line his breeches with my hard earned.  A person made herself available, a person with more than a little knowledge of the legal code, a person, who at first, had me cowed with the fineness of her mind, she volunteered to turn my rough Longsight ideas and words into things of beauty and awe.  Her deftness of phrasing was a pleasure to read, her subject easily wrought but it was her humour I craved.  In the midst of all this horror and talk of what legal bods could do to you if you only slightly overstepped this indeterminable line, there was a humour so unlike anything from her ilk, that I had to listen to and take in everything she said.

Eventually her tuition turned me into a far better man and a far more circumspect writer and hopefully I taught her a little of the northern spirit she claimed she had in her genes ( her family having moved from a semi-detached mud hut in Jarrow to a twee bijou residence close to Buck House in the 14th century).  So,  having been edited and tutored to distraction, I write now with ease, splaying silken sentences onto a sensuous screen.  I am no longer the man I was but I thank both my amanuenses for turning me from the guttersnipe I obviously was to a person you could take anywhere.

Having been inundated with requests for more stories of Longsight in the 1950s, my tales of life in St Robert’s parish have had more comments than others, I have racked my addled brain to think of the idiosyncracies of the place.  I thought I would dwell for a while on the people who lived around me as a youngster and try and describe them and the things they did that influenced my life so much.  To avoid any slight embarassment I have changed the odd family name and hope they do not mind.

We lived in Duncan Road in Longsight, between Hamilton Road and Slade Lane.  Duncan Road extended the other side of Hamilton Road towards Beresford Road and the Anson Hotel but that was the posh end, with little well kept gardens with gates that worked and shining brass letter boxes and knockers.  We lived in the poor eastern end with no gates to gardens that were only ever dug over once a year by “Bob-A-Job” scouts, not for cultivational purposes but to give them a job for their shilling.  The houses had seasonal mice but were riddled with cockroaches or blackjacks as we called them, insects about an inch long, with the capability of flight in their mature state, who loved spending the night in sweaty shoes.

No 13 was our house where my grandfather, Jim Crehan from Ballinamore Bridge in East Galway, was relocated after his house in Miles Platting had been flattened by a one ton high explosive bomb dropped from a Heinkel 111.  The bomb obviously intended for Bradford Gas Works, where he worked, missed the target by a couple of hundred yards but unfortunately hit his neighbours, killing 44 of them.  We, Mam, Dad, myself and my brother Kevin, moved into this rented accommodation in 1947 shortly after Kevin was born and my father bought the place for a few hundred pounds after my grandfather died in 1958.  There was another brother Michael but at this time only a twinkle in my father’s eye and really the scrapings of the bag as he came along 16 years after me, when my mother was well into her 40s.  I think we were the only Catholics living on our end of the street until the Poppaladas arrived later. We were surrounded by god fearing agnostics and atheists and we were certainly the only family that kept the Sabbath Day holy, ensuring that at least one family swelled the contents of the collection boxes.

On our side of the road at the Slade Lane end there was a church and a hall belonging to some strange, to us, religion.  Anything non-catholic was strange and this church anyway had probably had its day as I never remember seeing anybody go in or come out of the place except on one day a year when their Boys Brigade band sent the slates rattling when they marched up the street to god knows where.  I think they were some kind of Methodists or Presbyterians, but our lives were well controlled by our parish priest and we were taught not to get too imquisitive.  As it happens this church still stands today, so you would think it must have some devotees.

Next to this church in our row of terraced houses lived the curate of St Agnes’ church, the posh Anglican church at the southern end of Hamilton Road.  He kept himself to himself, a meek and mild chap, who probably did not like living where he did, surrounded by nutters, non-churchgoers and serious Catholics.  After his house there were three more houses which also retained an air of isolation.  People lived there, we used to see the odd light in winter but we never saw the habitues.  Next door to us was Jim Miller, the most successful man on the street, he was the driver of the London express steam train out of London Road Station into Euston Station and back again, six days a week.  A man to be admired as were his wife’s egg and tomato sandwiches, which she used to make us when we were invited into her house to have tea with her grandson, Christopher, on his frequent visits.

On our other side lived the Mellors and the star of our street, their daughter Eveleen, the best looking girl in Manchester or so the Burtonwood GIs used to think as they wore a track in the granite flags in our footpath  traipsing out of their camp at weekends, hoping to spend an hour in Eveleen’s  company.  Winning beauty competitions was like shelling peas to her, she was the queen of Butlins and Pontins holiday camps.  She was probably seven or eight years older than me and I could not understand her popularity as she struck me as being rather vapid ( a word I only understood years later).  She used to take us to the Galleon outdoor swimming pool in the Summer and there, lieing on the grass at the side of the pool, resplendent in her swimming costume that I never ever saw get wet, her popularity was obvious, as you could not see her for the hairy legs of admirers.  Eventually after going through a couple of thousand GIs at Burtonwood and half the male population of South Manchester, she chose a man from Tampa in Florida, where she lives in blissful retirement to this day.

Beyond the Mellors lived the Jones, a mild mannered cockney cost accountant with a penchant for Lilliput and naturist magazines who had a wife of dubious morals, who most nights used to jump into stopping cars at the top of our street.  I used to play with her two sons both born during the war and a year or two older than me.  Their arms were always covered with scabs where their mother had stubbed out her cigarette on them in some weird form of discipline.  Next to the Jones lived the Clarkes, decendants of Romanies, who later became sucessful fish and chip shop owners in Didsbury.  They had a son John who married a famous folk singer and a daughter who  snapped up another GI from Florida, in those days it was the only sure way of winning the pools in Longsight.

Next to the Clarkes but across the entry that led to Palm Street lived the Wagstaffs.  Just a mother, with no apparent father, whose claim to fame was wringing the necks of her son’s pigeons one day, which he kept in a loft at the back of their house.  She reckoned their cooing was driving her daft.  He was too tough to show any emotion at this sad event because he was our street’s resident Teddy Boy whose main achievement was getting stabbed by another of his ilk outside the telephone box at the top of Slade Grove.

Further on down the terrace after a few more houses with just women in them, lived Geoffrey Smith ( men were in short supply in Longsight, whether it was the war that killed them off or the pleasures of army life made them stray, I don’t know).  Geoffrey only had one eye, an everyday complaint in our neighbourhood, children generally lacked something, an arm, a leg, an eye or a digit, crutches were a common sight but this Nelsonian attribute did not deter Geoffrey in the slightest.  Although not good at contact sports, he was a wizard at the game of marbles, using his glass eye to great effect.  I never saw him lose a game, when with a shake of the head and a swift movement of the right hand this gleaming blue eyed prosthesis became ready for use.

Opposite Geoffrey’s house lived the Stanistreets, whose son John was a few years older than me.  His father, Mr Stanistreet, used to sit on the steps of his house, unshaven and smelly and took great delight in luring young children up to himself, grabbing them and rubbing his stubbled, slavery chin into their faces.  I suppose whatever floats your boat but we never looked upon it as having sexual connotations, mind you we did not know what sexual meant those days but he seemed to get great satisfaction from his actions.

I still had not learnt what sexual meant when Elizabeth Rudden, across the road from us, suggested to me that she would pull her knickers down if I dropped my pants.  I did and felt sorry for her, somehow realising she also was deficient in some way.  Some kids had no eyes, some had no arms, some had no legs, some no fingers, poor Elizabeth had no willy.  I put it down to the house she lived in.  Her grandmother was an Irish woman, who I doubt ever washed.  You could smell her from across the street.  She owned a large four storey end of terrace, which she used as a lodging house for Irish lads working in the burgeoning construction industry after the war.  On a scale of 1 – 10 with 10 being luxury, this lodging house was probably minus 20.  Bare floorboards and beds of sorts in every room. Elizabeth and her stinking forebears all lived in one room, not a man, only lodgers to be seen.

Up the road from the Ruddens lived a mad Belgian woman, who used to lean out of her bedroom window and harangue the street.  They said she was Belgian but she could have been from anywhere that spoke a foriegn language.  Belgium in history as been blamed for most of the world’s ills, so why not blame it for this poor encumbered woman.  She used to follow us to church some Sundays when Fr Brennan took over after Fr O’Shaugnessy’s death and she used to shout down his sermons.  Poor Fr Brennan was too kind a man to remove her and he used to carry on with his prepared text while she taught us all Flemish.  The apparitors had a meeting and my father because he was a neighbour was asked to head her off at the pass but she was crafty and often evaded his blockade by going in different doors.

Next to this lady lived a family of Italians, who moved in about 1960, they had been living a few streets away but their family had increased, so they moved to our mansions.  I began to realise then what sexual meant.  Their eldest daughter, probably a year younger than me, was blossoming into a beautiful girl, she went under the equally beautiful name of Agatina Poppalada and by god wasn’t she a looker.  It took me six months to pluck up the courage to approach her, as she sported herself up and down the street in the fashion of the day.  Her mother was a dressmaker and knew how to turn her daughter out.  Unfortunately six months was far too long for Agatina, so by the time my courage was plucked, Lesley Murphy from Slade Lane had her in his grasp and would not let go.  Lesley was a ne’er-do-well but he obviously had something I didn’t and taking your opportunities must have been it.

I was 16 in 1962 when we left this fragrant meadow and moved to richer pastures but I always look back with fond memories and thank the lord that I was given the chance to experience the riches of Longsight that have formed my character.