Paul Malpas

As I moved out of my early teens and started to stumble around trying to make sense out of what was happening around me, my circle of friends and aquaintances increased, but they were nearly all culled from the working class areas of Manchester.  Harpurhey, Gorton, Longsight, Chorlton on Medlock, Ardwick and Wythenshawe.  There were one or two from finer parts, but with these, our mutual attraction was sport and mainly cricket.  It did seem that like attracted like and we at the bottom had a job climbing the ladder to join the cleaner and more studious from the hygenic outer suburbs, who had a different, more relaxed, but I do not think as exiting a life as that which we were trying to pursue.  I remember one chap from Gorton explaining to me one night that I should not be in this elite group of working class kids, because we lived in Birchfields Road and were therefore rich and middle class.  I could not understand his logic, we did not have a pot to piss in, but lived off the aspirations of my parents.  I suppose his argument was a little bit of inverted snobbery that Old Labour revelled in.

However his outlandish views did not stop me from ploughing my furrow and the friendliness of the girls kept my furrow very straight.  Okay we did not live in some landlord slum, but we walked everywhere or caught the bus if we had any money and time was pressing and it was amazing how good and cheap the bus service was then.

Most of my memories of those teenage acquaintances were of the lack of fathers; by the time these kids were 15 or 16, the fathers, when they were needing them the  most were disappearing.  No, there was no migration of healthy masculine types to the arms of women demanding what the 1960s expected of them.  No, these men were dying.  Once they had passed 40 the ravages of the war and 20 years in the terrible conditions of the working class workplace took their toll.  They were dying of all types of respiratory illnesses, the last vestiges of TB and heart conditions brought about by excessive smoking and bad diets.  The lad who had accosted me about where on the class scale I should be, had lost his father the year previously and in some bizarre thought process considered himself lower than me.  His father’s loss was a massive blow and as with them all it took him years to recover.  I remember one kid, we will call him B, when we were about 14 and in a Latin class with Ron Smith.  There was a knock on the door and in walked Geoff Burke, the Headmaster, “B your father died this morning, remain in school and go home at your normal time”.  The delivery and shock was nearly as bad as the event.  Certainly Burkes bedside manner was not what you would expect and B naturally blubbed at the back of class for the rest of the day.  We at 14 did not know what to say or do, nor it seemed did any one else.

These sudden departures of fathers at the demanding age these kids were at, affected them in a far more serious way than we can believe, these were loving fathers not the feckless fruit of 21st century philosophy.  These men were dying because employers were cutting whatever corners there were to be cut.  There was no thought of Health and Safety or no regulatory bodies to control all the thousands of back street workshops that brought Europe back from the brink in those times ravaged as they had been by wars and recessions.

The housing stock was atrocious in the poorly maintained landlord estates, and massive waiting lists in the few slightly better maintained corporation owned properties.  Most houses in the districts mentioned had no internal toilets, relying on outside loos, there were even some  with shared accommodation.  Most houses only had cold water, with hot water being heated by gas fired water heaters over kitchen sinks or by back boilers behind fires, that needed total precision when planning a bath, when every one lined up to take it in turns to spruce themselves up in two inches of degenerating and murky warm water.  Pity the last man in.  In some cases that precision was not available so that baths were not as frequent as they might have been.  There were no showers, no central heating, relying on one fire in one room as the only source of heat.  To day new and well refurbished houses stand in their place but it strikes me that the quality, kindness and friendliness of the people is not there.  That generosity of spirit that pulled everyone along seems to have vacated the cupboard.

We all suffered strange illnesses and everyone was plagued with boils and other skin eruptions, an obvious sign of vitamin deficiency.  We ate enough but probably a lot of the wrong thing.  Fresh fruit and vegetables was not a must-have but as a whole we were generally fitter.  There was no television so most people spent more time out of the house playing sport or going to the cinema two or three times a week.  there were no cars so every one walked.  Even in winter in the dark, black streets of Manchester everybody walked with not a worry in the world.  You were as safe as houses.  We often used to walk there and back to Manchester, three miles each way.

We had no money but we had a few brains between us and that enabled us to pick our way out of the maze and eventually after a few years pottering about in the mire of life we made a decent fist of what we set out to do.  No thanks at all to most of the so called education we received free gratis, but more to do with guts and having seen the bottom of the heap.

It seems today that if you have not made a success of your life at twenty, you are a failure.  Bollocks to that.  Head down and keep ploughing is how I have always tried to live.