Child of the North. Piers Dudgeon

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СКАЧАТЬ unhygienic backyards, pot-sinks and outside lavvies, they wouldn’t escape…But for now, Auntie Biddy’s Blackburn remained relatively intact and contented and fiercely defended by every man, woman and child, who had never experienced any other way. They delighted in the open-topped rattling trams, the muffin-man’s familiar shout, as he pushed his deep wicker basket along the uneven cobbles, and the screech of the cotton-mill siren, starting another day. As long as one and all were left alone to make their own way, they bothered nobody and asked no favours. The children spilled out to all the streets, played with their skipping-ropes, hula-hoops and spinning tops, their laughter no less spontaneous because of inherent poverty…

      Her Father’s Sins is about the way things were: the good times, the bad times. It is richly autobiographical. Queenie is the name of the little girl who experiences so many of the joys and traumas of Jo’s early life on the streets of Blackburn. Although her home is transferred from Derwent Street to Parkinson Street in the novel, they are, with reference to Jo’s early life, interchangeable.

       Lying in the half-dark, Queenie found it hard to settle. She sensed something was wrong. But what? After a while she dismissed the notion, and turned over to warm Auntie Biddy’s side of the bed. But the uneasiness within her persisted. And slipping out from underneath the persuasive warmth of the eiderdown, she crossed to the window. For a change Parkinson Street was all quiet, save for the pitiful mewing of a frustrated torn cat, and the occasional dustbinlid clattering to the flagstones beneath some scampering cat’s feet.

      Queenie looked along the higgledy-piggledy Victorian sky-line. The irregular pattern of chimneys reaching up like the fingers of a deformed hand traced a weird but comfortingly familiar silhouette against the moonlit sky. Lifting the window up against the sash, Queenie leaned out so she had an unobstructed view of the street below. Parkinson Street was home: No. 2, Parkinson Street, and Auntie Biddy, they were hers, her comforting world into which she could retreat when things became complicated and painful.

      ‘I loved the streetlamps and the cobbles,’ Jo remembers of her earliest childhood. ‘Many was the time I counted the cobbles in our street. When I had counted them from one end to the other, I counted the fanlights, the stained glass, on the way back. I had Queenie doing that.’

      There were one hundred and four houses – Queenie had counted them all with loving precision. And there were one thousand and forty flagstones; Queenie had hopscotched every single one. She hadn’t finished counting the road-cobbles yet, but up to Widow Hargreaves at No. 16, there were nine hundred and ten; that was counting across the road to the opposite houses. When she’d finished them, she would start on the stained glasses in the fanlight above the doors. Queenie meant to learn all there was to know about Parkinson Street because the more she knew, the more it was hers.

       Stretching her neck, now, Queenie attempted to identify the dark figure approaching against the flickering gas-lamps. The tottering speck grew and grew, until it shaped itself into the towering frame of George Kenney. On recognising it, Queenie involuntarily backed away…

      Though Derwent Street is gone, Parkinson Street, the imaginative theatre of Jo’s real childhood joys and fears, still exists today and sparks characterful childhood memories of its own, Mill Hill being where some members of Jo’s family settled after Jo’s mum moved out in 1955. ‘We had relatives there: Auntie Margaret lived up there and we’d go and see her. My brother, Bernard, lived for many years in Stephen Street. And another brother, Richard, lived on Parkinson Street, so we were always up there. I love that area of old Mill Hill, and I have set a lot of my stories there. It has changed now obviously – you’ve got the Indian takeaway and all that; they weren’t there, it was just little shops and little houses and cobbled streets, and I loved it.’

      Mill Hill, to the southwest of the town centre, developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century around Cardwell and Albert mills between the railway and the canal, together with another worker colony around Waterfall Mill in this same area, close to Parkinson Street.

      The area may have seen change since Jo’s childhood, but it is easy enough even today to catch a glimpse of how it was. The Navigation pub is still to be found by the bridge over the canal where Emma Grady’s daughter, Molly, escapes from a prison van in Alley Urchin, although it has recently undergone a makeover. ‘It’s so old,’ agrees Jo, ‘and it’s got the wooden benches around the wall and the real old characters, and my God you pick up some tales.’

      She reminds me that the Navigation became her dad’s haunt, and it is of course also George Kenney’s local in Her Father’s Sins, and in the Outcast trilogy (Outcast, Alley Urchin and Vagabonds), set in the second half of the nineteenth century, the pub is a haven for pickpockets and ruffians, and the place where Sal Tanner mistakes the attentions of a fellow in a spotted scarf for an invitation to bed.

       ‘’Ere…d’yer have a fancy for me?’ Sal said in a low, excited voice. ‘Got an urge ter tek me ter bed, have yer?’ It was ages since any man had laid her down, and the thought of a tumble had her all excited. ‘It’ll cost yer a bit more than one gill though, me darlin’,’ she finished with a chuckle and a suggestive wink.

       ‘Don’t be so bloody daft, woman!’ The poor fellow was shocked. ‘I’m offering you a drink…Whatever gave you the idea that I’d want to take an old soak like you to bed?’

      Old Sal, a legend in the area, ‘a limping, bedraggled woman with thin, tousled hair and a kindly face that was ravaged by a rough life and a particular love for “a drop o’ the ol’ stuff”’, was modelled on a woman who used to live down on the banks of the canal in a shed, an old hut between the pub and a vicarage. ‘All the kids used to go and see her,’ Jo told me.

       The hut which was now home to Sal and Molly was situated at the widest area of grassy bank, and was half hidden in the undergrowth. There was a tall stone wall immediately behind, and directly behind that, the vicarage. This fact had given old Sal a great deal of pleasure as she told one and all: ‘What more could a body want, eh?…I’ve got the ale house down one end, and the vicar at the other. If I’m tekken bad after a jolly night out, I have only ter whistle and the vicar’ll come a’runnin’ with his Bible. He’ll get me ter the gates o’ Heaven right enough. Drunk or sober, the good Lord won’t turn me away, I’m thinking!’

      When they had first come across the dilapidated workmen’s hut, there were chinks between the weathered boarding ‘wide enough ter drive a horse and cart through’, as Sal had complained. Now, however, the chinks were stuffed with moss which Molly had painstakingly gathered, and the wind couldn’t force its way in so easily. On a hot day like today, though, the air inside the cramped hut was stifling. ‘Bloody hell, lass…prop that door open with some’at!’ instructed Sal as she fell on to the narrow bed, this being a scrounged mattress set on four orange-boxes, the whole length of which swayed and creaked beneath Sal’s sudden weight.

      ‘You’d walk to the pub with her and she’d sit you on the step. And you’d hear all this noise going on in the pub and I used to stand on tiptoes and look through the window, and there was Sal on the counter, dancing, drunk as a lord, showing her knickers to all and sundry. She was wonderful!’ Jo put the scene in Outcast:

      Not daring to set foot in such a place, Emma stood on tiptoe in order to look through the windows. Her vision was impaired by the frosted pattern on the glass and the large words which read ‘Public Bar’ on the first window and ‘Snug’ on the second. Peering through a small corner below, where there was an area of clear glass, Emma’s view was still frustrated by the thick smoke screen and the wall of bodies inside…Suddenly a cackle of laughter erupted from within and as Emma peered through the haze in search of her husband, the unmistakable figure of Sal СКАЧАТЬ