Oh, I found these in my garage among mum’s stuff.”
Linda, my sister, passes me a fat bundle of dog-eared, handwritten sheets, that look like archaeological remains.” It’s great Aunt Martha’s novel. Mum was given it at Martha’s funeral.” I remembered the story, in my mum’s voice, it was her cousin Olive, who had found this treasure in a drawer of smalls as the relatives of the deceased were ransacking the property for useful chattels. Against my will I took the bundle from her. It took me back quite suddenly, as memory will, into a long-neglected childhood past. Memories are like rooks or starlings, you find one and suddenly half a dozen are marching into your head! I am in Yorkshire Street on a drizzly Saturday morning holding my mum’s hand, the street is a slow-moving press, we are with Granny Shepherd and have just made it to the middle of the street outside Woolworths. Progress is very slow because everybody knows either mum or Granny S. or both! Granny Shepherd was brought up as Mabel Mills the eldest girl of eight surviving children, who lived at Rydings and then on Halifax road in Smallbridge and after that in South Street off Whitworth Road; just round, the corner, so everyone is either a relative or a neighbour. The street is full of people who know each other , a chatter , it is Saturday morning and the market is almost within our reach. It must be in the early 1950’s because my granny died in 1955,. The throng of people are mainly dressed in dark clothes and the smell is like being on a bus after the mills empty. A bus down Oldham Road after school when I’ve been in detention, full of women covered in bits of white cotton from the weaving sheds on Well-ith Lane, where as it happened my dad lived before they got a house on Turf Hill. Also the noise is deafening, like on the bus, people used to shouting at each other over the noise of machinery. Then some-one comes up to us pushing through, “ Eeeeh Mabel, how are you keeping? Is this Your Edith and her little one? “ I shrink immediately, conscious that yesterday’s haircut at Sharples on Whitworth Road has made me look ,in my father’s phrase, like ’ a shorn pig’, that my fly-away ears look bigger than ever; so as they look at me I shrink, hoping to melt into the cobbles. Then I realise that I want a pee and begin to shuffle from leg to leg. My mum says, mortifyingly. “ Stop that , you can go when we get to the indoor market. Then they talk and talk for what seems like an eternity. They talk about people as familiar to me as Greek heroes, or Nordic Gods, Neighbours and relatives, one name triggers another and they are all linked to strange religions. Mostly it is Smallbridge Congs. , but there are a variety of Methodists and Baptists as if after the Wesleyan Schism of the 1840’s a plethora of alternative forms of worship were on offer in the streets of Rochdale, as well as Congregationalists there were Primitive Methodists ,Unitarians and a variety of Baptists, the Ebenezer Baptists were particularly strict it stretched as far as the Plymouth Brethren; all redeemably non-conformist. It always seemed that strictness was a virtue practised by the good women of the town. From this high moral ground the men appeared to fall away badly, She would be ‘strict’ but her husband, ‘well!’ and the worst of them ‘he drank’, or ‘ went to clubs in Manchester’ those men closest to the devil incarnate himself ;’drank and went to clubs in Manchester’. It was during these conversations that my plans to become a better person formed, and mostly they were plans to live a more boyish life away from the servitude to these large and terrifying women. One of whom was probably my Great Aunt Martha. I take the scruffy bundle of papers with some trepidation. When the Grim Reaper eventually calls, I am fairly sure that the strait gate that leads to the Methodist heaven will not be manned by a gentle kindly St. Peter , but will be personned by a combination of stern matriarchs from my early life: there will be questions .””Did you ever play football on Sunday?” a careful reply” Only when mum said I could after tea for half an hour, if the rain stopped.” Inevitably drink and clubs will come into it my life is marked by moderation and temperance and I couldn’t afford clubs; I shall bluster and then inevitably, “ What did you do with Great Aunt Martha’s novel?” I want to be able to answer with unswerving honesty, the absolute truth.” I did my best I showed it to everybody,. I did not shove it in a drawer with my smalls and forget about it for 30 years. I can see over the shoulder of this gloomy spectral woman the ghostly figures of mum and gran pleading for me to be let in,” he was always a good, good boy!” but behind them the voice of the All Hallows Rose Queen in 1957, screaming “ It’s him. He’s the cushion bearer who dropped my crown that broke into a thousand pieces on the Sunday School Floor” I begin to have doubts and glance towards the flames beneath me in whose dark glow I see lads fishing and playing football and blokes drinking beer. Is that the shade of my old dad puffing on an untipped Senior Service extra-strength? Someone telling a terrible joke?