Gazing on the first remembered child-hood home, thoughts time-travelling back over half a century. Pre-War semi-detached, leaded glass bay window, upstairs two bedrooms and a box room. In front father’s small rose garden, bounded by the same wrought iron gate and low brick wall capped by saddleback terracotta coping tiles. These hollow copings favourite hidey-holes for all manner of small boy secrets. Next door Len and Doris childless couple, seemed so old, probably in their fifties: Ambulance came for Doris one day, dead; shocked neighbours whispering of chronic alcoholism maybe suicide. A seven, eight year old’s first encounter with the urgency of death.
Follow again the daily route to infants’ school past a manicurist salon, once the green-grocer’s where Mother bought staples; dried soil coated King Edward’s wrapped in newspaper. Turn a corner expect to see the sombre red-brick school house, find now a modern build replacement. Still C of E though today’s pupils mainly hijab wearing. Memories stirred of forgotten school days friends. Andrew B. from around the corner youngest of several brothers known trouble-makers, said Mother. Dawn M. in emerald green sweater, green tartan skirt and knee-high white pop socks, never forgotten first kiss in the schoolyard.
Retrace steps of a hundred trudges from home to town centre. Pass the park of many over-excited visits to swings and roundabouts. Over the railway bridge, still soot-stained from years of delighting steam trains choo-chooing below, pearl grey smoke billowing over the parapet submerging a father and son. Reach the technical college with its pool in which 25 yards swimming certificate proudly gained; where later the rudiments of car maintenance learnt. At one end of the high street the town’s 1936 Odeon, venue of first cinema experiences (Mary Poppins, James Bond); now surrounded by pre-demolition hoarding. One corner of the Odeon once a memorabilia shop source of an Iron Cross (imitation) a rebelliously sported teenage fashion accessory. Around that corner the much visited Army & Navy surplus outlet, purveyor of a desirably tailored modestly priced Royal Canadian Airforce jacket.
Stone’s throw further, top of the high street now a gaudy Vietnamese restaurant occupies the site of Father’s men’s and boys’ outfitters; his sole means of survival, through life-long dedication five-and-half days a week fifty weeks a year. Opposite end of the high street looms the parish church on the river’s bluff overlooking gentle meanders flowing from the curbed moors distant. From this vantage once was seen stretching up the valley a forest of towering factory chimneys; brick giants brooding in the wake of sunk industries; decaying power-houses of textile mills and dye works. Father spoke proudly of the many built brick by brick by his steeplejack grandfather. So bequeathing an ancestral bond with the industry risen from this land of flagstone, coal, rain fall and gradients.
Spanning three points of the compass about the home town soaring moors customarily huddled beneath their heavy grey blanket precipitating notorious Pennine drizzle. Most days it seemed; it wasn’t ‘fit to play out’, Mother said. Days spent peering through misted rainy windows at a Lowryesque townscape; hunched grey rain-coats scurrying past terraced houses, over-bearing smokestacks and soot black civic buildings. Father peddled off to work on dreary damp mornings protected by rubber overshoes and nylon Pacamac; when foggy by a disturbing smog-mask.
Walking from school one early teens day the long scaffolded town library was seen to be released, glinting into harsh sunlight, a Spring afternoon: Exfoliated, a façade of sparkling yellow-gold mica-speckled millstone grit sand-blasted free of a century of industry’s smothering coal-fired sooty grime. Revelation, the town’s all pervading dark countenance taken for granted growing up was not after all the reality: Instead peeling away the skin of the town’s church, civic and commercial edifices would reveal unsupposed beauty, materials unearthed from under the surrounding moors’ carpet of bobbing cotton-grass; once golden beaches stratified 300 million years earlier lying in wait for the building of our town.
The moors concealed more recent and macabre secrets entombed in the peat on their sodden summits, where one remains still. ‘Don’t you get out of my sight’, Mother said. For some years the pall of bestial child murderers at large terrified a generation of Northern mothers. Brady and Hindley evil incarnate. Keith Bennett, twelve years old, rest in peace.
