and waggled a tooth, and the pain was instantaneous. I jerked violently.
‘I thought it was,’ he said complacently, blissfully unaware of how close he’d come to losing a finger.
However, it was a quick, efficient extraction and triumphantly he held out the molar for me to see. There was a dark hole in it, no wonder it had caused me so much suffering. I was delighted and amazed that it had all been so quick and painless. I smiled at Auntie Emmy and was even more amazed when the dentist patted me on the head, called me a brave little man and gave me a toffee—a toffee of all things! He was probably looking forward to seeing me again in the very near future.
When we returned to Grandma Ashton’s, I gave the toffee to John and then we had tea—well, they had tea, but I had to make do with a glass of milk because I was in no condition to eat. But my day wasn’t ended. It was dark when Mother, John and I got on the tram. Mother was between John and me and I was squashed between her and a dozing old man. Why we had to sit there was beyond me; after all, apart from us and the conductor the tram was empty. No one spoke as the tram buckled and clattered up Oldham Road, and then almost imperceptibly the old man closed his eyes and began singing softly to himself in a cracked, tuneless voice. I was intrigued, and I turned my head to observe him more closely. Immediately Mother put her hand under my chin and whipped my head smartly to the front. After a short time I slowly turned to look at him again furtively and what impressed me most was his nose. It was large, round, extremely red and pockmarked, but before I could take a closer look my head was jerked back to neutral. The old man was still singing when we got off and straight away as the tram disappeared I asked Mother what was the matter with him, but Mother was reluctant to answer and I wondered if she’d heard me. Then she said, ‘That’s what you get from eating too much pork.’ This explanation, brooking no argument, knocked me flat. I was so impressed that I never got round to asking about the man’s nose; and it had such a profound effect on me that I avoided pork until I was well into my twenties, although I must have consumed buckets of alcohol since Dad bought me my first half a pint on my sixteenth birthday. The lesson to be learned here is: don’t muck about with the truth when dealing with children.
Now in the year 2003 I’m at my desk wearing headphones as I listen to a programme on the radio. I sit back in my chair staring at the ceiling wherein lies inspiration when, half listening to the disembodied voice from the radio, a man is urging us to clean up our rivers. This doesn’t particularly concern me as I don’t own one but his next remark has my full attention. The voice mentions Manchester Ship Canal. Immediately my mind races back to when I was about ten years old and standing on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal, clutching a damp towel round my thin white shoulders, my lips blue with cold, teeth chattering like a pair of demented castanets, and looking round occasionally in case there was an approaching bobby, because swimming, splashing about and especially diving or jumping off the lock gates were strictly forbidden. We weren’t too bothered, though. In the event of a constable hurrying towards us, we’d simply jump into the water and swim to the opposite bank, and scrambling out we would pull faces at the sweating arm of the law, the width of the scum-laden, smelly canal protecting us. The police must have been aware of this tactic and wisely kept away—they had better things to do.
Deciding it might be warmer in the water, I was about to jump in when I noticed a small black object floating through the half-open, decaying lock gates. As it moved slowly towards the shrieking, juvenile, splashing mêlée, I was able to see what it was: a poor, dead dog floating majestically along, legs stiff and pointing to the sky. I quickly shouted a warning. I had to shout twice over the hullabaloo, pointing at the dog. When they realised what it was, there was panic as they parted to allow the dog unhindered passage to its Valhalla—just another incident on the turgid Manchester Ship Canal.
Returning to the present, I turn up the volume of my radio to hear the news that now at last the Manchester Ship Canal has been cleansed and purified, oxygenised or whatever, and for the first time in living memory can be enjoyed by the natural inhabitants, fish. But then the marine expert goes on to say, ‘In the old days, anyone found frolicking about in the oil-scummed waters of the canal was unceremoniously hauled out and rushed off to hospital to have their stomach pumped.’ On this note I switch off, and once again stare at the ceiling, recalling the dead-dog incident. It wasn’t unusual—sometimes dead cats, rags of clothing and unmentionables floated calmly along—and when the weather was unusually hot there was always a gang of young herberts splashing about among the jetsam. To my knowledge none of us went down with malaria, typhoid, yellow fever or beri beri. The only real threat was hypothermia, and certainly no one was hauled out and rushed off to the infirmary to have their stomach pumped. I can only assume that in those days our bodies developed an immunity to diseases not yet known to man.
It’s a good job my father didn’t get to hear about my frolicking in the Manchester Ship Canal. He had never chastised me physically before, not even a slap round my bottom, but if he found out he would be driven to break the rule of a lifetime. Luckily for me he never showed any interest in where I’d been, who I’d been with or how I’d managed to rip my jersey. If he’d asked me, I would have answered him truthfully—we lived in a moral climate. However, I was apprehensive that day when I returned home from the Manchester Ship Canal, hair all damp and spiky, that he would say something like ‘Where the dickens have you been?’ and like George Washington I would have to tell him.
One Saturday morning I came running into the house, not because it was cold outside, nor because it was dinnertime. The explanation was simple: I hadn’t been out for more than a couple of minutes and was idly chucking stones at the lamppost just outside when Jack had lolloped out of the ginnel and barked at me. Jack was a wirehaired brindle dog and we had a mutual dislike for each other. He’d never forgotten that I’d once hit him with a stick when he’d had his back to me. He’d been more shocked than hurt and, ashamed of his cowardice, he’d been after me ever since. It was an unfair contest, as he had teeth and could run faster than me. Luckily I wasn’t too far from our vestibule door, but even as I slammed it on his slavering chops he kept up his barking and frantic scratching on the door.
I sauntered into the kitchen.
Mother said, ‘Hark at that! What have you done to him now?’
And taking John by the hand, she brushed past me, opened the door and shooed Jack away, and he went without further argument. While she was gone I noticed a near stranger in the room. It was my brother Vernon, and he was looking at me as if he could smell something nobody else could. My father was sitting in front of the fire, reading The Green Final, a newspaper someone had left in the tram on his way home from work the night before. My father wasn’t actually reading it as he was in the middle of an argument with Vernon, which I had inadvertently interrupted. Vernon was on one of his visits, and he always seemed to upset Dad, who was used to overlookers and managers berating him at work but was definitely against being taken to the cleaners by his eldest son.
‘Dad,’ said Vernon, ‘you don’t understand…’
I didn’t wait to find out what was beyond my father’s comprehension. I’d seen the signs on his face, which was the colour of a Cox’s orange pippin.
I went to Mother and John at the front and listened attentively while she discussed the price of bread with Mrs Turner, our neighbour. I’ve no idea how the battle in the kitchen went, but for the next few days we were three in the bed. By the time Vernon came upstairs John and I were usually asleep, but what I did learn during his stay with us was that his real home was with his Grandma Stacey in a beautiful house where everyone had a chair to sit on at meals and he didn’t have to stand at the table as we did to eat. The way Vernon had always spoken of Grandma Stacey, Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Wilson you’d think they were all closely related to royalty, and his disdain for 36 Leslie Street and all its occupants was plain for all to see. Poor deluded Vernon. It never crossed my mind that if he was related to the Staceys, so was I.
Birthdays came and went like any other day; we neither received nor sent cards, as they were unaffordable luxuries—in fact I don’t think newsagents in our area even stocked them. But Christmas was something else. A few days before the ‘big one’, most houses began their preparations: sagging paper chains of merry colours criss-crossed