Double Anniversary

My brilliant career.

Today, February 16, 2025, is a double anniversary for me. On February 16, 1970, 55 years ago, I started work at the social security office in Cornwall Street, Openshaw on the outskirts of Manchester, about three miles east of Manchester city centre.

On February 16, 1997, I had my retirement party at Wellington House near the Old Vic.

In 1970, I was sharing a flat with three male friends in the pleasant suburb of Didsbury, which is on the north bank of the River Mersey, 5 miles south of Manchester city centre.

There was a bus route that took me directly from my home to my work. The 169 and 170 were old Manchester Corporation routes which ran from Didsbury into Droylsden, the 169 branching off at Market Street to serve Greenside Lane, whilst the 170 continued towards Droylsden Station terminating at Lumb Lane.

This was more than a physical form of transport. I was being teleported from a middle class world of civilised culture and good manners to a hell hole of poverty and mental and physical deprivation.

On my first day, I was late because I got off the 169 bus too soon and walked along Ashton Old Road in the wind and snow. There were many derelict buildings because the old slums were being cleared and new slums were being constructed. Those replacement slums have now been demolished. As I struggled through the snow, I recognised many of the street names because I had been reading Emlyn Williams’s book on the Moors Murders, Beyond Belief. One of my office colleagues had known Myra Hindley.

The atmosphere in the Cornwall Street office would be unrecognisable today. Everybody smoked, so one’s eyes would be stinging and one’s clothes reeked. Although the civil service retirement age was 60, most of the men seemed ancient. The second world war had ended only 25 years previously and many of these men had served in the armed forces. George Bill, who was heavily Brylcreamed and had a dapper little moustache, was constantly telling anecdotes about his days in the RAF. Cheeky young clerks called him “Biggles” and “Wing Commander Bill”.

Most of the older men in the office were revoltingly lecherous and personified the concept of male chauvinist pig. The women did not like the way they were treated by these oafs but had to put up with it. As a long-haired graduate (shockingly incompetent at the work and prone to taking lots of sick leave), I was not popular with the old male neanderthals, but the women found me a refreshing change. I received a better education at Openshaw than I had at Manchester University.

I wrote some poems about Openshaw.

SUMMER IN THE CITY

Throughout this first day of almost summer,

They have poured out of their dark and dusty terraces.

In Abbey Hey Park the old and the halt,

The wage slaves and the petty clerks,

The jobless and the feckless,

Have tried to enjoy the blue but airless sky.

In Abbey Hey Park, young women skiving from Atora,

Tresses lank from their work,

Faces pustuled from the suet

Usurping their sebum,

Broiled gently under the low flame of the sun.

A young mother in a short skirt,

Exposed shins mottled and marbled,

Brindled like brawn by her winter fires.

She hoped the sun’s blessing would heal

Her flesh, erase the purplish yellow

Shadow about her cheekbone.

Pale, sandy-haired children have smeared their faces

With Mr Softee and fingered dog turds,

Baked white in the sunshine.

In Abbey Hey park, hennaed women offered

Varicose veins in benediction to the heavens.

The sun is a glob of phlegm

Hawked westward from the rubber works,

Slithering down the greasy sky over the suet factory.

As the sun sets in the mad alien fire

Of the polluted sky, women’s bodies, sweaty,

Glowing from the heat of a long day,

Freed from imprisoning foundation

Garments, flounder, squeak and slide

Across plastic sofas draped with laddered tights.

Laughing hips flop in defiance of loosened girdles.

As the sun descends to its nadir in the now infernal sky,

Dentures are abandoned to swim or sink

In pint pots of water. They grin back at their owners

In a rictus saying, “You’ve got to laugh”;

And “Mustn’t grumble”; and” Tomorrow’s another day”;

And “You don’t have to be mad to work here”;

And “We’ll all be pushing up daisies one day”.

GHOSTS

A dog’s body

Is deficient for the challenge

Of a charging bus

And becomes mere matter

For the flies to kiss.

Mind over matter.

A dogsbody in the wireworks

Was crushed to matter

Under a toppled crane.

He didn’t matter to anyone much.

They didn’t mind

Getting another from the labour exchange

Didn’t mind sending some flowers.

The “purveyor of fine meats”

“Is pleased to meet you,

And has meat to please you”.

An ultra-violet insect repeller

Hums and gives out a purple glow

Like an undertaker’s neon sign.

A bluebottle settles with a

Cyclorrhaphous

Languor on a lamb carcass.

Among dripping cadavers of cows

And smaller pieces of mutilated animals

The butcher reads in his news paper

Of carnage and mayhem in Ireland

And frowns.

Reflections of derelict houses

Mingle with sample headstones

In the funeral director’s window.

He’ll always do a good trade here.

Old people steal

From the social to put money by

To be respectably buried.

Crepuscular purple light

Casts a mortuary pallor

On crumbling streets,

Where generations of spirits were stunted.

Strips of brown wallpaper

Flap in the spiteful twilight.

A dead armchair still bears the greasy

Imprint of some Brylcreamed pate

That now may be a hollow skull

Growing weeds.

Green weeds and dandelions

Sprout stubbornly

Where hungry childhood died into vicious

Querulous old age.

Human spirits become carrion

For voracious vegetation.

What a carry on!

How do they carry on?

Why do they carry on?

The street names here

Give a frisson if you have read

Beyond Belief.

Years ago, when there was some kind of life

In these houses,

Hindley and Brady trod these pavements,

Carrying in their minds

The unthinkable,

Seeking children to torture.

Do the ghosts of their victims

Socialise with the factory-maimed?

Do they compare and contrast

The respectable and bureaucratic

Mutilations

With the perversion that sickens us all?

RELICS

Old stomachs rumble

Behind watchchains.

Time is buried in linty recesses

Of brown serge.

Old minds, stifled

In shiny brown wallpaper

Fade beneath flat caps.

On Thursday morning

The pillar box

Is so certainly scarlet

Outside the Post Office.

Old women, pension books

Slimmer by another order,

Arthritically finger their change,

Reckoning the chances

Of buying one more week.

URBAN RENEWAL

It’s a jungle out there.

Jungle sounds.

The damp echoing of a diesel’s klaxon.

Feline hiss of wet tires.

It’s a jungle out there.

The pocked yard fills with oily pools.

A distant, unidentifiable irritant

Like a dentist’s unceasing drill.

A night like an aching tooth.

An eighty-year-old woman is dying

In a state of siege.

Her body shrinks,

Eroded by insidious

Winds of time.

Her spirit dissolves

Imperceptibly into fog.

It’s a jungle out there.

Outside, a derelict wilderness

Gestates predatory creatures.

Loose bricks that once formed the homes

Of friends and family,

(Now dead or dispersed

In the diaspora of the downtrodden,

Disappeared by council decrees

Into spanking new slums in the sky)

Thud against her door

In the long threat

Of the night.