The Virtual Rambler

Number thirty seven: 19^th June 2013

My Home Town

Travelling west on the M62 , shortly before a pedestrian bridge which carries the Pennine Way over that artery of non-stop traffic , there is a moorland exit. On taking it . you descend through a landscape of grazing sheep , dry-stone walls , reservoirs and hamlets of gritstone cottages clustered around a pub or a chapel. You catch an L.S. Lowry view of Oldham's bristling mill chimneys below the 'overspill' , post-war council estates that eventually give way to an area known as 'Mumps' , where a railway bridge sign used to bid you Welcome To The Home Of The Tubular Bandage. “ Who is ever quite without his landscape ? ” asks W.H. Auden in a 1936 poem. In the 1920s , a young William Joyce lived here for a while. In the Second World War he would broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin. The nickname his adenoidal tones earned him was commemorated in the wartime hit , “Lord Haw-Haw , the Humbug of Hamburg , the Comic of Eau de Cologne.” The Irish-American Joyce was condemned as a traitor after the war and met up with hangmanAlbert Pierrepoint , a Yorkshireman whose 'day-job' was running a pub in Hollinwood called “Help The Poor Struggler". Our home town staggered into the 1950s with a backs-to-the-wall echo of the Dunkirk spirit and a Blitz-inspired “We can take it” attitude , at the same time that its children were absorbing an endless diet of war films (The Dambusters , The Colditz Story , The Cruel Sea). The history of a town is governed as much by chance as are the lives of the individuals who live there. Its cotton-spinning origins arose from its location in the shadow of the Pennines , where fast-flowing streams provided water power and their soft water was ideal for washing cotton. When the factories installed steam engines there was a ready supply of local coal available. By 1900 it was the world's pre-eminent cotton-spinning town.

Oldham was effectively severed from its place in history after the cotton industry gave way to man-made fibres and cheaper foreign competition in the 1960s. When town-centres become little more than places to by-pass , the settled life they once contained fades from memory. This is a town haunted by the phrase “There used to be ...” Its two central railway stations and extensive goods yards disappeared over half a century ago. During that time they have been followed into oblivion by all the cinemas and swimming baths whose interiors occupied many of my youthful hours. The town became a staple joke in many comedians' repertoires as a place of derelict mills and ill-nourished , edgy citizens of what was to become the multicultural society. Our grandparents had come to a boom-town seeking plentiful , if unhealthy , work. Prolonged exposure to air thick with cotton dust in the hot and humid atmosphere required for spinning often led to byssinosis or chronic bronchitis. Their grandchildren signed on as unemployed or left town as soon as they could. They have maintained the Oldham traditions of poor diet , bad complexions and even worse haircuts. The once-daily exodus to work (the clatter of clogs on cobbled streets) has been swapped for weekly visits (in hoodies and trackies) to the Job Centre , where motivation counsellors sought to implant the salubrious properties of positive thinking in the chronically unemployed. Using a phrase of my mother’s and one particularly appropriate to Oldham , few of the unemployed “cottoned on.” Towns in decline , along with their impoverished and elderly inhabitants , are morally bound to set an example to the prosperous, the hale and hearty – an opportunity for the human spirit to be seen rising above lowering circumstance. That's easier said than done. For my home town , as for my scalp , the plot was always thinning.

I sometimes picture our parents and grandparents getting through their ten-hour shifts and emerging into the black ice and clammy fogs of northern winter nights. Women in headscarves and men in flat caps made their way home along lamp-lit streets through rows of back-to-back terraced houses for suppers of tripe and onions , fish and chips , suet puddings. A cosy fug of pipe smoke in front of a roaring coal fire , head stuck in The Pink ‘Un and a kettle steaming away on the hob. Otherwise no running hot water , no bathroom , no cooker , no fridge , vacuum cleaner or washing machine. At one time there were 250 pubs in Oldham , one for every 240 people. The days before smoking was banned in public houses , after which Sky Sports were relayed into them instead. Behind each terrace stood one latch-doored , non-flushing ‘drop-pipe’ toilet shared by a dozen families. In winters there were blocked water pipes and ice-cold bedrooms above the communal parlour. Where the silver screen would later come to stand , an old rocking chair in the corner. The grandma who used to rock in it is now shunted off to a Care Home at the first sign of senility. These men and women were born to be "hands" - the dextrous means of production for all the heavy industrial work of the day. They were unaware of “lifestyle options” , being stuck in the only one available to them. The inescapable social matrix allocated them a lifetime's toil in a system designed and administered (then , as now) by leisured people who lived on another planet. The working classes expected little and that's what they got. How the fuck did our ancestors’ good humour survive ? They practised what the Stoics preached and they made the best of a bad job.

Wig

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 – Possessions, 20^th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting Stoics, 20^th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time, 20^th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't Allow, 20^th November 2013
Virtual rambler #43 – A Literary Nexus, 20^th December 2013
Virtual rambler #44 – Taking Liberties, 16^th January 2014
Virtual rambler #45 – More or Less, 20^th February 2014
Virtual rambler #46 – Under Control, 20^th March 2014
Virtual rambler #47 – Waiting, 20^th April 2014
Virtual rambler #48 – They Rose Without Trace, 20^th May 2014
Virtual rambler #49 – Bigger Impression , Smaller Footprint, 20^th June 2014
Virtual rambler #50 – Terpsichorean Instrumentations, 18^th July 2014
Virtual rambler #51 – Socially Mediated, 19^th August 2014
Virtual rambler #52 – Rambling Into The Sunset, 20^th September 2014