The Streets of Ancoats

About the Author

Malcolm Lynch won the 1983 Constable Trophy with his first novel. He came to writing after a varied career that included, among many other things, being a radium technician, flying with the RAF during the war, a carriage cleaner and owner of a zoo. Though he has written many short stories and several radio plays, most of his work has been for television – including a year as editor of Coronation Street, as well as writing for Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm.  His film about building the QE2 on Clydebank for Scottish TV won an Emmy placing.  In 1972 he was appointed executive editor of The Archers, at the time threatened with extinction: his brief was to update the series and inject it with realism and drama. His most recent job has been editing the Teignmouth Post in Devon.  The streets of Ancoats is written out of his personal experience of childhood in that ghetto.

Front Cover: An organ grinder by L.S. Lowry (City of Manchester Art Galleries)

Photograph of Malcolm Lynch by F. Walters

Author's note

In the late 1920s Ancoats, Manchester, was one of the worst slums in Europe. Within an area of less than a square mile, squeezed between the middle of the city and the railway yards, lived about 30,000 people in black pigsty houses built during the Industrial Revolution. The houses were two up, two down, with just one cold water tap under the backyard window. Some of the streets were barely twelve feet wide. The average number of men, women and children living in these decaying hovels was said to be about six. Most of them were Irish and Italian immigrants.

It was barely ten years since the end of the Great War to save civilization. The heroes had been allowed to keep the greatcoats they'd worn in the trenches, and they still used them. The coats became bedding at night. Sick children, and there were many of them, were kept warm under these rotting garments.

Surrounding the black, dismal houses loomed the great cotton mills with their huge chimneys reaching into the grey sky like black fingers of Satan. For variety, there were rubber works and chemical factories among the cotton mills. The sky was so dark with smoke that in summer the sun could be seen as a red ball; in winter the only light came from the gas lamps.

This was the landscape Laurence Lowry sketched when he was collecting rents in the area. Today he would be lost in Ancoats, for Ancoats has gone; indeed the view from the spot where Lowry once stood would now more likely inspire a Turner.

In the 1960s Manchester bulldozed it all down; schools, library, museum, University Settlement, tramp ward and work­house - everything. It has been grassed and planted with shrubs and young trees; the Pennines can be seen in the distance; it is to be known as the Medlock Valley Park.

And the people? Where are the children of the people Lowry saw only as shabby matchstalk men, women and kids? Many are holding good jobs and living in the suburbs of the city; but the children of Ancoats can also be found in a Sydney bar, a

Melbourne department store, a restaurant in Toronto, a garage in Vancouver, a warehouse in Chicago, a police station in New York, a railway yard in Cape Town.

Frozen lavatories of winter

––––––––

'Didn't she always think she was a cut above the rest of us? Taking the typewriting at night school!' 'And look where that's got her.'

The two old women were in a group of old women in shawls who stared at a house in Palmerston Street. They stood at a safe distance on the other side of the street and kept their eyes fixed on the bedroom window; for wasn't it in that very bedroom Kathleen Murphy was lying dead as a doornail, having taken her own immortal life by turning the gas tap on? And her being in the Children of Mary, at that!

That was about all Kevin and Patrick heard as they passed the group on their way to school. They glanced up at the window, but their minds were on other things. They were going to be tested on their catechism that very morning by Father Sullivan, and one moment of hesitation about why God made them and the old priest would belt them over the head with a prayer book.

All they knew about Kathleen Murphy was that she had left school two years before. She worked at the Cleopatra Mill, but she wasn't a mill girl. She didn't open her curtains when the knocker-up tapped on the window; she didn't run down the street in clogs when the seven o'clock hooter blew; no shawl for her; she walked to the mill at half-past eight in a coat and hat. She worked in the office.

They had passed her house only last Saturday and heard her singing. ‘For I'm in the market for you-oo-oo oo-oo. Boop-boop-a-doop!' She had strutted out of the house a few minutes later with circles of rouge on her cheeks and no shopping bag, which the boys had thought strange considering how she was supposed to be going to the market: their parents always took with them baskets which they filled with potatoes and cabbages found lying in the gutter after the market had closed.

There was no catechism that morning. Instead, Father Sullivan ranted and raved about the evil of suicide.

'The most precious gift God has given you is life. And if you take away that life by your own hand then you are stealing from God what he has given you out of love. You will not be buried in consecrated ground waiting peacefully for the day of Resurrec­tion. You will not be lifted up to heaven, for the Devil will already have taken your soul to be burned in everlasting hell fire.'

That night there was a knock on Kevin's door. It was Patrick, to ask if he was coming out to chase cats, but once outside Patrick confessed that chasing cats was only an excuse. He thought they could go and watch the house of Kathleen Murphy in case the Devil made an appearance at the window when he came to take her soul. He hadn't appeared yet, for the women had watched the house all day long, and they said nothing had happened, nothing at all.

The boys stared at the window so hard that even when they closed their eyes they could still see a red image of the window. But the Devil made no attempt to show himself. At one stage they began shouting 'Boop-boop-a-doop!' to remind the Devil where Kathleen Murphy was, in case he'd forgotten; but all that hap­pened was a man came out from a house behind them and threatened to break their backs with a stair rod if they didn't shut up.

It wasn't a bit like other deaths they'd been to; for normally when somebody died the children would be invited in the house to look at the body and say a couple of Hail Marys, after which they'd be given a cup of ginger beer or American cream soda and an arrowroot biscuit.

Had it not been only the week before that they had gazed into the coffin of Peggy Kelly? Peggy had been in their class at school until taken by consumption, the illness sent from heaven. Father Sullivan said it was because the angels had requested the pleasure of her company.

The small parlour had been filled with people, and every few minutes a little woman, who was an aunt of Peggy's, sprinkled perfume over the coffin. Mrs Kelly, a very fat woman, sat in a rocking chair saying her rosary. Every so often she would rock backwards and forwards, howling with grief that the angels had been so inclined to take her little daughter. Then, in one of her rocks, she had broken wind quite loudly, causing the two boys to giggle. They looked at each other and tried not to giggle, then they tried not looking at each other but they still giggled. Finally they spluttered bits of arrowroot biscuit into each others' faces, and the little aunt had snatched the cups of ginger beer from them and pushed them out into the street.

The Devil had still not shown himself, and both lads had half a mind to go chasing cats after all. And then from the window appeared a black bowler hat. The boys were afraid. They wanted to run, but they couldn't. After a couple of seconds Kevin pointed out that it couldn't be the Devil, because his father had always told him that a black bowler hat was the mark of decency and respectability, so it was hardly likely the Devil would put a black bowler hat on to the side of his head like his father did before he went to the pub on a Saturday night. Kevin was sure the Devil looked more like the joker in a pack of playing cards.

Indeed, it wasn't the Devil after all. It was Mr O'Rourke the undertaker, who had come to remove the body. Not wishing to offend the neighbours by taking the body out through the front door - her being a suicide - he had told his men to take it through the back yard and down the entryway, even though it meant having to tread carefully over a broken sewer grid and stepping sideways to avoid kicking the dustbins.

The two boys raced round the corner and up Hilkirk Street, then under the archway into the cobbled courtyard of Aloysius O'Rourke and Sons, Undertakers and Furniture Removers -only to find that another tradition had been broken. Whenever there was a funeral, Kevin and Patrick were paid one penny each by Mr O'Rourke for rubbing boot-blacking on the horse's hoofs. This was so that every bit of the horse pulling the hearse would be as black as the ace of spades.

'We'll not be bothering this time,' said Mr O'Rourke. 'There'll be no fancy funeral. She'll be buried with the paupers in the Queen's Park plot - her being a suicide and that. And there'll be no black plume on the horse either.'

Kevin asked Mr Aloysius why Kathleen Murphy had killed herself, with him being an expert in the ways of the dead.

'She had too many uncles,' said Mr O'Rourke. 'She had uncles she'd never seen before or would ever be likely to see again, and she would bring an uncle home on Saturday night and he would stay till the bells were ringing for Mass on Sunday morning. So all her neighbours got up a petition and sent it to the Town Hall, saying the likes of her was not fit to live among decent folk, and she should be turned out of the house. And it was after the Town Hall wrote to Miss Murphy that she put her pennies in the meter and turned on the gas. Ah, but 'tis not something to be bothering your head with, you not being a young girl.'

Next day it seemed to be all over and done with. Most of Kathleen Murphy's near neighbours used the back entry so as not to be seen in public; and neighbours who were compelled to brownstone or donkey stone their steps for the sake of decency tried not to look at each other.

Kevin ran home as he always did, and waited for his father to come in from work. His father was a Dolly Varden man; a middenman, or a muckman. He'd once told Kevin that the name 'Dolly Varden' came from the hats they wore. When muckmen tipped iron middentins over their shoulders into the cart, ashes and tea-leaves and all sorts of things fell over them, so the men wore wide-brimmed ladies' hats like a music-hall singer, Dolly Varden, used to wear. The horse that pulled the cart was named Roscoe, and sometimes they put a lady's hat on Roscoe.

His father went to work at four o'clock in the morning, and he carried a basket with a lid which held three brews of tea in condensed milk, and half a loaf of bread with cheese, all screwed up in newspaper. Ah, but it was the bringing home of the basket at five o'clock in the evening which mattered most to Kevin, because more often than not the basket contained broken toys, torn comics and books with pages missing which his father had rooted from the bins.

'We emptied the suicide's bin today,' said his father.

'And was there much in it?' asked his mother.

'Devil a bit! Hadn't the second-hand man and the rag bone man helped themselves to anything worth taking? There was a bundle of letters tied up, and as none of us could read we chucked it in the furnace; and there was a couple of books we gave to the time­keeper, him being able to read, though he said 'twas double Dutch, them being French and shorthand, whatever in tarnation shorthand is.'

'French and shorthand! My word, but didn't her ladyship fancy herself, then, and no mistake!'

'And there was this old thing.' He brought a teddy bear out of the basket and put it on the table. 'I thought 'twould do for the baby next door.'

Oh, how Kevin wanted that teddy bear. There was an ear missing, but its two bright glass eyes begged him to hug it; asking to be given a warm home and to be made restful and comfortable forever and ever. But how could a boy ask for a teddy bear? They'd laugh at him, they would; they'd all laugh at him.

'May the Lord forgive you for bringing this evil thing into the house!' shouted his mother. 'It could have been in the very room where she took her men folk, and where she . . . well, where she . . . and I do believe it still has the smell of gas about it. I don't want to look at it!'

She flung the teddy bear on the fire. For a second it was still a teddy bear, and Kevin's hands wanted to pull it from the fire and cuddle it and lie it down on a white pillow. But they'd laugh at him; oh, they would. So he let it burn away. The eyes still begged him for mercy as they fell down among the glowing coals.

He asked for the candle to be lit, and he went straight to bed. She shouldn't have burned the teddy bear. He blew the candle out quickly, for the flame might have come from the same flame as the teddy bear. The room was black as ink. He was afraid of looking towards the window.

Kevin was nine years old, and a very bright nine at that; but for the life of him he could never understand why he was supposed to be Irish, and his parents were supposed to be Irish, and everybody in the whole blooming district was supposed to be Irish, and yet they were living in Manchester, which was supposed to be in England, and them all singing drunken songs on a Saturday night about the Irish killing the English.

He knew a lot of people who were not English, but were also not supposed to be Irish; they were supposed to be Italians, and they lived a dozen streets away. There was one particular Italian girl in his class that he wanted to know better. Her name was Vera. She was about the same age as himself; her hair was shiny black, and her complexion smooth and brown; she was not a bit like the white-faced, freckled, red-haired Irish girls whom he normally threw half-bricks at.

Her father played 'Sweet Rosie O'Grady' on a barrel-organ in the streets, and he used to stop turning the handle occasionally to wipe his running nose on the sleeve of his old overcoat, which was far too big for him anyway and came down to his boots. Kevin wanted to marry Vera, and the gang said it would be okay because she was a Catholic, even though she was not Irish.

There was, sad to say, one snag to this desired romance, and that came in the size and shape of his pal Patrick Devlin. If ever there was a nine-year-old whose surname contained all the letters of Old Nick himself, it was Patrick; and wasn't it Patrick who was always boasting he'd seen the Devil, and the Devil had raised his hat to him and winked? Didn't the girls in the class just stare at him with wonderment? Vera's eyes were only for Patrick.

And Patrick's father was notorious, and known throughout Ancoats as 'the Yank', because he'd once set off from Tralee to make his fame and fortune in America, but he'd spent all his passage money on strong ale and porter in the quayside pubs of Cork, and had been left with only enough cash in his pocket to take him to England. All Kevin's dad had done to get to England was sell an old piano that nobody could play, and was broken in any case.

But it was at confession on Saturday evening when Patrick really came into his own.

The boys sat in the pews at the back of the church on the left side of the altar; and the girls sat on the right. When the tiny bell tinkled for the beginning of confession, Patrick always got up first and strode like a hero up the aisle. He wore the heaviest of wooden clogs, studded all round with steel rivets, and they sparked upwards and everywhere from the stone floor, offering positive proof that he had some sort of connivance going on with the Devil.

Many of the girls, including Vera, made the sign of the cross. The boys were a little embarrassed and pretended to look at the statue of Saint Anne.

When Patrick left the confession box after the usual minute inside, he would creep without so much as a spark to the front pew in front of the altar, far away from the other youngsters, as though he had been ordered to keep his distance from them. And then his contrition would begin. He would mumble away nineteen words to the dozen, glancing repeatedly at the suspended crucifix, and beating his breast as though in pain of purgatory.

He must be a sinful boy, the girls all thought. He must have been given hundreds of Our Fathers. What wicked sins had he committed?

One by one the children went in to the priest. They came out and gabbled their penances, and within minutes the boys were outside the church calling each other names, which usually ended up in a fight. But most of the girls stayed behind to watch Patrick beating his fists against his forehead and sometimes stretching out his arms in supplication to Christ on the cross. Let us pray for his soul, the girls would whisper to each other, and Vera was always the first to start on her rosary beads, the ones her grandmother had sent from Rome.

Eventually Patrick would stand up like a martyr about to save Ireland, and he would click-clack and spark out of the church. The devoted girls would follow him down the street at a safe distance; the more daring ones would chalk his name and their initials up on a wall, then run away in case he looked around.

To Kevin it became as plain as the nose on his face that if he wanted the Italian girl to look at him twice he would have to beat Patrick at his own game; he'd have to demonstrate he was the better sinner of the two.

This would not be easy. He had no experience of previous sinning, and at his age there were not all that many sins open to him. For a long time after taking his first Holy Communion he had gone nervously into the confession box to tell the priest that he had nothing to confess, for which he had been told to say three Hail Marys, presumably as penance for wasting the priest's time. Then he had bought a sin from Terence Mahoney for a penny. It was a very ordinary sin, and only worth a penny - simply that he had argued with his mother and father. When he told it to the priest, he still got three Hail Marys; it was disappointing but better than confessing nothing.

Kevin was fully aware that three Hail Marys would get him nowhere against Patrick Devlin's half-hour of breast beating. It would be the equivalent of a knock-out in the first ten seconds of the first round. He would have to study tactics.

But a Saturday evening arrived when Kevin realized it would have to be then or never. He had seen chalked up on a cotton mill wall that Vera loved Patrick.

The Devil's boy, little guessing he was going to be challenged to a duel, click-clacked and sparked his confident way into the box. No sooner had he staggered out than Kevin went in.

'Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It is two weeks since my last confession. I hate my father because he sold a piano to come to England when he could have tried to get to America, which is where Laurel and Hardy live, even though he might not have been able to afford the fare because of spending the money on beer.'

'Go in peace, and God bless you, my son,' said the priest. 'Make a good act of contrition and say three Hail Marys.'

Kevin crawled out of the box, defeated. Even the priest was on Patrick's side. And then the truth wafted across to Kevin as strong as the smell of frying onions. It was all an act on Patrick's part; he was putting it on. A boy could kill everybody in the whole world and get no more than three Hail Marys from Father Sullivan. Well, then he could cheat too!

Patrick had already banged his breast several times before Kevin knelt at the front pew on the opposite side of the