Here are the dead things
Alongside the living
Let’s see what the day brings
And end our forgiving
For Sharon, Lori-Ann, Ellie, Archie and Poppy
&
The township of Runcorn
‘NAVEM MERCIBUS IMPLERE’
The Altitudes of Bench Marks and surface heights are given in Feet above the mean level of the sea at NEWLYN and are based on the primary levelling of 1912
To refer these to the obsolete Liverpool datum, subtract the figures shown…..0.1…..feet} Note that the figure applies to this plan only and is only approximate to 0.1 ft.
Further information upon application.
He walks.
He walks to forget but all he does is remember.
He remembers when he still felt a part of this place.
He walks to escape but all he feels is contained.
He’s been nowhere.
He’s done nothing.
He knows every inch of this town.
He knows nothing of this town.
These paths and streets are not his.
Not anymore.
He walks these streets like a stranger.
They no longer recognise him.
Who he is.
Who he was.
What he will soon become.
He no longer sees them.
Who they are.
Who they were.
What they will soon become.
He no longer speaks.
He has nothing to say.
Not anymore.
Not to these people.
What words has he for them?
They wouldn’t listen anyway.
They are deaf to him.
Deaf to everyone.
They only hear what they want to hear.
They only see what they want to see.
They only feel what they want to feel.
He feels nothing.
Not now.
He’s empty.
He’s spent.
He walks to try to feel something.
To feel anything.
He walks to try and forget.
Forget who he once was.
Forget who he is now.
Forget what he will soon become.
It has become a ritual.
He walks the same route.
Top Locks to Bates Bridge and back.
Others like him also walk this pathway.
Along the canal.
The dead canal.
The dead canal in the dead town.
Not his town.
Not anymore.
Not his streets.
Not anymore.
He steps out from his house in Collier Street.
This is the best place to see the old Railway Bridge across the Mersey.
You can’t see it properly now the Runcorn-Widnes bridge has obscured it.
Only on this side of the arches can you really see it, really appreciate it.
Those bricks of eternity.
Dukesfield.
That’s where he lives, where he’s always lived.
In the house that used to be his nan’s.
Under the arches.
The arches of the railway bridge.
He touches the bricks.
The bricks of the bridges.
He rubs his hands across their surface.
He wants to connect.
He feels nothing.
There is no connection.
Only brick against skin.
They look at him.
They think he’s lost it.
Lost what exactly?
He HAS lost.
Lost his wife.
Lost his kids.
Lost his town.
Lost himself.
Somewhere in this place.
Some time he can’t remember.
Long ago.
Before he was even born.
He wants to offer his body up.
He wants the water to swallow him up.
Under one of these bridges.
Maybe now.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe never.
Even suicide takes energy.
He has no energy.
Just enough to walk.
Just enough to think.
To think about not thinking.
To try and wipe it all clean.
To start again.
He knows he can’t start again.
He’s come too far to start back at the beginning.
He’s seen the end up ahead.
He knows what the end looks like.
He doesn’t know when he’ll get there.
He feels it will be soon.
He walks towards this place.
Every step he takes is a step closer.
Maybe he’ll never get there.
Maybe he’s there already.
Fog Bell
L.M.S.R.
Runcorn bridge
Aston, Runcorn & Ditton Line
Mud
Mud
Sand
Widnes Transporter Bridge (Toll)
Toll House
612
914
Church Bank Sand
Runcorn Gap
Boat House
Boat yard
South Bank Terrace
Sand
Sand
B.M. 45.8
Graveyard
All Saints Church (Vicarage)
B.M. 36.1
Note – To convert Decimal parts of an Acre into Roods and Perches multiply by 4, this will give Roods and Decimals of a Rood, multiply this Decimal by 40 thus obtaining Perches and Decimals of a Perch.
He walks along Brindley Street, up Egerton Street, he walks past where the old Welsh chapel used to be. He walks through the subway, through the debris of last night’s haunting; the Rizla skins, the Subway wrappers, the empty bottles of lager, what passes as a night out for the kids round here now. He walks up the side of what used to be the Waterloo pub, crosses Station Road and stands on Waterloo Bridge. He looks down at where the canal terminates at Top Locks.
It never used to end here. These were the final locks before the canal went down to where The Big House is, Bridgewater House. It’s offices now.
Old line of locks.
Sebastopol ABM
Boat Yard.
New Line of locks.
Mooring Posts.
Reservoir.
BM 75.5
Custom House
Those names:
Francis Egerton.
Egerton Street
The Egerton Arms.
Lord Egerton.
The Third Duke of Bridgewater.
The Bridgewater Canal.
Duke’s Field.
Dukey.
These are the streets of Dukey:
Collier Street
Blantyre Street
Suffolk Street
Cawdor Street
Portland Street
Bentinck Street
Leinster Street
Leinster Gardens
Algernon Street
Brackley Street
Brindley Street.
Money!
Greed!
James Brindley.
Egerton’s engineer.
Brindley Street.
The Brindley Centre.
Dukes.
Earls.
Lords.
Knights.
Nobles.
Water.
Money.
Land.
Money.
Goods.
Money.
Locks.
Money.
Houses.
Money.
Workers.
Money.
Trade.
Money.
Profit.
Money.
Coal from Egerton’s mines in Worsley.
Shipped in flats along the canal.
Burn.
Kilns.
Burn.
Chimneys.
Burn.
Houses.
Burn.
Factories.
Burn.
Arthur Wellesley.
The 1st Duke of Wellington.
Wellington Street.
The Wellington pub.
Burn.
Lives.
Burn.
War.
Burn.
Battles.
Burn.
Slaves.
Burn.
Cotton.
Burn.
Mills.
Burn.
Coal.
Waterloo Road.
The Waterloo Pub.
Waterloo Bridge.
Burn.
Alexandrina Victoria Saxe-Coburg Gotha
Queen Victoria.
Empress of India.
Married her cousin.
Hanoverian Incest.
Victoria Road.
Victoria Road School.
Burn.
Empire.
Burn.
Statues.
Burn.
Cenotaphs.
Burn.
Cemeteries.
Burn.
This is their history.
Wellington.
Egerton.
Brindley.
Victoria.
This is their cycle.
Empire and trade.
War and death.
Slavery and exploitation.
Round and round and round and round it goes.
He walks through it all.
He walks past it all.
Left right
Head down.
One foot in front of the other.
He spits into the Bridgewater canal and sees his reflection in the still, murky water.
Is it the same water as when it was built?
Does the water ever go anywhere?
How many reflections has it reflected?
Are we trapped in the water?
Do we return to it?
Is that what they mean by reincarnation?
We are water?
Water made of water.
H2 fucking O.
Canals.
Rivers.
Seas.
Oceans.
Spit and sweat?
He loved the film Waterloo. He watched for the first time with his grandad. His dad’s dad. His grandad was into all that military history stuff. He loved the bit when the Scots Greys charge the French and it goes into slow motion. Then they get cut to pieces by the French guns and picked off by the lancers. Soft cunts.
Waterloo? Big deal!
Wellington? Twat!
He couldn’t say this to his grandad though. His grandad loved the bit where Wellington lords it over the soldiers and calls them the scum of the Earth but they love him for it. They don’t deserve freedom. His grandad was like that. He had a big Union Jack plate on the mantelpiece and a photo of the Queen hung in the hall. He was a patriot and a Tory, living in his three bedroom terrace in one of the poorest streets of the town.
He said he was too young to fight in the First World War and too old to fight in the second. He used to believe this for years, then he worked it out; his granddad was born in 1901 so he was 13 when the first world broke out, so that was fair enough but he would’ve only been 38 when the second world war started. Was 38 too old to sign up? Maybe it was. Or maybe he had a reserved occupation in the tannery. Whatever, he never shut up about the fucking war and the German planes flying over to bomb Liverpool and Italian prisoners of war working on Grice’s farm and the Hush Hush factory on Wigg Island where they made mustard gas. Who knows? That was ancient fucking history.
He walks.
Head down.
One foot in front of the other.
Going nowhere.
Going anywhere.
Same route.
Another day.
Another year.
One foot.
Left right.
In front of the other.
Left right.
He sees his feet move.
He knows he is moving.
He can’t feel his feet move.
He can’t feel the earth beneath him.
It’s as if he’s invisible.
Weightless and at the same time heavy.
So fucking heavy.
Sometimes.
Like he’s walking in mud.
Dead already.
Maybe he is.
He passes under the approach road to the bridge across from the narrow boats and under Doctor’s Bridge with its sailing ships carved into the sandstone. Some of the old uns still call it Savage’s Bridge where Savage’s butchers used to be.
He passes the waste ground where the jobcentre used to be. Where he used to sign on. He was classed as a PV.
Potentially Violent.
They were sick of his kick offs on giro day.
Gone.
He passes the wasteland where the Scala Bingo used to be.
Weeds.
It was left derelict for years.
Big gaping hole in the roof.
The Beatles played there once.
Before it was the bingo hall, it was a dance hall
His grandad talked about the dances there during the war.
Hard times.
Good times.
Tough times.
Tough people.
Good people.
Hard people.
He passes the Bank Chambers.
He was a bouncer there for a while.
Used to deal at the back.
The Chambers was always in the news.
Bad news.
Fights, stabbings, the odd kicking to death of some poor fucker.
Before it was a pub it was a function room.
He attended a wedding there in 84.
His mate’s ma had got re-married to this Portuguese fellar.
His nan said she was on the boats.
Marrying a darkie.
It was the first time he’d ever tasted fondant potato.
It was a posh do.
He shagged one of the bridesmaid’s, a Portuguese girl from Porto.
Before it was a function room, it was the main post office for the town.
Before that it had been a solicitor’s office.
When it was built it was the home of John Johnson of Johnson and Johnson, who owned the Runcorn Soap and Alkali Company; the ‘soapy’.
Mersey Road
Mooring Posts
Mission Hall
Belvedere
Mill Street
Graving Slip
Graving Slip
Union & Munl.Boro.Bdy.
U.D. Body
Runcorn Alkali Works
Johnson and Johnson.
Hazlehurst.
Wigg.
When he’d been with her for a few years they were looking at a house on Saxon Road but there’d been problems with subsidence. Some of the houses round that way had been condemned because they were slowly sinking into the soil, an old waste ground for the soapy. He decided they’d live in his house, his nan’s old house. She didn’t like it. She never liked it. She wanted to live by her mum and dad in Brookvale. He wouldn’t entertain it. Not up there. Not with the scousers.
No fucking way!
This was a compromise. They went to see a few houses on Halton Road, Sea Lane way. It was too close. It was too far away.
The soapy was long gone by the time he was born. He only remembers it being the old Crosville bus garage and where the RNA used to be, near the subway that leads to Victoria Road. The fair would set up there sometimes. He had many memories of those places. He still has these memories; they haven’t yet been displaced by new ones. There were no new memories to displace them with.
He’s sat on the bus with his nan. He’s about six or seven. They’ve been up to the new Shopping City mall opened by the Queen the year before. They were given the day off from school and forced to wave shitty plastic Union Jacks along the spur road. Even then, he knew it was fucking bullshit. He saw her as she passed, this Queen with her moron smile. Like a trapped rat.
This day coming back from The City was hot. He felt sick. The smell of his nan’s Embassy fag, the smell of the warm leather seats, the smell of the fellar in front’s vinegary chips. He couldn’t help it. The bus had called in the depot as they changed driver. He spewed up all over himself and his nan. She slapped him all the way home.
He’s at the fair with Baz. They’re about ten or eleven and one of the fair lads is having a fight with one of the older lads from Dukey. The Dukey lad is winning and the other gyppos join in and kick him half to death. He remembers the sick feeling he got watching the beating, excitement and adrenaline, terror and – he couldn’t describe it – JOY?
He’s sat at a table in the RNA with Paula Moores as Honey Bane’s ‘Girl On The Run’ is playing. Paula is French kissing him and gently rubbing his dick under the table. He cums in his zip pants.
Of Heroes & Industry.
That’s what the mural says.
There’s a painting of Todger Jones who won a Victoria Cross in the 1st World War. He was from Dukesfield. Some relation of his nan’s. He captured a load of German prisoners on his own during the Battle of Morval.
Morval Crescent is off Boston Avenue. They would meet the scousers from Halton Brook there. Sometimes they’d leg the scousers back into the Brook, more often than not the scousers would leg them back onto Sycamore Road, on the Grange estate. Morval was the front line; on one side, the scousers, on the other, the woolybacks.
Todger was a hero. He got back. Never had to buy a pint again in his life. There were hundreds from the town less lucky. Sacrificed to their lords and masters, their flags and fatherlands, their names carved into the cenotaphs and he wonders about the stone masons that carved those names and whether they felt any guilt at surviving the war to end all wars.
Then there are the industrialists.
Hazlehursts
Johnsons.
Wigg.
He sits in the old library on Egerton Street. It was a gift from Andrew Car-fucking-negie!
Not such a bad cunt as cunts go.
‘The Gospel of Wealth’
Not exactly what JC had in mind but there yer go.
It’s a lovely old building.
It WAS a lovely old building till they shut it.
They’d knocked down the old market.
Made this shitty little market with enough room for about ten stalls.
No-one came.
Another nail in the coffin of the Old Town.
They moved the library to the building instead.
No-one read books anymore.
They went on the internet.
They paid their council tax.
They did fucking job search.
They kicked off on each other.
It’s a LIBRARY!
He can’t get peace and quiet anywhere.
He reads these old local history books. It fascinates him. What they did and how they are remembered. These pricks with streets and islands and buildings still bearing their names.
The Johnsons.
John and Thomas Johnson mortgaged their soap works to fund the supply of coal to the Confederates during the American civil war. The steamships they sent from England were all lost during the shelling of Charleston, South Carolina and the Johnsons were declared bankrupt in 1865. Charles Wigg, their agent, appealed to Liverpool Exchange to rescue this fine and noble enterprise.
The Runcorn Soap And Alkali Company was registered on 13th November 1865. The Johnsons owned the bulk of the shares, £80,000 worth, with others including the Hazlehursts and Wigg also having stakes in the business. In 1871 the Johnsons sold their interests and land and were declared bankrupt again.
Runcorn Salt and Alkali bought the Winsford Salt Works from the Johnsons and their coal mines in St Helens were sold to Laffack and Garswood Collieries, of which Charles Wigg was secretary and agent.
Charles’s brother, George Wigg was a cotton buyer in New Orleans and Galveston. He and Judah Philip Benjamin were the financial agents of the Confederate government. Wigg shipped arms and goods to the Confederate army, his ships, the Antonica, the Pearl, The Eagle and The Thistle ran the blockades. The Antonica ran the blockade of Mobile, Alabama with a cargo of 22,000 pairs of shoes and 30 tons of gunpowder.
‘Then the Lord said unto Moses, “Go into Pharaoh and say to him ‘Thus says the Lord, “let my people go, that they may serve me.”
Good Bible folk.
“As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers, the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.”
Good Christian folk.
Wesleyans.
Presbyterians.
Puritans.
Puritan Tannery.
Camden Tannery.
Highfield Tannery.
Astmoor Tannery.
Men of God.
Wigg also bought Grice’s farm in Halton from the Johnsons and built a large house, Halton Lodge on the site. This was demolished in the 60s and Halton Lodge Primary School was built on the site, although the gateposts remained. The same gate posts he passed every morning as he walked into Halton Lodge Juniors.
On his first day at Halton Lodge, the cock of the school, Nige Wilkinson offered him out on the fields behind the shops on Grangeway. He didn’t really want a fight on his first day but he didn’t want to be called a shithouse either, so he agreed. There was a massive circle around them as Nige took up a stupid boxer’s stance. He knew they all wanted Nige to win. He let Nige come to him. He was a strong kid but he managed to trip him up as he rushed forward and booted him in the face, then stamped on him and was pulled off by a few of the other lads. Nige tried to get up, so he punched him a few times and he stayed down. Some of the girls were screaming. An old fellar came to split it up. He walked away. Nige never split on him. It was the only fight he had at Halton Lodge apart from the last day before the summer holidays when they were leaving to go to the secondary school. He was supposed to be going to The Heath but they’d already told his nan they wouldn’t accept him, so he had to go to the Grange instead. It was the hot summer of 76 and on the final bell, they’d all invaded the school field as tradition dictated. Mr. Brophy thought he was the school hard man. He’d made his life a misery, the kind of cunt that stood kids on chairs and humiliated them for having dirty fingernails or not knowing what seven times eight was.
Brophy tried getting them all off, running after them like a dickhead, shouting orders at kids that would never have to hear his bullying words ever again. Everyone scattered but he stood there and Brophy grabbed him by his jumper and threw him to the ground. He got up and punched Brophie in the face, which seemed to startle him. The teacher just stood there, open mouthed, so he punched him again. This time the teacher reacted, not as he’d anticipated but by bursting into tears.
Fucking puff!
The summer holidays were boring as fuck.
He walked over to Wiggsy’s with Jonesy.
Over the Old Quay bridge. It was red hot. Hottest weather he could ever remember. Every day. A hundred degrees they reckoned. Jonesy was going to The Heath. All the other kids from Dukey were going to The Heath except him and Aidan Keogh who was going to St Joseph’s Catholic school in Widnes. All the Mersey mud has cracked like a proper drought. They walked down to the edge of the water, all this black sludge rising to the top between the cracks until their legs were totally covered in this stinking, oozy shit.
They walked back up to Sandy Cove on the Ship Canal and went for a swim to get all the mud off their legs but it wouldn’t come off. He got home and ran a bath and scrubbed at his legs for ages to get this stuff off.
Wigg
The Old Quay Chemical Works.
Wigg
Soap-alkali-copper-pyrites ash-bleaching powder-ferric oxide-iron ore-sulphur-ammonia
Wigg
The Alkali Makers Association
Wigg
The Bleaching Powder Association
Wigg
The Church of England
Wigg
The Conservative Party
Wigg Works
Wigg Island
ICI
Randles Works
Mustard Gas
World War I
5.12.71 ICI note that work was not well documented during the First World War. Processes known to have been dealt with on site at this time include (ICI, 1996):
- Chlorosulphonic acid made for smoke generators and also used in the manufacture of saccharine.
- Sulphuric acid for the manufacture of explosives.
- Dinitrophenol from chlorobenzene via dinitrochlorobenzene.
- Ammonium perchlorate by electrolysis of sodium chlorate.
- “War gases‟: chlorine, phosgene, arsenic trichloride, mustard gas and its intermediates (in particular sodium sulphide, thionyl chloride, sulphure chloride etc), chlorhydrine and thionyl.
World War II
5.12.72 During the period 1939 to 1945 ICI (1996) indicate that it is believed a number of “Ministry of Defence” Classified projects were carried out on the site. Although ICI records of wartime arrangements with the MoD have been destroyed or are not free for examination (ICI, 1996), limited details are available with respect to the “Tube Alloy Project”, which involved early development work for atomic energy and the atomic bomb.
5.12.75 ICI note that “war gases were developed and manufactured throughout the Second World War”. ICI was the Governments largest industrial agent and the largest investment of all was in the research, development and manufacture of war gases. The gases developed by ICI during World War II were :
bromobenzylcyanide,
diphenylchloroarsine,
diphenylcyanoarsine,
phenylarsinic acid
and
thiodiglycol (for use in mustard gas) but ICI state there was “no confirmation that any of these gases were developed at this site” and that “no shells were filled with poisonous gas at this site”.
His nan’s house is towards the bottom of the hill. He’s been sent to Joe’s chippy in Cawdor Street. He’s been gone half an hour. He knocks at the door with the hot bag that is burning his small hands. His nan answers. She looks angry. She always looks angry.
“Where have you been?”
“There was a big queue.”
She snatches the chips off him and walks quickly into the kitchen, takes out one large plate and a smaller one, then with her hands picks up the red hot chips in a claw grip and throws them onto the plates. She has about three times as many as he does. She butters a few slices of white bread and cuts them in half. She places the bread on the side of the plate and hands the small plate to him without a word.
He yawns.
He didn’t sleep well.
He never sleeps well.
Another night.
Another day.
Another day.
Another night.
It just all rolls into one long dream.
The tablets.
The boredom.
The tablets.
The loneliness.
Left
Right
Left
Right
One foot
In front of the other
Head down
Mouth shut
112
12.588
Victoria Yard
Graving Dock
Graving Slip
Jackson’s Lane
Bridgewater Foundry (Iron & Brass)
Rock Mount
B.M. 101.6
Cranes
He walks
Alongside the car park wall
FTW
MUFC
EFC
LFC
Caithness Street
White Street
Howarth Street
Sutherland Street
Metal Extracting Works
Gas Street
Cholmondeley Place
Stone Street
B.M. 81 0
Gasometer
Engineering Works
He wakes up in a stairwell on the Southgate estate. It’s dark and he’s cold and the concrete steps are hard. He tries to remember how he got here. He tries to stand but wobbles and falls back against the wall. He laughs. He shouts.
“Do you know who I am? Do yer?”
He hears a whistle on the landing above. Then he hears two men talking. Then he sees a face.
“Who are you then?”
The man doesn’t laugh or smile or register any emotion. Not pity or aggression or amusement. The other man stands above him on the stairwell but doesn’t speak. He can smell weed. He remembers being in the Straw Hat with Moggy then being in the Merry Monk. He was talking to this girl. Him and Moggy went back to her flat. There were three kids sat on the settee. Then….he was here.
“Where’s fucking Moggy?” he shouts.
The lads laugh.
One of them tries to lift him up as gently as he can but he stumbles and falls back against the smooth, yellowing concrete of the stairwell and cracks his head on one of the steps, feels the blood wetting his hair.
The lads start kicking him.
“Who are y’now lad?”
He laughs as they boot him. He feels no pain. He is immune to it.
A Home That’s Right For You
Southgate is the nearest of the Corporation’s housing areas to the town centre at Shopping City. It was built in three phases providing homes in the form of flats, maisonettes and houses.
Description of property
A distinct heating system with individual pre-payment heat controls, is installed at Southgate and provides partial central heating and hot water to each dwelling. Fitted kitchens, convenient power points, a television aerial socket, external meter cupboards and waste disposal fitments are standard provisions for every dwelling. There are no gas mains to Southgate, so cookers and fridges should be electric.
Phase 1
On the ground level of phase 1 are 3 bedroomed maisonettes and 2 bedroomed maisonettes on the deck level above. On the top level (with access by stairwell) are 1 and 2 bedroomed flats., The maisonettes and flats are in terraces overlooking landscaped squares where toddlers can play in safety, Ramps and/or stairs to the squares allow access for residents from upper levels, whole ground level maisonettes have garden gates opening into the central area. Each square is intended for the use and enjoyment of the families living around it.
Success Abroad
“Good now at last I can begin to live like a human being.” Thus, according to Suetonius, the Emperor Nero, that most enthusiastic of New Towners, greeted the re-built Rome. And one is irresistibly reminded of him on visits to Runcorn New Town as it grows into the city it will one day become. In Shopping City, opened by the Queen last May and now all but fully let, a housewife told me why she liked Runcorn. “It’s convenient” she said. “it’s quiet and it’s clean.”
Vandalism in Runcorn, according to its Chief Architect and Planner Mr. R.L. E. Harrison, is minimal. His view is “If you put people down in a housing estate that looks like a bomb site people are going to treat it like a bomb site. We have made great use of landscaping, not only round the houses but on the industrial estates as well. As a result, we find that people here are treating things with care. One doesn’t often see snapped saplings about and it always seems to me that the gardens here are better kept than those in other towns I visit.”
Even at this comparatively early date in its life it is possible to discern success in Runcorn as a town, as a design and as a pleasant home for the refugees from Merseyside’s teeming streets.
Homes That Were Never Fit To Live In
The news that the public housing in Runcorn New Town designed by James Stirling is to be demolished by the Warrington and Runcorn Development Corporation only 13 years after it was completed cannot fail to elicit a feeling of schadenfreude in anyone has ever had to live or work in one of his buildings – as I have. The deep irony of the Runcorn saga is that although the housing is prefabricated it is not high rise. By making the upper storeys project over the lower, supported on solid staircase towers, he created brutally powerful repetitive elevations full of depth and shadow, even the architect’s comparison with the civilised scale of Bedford Square now seems fatuous. “Legoland” the second phase of the Southgate project begun in 1972, was a response to a changed brief, for demand was now for houses with gardens instead of flats and Stirling substituted panels of GRP (plastic) for pre-cast concrete,
The real failings at Runcorn stem from the inflexibility of the adopted form of construction and, as in so many cases, from inadequate maintenance and bad management, it is certainly wrong that, in this instance, Stirling should be made scapegoat for the whole architectural profession,
But doubts must remain. Why did the local authority choose this particular estate for dumping its problem tenants and why are other housing schemes in Runcorn new Town not also proposed for demolition? At Runcorn, Stirling was possibly the victim of an idiotic brief, but in this latest episode in the great national tragedy of post-war public housing, it is not the architect who deserves sympathy or, in this case, the local authority, but only the usual victims: the long suffering tenants,.”
Residents of “Legoland” in homes battle
Angry residents of the notorious Legoland council estate are to lobby parliament this week in an attempt to save their homes from demolition.
The decision to knock down the Southgate estate in Runcorn designed by the acclaimed British architect James Stirling, and famous for its plastic-clad houses and porthole windows, was taken on Tuesday. Warrington and Runcorn Development Corp said the cost of maintaining the dilapidated estate was too high and that it wanted to replace it with “the kind of homes people would like to live in”
Residents are upset because they have been working for 18 months with a local housing association and community architects on a £22m plan to upgrade the estate. John Heverin, regional manager of Merseyside Improved Homes said “It’s a disgrace. We’ve been working on this for 18 months and got £30,000 from the Dept of Environment and spent about the same ourselves on the study. The same people who built this estate are compounding their mistake 20 years on by saying they’ll knock it down. You shouldn’t be shunting these people around again.”
David Binns, general manager of the Development Corporation said that it decided on demolition after a survey predicted high repair costs on the estate over the next 15 years. It costs £600,000 a year to maintain and £3.5 million had been spent over the past three years on repairs. Condemning the refurbishment scheme as “very messy and difficult to implement” he added that the families could be re-housed gradually as flats elsewhere became empty. The cleared 80-acre site could then be worth up to £20m with planning permission for new housing and some rented housing could be provided he said.
They re-renamed Southgate as Hallwood Park. Moggy had long gone by then. They moved him to Castlefields, in a flat even worse than the one he had on Southgate. He got bad on the gear. Castlefields was where they stuck all the junkies when they pulled down Southgate and they didn’t want them moving back into the new houses. They kept the pub though. The Monk! The Merry Monk! It was never fucking Merry. Changed its name to The Hallwood Raven.
Hallwood Park had originally been the site of a medieval deer park called Northwood or Halton Park. From the 14th Century on, the deer park was reduced in size by agricultural encroachment and demands for wood from the ship/boat building industry and for building houses. However, there was still enough of Northwood left in the 17th Century to allow King James I a day of hunting, records in 1610 showing that there were 120 deer in the park. Timber from the deer park was also often used for repairs to Halton Castle. Today, many of the street names on the Hallwood Park housing estate have a hunting/falconry connection: Hunters Court, Falcons Way, Kestrels Way, Deer Park Court and so on.
Hallwood Park takes its name from the estate of Hallwood, the birthplace and former home of Sir John Chesshyre, an extremely important lawyer in the early 18th Century. The peak of his career was being appointed Premier Serjeant-at-Law to King George I in 1727. A former wing and stables of Hallwood Manor are better known to us today as The Tricorn public house.
The Hallwood Raven, a former Greenall Whitley pub, opened in October 1976 as the now legendary Merry Monk, originally serving the people of the radical new housing estate called Southgate. This estate, designed by Sir James Stirling, was built in two phases and finally completed in 1977.
After a seven-month refurbishment, the pub reopened in 1994 as The Hallwood Raven, by which time Southgate had been demolished and replaced by the more traditional housing estate, Hallwood Park.
In the final year of the pub’s life it had become The Hallwood Carvery, in a brave but unsuccessful attempt to reinvent itself as a pub/eatery.
The pub closed in 2011, and after the usual arson attack/s that abandoned buildings are subject to, was demolished in May 2017.
Moggy was just another one that was doomed before they were even born. They walk around with a death sentence stare. Even when they’re kids, he could sense the ones that wouldn’t last till old age. Young Bowman for example. The kid was always gonna end up dead in some cunt’s dirty flat and that’s where they found him in 92, OD’d on his meth in a flat on Palacefields, overlooking the hospital. Moggy lasted a bit longer, he was surprised that he got to forty to be honest. 2007 was when they dragged him out of the canal. Maybe it was suicide, maybe he fell in, off his head as usual, probably scoring. There are accidents too. Young Nello was hit by a stolen car, Gibbo fell through a roof working on a demolition job. Franny Lowe got trapped inside a fucking commercial oven. Fuck man! He doesn’t dwell on it. He can’t. The universe is just a circle. Everything’s spinning and coming back to where it all fucking started.
Every now and then he cuts a tiny piece of skin from his body. It started when he was eleven or twelve. He took his penknife and peeled a hard piece of skin from his left knee and he enjoyed the pain and soreness. So every time he feels totally fucked off, he gets out his old knife and slices a part of his flesh. It’s not what he’d call ‘self-harm’ – that was for silly girls who wanted attention – it was just something he did to test himself, to test his powers of resilience, his pain threshold. When she left him he cut loads of skin off the bottom of his feet. He carried on walking. It fucking killed him. He had to see the doctor when it got infected.
That was his first stint in The Brooker Centre. Dosed him up into a slobbering wreck. He looked around at the fucking nuts he was stuck with and he tried to leave. They wouldn’t let him. He punched the walls, wrecked his room. They gave him a big shot of juice and shipped him out to Winwick. It was the first time he’d cried since his nan died.
B.M. 59.3
Penketh’s Lane
Spring Street
Ellesmere Street
53
43
Towing path
Hazlehurst Soap Works
78
243 – 645
He uses cheap felt tips to colour in the drawings. His latest one is a sparrow hawk. He thinks it’s his best one yet. The sparrow hawk is his favourite bird of prey. Better than eagles even. He likes its yellow eyes and its speckled chest. He likes how it stands, the shape it makes. He’s done a really good job on its feathers. He shows it to his dad who lives with his new ‘mum’ in Widnes. He says it’s great and he’ll get a frame for it. His new mum has got two lads and a girl. His dad says they’re his new brothers and sister and when they get enough room, he can come and live with them but for now he’s got to stay with his nan.
He’s done other drawings, copied them from a book in the library. There’s a kestrel, a barn owl and a buzzard. He’s only ever seen a kestrel in real life. There’s one near the pond at the back of Leinster Gardens. It hovers and then swoops down really fast to catch a mouse or maybe a vole.
He was watching the kestrel one day when he saw the girl and the man in the grass. The girl was in his school, a few years older than him. The man was about the same age as his dad. He heard this noise, he didn’t know what it was and then he almost tripped over them.
The girl started to yell but the man put his hand over her mouth and told him to ‘fuck off.’
He ran away. He didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t really understand what they were doing. He saw the girl in school the next day and she just looked at him. He didn’t know if he should say something to her. He didn’t say anything and she didn’t say anything. He saw the man once outside the betting shop. The man saw him. The man looked at him, flicked a ciggy on the ground, stamped on it and walked back in the bookies.
B.M. 47.2
Market Hall
Trinity Street
Holy Trinity Church
Stocks
Police Station
Public House
Public House
Mersey Street
Inn
B.M. 26.7
Graving Slip
It seems to pulse. The wallpaper next to his head is breathing. He can hear it. He can see it. The little bubbles expand, then go smaller. They make a noise but not a breathing noise just like a faint buzz. He watches one at first, tries to concentrate on just one of the bubbles but it’s impossible. The whole wall is pulsating. The yellow light from the streetlamp outside casts a long shadow across the ceiling and he sees them crawling along a crack in the plaster, all these creatures, tiny, like ants but not insects or anything that he’s ever seen before. They have legs like crabs and long bodies, with baby’s heads. They all open their mouths and howl then dig a hole in the wall and crawl inside. The hole closes after them and the room starts to spin. He screams and his nan comes in.
“What’s the matter now? He cries.
“Shut up and go to sleep. I’m tired.”
B.M. 28.8
Dover Street
Brunner Guild Hall
John’s Street
Thomas Street
Parker Street
Ann Street
Stanley Street
Fisher Street
St. Edward’s RC Church
Public House
Bold Street
B.M. 47.2
He walks.
One step in front of the other.
He walks through history.
One step.
He walks AGAINST history.
History suffocates him.
One step.
Memories choke him.
Left.
He wants to destroy himself.
Right.
Destroy this town.
Left.
Going nowhere.
Right.
Destroy all those who have held him back.
Going anywhere.
Held him down.
Head down.
Till he can’t breathe.
Hood up.
Till his head explodes.
One step after another.
He wants to get as far away from this shithole as he can.
Left.
But he can’t
Right.
He is stuck here.
Eyes down.
He sees his feet move but they always take him back.
Mouth shut.
Back to where he started.
One step.
Back to where he will end.
After another.
Like he’s never left at all.
Left.
Like he’s just been here for all time.
Right.
Before the canal.
Hood up.
Before the town.
Head down.
Before the river and the fields.
Mouth closed.
Like he just sprang into being and they live in him.
Eyes open.
He is the town.
One foot.
He is history.
After another.
Fryer Street
Granville Street
School
52
Loch Street
B.M 51.9
Princess Street
Cross Street
Regent Street
Public House
Devonshire Place
She takes his hand and pulls him quickly towards the school.
It’s November and it’s cold and he is wearing shorts and the shorts are much too big for him.
The school is old and black with chimney soot and factory dust.
The school is tall and dark and foreboding.
Inside, it smells of failure and brutality.
She wordlessly drops him at the iron gate and carries on her way to the hairdressers for her weekly appointment.
As he walks in, the Bowman twins immediately gather their gang and he attempts to walk to the other side of the yard where the lone teacher smokes his rollie. They cut him off before he can get there and force him behind the toilet wall. He takes their punches and their kicks. He tries shouting but it never helps. Parish school is on Church Street next to All Saints Church. It is the most un-Christian place on earth.
“This Sunday School was originally intended for a Sunday school only, on Dr. Bell’s plan, but this year 1812, it was proposed, and accordingly has been converted into a day school for the purpose of instructing the children of the poor.”
At first exercise books and writing slates could not be afforded. Instead there was a large, narrow table in the form of a shallow trough filled with fine sand, which was smoothed over with a ruler and the children wrote on it with their fingers. This primitive device was very useful but it made the school so dirty that it was abandoned to be replaced by writing slates.
He passes what’s left of St Paul’s church. He’s seen the old photos of it, a tall Methodist church built by Thomas Hazlehurst, Christian soul that he was. Now there’s only a few bits of wall left. It used to be gardens here, not really tended to, more of a hide out for people shagging or taking drugs or drinking.
He walks under the curly bridge that leads over to Greenway Road. They’d jump off here during the summer holidays into the Bridgey. He was a decent swimmer and would dive in, to show off. The water wasn’t deep and one time he jumped off the top, sank to the bottom and felt something dig into his foot. When he came up his foot was bleeding and there was a deep gash in his sole. He had to go to the hospital. Get it stitched but it got infected and went all green. Who knows what’s been left in there, under the silt over the past two hundred years? Layer upon layer of shit.
St Paul’s Church (Wesleyan)
The Citadel
1.845
111a
B.M. 96.1
Alcock Street
Bethesda Congregational
Burial Ground
Emery Hall
Vicar Street
B.M. 59.0
The Brindley centre is up ahead. It was built here about ten years ago.
Big fuck off portrait of James Brindley in the foyer.
He’s never set foot in the place
Supposed to be an arts centre
They closed down the Queen’s Hall in Widnes
Built this place
He went to see the Happy Mondays at the Queen’s Hall
Saw The Stone Roses there too.
Not that he was into them so much, but they’d been on Top Of The fucking Pops
Who ever played at the fucking Brindley?
Tribute bands.
Shit comedians off the telly.
Panto.
The Brindley can get to fuck.
Funded by Lottery money.
EVERYTHING’S funded by gambling now.
Pick your numbers.
Mugs.
Scratch the card.
Dickheads.
Lose. Lose. Lose.
Losers.
But it’s OK, because we can fund charities and the arts from your foolishness.
Poor people subsidising society
The BIG Society
Pick your numbers
It could be YOU
But it won’t
It never is
It’s always been the same
That carrot
Easy riches
People preying on the poor
Praying for the poor
All that scratching’s making them itch.
All that scratching’s making some fucker rich.
More! More! Moore!
The Moores family
Statues of them in Liverpool city centre
The Pools
He helped his dad to do his coupon when he was little.
Littlewoods.
Home win.
Zetters.
Away win.
Score draw.
Spot The Ball.
No score draw.
Nine score draws.
Jackpot!
His dad was a gambler.
The Pools.
The horses.
Boxing.
Dogs.
Poker.
Bandits.
“Couldn’t keep money in his pocket if he tried that one.
Your mum was a fool to marry him.”
A gambler.
A drunkard.
A work-shy bum.
A womaniser.
A wife beater.
Low life scum.
“And his mam and dad are such lovely people too.”
He can’t really remember what she looked like anymore.
He can still remember her laugh.
She had a great laugh.
He remembers her rowing with dad a lot.
He remembers her slamming the door shut.
He remembers his dad knocking them up in the middle of the night.
He remembers her crying then moaning then crying again.
Her face though.
He remembers she was dark.
Dark hair and eyes.
That’s all he can remember of her.
The photos don’t do her justice.
The photos his nan has when she was a girl bear no relation to the memory he has of her.
His dad never got back in touch once he’d moved in with his nan.
He knew the cunt lived in West Bank in Widnes
Just over the bridge.
He lived in Ditton first with his new family but that didn’t last long.
He’s been told he’s shacked up with some woman from West Bank.
West Bank.
Different people over there.
Lancashire people.
Funny accent.
Rugby League.
Widnes.
Widnes Transporter Bridge (Toll)
Toll House
616
Mud
Sand
High Water Mark Of Ordinary Tides
612
914
Victoria Gardens
Hospital
Lock
Ditton Oil Mills
Mooring Posts
West Bank
Half a mile and a half a lifetime away.
He used to walk over the bridge sometimes.
West Bank was like Dukey.
Cut off from the rest of the town.
A town in itself.
Insular.
Suspicious.
These are the streets of West Bank ;
Mersey Road
St. Mary’s Road
Beaumont Street
James Street
White Street
Davies Street
West Street
Oakland Street
Cholmondeley Street
Wright Street
Church Street
Viaduct Street
Irwell Street
Bank Street
Parsonage Road
He’d walk around West Bank, hoping to see him, bump into him.
He’d walk down to the prom that looked over the Mersey and the bridge opposite the Mersey pub, which the locals called ‘The Snig.’ A gang of lads surrounded him once, asked where he was from. He told them. They asked his name. He told them. They said they’d heard of him. He asked them if they knew his dad. One of them said he thinks he’s seen him with a woman who’s friends with his mum. The lads offered him a fag. He had a smoke with them then walked back over the bridge, looked down at the river and the canal and wondered if anyone could survive a fall into the water from that height.
His grandad told him that him and his mates would hang from the cable car on the Old Transporter Bridge when they were kids and drop into the cut. One lad misjudged it and hit the gantry wall then fell back and drowned.
He saw his dad once in West Bank, a few months later stood outside The Swan.
He watched him arguing with this woman and then he went back in and the woman walked back in a bit later. He tried to look in through the windows but couldn’t see him. He stood in the doorway, smelled the ciggy smoke and the stale ale and could hear laughing and shouting. Pubs thrilled him. He couldn’t wait to be old enough to spend his hours sat in his own local, the Dev or the South Bank, the Welly or the Clarry.
Slipway
Ship & Boatbuilding Yard
Slipway
Stage
St. Mary’s Church (Vicarage)
Ward Bdy.
Bower’s Pool
Picture Theatre
Mission Room
He thought about walking in and just standing in front of him, see how he’d react but he didn’t. What good would it do? He couldn’t turn back time. He couldn’t make his dad love him.
It was just before his ninth birthday.
His dad turned up at the door, pissed.
Asked to see him but his nan wouldn’t let him in.
His nan told him to clear off and his dad called her a twisted old bitch and said he was glad her daughter was dead because she was a slag and had been shagging Tony Derbyshire behind his back. His nan flew at him and he pushed her away. She fell back into the hall so he went into the kitchen and got a carving knife from the drawer. He held it in front of his dad.
His dad just laughed and said ‘what the fuck are you going to do with that then?’ and he went to slash his dad’s face but he held up his arm and the knife cut deep into his forearm. His dad screamed as blood spurted out and his nan got up and slammed the door shut. He could hear his dad screaming outside, shouting
“I’ve been stabbed. I’ve been stabbed. Little bastard stabbed me.”
His nan started crying. He thought she’d belt him but she hugged him instead. She didn’t just hug him, she clung to him. He knew then that he loved her more than anyone else in the world.
He walks.
He thinks.
He walks.
He dreams.
He walks.
He sees them.
They walk with him.
All these ghosts.
They walk through him.
He greets them.
He smiles as they pass.
Bridgewater Street
Church Street
School
Queen Street
Cooper Street
King Street
B.M 48.8
School
Brunswick Street
Inn
51
He sees the old places.
He’s seen them in the old photos.
All those photos in the old pubs.
The dead pubs.
Dead pubs in a dead town.
The Wilsons, The Willy’s.
The Royal.
The Barley Mow, The Barley.
The Wellington, The Welly.
The Clarendon, The Clarry.
The Devonshire, The Dev.
That’s all that’s left now.
Even the ones from when he was better.
When he still lived amongst them.
The Egerton Arms, The Edgie.
Flats now.
The New Inn.
Employment Agency now.
The Masonic.
Falling apart.
The South Bank.
Rotting.
The Waterloo.
A fucking Buddhist Temple.
He remembers the stories of the old ones.
He sees them in their pubs.
The George Inn
The Barrel
The Wheatsheaf
The Nelson
The Holyhead Harbour
The Stanley Arms
The Queen’s Head
The Derby Arms
Kings and Queens.
Trades and trading posts.
Explorers and generals.
Earls and Lords.
This is their cycle.
This is their history.
This is their lie.
All the pubs are gone.
Like they were never there.
Maybe they weren’t.
Maybe he isn’t here.
Maybe it’s all a dream.
Maybe he’ll wake up and his mum will still be alive and his kids will both in bed and he’ll be sat on the settee with Kelly and he’ll be happy.
He’s playing Ged Farrell; the Dev versus the Burma Star. Old Town v New Town. Wools v scousers. It’s the deciding match. Farrell’s good. There’s an atmosphere and their lot are asking for it, yelling;
“Come on Ged, do this Manc cunt.”
He misses the black, leaves it right over the fucking pocket. Farrell smirks. The scousers whoop. Farrell doesn’t even look but smiles at him as he pots it. The scousers roar. Joey Lego throws a pint at Farrell, it hits him right in the fucking face and smashes. He puts his cue over the head of Billy Owens and that’s it. Shame for Ivy like, she’s a lovely woman and her alehouse is getting smashed up but she understands. It’s a matter of pride. Can’t have these scouse cunts coming down here taking the fucking piss can we Ivy?
There’s the Co-Op now, the Co-Op and Iceland. That’s it. The market’s gone. All the shops have gone.
He sees the old shops.
Somewhere from back when, from before he was born, from before memory had a name.
Ahab Sayle’s butchers.
William Griffin’s chandlers.
Isaac Speakman’s chemist.
Franklin Goforth’s wine merchants.
Grice & Sons saddlers.
Eliza Brimelow’s fishmongers.
Arthur Riley’s bakery.
George Parkinson’s barber shop.
Ellwood Smith’s tea merchants.
Now it’s pizza and kebabs, curry and Chinese, take out, home delivery.
Boxes.
Cartons.
Wrappers.
Filth.
Now it’s Help The Aged and Cancer Care and Save The Children and British Heart Foundation and it’s all disease and dementia and poverty and death. Now it’s all Joeys and Gyppos outside the Co-Op begging for the Big Issue or bugging you with The Watchtower.
He was arrested again last year for breach of the peace. He went up to the two young, attractive, female Witnesses and he took a copy of their tract and began reading it and they tried to speak to him, tell him about God and all that shit. He looked at them, saw inside their dead eyes, their stupid children’s brains, he saw their own abandonment and their degradations and he took out his lighter and burned their silly pamphlet with the kiddy playing with fucking lions in the Garden Of Eden on the cover and started turning over their stupid stall and he felt like Jesus in the temple, turfing out the money lenders.
Deuteronomy 4:9
Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live.
If she had just told him the truth. If she had just come clean. He’d seen her with him. Talking to him. Flirting with him. Why did she always lie to him? She said he was imagining it. Greg was just a friend from work. Greg was her line manager. Greg was married himself. Greg lived in Stockton Heath. Greg sent his son to private school. Greg swims like a fucking fish.
She said he was paranoid. She said he was a cokehead. She said he had no ambition. She said she didn’t know what she ever saw in him. If it wasn’t for the kids, she’d have left him years ago. She was cheating on him. He knew it. He could tell by her eyes. Her green eyes. She said and “what about you, all those slags you shag behind the Chambers? You fucking hypocrite.” It wasn’t exactly a confession but he knew. He fucking knew. “And what about that one that turned up at the door, six months gone saying you were the dad?” It was all bullshit. He’d never even set eyes on her. She was a fucking crank. He did know her. He did fuck her. He probably was the dad. There had been few others claiming paternity over the years. Why did she lie to him?
He’d been out on a bender with Paddy and Hicko. There was a rave going on somewhere out near Manchester and they had a load of pills on them that Paddy had brought over from Amsterdam. He’d never really been into that scene, the acid house stuff. He was still more into his punk and ska but Paddy had given him one of these tablets and he ended up on a mad one, woke up in some flat near Wilmslow or somewhere. This bird was next to him. He couldn’t even remember getting there but Paddy was in the next room still on the beak with these two other birds.
She lied to him all the fucking time. He didn’t believe a word that came out of her scouse fucking mouth. She was too much like her ma. She was a hardfaced bitch too, always had too much to say for herself. He didn’t know why Ray put up with her. He didn’t mind Ray really, even though he was always on about how much he earned on the rigs. Think he was glad to get away from Maureen. He didn’t blame him.
It was Ray who came to see him. He admired him for that.
“She’s had enough. You don’t deserve her. She’s moved away and I’m not telling you where she is so don’t even ask.”
It took balls to come and see him and say that. Face to face. Like a man. Like a father. He even went to shake the fellar’s hand but Ray wasn’t having it. He didn’t blame him really.
Why did she lie to him?
He is walking along the canal by Top Locks. He is about eleven. It’s winter. It’s freezing. He is here with his cousins, Matthew and Ian, his Aunty Pauline’s lads who are younger than him. He’s been told to watch them. Aunty Pauline and Uncle Andy have gone to some do at the golf club because he’s some big shot at Castners and they live in a posh house on Beechwood. He’s bored with these two little kids so he walks up to the canal. The canal is frozen solid. He tests it with a house brick that pings on the surface and skids a few feet to collect with the other rocks and bricks and a shopping trolley that other kids have left behind.
The canals have always been their playgrounds, the summer holidays swimming in the Ship Canal across to the Gantry Wall then walking along all the way to Moore, swimming back over and walking home. He often wonders how they filled the canals. Did they re-direct water or pump it from rivers or just let it fill up with rainwater? How long must it have taken?
He jumps on the ice. Matthew and Ian cautiously follow him. They pretend to ice skate. He picks up one of the larger rocks someone has thrown. He throws it close to the edge and it breaks straight through, causing the thinner ice to crack wide open and Matthew falls in. He manages to drag Matthew out but he’s freezing and they have to go home and he threatens him not to tell nan about the stone but as soon as they get in, Matthew grasses him up and his nan gives Matthew a slap for getting wet and being on the ice and then gives him three hard slaps on his face for letting him go on the ice in the first place.
He knows his history.
He can see through their lies.
Their propaganda.
Their religions.
Their flags.
Their laws.
He can see through them all.
Why can’t they all see it?
Maybe they do.
Money.
It’s always about money.
Progress!
Greed!
Greed is the engine of progress.
Ego is the lubricant.
Statues of these cunts.
Pubs named after these cunts.
Schools named after these cunts.
Streets names after these cunts.
It’s all a con.
He knows it now.
He knew it then.
He’s always known it.
No-one else knows it.
Or maybe they pretend they don’t.
It’s easier that way.
They can get on with their sad lives.
He can’t.
Johnsons.
Hazlehursts.
Wigg.
Boston.
Castner.
Kellner.
Brunner.
Mond.
Baker.
“By no means let us forget that the early history of industrialisation had its wrongs – its shocking wrongs of child labour, filth and preventable disease. But let us not forget also that these wrongs were remedied while the benefits of industrialisation remained, and are with us now.
It was glass that brought light into human homes; plumbing, soap and chlorine, health and length of days; the textile industries, and a host of others, that brought beauty and dignity.
The chemical factories may have appeared satanic enough – certainly they were no garden of roses – but the men who established and developed them bear no whit of resemblance to the grasping ogres of the conventional picture of industrialists of the past.
They lived and toiled on the scene of their enterprises; the contributions they made in leadership and inventiveness were personal ones – they were the visible captains in the field of battle.”
There she is. That girl with the red hair. Cut into a wedge. Really pale skin. A few freckles. He likes girls with red hair. And pale skin. And freckles. He is stood at the side of the dance floor of The Cherry looking directly at her. She’s pretending she can’t see him staring at her. He can tell, the way she’s talking to her mate, the way she’s using her hands a bit too much, like she knows she’s being watched. It’s all a dance.
She’s small. Maybe five two or five three, not much taller but she’s wearing heels and jeans, tight jeans, the latest ones, Second Image maybe or Razzy, whatever the scousers are wearing this week and she’s got a white blouse tucked into it with a frill around the collar and she’s wearing a few gold sovs on her fingers and a thick, gold rope chain around her thin, white neck. He blows smoke from his ciggy her way and she feels it against her neck and turns and says ;
“Do you mind?”
And it’s not the voice he’d expected. It’s a posh voice. Well a posh, ‘scouse’ voice. He thought she’d be one of these Halton Brook or Castlefields girls. Gobs on em. Pure mouth. She looks disgusted. He pauses, doesn’t really know how to take it from here. He puts his ciggy back to his mouth and blows smoke at her again. She snarls at him, calls him a prick and turns back to face her mate. He laughs. He takes another swig of his lager. He looks around and sees Sue Fletcher looking straight at him. She smiles at him. He walks over to Ginger Rogers.
“Did you go to Norton?”
She turns around again and snarls;
“What?”
She has to shout it above the music. It’s Funkin For Jamaica and she’s half dancing to it, doing that weird strut all the scouse girls do to these records. His approach stops her in her tracks.
“I said did you go to Norton. Norton Priory?”
“Yeh I know what you mean.”
Her mate smirks too. He nods at her. His confidence is unsettling for a lot of people. He knows he’s good looking in a funny sort of way. Not one of these pretty boys. Bit rough looking but some girls go for that. He acts like he’s some kind of stud. Not a chat up merchant. Just like he doesn’t give a fuck one way or the other. Which he doesn’t. It works or it doesn’t.
She looks at her mate for reassurance. Not a straight up blank then.
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, I didn’t go to Norton Priory.”
“Where did you go to then?”
“What?”
“I said. Where…”
“Helsby.”
“What?”
“HELSBY!”
“Oooh!”
“What?”
She smiles. He’s in.
“Helsby eh?”
“So?”
“Smart arse are yer? What’s yer name Helsby girl?”
“Kelly.”
This is his route from his nan’s to Uncle Bob’s.
Up Collier Street
under the arches,
along Lord Street,
onto Church Street,
up Bridge Street,
past the baths,
down Bold Street,
along Parker Street
down Fisher Street.
No 7
His Uncle Bob is his mum’s older brother. Now and then Bob takes him to watch The Linnets, Runcorn AFC, in their yellow tops and green shorts. He takes him in The Navigation – the Navvy – about an hour before tonight’s kick off, against Frickley Athletic in the Northern Premier League. He eats pack after pack of salt and vinegar Golden Wonders and he watches the men as they come in steaming from the rain, supping their dark drinks and smoking their strong ciggies as he drinks his flat cola and he sees Bob pinch the bum of some young woman stood at the bar.
He thinks of Uncle Bob’s wife, Aunty Val sat there, silent, silent as always, just sat in front of the telly, like she can’t talk, like she’s not got a fucking tongue in her mouth, just watching Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm and Coronation Street and the made up lives of people in streets and farms and motels and he used to feel sorry for her but now he feels anger. Daft fucking bitch. Say something!
The match is boring. He stands with Bob and two of his mates behind the goals. There’s a collection on the pitch. The stewards walk around with a blanket and the crowd toss spare coppers and silver onto it. A little pack of kids from Castle Rise follow it and pick up pennies that miss the blanket and pocket them. The same bunch get on the pitch sometimes at half time and play a game at the bottom end where there’s no terracing. The tannoy fellar tells them to get off. They always ignore him.
The game ends 0-0. Bob takes him back in the Navvy and the girl whose bum he pinched is still there and he goes over to her and they start laughing and Bob buys her a drink and then another one. He sits on his own for a good thirty minutes before realising that Bob has other things on his mind and he walks home in the rain.
F.A Lake Solicitor, Clerk to the Runcorn Improvement Commissioners.
Richard Lea, Ironmonger.
Thomas Sharrocks, Currier and Leather Dealer.
Thomas Williamson, Grocer & provision dealer.
J.W Woodland, Printer, binder, bookseller, stationer, Newsagent.
George Slater, family and shipping butcher.
He walks on.
One foot in front of the other.
Head down.
Hood up.
Left.
Right.
He walks past the subway that leads to Ellesmere Street.
They built this estate in the early 80s. The houses were weird. Bedrooms downstairs. Front room upstairs. He used to fuck this girl who lived in one of these houses. She was from London or somewhere. Proper weirdo. Self -harmer. Into the gear. On the game probably. Damaged kid. So many damaged kids. What chance do they have? What choices did they have? Maybe it’s fate. He never believed in that. You make your own fate. Now he’s not so sure. The cards are dealt before you’re even born. In your genes. What can you do about it?
He passes the Polish lad on his bike. The Polish lad wears a high vis vest and cycles with a grim determination. Probably on his way to start his shift at a factory on the Astmoor Industrial Estate. They’ve come back a lot of them. A lot went back. Back to Poland. But now they’re back here again. Why the fuck they’d want to come and live here is beyond him. Gdansk must be grim. He sees them up the Aldi and Lidl. They’re all right, the Poles. He likes them. Keep themselves to themselves. Hard workers. Not like this lot round here. Too busy eating fucking pizza and smoking weed. Lazy cunts.
He sees them signing on. Fucking walking sticks, every single one of them on a stick or them plazzy crutches. Old before their time. In their forties but looking sixty, seventy. Bagheads and boozers. Losers. Small town pricks. They’ve seen nothing. They’ve done nothing. They’ve felt nothing. He was sent for a fit for work assessment himself. They said he needed to go. He said he couldn’t go. They said he had to go. He didn’t go. They sanctioned him. He didn’t care. He sat at home and drank another can. His GP asked to see him. An Asian girl. Didn’t look old enough to be a GP. She was nice. Said she’d write a letter for him.
He knows he has become like them. The walking dead. The zombies that sit in the doctors waiting for their scripts. The daily pick up mob at Lloyds the chemist. The ones sat in the library on the internet all day. The ones sat at home getting wasted on ale or smack or weed or porn.
Going nowhere.
Going anywhere.
One foot in front of the other.
The Polish lad with the high vis jacket on nods at him as he passes. He pauses. There’s some new graffiti on the side of the subway wall where all the little weedheads hang out.
‘Any Green Lad?’
‘No lad.’
It’s funny in a way.
A lad was stabbed there last week. Little crew use the subbies by the canal to graft; weed, lemo, ket, magic, brown, rocks. On their mountain bikes. In their black uniforms. 110s and North Face, Rab and Montaine, Karrimor and Jack Wolfskin, Berghaus and Under Armour.
Stashes in the bushes. Machetes hidden in the hedgerows by the busway. No CCTV here. No prying eyes. It’s all changed since he was grafting in The Chambers. These kids have got no respect for anyone. Certainly not him. They laugh as he passes them. They don’t know who he is. Who he was. Who he will soon become.
He needs to forget.
Just for a few hours.
Forget where he is.
Forget who he is and what he has become.
They’re building a new bridge.
The Mersey Gateway.
“A Gateway To Prosperity.”
Another fucking lie.
Another fucking deception.
He’s been watching it go up.
He’s been watching the diggers, digging up all that shite buried there for years.
The chemical waste.
The mustard gas.
The arsenic.
The cyanide.
The acids.
The alkalis.
The oils.
From ICI.
From the Soap Works.
From the Tanneries.
From the munitions factories.
He breathes in the air.
He breathes out.
Eyes down.
Mouth closed.
He sees them cough.
He sees them coughing in the doctor’s surgery.
He looks at them.
Who they are.
Who they were.
What they will soon become.
He sees through them.
They are invisible to him just as he is invisible to them.
Doctor Flaherty was his doctor.
Irish fellar.
Put him on the tablets.
He died of cancer, Flaherty.
Lived in a posh house on Weston Road.
One of them huge ones with massive back gardens.
Overlooking Castners.
Overlooking the chlorine factory.
Overlooking Stanlow.
Overlooking the oil refineries.
Overlooking Fiddler’s Ferry power station.
Money can’t buy you health.
He walks under the busway bridge.
Past the narrow boats moored up here on the other side.
Laughing Tam
White O’Morn
Cheshire Lad
Errol Flynn
Errol fucking Flynn?
The canal used to divert into Big Pool here and the path curved in two directions, along to the Union Tavern at the bottom of Union Street and down to the other end of Victoria Road, beyond the subway that joined onto Heath Road at Dougherty’s garage. Some of the houses are still there and the funeral directors is opposite the weird little old house that everyone said was haunted. Nuns used to live there they reckon. Crowther’s Farmhouse looked across Big Pool but was derelict for years. He cut his arm open inside when they were smashing windows, punched the glass in a door between two rooms and his arm went straight through. They had to rush him to the hospital. He lost a lot of blood. His nan said she didn’t know what to do with him anymore. He’s still got the scars up his arm, looks like he’s a baghead.
They knocked down Crowther’s and filled in big pool when they extended the approach road from Astmoor to the bridge. His nan’s sister, Annie topped herself in Big Pool back in the early 50s. Drowned herself after some fellar broke her heart. His nan had never mentioned her sister to him. Ever. He only knew this from talking to Old Edie Jameson one night, late at the Dev. She told him his nan and Annie were like twins, never apart until his nan got wed and then Annie took up with a married fellar from Weston Point and he told her he’d leave his wife for her but he never did and she couldn’t get over it. Sad story. So many tiny tragedies that go unrecorded. There are no secrets in small town. Someone always knows something you don’t and some things are best left buried with the dead.
He’d been on the mushies one night with Urqo and Burt and they went for a walk up the canal. He saw these two kids up ahead. He shouted them but they didn’t answer. Urqo and Burt couldn’t see them but they were definitely there, it wasn’t just a hallucination. These kids were small, aged 7 or 8, both lads, and were dressed in grey shorts and jackets with caps and boots and they ran away up Union Street. He shouted to them but they didn’t look back. He followed them along Sutton Street into Rock Park and they took his hand and they all flew high up over the town, over Stenhills and Wiggs Island and over the cut and the Mersey and over Fiddlers Ferry and the bridge and Castners and Rocksavage and the hills and across Bozzy Ave and the town hall and then landed back on Rock Park and he was laughing and laughing and laughing. He had flown over the entire universe. The kids weren’t there when Urqo and Burt found him.
Singer Manufacturing Co – Sewing Machines
William Davies Joliffe, Solicitor
Ellen Stoll, music seller
George Christie, dressmaker
There was a rock on the field. It had been there for years. Too big to shift. It had bits of glass in it. He sat next to it. It was a sunny day. It was the summer holidays. He managed to turn the rock a few inches and from under it a snake wriggled out, a grass snake and he picked it up and it changed into a boa constrictor and he lifted it up to the sun and he heard the skylark sing as the snake gathered him in its huge coils and squeezed his thin, little white body until his bones cracked and his blood seeped from his ears and his nose and his eyes and his mouth and his dick and his arse. He laughed as it opened its giant jaws and swallowed him whole, he sang as he slowly went down the snake’s throat and body into its acid guts and he kicked his way out again, like it was made of toilet roll and the snake’s skin lay on his bedroom carpet and his nan ran into the room and saw the dead snake next to his bed and she turned into a woman he’d never met before, a woman with short, almost black hair and dark, Welsh eyes and a pair of angel wings and she got into bed next to him and started crying.
Balfour Street
Havergal Street
Curzon Street
Lightburn Street
Queen’s Road
Balfour Street school was like Parish, another Victorian workhouse to contain the children of the poor and feed Queen and Country bullshit into their tiny, feeble minds.
Balfour Street, another street named after one of the great and good.
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, FRS, DL. Tory cunt.
Jenny Miller was babysitting for this couple who lived in Curzon Street. She said they could come in. He was seeing Paula Dunne at the time and she was the fittest punk girl in the Old Town. Jenny Miller was jealous of Paula Dunne and asked him and Lee Partington to come over. There was a black bin bag acting as a curtain between the front room and the kitchen. The kitchen stunk of fat. There was no carpet on the stairs. The bog was fucking disgusting. Jenny Miller played them the new Damned LP, Machine Gun Etiquette. He thought it was shit. He was into Public Image Ltd now. Metal Box. Paula Dunne knocked. Jenny Miller seemed pissed off but said she could come in. He took Paula Dunne up to the bedroom. He fingered her but she wouldn’t let him shag her. He got angry with her. He called her a slag. She went home crying. He went into the front room. Jenny Miller was necking Lee Partington. He told Lee Partington to fuck off. Lee Partington fucked off. He took Jenny Miller upstairs and fucked her.
Byron Street
Salisbury Street
Fox Street
Picow Street
Eaton Street
Arthur Street
Shaw Street
Vine Street
New Street
His new area to haunt. Back of Balfour Street school yard. He burns off a bit of Leb that Hendo has sold him and rolls a joint. He passes it to Yvonne Mercer who splutters and then acts all stoned. He laughs at her act. Yvonne fancies him but hasn’t said so. Hendo is seeing her at the moment. He’d just got out of DC when he met her. She was a nice girl. He liked her. She was funny. Had a good sense of humour. They were posh. Posh by Runcorn standards anyway. Her dad was some kind of surveyor, whatever a surveyor was and her mum was a teacher at Beechwood Primary School. They lived in one of the massive old Victorian houses on Moughland Lane. She invited him back once and he loved the smell of the place, the damp, brick smell that old houses have. His nan’s had it too but not the same way, more the stench of surrounding chimneys, the black soot of a million coal fires that had gathered over a century on the walls of Dukesfield.
Yvonne had another stab at smoking the weed. She held it for a few seconds and wobbled a bit. He caught her as she stumbled and he kissed her and she drew away from him. He was upset by that but she told him straight ‘she was with Hendo and didn’t like two timing him’ and he was pretty impressed to be honest. He walked her home, back to that Gothic pile with a massive drive and a massive back garden that edged onto orchards and he wondered where all these people got their money from, how they could afford to live in these huge houses. Even if they had decent jobs, how could they afford these ‘mansions?’
He worked for this fellar once doing demolition jobs. He kept calling himself a ‘self-made man’ and lived in a huge Georgian house in Frodsham. Turns out this self-made man was the son of a man who inherited his grandfather’s fortune made on importing Ivory from the Congo. Real fucking Heart Of Darkness stuff. His dad had bought up all these old mills during the 60s and was now knocking them down and building YUPPY flats in Manchester and Lancashire. Money makes money.
These are the homes of the self-made men.
And the sons of the sons of the sons of the self-made men.
The self-made men that never made a thing in their lives.
Bought and sold with the stroke of a fountain pen.
Yvonne went off to University as her type do after flirting with the tough boys to piss off their parents, before conforming to their own limited expectations. They’re trapped too in a way. Hendo went in the army to escape the violence of his stepdad. He served in Northern Ireland and saw his mate shot dead. He had no time for these crying squaddies. That’s the deal. If you don’t want to be shot or bombed in some Belfast street or Arab desert, don’t join up. Imagine having some posh cunt from Sandhurst giving you orders and treating you like shit. No fucking way man.
He waits for them on the corner of Lord Street and Greek Street. He hides in one of the entries. He hears them laughing as they walk home from school. He has planned it in his head for years but now he is actually going to do it. He’s nearly sick. He waits till they pass the entry. They don’t see him. He jumps out behind them. Willy Bowman, the taller of the twins turns around and he jumps on him, tears at his long, sandy hair. Bites his cheek. Willy screams like a little fucking girl. Paul Bowman, the smaller twin, shouts for his mummy and runs off down to his house. He walks along Ashridge Street to the park, Bowman blood dripping down his chin and he is happier than he has ever been in his life.
He walks past the glass factory and what used to be the Egerton Arms across the road.
He’s sat in there with Fat Des. Shay Byrne is playing pool with the fellar they call Dylan cos he looks like Bob Dylan. In fact, he looks more like John Cooper Clarke’s version of Bob Dylan and speaks more like John than Bob. Shay’s a nightmare. You couldn’t make him up. A big, boozing Irish lump with about ten kids who lives down Parker Street with his long-suffering wife. He works on the building sites. You couldn’t make it up! He gets pissed every day and picks fights with people, then goes home and terrorises his family. You’d be done for racial stereotyping.
Tonight, Shay’s being friendly though. Until Dylan says ‘two shots’ and Shay feigns innocence at brushing one of Dylan’s stripes with his tatty jacket sleeve. Some cunt has put Meatloaf’s ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ on the jukebox probably because it’s about a week long and they want their ten fucking pence’s worth. It’s a bizarre scene, big Shay chasing skinny Dylan around the pool table trying to reach over and lamp him with his cue as that fat Yanky cunt is howling about being gone in the morning light. Fat Des is trying to calm Shay down but he’s just roaring. Shay stops trying to hit Dylan and turns round;
“Funny is it?”
“Yeah it is Shay.”
He thinks Shay’s gonna launch him but instead Shay starts laughing himself and Dylan starts laughing too and Shay asks them what they’re all drinking.
He had some good nights in the Edgie. She hated the place. Said it stunk. She said everywhere stunk. Turned her fucking Helsby Grammar snob nose up at everyone and everything. He was in there with her the night of the crash. Her brother, Lee had been in a collision with a bus. He was in a bad way. They reckon the bus had jumped the lights on the busway across Palacefields Avenue and hit him on his bike.
Ray came in to tell them what had happened. They left and went straight to Warrington hospital with Ray and Maureen but Lee was dead by the time they got there. Poor cunt. She was never the same after that. He saw some of the light go out of her green eyes. The bus driver got off with it. There was no one on the bus. There were no witnesses. It was dark. The driver claimed it was Lee that jumped the lights.
He saw the driver in The Dray once. He thought about doing him in but he didn’t. What good would it do?
Irwell Lane
Norfolk Street
Grosvenor Street
Hartley Street
Old Quay Street
Old Quay House
Engine House
Old Quay bridge
Jetty Mud
He walks under Delph Bridge where the sandstone slabs and elegantly curved roof provide shelter for countless pigeons, their shit frozen thick along the path. In the dark recesses he can hear them croak and flutter yet can’t see them, only the noise and the shit gives their presence away. He touches the pockmarked sandstone blocks and the smooth brickwork, he tries to connect again, placing his hands on their works, as if he can feel what they felt. A woman passed him once as he was feeling the stones and gave him that look. He doesn’t care anymore. He wants his body to become one with the bridge, become one with the water. Flesh and blood and iron and stone and water.
He walks on.
On the opposite side of the canal he notices a fresh barrage of lager cans tipped over the side of the wall on Halton Road. Must been a hundred of ‘em, all cascading down the bank and, at the bottom, deflated balloons celebrating somebody’s 40th Birthday hang miserably from the branches of a tree. A discarded wheely bin protrudes through the weeds and water like some strange sea creature coming up for air.
There’s a heron that comes here too now and then. He watched it once for ages as it stood motionless on top of the half submerged wheely bin, watched it regally surveying the murky, grey water for signs of movement. It hadn’t moved from the spot until, startled by a bus beeping at a car across the road, it flew away, its huge wings silently flapping across the roofs.
He feels some kind of kinship with it, envies its power of flight, its ability to escape. Yet it remains here. He sees it all along the canal, sometimes by Delph Bridge, sometimes further up or down stream. Such a beautiful creature. Of all the places in the world it could fly to, how has it ended up here, amongst this garbage? Everyone needs their turf. This is its turf. This is his turf. At least it used to be.
He gets all Stalinist about it; get the bastards on work gangs, force them to pick their shit up, clean it all up, dredge the canal, tidy the paths, the bushes, the trees, clear their shit, generation upon generation of shit, layer upon layer of shit. Get them off their bone-idle arses, their disgusting litter tipping arses and beat some civic pride into em. Although he also knows that, as someone who’s been on various incapacity benefits for the past eleven years, he’d be one of the chain gang himself.
There’s a housing estate where the football ground used to be. They called it Linnet’s Park. Fucking disgrace. He wants to know who got weighed in for knocking the ground and the Linnets Club down? Leaving the team to play in Northwich and then Widnes. What is a town without a football team? Now they play up at The Halton Arms. Fucking Murdishaw! Scouseland! Fucking disgrace!
Tidal Opening
High Water Mark of Ordinary Tides
Mooring Posts
Old Quay Lock
Mooring Posts
Mooring Posts
Lower Dock (disused)
BM 36.3
Brick Works
Football Ground
Wivern Place
Canal Street
We’ve got Barry, Barry, Barry, Barry Howard on the wing, on the wing!
Barry Howard.
Barry Whitbread.
Timmy Rutter.
Stevie Hipwell.
Phil Wilson.
These were his heroes. Not Kenny Dalglish. Not Bob Latchford. Not Stuart Pearson. Not Pele. Not Cruyff. Not Beckenbauer. Timmy Rutter who mowed the grass for the council. Stevie Hipwell who collected rents for the council. Real people, not remote stars. He said to them all;
“You can’t support United or Liverpool you have to support your local club.”
They laughed at him but he meant it. He was committed to Runcorn AFC. Those matches with Uncle Bob got him hooked. His grandad was the secretary there in the 30s. The club was actually set up as a tannery team before it became the town’s team. His grandad would tell him of the time the club played Preston North End in the third round of the F.A. Cup. Preston! The reigning cup holders. 1939. Record crowd. Still the record crowd. Over 10,000 there. Half the population. They got beat 4-2 but what a night.
He’d volunteered to scythe down nettles around the floodlights and the long, weed strewn terraces every Sunday for a few months. He got a brew and some biscuits for his efforts. He didn’t mind. He felt like he was on the inside. He dreamed of one day getting inside the director’s clubhouse above the snack shop behind the goalmouth. That elevated position where the tannoy fellar announced the team and important looking men in suits watched the game with disinterested faces.
Canal Street.
Shithole.
Falling apart.
No investment.
All the money goes to the scousers.
That’s what the old men say.
They don’t call it the ‘Old Town.’
They say there’s only ONE town.
The ‘New’ Town isn’t Runcorn.
There’s no such thing as the ‘Old’ town.
Canal Street.
RAFC
We Hate Stafford
Vics Die
Built in between The Bridgewater and the Manchester Ship canals. The ground sloped dramatically, comically, from the Bridgey down to the Manny Ship. During the odd game he’d be distracted by a passing ship, silently sailing along the ship canal either ‘up’ to Salford docks ‘down’ to Eastham. When one went along during a night game all he’d see was the eerie glow of the light as it passed and the distant slap of the canal as the water was dragged out under the vessel, then the backwash of the waves against the bank. He thought of the sailors on board. Where they were from and where they’d end up. How far they’d travelled to pass him as he watched their ship slowly sail along the cut. How did they escape? Where are their kids and their wives and their dads and their nans? How many millions of people are there in the world that he’d never meet?
Passing through, always passing through.
Barry!
Barry Howard!
Barry Howard on the wi-ing!
Barry!
Barry Howard!
Barry Howard on the wing!
A-Runcorn!
Clap clapclap
A-Runcorn!
Clap clapclap
The Navigation, The Navvy.
Uncle Bob’s local.
He remembers the Burnley game.
FA Cup 3rd round.
Replay.
They’d played them at Turf Moor on the Saturday and drawn nil nil.
Good result for a non-league team.
He led his mob up there early away from all the dickheads who’d gone up on coaches or the train.
They walked around the insanely steep terraces whistling the Hovis theme when about forty lads appeared in front of them. This mob charged and they stood. All of them stood for once and they had it toe to toe for a good few minutes before they heard the sirens and everyone got on their toes.
They brought thousands to the replay the following Wednesday.
It was November and a freezing night.
The Widnes lads were supposed to turn up to help them, as they’d done for a while now against the scousers. He liked the Wids. Still used to go over West Bank now and then for a drink and to graft. Good lads. Couldn’t stick the accent though. They still called the bizzies, ‘bobbies.’ Rough little town, Widnes. They were divided too. The townies hated Ditton and Ditton hated Chezzy Lodge and they all hated West Bank. They had their own scousers there too, up in Hough Green and Upton. He’d met one of the Ditton lads in The Sporting Ford pub and was introduced to a scouser from Netherley called Eugene who had a load of weed to get shut of. It was his first big deal.
The Wids were supposed to meet them down the Old Town but hadn’t shown, he led their mob up to the ground and got inside the new terrace where the old shed used to be. They lost 2-1 but that was nothing to be ashamed of. The Wids eventually turned up, a good 70 or so of them but the scousers also came down at the same time, about 200 strong and ran the Wids back over the Mersey. The scousers waited outside the ground.
At the final whistle his mob ran across the pitch to get at the Burnley lads and some stayed to fight it out whilst other ran outside into the scousers and there were a few slashings. It was chaos. The scousers were in a nasty mood and were running everyone. He tried to make a stand outside the Wilsons but they all melted and he and Urqo knew they were beat and slipped away behind the baths and along Mersey Road back to Dukey. He was fucking fuming for months about it. It was shameful. He felt the shame. Took it very personally.
He had bled for this town.
Yet they called him a thug.
A mindless moron.
Who else was protecting it?
Who else stood up for its name?
He hated the club crest though. It was one of those old Victorian shield things. That shit was stuck in the past.
The past of his grandad.
A past he didn’t understand or want to understand.
Those names :
Cholmondeley – pronounced ‘Chumley’
Old Cheshire landlords.
Land thieves.
Aristocrats.
Them and the Grosvenors, pronounced ‘Grove-ner’
The Cholmondleley Arms in Frodsham where he took Kelly and the kids for Sunday dinners. Cholmondeley Street in West Bank.
Grosvenor House, by the Shopping City where Kelly worked for the council, next to the magistrates’ courts and the police station where he’d been banged up in the cells and stuck down. Grosvenor Street down by the ship canal, off Irwell Lane by Uncle Bob’s. He read up on these families.
Richest man in Britain, Lord Grosvenor. Owns half of London. Mayfair.
He owns fuck all.
Not really.
He stole it.
Thieving cunt.
He’s going to take it all off them one day.
One day.
Bunch of robbing cunts.
Normans.
Fitz Nigel.
Baron of Halton.
Earls of Rocksavage.
The Savages.
It was still in their hands.
Since 10 fucking 66.
Still robbing us 1000 years later and still getting their dirty hands on our town’s crest.
The shield has a background of gold for prosperity and commerce, with a base of four blue and white waves for the four waterways which have played so great a part of life of the Town at different times – The Mersey, the Bridgewater canal, the Manchester Ship Canal and Weaver Navigation. The council’s former device of a ship is recalled in the vessel sailing upon the waves, which flies the ancient flag of England, which also appears in the Arms of the Cholmondeley, Earls of Rocksavage.
Other important industries are suggested by the red colour of the chief, signifying the old sandstone quarrying industry and the fires of modern engineering plants. Two ancient flaying knives, the symbol of St Bartholomew, the Patron Saint of Tanners, represent the leather industry and stand between two roundels of blue and white waves signifying water, chemicals, brine and wells. The Chief stretching over the ship suggests Runcorn’s bridges.
The decorative mantling is in the main colours of the shield, blue and gold, the Cheshire Liveries, and upon the helms stands the crest rising from a red walled crown representing Runcorn Castle. The black lion of the crest is from the Arms of the famous Savage family of Clifton and Rocksavage and is supporting a crozier for Norton Priory, from which hangs a shield of the Arms of William Fitznigel, Baron of Halton in Norman times. To indicate the reversion to the Crown of the Ancient Barony of Halton the lion is crowned.
The shield thus represents the industrial history of Runcorn whilst the crest recalls its ancient connections.
The Motto, ‘Navem Mercibus Implere’ is a classical quotation from Juvenal meaning ‘To fill the ship with goods.’
He read up on Saint Bartholomew too, this patron Saint of tanners. He never knew his Bible except the usual shit they tell you in school ; Easter, Christmas, Virgin births, resurrections, miracles.
He’d never even heard of Saint Bartholomew even though he was supposed to have been one of the 12 disciples. Or one of the 12 apostles. Was that the same thing? Who cares anyway?
He was flayed alive, skinned alive or so the fairy story goes. The patron saint of tanners. Taking the piss that really.
He collected programmes. He remembered it going glossy in the 78/79 season. He got proper excited about it. The feel of it, the smell of it. The cover always had the same image; a badly drawn player with a ball at his feet. Inside there were regular columns from the likes of manager, Stan Storton, commercial director, John Lloyd and programme editor, Jim Corcoran. He’d scrutinise it for hours after the game, even though there was very little content in amongst the advertising, apart from sponsorship appeals, the odd action photo and team lists. One day he hoped to pen his own column, to become important enough to be counted as a valued fan, instead of being sneered at as a yob.
He still got them out now and then and re-lived classic encounters like Stafford Rangers in the FA Trophy Semi-Final, when thousands of Rangers fans had taken over the wooden ‘shed’ in their black and white scarves and hats. That was the worst trouble he’d seen at the match. He’d got trapped across the ground somewhere near the tea shop and missed the entire second half, too small to see over the older fellars pressed tightly inside the ground. But he could sense the aggro, hear the songs, the threats, the chants, felt the adrenaline rush of pure excitement as he became mingled in with the older lads after the match, chasing the Stafford fans up to their coaches parked on the waste ground behind the dairy up by Rock Park, where thirty or forty young lads, some his own age but most a few years older, were already bricking the windows.
He lost himself in that visceral thrill of violence, the sight of brick against glass of glass against skin, of blood and spit and flesh and sweat and he wanted more of the same. As he ran alongside one of the coaches armed with a rock, a man swung around and punched him before jumping onto the moving coach. He recalled the hard ground against his face and then two older lads picking him up and making a big fuss over him, patting him on the back, letting him join in with them as they sang their songs,
‘Runcorn Boys We Are Here, Shag Your Women And Drink Your Beer!’
“Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”
“Run-corn Agg-ro!”
“You’re going home in a fucking ambulance”
Runcorn had won the Northern Premier League back in 76, the same year Wimbledon won the Southern Premier. They almost won promotion into the football league but their ground wasn’t considered good enough, even for the old fourth division. Wimbledon went onto win the FA Cup final against Liverpool a decade later. What could’ve been.
He walks on, looks across to the old Co-Operative Terrace on the other side of the cut on Halton Road with its year of construction – 1898 – boldly imprinted on the brickwork.
The Runcorn Co-Operative Society Limited
Branch No 3
Was it really better then? Was there ever a Co-Operative, a community, a sense of belonging to something, some place? Maybe it has always been a myth, another con trick to divide us with town crests and football teams. Thatcher was right; there is no such as society, just people. People like him. Alone in the world. Alone through circumstance. Alone through choice. Either way, didn’t matter.
It was all a coincidence, him being alive in the first place. If his grandads and nans hadn’t met, if they hadn’t had their kids, if his mam and dad hadn’t met that night at The Royal, if they hadn’t had two miscarriages before he was born and had stopped at one or two, would he still have been the third? Trace it all far back enough, all those jobs that brought men and women to this place fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago, the canals and the chemicals and the quarries and the tanneries, the breweries and the factories, old towns, older towns, new towns, no towns. He has to divert himself from these endless, relentless thoughts.
He looks at these new homes. The Linnets Park mob. Hears the roar of a few hundred hardcore fans, smells of the pies and the soups and the piss and the sweat. These people fooled into a loaded game they’d never win. This new breed of homeowners, the backbone of New Conservatism, New Labourism, didn’t make any difference to him. Mortgaged up and kept in line, slaves to building societies and interest rate fluctuations. He despised them. Now he wasn’t one of them, his contempt only magnified, fed on itself. These spineless bastards were what he once was, what he perhaps longed to be again if he was being honest. Normality. What is ‘normal?’ anyhow?
You own fuck all dickheads.
Just owe a lot of money to banks.
You’ll never understand what you’ve lost.
What WE’VE lost.
You work.
You pay your bills.
You work.
You raise your kids.
You work.
You go on holidays.
You work.
You buy a car.
You work.
You sell your house.
You retire.
You look in the mirror and see who you once were and what you have become.
St Luke’s Congregational Church
Tennis Grounds
Bowling Green
Mason Street
Norton Street
Mimosa Road
Mimosa is one of the ingredients used in the tanning industry.
Vegetable tannins are contained in various parts of trees such as bark, wood and pods. The chemical constituents of vegetable tannins are composed of polymeric polyphenolic molecules with a wide range of mass from 500 to 3000 units. The tanning action of polyphenols is dependent on the molecular mass and the under of phenolic –OH hydroxyl groups. Mimosa tannins have a molecular mass of on average 1250 units and generally have a good tanning action.
Vegetable tannins are classified according to their chemical structure:
(i) Pyrogallol or hydrolysable tannins, such as Chestnut and Myrabolam extract.
(ii) Catechol or condensed tannins, such as Mimosa (or Wattle) and Quebracho extract.
In South Africa, Mimosa extract is obtained from the bark of Black Wattle (Acacia mearnsii) trees grown in plantations. It takes 7 to 10 years for the tree to grow large enough to be ready for cutting down and stripping of the bark, which is then chipped and extracted under controlled industrial conditions to extract the optimum amount of tannin with the lightest of colours. Mimosa or wattle bark contains about 30% tannin. The wood has other industrial uses.
Wattle bark is best extracted immediately after stripping to give extract of light colour; the older the bark, the darker is the colour. Sometimes the bark has to be dried out before the extraction process, but this gives a dark coloured product. There is a definite season for stripping the bark depending on the weather and rainy season in the country where it is grown.
He walks past the Canalside pub, another fucking dump. He’d been to a few dos there. His cousin’s 18th on the same day as the massive Stone Roses concert at Spike Island just over the Mersey in Widnes. He had planned on going to do a bit of grafting but Kelly hated them. She hated everyone apart from Michael fucking Jackson and Luther Vandross. So, they went to Sean’s 18th instead and could hear the sound of the concert as the DJ at the Canalside was playing some shit from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It had been a restaurant upstairs at one point too. He went with Kelly and her mam and dad one boxing day with the kids. He behaved himself.
Maureen had a lot of issues after Lee died. She lost it a bit. Got into religion. Spiritualism. All that shit. Claimed she spoke to Lee and Lee said he was OK in Heaven and he laughed and Kelly got angry and said what was his problem as long as it comforted her? And he felt bad for a bit but then he thought about his mum and how he felt when she died and how he wanted to see her and feel her and smell her and hear her laugh but it was pointless. People just disappear. They die. They’re gone. For ever. And Ever. And ever. Ah-fucking-men!
Kelly was always more of a daddy’s girl anyway and sided with him during the divorce. Ray had always had a dog’s life with her. He fucked her off finally in 93 and Maureen moved away to Rhyl. Ray retired and moved into his own bungalow in Halton village. He didn’t give a fuck one way or the other. It was sad to see Mo in tears all the time but he had his own demons to deal with.
They’d go over to see her a few times a year with the boys and it was always the same fucking sketch. No one cares about me. Poor old me! Be a nicer fucking human being then you self-pitying cunt. Kel went to stay with her for a few weeks after he’d been caught out again. He drove out there to bring her back and Maureen told her daughter if she did, she’d never let her back in her house again. Kelly came back with him. The lads were only three and two; they didn’t really know what was going on.
Hicko had his own flat above the shops in Sandy Lane. He was knocking out gear from there. He went with Paddy to score off him. Hicko let them in then pulled out a machete and threatened them both. He could see Hicko was on a para trip from the beak, so just laughed but Paddy went off his head, starting calling Hicko all the cunts under the sun. Hicko had been inside three times. He was reckless. Even more reckless than him. They calmed him down and went to the Weaver for a pint. On the way back, they took a short cut across the footy pitch by the ICI Rec and as Hicko was getting trough the mesh fence, he booted him in the head and they carried on kicking him until they were tired of kicking him.
He had to stop.
He didn’t stop.
He couldn’t stop.
He wouldn’t stop.
It was just how it was.
How it is.
He did two years. He was in Risley for three months which was OK because it was only down the road. She came to see him three times. Never brought the kids. When the trial ended and he got stuck up in Haverigg, she never bothered at all. He didn’t blame her in a way. It’s a long drive up to Cumbria. He DID blame her really. She’d make the fucking effort if she loved him. She said she was embarrassed when it was all over the Weekly News. The lads were getting skitted in school. He thought she got off on it really. He noticed how she acted when they walked into a pub and everyone turned around. She loved all those arse lickers coming over and offering to buy them a drink. Oh yeah, she loved causing a fight over some petty triviality.
“He’s just winked at me!”
“She’s staring at you!”
“He’s just asked me to dance.”
Goading him.
Then, when it kicked off, she’d act all outraged.
He couldn’t win with her.
Couldn’t fucking win.
He didn’t mind prison.
It gave him some peace.
A bit of head space.
He’d done borstal when he was thirteen.
Some place up by Rochdale.
Proper grim.
They’d caught him trying to burn down the Scout Hut up the park.
Fucking Scouts!
Bob a fucking job.
He got a year.
Did seven months.
Prison was a fucking breeze compared to that place.
The screws there were monsters.
Rapists.
Sadists.
He didn’t have it as bad as some of them in there.
Poor cunts.
He heard them screaming but what could he do?
He was a just a kid himself.
The governor knew it was going on.
He was probably in on it himself.
They all were.
The bizzies, the judges, the wardens, the governors, the social workers.
How could you fight that?
He was moved down to Winson Green.
He got on with the screws. He got on with the rastas. He liked the rastas. They were more like him. Kept themselves to themselves, never acted the big I Am. He’d never been like that. He was always controlled. Mostly. When he lost it, he lost it. He didn’t lose it that often. Losing control gets you in real trouble. The rastas were always watchful. They only acted when they had to. He used to drive down to Tocky or Hulme to buy weed in the early 80s, after the riots. He was the only one who had the balls to go face to face with them.
Ofcourse they tried to rip him off. Same with the gyppos. You had to stand your ground with em. Say ‘I’m not interested.’ Go to fuck off and wait till they saw that dough going down the pan. Sometimes they’d just try to take it. He lost a few deals that way. Sometimes you had to fight for it. He had a straightener with this gypsy kid, levelled the cunt. He was a big fucker but fat, a decent rib shot put him down. He got jumped by these black lads once. Took all their gear back once he’d paid them. They gave him a good kicking.
What could he do? You can’t dwell on these things, it’s just the way it is. He didn’t mind stuff like that. It’s a cunt’s game after all. What he didn’t like was sneaky cunts. If he shook hands on a deal he was good for it. He despised these weasels that went around bitching and grassing. They deserved everything they got.
This rasta in nick was padded up with him for three months. Nice lad, only been over from JA for a few years and was living in fucking Wolverhampton. Fancy swapping Jamaica for fucking Wolves man. He read his bible every day, smoked heavy weed, listened to his dub. Proper dub, not that shit that got peddled by fucking Aswad and all those pop star cunts. He used to think it all sounded the same. He loved Jah Wobble through Metal Box but he never really understood dub until he met William the rasta. He couldn’t get into all the Old Testament bullshit but after a toke on one of his bifters he could start to feel the vibrations in his soul, whatever a fucking soul was supposed to be.
When he got out he went down to see William and started running a few packages back. Went down a storm till the smack took over. He never grafted brown. NEVER! Evil fucking stuff. He saw what it did to some of his mates, even those he hated. What it did to their families, their kids. He’d sling beak or Garys, weed, wiz, trips but not brown. He cut open some scouser grafting gear down the Dev. Some lad from Speke way trying to move in. They got him back. Took them two years like but they hit him hard. He spent two months in Warrington hospital. They jumped him outside the Chambers. He never saw it. Just remembered waking up with tubes in his mouth. His head shaved. They thought he was a gonner. Kelly came to see him with the lads. He promised her this was the last time. He’d pack it in.
The huge expressway bridge is up ahead. It funnels traffic through the town towards Liverpool or Warrington. There are seven huge pillars in four rows holding it up and when it’s sunny the water reflects on the pillars in lovely waving patterns and he will stand there for ages just looking at it, it’s mesmerising.
Passing through, always passing through.
It used to piss him off when these mingebags would stand on the bridge above Canal Street and watch the game instead of paying a few quid to watch the Linnets. The club needed all the money they could get and these cunts watch from the bridge. The pillars are covered in shit graffiti, lads offering other lads out, lads insulting other lads, lads insulting girls, Free The Weed symbols, crap tags. The water is always dark and cold underneath the bridge and he thinks that’s where he’d like to end up. Right under there, in the cold waters next to where the ground used to be, where the tanneries used to be. He’d be at peace there.
There were many small farmyard tanneries in Runcorn in the 18th Century, but in the 19th Century and for the first half of the 20th Century, tanning was a major industry in the town. Indeed, we were once the largest producer of leather in the country. However, by 1968 tanning had ceased in Runcorn, mainly because of the availability of cheap, non-leather substitutes.
The most important tanneries were the Camden, Puritan, Astmoor and Highfield tanneries. Runcorn docks were important for importing the materials used in tanning and for exporting the finished goods. The larger tanneries were positioned along the Bridgewater canal, and it was by way of canal that they received their coal, raw hides and tanning materials (imported from overseas via Liverpool docks).
A plentiful local supply of hides came from the Cheshire dairy industry. Our tanneries also used the North Wales to Liverpool water supply which was of high purity and of great benefit in the tanning process. Runcorn’s tanneries supplied the leather for the war effort in both world wars.
Runcorn Association Football Club and the Highfield Male Voice Choir have their origins in the tanneries. An early nickname of the football team was ‘The Tanners’ and the choir’s emblem has three figures carrying three ‘bends’ of leather, each ‘bend’ consisting of half an animal hide after tanning.
According to tradition, a Runcorn tannery supplied the leather used to make the boots for the Duke of Wellington and his army at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Camden, Puritan, Astmoor, and Highfield were well-known tanneries in the Runcorn area. Their demise after the 1950’s was swift and final and all tanning had ceased in Runcorn from 1968.
Only some outer walls of the Camden tannery now remain in the car park off High Street, but one building of the Puritan tannery still remains in Halton Road but has been re-clad so only part of its original appearance can be seen. These notes refer to the Highfield tannery, which stood about where Hardwick Road (Astmoor Industrial Estate) and the Daresbury Expressway runs at that point, on the north side of the Bridgewater Canal.
- The date of this Company in its present form is 1888, but it almost certain that there was a tannery on this site for at least 100 years before that, as it is mentioned in a survey of Runcorn Trades dated 1810 (besides other local evidence).
- Atthe time of the founding of the original tannery, there were two or three little yards in every town in England, which existed to use up the local supply of hides and skins. It could not, therefore, be said, that Runcorn was “chosen” at all. This tannery has survived where hundreds of similar small 19thCentury Tanyards disappeared. This has probably been helped (apart from special enterprise by the owners) due to its proximity to a major seaport. Present day tanneries import 50% of their hides and 90% of their tanning materials.
- Proximity to a major seaport is still a great advantage. The majority of sole leather is used in the Midlands and one would imagine that sole leather yards would be there on the spot to supply the demand: this is not so, and there are virtually no sole leather yards in that area. Runcorn is fortunate in being allowed to use some of the Liverpool water supply from North Wales. This is unusually pure and is a great benefit in tanning. Like other tanneries on estuaries, we are able to discharge our effluent without expensive treatment. There is legislation at present in Parliament to correct this unhygienic use of estuaries.
- We use Ox, Cows and Bull hides, 60% of which are English. The remainder are bought from Western Europe, North and South America and New Zealand. The tanning materials are also imported. These are :-
- Mimosa – South Africa
- Quebracho – South America
- Myrabolans – India
- Sweet Chestnut – France and Italy
- Valonea – Turkey
- Sumac – Cyprus
The first three being the materials mostly used.
His grandad worked at Highfield tannery for 50 years. He was also a Methodist. He asked him why he couldn’t live with him and gran, instead of his nan. His grandad told him that they didn’t have the space but he knew that was a load of shit. There were two empty bedrooms. His gran didn’t want him there. He knew that. She hardly ever spoke to him. Women are like that. Mums and daughter in laws. Fellars just get on with it, like it or fucking lump it but with women it goes much deeper. He thinks it’s something to do with evolution. Competition. Some sort of shit like that. Kelly was the same. Even Maureen. She treated Ray like a cunt but as soon as some other bird’s there, it’s like ‘get away from MY man.’
To his gran, he was always a reminder of her. No matter how much of a bastard her own son had been, he was her flesh and blood. His grandad never mentioned his dad. He reckoned his grandad was ashamed of his son, their only child. He hoped his sons weren’t ashamed of him. He knew they would be ashamed of him if they saw him how he is now.
Who he was and what he had become.
He keeps a photo of his two sons; Sean and Wes in his wallet. Wes was her idea. Short for Wesley. She didn’t know who the fuck John Wesley was. She named him after Wesley fucking Snipes. White Men Can’t Jump! They should’ve seen him clear that fucking twelve foot wall when the scousers cornered him by Halton Lodge.
He said to her once “an ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge” and she just looked bemused.
Sean looked like her; pale skimmed, red haired and had her calm, sarcastic temperament whereas Wes was more like him; dark, moody, prone to impulsive acts. He hadn’t seen them for almost 12 years now, they’d be 21 and 19. He thought he’d seen Sean once up the city but he couldn’t be sure. He imagined what they’d look like now. He wondered where they were and if they wanted to get back in touch. Maybe. What good would it do? What did he have to offer them?
An ounce of love.
As far as he knew, his grandad never went to church. He wasn’t supposed to drink but kept a bottle of whisky in the sideboard and he wasn’t supposed to gamble but always had the racing on and would take him down the brew from Castle Rise to the bookies on Halton Road. He always wondered what the Method in Methodism was all about. He knew that it was a teetotal crew, against the bevvy and the bottle and gambling, these ‘vices’ that ruined so many men, destroyed so many families in the olden days.
So why the whisky? Why the bookies?
Is worth a pound of knowledge.
He would repeat that over and over to himself.
He wished he’d shown her an ounce of love. Maybe she’d still be with him. Maybe he would playing footy with the lads on the park or even taking his grandkids for walks along the canal, throwing bread for the ducks, pushing them on the swings. The things men his age were supposed to do. He tried to do it the right way. He tried to be a good husband and a good dad. He really did. That’s what he tells himself. He blamed her. Her and her fucking ma. Nothing was good enough for them.
Mud
Mud
Stages
Mooring Posts
Stages
Highfield Tannery
Brickfield Cottages
Highfield House
Mud
Stages
Tanks
Wiggs Works
Towing Path
Chemical Works
Travelling crane
Boston Tanneries
Those names:
Johnson
Hazlehurst
Wigg
Boston
Boston Tanneries
Boston Avenue
Castle Rise was at one end of Boston Avenue, Heath Road was at the other. In between was the Town Hall. It hadn’t always been the Town Hall though.
1854
From Runcorn Heath
Marquis Of Cholmondeley
Trustees Of The Late Duke of Bridgewater
Geo. Orrell Esq.
Big Pool
To Runcorn
Trustees of the late D. Brundrit Esq.
Mr. John Johnson
Welph Hey
Small Brooks
Bottom Springall
Top Springall
Big Field
Clover Field
Long Field
Halton Field
The story of the Town Hall is the story of the town and the men that poisoned the townspeople.
In September 1851 Francis Salkeld purchased a small strip of land adjoining the south west corner of Halton Field for the sum of £19. This land was known as The Inclosure as it was an encroachment from the waste land of the Manor.
In May 1853 the Duchy of Lancaster granted the freehold to Francis Salkeld for the sum of £94.60. Francis Salkeld sold most of the land to Thomas Johnson in January 1854 for £4,280. He retained the fields known as the Orchard, the Garden and Backside.
The house and buildings known as Halton Grange were built about 1856 for Thomas Johnson who was a local soap and alkali manufacturer.
The property was mortgaged for the sum of £5,000 at 5% interest by Thomas Johnson in February 1857 as part of the marriage settlement and heir provision. He married Louisa Reeve, daughter of Sir Thomas Newby Reeve.
In January 1871 the property was again mortgaged for £5,000 and in July 1872 the Mortgagees sold the land comprising Halton Grange and Pool Farm to Charles Hazlehurst for £10,428
Charles Hazlehurst quickly set about increasing his land holdings. This reflected the fact that his soap works were increasingly prosperous.
In April 1873 he completed the purchase of 16.21 acres of land adjoining the southern boundary from the Marquis Of Cholmondeley for £2,108.45. This was followed in September the same year by a further 7.97 acres on the west side of Heath Road from the Reverend Meredith Brown and George Swindles for the sum of £1,675.
Charles Hazlehurst had married in October 1852 and died and 14th December 1878. By his Will he left the property to his son Charles Whiteway Hazlehurst but with a life interest to his wife, Julia.
The property was mortgaged in December 1880 to Thomas Francis Hazlehurst of Misterton Hall, Leicestershire and Samuel Beckett Chadwick of Daresbury Hall, together with other property, for £52,572 and the mortgage was redeemed in June 1903. Julia Hazlehurst died on 11th January 1903.
In April 1904 Hazlehurst leased the house and grounds to Francis Boston, the owner of the Boston Tannery in Halton Road, for a period of 10 years at £100 per year to use only as a private residence. The lease contained an option for Boston to purchase the house and grounds, Pool Farm and the area including Pool Cottage at any time during the first five years of the lease.
The price was to be £5,500 and specifically excluded from the option were the two pictures described as ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’ and ‘Boadicea.’
Boston exercised his option in June 1909 and the property including the pictures was conveyed to him for £5,000. Francis Boston died on 2nd November 1929 and the property was put up for auction on 25th June 1930 by Wm. Thomson and Moulton at the Law Association Rooms in Liverpool.
On 2nd April 1931 the Executors sold to Frederick Clare and Latham Ryder for £1,975. On 18th November 1932 the Runcorn Urban District Council purchased from the Executors the house (including pictures) and grounds for the sum of £2,250. The building was converted into the Urban District Council offices and opened on 30thOctober 1933. .
It was almost dark and they were sat on the bench next to the pond and Urqo was pissing about trying to get the duck’s eggs from the island. These big posh cars kept pulling up to the Town Hall entrance. These fellars and women were getting out of them all dressed up in fucking suits and ball gowns and all that so they went over and Franny asked one fellar what was going on and he just looked at Franny and said ‘nothing to do with you, you little bastard’ and walked in with his fat fucking wife. They all laughed but he didn’t, he decided he’d teach these stuck up cunts a lesson. They went around collecting dog shit and placed it in plazzy bags out of the bins then threw it all over the posh cars parked up outside and then smeared it all over the large windows where these fancy guests were stood about drinking from fancy glasses. One of them turned around in horror and they heard shouting and footsteps so the others legged it into the wood but he just stood there.
Three fellars came around the corner. One shouted “you disgusting piece of shit” at him and went to grab him but he just smiled at him and the man lost his nerve. One of the others said “the police are on their way” and he laughed, then turned around and walked slowly away.
One shouted after him but he didn’t look back.
Travelling crane
Taylors Row
Stenhills Lane
Churchfield House
Porter Street
Trinity House
Cambridge Street
Robert Street
William Road
Wicksten Drive
Wisksten Hill
Stenhills farm
Saxon Road
Stenhills Cottage
The past is the past and the future is the future and today is today and that’s all you need to fucking know man.
You can’t change the past. You can’t predict the future. You can do what you can do today and that’s all you can do.
One foot in front of the other.
Head down.
Eyes ahead.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
There it is up ahead, there it is.
He can see it.
Clear as fucking day.
The day he walks through the bricks and dissolves into the water, the bridges and the canals and sinks to the bottom for the dredgers to scoop up.
There’s this noise he gets in his head.
It’s like every fucking baby in the world screaming at top volume at once.
He thought he had a brain tumour at one point.
Saw the quack.
They did a scan.
Found fuck all.
He tried to describe it and how it made him feel.
He blacks out sometimes.
It’s not epilepsy though.
They ruled that out.
Sometimes he wakes up in places and he can’t remember how he got there.
First time it happened he was about nine.
He was messing about up the hills.
There were about ten of em playing foxes and hounds and he’d sat there scratching his name into the thin sandstone rock of Frog’s Gob, then walked down to Weston Road and crossed over to the entrance to the tunnel. He heard this buzzing noise in his head.
His head got tighter and tighter as if his brain was going to explode through his head.
He woke up in the dark.
He walked home and his nan was out.
He called next door and Jean told him they’d reported him missing.
His nan was out looking for him with Uncle Bob.
She went mad when she got back.
He said he’d fainted.
She didn’t believe him.
She said he had to go and live somewhere else.
He stayed with Uncle Bob for a few days.
She called round and brought him back.
She said he’d have to go to the doctors.
Tennis Grounds
Castle Rise
Well
Rock Park
Rigby Street
Weslyan Methodist Church
Windmill Street
Travelling Crane
Wilding Avenue
The Police were waiting for him when he came back from the park.
Said they could put him in jail for Grievous Bodily Harm for what he’d done.
Asked him why he’d done it.
His nan defended him.
Said they’d been bullying him for years, those bloody Bowmans. They should be the ones sent to bloody jail.
It was the first time she’d ever defended him.
He didn’t even know she knew about it.
They gave him a caution.
Said he’d been very lucky they didn’t want to press charges.
Said they’d have to tell the school and the headmaster what had happened.
They expelled him the next day.
He didn’t go to school for a month before he got into Halton Lodge.
They were the only place that’d take him.
On the Grange estate.
Miles away.
He had to walk it.
Rain or shine.
The bus cost too much.
Rock Park
Bowing Green
Tennis Ground
Sutton Street
Union Street
Sewell Street
Stenhills Crescent
Stonehills Lane.
Old Quarries
He took her to the hills. It was summer and still warm. It had been a hot summer and she was wearing a loose dress. He liked to see her in dresses like this, showing off her delicate white flesh, her lovely pale freckles. She had a great laugh. He could make her laugh. They’d been going out three months before she let him. That night up the hills, in the ferns. It wasn’t her first time. She’d told him about Matty, her boyfriend from school. He was in the army now. They’d lost touch over the past year. She wasn’t devastated, more disappointed that he hadn’t been in touch for the past six months. Nothing had been said but she knew that was it. She’d briefly been seeing Anthony O’Connor but he was a dickhead. All the girls fancied him but he was nasty and his house stunk. His mum was a horror too.
He took her hand and walked up to Frog’s Gob. He sat on the edge of the rocks looking out over the Mersey as the sun slipped down over the Welsh hills and she looked at him and he felt it; love. For that tiny moment in time, he realised that this was what love felt like. Not the same love he had for his nan. It was a different love. He showed her his name that he’d scratched into the soft sandstone on another summer day eleven years earlier. He covered it with his trainer. He said to her :
“This is the only thing that will last.”
She looked at him and asked what he meant.
“When we’re all dead, this will still be here. If I cover it up like this, it’s like I’ve never existed.”
He saw her eyes change. Maybe he lost her right there and then.
The quarries at Runcorn which afford stone for docks and other public works at Liverpool have caused great increase in population.
William Wright
Charles Hickson
William Grindrod
John Lineaker Wright
Dennis Brundrit.
John Tomkinson
Frog’s Mouth Quarry
Of the sandstones in this vicinity, that of Runcorn is more sparkling and siliceous in its grain than most of the others. Our architect’s choice was settled in favour of the quarries of Messrs. Wright.
Wright’s Quarry, Weston and East Quarry, Weston were the last to close in 1938/39. The north part of these quarries was used as a rifle range during WW2 but the main part was used to dump chemical waste, mainly lime slurry, from the near-by chemical works. After WW2 small quantities of other chemical waste was buried in this quarry. This chemical waste dumping finished in the 1970’s and the quarries were then grass-topped but traces of these chemicals were detected in 1990’s under nearby houses, which it was found, had been built on back-filled areas of the old quarry and the gases were seeping up through the rubble on which they had been built. The affected houses were condemned and demolished.
He came back from the Dev and he was pissed. He’d taken a load of whizz earlier in the day but it had worn off and he felt about fifty stone. He opened the door and knew straight away. She was still sat up in her armchair. He looked at her for ages. Maybe it was only minutes, but it felt like hours. He sat down beside her, took her cold hand, held it and let it all out. He couldn’t stop. Maybe it was the ale. Maybe it was the come down. Maybe it was being alone in the world.
Aunty Pauline came back from Hemel Hempstead with Matthew and Ian who had both grown up to be the type of student pricks he’d expected them to be. His Uncle Bob hinted at him to sell the house. She’d bought it for buttons when they put em up for sale and knocked half of the streets behind Collier Street down. This is what they’d turned into; monsters! Waiting for their loved ones to die so they can make a few bob from their house sales.
He told Bob to fuck off.
He’d been seeing Kelly for about a month when it happened. She hadn’t met his nan and he hadn’t told his nan about Kelly. It might be something or nothing. He acted tough in front of Kelly, didn’t show her how upset he truly was. After all he was supposed to be a hard case. He asked her to come to the funeral, but she said she’d feel out of place. She was right.
After the crem, at the do in the Dev, he watched Bob acting the big shot, the life and soul of the wake with all those other fucking miserable cunts, happy for as long as someone was getting the ale in. He saw him chatting up the new barmaid, about thirty years younger than him and looked at Val as Val pretended not to see. He sat next to her and said
“Why do you put up with it, Aunty Val?”
She looked back at him with empty, dead eyes and said
“Who else have I got?”
He held his big, battered hand out on the table, and she put her tiny, thin hand in his and he squeezed it tight and he said,
“You’ve got me.”
Bob came back with his pint and a vodka and coke for Val and said ‘what’s all this then?’ and he told his Uncle that if he ever hurt her again he’d kill him and Bob laughed nervously but knew in his nephew’s eyes that he fucking meant it.
They had two kids to bring up and she didn’t want to bring em up down in that shithole.
She wanted them to go to a good school
Victoria Road or Pewitt Hall
He said he’d think about it
He thought about it.
He said ‘no’
He wouldn’t let his kids go to Parish though. He had some standards. They went to Wezzy Point instead. Bit of a trek like.
That’s it with some people. They think sending their kids to some school they think is better because it’s in a better area, that it’s gonna rub off on them. He knew loads of people like that. Fucking nobheads, the lot of em. Her family was full of the cunts, all sending their kids to fucking Frodsham or Helsby instead of Brooky Comp or Norton. Who were they trying to fool?
After his nan died, they were clearing away her things, not that she had much, and he found a load of old photos of his nan with his grandad. A grandad he’d never known. He’d passed away a few years before he was born. Lung cancer. He worked at ICI all his life, worked at Randles on Wigg Island during the war, the secret mustard gas factory they called the ‘Hush Hush.’
They had a rope swing under the bridge that went out over the Ship canal and they’d all jump off it, doing Tarzan calls. He dove in once and got a lung full of it. It didn’t have the texture or taste of water. It was like oil. It stunk, a weird odour that he never smelled anywhere else. What was this stuff?
Yet here in these photographs of them, his nan and grandad, his mum and Uncle Bob and Aunty Pauline, they’re walking along a prom and sat they’re on a beach and they’re smiling and they’re happy.
What happened to them? What happened to him?
There was a makeshift cross at the bottom of Frog’s Gob. Some kid, seventeen years old, pissed up, trying to impress his mates or a girl, fell and died. He knew the lad’s dad. There was a Man United scarf tied around the cross.
He knew others that had fell from those crags over the years. It’s easy enough to do, especially at night, especially if you’re pissed or stoned. Such a fucking waste and sometimes he just can’t switch it off, thinking about it. Karma? Heaven? He knows he’s done some shit things in his life but what have kids with cancer ever done to deserve their fate? All those kids trapped inside their bodies, that’s a REAL Hell. Sin? Forgiveness? Who’s to say what’s sinful or not and what’s to forgive or not? He’s had enough of forgiveness for a lifetime. Forgiving others and others forgiving him. What does it amount to anyway, all this forgiveness? He doesn’t see forgiveness as a virtue anyway. You forgive me? So what? He couldn’t forgive Kelly. He couldn’t forgive his dad. He could live with hate.
That’s why he can’t go to funerals anymore, listen to all that childish nonsense about death being only temporary and life everfuckinglasting, and even if it’s a metaphor, it’s not even a good metaphor. Grown men and women believing all that bollocks. When they cremated his nan, what had been her purpose? There was no purpose to life, only to fuck and have kids and pass on our genes.
What was she once and what had she become? She’d been dead for decades anyway, just living each day as it comes. She was a hard woman and life had made her hard and maybe she was born hard too. Are we born bad, does life make us bad? Is it in the genes or the streets, or both? Fuck your morality because we all end up dead as dust and the evil die along with the good and there’s no Heaven or Hell, just silence.
He sometimes walks up to the hills and sits looking across the Mersey and tries to imagine a time before industry and before farming and before people and before Gods. He can see the world differently up there. He can place himself in a wider universe and then he doesn’t fear death. Sometimes he stands right on the edge and feels an urge to throw himself off. It would only take seconds and he’d be free of it all.
His grandad used to take him to the Remembrance Day parade and pointed out his relative’s names on the cenotaph. Once he got out this large box with tissue paper inside it and took out these medals, a star shaped one and two massive round ones. How cheaply they held their lives and for what?
This is their cycle.
FOR OUR SAKE
He used to go to the cenotaph a lot. On his own. Look at all those names. Hundreds of names. Too many names for such a small town at the time. Maybe a fifth of the male population of fighting age. He would watch the scouts and the Boys Brigade and the sea scouts and the army cadets and the old men in their suits and uniforms and union jacks and medals lay their wreaths. He heard the drums and the bugles and the speeches and the prayers and the hymns and he felt…
NOTHING
He read the inscriptions carved in elegant capitals.
MORE THAN CONQUERORS THROUGH HIM THAT LOVED US
All those names, all those widows.
OBEYING THE COUNTRY’S CALL SERVING HUMANITY THESE GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR THE CAUSE OF TRUTH OF JUSTICE AND FREEDOM IN THE GREAT WAR.
All those mums and dads, sons and daughters.
THESE AT THE CALL OF KING AND COUNTRY LEFT ALL THAT WAS DEAR TO THEM ENDURED HARDNESS FACED DANGER AND FINALLY PASSED OUT OF THE SIGHT OF MEN BY THE PATH OF DUTY AND SELF-SACRIFICE GIVING UP THEIR OWN LIVES THAT OTHERS MIGHT LIVE IN FREEDOM.
It made him sick. Lies. Freedom? What fucking freedom?
THEY SOUGHT THE GLORY OF THEIR COUNTRY AND FOUND THE GLORY OF THEIR GOD.
Glory? What fucking glory? Cunts! Liars! Why couldn’t they see through it?
This is their cycle.
Wars and money and shares and palaces.
Round and round and round it goes.
For Our Sake!
Yeah! Tell that yourself if it consoles you. They died for some noble cause, in Belgium, in North Africa, in Korea, in Northern Ireland, in The Falklands, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. The world keeps turning and your son is dead.
Dead forever.
His grandad boasted that he’d never missed a day through sickness in forty years at Highfield as if that was something to be proud of. The Protestant Work Ethic. Another fucking con trick played on the proles by lazy cunts that never put a shift in during their entire fucking lives. Work will set you free but it doesn’t, it just destroys you, slowly.
Still, they made things back then. Useful things. Now it’s all shite produced in sweatshops by slaves in India, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Pakistan, Malaysia. Poor bastards. There was at least a degree of craftsmanship in his grandad’s times. He admired that aspect of it.
Highfield Tannery Artefacts Register A.024 – A.041
A.024 Sample of hide
A.025 Sample of elephant hide
A.026 Sample of cow hide
A.027 Sample check strap
A.028 Sample hide with brand marks
A.029 Buffalo hide
A.030 Charolais hide
A.031 Sausage skins
A.032 Item used in textile industry
A.033 Bark
A.034 Fish skin
A.035 Black dyed skin
A.036 Green dyed skin
A.037 Skin
A.038 Snake skin
A.039 Brown dyed skin
A.040 Sample bull neck leather
A.041 Highfield leather sole
He walks up to his grandad’s. It’s 1977, the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee, he’s wearing a Sex Pistols t-shirt and his grandad goes mad at him. He says the punks have been spitting at the picture of the Queen above the stage at the RNA when the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ comes on. He says the DJ had stopped playing it and the stewards had cleared them all out, these louts, disrespecting Her Majesty like that. He says they all need a stretch in the Army and he answers sarcastically ‘like you?’
“What’s that supposed to mean?” grandad asks.
“Well you always say you were too old to fight in second world war.”
“That’s right.”
“You were only 38.”
“So?”
“You were too old to join up at 38? That doesn’t sound right. Is that why you get off on all those fucking war films, cos you were a coward?”
“Get out! I don’t want you to come here again!”
“Fair enough, you can fuck off and me gran can fuck off too and that cunt you brought up, I hope he dies slowly in agony.”
Artefacts Register A.042 – A.060
A.042 Highfield leather sole
A.043 Limed raw hide
A.044 Limed raw hide
A.045 Leather sole
A.046 7 card templates for soles sizes 6-12
A.047 Iron gauge to measure thickness of leather
A.048 ‘Proof hide’ leather dressing
A.049 Mimosa powder
A.050 Galla from China
A.051 Hockey ball (half)
A.052 Sole cutting knife left
A,053 Sole cutting knife right
A.054 Ash tray in leather
A.055 Hydraulic and pneumatic packings
A.056 Large leather sole
A.057 Billiard/snooker cue tips
A.058 Cushion for billiard/snooker table
A.059 Cycle saddle repair kit container
A.060 Door restraining strap railway carriages etc.
He didn’t see his grandad again till his gran’s funeral in 82. He had to show his face for that. His dad was there too. He had to show his face too. They didn’t speak. Didn’t even acknowledge each other. His dad looked fucked. Like he was on his lazzys. The do was at the Halfway but he didn’t go. He knew how it’d end. His grandad died not long after. He didn’t cry. He had lost all the respect he once had for him as a kid. He saw him now as a weak man, too under the thumb of his gran to take his grandson in. Too weak to deal with his waste of space son. Too dumb to realise how those he admired really despised him and his class. Fuck him and all those like him. His grandad didn’t last long after, holding on for a few years on his own. He never went to the funeral. His dad would be there. He couldn’t bear seeing the cunt again.
Artefacts Register A.061 – A.075
A.061 Sommacco
A.062 Leather grip for golf clubs/racquets etc.
A.063 Galla (turca)
A.064 Policeman’s handcuff container
A.065 Myrobalan nuts
A.066 Hand protector for sewing sailcloth etc.
A.067 Cycle saddle
A.068 Dog chew
A.069 Chain link belting
A.070 Plaited dog lead
A.071 Myrab powder
A.072 Tara Baccello Molito
A.073 Mirabolano
A.074 Gambier (extratto)
A.075 Pencil –Highfield Tannery
The Tanners pub was in the middle of Castlefields Centre. The centre was made of the same white tiles as the Shopping City but was even more run down. He sometimes felt sorry for the scousers. Moving here from their slums and ending up back in slums but miles away from home. Castlefields was a terrible place, the flats were grey and depressing, the centre was a piss stinking shit hole and the pub was the most disgusting alehouse in the town. All the bagheads had been shipped here when they demolished Southgate.
He liked Southgate. He lived with Moggy there for a few months when he got out. Moggy’s flat was a meeting place for all the druggies and Kelly knew him from junior school. She said he’d always been a nutter but she liked him, said he was funny. He’d met him inside when they were both in DC. Moggy had been burgling shops and houses. Short, sharp shock. All that shit! Never worked. Not for him or Moggy or any of the others.
He remembers walking around Southgate when he was a kid and thinking it must be like living in the future, living in these orange and yellow metal houses and the flats with their massive washing machine windows. His nan’s house was 100 years old, maybe older. On the maps of Runcorn from the olden days, the town’s just a clump of streets by the Mersey. It looks like a tumour. Now it stretches out for miles into the countryside, its cancer spreading and spreading.
He was here to exact revenge. Not that it was his problem, but he’d made it his problem. It was a matter of honour. The Bank Chambers was chocka that night and he’d made a stash on the Garys and the beak. Other people were moving in from out of town. They had a crew come down from Huyton the week before. They meant business. Wanted to take over the door. This night had been peaceful though. No real trouble, a few dickheads had to get lashed out but that was all. Tony, the landlord let them get on with it. He took his cut and made sure the bizzies were kept sweet.
He’d been clearing the Chambers of all the hangers on, Tony wanted an early night and the same old bunch of arse lickers were clinging on for a stay behind. A new lad, Ste, had started a few weeks before. Ste was huge, about six feet nine and well built, bit of a juice head. He’d moved here from Stoke or somewhere and was acting the big shot, trying to impress the other doormen by bouncing divvies.
Matty Kavanagh and Gary Murray were both sat up at the back of the room and they all knew what these two were about. Matty was certifiable, a total psycho, always in and out of jug. Gary wasn’t as unpredictable but was also a loon, well known for carrying a blade. They were the biggest headcases in the new town but Ste didn’t know them from Adam. He made the mistake of telling them to fuck off home and grabbed hold of Muz. Before he knew what was going on, Ste was screaming on the floor and Kavva and Muz had fled the scene. He went over to Ste and saw a thin, red slice running from his eye brow to his chin, blood pumping all over the sticky carpet. Ste soon moved back to Stoke.
He always did his business alone. He didn’t need to rely on others, people who’d use any excuse to shit out at the last minute. He knew Muz bevvied in The Tanners but he’d gone to ground since slashing Ste. He knew the landlord of the Tanners and he’d been in touch; Muz was in with some lad he didn’t recognise, a black kid with a Manc accent.
He drove up to the car park behind the centre and walked up the steps to the Tanners. He walked in and saw Muz sat at back of the narrow bar with this other lad. Muz looked at him and said something to his pal, his pal looked around too. He sat down next to Muz and this kid. Muz smiled at him and said “let’s do it then.”
Mince and chips for tea.
The mince is greasy and over cooked.
The chips are brown and crispy.
The chips swim in an oily broth that has almost raw onions floating in it.
His nan places his tray on his knees with three slices of over buttered bread and a salt shaker.
“Ta”
She sits opposite him on the settee and eats her own tea. She looks at him. He’s grown. He’s a man now.
“What did Frank want?”
He makes a butty, folds his bread in half and pats down the chips and dips it in the gravy.
“Got a job for me.”
He watches the telly. His nan’s got Corry on. Mike Baldwin’s kicking off on Vera and the girls in his sewing factory.
“What kind of job?”
He chews faster to answer her.
“Security.”
He’s a man now. He’s got a reputation. They all know him round here.
She doesn’t say any more.
He looks at her.
“He’s working on a building site in Birkenhead tomorrow and wants me to mind all the stuff in his van, so the smackheads don’t have it off.”
“You be careful.”
He almost chokes.
She agreed to go out with him.
A date.
No, it’s not a date.
Let’s just see if we have a good time eh?
He put on his best clothes.
He borrowed Urqo’s XR3i
He drove her out to Frodsham.
They had a few drinks in The Bear’s Paw.
They went for a curry.
He told her stupid jokes.
She laughed at his stupid jokes.
She told him about her big plans.
He was impressed with her big plans.
It took him three months to get inside her knickers.
It took him five months to get to meet her mum and dad.
They never married.
It took her twelve years to leave him.
He came home after a bender and she wasn’t there. The kids weren’t there. He saw it coming. He’d been asking for it really. Maybe part of him even wanted it. He wasn’t cut out for it. He blamed his dad. He blamed everyone but deep down he knew it was HIS fault.
He’d been good to his word. He’d stopped working the doors. He’d got a proper job. He worked shifts at the warehouse. He worked overtime and weekends. He even looked at houses down Sea Lane way and said he’d save up for a deposit. They went on holidays abroad. Spain, Portugal, Greece. The lads loved him. He loved them. Kelly loved him. He loved her. It was all an act though. He was just pretending. He knew himself. He knew how it would end. One day. Today. Tomorrow. Who knew? He couldn’t hide from himself. Fool himself. That’s how he is, how he’s always been and how he’ll always be.
He wants to remember her voice. What she sounded like. It’s the voice that he misses the most. The laugh. She was always laughing. That’s how remembers it any way. She had a bit of a lisp. His dad teased her some times. Did this sound like Sylvester The Cat.
“Thutherin’ thuthercaths!”
He remembered coming back to their house and his dad crying and he didn’t know his mum wasn’t coming back. Not really. He’d been told she’d been in an accident, that she’d come off a motorbike, some fellar’s motorbike. He didn’t know who the fellar was. He didn’t understand why everyone was shouting at each other. He missed her voice the most. That’s what he missed. Her voice.
One foot in front of the other.
Left
Right
He looks a state
He knows he looks a state.
That’s the least of his worries.
He’s put on a load of weight.
He’s a fat fucking useless cunt.
It’s his meds.
They avoid eye contact when they see him.
Pretend they haven’t seen him.
Cross the road to swerve him.
He can live with that.
Fuck em!
Bunch of phonies.
He looks a state.
Fatty clothes on.
Not even washed.
At one time he lived for his clothes
He spent a fortune on the latest gear.
He was well known for it, celebrated even.
They all waited to see what new trainers he was wearing, what new labels he’d endorsed, and they followed suit.
Fucking sheep!
Now clothing is purely functional, a shield against the elements, a protective skin against the world. He wears the same gear every day. Most days.
Hood up.
Head down.
Mouth closed.
One foot in front of the other.
He looks a state.
Unsworth Bros – tailoring, special premises, 24 & 26 High St
Marc O’Polo
Unsworth Bros – clothing, special department, 47 & 49 High St
Ocean Pacific
Unsworth Bros – Outfitting, special department, 47 & 49 High St
Ciao
Unsworth Bros – Hatters, special department, 47 & 49 High St,
Chevignon
Unsworth Brothers Hold The Largest Stock In The District
Stone Island
Samuel Coventry – Practical, Clerical and Livery Tailor; thoroughly shrunk; perfect fitting, latest styles, Most Reasonable Prices.
CP Company
Blythe – Practical Tailor & Clothier ‘fit and style guaranteed’
Paul Smith
He didn’t really listen to his old records or CDs anymore. He preferred to read now or listen to Radio 3, the classical station, no fucking nobhead djs wittering on about fuck all, just filling in empty space. He finds it calming, the classical stuff. He’s learned a lot from it. He loves Aaron Copland and Dvorak and Debussy. The only band he really stills listens to is PIL.
He followed Lydon into his post-Rotten career. He was the only one with any sense. The one who saw through it all. The punk lie. Just another con trick. Another product. He sometimes got Metal Box out from its time capsule tin like something buried for future generations to discover. Puts it on his ancient turntable. He plays their other stuff too. Order Of Death is his favourite.
This is what you want
This is what you get
Here now
Nightlight
Windows
Waiting
Weakness
Waiting
Silent
Waiting
Guilty
Haunting
Calling
Claiming
Here now
Ending
One life
One knife
It’s depressing as fuck. It does him no good listening to this stuff really. It’s too close.
He feels the walls pushing in on him, closing in. He’s sat on the beach and it’s hot and there’s a man sat next to him playing in the sand. Digging a massive hole in the sand and he keeps digging and the sea comes in and goes down the hole and he falls in with the man, him and the man are falling down this massive hole in the sand and it goes down for ages, just goes down and down and down and down and then the man catches hold of something and stops himself falling but he carries on falling and there’s this lake and he’s in this lake, on a boat and it’s just going along by these reeds and he sees fishes in the water. The fishes are swimming about, millions of them, all gold and red and yellow and he wants to dive in the water with them but he’s scared and there’s this woman on the side of the shore and she’s washing her clothes in the water like the Indians do and she waves at him and he waves back.
A-G
A-G-R
A-G-R-O
AGGRO!!
Hit him on the head
Hit him on the head
Hit him on the head
With a baseball bat
Oh yeah
Oh yeah
Hit him in the dick
Hit him in the dick
Hit him in the dick
With a Millwall brick
Oh yeah
Oh yeah
When the red, red Robins come bob, bob, bobbing along
Shoot the bastards!
Shoot the bastards!
Shoot, shoot, shoot the bastards!
Altrincham.
Alty.
The Robins.
He was arrested there in the FA Trophy.
Ran on the pitch at the end and tried to hit the ref.
Who’s the bastard?
Who’s the bastard?
Who’s the bastard in the black?
Who’s the bastard in the black?
Blind cunt!
Bent cunt!
Hartlepool.
He got battered there.
Twatted good style.
They all left him.
Shithouses.
The lot of em.
Fucking shithouses.
Merthyr.
Had it toe to toe with a huge Welsh mob up a steep hill. Game as fuck, the Taffys.
Today it’s a local derby.
Northwich Victoria.
Vics.
He’s sat in the Edgie with Joey Lego, Andy Cork and Urqo. The others come in and now there are about twenty of them but he makes sure his little inner crew keep tight. He knows he can only trust these three. They move to the Navvy. Inside the Navvy are about ten Vics fans. Joey starts giving them stick but he tells him to pack it in, these are just fellars with kids, having a pint. Joey’s a bully. Urqo’s not so hard but he’ll stand. Andy’s a loon. He sees another group walk in through the bar door and the first one pushes his way through and sees them, then turns and tries to get back out. He nods at Andy and they walk out through the main entrance where a coach is parking up and a mob of Vics lads are getting off, noisily chanting.
Without a word, he steams into the disorganised gang, scattering them at first. They re-group on the field in front of Irwell Lane and realise there are only four lads confronting them and gain a bit of courage. They charge en masse but he doesn’t move. Andy doesn’t move. Urqo doesn’t move. Even Joey doesn’t move. They get nearer, maybe twenty of them, with their green and white scarves. They slow down. He can see the ones who will drop off. He waits for the ones whose pride will bring them to blows.
He readies himself.
He walks under the curly bridge that connects the canal path to Halton Road. Stonehills Lane runs from the bottom of Halton Road up to Saxon Road. On the right is Big Hill, behind the Grange Comprehensive school, where he attended on and off for five years, in between his two spells in DC in 80 and 82. He was the cock of the school. Only Vinny Redmond ever gave him a real fight. He liked Vinny, a wirey, red haired kid from Halton Brook, one of the only scousers in their year. Vinny’s sister, Terri was fit as fuck, worked in the posh barbers downtown, next to the Scala. He always went there to get his hair cut, just to feel her tits on the back of his neck.
He asked her out once but she was four years older than him and gave him a polite knock back. She was seeing Paul Barton, a psycho from Halewood. Vinny went out joy riding with him or so he made out. They got caught robbing a post office and Vinny got a year in DC. When he came out, he was acting like the big hardman, so he offered the cunt out on the back field after school. Vinny put up a better fight than he’d expected. Gave him a good smack that wobbled his teeth but the ginger prick couldn’t take a dig. He decked him and then gave him a couple of decent butts to his face, split his nose wide open. They were good mates after that.
This kid from DC, Jacko, from out Salford way knocked at his house once. He’d absconded and wanted to hide out in Runcorn. He took him to the tunnels. These were a secret from most people, two long, narrow tunnels that led from Big Hill under to where the Lard Factory used to be. Two kids from the Grange estate had discovered them and ran away for months hiding out there. The tunnels went along for about three hundred yards before opening out into a small chamber about twelve feet square with a low ceiling. It became a big of a meeting place for smoking weed, taking mushies and shagging. The lardy had burned down in the 70s but fat still covered the walls and the place absolutely reeked.
Still, it was better than nick and Jacko hid there for about three weeks before some cunt grassed him up. They sealed them up after that.
Puritan Tannery, Halton Road, Runcorn
Tel Runcorn 2321-2-3
Cables: “Puritan, Runcorn”
1926 The company was incorporated, and carried on the business of sole leather tanners, including the manufacture and supply of cut soles.
A tannery in Runcorn was leased from Boston Tanneries Ltd and H. G. Boston became managing director.
1947 Listed Exhibitor – British Industries Fair.
Tanners and Sole Leather
Bends
Shoulders
Bellies
Cut Soles
Insoles
Top Pieces
Slabs for the Manufacturing and Repairing Trades
Polishing Leather
Flexible Shoulders and Bellies
Dry Limed and Pickled Bellies.
(Earls Court, 1st Floor, Stand No. 412a)
1961 The company ceased leather production
1966 The company went into liquidation
The old iron crane used to be here when he was a kid. It transported coal from the narrow boats into the tannery’s furnace.
Bogie Marsh lived near here too. He was like Steptoe, had this horse and cart and used to go around selling fruit and veg. His grandad knew him well, used to stop and talk to him all the time when he delivers in Castle Rise and Bogie would always ruffle his hair, ask how old he was. He asked his grandad if Bogie was called that because he was a Bogey man and his grandad laughed and just said ‘he’s harmless.’
All these old characters his nan and granddad spoke of :
Bogie Marsh
Darky Joe Lewis, another fruit and veg man with a horse and cart
Nobby Cook and Bert Rolls, the tramps
Daft Charlie, the traffic conductor
Blind Josh Eden, the tea seller.
Jimmy Gough, the clog maker, mouth always full of nails
The ones from his own era;
Laughing Danny
Lead Handbag
Joe The Pole
Spazzy Sue
Maybe he’s like them now. Kids poking fun at him. Laughing at him. He doesn’t care anymore. He couldn’t give two flying fucks.
He can see things they can’t see.
He can feel things they can’t feel.
The man with the white beard tips his pipe out and takes a drink from a leather bottle. He ties the boat up and rests against the iron post, another man on the flat shouts something at him and they both laugh.
The girls are dressed in long, frilly petticoats and scoop coal from the canal with their improvised nets. They gather net full after net full and place them in a large tin bucket. The woman on the barge comes out and takes the bucket from them.
There’s a light on in the Mariner’s Mission and he can hear the half-hearted singing of hymns and loud, phlegmy coughs.
A schooner sails along the Mersey and drifts into the mist, disappears and he hears someone scream.
A plane flies overhead and the woman shouts at her son to come inside. It’s getting dark and the plane’s flying low, losing height and there’s thick black smoke coming from the engine. He can see the pilot. The bomber crashes somewhere near Astmoor and he hears a huge explosion.
A woman is lying face down in the water, wearing only her nightie. He walks down the path and looks at her. He wades in and pulls her out. She sits up and smiles at him.
A dog barks loudly at the corner of Picton Road and Halton Road. A man shouts ‘be quiet’ at it from across the road. The chimney smoke hangs heavy in the cold air and a bus comes into view, turns up Picton Avenue and he hears an owl hoot from behind him in the woods.
The wooden hut stands on the bank of the ship canal and three men stand outside, drunkenly hurling insults at each other in thick Irish accents. One takes a piss and begins to sing as the others laugh and walk away.
A young girl with a short bob hairstyle walks hand in hand with a man and the man is holding her hand too tight and she begins to cry, so he tells her to belt up and not tell anyone or he’ll come back and kill her in her bed.
He walks.
He walks today.
He walks every day.
He walks the same way.
Every day.
There and back.
Every day.
All days become one day.
One day he’ll be free.
He walks around the bend behind Webby’s builder’s merchants and the new RNA that’s now some kind of cabaret club. Urqo got married there in 87 and he was best man. He took the role seriously. Did his speech. Nothing too lairy. Kelly looked gorgeous. Urqo’s bird wasn’t bad either. She was from Widnes, one of the Didsbury clan from Hough Green. Urqo moved away soon after. Moved to Kent or somewhere doing building. Good on him. He escaped. He never saw him again. Heard he’d moved to New Zealand. Good luck to the lad.
Terry and Beo had this narrow boat down the yard behind the timber place off Halton Road. All the fucking smackheads and crusties would be down there all the time. He lived on the boats for a while when he got out of the Brooker. Didn’t want to go back to that house. The cold house. The dark house. The house where he failed time and time again. He liked Beo, even though he was on the gear.
Beo used to live in Suffolk Street with his mam and about five other kids of different colours. His dad wasn’t really his dad but this old Polish fellar and his ma was on the game, always in the Barley and the Blue Lagoon, the Bluey. Beo got skitted all through school. There were a lot of prozzys in town back then, with all the boats still coming into Runcorn and Weston Point docks. His nan had every other woman in Dukey down as a whore. Sometimes they’d go down to the Borax silos by the docks and watch the prozzys with the sailors and yell encouragement.
Beo got stuck down for dealing whizz and when he got out something had gone west. He got on the gear inside and carried on when he got out. Terry was a scouse kid from Halton Brook. He used to be a boxer, bit of a hard knock. Now he was on the gear too, the two of them surviving as best they could. The barge they squatted in was a fucking death trap but at least he had somewhere to get his head down, someone to talk to, even if all they talked about was the past. They didn’t have much of a future. None of them.
He didn’t deserve anything from Beo.
He didn’t deserve pity.
He deserved everything he got and he got everything he deserved.
How many times had she forgiven him?
How many times had he said he was sorry?
Truly sorry.
That he couldn’t live without her.
Her and the kids.
The kids.
Her.
Her and the kids.
He couldn’t help himself.
It’s a fucking disease.
He needs help.
He can change.
He WILL change.
He never changed.
He couldn’t.
He wouldn’t.
This was how he was.
How he is.
How he will be.
He saw them.
They changed.
They changed on the outside.
They didn’t change on the inside.
It’s impossible.
They can change the way they act.
They can’t change the way they feel.
It was all an act.
Sooner or later they’d end up at the same place as him.
Some sooner.
Some later.
Some whether they fucking knew it or not.
Whether they admitted it or not.
In time.
In time.
Yes, they would.
Yes.
They.
Fucking.
Would.
Solomon Shepherd – Boot & Shoe Maker
Elizabeth Lydiate – boots and shoes
James Haynes – Boots and shoes
Henry Stone – boots, shoes and clogs
W.L. Croley & Co – Boot and shoe maker
William Travers boots and shoes
William Page- boots and shoes
Tyler and Sons – boots and shoes
He passes the boat yard. Beo died on his boat back in – when was it? – 96 or 97. OD. He went to the church to show his face but didn’t go back to the Welly. Too many faces he didn’t want to see. Old faces, same stories. Living in the past. Old fights. Boring cunts. They’re all a waste of fucking space. Grow up! Still stuck in the 3rd year. Remember when you twatted so and so? Remember when the scousers jumped us up the city? Ancient fucking history. Boring cunts. Get out of this place before it kills you.
He walks.
Back into the future.
Forward to the past.
One foot.
Infront of each other.
Left.
Right.
The sound of the expressway towards Daresbury is deafening. Cars and lorries and bikes and vans and busses all going somewhere, all travelling to some other place, places he will never see, places he never wants to see ever again.
A fellar’s sat fishing with a huge carp pole that blocks his path. He can’t be arsed arguing the toss just steps over the rod and the fellar looks up at him and says ‘alright?’
He doesn’t answer.
Maybe the fellar knows him.
Maybe he knows the fellar.
Maybe they’re strangers.
Maybe they’re best mates.
Once.
Maybe he’s not even here at all.
His dad took him fishing here once. He couldn’t get into it. It was boring, just watching a float for hours and for what, to catch a three pound perch? Urqo was into his angling, went over to Ireland every summer for years with his dad and his uncles. He envied Urqo his large, extended family. Yet his mate fucked them all off to live on the other side of the world. Maybe families aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Maybe he’s always been better on his own.
He’s always been on his own.
The Urqos took him sea fishing once from Rhyl when he was about twelve and he got seasick, even though it wasn’t even that rough. Urqo’s dad caught this massive fish, a bass and he remembered its eyes as it was unhooked and smacked against the hull, then placed in a bucket. He felt queasy as it wriggled about, its blank, black eyes looking out at the universe. To see death in an instant. The eyes. The eyes of this fish. The eyes of his nan in her armchair. What did his mum’s eyes look like as the life left her body? What will his eyes look like? Will Kelly and the kids come to the funeral? How would they even know he was dead?
He walks towards Bates’s Bridge, sees her stood at the top looking over the canal, waving to him.
She’s shouting something to him. but he can’t hear her.
He picks up his pace.
A moorhen hoots as he walks past before flying into the canal, its thin red legs trailing behind its black body.
She’s walking down the other side of the bridge towards Sea Lane. He knows it’s her. He shouts
“WAIT!”
He gets to Bates’s Bridge and runs up the makeshift path, but she’s gone. He walks across the canal and up Sea Lane for a few yards but there’s no sign of her.
He slumps to the floor and throws his head back.
He wants to scream but no sound comes out.
A dog passes, sniffs at him, followed by a man, an old man who smells of cheap ciggies.
“You OK mate?” the old man asks.
He doesn’t answer. The man and the dog walk past and over the bridge.
Sea Lane
Dudley Avenue
Renton Avenue
Dalton Street
Fairfax Drive
Carlton Avenue
Manor Road
Brookfield Avenue
Stanmore Road
Eventually he gets to his feet. He walks down the path and back onto Bates’s Bridge. At the centre of the bridge, he stops and looks back along the route he’s followed.
The canal is still the canal, the houses are still the houses, the town is still the town.
Not his town.
No town is his town.
He has no town.
He has no bonds.
Not anymore.
He spits into the Bridgewater canal and sees his reflection in the still, murky water.
Is it the same water as when it was built?
Does the water ever go anywhere?
How many reflections has it reflected?
Are we trapped in the water?
Do we return to it?
Is that what they mean by reincarnation?
We are water?
Water made of water.
H2 fucking O.
Canals.
Rivers.
Seas.
Oceans.
Spit and sweat?
He grabs the bricks and tries to connect.
He closes his eyes.
He tries to remember her voice.
He sees the old woman in her chair.
He sees his boys laughing on the roundabout.
He sees Kelly in her lace dress, sat with him up the hills, looking into his eyes.
He holds his hands out to them.
He hears a noise.
It’s THAT noise.
He covers his hears.
The noise gets louder.
Louder!
Louder!!
Louder!!!
He feels the top of his head get
Tighter!
and TIGHTER!!
and TIGHTER!!!!!!!
The Altitudes of Bench Marks and surface heights are given in Feet above the mean level of the sea at NEWLYN and are based on the primary levelling of 1912
To refer these to the obsolete Liverpool datum, subtract the figures shown…..0.1…..feet} Note that the figure applies to this plan only and is only approximate to 0.1 ft.
Further information upon application.
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