Thomas Jackson's Website

THE TREE OF TREMENDOUSNESS

NOW Published for Kindle !

I’ve described this book as a fictionalized autobiography.   What I mean by this is that we recover the external events of the past through diaries, reports and historical records.   But we can only recover the inner events of the past – those things that happened deep within our hearts and minds – through symbols.   Only a re-imagined and fictionalized account can bring those kind of past things back into the present.

  But whereas the external events recorded by history have vanished, this re-imagined inner past continues to live on inside us, creating and shaping the present selves that we are.   It is this hidden living personal past, still active in my own life, that I am trying to track down.

  So, externally speaking for the historical record, this is partly an account of what actually happened and partly not.   But it’s as true an account as I can make it of what I think was happening inside me, too far down then for me to realize its significance.   Not then as it was then, but then as it is now.

‘What might have been and what has been point to one end which is always present’ as T.S. Eliot says.

One readerwrote: The Tree of Tremendousness is the best and most moving and imaginative account I have ever read of a childhood and its experiences, dreams, deights and fears. I couldn't put it down and was so sad when it came to an end. 

My local librarian said: I really enjoyed this.  It's the new Laurie Lee
 

 Chapter Six

 
All For Jesus Through Mary With a Smile
 

Not unnaturally from the very beginning of our time in Salford the           question of my education was an important one which particularly exercised my mother, within whose breast all hopes of my becoming Prime Minister had not become entirely extinguished.  She was therefore absolutely horrified when it was decreed by Salford Local Education Authority that to begin with I would have to    attend Trafford Road Junior School, as we had arrived in the middle of a term and there was for the moment no room in any other school.  Like a lioness, not so much defending her cub as giving him a wrathful leg-up in the pride, and with the same determination that had inspired Grandma Rotten to rout the Principal of Queen's Theological College Birmingham, my mother went into battle with the educational bureaucrats.  In the end I only attended Trafford for two weeks before the problem was resolved by my being transferred to a Catholic school, even though we were not Catholics, that of Sacred Heart Inkerman Street.  I can remember nothing of what I was taught by the teachers during this fortnight at Trafford.  I was received at the door of the school by the headmaster from the hand of my father and led to a classroom on the second floor and put in a desk by the window.  I looked down out of the window.  Immediately I knew that this was one of the great places of the world.  The scene outside the window was that of a dockyard quay against which there was a ship unloading wood, with dockers swarming round pallets on which the wood was being lifted by a crane.  Imagine.  You look out of the window of your classroom and your eye is not met by boring old trees and playing fields - the children so appreciate the playing fields, don't you children? - but a ship! And a ship that has sailed from Vancouver or Vladivostock or Adelaide or Sumatra, and is loaded with wood - and diamonds and peacock's feathers and spices and mangoes and silks and furs and caviare. And more, still more!  Walking along the quay in a kind of procession uncannily and exactly each the one three feet behind the other was a crew of Chinamen, pigtailed and piratical, and coming from the other direction a grizzled ancient mariner with a pipe in his mouth, proceeding in tacking forward motion with a salty roll and holding a tin box under his arm, and with a monkey, yes a monkey, perched on his shoulder.                                                                                               

I knew then that Trafford Docks was a place of Pentecostal fire.  Here were Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphilia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians; and not only these but Australians, Canadians, Chinese, Lascars, Singhalese, Irish, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks and all those other nations sending goods to the port of Manchester.  Here - I saw it at once - as in Elizabethan London or classical Athens the human spirit here had leapt up from its grey ashes and spluttered into flame, dancing bright in the glory of these many overlapping lights. All these sailors didn't just come to Manchester, they brought something of their countries with them.  So that in the streets of Ordsall mankind stepped out of the tightnesses of his parish - and I knew this as by a rush of  faith -  making Ordsall rich with the flavours of the Casbah and peppery Greek spice islands and unending golden Canadian wheatfields and fishy raw Newfoundland fogs and spicey Indian bazaars, one atmosphere glazed upon another, as an old master in his paintings laid coloured wash on coloured wash one on top of the other, that the whole picture might glow and throb with a rich, deep, concentrated and fascinating glow, so that you could walk the streets of Ordsall and say, not, there is a Chinese over there, and there a Turk but - I belong to the world here, I am a man.  Out to the edge of the window frame and on to the end of the Manchester Ship Canal and then into the Mersey and then on to the sea and then on on on out to the world stretched the docks, fascinating and wonderful, a prodigious portal of marvels, issuing open invitation to the universe, and imaginatively intensifying the longitudinal vision of the eye, as the ships that stood so majestic and splendid at its quays broadened and fulfilled its latitudinal gaze.

I soon got to know some of the lads in the classroom into which I had been introduced on the second floor, three of them in particular.  They were considerably older than me but they were kind to me.  There was Charlie Domenico whose father had been an Italian sailor who had fetched up in Ordsall many years ago before the war and had met his mother, who was a fryer in a       chippie, and had stayed.  Charlie lived in Monmouth Street.  There were also Wally the Turk and Len Rush, both of whom lived in Trafford Park itself, Wally in 11th Street and Len in 3rd Street. Wally the Turk had in fact no trace of the Ottoman in his lineage and had no idea, as had nobody else, how he had acquired the cognominal Turk.  He was, however, very proud of the title and would introduce himself as Wally the Turk, 11th Street, much as a Scottish aristocrat might say McLeod, of The Islands.  Len Rush was a tough fair haired boy who was in fact very bright and put a great deal of his intelligence into getting sums and grammatical questions wrong so that he would not be regarded as a blackleg or a scab by the others.  I was in awe of these boys.  They inhabited dimensions I had not met before, and far from wearing the downtrodden and deprived air which the folk of Weaste were anxious to foist upon them - Eeh a' do feel sorry for them lads down Trafford, never 'ad a cha-ance poor lambs - cocked        their heads on one side with a knowing fleecing grin and walked             with a rolling buccaneering swagger.  They were all going to be dockers as their dads were dockers.  Being a docker was a fine life.                                                                                                                                 

It was tough.  By damn it was tough.  But you could lift no end of stuff off the boats.  Whiskey, tins of ham, apricots, legs of lamb.  They had everything.  And not just odd bottles and tins.  Crates of whiskey.  Gross boxes of tins of ham.  This, topped up by offerings for the wretchedly deprived kids of Ordsall collected by the missions in Seedley and Weaste, made for a satisfactorily affluent style of life.  Or maybe they'd be sailors.  That was good too.  You got right round the world.  Girls in every port.  'scuse me mate, I think I'll 'ave a bit o' that.  Whooooaaarrrgh!  Nah, couldn't beat Trafford.  Best place in whole bleeding world.  Trafford and Ordsall were great because they were full of characters.  Ma Clap for instance.  Ma Clap's house was opposite the school and you could see it from the opposite side of the classroom to that giving on to the dockside.  I understood from them that this house was a boardy house.  I saw at once why it was called a boardy house.  There were indeed boards fastened across its lower windows.  Apparently Ma Clap was a grand lass and the salt of the earth.  She very kindly allowed other ladies to use rooms in her house.  They were all grand lasses.  Air Force May, Spanish Ethel, Lulu, Bignose Anne.  I should meet them.  I'd love 'em.  Apparently these ladies were very kind to the sailors who were far from home and they took them to their rooms in the boardy house and sometimes looked after them for a fortnight.  I was most impressed by all this.           It was becoming clear to me that the folk of Weaste had got Ordsall all wrong.  I went home full of enthusiasm and told my parents that I was going to become a docker when I grew up and that a lad called Wally the Turk was going to introduce me to a kind lady from the boardy house called Spanish Ethel.  There was an almighty explosion.  I was not allowed to go to Trafford Road Junior School next day and within forty-eight hours found myself a pupil of Sacred Heart Inkerman Street.

I was very surprised on my first day at the new school to find that the principal of it was not a man but a woman, and a nun to boot.  Mother Mary Consolata of the Five Wounds didn't take any nonsense.  She was a big beefy Irishwoman with a red face and a resolutely determined cast of countenance.  She exploited the fear of the female that lurks in the male breast with ruthless efficiency and followed home this advantage with frequent woppings.  The woppings took the form of sharp stripes, usually four in number, delivered with a terrifying whoosh and smack of bamboo on the defenceless flesh of the miscreant's outstretched hand.  "Will yez never learn? Do I have to be chastising yez again? Hold it out then".  Every pupil lived in fear of hearing these words, as murderers must once  have feared seeing the judge putting on his black cap.  Her frequently repeated motto, with which each piece of work had to be adorned as with the Jesuit AMDG, and which had often to be intoned, was "All for Jesus through Mary with a smile".  She hated any sign of gloom and despondency.  "We'll be having no miserable long faces in the house of the Lord".  As a result everybody in the school tended to wear a sickly half-smile for much of the time.  Visitors to the school must have thought that they were in a mental hospital.  This was particularly the case on occasion of the woppings.  If            you showed any sign of castdown countenance you were likely to get two strokes extra.  So we presented ourselves for the woppings with gladsome and cheerful mien. "All for Jesus through Mary with a smile" you chortled, as you hopped about the room gasping with pain and holding your hand under your armpit to try to mitigate the agony.

Among her other remarkable attributes was a passion for football.         She was an ardent supporter of Manchester United and said to be a close personal friend of Matt Busby himself.  In fact she was even said to take her place in the directors' box next to the doyen of managers during home games.  It appeared that he relied         on her judgment to make the right decisions in footballing  matters and upon her prayers to bring these decisions to satisfactory conclusion.  In fact I discovered many years later that none of this was true at all with regard to Mother Mary Consolata of the Five Wounds, though it was to some extent true of another nun in Salford.  But with the impulse with which every society seeks to fortify itself by replacing those qualities it lacks in fact with the greater and more splendid fictional attributes of myth, the processes of legend had appropriated these interesting properties and set them to work for the greater glorification of Sacred Heart in the person of its formidable headmistress.  In any case, whatever nun it was who was involved, her prayers must have arisen as a sweet incense up to the           nostrils of the Almighty in 1948, for United carried all before them.  Mother Mary had a catechism which she had concocted which was meant to instil the school's aims and ethos into the mind and heart of every pupil.  You could be called upon to give the correct answers to this catechism at any moment and woe betide you if, smiling broadly as you rose, you were unable to give the correct answers upon invitation to do so.

Q.  What is your name?

A.  N or N

Q.  Of what nationality are you?

A.  I am of the English (Scottish, Irish, Maltese, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish etc) nation, but also a citizen of the world, of which I am justifiably proud

Q.  To what city do you belong?

A.  To the city of Salford, which is proximate to that of Manchester

Q.  Who is your saviour?

A.  My saviour is Our Lord Jesus Christ who came down to earth for my sake and through his Death, Passion and Resurrection has offered to me the hope of eternal salvation

Q.  To whom do you owe legitimate obedience?

A.  To His Majesty the King and to his government which rules in          his name, to the properly and constitutionally elected members of  Salford Borough Council, to my parents and to the legitimately appointed authorities of this school.  Also if I am a Catholic to the Pope

(and then by way of light-hearted addendum to indicate the        humanity of her vision)

Q.  What is your favourite football team?

(in theory the answer to this question was optional.  You  could,  for example, have said Sheffield Wednesday.  But nobody ever did.  For catechetical purposes support for Manchester United was one hundred per cent)

A.  Manchester United, a team with a glorious past both in deed and legend, and, it is fervently to be hoped, with a yet more glorious future.  All for Jesus through Mary with a smile.

Teaching in the school was efficient and traditional but dull.  There were two other nuns who taught.  Sister Louise of the Immaculate Conception was a thin lady of pale countenance and refined manner.  Never didde she leve a ring of grese upon her cuppe when after a drink she raughte.  She taught us English.  This took the form of endless parsings of sentences and recognitions of main, with attendant appendages of adjectival and adverbial subordinate, clauses.  It was deadly dull, although occasionally her classes were enlivened by accounts of how she had once taken tea with the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire.  We also studied literature.  We would read a poem, say a Lucy poem        by Wordsworth, and she would dictate notes about it.  Birthplace, date of birth and Christian name of poet.  Place in canon of his works.  Type of rhythmical and metrical construction.  Whether rhymed or not.  Meaning of obscure phrases such as "untrodden ways".  Category of poem whether epic, lyrical, satirical or love.

In this case love.  And so much for Wordsworth's Lucy.  The nicest of the three nuns was Sister Antony of St John of the Cross.  She taught us Biology and did have the rudiments of a love for the subject, though utterly pallid in comparison with the arousing  pedagogical inspirations of Miss Franks.  She was a small woman with a twinkling face peeping like a cheery squirrel from out of her hood and wimple.  She occasionally gave us sweets if we got a question right.  As there was still sugar rationing, I must suppose, and doubtless this was a consequence of the mystical illuminations of her eponymous saintly mentor, that they must have been from her own ration.  Unfortunately it was taken for granted that it was not suitable for a nun to mention anything to do with sex, so the whole of Evolutionary Biology had to be recast in order to accommodate this fact.  Mother Nature, far from letting copulation thrive, had instead substituted extremely vague and purely non-tactile processes as her major means of continuing the various species.  Biology failed to hold my attention.  But at least Biology was neutral.  I could simply       skulk at the back of the class and keep quiet and on the whole could get away with it.                                                                                                                                            

Far worse was Mathematics.  Mr Hunter took us for Maths.  He saw Maths as a kind of religion.  This was, after all, Manchester, home of the fruits of applied mathematics in the Industrial Revolution.  The country was going to the dogs for lack of trained men who could continue this great tradition.  Too many lah-di-dah long haired literary types about these days who simply faffed around.  Boys, I must warn you against G.K. Chesterton.  Failure, therefore, to understand long division and decimal multiplication was moral rather than intellectual.  He had no sympathy with my inability to cope with mathematical concepts.  Decimals, long division, vulgar fractions and those problems in which one tap is pouring water into a bath at one speed, and another tap at another, and the waste pipe is letting water out at yet another, and how long will it take the bath to fill (as if folk in Salford had baths for goodness sake) - all of these were quite beyond me.  I was therefore terrified of Maths classes and any hope I might have had of grasping the concepts that were put before me was quite smothered by the nervousness which now stalked maths clases from end to end.  Mr Hunter had a very unpleasant habit of standing beside you while you struggled to find the right answer and twisting your ear until you did.  All this with an air of pained righteousness; as Dominican friars held up crosses in sorrowful compassion while abjuring the recalcitrant heretic to repent as the flames of the Inquisition engulfed him.  He spoke in tones of weary sarcasm, rather like policemen do in television detective dramas: "Ready to understand the principles of long division now are we?" Twist twist on the ear "Patiently waiting".

History was taught by Mr Tattersall.  It was an astonishing fact that entrusted with this story of egregiously vivid characters, dealing with material of a bloodstained suspense and unpredictable dynamic that must beggar the imagination of any writer of fiction, Mr Tattersall reduced History to total boredom.  He had a face of set expression which rarely changed almost as if he had been carved, and a monotonous voice of relentlessly median register.  These were his vehicles of             communication for a multitude of unattached facts which had no connection with one another whatsoever.  Henry VIIth  came to the         throne in 1485.  He put down the rebellions of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.  Started the Court of Star Chamber.  He made a lot of money.  He also invented Morton's Fork.  He was a successful king.  Turn over the page.  New heading.  Henry VIIIth.  Underline.  And then the huge vehement passions and incomprehensable insanities of Henry VIIIth 's reign would also  be reduced to a similar heap of dislocated dead limbs.  Very unpleasant to me also were the sessions of Sports and Physical        Training taken by Mr Hartley.  Mr Hartley's main object in life was to stop people folding their arms.  This pulled down the scapulars and inhibited the pectorals and led to a puny hunched chest and rounded shoulders.  The posture making the man, moral depravity would rapidly follow and in the end national disaster.              Roundshoulderedness had got so bad in the nineteen thirties that ignominious defeat by Hitler had only just been avoided.  He was there to see that the same did not happen again. He was constantly shouting out "Don't fold your arms like Nap-oleon", with the emphasis on the Nap, so that it rhymed with Slap-the-tea-on.  I could never stop myself remembering that the picture of Slap-the-tea-on leaving for Elba on HMS Bellephoron in Aunt Olive's front room showed the little Corsican as remarkably pouter-chested in spite of his execrable arm-folding habit.  But I thought it prudent not to raise this difficulty.  We hung from wallbars which I hated.  Far worse, we had to jump over a wooden horse which frightened me.  We also played football.  We were all given the names of Manchester United players, the thinking being that these inspiring identifications would improve our game, but since there were far more of us than eleven several people had to share the same name which led to much confusion.  I was Mitten the Third.  Except for the name of Johnny Carey, United's Irish international fullback and captain.  Mr Hartley always took the name of Johnny Carey for himself and shared this distinction with nobody.  When we played pick-up-a-side games Mr Hartley always scored most of the goals and took all of the free kicks and penalties.  There's only one Johnny Carey.  He was a shortish stout man with receding fair hair and rather coarse features.  I hated him.

In spite of my lack of enthusiasm for much of the teaching at Sacred Heart Inkerman Street I would probably have got on well enough if all other things had been equal.  At least much of the teaching was thorough if uninspiring and most of the other lads in the school were by nature friendly and easy going.  In fact during my first few weeks at Sacred Heart I established a definite rapport with the boys who sat closest to me in our form, and even had visions of establishing a regiment as glorious in its chronicles of non-co-operation and disruption as that in which I had been the loyal comrade of Dave Ruff and Nigel Barker. There was Freddie Gillespie, a lad with carrotty hair and, it appeared, a relaxed and undisciplined disposition.  Colin Cleaver was from Newcastle and had a strong geordie accent, for which reason we called him George.  "A were tillin' mi mairtes. N'cass'll 'll win the champ'ship this yeer.  They'd bet-ter".          His father was something to do with ships and their repair and worked in Salford dry docks.  There was also Rory MacNamara, a sworn enemy, though compatriot, of Mother Mary Consalata of The Five Wounds.  We had begun to get quite a nice little corner going at the back of the classroom and called ourselves the Stern Gang in imitation of the Jewish terrorists who at that time were            figuring prominently in the daily newspapers, their unfortunate lack of British nationality being more than made up for as qualification for role models by the daring bloodthirstiness of their deeds.  We were becoming expert at muttering in a loudish jeering voice "Fucking cow" just quietly enough for Sister Louise       of the Immaculate Conception not to hear it clearly.  If she did hear something and asked you what you were saying you replied "I was just saying to Gillespie.  Give me my book and ink now. I am             anxious to get on with my work".  Alliances were being cemented.  I had already swopped my whole cigarette-card collection of Famous Footballers of the Nineteen Forties plus my lucky marble The Patricroft Flyer plus a hundred-and-twentier conker with George Cleaver in return for information about where to get over the wall and look through a crack at the back of the neighbouring girls' school toilets.  The girls' school - Mary Immaculate High School - was round the corner in Main Street.  But their playground backed on to the other side of the road opposite Sacred Heart.  George, who was getting quite a nice little            business going, claimed to be able to show you a way of climbing over the wall and where to peer through a crack at the back of the toilets.  According to his vigorously prosecuted promotional advertising you could see girls, so George Cleaver claimed, pulling up their skirts and exposing their knickers as they entered the cubicles.  Blue ones, white ones, pink ones, Mary Immaculate had 'em all.  Having risked so much and agog for         immediate return on my investment, I climbed over the wall as instructed at the earliest possible opportunity and applied a lecherous eye on the crack to begin  my lascivious vigil.                                                                                           

Picture my mortification therefore on discovering that the view through the crack was blocked by a lavatory cistern, the flushings of the cistern whipping up my concupiscence  even at the very moment that  they frustrated it.  I was definitely not amused, quite failing to appreciate the value of so early an instruction in the ironic structure of reality. I went back to George and complained bitterly, but he invoked the principle of caveat emptor. The matter remained unresolved between us.  This difference between myself and George Cleaver did not prevent me, however, from continuing to participate with him and the rest of the Stern Gang in our customary pastimes. We kicked old tins round the school yard and re-lived Man United's triumphs.  Also, as it was the summer of the 1948 ashes test series during my first full term at Sacred Heart, we replayed endless versions of highlight moments from the tests.  There was Compton's 184 in the thunder and lightning during the first test at Nottingham.  And it's Lindwall bowling to Compton.  And Compton crashes the ball to the boundary with his famous negligent sweep shot.  Four more to England's brylcreemed Denis.  There was also the Australians' 404 for 3 in a day to win the fourth test at Leeds - it was the summer holidays by  now - an action that we had some scruples about impersonating, for Bradman and his men were after all Australians; but on the principle that "Art is international, Mr Armstrong" (as Arthur Mailey replied immortally when upbraided by his captain Warwick Armstrong for discussing the secrets of the legbowler's craft with Tich Freeman during the 1921 series) we vicariously revived that stupendous feat as well. And it's another scorching four from the flashing blade of the little man in the baggy green cap.  The most frequent exercise in anamnesis however and the most vividly re-presented   was the  re-enactment of the episode in the third test at Old Trafford in which Lancashire's Pollard had hit a ball straight into the kidneys of the Australian Sid Barnes who was fielding at silly short leg.  This lively dramatisation  - mimesis being the formal medium of catharsis in tragic art as Aristotle teaches - involved Barnes frothing at the mouth, Pollard on his knees howling with contrition, ambulances rushing to the scene from Manchester Royal Infirmary and from Hope - Weow Weow Weow Weow Weow Weow - Sir Humphrey Tanner FRCS a famous surgeon who was crazy about cricket and happened to be watching the game rushing out from the Old Trafford pavilion to the middle - Out of my way Out of my way I'm a doctor - and a deathbed speech from Barnes who assumed, for purposes of the dramatic tragic action, that he was dying.  G'bye fowks. Si'y g'bye for me to mey gil b'ck in Aussie.  Len Hutton was the gritest betsm'n I ivver pliyed aginst.  Keep y'r peckers up, mites.  Aaauuuurrrschlmpfph uggrk grhhh sssss nnn.  So on the crofts of Julius Caesar street and Frobisher Street, all through the summer evenings of 1948, these epic passages were re-enacted against the declining splendours of the day,  under evening skies hanging over the chimney pots like mauve and lilac silken awnings stretched out above the tournaments of kings upon lines of pegs.

So  during the long summer term and the summer holidays of 1948 life went by well enough, and I was therefore wholly unprepared for the great changes that would come about following the advent into our form at the beginning of the new Michaelmas term of Oswald Black.  He was quite a short dark boy of initially unremarkable appearance.  But he had extraordinarily compelling feverish blue eyes, and some mysterious power in his personality whereby he was able to awaken the slumbering demons in the     personalities of others.  He established his dominant position in the form hierarchy by means of an incident that occurred only three days after the new term had begun.  During lunch break a lad called Nat Kelly discovered a mouse running about the corner of the classroom.  Immediately a crowd gathered and began to      shout abuse and death threats at the mouse and began to throw books at the terrified little thing, and started to block off its escape by moving desks across its path.  Enter upon this scene Oswald Black.  The mouse was almost hit by a flying maths book and turned desperately and sharply in the direction, as it happened, of Oswald.  With a movement of his hand as quick as the spring of a trap snapping shut Hard Black, as he came to be known after this incident, swept the mouse up off the floor and squeezed it in his hand.  With superb timing he waited for a dramatic instant, and then dropped the little lifeless and shapeless grey bit of pulp into a circle of intense awestruck silence.  One moment there was a seething mob, the next this frozen silence.  From that moment on his authority was total.  He had a curious kind of demonic mental energy that enthralled and enslaved, and was expert at manipulating his followers' emotions.  It rapidly became apparent that his chosen inner cabinet, invited to share his power in return for compliance with his will, were the former members of the Stern Gang, with the exception of myself.  From the very beginning I was driven out with jeers, curses, withering sarcasm, sly kicks in the ankle and sudden attacks from behind, in which the attacker would grip your neck in an armlock and squeeze to near strangulation.

To my intense   mortification my former mates ganged up against me without hesitation.  My eyes smarted with tears of fury at this craven miserable disloyalty. My tears only piqued the relish of my persecutors.  "Cry Ba-by! Goo 'ome to y'r mam!"  It was my first lesson in the psychology of sacrifice; the shared blood of the victim binds the sacrificers together in a bloodguilt which allays their own feelings of vulnerability and requires ever more blood to sustain itself.  Oswald introduced smoking and would disappear behind the toilets with his courtiers to share Woodbines. Not to be outdone I went into Ingram's for some boiled sweets and then when Mr Ingram's back was turned stole a packet of Woodbines from the shelf beside the counter.  The technique was to keep staring hard out of the shop window when he turned round again to weigh out the sweets, as if you were compulsively       fascinated by something outside.  When he asked you what it was you said as guiltily as you could "Oh nothing Mr Ingram" quite failing to restrain yourself from taking just one more peep. He would then keep looking out of the window himself and wouldn't notice that the Woodbines had gone.  "Thanks Mr Ingram.  Mi Mam sends her regards".  I retired behind Foster's woodyard with the intention of losing my virginity.  I took a cigarette from out of the packet.  The smell was harsh and rank and dangerous.  There it lay in the palm of my hand, a thin white forbidden but libidinously arousing and numinous tube.  Goodbye to my childhood. Farewell the innocence of youth. This was the rite of passage whereby I would become a man.  I offered the cigarette up to the sun. It was a solemn moment.  Trembling with excitement I placed the fag between my lips.  The sharp bitter taste caught the back of my throat and made me retch.  But no great achievement was ever pulled off without preliminary ordeal and trial.  Think of all those knights battling for their ladies' favours.  Churchill during the war.  Nelson.  Sir John Moore at Corunna.  Captain Oates.  Shaking violently I struck a match from the box I had purloined off the mantelpiece in the front room at 15 Julius Caesar Street and inexpertly tried to light  the end of the cigarette.  I had to have several goes and got through several matches before I managed to synchronize flame and suck, my stomach heaving ever more rebelliously, and then finally, one end of the cigarette now charred and the other fraying and wet, I shut my eyes and sucked as hard as I could.  Ten thousand monkeys instantaneously urinated into my open mouth as a bucking bronco hurled me into the middle of a sewage farm.  Moral and physical disgust crashed and roared through my body like unleashed wild beasts.  I lay on the grass retching violently, wishing only to die, my eyes smarting and my nose clogged with vomit.  Never would I ever smoke again.  Never, never, never, never, never.  From now on, for me, only the good clean life.  The fresh green of the surrounding grasses reached out to me as from that         paradise which only the righteous can know. From now on I would always, always be good. Oh how broad is the way that leads to destruction and how narrow the path of virtue.  But innocence, abused and lost, how lovely thou art.   I arose and picked up the cigarette packet to hurl it as far from me as I could.  But then       a thought struck me.  Cigarettes were valuable.  There was no absolute reason, as far as I could see, why the righteous life upon which I was now embarked should exclude the occasional politically astute maneouvre.  Saints weren't suckers. No sir.  Why not give them as a peace offering to Oswald Black?.  Perhaps even restoring some of my lost bad boy credit by dropping hints that I had lifted them off Ingram's counter under his very nose.

On the following day I chose a moment during mid-morning break         when Conrad was lounging with his henchmen against the wall of the bicycle shed, and plucked up my courage and approached him.  "Oh, by the way" I said in as offhand a way as I could muster            "Would you like some fags?  I've more than I can handle at the moment".  A look of ferret-like sharpness crossed Oswald's features, to be followed by a soft mask of menacing ambiguity.             "Yeah thanks.  Thanks, kid.  That's good."  I passed the packet over to him.  With a movement as swift and deft as that with which he had crushed the mouse he ripped the packet in half and pushed one half of the torn cigarettes with their tobacco hanging in exposed shreds straight into my mouth.  With compulsive reaction I fell to my knees vomiting copiously.  Delighted jeers and howls rang out from the bystanders.  From nowhere a crowd gathered and as if by electric telegraph the news flashed round of this latest magnificently executed coup of Hard Black's.  Each time my head came up from retching I could see all around me the jostling bobbing faces of those I knew and had thought of as friends, shrieking and howling like beasts, become ugly with cruelty, jeering and taunting, fascinated by the vomit, the humiliation and the gratuitous display of power.  For the moment they were released from the     pain of individuality into an intoxicated brotherhood of violence.  From that time I became a stateless person, without civil rights, the unpitied object of any trick or humiliation.  Even the weediest boy in the form felt confident in taunting me, knowing that he could appeal to the huge power of Oswald to take his part.  My former comrades of the back corner of the classroom would flick ink blots across my work - Oops sorry! Fancy that happening.  Sorry, kid.  Once somebody jabbed a sharp pen nib into the back of my neck during Mr Hartley's class and I cried out, and was sent to Mother Mary Consalata to be wopped for causing a disturbance, the rest of the class openly, and Mr Hartley covertly, sniggering at the injustice.  People tripped me as I went to my desk so that I fell on the classroom floor and all my books went flying.  Worst of all, my adenoidal problems which had begun in the very first week that we arrived in Salford increased considerably.  Whether this was the result of anxiety or was caused by the continual exposure to the Manchester climate I do not know.  But I snivelled, coughed, sniffed, cleared my throat and blew my nose almost     continually.  Oswald invented the name Snotbag.  The jibe was taken up with enthusiasm.  "Hey Snotbag, t' Lancashire cotton industry's in a bit of a crisis.  Can't get enough cotton to mek y'r 'andkerchiefs. Ship Canal's got blocked with snot".  To get away I took to going to the corner of the playground where the smallest children gathered but jeering gangs followed me. "D'yer know what Snotbag did?  Picked 'is nose like a little kid".  The misery of this persecution became unendurable.        Snot-bag! Snot-bag! Snot-bag!

I knew that if things went on in this way for much longer an injury would be done to my self-esteem that would incapacitate me for ever.  I knew too, now, that if Hitler had conquered Britain even in friendly Salford monsters of cruelty would have appeared like the slugs creeping out from under the brick footings of the school toilets to man the Gestapo and the SS.  As if Oswald were already the commandant of a concentration camp set up for enemies of the regime near Accrington I became             pathologically terrified of him.  I had terrible dreams in   which he wore a high peaked cap and with a flick of his white gloved hand sent me towards huge bronze doors which were slowly         opening onto fiery darknesses.  I separated myself from him as much as possible and cowered in corners, as a result of which, not surprisingly, he took delight in strolling over towards me, with menacing lunging gait and cool controlling eyes, exulting in my involuntarily shaking limbs.  It grew worse and worse. Then one pouring wet day in mid-October this momentum of events suddenly reached a climax.  Because it was very wet everybody had stayed in the form room during mid-morning break, and because of the dampness in the air my snivelling and sniffing were exceptionally bad.  Somebody asked why Nat Kelly wasn't in school that day.  Strolling over to me with his tight-legged rolling walk, a mode of perambulation copied from westerns and       much in vogue at the time, Oswald looked me over contemptuously as I shrank into my corner, as if I were a slave in a market, and said "Got drowned when Snotbag did a gob. Drowned 'alf Lancashire".  There was a dutiful snigger from his followers, as if it might be the quick fawning patter of clapping from his courtiers at the bon mot of some petty Renaissance tyrant.  A flash of anger shot through me.  I think it was the matter of factness of the sniggering, the taking for granted that I was Oswald's butt.  Become nothing but this flash of anger, without   thinking I put out a foot as Oswald turned away and tripped him so that he went down sprawling on the wooden floor with a cry of pain.

The world shuddered, stood poised for a moment, and then turned sickeningly upside down.  In an instant I felt Oswald's power draining away from him and an electric thrill running through the bystanders.  It was, I grasped. a thrill of recognition.  I had expressed in physical fact what many others who had also suffered from Oswald's persecution, though not to the extent that I had, had only harboured in the secrets of their inner chambers.  As in a rapid succession of slides across a magic lantern screen the projection of these succeeding phases of awareness passed over Oswald's features too.  With the dawning of the possibility of loss of power and empire his face went dirty white and ugly. "Why, you filthy little toe-rag" he ground out in the stereotyped phraseology of his kind, his teeth literally gnashing "You'll pay for this".  A hubbub broke out, some bystanders shouting for Oswald, some for me.  The power of Oswald's punch was legendary, indeed it was his major vehicle for the enforcement of his will.  He came at me winding back his arm as if it were a spring.  By reflex action I sprang aside and by accident stumbled into a desk.  To save myself from falling I involuntarily stuck out my leg and through complete chance Oswald again tripped over it and went sprawling, in the opposite direction this time, hitting his head against one of the iron bolts that fastened the desk seats to their frames.  Pandemonium broke out at this latest act of defiance by David against Goliath.  I could feel the crowd swinging over to my side. It was rather like a boom lurching over from port to starboard in a tacking sailing boat.  What did the crowd think?  Did they imagine that all this time I had just been pretending to be a weakling, just kidding Oswald along for my own amusement, so that I could turn the tables on him all the more spectacularly?  Political man is nothing if not an imbecile.  I knew that if Oswald once managed to land one of his swinging blows on my face or head I was finished.  I ducked and went into a clinch, grasping him round the waist as tightly as I could.  The crowd was cheering maniacally as if it were an eighteenth century bare fist fight with thousands of pounds riding on the outcome.  Blows rained on my back and neck.  He got me in the kidneys and I felt a sharp stab of pain.  With a supreme effort I removed one of my arms from his waist and pulled his lower leg from under him.                                                                  

We both went crashing to the floor.  There were electric lights flashing on and off and madly jangling bells and crazily careering stars and then I began to realize that Oswald was no longer fighting and everything had gone deathly quiet.  A pair of shiny black shoes, long black skirts, a leather belt, a rosary, the bottom edge of a wimple.  I knew inescapably that the next feature upon which my upwardly travelling gaze would alight would be the ruddy sternly reprimanding countenance  of Mother Mary Consolata.  "I am shocked at such behaviour in the house of the Lord.  Yez, Oswald Black, and your mother a daily mass-goer.  And yez Henry Bradford, your mother a holy Anglican. Yez will come with me."  Oswald and I reluctantly rose to our feet and followed her to her study to receive our punishment.  I was first.  "All for Jesus through Mary with a smile" threatened Mother Mary Consolata menacingly.  "All for Jesus through Mary with a smile" I simpered back.  Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!   The desk, the walls, Mother Mary Consolata, the pictures, the photograph of Matt Busby and Manchester United taken after the 4-2 defeat of Blackpool in the 1948 Cup Final, the door, the crucifix, the holy water stoup were dancing and jumping and throbbing and yelping and howling as if they were made of nothing but pain.  And then, through it all, I heard Mother Mary Consolata saying to Oswald "Yez will  be happy and take your punishment like a Christian.  Yez shall have two strokes extra".  Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! And then after what seemed an an infinity of time two strokes more. Thwack! Thwack! Oswald's face crumpled and broke open as if it were a squashed apple and he began to sob. O sweetness! O justice of the universe! How unsearchable are all thy mysteries and how wonderful all thy ways!  How sweet indeed it is to suffer in the cause of justice and righteousness! From that time Oswald's power was broken and never again did he or anybody else attempt             to make me miserable, I was never friends again with anybody in my form.  But release from the prison of my former persecution was all that I now asked.

As I was now friendless, at least as far as the fickle human         example was concerned, I turned to Bess for consolation and took her as my comrade on many adventures.  We walked for miles along the streets and canals, into Upper and Lower Broughton and to Monton and Eccles, wholly unrestricted in our audacious imaginative flights.  One day in late October we determined that the next Saturday we would make an expedition from Barton    Swing Bridge along the Bridgewater Canal as far as Worsley, and then walk in the woods there before returning on the tram or trolleybus.  This was the most adventurous expedition that we had yet conceived.  But when the day dawned it was one of thick autumnal mist and I had some doubts as to the wisdom of the expedition.  Would we get lost?  Would we fall into the canal?       I went round to Auntie Alma's to consult Bess.  Bess was very   anxious to go, not barking joyously as Peter would have done but making a most persuasive kind of refined snuffle and gazing piteously at the lead hanging on the parlour wall, so we decided that we would risk the fog and go on the expedition.  Auntie Alma - from whom I kept the knowledge that we were thinking of going near water into which in the thick mist we might fall, a kindness really as she would worry so - gave me a key to the house so that I could let myself and Bess in on our return.  Uncle Ernest it appeared was off banding and Auntie Alma was going to buy a new hat at Kendals in Deansgate, as she had to go to a wedding the following weekend, and wouldn't be back until seven o'clock in the evening.  So off we went and caught the trolley bus up to Trafford Park and walked to Barton. When we arrived there both the swing road bridge and the aquaduct were closed as a ship was about to come through. We waited for the ship but nothing came.  Had they made a mistake?  Would we be waiting all day?  Dear sir, I was disgusted while walking with my dog the other day to be kept waiting for a whole day for Barton Swing Bridge to open.  This is disgusting.  Is this what we fought the war for?  Yrs sincerely, Your obedient but nauseated servant Henry Bradford.  While we were waiting, as still no sign of the bridge opening, we walked up to Barton Power Station.  The tall cooling towers were amazing in the mist, looming black cliffs of Abraham, mighty rooks in a game of giant's chess, each one of them a huge piece that some giant playing Manchester Chess - a game truly of the gods - that he would lift up, he would pick up a cooling tower, this giant, and with a casual flick would take the Free Trade Hall and the Royal Exchange and knock them off the face of the earth and put the City Hall in check. His harsh triumphant laughter rings out over the city and can be heard all the way from Stockport to Bolton.  All at once there was a hoarse wail from the approaching vessel.  We hurried back to the swing bridge.  We waited.  Another wailing groan from the approaching ship finding her way blindly through the mists.  Another wail.  A giant with whooping cough. And then another, a long mournful hooting of hopelessness  and despair, almost upon us, surrounding us, invading the air, almost coming it seemed from the earth under our feet, the wailing funereal sound is entering our very souls, and then - O wonder, O marvel of the deeps, with further long mournful wailings of her hooter a Manchester Liner slipped into view, a materialization from the world of the spirits, a swiftly moving shadow hung on gauze and a black wraith of the mists, her bulk become  dark air, as enchanted and insubstantial as a transfer on the swirling fogs, a Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship crewed only by shadows and shades.  Hrrraaaawwooop!  Hrrraaawwoooop!   HRRRRAAAWWOOOOP!   On and on she comes, as silent as the surrounding mists engulfing her but for these admonitory wailings proclaiming the mortality of  flesh, and swiftly she slips by, as if steered by an invisible Charon along the dark sluggish stream to Pomona or Nine Dock, where seated grim and judicious in the Customs House in the Docks Offices on Eight Dock at the head of Trafford Road, Anubis, the terrible dog-headed god, will weigh in his scales of final justice to the last jot and tittle the merit of each one of the cargo of terrified and anxious souls who even now are being swept to their final and eternal  doom.             HRRRRAAAAWWOOOOOP!  HRRRRAAAAWWOOOOP! Hrrrraaaawwoooop!             hrraawoop!  hrrooop!   hroo  And as if she had never been she is gone.  With a great grinding and clanging the swing bridge swung across the canal, and, as if joining the cheerful substantial world of mortals again, we crossed the Ship Canal and are off up the towpath of the Bridgewater.

All was transformed to magic by the shining mists lit uncannily from within by the inhibited radiance of the sun.  You could smell the silence coming up from the water.  And other smells too, those of the death and decay of the year, dank leaves and slimey reeds,  stinking rubbish tipped from passing barges and  rank smells of mortality, the aimlessly floating corpse of a  rat and  the rotting bodies of hedgehogs that had gone down to the canal edge to drink and had toppled in. Nauseous gasses seeping out from the decaying remains of a multitude of formerly living forms; the canal giving back its creatures to the earth.  We will soon be passing the Eccles packet house where, according to my Uncle Ernest, people used to wait to catch barges travelling to and fro along the canal as they wait for buses today.  And for heavens' sake what's that? A flash of silver in the water.  The fin of a pike?  According to Rory MacNamara, in the canal where it passes the Kelloggs  factory further down in Trafford  Park there are ten foot long pikes grown mighty on the cornflakes swept out into the canal with the warm water from the cooking  processes.  Stoopid. What a liar. Jerk.  But hey hang on a minute.  It could be possible.  This is after all Manchester, city of marvels and place of wonders. Why shouldn't pike thrive mightily on cornflakes and warm water? And might not such puissant and prodigious  kings of the canal even sometimes  make their way right up here towards Patricroft Bridge?  I shivered at the thought of the monsters even now patrolling the depths by my side.  I forced myself to scan the face of the water for cleaving fin or bubbling surge lest even at this moment a huge ten foot long pike should rise up out of the oceans and seize a passing dog - thanks be to heaven, Bess is happily trotting along hugely         enjoying this cornucopia of disgusting smells. And the monstrous pike it seems are all hidden behind the coral reefs today.                                                                              

Phew1 Thank goodness. It is just as well that the canal bank is fairly empty for Bess and I need rest after our latest espionage expedition to get vital information for the President of Philharmonia.  Outside the window the military bands are playing and the splendidly uniformed soldiers are marching by the President's podium in ceremonial formation and the crowds are going wild with enthusiasm.  Little do they know that but for the atom bomb secrets that Bess and I have stolen from the rival republic of Nicotania they would all be charred crisps by now.  "That was a rough ride.  I'm so tired" yawns Bess as she gnaws on one of Warburton's juiciest bones with the contentment of one who has performed a job well done.  "Leave it to Bess and me, Mr President" we had said, as we negligently sipped our cocktails on his verandah when he had first told us of the tragic dilemmas of his people, "We specialize in this sort of thing".  We are now going under the Patricroft Bridge on the Liverpool Road and passing the Bridgewater Mill, a huge fortress rising from the banks as sullen and unbreachable as Bamburgh Castle louring over its northern sea. Hello down there, you scabby varlet, what wish you with my Lord of Bamburgh?  A boon, a boon, I crave salvation for my soul and to undertake pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  There was a knock on the door.  Come in.  Good Heavens it is Mr President Rampas Spineshook himself.  Good morning Mr President.  We thought you were taking the parades.  I have urgent work for you, he says.  Oh no, we wail, we've only just got back from Nicotania. I have grave news, he says. Auntie Alma has been captured by Boris Koughdrop the Russian spy and is being held in Trafford Park.  We leap to our feet, all tiredness forgotten now.  Auntie Alma? Oh how dastardly.  The coward. We are on our way Mr President.  But before we can go we are held up because Bess is snuffling in an old bit of newspaper containing the rotting remains of fish and chips.  Good dog, Bess, good dog, drop it, drop it.  There's a good girl.  Come on girl, we've got work to do.                                                                                                               

Auntie Alma, said the President leaning gravely over his wide desk and gazing at us with his wise imploring eyes, is being held in the Brooke Bond Tea factory in Trafford Park and her personality is being changed by drugs so that she will become all argumentative and sharp-tongued like Aunt Olive.  She will then be used as a propaganda weapon on American radio chat shows.  Oh no! How dastardly! The love that will be lost to the world!  Fatigue forgotten, bone abandoned, cocktails swiftly drained we are all attention.  The railway bridge is rising from the mists.  A thunder of a train passing overhead.  Bung-a-der-dung  Bung-a-der-dung Bung-a-der-dung Bung-a-der-dung.  Two swans drift by, white and remote and beautiful in the mystery of their monogamous love.  We are at Nasmyth's Wharf where the Duke of Bridgewater once received Queen Victoria who came to visit his works in a barge, the barge she sat in like a burnished throne burning on the water, purple the sails and so perfumed - they would need to be in this canal - so perfumed that the winds were lovesick with them,  silver the oars keeping time to the tune of flutes, pretty dimpled boys smiling like cupids whose fans did seem to glow the cheeks they cooled, Prince Albert noble in the poop gorgeously arrayed and armoured cap-a-pie like Anthony himself, the Duke of Bridgewater bowing low and throwing down his cape and saying "Land, Gracious   Madame",  Sidney, the driver of The Pride of Preston, with gravely lowered head  ready to inform the queen about double valved cylinders and McKenzie 525 high compression chambers, Slogger Watkins raising  his inspired baton on high and gloriously leading huge massed choirs and orchestras into The Entry Of The Queen Of Sheba, Len Hutton offering his bat in homage, Matt Busby on his knees murmuring Manchester United is at your command Your Majesty, Cyril Washbrook - so it was that two nights later we found ourselves jumping out of a Lancaster bomber on a moonlit night over Trafford Park.                                                                

Bess, Henry?  Maps, grenades? Suicide pills?  Yep yep yep. All checked.  Five four three two one Go! Go! Wheee-eeee-eeeesshh! We are out of the aircraft and into the slipstream of the plane - it's funny you can never actually remember the moment when you actually left the plane - and then the plane pulls away and there is complete and absolute and wonderful silence.  And there is Trafford Park below us silvered and glorious in the moonlight.  All stretched out below us white and vulnerable and nakedly undefended are  Metro-Vickers, Glovers, the Carborundum factory, John Ashworth Timber, Courtauld's,  and then laid out like rows of sparkling silver bars Six Dock, Seven dock, Eight Dock and finally, nearly half a mile long and bright and glittering in the moonlight Nine Dock and at the end of Nine is Number Two Grain Elevator and then the Ship Canal itself twisting like a flashing corkscrew, no it can't be doing that, the whole point of the Ship Canal was to straighten out the Irwell, the Ship Canal as brilliant and flashing and undeviatingly straight as a drawn sword.  At this point in my pre-occupations I tripped over a fisherman's rod and jerked his line clean out of the water.  Suddenly it was pandemonium.  The rod is tipping up, the float is coming plopping out of the water, the lead weight falling back again with a splash, the fisherman  is arising from his canvas seat red and raging shouting Hey Oop y' blahnd littl' booger watch whe'er y'r goin', Bess and I gripped by panic are streaking off up the towpath, Bess loping along easily and swiftly and for once barking and woofing mad with excitement, I am running as if all the demons of hell are after me, hopping over more fisherman's rods, more shouts of Hey Oop th'ere   Y' da-aft booger  Watch whe'ere y' goin' y' blanhd little sod, on and on and on, no time to draw breath, I can see out of the corner of my eye a terrace of houses on the other side of the canal shooting in and out and up and down as if elasticated, we are rushing past the Eccles Spinning Mill towered and pinnacled and  cupola'd as if it is a Byzantine church which is itself spinning furiously like one of its own jennies, but now through  it all I can hear the great steam hammer of Nasmyth's forge still bonking out its great tuneless bonk as if it alone has remained sane in a world now ricochet-ing crazily  streaking past like madly jostling racing cars, past jitterbugging and charlestoning Armstrong Shackleton and Gardiner's Engineering works, another distempered  row of houses flash by cartwheeling and somersaulting as if themselves on a bucking speedboat, until at last, panting and breathless but safe, we arrive at Monton Mill, a massive moated castle as secure as Conwy or Harlech where surely we can seek sanctuary - a boon, a boon, we are but  poor wandering knights seeking adventure, Sir Millowner,  we are pursued by yon varlet fishers and would crave the swords of your goodly men-at-arms to come to our assistance under the law    of chivalry.  For verily Sir Millowner - but the fishermen have receded into the distance, so we leave them fishing with their peace restored and their arid plain stretching suburbanly behind them.

On from Monton past Westwood Park.  The opposite bank is now all trees, their last bronze splendours of the year hanging glorious in the mist like the fleeces of the Argonauts.  Bump, we have landed.  We struggle out of our parachutes.  Now, how to find Brooke Bond?  We see Pearl Duck.  Nice night, Pearl.       How do we get into Brooke Bond Tea?  Bro-oke Bond Te-ea?  Eh, y' wanter fahnd Silon t' Dwarf, e'es naht-watchman at Glover's          Ca-ables the da-aft sod.  'e knaws al' abowt ma-gic po-owtions.  e'll give y' anti-dawte.  So through the strange nocturnal streets of Trafford Park, their wonders doubled by the deep   black shadows of the radiantly argent moonlit night to find Silon the Dwarf at Courtauld's.  He is a little red-cheeked bright eyed gnome who cackles merrily, as you would expect in an elvin night-watchman.  He he he! he cackles, He he he! as he pokes out his cheery face from his nightwatchman's kiosk.  We give him a golden leaf picked from a chestnut tree on Monton Green and in return he gives us the potion and instructions about how to get to Brooke Bond.  We are now almost at Worsley and the water has changed into its mysterious Worsley red, as if it were a kind of orange blood, and we are almost at the boatyard and the black-and-white gabled packet-house where just beyond here the canal branches and enters the black mouths of   the mines where Grandpa Rotten had worked, disappearing into the black caverns as sinisterly and horrifyingly as the frog being drawn slowly and remorselessly down into the jaws of the snake.  And so over the humpback bridge and down into Worsley Woods.  We are now at Brooke Bond Tea. There is a sentry in SS uniform at the gate.  We are so close we can see his lightning flashes and the death's head on his collar.  Bess engages him in conversation while I creep up behind him and then let him have it.  Ratatatatatatata.  Ratatatatatatata.   His body spins viciously in a pas-de-deux of death.  We make our way into the factory.  The smell of tea is overwhelming.  Where is Auntie Alma?  Through the drying rooms.  Through the blending rooms.  We have now thrown over all pretence of secrecy.  We run through the factory shouting - Auntie Alma! Where are you?  Woof Woof!  Auntie Alma?  Where can she be?  The manager's office! Of course!  It is locked.  No problem.  I let the lock have it.  Ratatatatatata  Ratatatatatata The lock disintegrates like a crushed cream cracker.  We surge inside, unstoppable now.                                            

The scene that greets our eyes is of an extreme and       challenging nature.  Auntie Alma is completely naked except for the new hat that she has bought in Deansgate.  She is being pressed against the wall of the manager's office by the villainous Boris Koughdrop.  He is forcing her to drink the drugged drink.  Her eyes sweep round the room wildly, hopelessly, desperately, beseechingly as she unwillingly is forced to drink.  In the very action of the moment, even as we watch, her features begin to turn into those of Aunt Olive, her lovely new Kendal's hat into Olive's dumpy cloche, one of Olive's best Sunday High Tea twinsets complete with artificial  pearls appearing as if my magic to clothe her naked corporal members.  Not this time, Boris Koughdrop!  I let him have it.  Ratatatatatata  Ratatatatatatata.  He crumples like a collapsing lemon meringue pie and blood spurts everywhere.  His mouth opens feebly and he gives two little strangulated gasps and then he is for ever still.  Auntie Alma!  Are you alright?      Aunt Olive stares back at me resentful and furious. "Whe'ere y' bin?  Why are y' so la-ate?  Dreamin' as usual y' dozy boy.  Y'll be la-ate for y' own funeral."  "Here, drink this Auntie Alma".  She drinks the potion.  Before my very eyes she turns back into herself, arising like some  fairy queen emerging gorgeous from the waters,  naked, ravishing, Deansgate behatted, her breasts as round as pomegranates, her buttocks full ripe juicy melons, her waist a sheaf of gathered wheat, her eyes soft pools of love.  "Oh Auntie Alma! How beautiful you are!"  "Oh thank you Henry" she murmurs in her gentle soft humming-like-a-cello-string low voice - an excellent thing in woman - "Oh thank you, Henry.  And you too, dear dear Bess.  Thank you Thank you . You shall have my love for always."  "Oh it's nothing, Auntie Alma" I  say "I love you."

By this time we were in Worsley Woods and we made our way to Grandma Silvertop's Cottage.  I was convinced that Grandma Silvertop was a witch.  For one thing she had sixteen cats, all sleek beautiful creatures, and who but a witch would be doing with sixteen cats?  Furthermore her garden, which she kept with          the utmost devotion and care, was not walled round or fenced like any normal person's garden but simply ran fenceless into the woods so that you couldn't see where garden ended and forest began.  It was also full of herbs for her brews.  If ever I had seen a gingerbread cottage this was it.  I never went to Worsley Woods without allowing myself a bit of a stare at Grandma Silvertop's cottage, its fascination never failing.  On this occasion, picture my astonishment on seeing that she had a clothes line propped up in the garden and on the clothes line a row of the flimsiest and most delectable ladies' scanties that ever you did see.  So that was it!  Obviously in her normal septuagenarian incarnation she could have little use for such erotically charged garments.  But when she flew on her broomstick!  O then, yes then!  Then she changed into the most beautiful young maiden to work her spells, and speeding through the air with one of her cats clinging  tight to her besom would land, say, in the West End, or at Ascot on Derby day perhaps, to wreak goodness knows what magic mayhem in the foolish hearts of men.  Contemplating the garments on the clothes line I was overcome with a deep desire to try on Auntie Alma's underclothes.  Why not?  She would never know.  And perhaps if I     could only once but touch these intimate garments she might by contiguous magic come to be in love with me as I was in love with her.  Magic works after all through contact with intimate           and personal possessions (I knew this from perusing One Hundred Household Tips in Ingrams').  And then she would be so happy.  Obviously if she were in love with me she would be utterly happy instead of melancholy as she so habitually and mysteriously was.  I pictured to myself a happily laughing Auntie Alma deeply in love with me and suffused with delight over a funny turn I had put on for her.   Come to think of it, I had a moral obligation to try on Auntie Alma's underclothes.  I had been dodging this obligation for years, not even allowing myself to think of it, - how puritannical I had been, how unloving, how narrow - but now, yes now, now I see, this very very day, this very afternoon I will address myself to this noble task, so vital a   part of my mission to make Auntie Alma happy.  Quick, quick, I said to Bess, Back to the trolley, back to Salford, quick,quick.  O the mysterious ways of fate.  Each person has an ordeal ordained for them in life, a narrow gate in a wall, but only through this fated gate lies the way to greater knowledge designed especially for them, and here on the very day that Grandma Silvertop's clothes line had revealed my fated path to me, on this very day uniquely I had the key to Auntie Alma's house with neither she nor Uncle Ernest returning until late evening.  O mysterious providence!  O pattern profound beyond the petty minds of men!

Through the seemingly endless time that we had to wait for the trolley to come and during all  the journey back to Weaste I could hardly contain my excitement and nervousness.  When the trolley put us down on Weaste Lane we dashed back up Hannibal Street and along Virgil Street and then up Frobisher Street to 32.  I was so excited I could hardly get the key into Auntie Alma's lock.  When we got into the house I shut the door, and Bess, tired out no doubt, went immediately to her basket and went to sleep. But I myself, firing on all cylinders, flushed with desire, the urgings of Eros pumping hectically through my veins, drew a deep breath, and then ascended the stair.  I went into Alma's and Ernest's bedroom.  A dressing table together with a long free standing mirror, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a double bed, wedding photographs, hairbrushes, a wicker chair.  I opened a drawer.  Ernest's pants and vests,  repugnantly unromantic.  I opened another drawer.  Alma's underwear!  As frilly and frothy and lacey and feminine as ever I had imagined.  A herbaceous border of knickers - white, pink, both coral and salmon, light blue, green, red, dark blue and - good heavens! black ones of woven silk!  It seemed even to me that for a lady of Auntie Alma's respectability in the late nineteen-forties silk black knickers were going it a bit.  I undressed breathing hard and fumbling clumsily as I tore off my clothes.  Even my own nakedness made my whole body hum and tingle with excitement.  Which  to choose.  Trembling I put out my hand and chose the black knickers and drew them on.   If one was going to commit a sin it might as well be a big one.  The feeling of the soft silk on the skin of my inner thighs was wildly delicious and so exhilarating I could have leapt ten feet into the air.  What about stockings?  I tried another drawer.  Only shoes.  Another.  Bits and bobs.  Another.  Ah! here were the stockings folded neatly pair by pair!  I chose a pair of nylons.  They shimmered with a thrillingly erotic sheen.  I found these more difficult to put on than I had imagined and first of all fell over hopping on my right leg while trying to pull a stocking onto my left, and then while hopping on my left leg laddered with my big toe the stocking that I was trying to pull onto my right.  Cripes, Auntie Alma would be so mad to find a ladder in her best nylons.  A good job that she's never going to find out who put it there.  Finding out by trial and error, I discovered that the best method - by this time I was on my fourth pair - it was best  to sit on the bed and ruck the stocking up so that you could put the whole of your foot into it at one go and then pull it over your heel and up your lower leg.  I at last managed to get both legs encased in stocking.

How to keep the stockings from falling down?  I knew from seeing my mother's heavily armoured whalebone corsets on washing day that what women did was to fasten the stocking tops onto buckles on little straps hanging down from the corsets.  Rootling further down in the knickers drawer I found some corsets.  But how on earth to put them on?  My imagination was defeated.  It was like one of those impossible spatial puzzles you get given for Christmas.  I decided to abandon the corsets.  In any case, compared with knickers and stockings and brassieres corsets were about as magical as chain mail. Did Alma have any garters?  The stockings drawer was the obvious place to look.  Brilliant! Garters!  Just what I needed.  Clever of me to think of looking in the stockings drawer.  I put them on.  I walked over to the mirror to survey myself.  What struck me at once was that the fair wavy-haired boy gazing back at me from the mirror, wearing long black shorts that came almost to his knees - knickers of the nineteen- forties were not the panty briefs of today - this figure reminded me of nobody so much as Billy Wright, Captain of England and Wolverhampton Wanderers.  And it's Billy Wright, captaining England in the ninety-fifth encounter with the old enemy Scotland on Wembley's hallowed turf, Wright passes to Matthews, Matthews to Mannion, Mannion to Finney the phantom flyer from Preston North End.  Finney is past the full back, no he isn't, yes he is, Finney shoots.  And McIntosh in the            Scottish goal pushes it round the post for a corner.  Good save! Billy Wright to take the corner.  In the mirror, Billy Wright, by this time even in spite of the garters one of the nylon stockings is beginning to fall about his knees, Billy gives a perfect demonstration of the technique of the corner kick as I had read it in Soccer My Way by Stanley Matthews.  Chest and shoulders pulled back, left leg steady to act as the fulcrum, long swing of the right leg, right instep UNDER the follow-through - And it's Billy Wright to take the corner kick.  And it's perfect!  A textbook corner from Billy Wright!  Nat Lofthouse gets his head to the ball! McIntosh punches it away!  It's bobbing about in the box!  And it's a goal!  It's a goal!  Henry Bradford coming through fast from the edge of the penalty area has scored! Henry Bradford has put the ball in the back of the net! And it's balls in the back of the net that count!  This brilliant young inside-right from Manchester United has scored on his debut for England!  And they don't come much better than this one.  It was a perfectly taken goal that scorched into the net giving the Scottish custodian no chance. They say old heads don't grow on young shoulders but this young man seems to have everything.  Matt Busby must be so proud.   So it's one-nil to England and Billy Wright's English lions are stalking rampant over the sacred turf of Wembley.  What a brilliant goal from young Henry Bradford of Manchester United and England!  And just listen to the crowd.  They're going crazy.  Just listen to it.  Brad-ford! Brad-ford! Brad-ford! Brad-ford! Brad -                                                                                             

There was a sickening sound of a loud click from downstairs.  The         front door!  No!  Auntie Alma home early!  It was impossible! Breaking into a cold and then hot sweat I tiptoed over to the drawers, scooping up discarded knickers and laddered stockings in armfuls and shoving them higgledy-piggledy into any old drawer, closed the drawers one after the other as quietly and as quickly as  I could and then - O horror! - I heard footsteps coming up the stairs.  Snatching up my scattered clothes and shoes in my arms I just had time to dive under the bed when the door opened.  It was Auntie Alma.  I had a limited but horrifyingly adjacent view of her shoes, ankles and lower calves.  There was a rustling sound.  She must be taking the hat out of its box and trying it on in front of the mirror.  If I could only stay completely still and sit it out she might go downstairs after she had tried on the hat and perhaps even leave the house and give me a chance to escape.  Unfortunately at this point I dropped one of my shoes.  Immediately the air was rent by a woman's screams and the sound of a female person leaping onto the top of a dressing room table.  "Ernest! Ernest! Come quick!  A mouse!  It's in the bedroom!" But these plaintive shrieks fell wholly ineffectually on the unhearing ear of the absent banding Ernest.  Perhaps she would run from the room and rush out of the house?  But perhaps she would take her courage in both hands and look under the bed?  I couldn't bear the thought of being detected stretched humiliatingly beneath the bed.  In any case, it was hardly the height of chivalry to leave a lady under the illusion that she was being assaulted by a       mouse when in fact there was none.  I crawled out from under the bed.  The wails of terror stopped abruptly in mid-scream as if somebody had flicked off a light switch.  Neither the Magdalen presented with the apparition of the Risen Lord, nor Europa realising that the bull was Zeus could have registered more       astonishment than did Auntie Alma now - still, I noticed, wearing the Kendal's hat - confronted with the spectacle of her nephew arrayed in nothing but her own knickers and nylons.  Her   jaw dropped.  Her already beautiful eyes widened into orbs of a     still more radiant lustre transparent with every motion of her       soul.  "I love you" I said.  There was a pause of seemingly infinite duration during which noises came up from the street outside as from a distant and remote formerly known universe.  Then Auntie Alma burst into tears.  Got down from the dressing room table.  And then put her arms round me in a long long affectionate hug.  I wept with tears of joy.  O how right I had been.  Fortune to the brave!  I had ventured and I had won!  Then Auntie Alma started to laugh.  Tears began to roll down her cheeks.  She could hardly breathe.  She clutched at her side and leant paralyzed against the wardrobe.  She laughed and laughed and laughed.  "Get - dressed" she gasped.  "I - go.  You.  Dressed.  I - outside" she croaked.  It was my turn to be astonished.  I felt first puzzlement and then embarrassment and then a terrible, terrible sense of rejection.  "You - dressed.  I - outside" she gasped and wheezed.  The great castles of romance which had so fortuitously appeared in the heaven of my life now crumbled into nothing and came crashing down from their heavenly eries to collapse ignominiously in heaps of dust.  The knickers which had so recently glowed and glittered with so enticing a glamour now seemed garments unutterably utilitarian and drear.  I wearily removed them when Auntie Alma had at last succeeded in leaving the bedroom.  Sadly I pulled on my own clothes, and then, rushing as fast as I could past Auntie Alma still weakly holding the bannister and wiping her eyes and gasping helplessly, tore down the stairs and out of the house and back up our own stairs to my bedroom in Julius Caesar Street, to hurl myself on my bed and weep bitter, bitter tears.