Where Tha's Muck Tha's Brass!

Joe placed his small leather holdall down behind him, and despite the small notice above the door which read, ‘Do not lean out of the carriage window,’ he did so.

‘Well luv it’s nearly time now,’ said his Mother, ‘and then you’ll be off and that’ll be that.’ She looked sad.

‘Cum on Mam it’s not that bad surely? And ya know its nowt ta do wi thee.’

‘But Joe yer me eldest lad and ta see thee going like this neigh on breaks me ‘eart. It’s not everyday summat like this ‘appens.’

‘Oh Mam don’t start roaring, ya know I can’t stop once you start.’

Joe tasted the salty tears as he kissed his mother one more time on the cheek. For a second he could hardly speak. He croaked, ‘so long Mam I’ll see thee soon enough.’ The Guard was shouting, ‘All aboard! All aboard please!’

She looked up at him.

‘Now then don’t forget ta write luv…I’ll miss ya luv I really will. Place won’t be the same without ya…I’ll allus treasure your luv. You’ve been a reet good son…’ her chin lowered and she started to walk away.

Vague images of grief and tragedy flickered in his mind. Somewhere a butterfly was flying out to sea: lost. La Fontaine’s duck had loved the white hen, yet after escaping together from the dreadful farmyard through the forest to the lake it was the duck that swam: the hen, following, drowned.

The fireman gave a long, mournful toot of the engine whistle as the driver climbed aboard; almost like welcoming a ships captain. Pigeons fled the rafters. The pale sun of midday shone through the glass-roofed station. Carriage doors slammed shut.

The guard looked up firstly, towards the barrier, then turned towards the engine; he looked at his watch and then raised the whistle to his lips and gave one final blast. He waved his green flag. The brake was released, the train pulled slowly out of the station, metal wheels clanking, pistons hissing. The train picked up speed, and above the roar of the engine, the plaintive cry of Joe’s mother, ‘did ya pick up your corned beef and piccalilli sarnies?’

His final glimpse was her standing among a small throng of people at the end of the platform who were all waving madly. Clouds of steam enveloped them.
‘Goodbye Joe I luv thee!’
‘Goodbye Mam!’ He shouted at the top of his voice. ‘ I luv thee too!’ The train went round a bend, and she was gone.

The town was busy. Edna walked slowly. She was going back to the small dry cleaning shop in Foster Square where she worked with her friend Amy. ‘Well he’s gone,’ she said as she entered the shop. She dabbed her nose with her hanky. Amy looked up, ‘Are ya all reet luv, ya look reet fed up?’

‘Well it’s just one thing after another Amy. It never seems ta stop. Today I say goodbye to our Joe. He walks outta one door, and most likely will not be in any rush ta cum back, and I found out this morning that our Geoffrey’s gone and put a lass int’ family way.’

‘Oh Edna! What thee gonna do?’

‘I don’t know…I haven’t had chance ta talk ta ‘im yet. But knowing Geoffrey, what wi ‘im being a bit more steadier than most, I suppose he’ll do ‘onourable thing and marry ‘er, which is more expense.’

‘Oh! by the way I nearly forgot, when ya were out that there cab driver fella called by asking for ya. Ya know what’s ‘is name, ‘ector?’
Edna looked up, ‘Really,’ all innocent like.

‘If ya ask me he reet fancies thee, and you a married woman at that.’

‘ Well what gives ya that impression,’ said Edna pinning a label to a dark brown overcoat.

‘Just the way ‘is eyes lit up above that there pipe he’s allus smoking. Ya know standing there, pipe int’ corner of ‘is mouth, and ‘is thumb tucked in’ is waistcoat pocket, almost like Councillor Ducksbury… ‘Is Edna about’ he was saying, trying to look over me shoulder.’

Edna felt a slight rush of blood to her cheeks. She smiled, ‘Well ya know what fellas a like…

On the long incline out of the town centre the engine laboured up towards Ripleyville, where it stopped at a signal, hissing and blowing as if gathering its breath before carrying on towards Lowmoor tunnel. Once through the other side they would have left Bradford altogether, and would be speeding towards Leeds.

Joe looked out of the carriage window. The sun had gone in. He could see West Bowling, his neighbourhood, lying there grimy and complacent among a dozen or so mills. Thousands of squalid secrets, and streets full of suffering, where on a daily basis childhood dreams were crushed under metal clogs clumping to and fro from the mill. Smoke belched up into the heavens from many chimneys. Sitting Bull sending smoke signals. ‘Prospects not good,’ thought Joe.

Day after day, near where he lived, the banging looms beat out a rhythm. In Spring Mill Street, large weaving sheds with rows of machinery, stretched for hundreds of yards into low roofed, windowless, interiors. The noise was thunderous; sign language was the only means of communication. It was like Whetherby Races at Whitsuntide where tic – tack men stood on podiums touching their fingertips and elbows. When Betty Alsop took her full set of teeth out, because they were killing her, Bill Bottomley used to say, ‘watching yon ordering a bag a chips for ‘er dinner was like looking at a bulldog chewing a wasp.’

Most of the workers were deaf by their mid-twenties. They got little or no recompense and nobody else would employ them, so they were lumbered. The touching, fingertip world of contact was the price that they paid to feed their dependents, and put textiles on the backs of the privileged.

Joe’s dad worked at Newlands Mill, but not in the weaving shed. He worked in the boiler house shovelling coal into the furnaces most of the day to keep the offices warm. He fiddled with gauges every now and then, and tapped glass thermometers, wiped his brow with a dirty cloth, sighed, scratched his backside, and in his quieter moments stood by the brass - handled doors of the boiler house cleaning them, and supping tea.

They were his pride and joy the boiler house doors. They shone like beacons, evidence he thought of his conscientiousness. His busiest day was Wednesday when the coal was brought over from Featherstone pit. He would spend most of the day shovelling it about and tidying up.

When the furnaces were roaring and the management was warm and content, Bob Senior, his charge hand, would get him to run round to the bookies in Ackworth Street.

‘Now then Tommy lad! ‘Ere’s two and six and I won’t thee ta put one and three-pence each way on ESB. It’s running int’ 2.30 at Doncaster. Oh yes and ‘ang on and for ‘t result and let me know what ‘appens. ‘Opefully they will be winnings.’

Off Tommy would run with his bit of paper and the money. Skipping almost, like a child, in all weathers, rain or shine. He was pleased to get out of the mill yard for half an hour. Mrs Cartwright had known him since he was a lad. ‘He’s not been reet sin he came back from that damn war ya know. Too many bombs if ya ask me.’

To a degree it was true. His behaviour had changed. At times he was subject to bouts of violent mood swings. He would become stubborn and ill tempered at what he construed as slight transgressions. He would stand there in front of the fire, his hands tucked in his boiler suit pockets laying down what he saw as his position in the grand order of things.

‘It takes a wise man to play the fool’ was one of his favourite sayings, as if his working life was some sort of game where he pretended to be an idiot in order to get given menial tasks, but all the time having the upper hand because of his superior wit and intelligence.

Most people just thought he was a fool; there was nothing wise about living in the damp back - to - back house in one of the shabbiest streets in West Bowling with an outside toilet that froze over in winter. There was nothing wise about being malnourished most of the time, and living with scores of children who lived nearby, who had deformed limbs from rickets, or died young of diphtheria, or wore leg irons as a result of being partly paralysed with poliomyelitis.

Newlands Mill was a monument to class division. Within its walls there was every conceivable type of person. It represented a cross section of class struggle all too familiar to Karl Marx and would not have gone amiss in Dickensian times.

It had been rebuilt in the years after December 1882, when the chimney collapsed, killing 54 people, mainly women and children. One child was as young as 8 years old. Mothers and daughters, Fathers and sons died that morning. Rescuers toiled for days pulling bodies from beneath the 4,000-ton mill chimney that had collapsed onto the main weaving shed.

When Sir Henry Ripley, the principal designer and benefactor of the chimney died the month before the collapse, his obituary in the Times had spoken of his glowing public service as a magistrate in Bradford, and various spells as an MP for the city, his work for the Chamber of Commerce and, above all, his leadership of the large manufacturing and dyeing firm which gave the Ripley name to the area of West Bowling in which it was located.

If Sir Henry had hung around for a couple of months before shuffling off the mortal coil, his obituary would have been dominated by another far less triumphal claim to fame: as the man who had initiated the building of a chimney which at a few minutes past 8am on the morning of December 28th of that year fell across Newlands Mill.

It was a tragedy, which was not entirely unexpected. The chimney had been suspect ever since it was built in 1862/63. Fourteen years before the collapse, William Foster, eldest son of the founder of Black Dyke Mills, had written in his diary after passing the chimney on his way home to Queensbury ‘Expect it will fall some day.’

The arrogance of Sir Henry, and his refusal to accept builders reports as to the insecure foundations, it being built on old mine workings and a filled in pit shaft, had led to several problems after its completion, mainly that of bulging and swaying irregularly. At the inquest it was found out that a slight deviation from the perpendicular in the early stages of construction had been ignored on the orders of Sir Henry himself. Although corrective work was carried out on two separate occasions prior to the collapse and the chimney was straightened, it served little purpose. To some it had fallen because of unscientific and inadequate construction and an ill-judged choice of site, and that people should never have been allowed to continue working there after the earlier indications of gross neglect. But despite these points being made the jury, no doubt in respect for his good name and family, did not find Sir Henry guilty of negligence, and the Coroner returned after three weeks of investigation, a verdict of ‘accidental death.’

That working people could so easily be subjected to such suffering, and be unable to say so little in their own defence, only served to ferment a deep seated hatred in Joe for what he perceived as the ruling classes. It seemed to him that they had it all ways. Why, he thought, should he line their pockets with his hard labour and in return get so little recompense?

Joe was glad to be leaving it all behind. He’d read enough about the struggles of the working classes and the injustices foisted upon them. It seemed since time immemorial the class war had been fought and what had become of it? The workingman was barely getting a living wage and a Conservative government who were continuously recruiting and bringing in cheap labour from the Asian Continent was undermining the trade unions. All the mill owners contributed to the Tory party. They saw it as their inimitable right to use whatever means possible to prevent the unions getting a strangle hold. In effect these people were paid less and were worked harder, and were despised by the ordinary workingman. It was pitiful to see worker pitched against worker, when the true target was the boss’s. They loved it and laughed all the way to the bank.

Sitting above the city, looking across at his childhood, he thought of his brother Geoff, and all the trials and tribulations facing him at that moment, what with him putting a lass ‘up duff’ and them not being married. There was no doubt that when word got out the gossipmongers would have a field day. Most likely she would be considered a tart. ‘Imagine not been married?’ ‘Disgusting I call it! Wouldn’t ‘appen in my day!’

Geoff had only just left school and Madge his girl friend was only 16. Joe had no notion as to how they would cope. They were baby cloths, nappies, and a pram and all the paraphernalia of bringing up a child in the back streets. Where would they live?

Then of course the marriage, Joe had visions of him having to return within the next few months to attend the wedding, no doubt at Muff Field Chapel, with the bride having to wear a dress far too big for her, to cover the bump, and the vicar having to ‘turn the other cheek’ for the sake of decency.

This would be followed with the reception being held in the function rooms upstairs at the Old Red Gin public house in Bowling Old Lane, courtesy of Alan Hardaker, pot bellied landlord extraordinaire who would often shout in the public bar, ‘pork pies ‘ave arrived!’ whereby he would put three on a plate, with lashings of brown sauce and scoff the lot, followed by twenty Woodbines and at least ten pints of Tetley’s best bitter. To his mind it all related back to a time before the War, when his Dad Albert coined the advert, ‘One half of ale, a meat pie, a packet of Woodbines and change out of a tanner.’

He was grossly overweight, and did very little exercise, other than helping out at the Old Lane cricket club most Saturday afternoons in the summer. This comprised of pushing the heavy roller between the wickets at the end of an innings and chalking the crease. It came as little surprise to those that knew him well, to see him being carted from the ground one Saturday afternoon in an ambulance, sirens wailing, up to the Royal Infirmary. What he considered as a touch of heartburn was a mild attack. But now he was back and having got over the initial shock, he was once again drifting into his old ways.

‘Tha’s nowt wrong wi me, I feel as fit as a fiddle’ he said to his wife, as he turned bright red and coughed his guts up whilst trying to light another Woodbine. ‘I don’t know yer allus wittering. If it’s not thee it’s thee mother. I can’t get any peace.’

‘Oh! You’ll get peace soon enough the way yer carrying on. The peace of the ruddy graveyard!’

Through the tunnel lay the escape route. This is what he had planned for. When he looked across the valley from his bedroom window, and saw the southbound trains, he knew then that it was the only way to break out.

The truth of the matter being that he could not face the rest of his life working and living in them streets. Row upon row of terraced housing stretched before him, mile upon mile of struggle and neglect. This wasn’t a life. It was something fobbed off to them as life. Work never ending, living each week from hand to mouth, always afraid of being made unemployed, and then what, the dole?

They lived within earshot of numerous mill and factory sirens that summoned thousands to work, buses laden with folk going into the city centre, virtual armies marching down streets in the early morning pouring into factories.

Joe witnessed the mill gates opening, and watched them all shoving and pushing to get in, and to his mind for what? Were they that bloody daft that they wanted to be tied to their machine for the rest of their days?

To Joe it didn’t make sense. He just didn’t understand what was needed of him and he was determined there and then, that he would not become a part of it.

This was 1962 and there was a revolution going on. Out there somewhere it was all happening. Joe didn’t know quite know where it was going on, other than some place called San Francisco. He’d read of ‘flower power’ and the ‘beat generation’ and ‘turning on and dropping out’ but what that precisely meant he wasn’t totally certain. Jimmy Costick the Polish kid that lived opposite seemed to know something. He had grown his hair down to his shoulders and played tenor sax all day. He would drop stones into puddles on the roadside and tell Joe, ‘Watch the ripples man! That’s what we are. Our ripples wash out and rub the sides man…wow!’ There was a distant look in his eyes and he would continue and say ‘we’re just consumers man! Playing our part man!’

Like, like it was there but it wasn’t.

Maybe Joe had seen too many cowboy films at Birch Lane cinema, the wide-open prairies of Colorado, and the big red sunsets of Wyoming. James Dean combing his hair, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.’ Montgomery Cliffe playing ‘last post’ in ‘From Here to Eternity’ brought tears to his eyes. Bob Dylan was singing about ‘ The Times they are a Changing’ and to Joe they were, except in Spring Mill Street. There the grind just went on.

Somehow the crushing conformity of a working life, whereby his dad had pressed ganged him into an apprenticeship at a local factory, when he wanted to be a flamboyant hairdresser in a salon in the city centre, was the last straw for him. His cousins Barbara and Margaret had built his hopes up, telling him how good he was when he washed and combed their hair, and his mother had found employment for him at ‘Teezy Weeze’s Too’ in Sunbridge Road, which was ran by a friend of hers who was quite willing to take him on as a trainee.

But through constant arguments and threats Joe, at the tender age of 15, was made to go to work at English Electric as an apprentice fitter/machinist, making rivets for aeroplanes he would never see. ‘No lad a mine is gonna do lasses work! And that’s final!’

So feeling crestfallen, he donned greasy overalls each morning at 6am, and trudged to work with the rest of the dead heads, being summoned by the wailing, steam powered siren on the factory chimney, and clocked in to another day of drudgery and noise.

All he wanted was to fulfil what he saw as his potential. He wanted to be around lasses, because him and lasses got on well. He’d always played with lasses when he was younger. He’d pushed their prams and changed the dollies nappies. His days had been filled with girls. They would tickle him and kiss him, and wrap his head in headscarves, and put their lipstick on him and get him to pretend he was Mrs Shufflewick at the corner shop who made the most frightful noises whenever she saw a baby in a pram. ‘What a simply beautiful child!’ she would scream, throwing her arms in the air and making cooing noises, all of which Joe could imitate to perfection, and the girls loved him for it.

So instead of learning how to cut their hair, and rub lotions into scalps, and use a blowdryer and make a fuss of them, he was now leaving town fed up with his lot. Fed up of being pushed around by his dad. Sick to death of the repetition of working life. There was just no fun and he was glad to be getting out of it.

Most of the girls cried on hearing the news. Eileen Robertshaw gave him a small box of ‘Black Magic’ chocolates to eat on his journey. Linda Barlow told him laughingly that they were going to get married when he came home on his first leave.

On the morning when he left, walking down the street to catch the bus into town, some of the girls came to the stop with him and waved him off. ‘Goodbye Joe, ‘ave a safe journey…look after thee sen.’ They kissed and cried and soon the number 88 came round the corner. He waved from the upstairs deck. ‘Tarar!’ he shouted out of the window as the bus pulled away.

He was unable to hold back his tears as they waved their handkerchiefs. ‘Tarar! Joe!’ they shouted and that was it, he was gone.

There was nothing else he could do if he was to escape his incredibly dull life. He saw no future there. It was distressing really because in a funny kind of way he wanted to stay with all of his friends, but the greater torment of living with his dad and mam far outweighed anything they could proffer.

How many more pie and chips could he eat before he went berserk? They were all squeezed upstairs at night into tiny bedrooms. There was no toilet so they pissed into a bucket on the landing, which was emptied most days down the drain out the back. The roof leaked. Rising damp was a problem; mould grew on the cheap wallpaper in all of the rooms.

His mother still scrubbed the back steps religiously every Sunday morning, rinsing them with hot water and rubbing pumice stone on the edges to finish them off, whilst green slime crawled up the broken drain -pipe.

The fire had to be made each day, dragging buckets of coal from across the yard in all weathers, and even when the flames were roaring up the chimney back, it did not warm the place. The cloths horse was always full, and made the small room smell of damp. Flies were stuck on the brown flypaper, which hung by the bare electric light bulb in the middle of the room.

Nearly every night when his dad came home from the mill he would stand warming his back side in front of the fire and say, ‘did you know you can boil fly papers int’ pan, and poison that comes off can be given to somebody, and it’ll kill ‘em outright and leave no trace whatsoever.’

His mother would stir the dumplings and eye his father up from the small kitchen, then look at the flypaper hanging from the ceiling, imagining herself getting a fresh one out of the cupboard drawer and boiling it up in the kettle. ‘Tea dear?’

There would be uproar if any pop music came on the wireless his dad immediately switching it off. ‘We’re ‘aving none of that bloody rubbish in ‘ear.’ So it went on with such regularity that Joe needed to get away. He couldn’t stand it any longer his spirit was being crushed.

His brother Geoff however, seemed quite contented. He’d only just finished school, and was just starting his first job down at the wood yard in St Stephen’s Road at 25 shillings a week. He had his cricket, and his girlfriend, and his mates, and now he was going to be a dad! What more did a lad need at 15 years old!

The train pulled away. It let out a long high-pitched whistle, which startled the horse of the rag and bone man nearby causing it to bolt for about 25 yards. The train picked up speed. It rushed towards Lowmoor tunnel and disappeared with a great puff of smoke that swirled and rose into the grey afternoon, just like Captain Marvel, Shazam! And it was gone.

Edna went out that night. She managed to get a strip wash in the tiny kitchen at the back. Soaping herself and rinsing off with hot water boiled on the only gas ring. Then looking in the small mirror nailed to the wall she applied a little lipstick, brushed her hair and tied it back with a pale blue chiffon ribbon. Adjusting her stockings and making sure the seam was straight she pushed open the small door into the living room. ‘Right I’m ready.’ Geoffrey and Tommy were sat in front of the wireless listening to repeats of Dan Dare’s ‘Journeys into Space.’ ‘Won’t be long,’ she shouted, but nobody paid any attention, they were too absorbed to care what she was up to.

At the bottom of Gaythorne Road, Hector sat in his brand new car twiddling the dials of the radio. He was smiling as she approached. He was the only person she knew who had a car, apart from her brother Ernest who had a Ford Prefect, unlike Hector’s much larger Wolseley bought on the ‘never never’ with all mod cons, including wind up windows on all doors.

To Edna it represented freedom, the ability to get away from the back streets and up onto the Moor for some fresh air. Anything was better than having to catch the crowded West Yorkshire bus to Baildon on Sunday afternoons. She remembered the first joke that Joe told her. ‘Mam what’s long, red, and ‘airy?’ she shook her head. ‘ I don’t know but it ‘ad better be clean.’ ‘West Yorkshire bus wi it’s windows open.’

‘ Everything all reet lass?’ asked Hector.

‘Yes I think so,’ said Edna, ‘he’s just sat there having eaten three steak and kidney pies, and stolen most of our Geoffrey’s chips. Poor bugger nearly started roaring…I mean I ask ya nicking the lads chips.’ A look of disgust was on her face.

‘Well don’t let the buggers grind ya down.’ He put his arm round her and gave her a cuddle and kissed her on the cheek, ‘everything will come good, you’ll see.’ He started up the motor.

‘Where wi going?’

‘Oh I thought we’d just take a ride up to Buttershaw, I’ve got summat ta show thee.’ He smiled, ‘and not what thee are thinking.’ They both laughed.

They drove out onto Manchester Road and turned up towards Odsal Top and then right, on towards Halifax. Neither of them said much. The roads were virtually empty. The streetlights had just been turned on and a steady drizzle was falling. After about ten minutes Hector turned the car into a side road that led up to the back of Leadbeater’s mill at Buttershaw. To their right there was a large open field and to there left, there was a row of six houses, all in good condition. Well kept gardens, polished windows, trimmed privet hedges, no rubbish lined the gutters, no broken prams. The drains didn’t smell and the gaslights worked.

‘Well, what do tha think a this place?’ asked Hector.

‘What does tha mean? It’s very nice’ said Edna looking round.

‘No I won’t thinking a that. If tha looks carefully you’ll see that the end one is for sale.’ Slowly the penny dropped. ‘Are you suggesting what I think you are?’

‘Look Edna I’ve known thee for six months now. And I think it’s safe to say I luv thee like I’ve never loved any other woman in my life. I know it wont be easy what wi one thing and another, but I carn't carry on in my marriage to ‘ilda…it’s not a marriage it’s a duty and she would be better off in a place where she can be looked after properly.’

‘So what tha thinking then?’

‘I just thought what wi your Joe ‘aving left ‘ome and there being so little for thee at ‘ome why don’t we buy this place between us and try to salvage our lives? I mean what ‘ave we got to lose?’

Edna looked at the end house. It was a beautiful well kept two up and two down with a small garden out the front.

‘Cum on let’s ‘ave a look un it.’

They got out of the car and stood outside. The curtains next door twitched.

Down at the bottom of the small hill to their left, the main Halifax road was lit by a row of gas lamps, and beyond that in the half – light of dusk other lights twinkled on the far off hillsides of Bradford. Edna had seldom seen the city like this before, so peaceful and kind. All her frustrations dissolved. A great weight was being lifted from her shoulders. She felt a little giddy.

Hector fumbled in his pocket and took out a key, which he put in the lock. ‘ Cum on let’s ‘ave a proper look.’ They went inside.

There had been two rooms downstairs originally, but by now it had been made into an open planned room. On the far wall there was a see through glass-panelled door with a small window to one side. This door led out into a small walled garden out the back, at the far end of which there was a gate that in turn led onto a back snicket and another field. Everywhere Edna looked in the half-light, there were flowers growing. Wild bluebells in the field, red roses up the walls, hyacinths blossomed by the gate and the smell took her breath away.

‘Oh! ‘Ector it’s beautiful,’ and with that a tear came to her eye. Hector took her in his arms and held her tightly.

‘Listen I want us to live ‘ere. I want us to share our lives with each other. I’ve got nothing with out thee…you mean everything to me. You know my situation and I know yours. We would be fools to let this opportunity pass. I cannot live wi ‘ilda anymore…I cannot push ‘er wheelchair around for the rest of my life, listening to ‘er moaning. There is no love, no sex, no affection, and no respite. It is terrible!’ he started sobbing.

Edna kissed him, ‘yes’ she whispered, ‘yes I’ll do it. We’ll do it luv, we’ll get away from those silly buggers and make a life for ourselves.’

The moon rose, and shone down across the open fields, and small birds twittered goodnight to each other. Edna was thinking, ‘Just fancy, inside toilet with me own bath!’