Wigan Album

This is an end-of-film picture. I used to be able to squeeze twenty five or twenty six shots onto a film by not getting over excited on feed. Usually, they got printed. This is taken looking out of the back room window in Church Grove in late afternoon one summer and that’s why the curtains are all shut in the terrace opposite – to keep the heat out. In that sense it is purely a fortuitous photo but another example of one of life’s little coincidences – they keep on popping up from time to time, jogging memories and making you wonder ‘eee that’s strange int it’.

I found this house by pure chance after spending three weeks wandering about the parish and assorted estate agents trying to find somewhere. I drove down Lorne Street one evening, at random, for no reason, and spotted a sign. It meant nothing then much, nor, even when I’d made a proper appointment on the following Tuesday evening, other than it looked to be ok.

She was an old woman of Irish extraction and proudly battling infirmity. Mary was now forced by bodily failure to move back to relatives over the water for her care. She really, really didn’t want to go. Not, certainly, in spirit. This was her life. That was my second thought as she had seated me in this back room in the corner in one of her best chairs and brought me one of her best brimming cups of tea after chatting gently through the boiling up of an old gas kettle. There was nothing wrong with her mind and nothing wrong with her heart.

My first thought had hit me half way up the hall about three seconds after the old lady had very graciously and properly asked me inside. There was an all pervading sense of peace about this place. I’m not a religious man and I don’t believe in ghosts. Where this tranquillity, this sense of peace, this overwhelming feeling of comfort came from I couldn’t understand, and even now, I couldn’t begin to explain. It matters not. The house had an ease to it. It had a lived in, loved and cherished sensibility. The house itself seemed to welcome almost as much as Mary did.

I know that all this sounds a bit mystical but I don’t believe in UFOs either. I could qualify perhaps and posit conjecture and mention being brought up in a terrace of similar age, and similar structure and steeped in people. I could describe that the semi that the council housed us in after the compulsory demolition of the terrace was a cold and empty place with mod cons but without history and exceptionally functional. This would amount to a little matter as well. Simply, there was a feel to the place. There was no question in me of having a decision to make after the first three seconds.

Two days later I visited Mary again and offered her the selling price. I could just afford it, only just. I was soon seated in what, already, I had begun to consider as my chair and was soon furnished with blistering tea as well. Mary listened as I told her I would have the house and never answered. Instead, she went back to the early 1900s and talked of Irish immigrants and the top place steelworks and the hard rule that a woman had to wield. I lacked guile, as yet today, and listened quite happily to tales of hard labour and hard Irish drinking without realising that she hadn’t answered. Maybe it was that she was making her mind up from within that one-sided conversation.

After a while, the lady from next door called and was soon comfortably sipping tea from within the confines of another comfortable deep chair. It meant a second cup for me, and a rerun of the usual questions about family and background. I was left to concentrate on the tea as Mary answered all of the questions aimed at me. In the usual way that it is when a man finds himself in the company of women, my presence wasn’t really necessary. The conversation could flow just as well without me, around me, through me.

After a further two days the estate agents roused themselves from slumber and confirmed the deal and that was that. It seemed that I had passed the interview. I called on Mary another few times in the intervening six weeks. She liked to talk and I liked to listen of her tales of pub brawls and the goings on in the Crispin, stories of the olden days. About Ireland, she was sparse, in comparison. With tea, she was generous.

It was terrible when the day came. Mary had removed all of the furniture that she wasn’t going to leave to me. The two high chairs and the sawn off cushioned chair had become all of the furniture that I now possessed. I had a bed to move in on that Saturday dinner time before the all important cricket and it was the only thing that I planned to move for the day. The fact that my remains amounted to eighteen banana boxes of books and a few clothes is perhaps an aside. So, Mary was drinking tea in the back room, coated and ready to go and ready to go nowhere, four hours before the appointed time as I was dragging a mattress up the stairs for something to sleep on that night and feeling like a burglar in reverse. I could touch her anguish and the tension but I couldn’t get back down the stairs quick enough to escape before she’d announced a very brief and choked goodbye, and then went. I was left to lock up. It was very sad.

Mary had left me a card wishing me well, and good luck. I didn’t find it until the Sunday but it contained the forwarding address and we wrote to each other a few times. There was more to be related, for sure now, about Ireland, now that she was there with the horses on the farm and I’d nothing to defend myself against her favourite topic of why had I no children to raise in her house. I would have someday, of that she was convinced. As for me, I had neither the means nor any intention. I was just as content to be alone in Mary’s castle as she herself had been.

But times change. Don’t they just! By the time that I’d worked out what was causing it, I’d two baby girls; often taken for twins. They would have had to have been twins for events to have taken place any faster. And, just as fast, they were galloping towards toddlerhood and taking full directorial control of the future. My castle besieged, invaded, my standing usurped and the only boiling oil I had was in the chip pan.

It was a round about this time that the picture was taken. Previously, in our brief correspondences, I had managed to convey news to Mary about a first born child. I was glad. She had expressed no surprise. It was round about this time that I got a letter from Ireland, but not from Mary.

These are the little strands of memory that this strange picture brings back. And, it’s the looking out aspect that’s causing me to ponder. I could have done any other lazy thing with the last picture on that roll, any of a dozen pointless things. But instead, here I have a little visual mnemonic to remind me of changing times; of looking out on the world rather than looking in on myself; of being frightened of what the future would bring having had that contemplation forced upon me; of an ending and a fearful unknown beginning…

Had I known that the next seven or eight years would be the happiest, most joyous times, then I wouldn’t have feared. Had I known that I would recapture my own childhood as my children giggled and skipped through theirs, then I would have paid more attention. I would have made more notes. I would have taken more pictures. Had I known these things then I’d have had Mary’s insight.