Old roads

I've not got a lot to say today so here's a word from my dad about growing up in Manchester.


When I was six or seven (roundabout 1949-1950 I guess) I used to spend weekends at my granny's house in Blackley in north Manchester.

I'd take the 114 bus from Old Trafford where I lived, disembark at Piccadilly in the centre and take an electric trolley bus down the never-ending Oldham Road to my destination. The trolley buses fascinated me because they ran on fat pneumatic tyres and were almost soundless. I always sat on the upper deck and always at the front.
The Oldham Road seemed to go on forever. Although it ran through some of the poorest parts of Manchester, Oldham Road was a thriving commercial thoroughfare of down-market shops and other enterprises: there were pawn-shops, second-hand furniture stores, cut-price grocers, butchers, used-car dealers, stone-masons, funeral parlours, junk shops, old-clothes stores, cheap clothes stores, ribs and cabbage shops (where you could buy a bowl of steamed cabbage with hot pork ribs for a few pence) pubs, more pawn-shops, tripe shops - it went on endlessly.

Strange as it may seem these journeys not only helped me improve my understanding of language (I avidly read all the shop-signs with their shouting bargain offers) but it also made me aware of the culture that I lived in as a child, a culture of impoverishment but one where pure survival was an ennobling factor.