Based on an idea by Tony Warren

On Monday night I took part in a First Draft cabaret evening at the Castle Hotel in Manchester. Back in early March, coincidentally on the day Tony Warren's death was announced, I saw a Facebook post from Archives+. The North West Sound Archive has found a new home with them, moved from its attic eyrie at Clitheroe Castle. It's an amazing resource and the Archives+ team, and my one time mentor, David Govier are exploring ways of making these sound archives come to life as a source of inspiration. A selection were put on Sound Cloud and we were invited to respond, taking an interview or recording as a starting point.It was an inspired and inspiring evening. I was beyond nervous at the beginning but so pleased to have done it. I was taken by the interview with Violet Carson, better known as Ena Sharples. What follows is basically what I wrote and read on Monday night. What I neglected to mention is that my amazing Granpa, Dr Garlick, looked exactly like old Steptoe! The Street: Based on an idea by Tony Warren Listening to Violet Carson’s story of how she took on and developed her role as Ena Sharples in Coronation Street took me back to my childhood. Both my parents came from an area of Salford known as Pendleton. My father’s family were in textiles. My grandfather was on the Cotton Exchange. My mother’s grandfather was head teacher at Langworthy Road school. My mother’s father was a GP based in the heart of the Salford Slums, Hankinson Park, better known as Hanky Park. He was born in 1880 and was practising as a doctor in the early years of the twentieth century. I remember going to his surgery also on Langworthy Road. Percy Garlick was an old grandfather. He had 10 children, 7 girls and 3 boys. I have been told that he sat on the Poor Law Board, and that he introduced mid morning milk to schools in Salford. He delivered Alistair Cooke, who never liked to admit he was a Salford lad, choosing Blackpool as a more refined place of birth. He was ahead of his years, fast tracked through his medical training. He’d worked as a ship’s surgeon. He looked after his patients before the National Health Service, some giving him what they could, and not always cash, to pay for their care. As a child I got used to being stopped in the street by people who saw the family resemblance between me and my sisters and my aunts, who wanted to talk about Dr Garlick. Years later, giving a local history talk in Eccles, a lady told me how as a child she had delivered the weekly sixpence to the house on Broad Street, an early form of health insurance. I tell you this because I need you to realise that my family were in the heart of Salford and Salford was in our hearts. But as the city became synonymous with slums and poverty, I know my mother found it increasingly difficult to admit to her origins. It’s a terrible thing to be a convent educated doctor’s daughter from Salford, especially if you are a bit of a snob. Listening to Violet Carson’s cutglass accent, I’m reminded that we had elocution lessons at school. Woe betide if your roots were identifiable by a Salford accent. To our amazement, even as children, when we were precociously aware of the shame of Salford, my mother became a huge fan of Coronation Street. She watched it from the beginning. We were allowed to stay up on Mondays and Wednesdays to watch it with her. It became our treat too. As the story lines and the characters developed my sister and I were caught up in Lucille Hewitt’s crush on Dennis Tanner and the scandal of her compass and ink tattoo of his name. Lucille’s mother was called Conceptua and one of my friend’s mothers had the same unmistakably catholic name. My father worked for a firm of civil engineers called Leonard Fairclough. My best friend’s father was an extra, appearing regularly in the public bar of the Rovers Return. We wrote plays and did drawings on scrap scripts he brought home. Another neighbour was a cameraman on the programme and his children were the envy of the road because they had been taken to the cinema by the actress who played Irma Ogden, Stan and Hilda’s daughter. My piano teacher was a friend of Violet Carson. I hated the lessons, but loved getting Miss Hayes to tell stories of her childhood and her friends. On retirement my grandparents moved to the rural splendour of Little Hayfield. Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner, lived there, and I believe Tony Warren wrote episodes in the Lantern Pike pub. Violet Carson played the organ at the Ambassador Cinema on Langworthy Road, whilst Ena Sharples played it in the Gospel Hall. Did you know there was a bible of characters and storylines for scriptwriters who joined the team? So fact and fiction wove in and out of the programme, in the names, the locations, the plots and the people. As I grew older I realised what a ground breaking series it was, in its depiction of essentially working class life at the start of the swinging sixties. It was affectionate and funny, but didn’t avoid difficult storylines. Violet Carson’s role as Ena Sharples combined with Martha Longhurst and Minnie Caudwell harked back to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. Three witches, three fates, providing a traditional and moral interpretation of the changes in society that everyone could recognise. They may have drunk milk stout but there wasn’t much milk of human kindness in the Rovers’ snug. Old values met new fangled ways in Weatherfield. No wonder it was such a success and has become the longest running TV soap opera. It validated a world that my parents, especially my mother, was very familiar with, even though she may not have felt a part of it. It changed the image of Salford. Salford is now Media City and the Lads Club, the Lowry and the Imperial War Museum. The Coronation Street visitor experience is geographically placed there. At the start of the series it could have been set in any run down area of Manchester or Salford, before sixties redevelopment took hold. It’s a remarkable survival in fiction. John Cooper Clarke, the bard of Salford, made it on to the English exam syllabus. A far cry from my school elocution lessons. My mother continues to watch Coronation Street. Before clever televisions, you wouldn’t dare to phone her in that sacrosanct half hour. The fictional Street has helped her deal with family crises over the years. I started to write this piece on the day that Tony Warren’s death was announced, March 2nd. About thirty years ago a neighbour’s daughter invited me to a party. She had been a script writer on the programme and I was thrilled to meet Tony Warren there. And more recently an old schoolfriend had a small part as a social worker on the programme. The Street continues to connect.

Songs they never play on the radio

Moving house means moving books. I started the process of clearing the shelves and deciding which ones to keep as soon as I thought about putting the house on the market. I knew I couldn't keep them all. I bought boxes and boxes of them to the local specialist charity book shop round the corner from where I am now living. It wasn't difficult to pass them on, mainly because I have kept so many. I asked myself if I would read it again, and if the answer was yes, I kept it. I had a fantasy that I would tidy and categorise my personal library - after all I have worked in libraries and archives. The reality was that books got packed in boxes room by room, but were unpacked randomly when all sense of order was thrown to the winds as I raced against the clock to unpack boxes and get my new home habitable. So the books on the shelves are even more random than they were at the old house. I have multiple copies of some - I Capture the Castle, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Children of Green Knowe and oddly Mick Middles book on Joy Division and New Order to name a few. I'm still discovering others. Books jump out at me from unfamiliar arrangements in familiar places. Most weeks I have a day of train travel and waiting. I find it hard to concentrate, so I choose a book that I think I can read in a day, an old friend off the shelf, self contained and comforting in its familiarity. A couple of weeks ago someone mentioned James Young's book about Nico, Songs They Never Play On The Radio, saying it should be reissued with a new foreword . I bought my copy at a friend's bookshop in Bakewell many years ago, when it had been remaindered by the publisher. You can see by the price label. I came very close to giving it away to Antony Hegarty some years later, knowing he was a huge Nico fan, as a thank you for putting me on his guest list. I was torn, because I wanted to keep the book, but I knew how much he would appreciate it. Fate intervened literally the day before I saw him, when a single copy turned up on an otherwise empty outdoor display shelf at a cut price bookshop in rural Derbyshire. Spooky. So I kept my copy. I must have read it back in the mid nineties. I may even have read it more than once. It was only when I read it again last week that I realised it was more fact than fiction, and that I was being introduced to a darker side of people known to me. Some were people I'd see out and about at gigs, others I'd worked with, even had my hair cut by. I felt more sensitive and vulnerable to this darker version of Mancunian history and Nico's part in it.I felt shocked and I felt guilty for passing it on to Antony, possibly shattering his illusions about Nico. I realised that while I had admired her over the years, I had never mythologised her, because I'd seen some of the reality of her time in Manchester. Reading a book in a day is an intense experience and this is a great read.

Woman on the Edge

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted on this blog. I was writing work blogs regularly which gave me a false sense of continuity. And it has been a crazy time, with a difficult moving experience. So here I am in Sheffield, living below Brincliffe Edge. I did consider changing the name of my blog, but I loved living near the Nico Ditch, and a piece of my heart is still there. In the months since I last wrote I have been close to the edge, metaphorically and geographically. I wanted less responsibility and some money in the bank. Be careful what you wish for! My house sold but I found myself jobless and homeless, with most of my worldly possessions in storage.In the end it resolved within weeks, but it was very scary. As I downsized from a family home to a two bedroomed flat I sifted, sorted and stored in Granny's attic. I was on first names with the staff at the local tip, and my favourite charity shop told me I'd kept them going through Christmas and the new year! So here I am in Sheffield, old haunts and new experiences after a gap of nearly 23 years. It's all falling into place and I'm working part time, back where I have worked before. I'm planning to get back into writing regularly, I am still doing music reviews and I hope to share something of life in Sheffield as I settle in and start to breathe again.

Take Care

I am wary of writing about this topic. There are a lot of buttons that might get pressed. But in the last few weeks several things have happened that have made it hard to ignore. I think about this topic constantly, especially as I get older and review my own teenage years and life so far. I sometimes feel I could write a book about it, but I don't know if that would help me. Perhaps it could help others. One day I might try it. My recent desire to take up the topic was prompted in the first place by the poet Lemn Sissay sharing his responses to receiving and opening his care files from the local authority who took him into care as a baby. An obviously bright and lively boy was labelled in ways that had an effect on his teenage years. The level of scrutiny and vocabulary used by the social workers was uncomfortable reading for someone as remote from the situation as me, so what must it have been like for Lemn to read. I was reminded of my own boarding school experience. Those of us who had parents abroad were treated differently from those who had parents close by. I was an intelligent and questioning teenager when I went, though nobody had told me that. This attitude got me labelled as rebellious and sly by the nuns and I started to hide my thoughts and feelings, constantly feeling like an outsider. I had some good friends and a diary. I wrote letters to friends outside of school. These had to be smuggled out and I was sometimes caught doing this. All aspects of our lives, from the underwear we wore to deodorant we used was under scrutiny and disapproval from the nuns. Even washing our hair more than once a week or sneaking an extra bath ( twice a week on a rota) was a punishable offence. You get the picture. I could go on. And the education was poor, except for my wonderful English teacher. A few of us applied for university and the headmistress refused to sign our UCCA forms. Our parents paid for this kind of care and education. So Lemn Sissay revived my memories and then there was a sudden flurry of activity on Facebook. The Daily Mail had done a feature on boarding school memories, and someone from the junior part of my school had written in a damning piece. Coincidentally there is a school reunion planned in September, so there was a lot of response to this. I was amazed to see that some defended the school and the nuns, but others had an equally unhappy experience, including physical punishment and beatings. I went there at the age of 13 , and I would describe the abuse as emotional and psychological, alongside neglect of physical care. Poor food, lack of awareness of health problems teenage girls might be dealing with. Period problems, eating disorders, hormonal imbalances, asthma, excema,etc etc. Then I heard Julian Clary talk about the impact boarding school had on him, and the way he had turned a nightmare into a way to survive, which led eventually to his successful career. It was on Radio 4's Saturday Live programme, and I could hear the incredulity from the presenters that his parents hadn't intervened. And of course, that's the big difference for my generation. Parents didn't believe their children's testimony. Adults were the experts. It's one of the reasons why abuse stories are coming out into the open now, and not when they happened. It's still happening in some areas of life. And this week the troubles of Kids Club has been all over the news. There are going to be a lot of disappointed children as a result. All those children who need someone to support and encourage them, someone to fight their corner,to recognise their abilities and their difficulties. And then there's love. It's about self esteem and confidence. Ironically yesterday's news item on the on the fact that public school pupils earn more than their state school contemporaries within a few years in the workplace highlights one aspect of this. That's why care in this context seems a contradiction in terms. I'm talking about young people in this post, but you can apply all of this to the older generation and their experience of care too.

Family Affairs

I have been listening to the song 'Family Affair' this week as my son Jamie has been working on it. Coincidentally I had booked tickets to go to a talk on the making of 'Long Lost Family'at Sheffield Doc Fest with my daughter. She had introduced me to the ITV programme a couple of series ago and it has become a favourite. It could be voyeuristic, it can be sentimental, but there is always a sense of authenticity and compassion in the way it is filmed and edited. I knew people who made TV programmes when I was younger and I know I can be cynical about what we see on screen and how that story is managed. I had read Nicky Campbell's book about his own adoption and I had seen both Nicky and Davina MacCall on 'Who Do You Think You Are?'I was prepared to accept them as presenters of this particular programme based on that insight into their own experiences. It was fascinating to hear about the genesis of the series and the approach the producers take. There are social workers and adoption experts involved. It is ethical and responsible in its approach to those involved. Some of them were there at the talk at the Crucible, by arrangement and also in the audience. It's a life changing programme. We all know families are complicated and there can't always be happy endings, but what we see in the programmes and the individuals they film is the relief of finding out the answers to questions that have haunted a lifetime. Neither Davina nor Nicky share their own experiences and I often wonder if viewers realise why they were chosen as presenters. There's another aspect that always interests me. The social history of the times is there in the stories but it isn't explored. I am of the generation who had the benefit of an Abortion Act, Family Planning Clinics and the pill. But I was very aware of the experiences of people not many years older than me. Even with new attitudes towards sex and the single woman, contraception and ultimately single parenthood, it was never easy or straightforward. If you found yourself pregnant you could get married, trying to hide the pregnancy and the 'early' baby. Within my social circle I have known women who had babies adopted. I'm sure many more had terminations. One work colleague found out that the woman he thought was his older sister was in fact his mother. It happened to Eric Clapton too. I had friends who had a baby at 16, stayed boyfriend and girlfriend, but she lived at home with her parents. If parents did support their daughter as an unmarried mother it was often support mixed with shame and disapproval. We live in such different times. Pregnancy was confirmed by a doctor, with a consultation. Over the counter sensitive pregnancy testing kits weren't available. Pregnancy was hidden, denied, ignored until there was an inevitable outcome. There's been a similar story on Coronation Street recently. Many of the stories on the programme involve women a few years older than me who gave up babies for adoption because they really believed that was the best thing for them, that they had no economic choice, at great emotional cost to themselves. Their reunions with their now grown up babies are some of the most moving stories in the series. But there are lost siblings, absent fathers, even reunited twins. All that fear of being found out becomes a desperate longing to know. I wonder how the stories will develop as we move into the next generation, who had different choices about giving birth and bringing up their babies. I imagine it is going to be more about missing fathers and the role of social media in tracking people down. My younger son found some of his half siblings by chance because of a YouTube post featuring his father, who had left when he was two, but who had kept in occasional contact. It's an intriguing television programme and it was reassuring to see the care with which it is made. If you haven't discovered it, it's on tonight at 9pm. Have the tissues to hand. It's a powerful shared emotional experience.

Watching the Wheels

Occasionally there are connections which throw up unexpected emotions.I was sorry I missed seeing Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl as Ghosts of Sabre Tooth Tigers last year in Manchester. My lovely photographer friend Melanie Smith took some great photos which she shares on her Mudkiss website. It brought back memories of John Lennon and my awareness of Sean as a longed for child for John and Yoko, an awareness only supported by the media coverage of the time and the album Double Fantasy. When I lived in Morocco I had a borrowed cassette player and a few cassettes to listen to. Stevie Wonder's Hotter Than July, Bowie's Scary Monsters, an NME compilation featuring Scritti Politti, and John and Yoko's wonderful Double Fantasy. Whilst I was living there John Lennon was shot. No online news in those days, just a rumour at the language school one evening, confirmed by an English newspaper the next day. Having listened to Beautiful Boy, my heart went out to him. I follow GOSTT on Facebook and to my surprise I have discovered that they have been shooting a new video in Sheffield this Bank Holiday weekend, in a run down cinema so well known to me, in the area of Sheffield where I used to live, where my son lived for many years, where my former husband still lives. For some reason it seems so strange that the child I thought so much about back in those Double Fantasy days should be in such a familiar neighbourhood in Sheffield. I could never have made that connection all those years ago in Casablanca.

The F word

I spent a day at the Folklore Society's annual conference yesterday . I couldn't sign up for the whole weekend, but I decided a day was better than not going. I am not a member of the Folklore Society, though I follow them on social media. There were familiar faces there, Simon Heywood and Julia Bishop, tutors on my MA course just over ten years ago. I met some people whose work I have admired over the years too, Jaqueline Simpson and David Clarke.I also met new contacts and look forward to keeping in touch with them. I was intrigued and inspired by the papers and presentations, relating some of them to my own areas of knowledge and research. As I listened to the ongoing discussion about collaboration, the lack of academic recognition of folklore and folklife studies, and the future hopes for research and recognition, I realised how lucky I am. I was an undergraduate at Leeds, able to specialise in Folk Life Studies as part of my English degree. There was a Dialect Studies Department within the school of English too. Both had world class reputations and staff, Stewart Sanderson, Tony Green, Stanley Ellis.I then went on to do a diploma in Local History, using oral history as an approach to researching a particular community and way of life as part of my work with Manchester Studies. Just over ten years ago I signed up for an MA in Folklore and Cultural Tradition with NATCECT, based at the University of Sheffield. NATCECT was the National Centre for English Culture and Tradition. It too has closed down, unable to convince the powers that be that there is value in this kind of academic research. Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Archaeology, History - all these overlap with Folk Life Studies. But it is dangerous to mention the F word if you want to be taken seriously as an academic. It's a different situation in Ireland and Scandinavian countries apparently. Here there's a new awareness and interest in folk lore in the art world, including last year's Tate Britain exhibition and Jeremy Deller's work. There were archaeologists at the conference, wishing that they could have studied folklore as part of their course. My daughter studied archaeology at Sheffield when NATCECT was still there, and she had that opportunity. Historians talked about oral history as a bridge between the two disciplines of folklore and history. I felt I had been one of those who had started to build that bridge back in the 1970s, but I didn't realise the possibilities. I do think of myself as a folklorist and I realise it colours the way I look at life and culture on a day to day level. I'm not scared of using the F word.