Last Train to Palookaville: The Life of an Unknown Artist

By Ian Lovegrove

This is the story of one mans struggle to make good in the hash environment of post World War II Britain, a country in long-term decline. It depicts the experiences, adventures and misadventures of a working class male. The treatment is earthy and candid and laced with humour in its description of the twin impostors of triumphs and disasters in personal and professional life. His artistic development is described in some detail with reference to works on his website, palimpsestart.com. A substantial part of the book is dedicated to a serious critique of contemporary life in Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496994202

Ian Lovegrove

Ian Lovegrove is an artist and graphic designer, with a substantial body of work, some of which is on his website, Palimpsestart.com. He worked until his retirement in various software houses in England as a systems designer and an accountant in both the public and private sectors.

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© 2014 Ian Lovegrove. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/23/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9419-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9418-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9420-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918449

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter 1 Life In Palookaville

Chapter 2 Escape From Palookaville

Chapter 3 Life With Meggie

Chapter 4 Return To Palookaville

Chapter 5 It’s Grim Up North

Chapter 6 The View From Palookaville

Chapter 7 Madness Repeated

Chapter 8 Painting In Palookaville

Chapter 9 A New Millennium: Plus Ca Change…

Chapter 10 … Plus C’est La Meme Chose

Chapter 11 Final Thoughts

To my mother, Alice Lovegrove,

100 on 17th August 2014

CHAPTER 1

Life in Palookaville

Palookaville is a fictional town in America. So, at least, I presume. It’s the place where Terry Malloy, Marlon Brando’s character in On The Waterfront, metaphorically ends up after losing his fixed fight against Wilson, the fight which, had he won, could have made him a contender. In my case, it might be said that I started out in the real world Mancunian equivalent of Palookaville, namely Longsight. No distinguished person ever came from Longsight. It was and remains one of the poorest areas of Manchester, perhaps then, in the 1950s and 60s, a little better off than Moss Side.

My infancy was spent at 141 Victoria Street, a street of terraced houses. My parents left Victoria Street when I was three years old and moved to 267 Morton Street, a mid-terraced house in a row of four. The neighbouring street, parallel to Morton Street, New Bank Street, which still exists, ran alongside the railway line up to Ardwick and Longsight railway station was the first local station out of Piccadilly Station on the line to London. I, and my friends, spent many hours of my early youth train spotting on Longsight station and also furtively wandering around Longsight station marshalling yard, avoiding the railway police. There was a network of concrete air raid shelters, abandoned and in disrepair, close by the marshalling yard and we went there for something to do and sometimes just to shelter from the Manchester weather.

The end terraced house, 269 Morton Street, was occupied by my grandparents, George and Alice Carson, my mother’s parents. They had previously lived in a two up and two down terraced house, number 204, in New Bank Street. Whether they moved to 269 before or after my parents arrived at 267, I know not. But the fact that they lived next door to us was doubtless important in keeping us for such a long time at 267. I lived there for fifteen or sixteen years, the formative years of my life, the longest I have lived anywhere.

It has always remained a mystery why my parents stayed so long at 267 Morton Street. It was a small terraced house, rented on a weekly basis, that you walked straight into off the street. Downstairs there was a small front room, a small living room and a scullery and outside a small backyard with an outside toilet. Upstairs, there was a large front bedroom and a back bedroom and a small box bedroom. There was a cellar where you could keep perishable food for a short while and a bathroom with a large metal boiler in it. You heated the water you required for the bath and then ladled the water into the bath. Often several people bathed in the same bathwater. There was a manhole cover on the pavement outside the house, where the coalman poured the coal into the cellar. You could raise the cover and slide down the coal into the cellar and hopefully gain access to the house, if you lost your front door key.

The presence of my grandparents next door was helpful, because it allowed my mother to work full time as a machinist. My sister and I could be looked after in the school holidays by my grandparents. In addition, my father was a carpenter and over the years he made quite a few ad-hoc improvements to the house, which obviously he would have had to write off if the family left. But apart from that, 267 had absolutely nothing to recommend it. The most important fact was that it was situated in the noisiest place imaginable. And there was no escaping the noise, once it started. There was no double glazing to muffle the noise. Directly opposite 267, there was a public house, The Railway Hotel, where you were subjected to the noise of the clientele. That noise was usually tolerable. However, alongside the pub, separated by a narrow alleyway, there was a large panel beater’s yard and the noise it produced certainly was not tolerable. On the contrary, it was loud and intrusive, rat-a-tat. In addition, there were dogs all over the neighbourhood, including one, a poodle I think, of a rather neurotic temperament that lived at the pub. Every night after 11pm when the pub had closed you could count on the dog sitting outside barking for a long time before being let in. During the day, the noise from the panel-beating yard set off the dogs barking. Another dog, a mongrel named Paddy, lived round the corner, in Berrigan Street, at the Rolf’s house. Probably not too many people can recall, over half a century later the name of a dog they didn’t even own or like. But Paddy was in a canine class of his own in making my life a misery with his incessant barking. At night-time, you could hear the noise of the railway marshalling yard but this was bearable by comparison with the dogs and the panel beating. Finally, there was the noise of motorbikes to contend with. Morton Street, being a long straight street and with not many cars around, the bikers could accelerate noisily up and down to their hearts’ content.

269 Morton Street was similar to 267 except that it was the end-terrace house, on the corner of Berrigan Street (formerly Bertha Street) and Morton Street. It suffered all the external noise of 267 plus one more: adolescent boys, including yours truly, played games of football against the windowless end-terrace wall. My grandparents were rather deaf and they didn’t complain. So their end-terrace wall was used, rather than the end-terrace wall opposite, belonging to the Williams’ house, because Mrs Williams did complain, rather vociferously. Apart from the noise of footballs thudding against the wall of your house, football games always entailed the risk, which sometimes materialised of a broken window.

The Carsons were poor but clean. My grandma never had a job after she was married. She had a job shelling peas before getting married. Raising five children was a full-time job. She was a good housekeeper and a cheerful, simple woman. She was very well liked. Every Sunday, wearing her usual pinny, she scrubbed the front-door steps of 267 and 269 Morton Street. It seems very odd now, scrubbing the steps of a house you merely rented on a weekly basis. My granddad, who had worked very irregularly as a bricklayer, due to his chronic ill-health, had a part-time job as a lollypop man, leading kids across the road at Plymouth Grove Primary school.

It was not just noise outside 267 that was the problem. Each of the four residents, including me, had their own noisy specialities. In my case, it was trumpet practice. I had learnt to play the trumpet because there was one in the house, which my dad played from time to time. He had been in a Salvation Army brass band. It was probably the most unsuitable musical instrument for a lad of my crippling shyness. But, apart from temperamental unsuitedness, I also, frankly, had no musical ability. However, the fact was that you could not play the trumpet in 267 Morton Street, well or badly, without both the rest of its occupants, together with those of several neighbouring houses and pedestrians in the street hearing it. In the neighbouring house, 265 Morton Street, there lived a young man, a few years older than me, Melvin Dover, who played the piano. He was quite an accomplished musician. In our parlour, you could hear him quite clearly when he practised. In my dad’s case, he was a carpenter so he made furniture, to a very high standard, in his workshop, which doubled as a bedroom. Carpentry is a noisy business when drilling or hammering is required. In mother’s case, there was machining or vacuum cleaning to be done. Usually, in all honesty, mother’s activities were not a problem. Last, but by no means least, there was my ineffable, inescapable sister, Christine.

My sister, two years younger, was a person, in other circumstances, for whom one might have felt sorry. She had no redeeming features, no saving graces whatsoever. From early adolescence onwards, she was plain to the point of being ugly, overweight, spoke in a voice that grated, had no talent or even any commonsense and was awkward in the outside world. She was fecklessness personified. In early adulthood she worked as a typist, maybe even a secretary, but it quickly became evident that she was essentially unemployable and, when she did lose her job, she stayed unemployed and endlessly thereafter sponged shamelessly off my parents. The one talent she had was the classic malevolent wrecking talent, the talent for which you need no talent. This manifested itself in making as much noise as possible, with singing at the top of her voice a speciality. My parents’ noise making was a necessary by-product of their reasonable activities but my sister’s was completely gratuitous and malicious, done with the sole purpose of driving me mad. It was, of course motivated my sibling jealousy, for I, being artistic, produced a product, an artefact, which could be seen. It was not even as though I was good at maths or something more recherché than painting with no visible end product. So my sister’s only recourse was to make my life a misery. She succeeded and the whole experience of living at 267 Morton Street contrived to alienate me from my parents. I began to keep myself to myself, and especially away from my sister, as much as possible. This is very damaging behaviour, because one ceases to be able to practise life’s all important social and interactive human skills.

The estrangement from my parents was a profound formative factor in my life. My father was in some ways typical of working class men of his generation. He spoke with the usual smattering of swearwords and dropped his aitches consistently. There was nothing pretentious about him. He had no petty bourgeois aspirations. But there was nothing boorish about him either. He was a quiet, dignified man with a considerable skill as a carpenter. I had enjoyed the lessons at Plymouth Grove Primary school I had in woodwork and my father would have been very happy to teach me carpentry. This would have been a very useful skill to have and could even have been the basis of a business together. It never happened, because of the alienation caused by my unhappy life at 267 Morton Street.

My parents, although both working-class fatalists, were complementary, temperamentally. It was the attraction of opposites. Some couples look alike, almost like brothers and sisters, even twins. Not my parents. They were dissimilar physically and facially. Although both short, my dad was a powerfully-built man. His contemporaries looked weedy alongside him in photographs of them as young men, pouring beers. My mother, eight years younger, was quite slim as young woman, more pear-shaped and round-shouldered in later years and chronically unfit. She loved dancing but her feet were always in need of attention. Together with her friends, Lilly and Dolly Corner and Florrie Andrews, my mother regularly went dancing. They travelled by train to Blackpool and danced in the Tower Ballroom. She was a natural extrovert, endlessly ebullient and in her element in company of friends and relatives. She was more or less the life and soul of the party because she had a genuine interest in people and could make them laugh with her stories, always told verbatim, with convoluted wordiness. With her lack of worldly experience, beyond the narrow confines of a poverty-stricken upbringing and a rudimentary education, she was very naïve and this was a source of amusement. But with a keen sense of humour she could laugh at her own naivety. She also had something approaching genius in her rapport with children.

Before they were married, my parents had a holiday together in the Isle of Man. Until then, my mother had never had a holiday. It was September 1939. Chamberlain’s ultimatum to Hitler’s Germany after the invasion of Poland was ignored and Britain and Germany were suddenly at war. My dad, worried about his mother, wanted to return at once to Salford. My mother told him that he could go but that she was staying to complete the holiday. She was a spirited young woman. And she was right. My dad seemed to think that the war meant instant calamity, whereas, in fact, several months passed in England before anything much changed – the period of the Phoney War.

Whatever the shortcomings of Morton Street as a place to live, there is no question that one grew up in a real community. It was a community of proletarian families. I doubt if there were any professional men or women, no teachers, doctors, lawyers or even accountants. Families were generally headed by craftsmen of various sorts, or else by shopkeepers, newsagents or greengrocers in particular. Or sometimes they were headed by general labourers, with no artisan skills. There would be people who worked on the railways or on the buses. My parents were well acquainted with dozens of other families in the neighbourhood. These families did not necessarily live in each other’s pockets. But in a small world, where few people had cars, my mother, with her natural extroversion and genuine interest in people, would regularly encounter other housewives going to and coming from the local shops. She would stop and have a natter on the street corner. She made a little money on the side by dressmaking and sewing for families in the neighbourhood. A community spirit existed which is missing nowadays from corresponding working class neighbourhoods. My parents were comfortable in this environment, with its mutual support. It was a good reason for staying put.

I was thirteen when I spent my last holiday with my parents. We stayed in a caravan in Rhyl for two weeks. It was a dull two weeks, about which I remember little. Traditional Jazz was in vogue in British pop music at the time and I played Acker Bilk’s Somerset repeatedly, with evangelical zeal, on the juke box in the café, where we stopped for a snack. Years later, I came across the track again on Acker Bilk’s LP, The Seven Ages of Acker, in a second hand record shop in Hammersmith.

One wintry day, in November or December, aged nine or ten, I was playing football with some pals in South Street, Longsight, when I fell over on the icy road. I fractured the tibia and fibula of my left leg. I was taken to hospital and my leg was in plaster for six months. It was a life-changing event. I spent six months off school. When the accident happened, according to my school report, I was seventh in a class of forty-three boys. When I returned, I was thirteenth. The accident was probably responsible for my failing the 11+ exam.

The accident was a triple whammy. Not only did I not get the Grammar School education I should have, but I received practically no education at all for two years. I stayed on for two more years at Plymouth Grove primary school, where we had either no teacher at all or a supply teacher, of which Mr Dann had a Dickensian memorableness. Often my class was just minded by monitors. During these two years, I and my friend, Paul Wilson, who had identical beautiful handwriting to mine and was a keen train spotter, compiled a railway scrapbook. It was a way of passing the time. The third aspect of this personal tragedy was that all my friends departed, either to grammar or to technical schools. It was no consolation that I was now top of the class in a dustbin school.

It was always an embarrassment to me to live at 267 Morton Street. Everyone else I knew, not from Morton Street, seemed to be better situated than us. My friend at secondary school, Jack Clarkson, lived in a council house in Stretford with a garden and an inside toilet and bathroom and he was one of four brothers. My mother’s sister was married to a man with a false leg, who had retired early and lived off a pension. They lived in a corner house with a garden in Burnage, a leafy suburb about four miles south of Longsight, on route to the posher area of Didsbury. Above all, their houses were quiet, oases of tranquillity compared to ours. There were numerous examples like this.

Morton Street was a long street, perhaps a mile long. But there were no trees in it, nor, probably, in New Bank Street. There were trees in Lime Grove at the bottom end of Morton Street and the houses there had gardens. There was common waste ground with grassy hillocks behind 267 Morton Street, bounded by the square formed from the houses in Morton Street, Berrigan Street (formerly Bertha Street), New Bank Street and Park Avenue. On 5th November, Guy Fawkes night, a bonfire would burn the household rubbish on this common ground and on the common ground behind the Railway Hotel.

Looking back, these two patches of common ground seem an oddity. They really were wasted – literally useless, except for their once-a-year rubbish-clearing day. Children could not play games there because the ground was too rough. The grass was untended. The only non-firework event I remember was when a gang of boys, somewhat older than me, found a large frog which they put in small whole in the earth and proceeded to fire rocks at with their catapults.

It was strange that neither the local council, nor the local residents themselves had the wit to develop the common ground. They could have been used as allotments to grow food, or organised as a play area, with swings and roundabouts and a climbing frame.

The nearest serious greenery was in the neighbouring districts, Birch Fields in Levenshulme and Platt Fields in Rusholme. I never saw a hedgehog, a squirrel or a fox until I reached adulthood. Now foxes and squirrels are quite commonplace – I’ve even had a rather mangy fox residing in my garden for a few days.

My mother has often said that when they got married, she and my dad had nothing. On my mother’s side, this is readily explicable, since she spent all her working life in sweatshops as a machinist, working for pin money. But my dad was a skilled carpenter. He had been working since leaving school aged fourteen. He worked first as an apprentice for a few years, but once that was completed, he worked constantly until he was made redundant at 60, whereupon he lived in retirement. I don’t think he was ever unemployed before that, not even in the depression in the 1930s. When they got married in the mid 1940s, my dad had been working for over twenty years. How is it possible to work for that length of time and have virtually no capital? I can’t answer this question with any certainty but can only speculate. Firstly, my dad was a very gentle, kindly man, too soft for his own good. This was his besetting weakness. I think he gave some of his earnings away to his mates, those who were unemployed, in cigarettes and drinks. Secondly, when he was a young man, he lived quite well by the standards of a working class artisan. He was reasonably well dressed to judge from his photographs, liked a drink and smoked heavily, forty cigarettes a day. He liked holidaying in the Isle of Man. There was probably no habit of saving amongst his contemporaries in Salford in the early twentieth century. I doubt if he even had a bank account. My dad also lived with his parents, probably until he got married. He seems to have been quite close to his mother and it may be that he handed over much of his earnings to her. My dad’s mother, seems to have been quite active in the Salvation Army as a sort of patron. There was a large black and white portrait of General Booth on the wall in her house, which for a long time I assumed was a photograph of my grandfather, who had died when I was a small child. Apart from my father and his sister, Harriet, there was an adopted brother, Bill.

The Lovegroves were certainly not wealthy or even comfortably off. They lived in a terraced house in Liverpool Street, Salford. But they were better off than the Carsons because they were shit poor. The Carsons lived in abject poverty because George Carson was chronically sick, with bronchitis and worked irregularly as bricklayer. He was passed unfit for service in the war, but there was a lot of pressure on such men, seemingly able-bodied, to fight and George Carson volunteered for war service. Because he had volunteered, he did not receive a war pension, an apparent perversity. Back in Civvy Steet, when it rained, there was no work and no pay. And in Manchester it rained often, persistent, drizzly rain from leaden skies, rather than torrential downpours. There were five children to feed and clothe. They might have nothing more than a spoonful of boiled egg for breakfast and an orange for Christmas. My mother had no dolls to play with. By Wednesday, the children would be sent to bed as soon as it got dark.

Perhaps my dad’s mother felt it necessary to spend my dad’s earnings to keep up appearances. There is no clear answer. I certainly did not quiz my dad on the matter. He was quite a different person as young man and quickly learned to be a responsible and provident parent once he acquired children. He gave up smoking when my sister was born and I never saw him drinking. He never went in the Railway Hotel. But he was in his mid forties by this time.

I know less about my father’s background because he was a quiet man and my mother is extremely sociable. She always talks very frankly and without any trace of bitterness or regret about her own background. In contrast, my father was reticent about his. My knowledge about his background comes from what my mother has said. It seems that my father’s parents were unhappily married. When my mother got married, my dad’s mother insisted that she would not attend the wedding with my dad’s father, so he could not be invited.

My interest in films goes back to my boyhood. I used to go to the cinema regularly with my father. The local cinemas in Longsight were The Kings, The Shaftsbury and The Queens on Stockport Road, all of which have now gone, converted into carpet stores or cheap supermarkets, more likely than not run by Asians.

Before I reached my teens, I was allowed to go unaccompanied to the cinema in the evening to see U certificate films. I went with my sister to see Old Yeller, a Disney film at the Shaftsbury. It was rather a sentimental film about a mongrel dog that performs several heroic deeds protecting his master, including fighting off a rabid wolf, from whose bite, however, he catches the dreadful disease and has to be put down. We were quite taken with the film so we sat through it twice. My parents became concerned when we didn’t come home as expected. They came to the cinema to retrieve us.

A mile and a half to the north, on the corner of Ardwick Green, was The Apollo cinema, a much bigger, more palatial venue, which still exists. On Saturday mornings kids could see films there, including shorts with the incorrigibly unfunny Three Stooges, cartoons, and feature films. The Apollo had a sunken electric organ in front of the screen and the lyrics of popular songs of yesteryear, like How much is that doggy in the window? and This old house, would appear on screen for the audience to sing along with. There was always a rickety, ancient serial, whose weekly episode would have a cliff-hanging ending where the hero could not conceivably escape from a grisly end, having, for example, fallen to the bottom of a pit full of venomous snakes, only for him to cheat death the following week by the simple device of breaking his fall, several frames earlier by clutching on to a convenient branch at the top of the pit. My uncle Harold, mother’s youngest brother, took me to the Apollo to see The Lady Killers and The Millionairess. They seemed exotic because they were in colour.

The cinema then was quite an important mainstay of working class culture. It was quite different from the TV, which you watched with other members of your family. The cinema was where you could take your girlfriend, if you had one, although I did not. There were no feature films on TV in the fifties and early sixties. We did not have a TV set at all until the late fifties and I watched TV in a neighbour’s house. In 1966 when England won the World Cup, I was nineteen and watched the match in 267 Morton Street on our black and white set. I lived in a grey city and I watched black and white programs on TV.

In the absence of a TV, and even when the family first acquired one, when there was nothing to watch before children’s programmes in the early evening, the mainstay of family entertainment was the wireless in the corner of the living room. Quaint or rather anachronistic programs like Workers’ Playtime, Billy Cotton’s Band Show or Two Way Family Favourites, were on the radio well into the late fifties, maybe early sixties. The oddest programme was Educating Archie, a half-hour comedy about a boy supposedly being tutored by various teachers, including Max Bygraves, Benny Hill, Dick Emery and Tony Hancock, in pre Hancock’s Half Hour days. In fact Archie Andrews was a ventriloquist’s dummy. Both Peter Brough, the ventriloquist, and Archie featured in the show. A ventriloquist on the radio! Nice work if you can get it. Archie even had a girlfriend, played by Julie Andrews. Lucky him! A similar wireless oddity was the morning session of physical jerks with Eileen Fowler, a distinctly middle-aged woman, pre Green Goddess, who doubtless had a fag and a cuppa while her listeners worked out.

Grey was the pervasive colour of Manchester. Today Manchester is a smoke free city but in my youth, smog in winter months was not uncommon. You would arrive home with your nostrils black with soot. The buildings in central Manchester, like the Town Hall and the Central Library, are typically clad with millstone grit and they had a charcoal grey appearance. When Manchester became a smoke free zone in the sixties as the dark satanic mills were closing, the Town Hall and the Central Library were cleaned and their appearance was miraculously transformed by their new, handsome light grey colour.

Although smoke-free Manchester was a change for the better in its appearance, there is no doubt that Manchester is a rather ugly city. According to the historian A J P Taylor, a Lancastrian, Manchester has nothing to compare with St Pancras Station or Keble College. The town hall and the older part of the university are in a rigid gothic which looks as though it had been bought by the square yard. The most remarkable feature of the Midland Hotel is the colour of its brick not its design. More recent buildings keep the same quality of grandiose tastelessness. It would of course be useless for the Central Library to challenge the pre-eminence of the new Bodleian as the most hideous library in existence, but it would win an honourable mention. Apart from being out of touch with its surroundings, it is remarkable for presenting an exact model of an iced wedding cake on a gigantic scale. One expects members of the library committee to emerge on high at any moment and cut it into slices.

It is not only the individual buildings, which, their pretentiousness notwithstanding, have no aesthetic appeal; there is no sense in Manchester or Salford of any unity of vision in civic planning. When the IRA bombed the centre of Manchester in 1996, there was a great opportunity to redevelop the centre with some style. Alas, it was not to be. Although £1.2 billion was spent the results are singularly unimpressive. The new structures are elevations rather than buildings, with a more than passing resemblance to stacked shoeboxes.

The advent of smoke-free Manchester not only improved the health of its citizens by creating cleaner air, but also had an effect in producing noticeably milder weather as cooling aerosols like soot disappeared from the skies. Winters in particular, which once were harsh and cold now are generally quite spring-like. Snow in winter has become