Autobiography Read Online Free

the dismal Victorian grandeur, for someone in a distant place has decided that this close-knit community must be dispersed, and that the wishes of the hard-working elderly, who would much rather remain where they have always been, must be ignored. With all of its consequences, redevelopment has its cold and set way through Bold Street and Preston Street, and all the way to Royce Road where perilous St Wilfrid’s shall not be moved. Bonsal Close and Burchill Close are both encroaching, and Hulme is set to be re-made with curved Bath-style crescents, the like of which we puddle-doused pygmies are certain to enjoy. I approach school each day with renewed fear, over the asphalt, treading underfoot the flattened remains of people’s lives, and bigger and blacker the school edifice rises above its bludgeoned parish like a rat refusing to die. We small kids see no warm lights to welcome, and no hope in the literal darkness. The flashy new maisonettes that elbow their way across Hulme are tatty and stained within their first year. Winding our way around them, we are scuttled off to Leaf Street Public Baths, so thankless and cold and pitifully cheap; the chlorinated stench turning the stomach. It is here we shall be taught how to swim – in ice-cold water where shadowy old Manchester once allowed its street-traders a sanitary dip in a slipper bath, or use of its crack-tiled showers. Now lifted out of humiliation by the Manchester Education Committee, the authoritarian and patronizing attitude frightens all of the children, who see the experience as excessively destitute. Leaf Street Baths opened in 1860 as the first public baths in England to house a Turkish bath. Its iron columns and exposed drainpipes dripping with condensation proved fully resistant to heavy bombing in 1941, and its 75-foot pool and public wash house scrubbed and soothed the Hulme poor until 1976, when, surrounded by sunless derelict streets, there were no longer any rain-sodden locals to take the icy plunge, and the tired doors bolted their last. At Trafford Park Baths I had gone to watch my father swim. Whilst cheering from the sides, I am pushed into the deep end by a brutally sallow teenage boy, whom my father then neatly chinned. I was small and I couldn’t swim, and the panicked roll to the corn-plastered depths terrified me for years after. This ringing hum of panic returned at Leaf Street Baths on our induction day, and I refused to jump into the pool. Ever-present Miss Dudley made no effort to understand the secret agony of a troubled child, and I was lifted up and thrown into the water in an act that, these days, would count as extreme physical and psychological assault. 1960s working-class education remained in 1930s desolation. In the great public buildings of Lancashire there were few rights for children, and there was thought to be no need to protect children against violence or assault from educators since such things were not thought likely to take place, and human history moves along.
    The industrial city has a teeming imagination, and Manchester was rife with what were known as tramps. Of these, too, most small children were frightened. The tramps were always men, usually in de-mob suits, no longer required as World War Two cannon-fodder, they have survived the manic eccentricities of Churchill and Hitler and are now untreated sewage of the urban dark, throwing strange shadows in city squares. They always approach children and they always ask for money, their faces discolored with dirt and their clothes brewing with meth-stench. In the midst of their wretchedness it is said that such tramps are happy only in the company of men, and in seeking such an impossible domestic arrangement they gather with their like under battered roofs in deep cellars, huddled around low fires, awaiting the rise of the bolt on the bath -house door. It is said that tramps are allowed use of Leaf Street Baths, where I and others float in dismal dignity. Many children