Autobiography Read Online Free Page A

cry because the tiles beneath their feet are so cold and pockmarked with stains, and my experience of St Wilfrid’s is sealed as a secret agony. There is no chirpy friskiness as we wind our way back along Jackson Crescent, Miss Dudley’s pale frown a map of lovelessness. As each member of the family leaves the school for standardized secondary placings – Jeane first, and then Mary, then Rita, followed by Jackie – I am the last of the flock, further alone in an area now bereft of its narrow and once-crowded streets, and stripped of its maze of illuminated corner-shops. Dark crimes return to a wasteland where there is now no street lighting since there are now no streets. There is no street traffic, and the hum of Stretford Road is distant. It has all been wiped away, and the church once pressed upon by houses now looks like a pathetic creature of pointless endurance. The Three Legs o’ Man and the Unicorn call in the last of the old crowd, who will tell you that life was so much better when things were slightly worse. There is a sense that something terrible has happened to this district even though they of scant resources welcome the promise of luxury – miles away from the knots of houses and narrow passageways of old. See the slums and the tramps and read of murdered children – beyond, where the bleak moor lies. An ultraviolet magnetic shock goes through the blood as the parents of the missing children over-hope. A swarm of misery grips mid-60s Manchester as Hindley and Brady raise their faces to the camera and become known to us all; nineteenth-century street life right here and now, with 1970 but a spit away. It is factual Hindley and Brady, and not our spirited Lake poets or cozy tram-trammeled novelists, who supply the unspoken and who take the travelling mind further than it ever ought to have gone, sealing modern Manchester as a place of Dickensian drear. Of Hindley and Brady there would be nothing to give you heart in their complicity, as children of the poor, who had lived short and shaky lives, were led away to their tortured deaths, and the social landscape of Manchester warps forever with further reason to cry. Tormentedly, everyone appears to know someone who knew Myra Hindley, and we are forced to accept a new truth; that a woman can be just as cruel and dehumanized as a man, and that all safety is an illusion. Nannie rails against Hindley and Brady with a hatred skirting terror, and our thunderclouds part only for the obsessive details of football results and the success stories of our world-famous local teams. Arbitrarily illiterate, football players remained in the stuckness of their own dull social units until George Best spoke and teased and joked and made sense. Best was clever and witty, and he had found a variety of ways to make his life glamorous. The old mold of the at-home regular fellow smashed forever as Best diversified the image of the football player, now suddenly capricious and disorderly but led by no one. Demonstrating the life of success, Best is of course penalized for enjoying too much, yet he is a revolution effecting overwhelming change on how sport is viewed because he is blatantly contemptuous of the press and of governing sporting associations whilst also, incidentally, being an extraordinary player. Catch him if you can. Conventionalized noblesse oblige such as Bobby Charlton would show disapproval of Best because Best is the shocking new against Charlton’s 1950s pipe-smoking discipline. It is the physical and facial glamor of George Best that gains him so much love and hate, for everybody wants what he has. My father takes me to see George Best play at Old Trafford, and as I see the apocalyptic disturber of the peace swirl across the pitch, I faint. I am eight years old. Squinting in the sun, it is all too much for me, and I remember my father’s rasp as he dragged my twisted body through the crowd and out into the street, causing him to miss the rest of the match.