Autobiography Read Online Free Page B

Another form of church, football was all that stood between earth and God. Mike Summerbee’s central Manchester boutique was destiny fulfilled, and George Best’s space-ship house in Bramhall attracts more visitors than Lourdes. But I? Am I to be saved? And, if so, for what reason?
    Watches and clocks are set to mark the sound and vision of ice-cream vans, whether Gerrards or Mr Whippy. This is still the old and weathered Manchester where people carry deep bowls to ice-cream vans, and load them with scoops, or carry dinner-plates to fish and chip shops where their supper is dumped onto their own trusted china which is then covered by a tea-towel for the walk home. All that you consider hip and happening will also tumble into nostalgia just at that moment when you finally come to realize where everything is, and how things ought to be. It is a race to the grave.
    Nannie drops a knife and shouts ‘Man to the door!’ – a somber and fearful predicament in a family and house where men usually represent trouble. 1967’s major investments are Simon Smith and his amazing dancing bear by Alan Price (who sings ‘well excepted everywhere’, which surely ought to be ‘well accepted everywhere’), Peek-a-b oo by the New Vaudeville Band, Bernadette by the Four Tops. Everything I am by Plastic Penny has the line ‘got my feet on the ground|you’ve found some good in me’, and the sad lilt jabs. I am fascinated by I’ve b een a bad, bad boy by Paul Jones, because it is so loud and so strange, and there it is at number 6 in the charts, hooray. These small black discs are the first things that are truly mine; my choice, paid for with my own scraps of cash, reflecting my own stubbornness. In a dream, I watch them spin and spin, calling out, pointing the way. These are the days when very few people collect records, so therefore whatever they might buy defines their secret heart. Everyone scratches their name on the paper labels because in the event of the discs being brought to parties it’s important that the owner leaves with whatever they arrived with. This becomes irrelevant in the 1970s when the value of records is beginning to be understood, and any defacing will reduce trading prices. In the 60s, of course, it doesn’t occur to anyone that they might one day sell their collection, for who would want such throwaway items?
    In our abyss, Jeane falls in love with Johnny, who is teenaged and tattooed and dispossessed. Johnny governs Jeane’s heart, and the family becomes a battleground since Johnny swells disfavor within everyone. The tornado of Nannie’s life erupts further as Johnny clambers up the drainpipe to bang on Jeane’s bedroom window; Dad chases Johnny and beats him up; Johnny laughs it off with Hulmerist ferocity; Jeane becomes pregnant with the first of three; Nannie’s house is broken into – filchings are sorrows, and buckets in the front parlor collect the rain. One bright Saturday afternoon I patrol Alexandra Road with Nannie and Jeane, and here comes Johnny in the oncoming traffic, hands in pockets, tattooed neck and Rat Pack sunglasses. He swiftly uppercuts Jeane as he zaps past, Nannie falls into a mad Irish panic, and we race backwards towards Loreto Convent where, for reasons unknown to me, Nannie bangs on the door of the nuns’ lodge begging holy assistance. We are within their high, spiked walls, and a slum nun greets us but blocks the doorway with her overfed bulk. Nannie pleads for refuge, pointing to Jeane’s battered face, and fearing the threat of immediate stabbing. Imprisoned in her own clothes, the nun knows only the world of make-believe, and she slams the door in our faces. In fear and trembling, Nannie leads us back home through a maze of mean and narrow streets, paralyzed by the thought that Johnny might strike again. But he doesn’t, and instead, Jeane reunites herself with the lover who punched her face in public, but who also has the power to make her happy.
    1965 had brought