Backward Glance by Freddie Knox

Author:Freddie Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2016-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

The next weekend the boys – that is Gordon, Eric, Billy, me and now Clement – ‘did’ Bradford; we visited J.B. Priestley land. It was still back then very much the textile city with an active Wool Exchange. Whilst gritty and grimy and with the same pall of industrial haze hanging over it as every other wealth-creating manufacturing town in the country, to us it was friendly and welcoming. The wartime bombing had not visited the place on such an intense scale as Sheffield, Tyneside or Hull, and the collective band of elected vandals had yet to sacrifice the wonderful market hall on the altar of progress. It must seem strange to today’s reader – accustomed to ghastly TV programmes celebrating inadequate police grappling with drunken dross of both sexes as an entertainment in the manner of ancient Rome’s deadly coliseum – that back then, providing you did not actively seek confrontation it was fairly unlikely to find you. Pubs were full of friendly young men looking for and sometimes finding friendly young women. We were the first mass-liberated generation where we, the children of a new affluent working class had enough disposable cash to actually enjoy ourselves in more generous spare time. We were not a bit like the Ashington miners of hard times past, receiving a benefaction from a later approving class, and now a pat on the back from a clapped-out Jock comic to say, “That’s a nice painting of a pigeon loft, by the way. Water colour is it? No, oh diluted whippet shit on compressed P45s, ah that’s very interesting.” Our youth did not receive or look for their patronage; we could pay our way and some of us realised it. Best of all Eric had come into a little money; a late aunt had remembered him in her will, over five hundred quid’s worth of remembering, and he had wisely invested some of it in a second-hand Ford Consul. Now that was real style. It looked like a yank, it had bench seats like a yank, a ‘three on the tree’ gear change like a yank. It wasn’t black and would go like hell, topping a good 75 with all of us in it. Where our parents in their youth aspired to a second-hand AJS or Norton, a Watsonian and a set of Belstaffs, we in our pomp wanted more.

In a favoured pub, The Spotted House at the far end of a then more innocent Manningham Lane, we were stood in a circle clutching pints and wondering if we should stay and try for a table and seats before it really started heaving, or maybe drift towards the centre of Bradford or then again head out towards somewhere more remote, Dick Hudsons maybe, high above Bingley, where in those days licensing hours were an ambition rather than an obligation. In amongst the usual rubbish we talked of, of girls not attained, sporting fixtures not seen but discussed with insight anyway, and the boredom of employment, Gordon casually remarked, “Shame about Adele.

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