The Long Road To Manchester

The Manchester Business School was located on or near to the Oxford Road. As a teenager, the Oxford Road Show had been a helpful late night TV introduction to the music scene of the North West. Manchester was the city of Joy Division and New Order. The Smiths. Magazine and Buzzcocks. Manchester was home to Factory Records. In the autumn of 1984 I was due to go there to begin a degree in computer science.

That never happened. The conditional offer I’d been given was dependent on passing 3 A-levels with an A and 2 Bs. I’d ended up with 3 passes, all of them D. Manchester was erased from the map of my future, only to be reinstated a couple of decades later. I remember attending a Christmas party in 1984 – it was to be the last time I met a cohort of my school friends en masse, but of course I was not to know that at the time. Paul Watson asked me what life was like in Manchester and I had to reveal the truth. I wasn’t in Manchester. I was still in Southend, at my parents’ house, passing time (treading water?) until I could resume my higher education the following autumn.

I never attended any school reunions. That Christmas party was too fresh to be considered a reunion. Here were people that had only parted company with each other a few months previously. Set against the last seven years of high school, that time span was little more than a protracted yawn.

One of the things the internet delivered some years later, when it finally arrived at that midpoint in our lives, was Friends Reunited. It was the earliest opportunity for people to reconnect with lost work colleagues or old school friends. It was a simpler, more homely version of what Facebook and others would later deliver (and ruthlessly monetise). I suppose the novelty and a certain element of curiosity led me to sign up.

A fair percentage of the people I’d been at school with were on there. It was possible to learn a few things from afar. James Lee who I’d collected samples with in Priory Park as part of a Geography project, had been a successful city trader before emigrating to Australia where he now ran a cattle ranch. The smartest kid in our year became a university lecturer somewhere in the Midlands and also a researcher connected to the Cerne project. I even exchanged emails with a couple of people who I’d been friends with briefly or who had been on the outer circle of those I hung out with.

But I didn’t make any real connections. I certainly had no plans to seek out any reunions. I didn’t want to be presented with other people’s successes, however minor, while I was still living in rented accommodation after a failed attempt at a career in the music industry and a similarly doomed attempt (then ongoing) at making a career as a writer. Also, there are dangers in the past. I don’t think I wanted to be reminded of who I used to be. Don’t wake up the ghosts. Better to stick to the written word, where at least nominally you have some control over the narrative.

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I forget the exact circumstances that led to Cath choosing Manchester as the place to do her PhD. They must’ve been actively recruiting overseas students. Maybe there was some incentives that brought her here. She soon took against the climate, the lack of sun when compared to her home city of Montreal. She was living in a shared residence with other female students. A kindly Indian lady who had become her confidante. One of the other housemates was less popular. An obsessive watcher of the weather channel (for reasons unknown), prone to leaving half consumed food discarded randomly about the kitchen until one of her housemates would eventually be moved to dispose of it for sanitary reasons.

Outside of her studies, she had adopted (or been adopted by) a group of gay friends. Her weekends were spent around Canal Street, the gay village, moving from club to club. Getting to mix with such celebrity names as Russel T Davies (later to become the saviour and then even later the non-saviour of Dr Who). As a straight woman the gay clubs were a safer and less aggressive environment to hang out in. She took to learning sign language as a way to communicate with friends over the loud thump of the dance music. (She taught me some of the basic signs a few years later on a 60 minute train journey from London to Southend).

After a year she moved in as a tenant in a house owned by one of her gay friends. Located on the edges of Salford it was here that I came to visit on a few occasions, as I belatedly found myself entering student life in Manchester. The journey from Penzance was somewhat arduous, but to that point it had always been Cath that made the journey. Now it was my turn. I went by train the first time, but after that I couldn’t ignore the significantly cheaper £9 return fare that National Express offered. It meant a train ride to Plymouth and then many hours by coach, first to Bristol and then northwards through Stoke and Stockport.

I liked Manchester, although I suppose I didn’t have to live there 24/7. The predominant style of red brick architecture was impressive. The trams were a novelty to me. On a sunny day (there were some sunny days), the canals were captivating. There was also the history, so much of the music I’d grown up with had come from this city. Even the names of the various districts could evoke old memories.

Often I’d accompany Cath to the business school and I would write or attempt to write fiction while she worked at her dissertation on a neighbouring computer. She’d sneak me in to the back of seminars. She had a shared office on one of the higher floors of the building, but one of the other post-grad students (Chinese I think) was living there fulltime and the student services seemed reluctant to do anything about this. His bedding and a rice cooker were neatly folded away and pushed under a table when he was absent from the room.

I didn’t write much to be honest, but I did complete one story while visiting. The Book Gamblers became my third professional sale, to the same site that had published my first. I liked that story a lot. It combined my love of books and my love of music. It could be viewed as another road trip story. And it had a twist in the ending, which was not something I usually did – not because twists were beneath me, simply that most of my stories were lucky if they had a plot at all, let alone one that could be twisted.

I suppose I liked Manchester because I was happy there. I took in the sights. I got to experience one of the gay clubs for myself, but during the early evening rather than late at night when the music and the culture would’ve kicked in for real. Mostly we used to hang out at The Font Bar, a 60s styled compact establishment close to the business school, housed across two floors. It wasn’t too trendy and as a result it never got too busy. It was our place. We could people watch from the windows on the main floor, the youngsters on a Friday night setting out with barely any clothes on even in the middle of winter. Everyone in Manchester seemed to be Mad Ferret as the saying used to go.

When Cath was not studying we would go out walking to marvel at the colonies of local magpies or hold movie marathons (Alan, whose house it was, was away at the times I visited). One night, watching a film with the lights off, we spotted a figure outside the back patio doors, spreading themselves against the glass like a giant moth. It was a child, a teenager, casing the joint, unaware with the lights off that there were people inside. The look of fright when we pulled back the curtains is still saved somewhere in the deeper recesses of my head.

We called the police and later had to make statements to the two police officers – one male, one female – who came to investigate. We never heard anything further about that incident.

At the coach station for the journey back to Cornwall, our conversations became more stilted. No one likes to say goodbye. It’s a long way to travel when all you have to look forward to is a cold and unaired flat. There’s plenty more Manchester memories, but maybe we’ll return here again another day. But if you’re reading this, Paul, Manchester was grand. It just took me a while to make it there.

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(A highly fictionalised version of my time in Manchester can be read in the story Melting Point which I wrote at some point in the 2000s and eventually appeared in print in my short story collection Treasure Trails in 2021)