Nick Sanders: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: Vol 1

CHAPTER 1

After leaving Copiapo in Chile I set off to ride over a raft of innocent hills en route to La Serena. I needed to finish off the day with a final 300 kilometres to this beautiful city and then a further 300 kilometres to the frontier of Argentina. To stay on track 3 700 kilometres had to be covered in three days, but I felt it was possible to do it in two. You have to want a record so badly that it would disgrace your very being not to get it. There are even stronger expressions of need, and they all apply to this simple task of riding the length of the Americas faster than anyone else has ever attempted. Yet more dangers lay ahead. This innocent route to La Serena is the devil’s backyard. The whole of the Pan American Highway is squeezed through a two lane backwoods road that pits truck drivers and motorists against each other in the way animals fight for territory - without quarter, neither caring if they kill or are killed. Twisting, climbing and then plunging through the trees, ordinary people drive at suicidal speeds to avoid getting caught in an accident, and more than a few end up in one as a result. Massive trucks tailgate a foot behind the vehicle in front, their huge tonnage pressed hard against you, accelerating down descents slimy with mud and wet leaves. These trucks are unstoppable, like battleships. The truck behind me sounds his horn impatiently but I make him wait until a straight section of road before he can pass safely. When he thunders by it is shocking to see the size of the load. The noise tramples all over my senses and so close is he that the vibration makes my handlebars shake. There is no chance of him stopping in a controlled manner in an emergency. Hitting anything head-on, the momentum of his load would reduce the cab to the thickness of a paperback book.

After 200 kilometres of this circus, I see a posada and pull up with handfuls of brake to stop for a minute and recover my senses. It’s only when you stop that you fully realise the speed of the traffic. I ask if there is a place to sleep and as all the rooms are taken the patron shows me a mattress next to the laundry room not normally offered to guests. Anything to sleep on is good and I eat steak and chips followed by a bowl of semolina. I am very tired and am no longer thinking straight and it is a mercy for my body to rest, it is that hard.

The next day I ride over the Andes, down Highway 5 to Los Vilos, La Ligua, San Felipe. Los Andes and Highway 60 takes me on to the frontier. The descent to Uspallata with its plunging vertical surfaces and striking mountain verdancy must be one of the most mesmerizingly beautiful sights in the world. I ride around Mendoza and then onto the Pampas. The sun sets, a half light remains for a while, slowly receding to purple-blue, then blackness. There are no large animals to surprise me on this flat plain and the riding is easy. After descending to the town of General Alvear and the next morning reaching Highway 3, I then head south to Puerto Madryn, Trelew and Commodore Rivadavia with no more local currency in my pocket, only US dollars. The cash point machines do not function but there are market traders who exchange my dollars for pesos. Outside it is sunny but the crosswind from the South Atlantic is strong and the bike has to be leant hard into it to stay upright. The wind blows my spare fuel can off the back rack at some point as I fight to hold my line all morning. Somewhere in the wind I stop for fuel and see oil beneath my final drive, then notice a strap hanging from in between the drive and the wheel. Earlier it must have snapped and got caught in the gears in the final drive, breaking an O-ring. I panic, ask if there is a mechanic nearby and am taken to an old chap behind the store.

We take off the wheel but his screwdriver becomes stuck in the central hub, nearly wrecking the spindle. Time is ticking away ever faster. I feel tired, desperate and unsure - the perfect recipe for more mistakes. The mechanic is very slow and is clearly unfamiliar with fixing motorcycles. I get impatient and stop him, even though he is only trying to help, and once we extract the screwdriver from the spindle I finish off the job myself, put on the wheel and leave. It is cold but thankfully the wind begins to subside. It is dry and there are few trucks. As the sun sets it becomes dark quickly here, and I mentally prepare myself for another ride through the night.

I continue south, to Rio Gallegos and then on to the Chilean border at Monte Aymond. Something inside me is beginning to whisper that I have failed, that the record cannot be won. All the effort and travail endured since Prudhoe Bay, all my dreams and hopes, aspirations and pressures will surely come to haunt me now. I have ridden my heart out across South America but it isn’t going to be enough.

Getting to the Magellan Strait where the ferry is waiting, a line of trucks begins to board. I ride on and the Chilean crewmen take me into their mess cabin and feed me lasagne and tea. Outside a chill wind is blowing. The strait is heaving with hard swells, the engine thumping the ferry through heaving white crests of water. The first part is nearly completed, and my schedule is eight hours ahead of the record. Having crossed this treacherous stretch of water the sirens sound indicating it is time to disembark the ferry onto Tierra del Fuego. Unfortunately the final frontier of the journey south, the border post at San Sebastian, 297 kilometres before Ushuaia, closes at 10pm in the evening. Customs there do not reopen until 9am the following morning. I cannot get to this frontier until midnight, which will be two hours too late. The sad realisation that the single one-way record is beyond me hits me hard. I have lost the advantage based on a timing technicality. All my efforts will have been in vain. I have forgotten how to be really upset over something that fundamentally has meaning only to myself, but still I am sad. Part of getting this kind of journey right is working out a strategy that takes such border crossings into account. I say to myself quietly that I am sorry if I have let anyone down. Near the Straits is a small town called Cerro Sombrero where I find accommodation. Even at midnight, the owner makes me some soup. After wiping the bowl with a hunk of bread I retire to a warm room and pull the sheets over my head and hide.

In the morning the sun can be seen shining over the plains of Tierra del Fuego through the window of my lodgings. Yesterday I was eight hours ahead of the record but that is now meaningless. For the record to be beaten the schedule needed to take me to Ushuaia the following morning by 8am, an impossibility given the time the frontier opens and the length of time it will take to ride the final stretch. Windows are the eyes of a house, portals to the world outside. Through this window I see a horizon of low-lying hills, and nearer, a cluster of white painted houses with red roofs. By the fence of this small warm house stands my bike. I want to run away across the tundra, past other windows cosily lit with families, fleeing all day past the smells of cooking and into the darkness.

Breakfast turns up; bread and jam accompanied by a cup of coffee with hot milk. It is 10.55am and I get up, say goodbye and leave. After riding the 100 kilometres of corrugated piste and dirt to the Argentine frontier, ice starts to form on the road. It is midwinter here in Tierra del Fuego. So as not to fall it’s vital to narrow my focus to include only the chosen line on the road in front of me. This eliminates any extraneous view of the world; everything is ring-fenced by what I need to do and so choose to see. Yet even that detail is breathtaking. There are stones on this track so sharp that they could easily pierce the walls of a tyre. There are hollows and conduits that rise in such a way as to fool how you see the ground. One wrong move, an inappropriate snatch at the brake lever, one miniscule misjudgement, and the bike and I would part company. The consequences of crashing so far from civilisation would be immense. When I do look up from this miasma of detail and glance across to the fields alongside the road, everything is frozen. Ponds and still waters appear white until you notice that the frost at the edges becomes a deep icy blue near the centre. Nothing is moving except me and the heads of grasses shivering in a bitter wind. Guanacos seem motionless as if cast in brown stone, and the sky is still, silent and empty.

I may already have lost my chance of securing the one-way record, so it is with a heavy heart that I ride past the Frontier Cafe and into the covered parking bay at the border. There are people here who know me: Señor Wilson and others - men usually - who have chosen to live their lives far away from the rest of humanity. One can only imagine what it is that drives them to be part of such an austere landscape in an environment that is beautiful but harsh beyond reason if you catch it on a bad day. Once again entry formalities are quickly completed and I am cleared to enter Argentina. Southern hemisphere winter daylight time makes for a very short day, and already the sun is setting and a bitter wind is gathering strength. I need a plan. Being the second fastest to ride the length of the Americas is not good enough for me. The air is dry and the conditions are cold but the road is good. I ride on in the dark and decide that the journey must now turn north to race back to Prudhoe Bay, to bolt on to this failure some real success. To give myself the opportunity to become the fastest man ever to ride the length of the Americas both ways.

Each day, each minute - you rise and fall, from victorious heights sinking back to ignominy. At worst it’s a mishap, at best a throw of the dice where you end up. Not here though, not for me - I press ever onwards to escape the jaws of defeat. On the road it is now freezing cold and getting steadily worse. Highway 3 to Rio Grande throws up no complications to hinder my progress and I leave this small city behind, then come to a halt at a police stop. The officer warns me of snow ahead, but I bury my trepidation and set off regardless. In 1996 I fell off my Triumph Daytona in the Pass de Garibaldi and broke my ankle. It still hurt when I was riding through Peru. It would be good not to do the same this time.

Sure enough, a thin layer of snow soon appears across the road. I slow down and wonder if the Super Tenere will be more forgiving than the Triumph on what is quickly becoming an extremely treacherous surface. The tyres bite crisply, no slip, just grip. It is now dark and the snow is turning to ice. More snowfalls. The road starts to climb. For an hour I am in the snow, which is getting thicker all the time. Through the forest and into the pass proper. The snow is now three inches deep. All those years ago I was so young; I’d motorcycled around the world on an Enfield, but the Pan American record attempt was my first real challenge. I had secured the sponsorship of Mobil Oil, Triumph and IBM, and my ride from Ushuaia to Prudhoe was a training run prior to riding around the world in 31 days. It goes back a long time, this mania. It was then, and remains now, obfuscation, firmly entrenched in my brain, unable to escape. Yet it is the physical reality that pulls me more strongly onward, something that goes beyond the intellectual. These journeys are both an escape and an incarceration. Perhaps it is the same for all adventurers, our compulsion a constant burden we have forced ourselves to carry.

In the headlights the snow falls thickly, partially obscuring the road ahead. The bike is holding up well. Higher up the pass it is pitch dark. Snow is piled up alongside the road and there is no traffic. Here in Tierra del Fuego, near the southernmost tip of the world, winter has come with a vengeance. Suddenly I cross a ridge formed by a frozen tyre track. My instinct is to grab the front brake lever; let go immediately as I realise my foolishness, but it’s too late - the front wheel slides then suddenly finds traction again, the bike lurching across the road. Gently I manage to bring the bike back under control. It happens again. I am tired. No, I am totally exhausted. It keeps happening. The front wheel slides again. I don’t brake. I am heading towards a drift at the side of the road and I can’t stop; no, too tired to stop, can’t be bothered, it won’t hurt… But I’m wrong, it does. Thump. Ouch. The bike plunges nose first into the snow, flings me off and falls heavily on my left leg and foot. Silence. Nothing. I lie face down on the ground. There is snow in my mouth and up my nose. The bike is on top of me and I cannot get up. There is no one around and it’s still snowing hard. The left pannier has landed hard on my left ankle. Touratech make the panniers and they are very strong. My foot is not so strong and a bone has broken - I can feel the jagged edge of a metatarsal butt-ended into each broken bone grinding when I move. I cannot pull myself free and I lie there slowly getting covered in falling snow. If there has ever been a time to ask myself what the fuck are you doing here? that time is now! It is really painful and I panic, thinking my ankle will break next. The pressure of the bike on my bent foot is extreme, the pain numbed only slightly by the cold. For a fleeting minute I actually fall sleep but when I wake my foot is still stuck. Life does not flash past and there are no redeeming features about this predicament except that in the snow, my face has now warmed and the snow around my foot has begun to thaw. With an agonizingly painful effort, my foot separates from its boot and is free.

Quickly digging out the boot I fasten it back onto my foot, hoping this will contain any swelling. Standing in the darkness, foot throbbing, life seems suddenly better. Slowly and with huge effort, balancing on my good leg, I raise the bike and jump on. 20 minutes later there appears the first sign for Ushuaia. The descent to the city limits passes another police post and it is here where I ask to have my witness book signed. We record a time of 21 days and 19 hours, making me the second fastest rider to have completed the length of the Americas. An American called Dick Fish completed this ride in 21 days and two hours. It is four in the morning. I find a cheap hotel, chain the bike to a lamppost and sleep. If this is how one day it might end, how did it all begin?

I started out a scraggy 2 lb. 13 oz., a scrawny lump of flesh pumped out of my mother’s body in a brutal, corporeal, wholly animal experience. Premature at 31 weeks, a near stillborn, shrivelled blue scrap of existence, fighting for life in the harsh world of 1957’s Britain.

No-one thought I would survive, but a shot of pure oxygen - a common recourse at the time for non-responsive newborns, despite the fact that a significant number of those so treated went blind - saw my limp, still little body jerk awake. Coughing up blood and mucus, screwing up my not-quite formed face, tiny newt’s hands clenched with the effort of becoming truly alive, I took my first breath.

Curled up in my father’s hand, I looked like a skinned rabbit, tiny purple veins pumping blood underneath translucent paper-thin skin. Veins as fragile as brittle hair were visible all over a head smaller than a squirrel’s. It took the full span of my two tiny spindly arms to encircle one of his fingers. But it was obvious I was desperate to live.

Behind the complete ordinariness of this miracle of birth lay the stark fact that brain damage in premature babies was common in the 1950’s, yet my early arrival was a blessing in disguise. It wasn’t the webbed fingers, the egg shell skull or leg bones as thin as dry twigs that complicated the delivery, or the imperfect composition of a foetus that was not quite a baby and too small to hold, that represented the real challenge to my survival in those delicate early weeks. My mother had consumed a bottle of gin most days during our pregnancy together, and I was close to having foetal alcohol syndrome.

Thankfully I had been rushed through the process of gestation before the real damage had set in. As a result I was one of the lucky ones to have been born from an addicted parent; I did not get stigmata of the face or memory loss, but I would go on to inhabit an arguably interesting position in the spectrum of disorder entirely of my own making. My name is Nick Sanders. This is the story of my life.

If my mother wasn’t sure if she wanted me, it was partly because the size of her pregnancy made it harder to reach the optics in the bar my father tenanted. It was he who had insisted on the conception to save his marriage, away from the clutches of a fleshy-faced man called Jimmy McGuire, a garrulous Irishman whom my father was too much of a gentleman to crush, but he knew what was going on.

I don’t know exactly at what age my mother lost her innocence but her childhood was deconstructed at about seven. She lost her father during the Great War, his legs ripped off by shrapnel in the trenches of the Somme. She said she’d heard his screams in her dreams and drank for closure, but closure never came.

In Ireland her family had to work from an early age to survive the abject poverty of there existence. While her mother brought in a little money as a working single parent, my own mother had to look after her two brothers; she cleaned the house, played Cinderella, and only briefly went to school.

Her childhood denied her; the start to my mother’s life had the emotional resonance of a seal clubber’s bat, brutally shaping her attitude to the man she would one day marry and the children she would conceive. If this were an assertion based on probability, history would record it as being uncomfortably close to the truth.

1956 did not cater easily for divorce; in the proud eyes of my father this was a social situation that could not be allowed to happen. I was the result therefore of a union that was imperfect from the outset, and which soon turned into one of complete dyspraxia; a partnership between two people who, like many couples at the time, lacked the insight to make it better. Clumsily in love is a kind way to describe how what started as honest, deep feelings would ultimately degenerate into dysfunction and loneliness, the waste of 40 years enough to make one cry. In hindsight, how could they have believed, even in their darkest imagination, that the emotional savagery they were already inflicting on one another could possibly be assuaged by the birth of another child, especially a blue faced little fart of a thing like me?

My earliest recollection of life was of sitting in a big room playing with a train set. I was not quite five. There was a large sofa and the usual modernist furniture of the 1950’s including a large round table at which I would occasionally - although not often - eat with my parents. There was a long coffee table, although my parents never took coffee; in fact guests never made it into this room at all, and for my very early life it obscured the fact that anything existed beyond what I could see within it. There was a door, and instinctively I wanted to explore, but I was dissuaded from doing so by the smashing of glasses and ceaseless shouting that erupted regularly from nearby. For long periods people would scream, and I didn’t know if it was mummy or daddy or other people downstairs, but after what sounded to me like a single hard hand clap, there were brief moments of silence followed by people saying sorry and the sounds of tears. It was here that I learned to focus; by narrowing down my senses it was possible at first to hear more, to begin to associate more keenly the sound of a slap and crying as being connected. A child knows when its mummy is being hurt. Eventually it was equally possible to tune things out so that the shitty sounds of someone’s torment could be dulled down to the occasional slap.

A child will cry when it knows it is being heard and there is a chance of a favourable response, but at four years of age there was already a grown up part of me that had learnt how to cry quietly without anyone knowing. My enforced confinement, owing to my parents’ inability to know how to want me, made any need for affection pointless. Superficially it would be the child that concentrated intensely on the train set he had been given for Christmas, rebuilding the track over and over until it could put the pieces together with his eyes closed. It was a terrible focus and I didn’t understand what loneliness was as a small child - that was to come later - but being on my own sat well on my small shoulders because that was all I knew. Children can be happy enough because their worlds are small; what else was there to know and not to like? Sleep was sonorous to me and the sounds of my not being awake were rich and deep, taking me briefly to a place faraway from the cheap bustle of my parent’s fractured lives.

My father was at that time a publican in an Irish part of west Manchester. He ran the Red Lion in a place called Patricroft, known then for its large population of Irish immigrants. They had come in their thousands, at first fleeing the famine and the blight, and then a second generation of Irish and those from the Provinces permeated throughout Liverpool and Manchester, my mother among them. There they stood, my grandmother with her daughter and two sons, on the dockside. I imagined them harried and prim, dressed as best they could in their cheap make-up, a pat of rouge, their hats pinned onto their hair. My mother, nervous and sad with her round, kind eyes and fresh cheeks, the child-woman that she was forced to be. When they could no longer afford the rent in Lisburn, they took transport to Belfast, and from there they caught the boat to Liverpool Docks.

Sometimes I would be allowed out of that room and down into the bar area. I didn’t understand why men (mostly) would drink a lot and then start shouting, and sometimes they too would cry. Maybe someone had been cross with them, their mummies perhaps? A sickly sweetness permeated the air. I didn’t know the names of the drinks I was given to taste, but the whiskey inflamed my throat and my mother’s gin smelt like granny when she missed the toilet.

Dad talked about spirits and spilt beer, and everywhere lay the detritus of cigarettes, vomit and spit. It was a rough pub that he had taken on, but he did so with a tough reputation. When the Navvies started to brawl from too much drink, he would clamp their heads between his big strong arms, drag them to the door and throw them out onto the street. Teeth were lost, spat out onto the cobbles by men too pissed to know or care. As I grew older words like banned, sober and contrite entered my vocabulary, and I became familiar with the notion that these men would regularly batter the gobs of their wives until, too drunk to stand, they’d fall asleep.

Rough as the earth, dad would say to me, leaving me to precociously deduce the kind of world in which he lived and which indeed he himself was part of. For him, these bastard drunks were but good men gone wrong, corrupted by the drudgery and the penance of never having enough of whatever they needed to live. Now they were good only for fighting and pickaxing dirt or coal, being chucked off sites by bastard bosses, with no choice but to be tranquilized by dad’s beer in his public house, sometimes handing me a sixpence until everything they’d earned was once again spent.

We moved nearer to the city centre of Manchester, to another pub in a place called Eccles. The trams had been dismantled and footballers then were only paid a few quid. The edges of cities are somehow invisible, an indiscriminate no man’s land of industrial anonymity separated from a glamorous interior and whatever exists further out. As a young boy I concluded that as a rule people didn’t make conscious decisions as to where they lived, but instead were swallowed up, as we all were, by shop fronts and dirty bricks. There was a realisation even then that life itself had somehow conspired against you living anywhere else.

Yet another of my father’s ventures, the pub in Eccles was a dirt-ridden hovel of a drinking establishment, The Odd Fellows Arms on Liverpool Road opposite buildings that had been boarded up. It was tiled on the outside like a toilet and not much better within. Politely put, it was a classless little shithole. Dad was forever fending off drunks who tried to punch him in the face. There were frayed carpets on the floor and late night drinking after the doors were secured for the night. The police were always round, banging on the window, waking me up in my pyjamas, whilst men caroused around my mother, which of course she seemed to like. I remember the ones with the crusty collars and their ill fitting suits, one notch up from the pitmen, selling from street to street in their fancy cheap cars. They tipped best, so my mother said, feigning little interest whilst still spooning to their silly talk and the low tones of wretched men and their predictable ways.

My mother was more voluptuous than beautiful, possessing a full body without being in anyway overweight. She had Irish black hair with languid neck length curls, strong shoulders and a gash of a mouth that could hurt and wound anyone in the vicinity. She had more personalities than she knew what to do with, but she lacked any composure of emotion, and she would have made a poor actress indeed.

Either to appease, maybe out of generosity or perhaps simple love, my father bought her expensive clothes in which she meandered around the bar like a diva, flashing secret smiles from her generously lipsticked face. If anyone taught me the pernicious value of a woman with a red mouth it was her. My mother, laughing and carousing with that mouth and that man Jimmy McGuire. He was the one who must have confused my father to the core. The Irish swine was full of gross chat, sliding in sweet talk when dad’s back was turned, and when my father was shifting kegs in the cellar he’d be there until decorum could be compromised in only one more way, his hand up my mother’s skirt.

Lawrence Durrell, in his book Justine, said: There are only three things to be done with a woman… you can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature. Whatever it was I might do or become, it was me then, that scraggy, dispossessed, unwanted runt who dared draw breath to take in the smells of sawdust and spilt beer, who tried to make sense of who that woman was.

It was also there I first heard the chorus of drinking men and their hard faced wives. Drinking places then, in tough parts of cities, just out of sight of the unbelievable tragedy of war, were dens of strangeness. Like a circus of sighs, they were buoyed up only by alcohol to fend off the hopelessness my dad said he sometimes felt as well.

In the first five years of my life we moved 14 times, each time taking with us the sour smells of a good time gone bad. Every move took from me what few people I knew and as I slowly started to become aware of my life, it made me think how all children are hostages to how their parents live. Taking on yet another tenanted establishment was always my mother’s idea. As is often the way of things, images and plots of life that appear as they do when you are small, become something else when the fog of not knowing begins to clear.

CHAPTER 2

1962 was a year of seismic cultural change. The Beatles’ first single, Love me Do, got to number 17 in the charts, partly because their manager Brian Epstein bought 10 000 copies himself. George Harrison sat with his mum by the radio waiting for his first ever airplay. Just a couple of hundred miles from where the actress Ursula Andress famously emerged bikini-clad from the sea in the James Bond film Dr. No, a US Air Force U-2 on a reconnaissance trip over Cuba spotted nuclear missile sites being constructed. President Kennedy’s aide, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, was quoted as saying it was the most dangerous moment in human history. The Pentagon later admitted that if there had been a nuclear attack quickly followed by retaliation, 215 million people would have died.

I remember my father commenting briefly on Miss Undress, as he put it, but the strict confines of his petty bourgeois upbringing forbade him to say any more. For me, several more addresses followed, which had a schoolboy excitement about it. There was always something hopeful about change, which a static situation didn’t quite deliver. Large men carrying tea chests would remove the same crockery and delicate items from various rooms whilst more men once again hauled larger items of furniture down to the pavement. Groups of woman stood with their arms crossed in their pinnies, linen scarves wrapped like turbans on each of their heads, gossiping parlour witches always with a curler or two protruding from the front. I cannot remember if they were pleased to see us go or not, but they didn’t look sad, enjoying the merry-go-round of our gypsy life.

Moving does not have to be a distraction; the losing of friends is easily replaced by the business of wiping the slate clean. This is what happens when you journey to a different street. It’s not as if we moved far, but in those days the kind of Thomas Cook consumer travel hadn’t reached the outer regions of Manchester city’s suburban working class. For them a trip to Blackpool was a major achievement, and London was out of the question unless you emigrated to the south and didn’t plan on coming back. Locally you only had to shift a few streets, half a borough maybe, to be forgotten. On a personal level it allowed my parents to focus on something other than the squalor of their own selfish existence. I never knew exactly why we moved so much, but my father’s increasing inability to finance his businesses might have contributed thereto.

During the temporary moments when we were settled, dad would allow me to steer his car whilst sitting on his lap. There was no seat belt law at that time, and drink driving was commonplace. I recall only the heavy smell of beer on his breath as we sat in the large Vauxhall Cresta that he had bought new, its bull nosed styling mimicking that of the latest American models. We must have looked quite a sight as we cruised around Manchester. He was quite jolly when intoxicated, and those carefree moments when we drove together gave me real happiness and instilled in me my love of motoring.

Other than the brief times my father and I spent together, there was nothing memorable about my early life. The world I inhabited, as it is with most children, was singularly small. How can you aspire to something you know nothing about? On account of my mother having drunk the optics dry and dad nightly pleasuring himself with two gallons of beer, he relinquished his tenancies on the public houses he’d leased and instead purchased two newsagent businesses less than a mile from the city centre.

The one I recall best was a small single roomed shop with a counter stacked with newspapers, behind which were shelves tightly packed with cartons of cigarettes. I liked the look of the John Player brand because it had a picture of a sailor framed by a blue circle on the front, but in keeping with the economic wherewithal of most of his customers, the small packet of five Woodbines was the top seller.

One of my father’s shops was situated on Church Street whilst the other was near the junction of Gray Mare Lane and Ashton New Road. Gray Mare Lane was a grimy little street filled with large dirty brick buildings, small factories operating heavy engineering and a social club. The other larger road postured as a busy arterial throughway from one anonymous grey suburb to another. Living in such a northern urban environment had an industrial cheerlessness to it. Anything clean quickly became soiled by soot particles that hung in the air like snow from some alternate, inverted reality, whilst washing that had been draped out of windows was pulled back into the house smelling of coal smoke. The stink and grime clung to people in the same way. For all their working life, pit workers never got the grime from out of their fingernails. Their skin was grey from the coal that had mixed with sweat and forced deep into their pores. In Uncle Ted’s house coal dust had permeated every absorbable material; whenever I came home from seeing him and Aunty Aida my mother would make me take a bath. It was an enforced association and made me think of poor people as being unclean, yet you didn’t need to be an interpreter of social values in such an industrially urban environment to understand the ridiculousness of this proposition, created by a person least likely to be able to judge. It was only a matter of time before the ability of my mother to adapt to the needs of her own environment was to be severely tested.

Opposite the shop was the White Hart Hotel, the bar of which my father frequented religiously the instant the shutters of the shop were pulled down. The moment I heard the clatter, I knew it was time for me to be put in front of the television. We had a small 12 inch screen set into a tall cabinet inlaid with different types of wood. One afternoon I watched the state funeral of Winston Churchill. The film being broadcast was in black and white, but it was the sea of hats that lined the road which took me by surprise. The cortège progressed slowly through thousands of bobbing trilbies, their owners all straining for a better view whilst the presenter described the event in discreet and sombre tones. Perhaps it wasn’t the hats that gave me a feeling for the importance of occasion, more the fact that as a little boy I had spent so much time alone and consequently without distractions I really had learnt to listen to what was being said.

In 1965 the average house price in the UK was £3 660 and a gallon of petrol cost 26 pence. The Pennine Way officially opened, and bodies found buried on nearby Saddleworth Moor were being linked to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. This was the year when the legendary footballer George Best’s status went though the roof and when spectators standing on the terraces watching him wore flat caps

I have a vague picture in my head of the architecture around where I lived, which was of bombsites, derelict buildings, small shops and a very busy road. Once a week my dad would take me on my tricycle past the front doors of houses that opened directly onto the street and people rushing by. There were no gardens or grass banks and hardly any trees, just cobbles and gutters into which my little bike occasionally dropped. Like this I pedalled to Philips Park by the cemetery. The best part was having my father to myself for an hour or two and it was a treat I looked forward to immensely. Whether it was the rarity of the occasion, or what I like to recall as noble silences between a father and his little son, but it was certainly a time when what was unsaid was more memorable to me than what was. Love needs no logic for its purpose and even a smile or a pat on the head gave me the strength I needed to get through the nights so I could spend another hour with my dad.

Always in the morning he started work when it was still dark at 4am. He would lift tied parcels of newspapers onto the counter in readiness for the stream of men coming to and leaving the pit. Not far away Bradford Colliery remained resolutely open as a viable coalmine, and men, clean in the morning, would return black-faced when the hooter blew to end their working day. Every time the hooter sounded a quick exchange of men would burst into the shop and spend a few coppers. I couldn’t see over the counter but looking up at my father serving, watching him take money in exchange for tobacco and newspapers, peaking on a Sunday when he would sell 144 quire of the News of the World.

If I only had the undivided attention of my father for an hour once a week in the park, at night at least he told me bedtime stories about a woodcutter venturing into the forest only to be assailed by a beautiful maiden. There was never any resolution to his story though, and my enquiring mind was often troubled by his inability to create closure. It is odd how such things lodge in your memory only to sift back into your senses in a different way many years later. It was easy to relate to the beautiful woman - who probably wanted rescuing - and the knapsack of cheese and wine he talked about made perfect sense to a young boy already subconsciously planning his escape.

Undoubtedly there was no dark side to the fairy tale. Nothing made it hard to reconcile my childlike feelings with the daddy I loved, except maybe the obsessive repetition. Every night it was the same simple story; the woodcutter, the girl, the darkness and the wistfulness in his voice. Even as a child I wondered why the woodcutter would carry such a sharp axe and yet never chop down a single tree. But daddy, why didn’t he make friends with the pretty lady? I would also ask, because as I saw it - when I understood more - the least he could have done was dump his piety at the edge of the forest and be proactive about the situation. But no; the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing, and this poor man had been abused for years by a woman he loved who’d transmuted into a type of contamination.

It is said that a baby only cries because it needs to, and if there was a hint of misogyny in his dealing with women, it was his wife who had constructed those circumstances. As a small boy I sensed he wanted a resolution to his fable, and it felt unbearable that as the person closest to me, his inability to deal with cessation ensured he would never find it. One of many legacies my father left me was an unbearable sense of obsequiousness. His high-mindedness borne from a combination of decency and guilt - the duty of a husband gone wrong - almost made him servile, and that took me years to shake off.

Such were the prevailing attitudes of 1960’s northern England that the missile crises and the war - anything thought to be out of the ordinary - gave people an opportunity to be gravely concerned. Babies born to single women, for example, were seen as a stain on respectable society. They were often given away to relatives or childless couples so the poor mother might rehabilitate herself in more settled circumstances. Either there was some collective regard for appropriate values, or it was the tittle tattle of narrow mindedness that crossed over into smugness.

My father had another son called Michael. He was older than me by 17 years, so arching the eyebrows of people knowingly whenever we were introduced as brothers. It was a cruel assessment of the situation but the age gap between us represented one of two things; an inability to conceive or a reason to hold together a marriage in mourning.

My brother, like my mother, didn’t take much notice of me and at just eight years of age I was smarter than he was at 21. So deep were his feet of clay you could have thrown a vase with them. So specious was he as a brother that it was he who taught me to cringe. On the few occasions my father asked him to look after me, he would leave me in a picture house and then forget to take me home. Once I sat through Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday four times before a neighbour saw me sobbing and took me home. It wasn’t that I minded being alone; the film really was that bad and I was cross at having had to watch it. Small situations like this become important learning experiences, and in time I turned the inconsiderate nature of someone who should have known better into a positive. I learned not to rail at my time in the dark, and instead learned to love the cinema. After all, it was becoming clear I was going to spend a lot of time in one.

Aunty Aida was the charlady who cleaned my father’s shop. She lived around the corner on Gray Mare Lane with Uncle Ted, who played the trumpet in the local brass band. They were very poor in the opinion of my mother - who never visited them - partly because they drank sterilized milk from a long-necked bottle but also because they never laid a tablecloth when they sat down to eat. Electricity was of course widely available, but as with gas, the meter had to be fed half crowns, and when they ran out of money completely, the rooms in their house were shrouded in shadows. These people were not really related to me, but I knew they loved me more than I was loved by my