Twisting My Melon (2 page)

After a few months at my nana’s, we moved to a house on Cemetery Road in Swinton. My dad was working at Coach Brothers’ Inks then, another printer’s, which was an okay job though it still didn’t pay that great. But as my parents were both working full time, they managed to get a mortgage. Like my nana, that meant a lot to them, as they were the first of their generation to buy a house, but it left them skint. They had this saying when I was young: ‘Some people have a nice car, and some people have a nice house’, which they really believed. It didn’t seem to occur to them, or to many people round our way, that you might be able to have both. Even as a kid it was obvious there wasn’t much money to spare in our house, but I didn’t think we were particularly hard up, especially compared to some of the people we knew. It’s only when you’re older and you look back that you can see how things really were.

My mam worked at the local primary school, so whenever the school had a jumble sale she would get first dibs and be able to have a root through all the clothes and pick out some of the best stuff before everyone else arrived. My mam is quite a proud woman, so she probably doesn’t like the fact that we got some of our clothes from jumble sales, but because she got in there first we actually got some decent clobber.

With my mam being from a big Catholic family, we went to Catholic school and we went to church every week. My dad, on the other hand, came from a Protestant background and his dad, my grandad Fred, was the head of the local Orange Lodge, but there was never any friction in the family over religion. For our generation, it was just something that was there in the background; it didn’t dictate life.

My mam worked at St Mark’s Primary School, which was also my first school, so I was actually in her class when I was five. Well, there were two nursery nurses who took the class, my mam and another nurse. I remember that year really well, because that was the first time I ever got into trouble. In the teacher’s desk there was a great big tin of sweets, nice sucky toffees and all sorts. I had this little trick going, where just before playtime I used to go in to the bog and push one of the windows up and leave it open. The classrooms would be locked at playtime, and I would go into the playground, go round the back when no one was watching, jump in through the window, and go and rob some toffees out of the teacher’s tin. I was doing this almost every day for what seemed like ages. I would do it at dinnertime, playtime, whenever. Then one day they realized that toffees were going missing and asked the class, ‘Who’s been at the sweets?’ Obviously no one owned up, so I left it a couple of days, then I was back at it again, but this time when I got in through the window and into the classroom, my mam and the other nursery nurse jumped out and caught me. They had been lying in wait. I was paraded in front of everyone as the guilty one. I knew I shouldn’t have been doing it, and I felt bad for my mam because she’d had no idea it was me and I’m sure she was embarrassed and a bit ashamed, but I didn’t think it was the end of the world – it was only a few toffees. I didn’t do it in a bid to get attention or anything like that; I just wanted to get my hands on the sweets.

I had problems at school from early doors. At primary school, a lot of it stemmed from the fact that I was originally left-handed, which was considered a real no-no. Nowadays teachers wouldn’t mind if a kid was left-handed, but back in the 60s it was still very much frowned upon. When we were learning to write, every time I picked up a pen with my left hand I got hit with a ruler across the back of the hand by the
teacher
. So I would start off writing with my left hand, from left to right, which felt natural, then I would get hit, so I’d have to switch the pen to my right hand and then for some reason I would start writing from right to left, so I was writing in fucking circles.

Being hit with that ruler, and being told that what felt natural and right to me was so wrong, had a big effect on me. It somehow affected the wiring in my brain, and after that I found it really difficult to learn anything. Looking back, I probably needed some specialist teaching to help me overcome my learning difficulties, but back in the late 60s there was still a stigma attached to anything like that. A few other children at our school did get specialist teaching, and went off to dedicated classes, but my mam didn’t want me being ostracized and, because she worked at the school, she was able to have a quiet word and make sure I didn’t get any specialist treatment. I suppose she thought she was doing the right thing back then.

Because of the way I was taught, I now write right-handed, but I’m left-handed for most other things. If I’m playing pool I use my left hand, if I’m throwing something I use my left hand, if I’m shooting a gun I use my left hand, and if I’m playing football I use my left foot, but if I’m writing, I’m right-handed. I think that’s what originally triggered my ‘fuck-off’ response to school. I’d been told what felt natural was wrong, and then found it really difficult to learn, so I became frustrated. St Mark’s wasn’t a bad school, and some kids came out of it okay and did well for themselves, but I do think the education system failed me.

At home, my mam and dad were quite strict. My dad could rule with an iron fist, and my mam didn’t take any crap either. My old fella would give me a bit of a hiding if I deserved it, but that was pretty normal in Salford in the late 60s. If you stepped out
of
line, or you were caught up to no good, you knew you’d have it coming to you. I got away with plenty of shit as well, though, as I learned quite quickly how to be a bit sneaky and avoid getting caught.

There was always music on in the house when we were growing up. My mam and dad loved all the 60s music – the Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks – but by the time the 60s really kicked off they were married with kids, so a lot of their record collection was the original rock ’n’ roll gear, from Chuck Berry to Buddy Holly through to Fats Domino. They would play all that stuff at home, and so would we. Both me and Our Paul went through their record collection as kids, and the records got ruined thanks to us, but they let us play with them anyway because it kept us quiet. They had one of those box record players, the ones that you could stack about a dozen singles on and it would play them one by one. You could even stack LPs on it.

As well as his various jobs, in his spare time my dad was also trying to make it as a musician and a comedian. He used to play all the working men’s clubs and pubs to earn a bit of extra dough on the side. I didn’t go with him that much, but I did see him when he used to play some of the Irish pubs and the more folky gigs. About seven o’clock most nights he’d go off to various pubs or clubs to do his thing. He once entered a talent contest and came second to Lisa Stansfield, who is from Rochdale so must have been on the same circuit. Years later, when Happy Mondays were playing the Rock in Rio festival, Lisa was also on the bill. She was on the same plane as us back from Brazil, and my old fella was with us and she remembered him from that talent contest.

At the time I didn’t really think it was cool that my dad was out playing music, but you don’t when you’re a kid, do you? Whatever your parents do can feel embarrassing. I mean,
fucking
hell, as a kid sometimes you don’t even want to acknow ledge that your mam and dad exist. You want them to be invisible – every kid does. But my dad worked the pubs and clubs, so people knew who he was, and my mam worked in the nursery, so everyone knew who she was. Especially as she would sit on the top deck of the bus on the way there, smoking cigars. Not just the little thin ones, but big King Eddies, puffing away.

By the time we were six or seven years old, we were roaming about the neighbourhood quite a bit – that’s what you did when you were kids; you weren’t kept in the house all the time. I wouldn’t let my kids out on their own now, but it was different back then. I’m not saying it was safer, because Salford could be rough as fuck, but that didn’t stop people letting their kids play out.

There are a few incidents that stand out in my mind from this time. One day I was messing around with some mates and we went down to this park near us in Pendlebury, which had a great big slide in it. When we got there, we spotted that someone had stuck razor blades all the way down the slide, with chewing gum. Luckily we saw it before any of us got on the slide, so we told everyone who needed to be told and luckily no kids got injured. What sort of sick fucker does that, sticks razor blades on a kids’ slide?

We would get into little scrapes and fights all the time, almost on a daily basis, but that just seemed normal. Looking back, I suppose it was quite rough, but all I had known was Salford, so I didn’t have anything to compare it to. One day when I was in Junior One I was walking home from school, through that same park in Pendlebury with the big slide, when I was jumped by three kids. Two of them held me while the other one just kept constantly kicking me in the fucking bollocks. Little bastards. I hadn’t even done anything to
deserve
it, which is why it sticks out in my memory. I probably did deserve a kicking sometimes, but even when I did I could usually sweet talk my way out of it, which is why this occasion stands out so vividly.

We became quite creative as kids. We had to make our own fun. We would do stuff like constructing our own smoke bombs by getting a ping-pong ball, breaking it up into little pieces and then wrapping it inside tinfoil. We would then light a match and stick it inside the foil until it started burning, and put the smoke bomb in someone’s desk or drop it through a letterbox.

Another of our favourite things was simply going out and getting a chase off someone. We’d do all sorts of stuff to wind people up and get a reaction. Ridiculous things. We’d try and smash a football through someone’s front-room window, or drop our trousers at the greengrocer. There were certain people who you knew you could always get a chase out of, particularly some of the shopkeepers. We loved the buzz you would get off getting chased. Sometimes we would run back to Nana’s and wait for the inevitable knock on the door, but my nana was great, as she’d cover for us and swear blind that we’d never left the house.

Throughout my whole childhood, I was always out and about doing something, and I developed an entrepreneurial spirit at a really young age, partly because there wasn’t much money at home. I knew that if I wanted something then I was going to have to find a way to get it myself. The first real example I remember is when I was about seven years old. I borrowed some plastic bags from my mam and walked for what seemed like miles, to where I knew there was a field full of horses. I walked round the field collecting all the horse shit, then carried it back to our house and split it all up into these smaller plastic bags that my mam’s balls of wool had come in.
After
I’d bagged it all up, I went round all the houses on the estate, selling the manure to the housewives to use on their roses as fertilizer. I made a few bob out of that – not bad for a seven-year-old.

I shared a room with Our Paul in our house at Cemetery Road, and my dad made us bunk beds, by hand, when I was seven and Our Paul was five. I was on the top bunk and he was on the bottom. The bunks were painted red, and underneath the mattress the bed-base was that green-diamond metal fencing, the stuff that people have round their allotments or sometimes round school playing fields. Every time I moved in bed it made this loud, creaky metal noise, ‘creak, creak’.

We never went abroad on holiday when we were kids, but no one on our estate did, really. The first time my dad ever left the country was when he came to New York when the Mondays first played there. When we were kids we went on holiday to places like Blackpool, Southport, Bournemouth or Cornwall. That was normal for working-class folk. My nana and grandad were some of the first to go abroad from round our way. They went to Spain in the late 60s, and then they used to go to Jersey quite a bit, which seemed quite flash at the time.

The first kids I remember knocking about with were my cousins the Carrolls, and then other kids round our way, like the Doyles, the Callahans, the Murphys, the Coxes, the Joneses, the Lenahans and the Healeys. There were actually two sets of Carrolls, because both my nana and her sister married blokes from Salford whose surname was Carroll. The two fellas weren’t related – well, not until they married my nana and her sister; they were after that, obviously – but to us they were all part of one family. There was just this huge mass of Carrolls. So although Our Paul was my only sibling, we were
very
much part of this massive extended family and we had loads of cousins about our age, which meant there was always a big gang of us at birthdays and other occasions.

I would go round to my Aunty Mary’s quite a lot. She had nine kids in a four-bedroom house. Our Matt and Pat were the ones that I would hang about with the most, because they were a similar age to me. I would often crash over at Aunty Mary’s. If you were round there and it was getting late, you would just sleep in one of their beds. There were about three or four of them in a room anyway, so one more didn’t make a difference. It was like the Waltons, but in a small council house in Salford. I also spent a lot of time at my nana’s, as she lived quite close to my school and I got on so well with her.

Round our estate everyone knew our set of Carrolls, especially because my grandad was well known and well liked. He used to take us to the rugby, to watch Salford Reds at the Willows or to Swinton Rugby Club, and later we would go on our own. Our Paul actually went on to play for Salford rugby youth team. When it came to football, all our family were Manchester United fans. Everyone from Salford supports United. If you see a City fan in Salford, they must be lost. I used to go to the match now and again, but I wasn’t fanatical about it. I was one of those kids who was more likely to be found fannying around outside Old Trafford while the game was on, getting into mischief, or looking for something to rob, rather than inside watching the match. My cousin Matt and a few others in our family were mad on watching footy, but I could take it or leave it. I enjoyed playing it but I never really understood the amount of time that some people invested in it. Even at a young age, I’d rather be acting the Charlie big bollocks and going round trying to cop for girls.