By Arthur Chappell
Location: The Bradford Arms, Miles Platting
My mum’s dad, Bill Cavanagh, was the best storyteller in our family. He had a reputation for spinning yarns and tall stories. His friends called him Tom Pepper, a common Manchester nickname for someone who spices stories up out of all proportion, or just tells plain outright lies.
Over the years, I realised three things:
1. His friends completely misjudged him.
2. He knew exactly what effect he was having on them.
3. Many of his stories were actually true.
In the 1970s and 1980s, on a typical Sunday afternoon he’d sit in the Bradford Arms pub close to home in Miles Platting, downing pints, while I had to drink Coke, being too young, and he’d start to reminisce about the 1940s when his horse brought down a Spitfire. Of course, everyone would look at him in disbelief and ask him what he was on about, but he’d change the subject or decide it was time to leave. Most folk would then write his anecdotes off as drunken waffle, but for those who kept at him about it over the next few days and coming months more information was forthcoming. It turned out that the Spitfire incident really happened.
No, his horse was not a Nazi sympathiser able to operate anti-aircraft artillery or fly a Messerschmitt, and in fact the War had ended when the incident happened. The Spitfire was being transported to a Manchester Museum display on the back of an open flatbed truck when Bill Cavanagh’s parcel delivery horse, frustrated and impatient with the crowd lining its normally quiet route, bolted and ran right into the side of the truck, jarring the plane right off its wheel blocks. It toppled onto one of its wings, causing some expensive damage. The horse had indeed brought down a Spitfire.
Bill Cavanagh cheerfully told many such stories, equally cryptically, eager to make an enigma of himself for beer and company. That’s why I found him such good fun, and went with him often as a passenger in his later life work as a Freightliner lorry driver, and just for drives out in his car.
Ah yes, the car, a bottle green Morris Minor of the kind he had driven ever since he moved away from working with horses. He’d gone from equine horse to petrol-driven combustion engine horsepower.
If he passed another Morris Minor he would toot his horn and wave frantically in approval. Before I hit my twentieth birthday I noticed we saw fewer such cars all the time. The species was dying out. Even his Morris was getting less reliable for him. The clutch juddered and screamed when he adjusted it. One windscreen wiper was totally ineffective. The passenger door didn’t open – I got in or out via the driver’s side of the vehicle. After months of this, he finally gave in to nagging from my mother, Alwyn, and his wife, Phyllis to get rid of the car and buy a new one.
By Debbie Brennan
Location: The Midland Hotel, Peter Street
My father concentrates on the keys
when his slender hands
play Delibes, Chopin and Grieg,
transforming cacophonous talk
into hints of whispered trysts;
drinks clink and wink at the Turkish lights.
The man braying into his phone is
silenced, as he imagines his wife
cascade down the stairs with a delicate laugh.
My father’s on board an opulent liner
that carries him off to a far away land
without Manchester rain or traffic jams.
When the guests take their leave
with a nod or a smile, the diaphanous notes
slip out and follow them home.
Debbie Brennan lives in Glossop and teaches at Oldham Sixth Form College. She has just completed an MA in Creative Writing at MMU. She wrote this poem about her dad who played the piano in the foyer of the Midland two evenings a week for twenty years.
By Lydia Unsworth
Location: a bus stop, Portland Street
The city has upped and folded all of its motorways; asked me to step down from off of its ring road.
We are not in love, the city says.
We have been together for nine years and now the city is leaving me. We have spent every moment together; I in its arms and it in my mind. I have flown away like that butterfly, which is always said to return if you let it. And each time, I did; I was no deserter in essence. I could not stay away.
We had our ups and downs, I and the city. Each time we met, the city had developed, was reshaped. I tried not to notice, not to give the city the ego boost it was inching for. I didn’t mention the Beetham Tower; and, when the Urbis announced it was to become a football museum, I took it to be a childish prank aimed at attracting my attention, and I looked the other way.
The city had its motives and so did I; there was a time when our desires were the same.
The city had been calling me for weeks, leaving messages in the papers and on the faces of my friends. I came home as soon as I was able. I called the council and we arranged to meet.
It was high season but the city spared me an hour. We went for a coffee. The city picked me up with a smooth breeze and set me down onto a Starbucks bench. The Starbucks was new and I stared at my latté and pretended not to notice the change.
The city expected something from me; its traffic lights were on amber, blinking. We stared at each other over the steaming cups and I knew we had lost something; it wasn’t just that I couldn’t remember the postcodes, or that the streets were vandalised with new words and new names; it was something more, something vital, the city didn’t have a place for me, it wasn’t going to rent me any more rooms or promise to keep me safe. The city and I were through. It was taking away my personal photographs and handing me a road atlas.
This is what I am to you now, said the city.
By Lydia Unsworth
Location: Oxford Road (outside the University of Manchester’s new visitor’s centre)
There is a small section of double-yellow lines along Oxford Road, just in front of where the Mathematics building used to be, where some leaves were trapped between road and roller while the paint was being applied.
When I have guests and they ask me what there is to see in Manchester, I take them there.
We will be approaching the place and I’m all ‘here it comes’ and ‘get ready!’ and they are looking about them for a sign, for a flashing light, for a pointing arrow, for something larger than anything.
And then I point to the ground. I’m jumping about now, telling them about how I once did a double-take while riding my bicycle. About how I stopped and got off, lifted my bike up and onto the pavement. About how I came back and turned around and knelt down with my camera. About how I walked the length of these imprints of leaves, photographing each one in turn.
I point out my favourite.
I ask what they think, if they have ever seen anything as perfect as these.
And some of them do enjoy it, although some of them look at me strangely and ask for the way to the museum.
I think that’s how I know who my friends are. Or who they will be. I like the kind of people who appreciate the coincidental timing of the double-yellow lines being repainted and the falling of leaves.
Lydia Unsworth blogs at gettingoverthemoon.blogspot.com
By Sadie Fisher
Location: Audenshaw Reservoir
‘And by the time we’ve walked around it, you will have your answer,’ she said.
The thing seemed insurmountable. It looked like it would take a good hour or two, maybe more. But she was adamant. Well, if that’s what it would take, so be it. It was typical of her unreasonable demands that she would elevate the conversation into some sort of unseemly contest, some test of strength. I looked down at my muddy Converse. They’d be a lot dirtier before this afternoon was finished, that’s for sure.
‘Alright,’ I sighed.
As one we turned and began walking up the short gravelly track. The sky was a light feathery blue now, denying the fact of the muddy puddles around us and the height of the water in the reservoir. Even on Sundays the M60 that girdled the reservoir was busy with families visiting families visiting families. But the hiss of the traffic had long ago ceased to register in my mind and I wondered how to proceed with the conversation. Looking down I noticed that Rachel had come prepared for this hike, her stout red leather walking boots looking like veterans of the Lakes.
‘Why are you wearing trainers?’ asked Rachel suddenly, our minds as always thinking about the same thing whether we liked it or not.
‘I always wear trainers,’ I replied, somewhat indignantly.
‘Didn’t you notice it’d been raining?’
What she actually meant was ‘didn’t you notice our relationship was going off the rails?’ but I didn’t rise to it. After all, it was a long way round this reservoir.
‘I didn’t anticipate traipsing through the mud,’ I defended myself. ‘What’s wrong with the Arndale?’
‘I wanted to break our routine,’ said Rachel. ‘We never do anything different.’
