Poetry | City Jackdaw

My new poetry collection is out in two days. As I’ve previously mentioned, I have given it the title ‘Fifty’ as it was conceived as fifty poems to mark my fiftieth year. But there’s another life connection on the front cover.

I’ve included a footnote inside the book explaining that those flats, caught on a typical Mancunian evening, were my home for the first eighteen months of my life.

Thinking about it now, though, it must have been a bit shorter than that. We moved out when my Mum was pregnant with my brother, who is eighteen months younger than me (which could be where I got that figure from). So if we moved when she was pregnant, maybe around that significant three-month mark, then I must have lived there until I was around twelve months old.

Would that be right? I’ve confused myself. Let’s call it a year and move on.

Queensbury Court in Miles Platting. We lived up on the ninth floor. Of course my memory of it is non-existent, but I have it on good account that I hated it. When my parents would wheel me into the lift, strapped in my buggy, I’d reach my arms out wide, trying to grip the doors on either side to prevent my entry, screaming my young head off.

Out on the veranda, through a tantalising two inch gap at the bottom of the balcony, I could see other children playing freely outside on the grass below while I was cooped up inside this torturous tower.

From a handful of black and white photographs taken inside the flat, I can today work out which side of the block that we lived, for through the window can be seen the Bradford gas tower in the distance, situated close to where Manchester City’s Etihad stadium now stands. For so long I had had no idea that I once lived within sight of my club.

That would be my personal cell right there, counting nine floors up, above the tree.

I recently (re)discovered this fact when I went to check the place of my origins out.

During the time of the Covid lockdowns, at the point where we were allowed to go outside or travel in the car with people from your own ‘bubble’, we took my Mum to see this landmark of our shared history. She was deep into her illness then, suffering from Alzheimer’s, and I was curious if the sight of our former home would register with her,

You guys know me by now, how I’m big on connections, retracing steps and recreating moments. Here was my earliest beginnings, one of those places that feeds into who I am today. I wondered if it was a two-way thing. Maybe some of me is absorbed in those walls, that if the conditions were right my wailing protestations could once again be released into the confines of that small two bedroomed flat.

I guess nobody wants that.

My wife took some photographs of my Mum and I stood outside the entrance but, having lost so much weight, she doesn’t look well on them and so I won’t share them.

But I will inflict this on you: me looking rough post-Covid, dressed inappropriately for a cold breeze (or maybe it was the tower block’s looming shadow) while chasing ghosts.

To my satisfaction Mum recognised where she was, pointing out the place where the parade of shops used to be and in the general direction of where the pub stood where she would go for a drink with my Dad. She couldn’t remember the pub’s name (The Hat and Feathers) and she couldn’t remember Dad. But it was something.

She could also recall the ground floor flat where the caretaker lived. “Do you remember him?” she asked me a couple of times while pointing to the right of the entrance doors.. “He lived just there.”

“I was just eighteen months old,” I replied, the one without Alzheimer’s and the one getting it wrong.

She was tiring and getting cold so we decided to cut things short. As we pulled away Mum continued to look in the direction of Queensbury Court through the car window. I wondered how she was seeing it. Did it appear to her as it was back then? Somehow preserved from the point where we all ended up on Langley, via Darnhill and Back O’th Moss. Four miles away. Fifty years away. A lifetime ago.