life lessons

[Stockport Viaduct from the brand new Viaduct Park]

I’ve just been away for four days in Stockport, where I grew up, and Manchester, where I went to school, with detours on the way up and down to Knutsford, Sheffield, and Hathersage. I absolutely love this sort of trip where I can cram in as much as possible in a short amount of time, then return home with all sorts of inspiration, ideas, books, postcards, anecdotes and family news.

I realise that this has been my way of doing things throughout my life. I used to see it as a form of consuming which would then be used for producing, but then I read that Henry Oliver calls it ‘exploring’ and ‘exploiting’ in Second Act . He looks at how many people gather ideas, experiences, skills all through their lives without necessarily having a plan to use them until they reach a ‘hot streak’ which is when when they become late bloomers. I’m not saying this is my trajectory, it’s more that it told me I wasn’t the only one who had been busy collecting like this.

I don’t often have free time when I’m visiting family but this time I gave myself some, drew up a list, made bookings, and got on the buses. Hats off to Andy Burnham for bringing in the Bee Network; £5 for a day bus pass all over Greater Manchester. I half-wondered if I should change my plans and jump on a bus to Eccles or Oldham just for the heck of it.

There was a trio of places just outside the main centre of Manchester which I particularly wanted to see, the first being Elizabeth Gaskell’s House. For years, this grand 1830s villa was a complete anomaly on Plymouth Grove where it was surrounded by small red brick houses and large red brick churches. Many times I passed the peeling, dilapidated pink building with absolutely no idea of its history which is all quite ironic, really, as we ‘did’ Cranford at school and were never told that the eminent Mrs Gaskell had lived less than two miles away from our classroom. (Similarly, when we were studying Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn’s poetry for A level it was never mentioned that the former was married to Sylvia Plath and the latter was gay. The same English teacher skipped all the sex in The Rainbow - pages and pages of it - and didn’t tell us about the 1915 obscenity trial. I still don’t know how you can ‘teach’ DHL, or indeed most classic literature, without the sex.)

But back to Elizabeth Gaskell, one of my favourite C19 authors, who does tackle the issue of sex but in a rather more delicate way than DHL so wasn’t censored at school. Nevertheless, aged 12 or 13, I didn’t really understand Cranford (based on her early life in nearby Knutsford) and why the story of the Alderney cow dressed in a grey flannel waistcoat and drawers might be amusing, but later I came to admire her range, humanism, appreciation of beauty, wonderful humour, and her lovely attention to domestic detail. When I was expecting Tom and Alice and was ill and confined to bed or a settee, I would read her work in the mornings and knit in the afternoons. (I still think that’s a pretty good way to arrange my days.) Later, I read Jenny Uglow’s brilliant biography and found that Gaskell, like so many great novelists, was also a collector and gatherer this time of incidents, conversations, characters, books, impressions, and events.

[the dining room as seen from Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing table]

The biography also explains how she worked in the dining room in the Plymouth Grove house, and this was what I wanted to see most of all because it says so much about her phenomenal ability to write anywhere and with constant interruptions and demands on her time. William Gaskell’s study door was kept firmly shut, but his wife’s writing table was in a room which in a way resembles the set of a Brian Rix farce. It was placed in front of a big bay window facing the dining table and three doors, one to the left, one to right and one in front which were constantly being opened and closed. In this way, she was at the epicentre of domestic life yet managed to write so many short stories, long novels, and witty letters. You can buy the biography in the cafe in the vast former kitchen downstairs, and sit and read about Gaskell family life and the likes of Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Carlyle staying upstairs.

[textiles in the Shirley Craven exhibition]

A short walk away from Plymouth Grove is The Whitworth. It was built in the 1880s in the rather fiercely red red brick which is so prevalent in Manchester but had a very stylish 1960s open-plan interior makeover, and more recently was extended and restored with the addition of a fabulous steel and glass box of a cafe surrounded by park greenery. Aside from a nice cup of tea with a view, there are wonderful textiles and C20 art and beautiful floors and fixtures and fittings. It’s free, calm, restrained, and not trying too hard. Fantastic.

If you do, try to make your visit coincide with when the Victoria Baths is open.

I cannot overstate how amazing it is to be able to wander freely and for free around such a phenomenal building (1906)

with mosaic floors, tiled walls, stained glass,

three swimming pool halls (Males 1st Class/Gala, Males 2nd Class, and Females who of course had the smallest), original changing cubicles, Turkish baths, ticket office, galleries with wooden seats, superintendent’s flat and more, including a cafe in the room which contained the women’s slipper baths.

It manages to tread the very fine line between retention and restoration so that you get the full impact of what it was like to use the baths (it only closed in 1993) without any fussy or inappropriate ‘interventions’ and alterations. I was also struck by the friendliness, pride, enthusiasm, and knowledge of the volunteers here and in Elizabeth Gaskell’s house; a couple of places in Cambridge could learn a lot from them about how to interact with visitors and make them feel welcome.

And this was just the Manchester day. No wonder I’m back on my lovely settee processing it all.

And did you think I wouldn’t be able to bring in a Beatles angle? I mean, you never see photos of John Lennon reading North and South or Paul McCartney on what was the 89 bus going down Plymouth Grove. And yet. When I was thinking about Elizabeth Gaskell’s ability to cram in her work, transmuting all her gathered material into superb fiction, I was reminded of my astonishment at just what the Beatles achieved in a very short time, and how much original, now-classic music (which exploited a vast range of influences) they managed to compose anytime at all in the interstices of their lives. Of course, there were substances involved to keep them going - just as Gaskell took opium. I guess you don’t just write ‘From Me To You’ on a tour bus from York to Shrewsbury

[in the Georges V Hotel, Paris, January 1964, photo by Harry Benson]

and a zillion hits late at night in hotel rooms without some sort of illegal energy-booster.

We rounded off the Sheffield leg with a swim in the gloriously sited, warm, open-air heated pool (1936) in Hathersage as recommended by Roger Deakin in Waterlog. It has views of the Peak District, a bandstand should you need brass with your breaststroke, and a cafe should you need, as I did, a fine chip butty on a barm cake.

Hathersage also has the not-to-be-missed David Mellor cutlery factory in a round building where the town’s gasholder once stood while the lovely cafe*, shop and museum are in the old gasworks offices.

*I am beginning to think that Elizabeth Gaskell maybe didn’t cram in as many cafes as I do. It was an early life lesson learned at the Kardomah which, when I was six, I thought was the ne plus ultra of cafes.

Happy Sunday!