Hulme in the 1950s
Archive images confuse my memory
Of 1950s’ long streets with tall green lamp posts
Beside gas lights of an era not yet passed
And trams with overhead gables led
Where buses followed
Crofts were our playing fields
Where cowboys chased Indians
And boys were boys
At war
Hop-scotch on corporation flag stones
Balls thudding against high walls
Hands felt the warmth of coal fires
Where demolition exposed brickwork
Maybe war, maybe progress.
Stick kids
In unwashed clothes
Smelt like the hops dark-clouds-brew
From Moss Lane
At dusk if you stood still and quiet
You could hear the whistle then the workers
Fleeing Trafford Park factories
Souls stamping homewards
Milk floats, coal drays and rag and bone men
Supplied nourishment, warmth and donkey stone
So my mother could hold her head high.
In front of neighbours
She bragged of a bathroom
Her own kitchen
And an unshared lime-washed toilet
In the back yard
It was rumoured that some roomed as lodgers
Living lives of get-by existence
Cooker on the landing six families sharing
Back yard ablutions
But the Christians lived in their bought
Double fronted Jamaican home grandeur
As Delvino Street expanded the Dalrymple’s
Exploded out of their small terrace
Ignored by Prouse
Her one boy two girls’ family unit
Here we lived
One Nigerian his wife a Liverpudlian and two kids
In a street called Radnor
That we called the United Nations
Of Poland, Norway, Pakistan and India
So Saturdays when Billy the cobbler
Got Guinness brave
His curses began with the English
Then circumnavigated the globe
©SuAndi - 2017