Live in a house long enough and there is a danger that past events slide into one another, and only when you think really hard do they tumble out one after another. Now I have been here since 1976 and that is a long time but none of the memories has overwhelmed me, all fit comfortably together and act as a gentle backdrop to what is going on right now.
As you would expect in that thirty six years the house has been a home at times to many of our friends and also somewhere which has touched many more.
Just last week I met up with an old flat mate. Greevz who I had last seen in the summer of ’73 but as we sat in the dining room he remembered being here and the talk naturally turned to other friends and people we had known who passed through 41.
When I washed up here in the December of 1976, John Mike and Lois had been in for about a year. Mary Ann had died in the April of ’73 and the house had been left to an animal charity which had not really known what to do with it but eventually put in the market.
Lois always maintains that her first impression of the place was that despite the old fashioned wall paper and the slightly musty smell it seemed a comfortable place, and I must admit that I have felt the same. It is somewhere to come home to and as I said a place where many others travelling through have said the same.
In the early years while we were all working we were all single and it was like being a student again but with money. So John built his boat, from scratch bending many of the timbers on the dining room floor by simply fastening them to the floor boards in the angle he wanted. The screw holes are still there. And when the time came there was boat turning day. Jenn who came for a week and stayed three months helped Lois, while Jack and Whispering Dave provided the advice and I, well I just pushed when told.
Even now I don’t know who gave Whispering Dave his name, although I guess it was Lois who at the time watched the old Grey Whistle Test and thought there was more than a passing resemblance to Bob Harries. Certainly they both had a way of talking which made you strain to pick out the next four sentences. But then most of our conversations only really began in the hours after we returned home from the Trevor, replete with four pints and the promise of a carry out.
It didn’t really matter when you got into the pub, you always seemed to drink four pints except on a Friday night when the first pint disappeared in the time it took to sit down and acknowledge everyone. Then and on Saturday you doubled up at last orders and the journey home was but a slip of a trip.
This is not to say there weren’t other diversions. Lois and would go up to the Essoldo and catch a movie and it was here that we saw Gone with the Wind which seemed appropriate enough since we were in a cinema which had opened in 1937. And I did regular trips to the Royal Exchange and Library Theatre.
Now Joe and Mary Ann I am sure would have approved of the Library Theatre. It was a no nonsense place and the first time I went in late 1969 they not only displayed adverts on the safety curtain in the interval but also had that wonderful light display where slides with different coloured wax were allowed to slide and drip across the screen. It would be another five years before I came across a java light in a pub off Penny Meadow in Ashton under Lyne.
But I guess for me it was the nights we entertained. To call them dinner parties would be to over stretch the event, but they were good. Plied with wine from litre plastic bottles and the food Lois cooked the evenings had a momentum of their own. Even now over thirty years later long after I have forgotten what we ate I can remember the fun and conversation and I think it would have been a first for the house. I doubt that Joe and Mary Anne entertained like that but it set the seal for the future and has been how we have lived since.
Pictures; from the collection of Lois Sparshot
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