Noises in the night and other experiences

I didn’t sleep well and in the way of things I ended up listening to the noise of the night.  Here in Chorlton it amounted to a tipsy but happy couple professing their love for each other and what I took to be a fox.  Later there was the dawn chorus and later still the alarms of the family going off.

Pretty ordinary really, but it got me thinking of the street noises  I grew up with and in particular those in the tiny two up to down home of my grandparents in Hope Street Derby and this was where I went every summer holiday.

On  still and quiet nights it was not only possible to hear the clunk of shunting engines from the nearby railway line but know when the people next door were rowing or the even more intimate moments of the couple at number 10.

Now the knocker up had long since vanished into history but you knew when people were stirring because there was the sound of iron pokers pushing around the embers from last night’s fire, and  the sound of a kettle with its whistle.

I rather think these houses were well beyond their sell by date, having been put in the 18th century and like so much working class housing of the period they suffered from poor materials and landlord neglect.  And with internal walls which were in most cases just one brick thick there was little in the way of privacy in Hope Street or the surrounding ones.

And also for that other pretty basic activity of going to the lavatory, which of course was in the yard.  It is a bit of a music hall joke, the visit in the dead of night or on a morning. Which of course is why the chamber pot still existed in most working class homes into the 20th century.

I still remember the one I used at Nana’s when I was a small child.  It was made of porcelain and on a bitter winter evening was cold to the touch, but still I guess preferable to the journey down the stairs into the yard in the dead of night.This one was made of metal, I can't date it but it was one of the treasures that came out of the Miller Street dig, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/planned-archaeological-dig-in-hulme-and.html

It would of course be easy to slip into some rosy nostalgic revelry of this past world.  The sort of romantic tosh which falls back on those “they were poor but they were honest”, street doors could always be left open and “everyone helped each other,” all of which were true but doesn’t detract from the fact that everyone knew your business and some at least of those secrets we all wish were kept private.  Of course this had been the lot of most human beings from the Stone Age onwards, but I have to say if it’s a choice between the drunken lovers and a fox on one side and the countless cacophony of the Derby streets I know which I would go for.

Picture from the collection of Andrew Simpson