Mum always said the day she and Dad moved into the house in Torridon Walk they thought they’d landed in Paradise. As an eight year old I guess I didn’t appreciate the full joy but it was definitely new, strange and huge. I recall running up the wide stairs to my very own bedroom, stopping on the way to use the upstairs, indoor toilet and splashing water into the bath just to watch it pool there under its own power.
A three-bedroomed council “semi” was at least four times bigger than our two-up-two down in Longsight’s slum clearance district. And that’s not counting the garden. Just to have a garden fulfilled a dream neither of my parents had imagined coming true. Front and back, grass, trees and rich, black soil waiting for Dad’s efforts at self-sufficiency. Well, at least in the vegetable department. Potatoes, onions, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, radish, beetroots and eventually tomatoes when he’d gained enough know-how. I was his garden help with the planting and inevitably the weeding. Mum chose berry bushes: blackcurrant, redcurrant, raspberries, gooseberries with the native brambles providing a harvest she turned into pies, jams and jellies and yes, I was kitchen assistant too.
In the sixties, Wythenshawe was in the countryside. The house was only a mile from Ringway airport with a single runway and newly built control tower and surrounding it were farms and country lanes which became our playground. There were fields right up alongside the house and, as I write, the one closest to the house is still intact, gone wild. Not farmed any longer and no doubt waiting for the next airport expansion. It will happen.
Mum and Dad lived in that house together for fifty-five years and for sixty-six years of marriage. The house gradually emptied of family chatter, comings and goings and gatherings over the next nine years when Mum lived there by herself. She died last May, two weeks before her 95th birthday. The house is now waiting on its new family as its sale just completed. 65 years after our family moved in there. That’s an awful lot of memories. And as the cliche has it: if only the walls could talk.
Here’s another one: it’s only bricks and mortar but something lives in those memories and so there is sadness in closing the front gate behind me for the last time.
Illustration by Lilian Galloway. Here’s one of here poems about living in the place she loved.
Urban Thoughts
The countryside at my back door
The willow herbs, trees and fields
I’ve come to love them more and more
Winds that whistle, crows that caw.
Soon I fear, with noise and roar
This scene of peaceful interlude
Will be extinct and lost forever mpre
Because of human greed.
The things I love will all be lost
Swallowed. as by a mighty. frost
Trees and fields will be no more
When I look out from my back door.
Lilian Galloway
Pam Galloway 