Goodbye Spring Vale

Oh, our days of innocence

Goodbye Spring Vale (The Summer of ’76)

The weathermen still talk of that summer of 1976, the hottest on record. Every summer since we are reminded of the sweltering sunshine and, however hot it gets since, we are told ‘it’s still not as baking as it was in ‘76’. That summer I grew up, hit my teens running discovering the real world.

Spring Vale was a small cul-de-sac street hidden from the main road in North Manchester. The dozen newly built houses were occupied by young families, newly middle-class looking for a fresh, quiet environment for their children. The street, sheltered by trees along the main road, ran parallel to a wasteland we called ‘the tip’. There we built our dens, tree houses and swings with ropes suspended from the trees. There we cradled our innocence, fought our childish battles and played ball games long into the warm summer evenings.

With Elyse, Kaye, Debbie and Joanne I cycled beyond the Spring Vale boundary along Hilton Lane sometimes even as far as Bury New Road, the main highway joining north and central Manchester. The cycle would take the best part of the day even though the distance covered was less than three miles. We explored the disused Second World War bomb shelter on the golf course opposite where we got high trying our first cigarettes successfully stolen from our parents. It is difficult to know if we were sheltered from the real world by our parents, or if we chose ourselves seclusion from outside vices and menaces but we spent our days carefree and the epitome of innocents. At the risk of sounding like my parents, aged and grumpy, we had no video, no play station, no internet and we survived, nay we prospered. We had books, Lego, the great outdoors and an imagination to create. Our needs and desires were less than of the teens of today, our

satisfaction far greater.

1976 brought our dispersion from Spring Vale. It felt, at first, like a cruel enforced exile. With heavy hearts we bade farewell as our families, one by one, packed fourteen years into a removal truck. With our new home just a few miles away, I decided to cycle. Perhaps symbolically it was the last days rain of the summer as the warm drops fell heavy on my bare racing legs. I took one last circuit of Spring Vale but with many of my friends already departed, not least Elyse and Debbie, goodbyes took only a short time. I cycled hard trying to keep up with the departing removal truck but it soon lost me and I slowed in defeat. Soon Spring Vale, and my childhood innocence, were out of sight.

Old Hall Road was certainly a move up. The house was at least twice the size, the garden infinitely bigger than the small square patch of Spring Vale. A hundred yards across the road sat Broughton Park, small, discreet yet perfect for evening bike rides and mini football games. Old Hall Road brought me together with Simon, now a journalist at The Guardian, who lived two doors down and his friend David, now a play director. At my new home during the summer of ‘76 and between the street water fights and the mock soccer game in the park, myself and Simon discovered words. Perhaps, as said by Antoine de Saint- Exupery, ’Words are the source of all misunderstandings’ but equally as true and as said by Aldous Huxley, ‘the word was as rich in content as some tremendous, elaborate work of art, it was a complete landscape with figures’.

My education, at school at least, ceased, The mind-numbing Algebra and History taught with a bias Oswald Mosley could never have even dreamed of, left me frustrated and still hungry for knowledge, real knowledge. Together with Simon, we spent our hours pretending to win the cup final for Manchester City in the park, or sprawled out on his two single beds with the words of Bowie, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Pink

Floyd and countless others. And like the modern day internet links, each took us to a further dimension. Van Morrison took us to Kahil Gibran, Dylan to Dylan.

In Simon’s room I stared at the ceiling as I heard Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Morison’s Astral Weeks and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. I watched the black vinyl rotate from across the room, the respective album sleeve grasped tight in my hand. We said nothing, the lyrics and saxophone said it all for us, for now words were unnecessary. Marjorie, Simon’s mother would offer us lunch but we rarely accepted. Never did she

suggest we ’go out and enjoy the sunshine’. She understood our reclusive tendencies and respected them. We showed no interest in girls (or boys), no interest in joining a gang or group. We were happy sharing our eccentricities with just each other.

In Simon’s room lay a copy of The Little Prince. I fell deaf to Simon’s request for a game of footie in the park as I devoured the words in the book like a starved man eating for the first time in days. Once Simon noticed my reading material, his begging ceased. He knew the importance of the book and saw the intensity of my reading. Every word of the ninety-three pages tasted like sweet well water plucked from the driest of deserts. I felt my face change with every emotion as the prince told his story.

That summer as I stood between the two huge oak trees, our two oak trees in Broughton Park, as Simon blasted the ball past my diving arms, I felt my childhood slipping away. The bike rides and dens were past joys in my increasingly distant memory. The pop and the pap replaced by voices of purpose, our irreverence replaced by anger and purpose, I combined a wonderfully childish existence of pretending we were world class footballers with a mini political life against racism, the latter not impressing the history teacher at school.

Puberty brought family arguments and excitement as hair began appearing followed by a great deal of itching. I had neither the confidence, knowledge or desire to explore the opposite sex, continuing my love affair with music and books. As the summer drew to an end events and deeds required a purpose more often, except the football in the park. That never went away and some twenty-five years later when myself and Simon met up, we headed straight for Broughton Park, for our oak trees and our summer of ’76. It was still there waiting for us.