March 15th 2003 10:30CST

It's a long way from Golborne

Having been woken very early this morning by el sproggo, I crawled the usual sites looking for entertainment. As per my previous post, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days while some dramas unfolded. Whenever I get in that kind of mood, I seem to drift towards the genealogical sites. Maybe doing that serves as a reminder that whatever I may be perceiving, things could be an awful lot worse and that localized problems are trivial in a broader context.

I was wondering whether any of my grandfather's cohorts might still be alive and came across a photo on friendsreunited from Ashton Secondary School, allegedly from 1950.

This photo contains a picture of the husband of my grandfather's sister, one Cliff Picton, who died in 2000. I question the date the photo was taken as Cliff would have been out of school for 10 years in 1950.

The image recreates what I can only describe as a feeling of inherited memory. It takes me back to Golborne, to Ashton, to Wigan. It takes me back to two-up, two-down terraced houses sprawling for miles, to the pit heads that dominated the landscape when I was a boy.

The pit heads were both deadly evil and a lifeline at the same time. Were it not for them, the poverty would have been much worse.

It may be illusion or that I was a child but that landscape, while exquisite in some respects, scares me. It reminds me of what I knew to be a hostile environment where people lived on top of each other, where fist fights were the norm, where barbed wire sat atop broken glass embedded in mortar topped brick walls. It's where the damp permeates everywhere and all year round is a perpetual autumn. It's penny chews, the smell of news-print and vinegar. It's the joy of a couple of apple trees in the midst of a tiny back-garden in the center of a council estate. It's mint Aeros and football matches. It's smashed bottles and mud. It's hard concrete and split heads. It's corner shops and single cigarettes. It's never being anonymous. It's never being forgotten. It's tight and claustrophobic. It's a hot chicken sandwich drowned in butter and salt on a Saturday night. It's potatoes fried in real lard. It's an awful lot of pain.

When Natzoid and I visited last April, I felt like an outsider. I probably am now. "Wigan not good enough for you?" seemed to seep out of every building and person. The truth is that while I love the history and I love visiting to populate my inherited memory, my pre-formed inherited memory knows I should be afraid and recognizes that I would not have survived there. Not in the 19th century, not in the 20th century and not now.

From more than half a lifetime and four thousand miles away, my home town still haunts, taunts and threatens me; maybe from my own experience or maybe someone else's.