Subject: RE: Who wrote ' Dirty Old Town '
From:
Susanne (skw)
Date: 24 Feb 02 - 06:53 PM
Let's hear the man himself - even if this was written after he'd metamorphosed into Ewan MacColl for good (incidentally, his ex-wife Joan Littlewood claims the name-change became necessary after Jimmy Miller had deserted from the army)
[1990:] Sometimes from the vantage point of the Peel Park reading room I would gaze out over [Salford] with its endless streets of identical houses, its rampart church spires and its innumerable factory chimneys pointing accusing fingers at the sky. Even from a distance it looked moribund, a 'place much decayed', and yet I was stirred by it, filled with a disturbing kind of enthusiasm. In the shabby wilderness, with its mean streets and silent cotton mills looking like abandoned fortresses, in those geometrically arranged warrens and occasional clusters of bug-infested dwellings built in the reign of daft George for 'the better class of artisan', in that wasteland of rotten timbers and rusting iron, of a fouled river and an abandoned canal, a quarter of a million people are born, live and die. It is my Paris. [...]
What is it I feel for this place? Hatred? Yes, most of the time, but not all the time. Not all the time. [...] Sometimes lying in bed at night I am overcome with the awful fear that I will never escape from this place, that I am trapped and destined to live out my life in this awful ratpit. [...] Of course I hate it, I loathe it, I am scared of being devoured by it; and yet, though I live to be a hundred, it is unlikely that I will ever come to know any place as well as I know this one. That smoke-encrusted brick was among the first things I ever saw. I have absorbed this place through the palms of my hands; the soles of my feet have walked, run, slid, hopped, jumped and skipped along its flagstones and cobbles, through its roads and alley-ways, ist detours and short cuts, its dumps, cinder-crofts and parks.
My nose is equally familiar with the place. If I were to walk blindfold through this labyrinth of odours, my nose would guide me like a well-trained bloodhound. [...] There's smells and smells, of course. On the whole, the smells of winter are bearable; half the time we don't even notice them. After all, you've had them in your nostrils since the day you were born. In the summertime they are less easy to put up with because then, in addition to the smell of this or that factory or industrial process, there is the stink of sewers and - even worse - the stench that issues from the few houses in the street where the struggle against dirt and squalor has been abandoned. It isn't easy to live in a constant state of siege, with dirt as the enemy. (MacColl, Journeyman 180ff)
|
sj
