AVIS BLAKELEY (Mrs Turner) June 1957
I was born in Crumpsall Hospital in North Manchester in 1957 and grew up in Bradford. Not Bradford Yorkshire, there is a Bradford in Manchester, near the Gas Works actually, just down the road from where the Etihad Stadium1 is now. That used to be the colliery when I was a kid. The only Black person that I knew was my cousin’s friend’s daughter. They lived next door. She was called Lorraine, but everyone called her Bubbles. The whole family lived in the area in various corner shops. We lived in a Bakery on the corner of Rylands Street, my Grandma had the corner shop on Nelson Street, and we had another one on Hinchcliffe Street. My Dad was only thirteen and my Mum nineteen when they first met. Mum walked alongside the canal to work at the Co-Op pharmaceuticals or something down in Droylsden. My Dad would follow her wolf whistling. She used to call him a ‘cheeky young upstart’ and ignore him. Of course, it would be dark as she walked back, so he would break the street lights on the canal so she would let him ride alongside using his bicycle headlight to guide her along. Eventually they must have started to chat but then he went off to war when he eighteen. Three years later when he was twenty-one I think and Mum twenty-six, they finally married. I am the middle child; my brother is eight years older and my sister seven years younger than me. Slum clearance started in the sixties. Inner city living was two up two down2. When I was a kid nobody shut their front doors, you just went in to everybody’s houses. Everybody sat outside on chairs. 1 The home ground of Manchester City Football Club 2 A small house with two main rooms on the ground floor and two bedrooms upstairs. Often it is part of a terrace. Widely built in British industrial towns following the Industrial Revolution.
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