Not Manchester

The Irwell starts its life in the hills above Rawtenstall, a Lancashire river from the first drop. It runs south through Bury and Radcliffe before it reaches Salford, and it carries on through Manchester city centre until it joins the Ship Canal and heads out to sea. For most of its length it is just a river, passing through towns that pay it no particular attention. But here, at Chapel Street, it does something else. Here it runs between two cities. Look left and you are in Salford. Look right and you are in Manchester. The distance between them is the width of the water, which is not much more than a decent throw. And that narrow stretch of river, where it happens to pass between two places that have never been the same place, has meant more to the people on either side of it than most national borders mean to the countries they separate. Every Salford family had someone like Fred Fielder. Fred was family to me through one of those connections that only makes sense in Salford, where everyone is related to everyone else by marriage, street, or the shared memory of a pub that closed in 1978. His sister Josie married my mother's brother. He was at our kitchen table constantly, a glass of Guinness in front of him and a story that could last an hour. Most of Salford knew him as Chunky Baby, a name from his DJ days that stuck to him for life the way only a Salford nickname can. He went on to become a presenter on BBC GMR Radio Manchester, and he was given an MBE, and he died in July 2024 aged seventy-five. I was in Normandy when I heard, sitting in a garden that has nothing in common with Pendleton except that both are places where I have been happy. And every Salford family had a house like my auntie Genie's. Hers was a large Victorian place on Regent Road, near the Salford Boys Club. Genie's husband was my mother's cousin, which made her children my cousins by the generous arithmetic of Salford kinship rather than by any strict bloodline. It seemed enormous to a child, full of rooms with closed doors and staircases that creaked. Jimmy, Alan, Robert, Susan and Raymond told me the attic was haunted. I believed them completely, with the absolute conviction of a seven-year-old who has been told something terrifying by people he trusts. The attic was at the top of a narrow staircase, behind a door that stuck, and it was dark. That was all the evidence I needed. I did not sleep properly for a month. My mother eventually got the truth out of me and told me not to be so daft, which is the Salford cure for most forms of existential terror. I tell these stories not because they are remarkable but because they are ordinary. Every Salford child has cousins who tormented them. Every Salford adult has a version of that attic, some dark corner of the memory that is frightening and funny in equal measure, and that only makes sense if you know the streets and the people and the particular texture of life in a place that the rest of the world has been calling Manchester for as long as anyone can remember.