by Graham Mort
In those days we lived in Crumpsall – me, my mother and my twin brother, Noel. We were identical twins, though I was the eldest by eight minutes. We were so hard to tell apart that we could fool the teachers at school most of the time. We did it for a laugh, swapping lessons. Sometimes, if one of us got into bother, they wouldn’t know which one. Often, we got away scot-free. Other times we both copped for the cane or the plimsoll across the back of our legs. Our father had gone off with a sales assistant from Whitlow’s shortly after we were born and was never seen again. Or at least,that was one story: that facing twins had been too much for him. The other story was that my mother and father had never actually married. Some fly-by-night had got her into trouble. There were no pictures of him. But we had a copper plate daguerreotype of a man with a winged collar and a waxed moustache that she kept wrapped in a silk scarf in a drawer. I think that was her father.
Only our mother could tell us apart. She worked in the Co-op on the bacon and cold meats counter – they’d call it the deli now. Somehow, she managed to raise two kids who never really went hungry. We started school together on the same day at six years old and left on the same day aged fourteen. He supported Man City and I supported United. Noel went to train as a gentleman’s tailor with Henry Goldstein and I was apprenticed to Hardcastle the chemist and went to night school to pass my exams in pharmacology. But photography was my first love.
My mother was from the town of Shaw, beyond Oldham, and had come to the city after the first war. She’d been a doffer in a cotton mill and hated the work. It was fast and repetitive and the overseers gave no quarter. Mother was fair, with that pale freckled complexion some northerners have. But we were brown-haired and dark-eyed with light olive skin, though I never saw an olive until I flew to Majorca with Marcie in ’64. They called us jewboys and yids at school, even though we didn’t know who our father was, even though we’d never been to a synagogue. They didn’t mean much by it. It was never really vicious. Mancunians had opposed slavery, they’d died at Peterloo fighting the Corn Laws and – most of them – had no time for fascism. It was too pompous for them by far. But they had quick, ironic, tongues, always at work, the way the looms and spinning frames ran on. Like a lot of things, an insult depends on how you say it and why. None of that really sank in until we were teenagers. Mosley’s lot had come to Manchester with the BUF in ’34 when we were too young to get involved. But it was in the papers and we were old enough to know what was happening in Italy and Germany by then. In ’39 they came to Belle Vue. Noel had joined the Challenge Club (I’d joined Bury Camera Club) and he dragged me along to the demonstration. I didn’t take my camera. I’d have needed a Rolleiflex or even a Leica for that and they were way beyond my reach.
There were 500 of them and 3,000 of us. Mosley never got a word in. He looked like a demented little puppet with his nervous bodyguards. The crowd sang Bye bye Blackshirt and chanted clear out the rats at him. Amongst us was a group of hard cases in black berets who looked as if they might have fought in Spain. But you couldn’t tell. A red-haired girl who stood next to us, and pressed up against Noel when the crowd surged, knew all the words to The Internationale. I could tell Noel was impressed. The police left Mosley and his crew to it in the end. He’d been given the KB, Manchester-style. If they’d started anything we’d have murdered them. It was a good day’s work and we were proud to be Mancunians. It was the first time I’d been proud to be anything or felt I was anything.
I remember the smell of the crowd – a blend of sweat, beer, hair oil and tobacco. And something else. Anger. Anger at the last war, anger at years of poverty and hardship, anger at the way the future looked. A fat lad next to me had stood and roared, Bastard! Fascist bastard! over and over, until he was purple in the face. He turned to me at one point and grinned with gappy teeth. I’m from Middleton. As if that explained the language. As if that explained everything there was to know right then. The smell of the crowd was the smell of solidarity, of love and hatred mixed together. Even though we weren’t really Jewish and had no idea then what happened to Jewish twins in Germany we thought we’d turned the fascists back for good.
We walked all the way home from Gorton and the crowd drained away around us into pubs and houses, trams and buses. We thought something new was beginning. But a few months later Hitler grabbed Czechoslovakia and the war came to bugger everything up. Later that year Noel was called up to the merchant navy. He didn’t fancy the coal pits or the army. I was spared because of my weak chest. Some days you couldn’t see to the end of the street in Crumpsall what with domestic fires and smoke from hundreds of mill chimneys, so it was no wonder I was bronchial. The smoke was yellow with sulphur, like a mangy tomcat slinking along the streets and alleyways. You couldn’t hang washing out on cold days when everything was going full thrutch. Drying it indoors over a clothes maiden didn’t help my respiration much. When the council came by to mend the roads, my mother stood me next to the boiler that heated up the tar and made me inhale the fumes. Maybe that started my interest in things medical. Coal tar. Respiration. Cause and effect. When the war started Noel and I were still living at home and we hardly knew what girls were.
The house we lived in was a two-up, two-down terrace with a tiny built-on kitchen rented from Ernie Hathaway, who my mother called a twisted little crook. He’d been buried by a Turkish shell at Gallipoli, so it wasn’t his fault he walked like a lame frog. Our house had a front room with patterned glass and a parlour with a cast-iron range and a privy down the back yard where we learned to smoke. Noel and I shared a bedroom until we left home. Two single beds, side by side in the narrow room. Lino on the floor that gave you chilblains in a winter. A chamber pot under the bed. Net curtains at the windows because our mother couldn’t abide nosiness.
In the front parlour was an old German piano with an iron frame and candlestick holders that she’d paid a few shillings for after a neighbour died. She took it and had it tuned because Noel had sat down at our uncle Ted’s piano at the age of nine and picked out the theme of Red Sails in the Sunset. He had perfect pitch and by the age of sixteen could read music and play pretty much anything by ear. I was tone deaf, of course, and the sight of sheet music made me feel dizzy. But on winter evenings if there was nothing better on the wireless, we loved to sit in the parlour with the fire banked up and the coals hissing and hear him play. Our mother sometimes ventured to sing in her shaky contralto voice, the firelight making her look like a girl again.
The war made us short of everything, including temper. People talk about it now as if it was the best of times, but that’s rubbish. What’s good about being starved and bombed and anxious all the time? Everyone seemed expectant, on edge, especially our mother. We’d never been apart and when Noel went to the navy it was like losing a limb. I couldn’t sleep for weeks and we waited for his letters every day. They came written in thick strokes of black ink with passages struck out by the censor’s blue pencil. I used to hold them up to the kitchen window to see what had been crossed out, but it did no good. I wondered what he’d been trying to tell us that was so important to national security. It was OK when he was based in Portsmouth or Liverpool, but when he started on the Baltic convoys I thought our mother would die with worry. The German U-boats were dropping thousands of tons of shipping to the sea bottom every month. A lad two streets away had been torpedoed on an Atlantic convoy and spent three days on a life raft. When they sent him home on rest leave, he looked half drowned. He was so pale you felt you could see through him. Another unwilling warrior. I thought of Noel drowning in a steel box, his last breaths bubbling like Morse code through salt water and the ship’s funnel tilting into grey waves as the boilers took in water and exploded. I’d seen enough newsreels of German ships going down to know it’d be no different.
It was just a year after the Manchester blitz, a few days before Christmas. They still hadn’t cleared up the mess. That took years. The city was wounded, but we knew it would recover. That happened later, too, w
ith the IRA bomb in ’96. That would have been hard to imagine back then. I was off work sick again, lying on my bed all morning swotting up on the British Pharmacopoeia. Mother was out at the Co-op, checking ration cards and serving customers their meagre dues. I remember I was wearing a grey and maroon pullover she’d made for me the year before. She’d used wool unravelled from old jumpers we’d worn as kids and it was tight and itchy under the arms. It was quiet on the streets outside. Petrol rationing meant there was hardly any traffic now. I was angling the book into the wintry light when I heard a key click in the front door and assumed that mother must have forgotten something and nipped home for it. Then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Not the slow heavy steps of my mother, but something altogether more familiar. A sprung rhythm I’d always known. The hairs stood up on my arms and I half turned as the footsteps reached the landing.
– Noel?
He was framed in the doorway with his knapsack.
– Bloody hell! Noel!
We hugged and he was laughing, but there were shadows under his eyes, a vacant look of exhaustion.
– What’re you doing here?
– We docked in Birkenhead and I got a three-day pass. Back the day after Boxing Day.
– Because?
– Because the next one’s a big ’un. I’m not supposed to say where…
– Does Mum know?
– I nearly sent a telegram, but I thought the shock’d kill her!
He laughed again. We knew about telegrams from the first war. How after the Somme there were curtains drawn all across the city. Then later at Paschendaele. All those boys gone under all that mud. It was another thing Manchester never forgot or forgave. Noel patted my camera where I’d left it on the windowsill and slumped onto his bed.
– How’s the photography business?
– Pretty good. I might be able to buy you a pint down at Ma Shiptons.
– You don’t say.
That was an expression we used all the time.
– I do say.
He took out a brown paper package, then pushed his knapsack under the bed next to the chamber pot.
– I hope you’ve emptied that.
– Maybe.
He put the parcel on the little oak veneered cabinet beside the bed.
– What’s that?
– Turkish delight.
– Blimey!
He slapped away my hand.
– For Mum, you greedy get. Got it in Chinatown in Liverpool. Rare as rocking horse shit, that.
That was an expression he’d got from the navy.
– Rare indeed. How’s the sailor’s life?
He rolled his eyes and unhooked the collar of his uniform.
– As per. The usual boring crap. You’re well out of it, mate.
Noel laughed, unlacing his boots and tossing them on the floor. I went downstairs to put the kettle on the gas and made two mugs of tea. When I got back upstairs he’d slipped off his greatcoat and cap and lay full-length on the bed, fast asleep, his brown hair falling across his face and his neck just like a child’s. We both had long eyelashes and dimpled chins. It was like looking at myself. Soon, he was softly snoring, each breath like tissue paper being torn and softly crumpled. Three days. It was Friday, so we’d be able to go out around Shude Hill and Stevenson Square, look for girls in the pubs and dance halls. Being a twin was always a good talking point. I suppose we thought we might meet twin girls one day. But we never did. I picked up my camera and took a photograph. There was a band of sunshine falling on the bed and the room was bright. I made the exposure: F5.6 at a 50th of a second. Then I drew the curtains and let him sleep.
I still have that photograph in a box of negatives and prints labelled with his name. He looks like a fallen knight, a sleeping warrior, one arm thrown across the bed, one across his chest. The light slanting into the room and onto his face. He’s young there. Forever. I’m holding the image now, here in the future, my old hands bracketing his youth. I made an enlargement from the negative. It’s soft-focus, but that gives it a tender quality, my brother sleeping, safe from all harm. His mouth curves into the dimpled shadow of a smile, as if he’s glad to be home. One moment stopped from time’s flow.
All that’s a mystery, somehow. A paradox. An illusion. It’d take fifty of these images to capture even a whole second of the years we spent together, yet there are only seventeen images in the box labelled Noel. Seventeen fiftieths. A passage of time so small that it lies somewhere between the flicker of the second hand on my watch. It’s a tremor, a measure of transition rather than time. The snap of the shutter. A serpent’s eye blinking. The magician’s sleight of hand. That man in the black suit we saw at Fred Karno’s, closing his hand on a pigeon’s egg, then opening it to show it had disappeared. When he took off his top hat to acknowledge our applause a pigeon flew up to the high wire and perched there. I never showed that picture of Noel to my mother.
When Noel woke up he drank the cold separated tea with a grimace, grinned and said worse things happen at sea. Then he took off his uniform and started opening drawers. For some reason he couldn’t find his favourite shirt. Maybe our mother had washed it or was mending it. She loved to sit in the firelight with a piece of darning listening to the BBC.
– Where’s she put my stuff?
– I don’t know.
I tossed him a neatly ironed work shirt that mother had folded by my bed.
– Try this. It’s clean.
– Ugh!
He pretended to smell it, but put it on anyway. He was wearing a vest and there were bruises down his arms. Later, over a drink, he told me about dragging cases of cannon shells into the magazine for the forward guns. Bloody murder. Everyone bawling at you to go faster, as if you gave a monkey’s. He told me about trying to sleep in his bunk with the U-boats slinking beneath them, hiding in the darkest fathoms of the sea.
Then he couldn’t find his trousers or shoes. I don’t know where we got the idea, but Noel decided to dress up in my clothes for a prank. Mother was due back from work at five-thirty, so we had a couple of hours to practise. He dropped his voice slightly to mimic mine. The master-stroke was borrowing my reading spectacles. I’ll swear to God he looked more like me than I did. I had three shots left in my camera and I’d just bought a flashgun. The plan was to follow Noel downstairs and catch the happy reunion when our mother realised what had happened.
The afternoon passed in chatting and lounging in the bedroom. We went out for a quick one at the local pub, where there’d be a decent fire. I seem to remember that the Christmas decorations were up. But we were careful to get back in good time. Noel was never much of a drinker anyway. Back at the house we piled upstairs and waited. Just after five-thirty, then voices in the street outside as mother said goodbye to a neighbour who’d walked with her. Then the key turned in the lock and she was hanging up her coat in the hall.
– Lewis?
I looked at Noel and he signalled at me to answer.
– Hiya.
– Are you OK? Feeling better?
– Yes, fine.
– Come down for tea in a few minutes OK?
– OK.
Noel was smiling delightedly. He put his finger on his lips. It couldn’t have worked out better. We heard her clinking about the kitchen, cutting bread and heating up the soup she’d made from ham shank and dried peas the day before. It smelled good, drifting up the stairs. Noel waited a few minutes, then picked up my copy of Picture Post and went downstairs. I heard him grunt at Mother, a pretty good imitation of me on a grumpy day. She asked him if I was better and he coughed, a little too theatrically. I crept downstairs in my stockinged feet with the camera and flashgun and sat on the bottom step waiting for the moment.
When nothing happened I realised that they must be eating. I could hear the clink of soup spoons, odd distracted words from my mother, short replies from Noel. She hadn’t been looking for him and so she hadn’t noticed he wasn’t me. I retreated back up the sta
irs. After about fifteen minutes I heard the table being cleared and knew my mother would be in the kitchen, so I slipped into the front parlour and hunkered down behind the settee where I couldn’t be seen. It was a strange feeling. A cold, hungry feeling, as if I’d died. Noel was pretending to be me and she hadn’t noticed. Yet I knew she was thinking about him all the time, beside herself with worry every day. Beside myself was how I felt now, that odd expression making sense at last.
It wasn’t quite cold enough to set a fire. In the war, there’d have to be ice on the mantelpiece for that. Mother came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, still wet from washing up. She picked up a bundle of knitting from the settee and began sorting through her needles. Noel came in and stood in the doorway for a moment. He was still wearing my striped pullover and reading glasses and the effect was uncanny. Even though we were used to being alike, had spent all our lives being mistaken for each other, we’d never taken it this far. It was like being out of my own body, like being a spirit and looking back at life from somewhere else. There was a look of bewilderment and pain on Noel’s face. My mother was ignoring him and I realised that he didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to break the spell.
I saw him move squeeze past the Christmas tree with its trembling tinsel streamers and sit down on the piano stool. He swung his legs under the keyboard and placed his hands above the keys. When I saw Noel’s hands, they seemed to darken, like the severed hands King Leopold’s men had taken to impose their rule on the Congo, stealing copper and mahogany, the iron, ivory and ebony that made an instrument. Noel nodded, as if swallowing something. When his hands fell to the keys he played the first few bars of ‘O Tannenbaum’, aka ‘The Red Flag’. At first my mother seemed paralysed. Her head rose up by degrees like a periscope. The look on her face was indescribable, but one I’ll never forget. It flickered between emotions: love, joy, pain, loss, discovery. I rose up from behind the settee with the camera and pressed the shutter, but I’d forgotten to switch on the flash, so the photograph was almost black when I developed it. Just shadows. Ghosts. I think the shock of light might have killed her anyway. She dropped the knitting and stood up. Then, quick as a whip, she cracked Noel around the face and cracked me one too. A full tilt smack of the hand that sent me reeling and nearly knocked Noel from the piano stool. My mother had never hit us before and now she stood with her chest heaving and tears streaming down her face. A huge sob bubbled up in her chest. It was only then we realised how cruel we’d been, how unending her love was, how inconsolable. After that evening, we never spoke about what had happened. Not that we got much chance.
