Non-Fiction
Ghost Town / Iqbal Hussain
Image by Sam Blurton
When you’re a child, you think you’ll always be friends with the girl next door. You can’t imagine ever leaving primary school. Summers last a lifetime.
But, from an early age, I was also aware of change. Every few years, my mother, like a hermit crab in search of the perfect shell, would make us move house. There would be much moaning and groaning from us children, and a half-hearted protest from my father, but we all knew that Mother would get her way. Transience was in her blood. Uprooted from her remote village in Pakistan when she was just a teenager, marrying a virtual stranger, she spent a lifetime moving from house to house, waiting for the right one to feel like home.
We didn’t stray far, remaining within the Lower Audley neighbourhood in Blackburn, Lancashire. A former mill town, the gridded streets were made of red-bricked terraces with grey slate roofs and cobbled roads. It wasn’t hard to see the cause of my mother’s dissatisfaction. She’d swapped her comfortable home in Mirpur with its wide verandas, courtyards and rooftop terrace for one cramped house after another. She felt hemmed in, complained of the noise of the traffic and was wary of walking on the uneven cobbles lest she broke an ankle.
We kids couldn’t relate to her unease. We knew no different, living on a real-life Coronation Street, the long-running UK soap opera set in the north of England. Chimneys sent out comforting coal smoke in the winters and feet crunched on snow that came down thickly during the night; in the summers, the women whitewashed the doorsteps, thumped dusty rugs on the walls and flung windows wide open. The streets rang with the sound of laughter, ball games and the blare of Bollywood hits from ghetto blasters.
We salvaged sticks from the canal side to play itti danda, balancing a small piece of wood (the itti) on a cobble and hitting it with a bigger stick (the danda) to make it flip into the air, thwacking it as far as we could. The flagstone pavements were perfect for hopscotch, the iron lampposts for clasping and swinging around while leaning back.
The first house I remember was 10 Pilkington Street. It was a gloomy mid-terrace, heavy in atmosphere and full of half-seen visions. Whenever I was ill and off school, I would dread being left alone while my mother ran to the chemist’s or doctor’s. An unnatural silence would descend throughout the house, before I became aware of a high-pitched keening at the edge of my hearing. Then, the unmistakable, heart-stopping sound of someone walking up the stairs. Many times I fancied movement behind the frosted window over the bedroom door. Of course, these were just the sights and sounds of an Edwardian house breathing and the play of light during the day, but my seven-year-old self would not be told otherwise.
After a few years, we ventured canal side to 5 Coronation Street (the joy of living on a street with the same name as its TV namesake was unbounded and carried much cache at school), with its coal fires, high ceilings and sash windows. These period features were wasted on Mother, who just wanted a fire she could light with a twist of a dial, and panes of glass that kept out draughts.
The street was a single terrace at the top edge of the Audley neighbourhood, with the Leeds and Liverpool canal forming a natural barrier. We played all day on the towpath and the wild vegetation that grew alongside it, only returning home for food and sleep. Hours spent pretending to be explorers, swishing away with fallen branches at the towering rosebay willowherb and thistles. We would play hide and seek, gorge ourselves red-mouthed on blackberries, chase jewel-coloured dragonflies, skim the water with our penny nets and deposit our tiddler haul into Natco lime pickle jars.
Once again, Mother was oblivious to the charms of the house and neighbourhood. In less than two years, we had decamped to the 1950s modernity of 7 Baines Street, a couple of streets away. It was woefully unfit for a family of eight, with just two bedrooms and no bathroom or inside toilet. But Mother thrived, once more in the thick of things, back on tarmac rather than the hated cobbles. She enjoyed being surrounded by people, the roar of cars going up and down the road, a shop at each corner. Never mind that we had to traipse to two outbuildings in the garden for our ablutions, both cold no matter what time of year, and battle spiders, rough bricks and more ghosts, since neither of the buildings had lights. In winter, we would shuffle through the snow-drifted yard, holding a steaming bucket in front of us like contestants on The World’s Strongest Man, naked except for a towel around our middle, hoping the neighbours weren’t watching. Night calls of the bladder were for the brave, armed with just a weak torch to guard against the ghouls. Perched above the icy seat, you did your business as fast as you could, then flushed and fled, the thundering gurgle of the cistern dogging your footsteps as sure as any monster.
In its heyday, Blackburn was at the centre of the global cotton industry. When cotton was king, the town employed more weavers than any other town in the world. Lower Audley’s terraces housed generations of factory and mill workers. My father, along with others from his village of Chitterpari in Pakistan, came over in the 1960s to man the looms and thread the shuttles. These early pioneers shared houses with many others, one man coming back and sleeping in the recently vacated warm bed as the other got up to go to the mill. They worked multiple shifts, earning enough money to buy their homes outright, it being impossible to get mortgages for a place of their own without an Anglo-Saxon name.
By the time I was twelve, the last of the mills had stopped production, the giant buildings finally silent, extinct, like dinosaurs made of brick. The men in the community lay just as idle, with no new industries having replaced the once all-powerful cotton. With little money coming in, the neighbourhood went into a rapid decline. Who’d paint windowsills or fix roof tiles when there were mouths to feed, school uniforms to source, petrol to buy?
What no-one predicted was change on a smaller but more devastating scale. As the 1980s drew to a close, the local authority deemed Lower Audley unfit for habitation. Years of neglect meant that once proud houses were now shadows of their former selves, with yawning holes in roofs, crumbling brickwork, rotten woodwork, inadequate facilities and too many people living in too little space. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, yet it still came as a shock. A brown envelope plopped innocently on the scuffed linoleum. The letter inside was anything but benign. A compulsory purchase order on the entire area, demolishing a score of streets, and we had twelve months in which to find somewhere else, pack our things and move out.
As my eldest brother finished translating the contents for my parents, the only sounds in the room were the hissing of the gas fire and the ticking of the starburst clock on the wall opposite. We would be moving house again, but this time it would not be of Mother’s choosing. She unfurled herself off the pouffe and returned to her kitchen domain, where she prepared the evening meal with much clattering of pans. Father carefully folded the letter and stored it away in the suitcase on top of the wardrobe. We children disbanded without our usual clamour and games.
In the coming weeks, Mother busied herself with her Pfaff sewing machine, rustling up curtains for the windows and floral covers for the sofa. She dressed every room, giving the old house new clothes and hope. Father found work fixing people’s boilers, TVs and anything else he could turn his hand to. A steady stream of visitors came to the door, with a pound or two for him to keep their ailing houses going for a little longer.
Life went on as normal. We papered over the mental cracks while all around us the house creaked and groaned. No-one mentioned the letter again. But, as the months passed, we realised we were fighting a losing battle. Something had been set in motion.
More and more neighbours packed their belongings and left. We accompanied Mother on house-calls to wave off outgoing families. We nibbled samosas, sipped sweet masala chai and promised to visit, before they got into their bulging Bedford vans and estate cars and vanished out of our lives. Without mobile phones and often even internal telephones, keeping in touch was unlikely, even if we’d have wanted to.
As the neighbourhood emptied, street corners became showcases for dumped mattresses, Taj Mahal tables, gaudy pictures in even gaudier frames, and half-open suitcases spilling out brightly coloured salwar kameez outfits no longer deemed fashionable. Men in donkey jackets and hi-vis came to brick up windows and fit metal shutters over front doors, strapping them with sinister black-and-yellow “Do Not Enter” tape. They weren’t always consistent. Some of the abandoned houses had their doors left open, welcoming anyone brave enough to enter. Others were bricked up, turning the house into a mausoleum.
When our immediate neighbours, the Khans, moved out, amid much uproar and kissing of cheeks and ruffling of hair, we spent the day in hushed silence, scared to unsettle the strange air that came in the wake of their going. A few days later, I snuck into their house by vaulting over our shared garden wall. There was little joy in exploring silent rooms without Shaheeda and her family bringing them alive. The laughter had gone. I abandoned it after a few minutes, slamming the kitchen door behind me, blinking the tears away.
With Autumn turning to Winter, the wind tugged at the bare trees and sent cobweb-coloured clouds scudding across the sky. It whistled through the broken windows and missing fanlights. Loose tiles clattered across the cobbles. We were the only occupied house left on our street. In the middle of the night, doors crashed shut in the empty properties on either side, rousing us from already uneasy dreams. My sisters refused to stay home on their own, claiming the Khans’ house was haunted. I would spot tramps shuffling through the upper rooms, ghosts traversing once-familiar territory. I stopped playing in the backyard, uncomfortable with who – or what – might pop their head up over the adjoining wall.
As the streets emptied, with fewer people and cars, other sounds took over: the wail of fire engines at all times of day and night; the crash and tinkle of breaking glass; fleeing footsteps and angry shouts, pulling us back from the dotty antics on our favourite TV programme, The Generation Game. Flames blazed and crackled in backyards, their light casting sinister shadows in our bedrooms. Strange bangs echoed through the air. We grew jumpy and longed for the clock to go back, to how things had been before, but we had no choice: we continued going to school, Father continued fixing household appliances, Mother continued to make curtains and frilly sofa coverings.
All around, one by one, households packed up and left. Weeds began to take over the cracks in the pavements, with fewer feet to trample them down. The glowing lights behind curtained windows dimmed, never to come on again. Streetlamps still shone their Lucozade-orange light, but when their bulbs popped or had a stone lobbed at them, they were no longer replaced. We’d sprint past the dark stretches in case a bogeyman leapt out and dragged us off into his lair.
Father held out till the end. He claimed the council wasn’t playing fair and that we were being undersold. He spent most days on the phone in the one public box still working, haranguing officials. Or, to be more accurate, my older brother did, as my father spoke little English, having lived his adult life surrounded by other Mirpuri men, all of whom had learnt just enough words to understand their supervisors at the mills. I can only imagine his sense of helplessness, arguing for something he couldn’t formulate in the language of the vanquishers.
It was not until the bulldozers rolled in to surrounding streets that we accepted the inevitable. Mother locked herself away, singing her beloved Bollywood songs in her little-girl voice, unwilling or unable to say goodbye. We wouldn’t see her for days. She became the ghost in the house. You’d catch glimpses of her, but she largely withdrew from daily life. Father took over the cooking. This wasn’t as unlikely as it sounded, as he’d taught my mother how to cook when they’d first got married.
Another letter arrived, this time in a white envelope. Another major shift in our lives. We were one of the last families standing. As Father hadn’t been able to come to an agreement with them, the council was relocating us to Higher Audley, to a newly built house. This was a twenty-minute walk away, but it might as well have been in a different country.
We heaved all our belongings into the back of a hired van. With so few people around now, there was no goodbye party. We didn’t clean the house, as we had done with our previous moves – we were the last in the chain. I touched the geometric wallpaper in my old bedroom one final time, nodded at the carpet with its busy pattern of orange and red chrysanthemums, and breathed deeply the lingering smell of our farewell chicken curry.
As we set off, with nobody speaking, I took mental snapshots of the childhood I was leaving behind, willing the camera in my mind to store them away where no-one could bulldoze them: Tehru’s shop on the corner, which sold pakoras and the biggest jawbreakers; the flagstones that still bore the colourful chalk marks of a hopscotch game from a few months ago; houses of friends that now gawped at us blankly with their bricked-up window eyes and metal-door mouths. A stray cat crossed the road and ran into an overgrown ginnel.
Even though the new house was bigger and more splendid than anywhere we had lived before, it lacked a soul that no amount of virgin carpets, draught-proof uPVC windows and freshly painted walls could disguise. We didn’t know anyone on the estate. There were no welcome packages from neighbours. No offers to come round for tea.
We were spent, both mentally and physically. We had left our spirits in the bricks and cobbles that were being torn down and ripped up even as we unpacked.
Mother resented every brick of the house. It was in a quiet cul-de-sac, away from the hustle and bustle of the busy main roads that she thrived on. She would vanish for days, the door to her bedroom shut, and Father once more taking on the cooking duties. We would occasionally hear her thin, wavering voice, seeking solace in her familiar Indian film songs.
We lasted just one year before Father conceded a move was necessary if we were to get back to anything resembling normal. We swapped houses with the family of a schoolfriend who lived on busy Chester Street. Another yellow-bricked house, but one surrounded by the noise of traffic. The schoolfriend’s family gained an extra room. We got Mother back. The peace lasted for three years, before she fell out with a neighbour across the garden and made us move again. And then one more time, from Dundee Drive to Aberdeen Drive. In hindsight, Mother did us all a favour. By keeping us on the move, she helped to distract us and ease the pain of being wrenched away from what we had known. Time passed. We grew older. We left school and went to college. My older siblings got married and, one by one, moved out. The hurt lessened. But the memories and ghosts remained.
Today, Lower Audley has been literally wiped off the map. The locality is no more, despite the clumps of yellow, Brookside-style residences that replaced the red two-up-two-downs. Tellingly, the estate has no name, as though it is ashamed of how it came into being. It is impossible to visualise what used to be. Where there were houses, there are now paths; where there were roads, there are now green spaces. The only constant is the canal. When I visit my mum, and I pass the old neighbourhood, I remain on the perimeter, unwilling to enter the unfamiliar warren of streets. I am a stranger in my own past.
Did the hermit crab find the perfect shell to call home? I don’t know. Mother has never stopped singing her sad songs. Like a siren of old, she remains stranded on a rock not of her own making, in a country she hasn’t chosen to be in. She has lived in her current home for the longest period, almost two decades, alone now that my father has passed away. But it’s unclear whether she has finally found solace, or whether she realised her search was ultimately fruitless, and that the perfect home didn’t exist. Whenever we ask her about our previous homes, she purses her sakhra-stained lips and tells us not to dwell in the past.
I found the brown envelope recently. It still lay uncreased in the old leather suitcase, along with my father’s yellowing payslips, various receipts and some of our drawings from school. With the power of an army, that single-page document from the council, with its slightly fuzzy typed letters, formal language and illegible signature, decimated an entire community. The secretary who had bashed it out, including the struck-through spelling mistakes, would never know its far-reaching effects. I would spend many years mourning what had passed and what might have been.