Paul Magrs

‘Good-bye to Gumble’s Yard’ was first published in the Sixties, as ‘Widdershins Crescent’ and was a sequel to ‘Gumble’s Yard’ – a novel about kids growing up in inner city Manchester, amongst the sprawling urban decay of warehouses and back-to-back terraces. This sequel is about the ramshackle family of orphans, cousins and ne-er-do-well adults being rehoused on a a smart new council estate beyond the Green Belt, out of town.

The child characters are immediately likable. They are bonded as a unit, weathering the storms caused by their terrible father-figure Walter, who gambles and drinks away every penny that comes the family’s way, and his wife Doris, who’s hardly any better. When the kids use all their resourcefulness to furnish the house with reclaimed solid wood furniture from the old streets being knocked down, they return home to find that Doris has filled the house – in an instant – with tacky ‘modern’ stuff made of plyboard and bought on the never-never.

It’s a book from a time when moving to a council estate was a chance for self-improvement. When the family neglects to tidy its front garden they are written to by the council and threatened with eviction. The place must be maintained as an environment that everyone is proud to belong to. When the narrator starts digging, neighbours pitch in to help him spruce the place up. Later, when his younger cousin is discovered to have a near-genius IQ, his headmaster moves heaven, earth and his ignorant father, in order to get him a place at the posh school. The whole street turns out to see Harold set off on his first day in uniform:

‘I suppose nobody in Widdershins Crescent has had anything special in the way of education, and none of their children have done anything striking either. But they were all proud of Harold. Whatever anyone might have thought about privileged schools that most children couldn’t go to, nobody grudged him his triumph. He was also, I realized, a sign that in spite of everything we were beginning to belong.’

It’s a spiritual successor to Eve Garnett’s ‘The Family from One End Street’, but it’s not quaint enough and long-ago enough for it to feel safely distant to a contemporary audience. And I don’t think it’s available nowadays. ‘Gumble’s Yard’ was reprinted a little while ago, but not its utopian New Town sequel. It reminds me a little of Angus Wilson’s New Town novel of the Sixties, ‘Late Call’, which is all about people adjusting to living in futuristic boxy houses and shopping in precincts built of poured concrete. These are books from a particular moment in the late Twentieth Century that chime a real chord with me: when we lived in futuristic settings and the tarmac roads ran Widdershins.

I’m sorry I’ve never read John Rowe Townsend before. His dialogue is punchy and naturalistic. He doesn’t flinch from depicting the ugliness and hardships of people’s lives, and how they can make things worse for themselves, but sometimes better, too. There is optimism and hope in this book, too. I’m going to have to hunt around on Ebay and suchlike for his other books – though I saw the other day that he has a website and a small press of his own, reprinting his earlier books.