Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Accrington used to make the world’s hardest bricks – there is iron ore in the heavy clay, and that gives the bricks their recognisable bright red colour, as well as their remarkable strength.
    The bricks are known as the Nori brick because somebody said they were as hard as iron and stamped it on the bricks backwards by mistake – so Nori they became.
    Thousands of these bricks went to New York to build the foundations of the 1,454-foot-tall Empire State Building. Think King Kong and think Accrington. It was the Nori brick that kept the gorilla swinging Fay Wray. We used to have special showings of King Kong at the little cinema in the town and there was always a newsreel about the bricks. Nobody had ever been to New York City, but we all felt personally responsible for its success as the world’s most modern city with the world’s tallest building standing on Accrington brick.
    The famous bricks had a more domestic life too. Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus architect, used Nori bricks for his only residential building in Britain – 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea, London.
    Unlike the Empire State Building nobody thought much of Gropius’s work but everybody knew about it. We had things to be proud of in Accrington.

    The money that came out of the mills and the cotton industry built the market hall and town hall, the Victoria Hospital, the Mechanics’ Institute and, later, in part, the public library.
    It seems so easy now to destroy libraries – mainly by taking away all the books – and to say that books and libraries are not relevant to people’s lives. There’s a lot of talk about social breakdown and alienation, but how can it be otherwise when our ideas of progress remove the centres that did so much to keep people together?
    In the North people met in the church, in the pub, in the marketplace, and in those philanthropic buildings where they could continue their education and their interests. Now, maybe, the pub is left – but mainly nothing is left.
    The library was my door to elsewhere. But there other doors too – not decorated or municipal, but low and hidden.
    There was a second-hand rummage and junk shop somewhere under the viaduct in Accrington which was the last relative of the nineteenth-century rag-and-bone shops. There was a rag-and-bone cart that came round the streets most weeks, and people threw on it what they didn’t want and bargained to take home what they did want. I never knew what the man was called, but he had a little Jack Russell terrier called Nip that stood on top of the rag-and-bone cart, barking and guarding the junk.
    Under the viaduct was a slam-door of prison-grade steel. Get inside, and you walked down a mummified passage hung with half-dead horsehair mattresses. The Rag Man hung them on meathooks like carcasses, the hooks wedged through the steel springs.

    Walk further and the passage broke into a small chamber that wheezed fumes in your face. The wheeze was from a flame heater – a shooting angry jet of gas and fire that the Rag Man used to keep himself warm.
    His was the kind of place that sold pre-war prams with wheels the size of millstones and canvas hoods on steel frames. The canvas was mildewed and torn, and sometimes he'd prop a china-head doll under the hood, its glazed eyes malevolent and watchful. He had hundreds of chairs, most with a leg missing like survivors of a shoot-out. He had rusty canary cages and balding stuffed animals, knitted blankets and trolleys on castors. He had tin baths and washboards, clothes mangles and bedpans.
    If you fought your way through the Victorian fringed standard lamps and orphaned patchwork quilts, if you crawled under walnut sideboards with their doors off and half-chopped church pews, if you could flatten yourself past the hot dry airless tombs of bedding still tubercular, and sheets hanging like ghosts – the lost linen of lines of the unemployed selling everything and sleeping in sacks – all of that sweated in misery, then, if you could press past and beyond the children's tricycles left with one wheel and the hobby horses without manes and the punctured leather footballs with their dirty criss-cross leather laces, then you came to the books.
    ChatterBox Annual , 1923. The Gollywog News , 1915. Empire for Boys , 1911. Empire for Girls . . . The Astral Plane , 1913. How To Keep A Cow. How To Keep A Pig. How To Keep House .
    I loved those – life was so simple – you decided what you wanted to keep – livestock,