View from my Desk – by Ursula Howard

From my study, I look out across the garden. At the end of July, it’s all clashing colours: cosmos, geraniums, lilies, from burnt orange to bubble-gum pink, a surprise second wisteria cascade, and clusters of yellow tomato flowers. I remember how my father loved bright late-summer flowers: his pom-pom dahlias and pink-and-red fuschia globules were legendary, swollen in meticulously-sifted compost. Via mind and memory, I refocus on my longer-distance view, beyond memoir, into history.

After decades as a teacher, community activist and researcher, I’m a late-summer writer. I’ve always known that my family’s past ignited my childhood love of history – and mystery. History was dramatically, often nightmarishly, present. Technicolour, not sepia-tinted. I raided our bookshelves for non-fiction: Carlyle’s bloody account of the French Revolution, Plutarch’s Lives and great-grandfather Ebenezer Howard’s book ‘Tomorrow’, which launched the Garden City movement. I shivered while my mother, proudly descended from Huguenot refugees, read Dickens, the Brontës and ghost stories by a feeble coal fire. I was gripped by the revolutions which changed old rural worlds into the industrial sprawl I grew up in. For me, Manchester, where we lived, embodied all the history that mattered. Our suburb was all dank evergreen shrubs, thick fog and black, once-pink sandstone walls.

England was made here, and the black Town Hall, circular Central Library, factory chimneys and the Ship Canal – its inky-thick waters half-hidden under floating yellow scum – sent my imagination whirling. Historical change was still happening: people from the Caribbean settling here, the first tower blocks and in 1958, Manchester United’s Munich tragedy. We read the Manchester Guardian, listened to John Barbirolli’s Hallé orchestra in the Free Trade Hall, site of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, and on the 47 bus into town, passed rows of Hulme’s back-to-back slums. Closer to home squatted the grandiose villas of cotton-mill owners, some from southern USA states, their racist pedigree stretching back to slavery. I knew then of deep divides, even in the age of vinyl 45s: Elvis and Buddy Holly, but we also went to see Ray Charles and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. As a convent girl I lived among the Irish Catholic diaspora of the North West, whose ancestors built 19th century Britain, still disparaged as a social group. Canon Donnelly, our whiskey priest, fed their homeless at the presbytery door.

Memory is my viewfinder into the 19th century, still alive in our family through Ebenezer: the poor Londoner with a rich vision of creating healthy communities in the countryside for city slum-dwellers. Our pride in his Garden Cities loosened the locks separating public and private history. And showed me how forgotten people can be brought to life if you search hard enough. Before researching my book, Bessie Quinn, I had no inkling of who my father’s mother was: the mysterious woman who died without trace in the 1919 Spanish Flu epidemic when my father was ten. Far from the mythic orphan, her large Irish family emerged as an embodiment of working-class history: navvies, stone-breakers, woollen mill-workers, jobbing gardeners and tenement dwellers who lived and died with chronic ill-health in industrial Scotland. All except my grandmother, who got away, emancipated herself, married Ebenezer’s son and lived out her life in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Names, places, journeys, events and possessions (if any) … all matter to writing history.

How all of us have got to where we are intrigues me. Years ago I worked in an adult education movement that nurtured expressive life-writing by people new to literacy – systematically failed by the school system. I wondered why and how working-class people taught themselves to write in the 19th century before state schooling even existed and wrote a book about their life-changing writings. Finding and interpreting lost people’s lives makes social history into something bigger: surprising, human, creative and real. People like Bessie and the extraordinary Quinns still hover beyond the garden gate. I hope they’ll go on channelling my runaway curiosity into writing.

– Written by Ursula Howard for the Writers in Oxford magazine (edited by Robert Bullard).