Don’t tell me Mam
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Canals have always held a fatal attraction for children, and as a kid you would often find me either by the canal or at Jacksons Clay Pit playing on a total death-trap from a raft we had constructed.
But we all preferred the canal, because it was full of treasures. Prams with wheels for bogies, bikes and bike frames, mineral bottles that you got a penny back on those days, (recycling that paid) and loads of scrap metal that could be weighed in at the scrap metal yard on the way home.
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Our parents would be forever telling us the horrors about the canal and how little Johnny from a few streets away, who we had never heard of, had met his watery end in great detail, with the exception of his address.
In fact on reflection the amount of children our parents tried to convince us had drowned in the canal would have caused a national outcry, and filled the canal.
If you were unfortunate enough to have been discovered playing down the canal then a lifetime of misery lay ahead, a week of incarceration is a long time when you’re eleven, not allowing for the embarrassment of being marched through the streets in front of all your friends with your mother screaming like a possessed shaman..
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This painting illustrates a trip to Ancoats and the disused Rochdale canal.
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Ancoats in the sixties was a kid’s dream come true. Empty Mill’s you could play in, along with the dilapidated canals that still had remnants of rotting barges in them. It was as if all the people had just walked away and left everything behind - It was amazing!
On this occasion we found a balsa wood glider that had flown into the canal and we decided to fish the plane out with a piece of wire from an old bedstead.
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Acrylic and oil on board, with airbrushed atmospherics.