by Alec Brady
I was born and brought up on Langley, one of the larger post-war council estates in Manchester. The houses were nice – rationally designed, light and airy, with gardens and bedrooms and bathrooms and everything the modern family might reasonably need, and in an area well supplied with greens and parks and shops.
One of my father’s best friends was Paddy Carew, a genial and erudite giant of an Irishman. He was the head teacher of a local school, and he lived in Wood End, a house that had been swallowed up by Langley when it was created – it was maybe a century older than the council houses around it, hidden away, surrounded by trees and bushes, and overlooking a large open field that never got built on. I loved Paddy, who was always a bit rumpled and knew everything. I loved his family (it was his daughter, Mary, who introduced me to Northern Leg), and I loved that old house. It wasn’t like the houses around it – it was big and a bit rumpled, it wasn’t designed or modern, it had a stone-flagged kitchen, it smelled of books and stone and baking and love. And, before I even went to university, it was where I first heard the name of Northern Leg; at Mary and Alessio’s wedding, that garden was where I first met Northern Leggers and heard them singing.
I walked Northern two years later, in 1977; and the year after that, I believe, Damien started on Midland Leg, (or was it Kettering? He did both. I forget which came first). We will have met and got to know each other bit by bit in the years following, but there was no dramatic “the first time I saw Damien” moment for me.
In 1991 I led Northern, and Damien rang me to ask if he could join us. Both of his parents had died within a month of one another, and for good reasons he needed to have a different pilgrimage that year. It would only be for that one year, but he needed it this once.
But during the week, he told me that this had been a revelation for him and “I feel like I might be turning into a real Northern Legger”. Years afterwards he would take delight in reminding me that my response had been, “you always were, Damien; you just didn’t know it before”.
Other people here have spoken of Damien’s fine qualities, and that’s lovely. But I want to say something different.
He wasn’t perfect; in fact, he could be profoundly exasperating. You know what I mean – he’d start an anecdote, and get snagged on an irrelevant detail. “You remember Rob? Yes, you do, course you do, he led Essex in 1986. Or was it 1987? Ah, no, it must have been ’86, because he walked Kettering the year after the big storm…”
And whoever featured in his tales was always a “lovely, lovely person”. I would tease him about this – he’d name someone I didn’t know from Eve and I’d say “Oh yeah, she was a lovely, lovely person”, and sometimes he’d be like “yes, she was, wasn’t she!” before spotting me grinning, and then he’d look accusingly at me. Or laugh at himself. But his saving grace was that he never took offence, never took himself too seriously.
His puns were eye-rollingly bad, his jokes were recycled chestnuts that we’d groaned at in the 1970s. He and I were both socialists, but quite different. I relished the cut and thrust of debate, but Damien was more practical. He did the hard work in his trade union branch, he was committed to the Labour vision, canvassing and campaigning at election time. I’d done all of that; but he was solid, putting in the hours, supporting union members, working behind the scenes. And it was a moral issue for him, far more than for me. He had no interest in analysing the structural failures of capitalism, he just thought that being mean to working people or the poor was bad and you shouldn’t do it. It annoyed me that he wasn’t analytical, that he didn’t develop his arguments. But he just knew right from wrong, and that was it.
People have said that he didn’t have a bad word for anyone; but that’s not true. When he talked about Tories, he had quite a lot of words, many of them venomous, and delivered with spittle.
I never really worked out his attachment to films. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema, but seemingly no opinions about the films themselves. Yes, he knew masses of facts about movies and actors, studios and directors; but it seemed like the enthusiasm of a stamp-collector or a trainspotter. I would try to talk to him about some film, but he seemed to have no interest in whether they were any good or not. Actually, that’s probably unfair – I do remember him describing something or other as “a load of bob” (which was pretty scathing for him). But the real pleasure, for him, seemed to lie in the accumulation of knowledge.
A few of us played Wordle every day and shared our solutions, and he had a swashbuckling style of playing – throwing up ridiculous guesses, and not really caring whether he won the race to the solution or not – that I found equally exasperating and charming.
Look, I could go on like this all day. Damien was an oddity; an exasperating, generous, blinkered, old-fashioned, big-hearted fool. He would spend long hours preparing something for Northern Leg, and then leave it on the dining table. His house was untidy, his bookshelves bowing under the weight of double-stacked volumes, surfaces piled high with unsorted things. Dusting was something that happened to other people.
Damien wasn’t designed or modern, he was a bit rumpled; he smelled of books and baking and love. You could see the effect he had on people. A bit because his jokes were hackneyed and his opinions predictable, a bit because his aesthetic and ethical attitudes were obvious and unsophisticated, and he was happy just to be himself – for those very reasons, we relaxed in his company, we opened up to him and to each other. He was a comfy sofa and a safe place for us.
Yes, of course he was so much more than that; so much more. But this is something I don’t want to forget. Other people here have spoken of Damien’s fine qualities, and that’s lovely. But I want to say something different.
I went back to Langley a few years ago. I took flowers for the grave of my parents and my sister. I went to see how the estate was doing. It’s changed quite a bit, but it’s still the world I loved when I was growing up there.
But Wood End is gone, flattened. Someone has decided that, I don’t know, it was costing more to maintain than it was worth. Or maybe they’re wanting to shoehorn twelve bijou maisonettes into that garden, where Mary and I played as children; where I first heard Northern Leg sing, that evening fifty years ago. And maybe that’s rational, and maybe other people’s lives will be better. But whatever the reason, it’s gone, and I’ll never see it again.
Just by being there, by being who he was, Damien made my life better. And now there are stories of his I’ll never hear, jokes I’ll never get to tell him. OK, it’s not like any of that has any practical importance.
But he’s gone, and what am I going to do without him?
Northern Pilgrim 