Last week I returned to Manchester. I’m one of the people who doesn’t have a straight answer to ‘where are you from?’, though here my accent answers for me. England, more or less. If you’re attuned to English accents, the north, and if you’re attuned to northern English accents, the northwest, but I’ve lived in enough places in the last 30 years that you’d need to be very attuned, to recognise the exact shifting of vowels that tells one English person the class and regional identity of another. Grass, castle, bath. I often set my novels in northern England. But I was born in Scotland, to parents from New York and Yorkshire whose own parents came from approximately Latvia, Ukraine, Glasgow and Kerry via Leeds. I can count eight long-distance or international relocations in my adult life. Now I live in Dublin where I intend to stay. Manchester is still the place I lived longest, from four to 18.
So despite the havering and slight embarrassment and occasional shame, despite the theoretical entitlement to a theoretical Scottish passport, I am indeed English, and when I go back there, usually for work, I enjoy the invisibility, or in this case more accurately the inaudibility, of any returning migrant. I’m not foreign. I can turn off the radar of anxiety about my accent, which I know runs on both sides of that sea; it was only after moving to Ireland that I had deep conversations about emigration with Irish friends who’d moved to England. We’re all at it, going both ways, trying to pre-empt stereotypes, guarding our tongues, code-switching a bit to blend in but not enough to feel fake, trying not to try too hard and second-guessing our own watchfulness, individuals on the tides of history. Sometimes it’s nice to go home and have a break.
But I wasn’t sure if I was going home. I haven’t lived in Manchester since I left my parents’ house at 18. My parents also moved, several times, so visiting family has never been visiting anywhere that had been my home. My schoolfriends ended up in London, or farther afield.
Still, I find, I know my way around the city, though not as reliably as 30 years ago. Much has changed, the outrageous, extravagant Victorian grandeur of a great trading and manufacturing city that was still bomb-damaged and dilapidated in my childhood now regenerated and cherished, with a new, sober acknowledgement of just where that money was coming from. The city still feels culturally distinctive, not London, not Birmingham, not Bristol, a place with a proudly radical past and present. Manchester was the cradle of Victorian resistance and activism, the birthplace of campaigns against child labour, against exploitative practices in the mines and factories that fuelled the region, against the extreme poverty that brought infant mortality rates as high there in the 1870s as they were in Ireland. The Pankhurst clan, central to the women’s suffrage movement, was based in Manchester, and it’s where Marx and Engels did their fieldwork.
It was only after moving to Ireland from England that I had deep conversations about emigration
As a teenage girl in the 1990s there was a level of harassment that I hope is unthinkable now
My friend’s effortless joyful incompetence sets an example that’s difficult to match
I’m not against HRT but are we once again medicating women for being angry?
The school I attended had been founded by the Manchester liberals, including those who established and worked for the Guardian newspaper, so that their daughters could be as well educated as their sons. The workers in the cotton factories went on a long strike, refusing to process cotton grown and harvested by American slave labour. Dirty money built the city, and also that dirt was contested and denounced from the beginning. It’s been a diverse, multicultural place for centuries, home to many generations by whom other people’s cultures, faiths, cuisines and dress are routinely accepted, often shared and celebrated. There was certainly racism, but I grew up in a place that was different during Ramadan, lit up for Eid and Diwali, where school and sports uniforms included hijab options and it was all so normal I noticed only after I left. If I do “come from” Manchester – despite having no family connections and neither being born nor in adulthood living there – I could do worse.
But I let my feet find their way to the fabulous Victorian station, and, like many people crossing that water over the years, east and west, I leave home, go home; go home, leave home.