Manchester, more than brick and lead, is a city built from the stories that it tells about itself. Frequently contested, sometimes contradictory, these fables of construction are apt to intertwine the triumphal and the tragic.
So it goes with the Peterloo Massacre, adopted son Alan Turing, and the collective trauma at the heart of what remains of Manchester United; the Munich Air Disaster of 1958, in which ultimately 23 souls were lost, eight United players among them.
Munichs, the latest novel by David Peace in which he mines his favoured seam (the Northern working class in the latter half of the 20th century), is the diamond that he has cut from the ashes of the disaster, an anthem for the doomed youth of a football team fledged for the flight of success, only to be cruelly brought down on freezing German soil. The audience for his appearance at HOME as part of this year’s Manchester Literature Festival, winter coats de-wardrobed to fend off October’s meteorological caprices, are perhaps more theatre-polite than terrace-raucous. The closest they come to a Mexican wave is the gentle shuffle to attention of those already seated to accommodate the late arrivals in the middle seats.
Ably enabled by Katy Shaw, professor of contemporary writings at Northumbria University, an interlocutor who seems to share a wavelength with him, as though Peter Taylor to his Brian Clough, Peace describes the set of circumstances that brought him to fictionalise the tragedy. His father fading with dementia, Peace put aside a long-gestating work taking shape in the pipe smoke and mirrors of Harold Wilson, the Huddersfield-born Labour Prime Minister whose premierships straddled the 1960s and 1970s, in favour of a conversation in their common language of football.
Although a fan of Huddersfield Town, the memory of watching the Busby Babes, the name bestowed on a youthful Manchester United squad with an average age of barely 22, had stayed with Peace. Managed by Matt Busby and his assistant Jimmy Murphy, Peace prized the recollection of one gifted youngster’s performance in particular – the prodigiously-gifted, left-sided midfielder Duncan Edwards. Playing in an era when television was the exception rather than the rule, the claims for Edwards’ greatness, made by many, form part of an oral history, passed down from generation to generation, that Peace was keen to honour.
Himself a Manchester resident from 1986 until 1992, Peace also strove to evoke both the city and its times, poring over ghost-written biographies, the newspapers of the day and yellowing A to Zs. Although little over half a century ago, in many respects the Old Trafford he resurrects seems a world or more away; a place where professional footballers still lodged with landladies, where players for the youth team would be expected to take care of the first 11’s kit, and where landline telephones were not a household given so that news of the crash, when it arrived, came in fits and starts. Grief, of course, is a constant, and tragedy the thread that ties those days to our own. Those whose lives are curtailed by an arbitrary fate are rapidly canonised and mourned en masse, all the more so if they should happen to die young.
It’s from Peace’s careful attention to the specifics of what he describes as “a working class tragedy” that a more universal empathy arises, like the phoenix sewn into the shirts of the team’s cup final kits at the culmination of that hellish season. As Peace says: “I wanted this to be read by people who don’t support United.”
It ought to be. It will be.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
Images: Book cover, Faber
