Coles Corner
The train came to a stop and the Ghost followed his eighteen-year-old self into town. He was smartly dressed in a suit and a black tie that he’d bought with money from his work at Bagdale’s. There was a spring in his step and a little white corner of an envelope sticking out of his front pocket.
It was a cold February evening.
He was at that section of Glossop Road where the squashed-up terraced housing disappeared and the shops began. The grocer, the butcher, the cobbler, the haberdasher.
This was the start of the town centre.
It was, back then, like a road to magic. A road to possibility. And especially this night.
This Saturday.
Because he had a date.
Eventually Wilbur (and the Ghost) reached Coles department store, which had closed for the day. But he was there, his ghost remembered, because it was where everyone arranged to meet their dates back in those days. Coles Corner.
And there was his date, Alice Dobson, waiting for him in a smart green dress, smiling beneath her blonde fringe. He couldn’t wait to tell her his news.
Alice was his girlfriend of about two months.
A girl who he had seen at the Milk Bar over Christmas drinking a Vimto with a friend, and Charlie Applewood had dared him to talk to her, primarily because Charlie Applewood was shyer than him and had a tendency to stumble on first encounters and he fancied her mate.
Wilbur had gone over and asked her what she wanted to listen to, as he was going to the jukebox.
And she had said ‘The Loco-Motion’ by Little Eva, so he had put that on and – as it was three songs for a shilling – he followed it with ‘Return to Sender’ by Elvis Presley and ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ by the Four Seasons, neither of which, thinking about it from the future, struck the right note of romantic optimism.
Alice was a year older than Wilbur. She liked that he was tall and had ‘mysterious eyes’.
She told him she lived at home with her parents in a semi-detached house in Fulwood, the posh part of town.
Her dad had made his money in the carpet trade.
She was the youngest of three sisters and was already going out on a Saturday night to dance to jazz and rhythm and blues in a hotel basement in town, and he told her his brother went there.
‘Your brother is Dougie Budd? So you’re a wrong ’un, then.’ She seemed appalled and fascinated all at once.
‘I’m not my brother. And, yeah, he was a bit wild. But he’s settling down now.’
Over the space of two months they’d gone for fish and chips, walks in the park, and a cup of tea with her parents.
All before dancing till midnight in the basement of the Acorn Hotel, which ended with a long goodbye kiss on her doorstep.
She told him that he was a nervous kisser and asked if he had ever kissed a girl before and he’d said no.
She laughed at him, with affection, but also with something else. He couldn’t help but have the feeling, a few times over this month, that he was half boyfriend and half pet.
And now this. A night at the cinema.
She smiled ambiguously. ‘Look at you in your flash suit.’
‘Well, I’m going up in the world.’
‘How far up? The clouds?’
‘Look.’ He pulled the envelope out of his pocket. ‘They got back to me!’
‘Who?’
‘You’ll see. Read the letter!’
As he handed it to her, she looked distastefully at a small group of pigeons feasting on a crust of bread thrown at them by a kindly baker.
And – with an equally apprehensive expression – she began to read, beginning with the letterhead: ‘“Balliol College, Oxford”.’ Then to the letter itself, each consecutive word being pronounced with ascending disappointment.
‘“Dear Mr Wilbur Budd, Having reviewed the results of your Entrance and Scholarship Examinations, in conjunction with your conduct at interview, we are delighted to offer you a full College Scholarship for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in History, which in addition to your County Scholarship—”’
She broke off. ‘So that means you got in to Oxford?’
‘Yes. Yes, it does.’
Wilbur waited for an eagerly expected smile or a hug. But instead he got an expression of confusion and hurt. ‘I thought you said they were all stuck-up. When you went to the interview. You said they were a bunch of snobs.’
‘I did. They were. But I still want to go.’
‘Oh. You’re not worried about it? I mean, you’re a lad from Glossop Road.’
‘I know. Exactly. A lad from Glossop Road. I’m not even meant to go to university.
Miss Graham says that if I get to Oxford it’ll be an act of revolution.
She says the education system reinforces the class system.
So every time someone from nothing and nowhere gets in, it subverts the system.
She says the scariest thing for the powers above us is an educated working class.
’ Miss Graham was quite the radical. An actual Marxist. But also the only teacher he ever saw in town, as she loved hamburgers and Coca-Cola and shopping.
It was the contradictions that made people interesting.
‘And they’re going to pay for everything.
It’s a double scholarship. That means lodgings and food and tuition.
My mam won’t have to pay. I won’t even need a job. I can just study. I’m so happy.’
She nodded but her eyes looked through him. His ghost felt regret. ‘Tactless, Wilbur,’ he said. ‘Look at her. She’s hurt.’
Of course, the Wilbur there couldn’t hear anything. He just said: ‘I thought you’d be happy for me too. I told you I wanted to go to Oxford the first time I met you.’
‘But I’m not going to see my little Wilbur.’
‘I’ll come back.’
‘What, so I say bye in September and hello at Christmas?’
The Ghost watched his young self as it dawned on him that there was more than one interpretation of his news. ‘Well, no. I will try and get back before. And you could come to Oxford. It’s not too far on the train.’
‘Don’t think I’d fit in with the posh brigade.’
‘You’re posher than me!’
‘I’m not posh in the slightest. I’m a Sheffield lass.’
‘Your dad is rolling in it.’
‘Now he is. Now that everyone in the north suddenly wants a carpet. But it wasn’t always like that. And I’m not posh. I’m proper Sheffield. And so is my dad. I don’t think I’d ever leave.’
‘You make it sound like a betrayal.’
‘Well, no. Do what you want. It’s your life.’
‘Look, can we just try and enjoy a movie?’
And as it turned out: no, they couldn’t.