The Emigrants

Although only a scant dozen passengers had disembarked at Ringway airport from the Zurich flight, it took almost an hour until our luggage emerged from the depths, and another hour until I had cleared customs: the officers, understandably bored at that time of the night, suddenly mustered an alarming degree of exactitude as they dealt with me, a rare case, in those days, of a student who planned to settle in Manchester to pursue research, bringing with him a variety of letters and papers of identification and recommendation. It was thus already five o'clock by the time I climbed into a taxi and headed for the city centre. In contrast to today, when a continental zeal..for business has infected the British, in the Sixties no one was out and about in English cities so early in the morning. So, with only an occasional traffic light to delay us, we drove swiftly through the not unhandsome suburbs of Gatley, Northenden and Didsbury to Manchester itself. Day was just breaking, and I looked out in amazement at the rows of uniform houses, which seemed the more rundown the closer we got to the city centre. In Moss Side and Hulme there were whole blocks where the doors and windows were boarded up, and whole districts where everything had been demolished. Views opened up across the wasteland towards the still immensely impressive agglomeration of gigantic Victorian office blocks and warehouses, about a kilometre distant, that had once been the hub of one of the nineteenth century's miracle cities but, as I was soon to find out, was now almost hollow to the core. As we drove in among the dark ravines between the brick buildings, most of which were six or eight storeys high and sometimes adorned with glazed ceramic tiles, it turned out that even there, in the heart of the city, not a soul was to be seen, though by now it was almost a quarter to six. One might have supposed that the city had long since been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum. The taxi driver, whom I had asked to take me to a hotel that was (as I put it) not too expensive, gave me to understand that hotels of the kind I wanted were rare in the city centre, but after driving around a little he turned off Great Bridgewater Street into a narrow alleyway and pulled up at a house scarcely the width of two windows, on the soot-blackened front of which was the name AROSA in sweeping neon letters.