Book description
This is the story of a family which has always lived in the heart of
one of the traditional working class communities of the North.
Originally immigrants from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, their
saga, their triumphs and tragedies unfolded in the cobbled streets,
working men's cottages and terraced houses of Horwich, near Manchester.
They worked in the cotton mills and on the railways. Like most families
at the time, they were good socialists and trade unionists. They also
attended the local Spiritualist church. Spiritualism was free-thinking,
modern and progressive too and went hand in hand with socialism. The
family living on Hope Street North had problems every family has - and
worse. Marriages broke up and they had more than their fair share of
loss and heartbreak. Within the working class in those days there were
many - now forgotten - class distinctions which caused painful rifts
between the family. There was a violent bully too and an eviction which
left a mother and her children wandering the streets penniless and
homeless. A young girl was run over and killed by a horse and cart and
another died of diptheria. An unmarried woman bound her abdomen tightly
to disguise her pregnancy, and as a result her child was born with
deformed legs. As a young woman, that child went on to elope with her
lover and they both committed suicide. She died as she was born: in
shame. The book that would become Hope Street started when Pamela Young
felt compelled to write about her mother's childhood, of seeing things -
spirits, angels - that other people couldn't see. Vivid memories of
their family life came flooding back: coal dusk glistening on her
father's scalp as he came home from work, the old army coats used as
bedding and the dresser with doors missing because they'd been chopped
up as firewood when times were hard. And swirling in and around these
very vivid, often earthy memories of life in Hope Street were memories
of the extraordinary spiritual phenomena that took place there. On one
occasion a silver ball sped around the room. On another her father,
asking for proof, was picked up by a spirit guide and lifted up into the
air as light as a feather. Pamela would once see her mother engulfed in
a cloud of ectoplasm and twice her mother gradually, and starting from
her head down, disappeared before her eyes. But it was after her own
marriage had broken up and her mother had died, when Pamela was in the
depths of despair, that she found her own spiritual gift. Guided by the
spirit of her mother, she began to fully understand the great project
her mother had initiated.
