Rain hammered down on the steel roof of Stealaway and fell off the slate of the smoke-blackened houses nearby like tears for times gone by. Later, when I ventured out, the stone flags of the pavement close to canal at Macclesfield almost bore a reflection but who would be this old bloke staring back?
Like Blake Morrison, in his book And When Did You Last See Your Father?, I sometimes see my father in the mirror when shaving but mostly I don't really recognise the grey thinning-haired man in the frame. At times I feel 17, though for most of the time I feel rooted in my mid-thirties. For one reason and another I look older but I am, in fact, 50, and being in the neighbourhood last week thought I'd visit the place I was born, Stockport General Hospital, and my first home, the Derbyshire Peak district town of Chapel-en-le-Frith.
Actually, half a century ago this month my father was roping on suitcases to the luggage rack of his 1938 Morris 10 in preparation for the then Herculean journey that would take him, my mother and me from Chapel to Devizes in Wiltshire. And so, aged eight months, my peripatetic childhood began courtesy of the British Army.
There is no canal to Stockport any more but L.S. Lowry's mills and massive railway viaduct over a sorry-looking River Mersey are still there - just. I left Stealaway on the cut at Macclesfield and travelled by train to the town, with its bustling new white mall full of mobile phone and sport shops. In the local history department of the central library I asked the assistant, who could have been a diminutive Jane Fonda in her youth, about Stockport General Hospital.
'There isn't one,' she said, flashing me a toothy smile. 'I don't think there ever has been. There is, or rather was, the Infirmary opposite the Town Hall but it's been converted into offices. And there's St Thomas's, which used to be the workhouse until the 1930s.'
I called my mother and told her that there was no general hospital, so was it the infirmary or the workhouse? She didn't know. Well, I said, was it a big pillared and porticoed building opposite the town hall or a small brick building with a clock tower tucked away near the old armoury.
'Oh, darling, I don't know. It was the middle of the night and I had other things on my mind.' (I was a breach baby and had to be cut from her womb.) 'Daddy drove us, me, straight there so it was on the main road. And after you were born I remember a tall open window with a full moon and an owl hooting outside.' Spooky. In another age that would explain a lot!
So it was probably the infirmary then but I'll have to wait until the end of this odyssey to check my birth certificate. I wasn't having a lot of luck with this root-chasing malarkey, just as earlier I'd failed to find the house in Chapel where we had lived.
After last week's murderous climb out of Manchester I had turned on to the more tranquil waters of the Peak Forest canal. My friend German Regina had joined me for the weekend and her help in climbing the 16 locks of the Marple flight. It was good to be on a true narrow canal with Stealaway fitting snugly in the chambers. In all the hundreds of miles and locks I had travelled so far, fewer than two score were narrow. Now I was entering the Midlands heart of the narrow system, where bridge holes and locks accommodate nothing wider than a beam of 7ft.
Having taken on water at the top of the flight, we set off for Whaley Bridge at the upper end of this glorious cut, opened in the early years of the nineteenth century. As we chugged gently along the steep upper levels of the west side of the deep Goyt valley, the purple majesty of the Peaks opened up in front of us. High up on one of them - though I didn't yet know it - was the house I was looking for.
Canal-wise, I was aiming for the basin at Bugsworth, or Buxworth as it now likes to be called. During the first half of the nineteenth century this was one of the busiest inland ports in the country, annually transhipping thousands of tons of limestone from high Peak quarry tramways into barges. Alas today the canal can no longer hold its water and the arm into the basin is closed. Which is a shame as the site is a scheduled ancient monument but without boats there is little to distinguish it from the ruins of a Roman fort. Still, having found a mooring at Whaley Bridge, R and I set off up the towpath to have a look.
What we found was the adjacent and splendid Navigation Inn, to where we quickly repaired and fell into a group discussion about immigration, where those who began arguing for keeping English for the English had to admit, much to R's silent amusement, that we didn't really know who the English were, what with being ruled by the Welsh, Scots and Germans for more than four centuries. What we also found at the pub was a guide to the Peak Forest Tramway. Originally, the canal was to have extended to Chapel en le Frith but engineer Benjamin Outram decided that the necessary locks and water supply would be too expensive so opted for a connecting tramway instead. This was handy as Outram, and his father, James, were pioneers of horse-drawn railways.
Blowing away the Pedigree cobwebs, R and I set out the next day to follow the track of the tramway, checking our progress by the hundreds of heavy stone blocks with their tell-tale three holes for the spikes holding the L-shaped rails, that still litter the trail. It was a good hike through ivy-clad woods, gurgling dales and sheep-shorn meadows. Three hours later we were in Chapel and over lunch I called my mother to check exactly on Bank House, as I thought, where the Hollands were quartered with two other service couples.
'Oh darling,' she said. 'I'm not sure exactly where it was. I remember it overlooking the town; there was a railway and a little station. We didn't go into the town much. We usually went to Buxton. I remember just after you were born, daddy took me for a very good lunch at a hotel there and we left you in your cot in the car. You couldn't do that now.' Probably not, and to some that may also explain a lot.
So a railway and a station. Ah, but in those days Chapel had two stations, neither of which was close to the centre of town. R and I set off for the one still open, the one furthest away, of course, miles away up the side of a peak which separates Chapel from Buxton, though I didn't know that at the time either.
Still, sitting waiting for a train to take us back to Whaley Bridge, and dozing sweetly in the afternoon sun, I had a real feeling the house was close by. But we were both tired and then the clatter of steel wheel on steel rail and the stutter of a diesel engine announced our train.
Later, after R had returned to London, and having failed definitively to find by birthplace, I had a hunch over a pint and ham sandwich. I bought an OS map and, yes, there it was. Not Bank House, but Bank Hall, high up on the peak behind the station. The line from Chapel to Manchester passes through Stockport. So do it! And I did, and in half an hour was climbing the peak along a tree-lined track. As I turned the final corner, I knew it was the right place and sat down for a breather under the blossoming spread of a chestnut tree to call the old lady.
I described the four-square late Victorian building with its terrace and big bay windows, looking sad and dilapidated now, but still having fine views over miles of the most magnificent country.
'Yes, that's it,' she said. 'Is the tennis court still there? I used to play a lot with Johnny Button and his wife until I was too big with you. He was very dashing, a squadron leader. They were both very sporty types.'
Yes, the tennis court is still there, unused, it looked like, for decades. Yet I could hear their laughter, these young people, full of themselves. My mother was 28 and my father would have been the age that I feel I am now. But he is dead, and I am 50. Still, I felt good sitting watching the sheep watching me. This is definitely a good place for it all to have started for me. I felt very peaceful.
· Mike Holland is writing weekly online dispatches from his canal journey around England. Thanks to the wonders of wireless technology, you can email him at michael.holland4@btinternet.com
