Salford, near Manchester. The writer Shelagh Delaney takes her dog out for a walk, stopping to talk to passers-by before breaking into a jog. She returns home to greet her brother.
The two plays that Delaney has written to date have both been set in Salford, or a place very much like it. She's lived there all her life and it's the only place she really knows thoroughly. Although she has spent much time in London, it's both theatrical London and an atypical part of it, as she worked with the Theatre Workshop in the East End with actors quite different from the West End variety. She's also been to Sweden and France, and liked them, but doesn't feel that she could live away from England in general and Salford in particular.
She explains that Salford is worth its weight in gold to a writer. A trip to the market illustrates her point, as it's full of a huge variety of people buying, haggling, selling, quarrelling. Delaney praises the language she hears for its virility and liveliness, and highlights some individual characters.
Walking by the canal, Delaney muses on the fact that despite Salford being so clearly alive, it also seems to be old, crumbling, neglected and dirty - almost dying. She highlights the endless alleyways, separating houses that look as though they're built on top of one another, forcing closeness between neighbours that generates huge warmth. Delaney compares it to the heart of the city beating, and complains that parts of the old city are being torn down and their occupants shipped to characterless (and theatre-free) blocks elsewhere.
For Delaney, Salford signifies restlessness, and this is particularly obvious in the young people that she sees. She reminisces about her own teenage years, comparing herself to a horse on a tether waiting for someone to free her. She went to five different schools from ages five to nine, failed the eleven-plus exam, and went to a secondary modern school until fifteen, which she regards as the best education she ever had. At fifteen, she was moved to a grammar school and expected to be behind, but in fact turned out to be cleverer and more knowledgeable than most of the pupils. She worries about what happened to her fellow secondary modern pupils, as they had far fewer opportunities despite not being any less able. A key problem is that teenagers often don't know what they want to do with their lives, and end up going too far down the wrong road until they hit middle age, when it's too late to start again and too early to give up.
Returning to the theme of restlessness, Delaney concludes that that's why Salford is so important to her - it's a rock in the middle of the north of England, and while she couldn't live there all her life, she's glad it's still there.
