THE ACCRINGTON HERALD
ACCRINGTON MUSICAL REACHES THE END OF THE LINE — WITH THREE SIMPLE WORDS
MIND THOSE TRAMS
The final song from Mind The Trams brings William to the end of the journey — and discovers that sometimes goodbye doesn’t sound like goodbye at all
There are phrases we say so often that eventually we stop hearing them.
Take care.
See you tomorrow.
Get home safely.
Mind how you go.
And around the streets of Accrington and Oswaldtwistle, where tramlines once ran through the everyday business of Lancashire life, there might have been another.
Mind those trams.
Three ordinary words.
Until one day they aren’t ordinary anymore.
THE LAST SONG
Across the songs of Mind The Trams, we have visited bakeries and ballrooms, stood beside mill gates and tram stops, listened through garden fences and followed characters whose hopes rarely extended much further than the streets they knew.
There has been laughter.
Love.
Gossip.
Fathers and sons.
Things said.
And considerably more left unsaid.
Now the music reaches its final song.
There is no attempt to make William suddenly profound.
He remains William.
And somehow that makes what happens next considerably more powerful.
EVERYBODY HAS TO LEAVE SOMETIME
The great temptation with a finale is to make it enormous.
Mind Those Trams chooses something smaller.
As the song progresses, the people we have come to know begin to leave.
One by one.
Not as heroes.
Not as names in a history book.
Simply as people whose company we have shared for a little while.
The bakery girl.
The gossip.
The mother.
The father.
The boy who joked.
The person who loved somebody without ever quite managing to tell them.
Eventually even the music has somewhere else to be.
THE ORDINARY WORDS WE REMEMBER
Perhaps that is why the title works.
Most of us don’t remember the grand speeches of our lives.
We remember somebody standing in a doorway saying:
“Put your coat on.”
“Let me know when you get there.”
“Don’t be late.”
Words that seemed completely insignificant at the time.
Years later, we would give almost anything to hear that particular voice say them once more.
Mind those trams.
It isn’t really an instruction.
It is another way of saying:
I care what happens to you.
WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS
And eventually it does.
The orchestra falls silent.
The stage begins to empty.
The people whose stories have carried this Accrington musical disappear into whatever history has waiting for them.
William remains.
For perhaps only a moment.
There should be no great theatrical gesture.
No swelling orchestra to tell the audience what they are supposed to feel.
Just William.
A familiar Lancashire voice.
And three words that have followed these characters through streets, friendships, dances, arguments, romances and goodbyes.
“Mind those trams.”
Blackout.
THE PEOPLE HISTORY FORGOT
That final moment also explains something about Mind The Trams itself.
This has never really been a story about trams.
Nor bakeries.
Nor even 1939.
It is about the enormous importance of apparently unimportant lives.
People stood behind counters.
People coming home from work.
People saving for Saturday night.
People worrying about their children.
People falling quietly in love.
People making each other laugh.
People who never expected anybody eighty years later to wonder who they were.
History records what happened.
Stories remind us who it happened to.
THE END OF THE LINE
And so our journey through the songs of Mind The Trams reaches its terminus.
We’ve met them.
Listened to them.
Laughed with some.
Probably argued with others.
And occasionally wished somebody would simply say what they were thinking.
Now there is only one thing left to do.
Step down.
Turn towards home.
And listen carefully, because somewhere behind us William has one final thing to say.
Mind those trams.
THE HERALD VERDICT
★★★★★
“THREE WORDS. AN ENTIRE WORLD.”
Mind Those Trams doesn’t attempt to end its story with a grand declaration. Instead, it leaves us with something far more recognisable — the ordinary words people use when what they really mean is: come home safely.
FROM THE WORLD OF MIND THE TRAMS
Twenty songs. One Lancashire town. A thousand ordinary lives.
Gabriel Undici — Lancashire author, songwriter and creator of the Mind The Trams musical project.
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