The Kingdom by the Sea (29 page)

Even Jason, who was twelve, was lacking in hope. He was a bright boy, but he said he was in the B class. "All the posh woons are in the A class. Teacher's pets and that." He said he was planning to leave school when he was sixteen.

"What would your mother say about that?"

"Me moom don't care."

The dislike of school was not unusual, but the widespread distrust of education was another matter. Perhaps it was justified. Everyone said the schools were bad—the only good ones were private ones—and it was a fact that many well-educated people were on the dole. And yet it depressed me to think of this young family dying of indifference.

Lord Street in Southport was a grand boulevard with arcades and Victorian iron canopies. It was gritty northern splendor—wide streets and big drafty buildings. But there were a great number of elderly people on it, and they added to Southport's atmosphere of feebleness and senility. Herb explained that this was June, the low season, and old age pensioners had special rates at hotels all over the Lancashire coast. I would see masses of mentally defective people, too, he promised; mental defectives also got special rates in the low season.

The day I left, I walked up to Marshside Sands, where Merseyside meets Lancashire, and then walked back again. A car followed me along the beach, passed me, and then stopped. The driver got out and sat on a bench, staring at me. I thought it might have been Herbert Bertram having another apish fit of jealousy. But no—it was a youth in a leather jacket. I kept walking. I reached Marine Drive. He had got back into his car and followed me again. He drew up beside me.

"Want a lift?"

I said no.

"Pity," he said, and drove away.

Love on all fours. It wasn't passion; it was just more pathetic sex.

On the branch line to Wigan, I opened the local Southport newspaper and read an advertisement for pornographic films.
Two big screens—Live strip tease—only £2—This Week "The Hot One"—Reduced admission for unemployed, students, and Old Age Pensioners.

That, surely, was a sign of the times, and a vision of the world to come: discounts on pornography if you were unemployed or a student or very old, for the chances were much greater that if you were one or the other, you would have enough spare time to turn porn shows into a habit.

Blackpool was only ten miles from Southport, but there was no direct road or train—the River Ribble was in the way—so I went via Burscough Bridge and Parbold and through flat green vegetable fields to Wigan to change trains. Almost fifty years before, George Orwell had come here and used this manufacturing town to examine English working life and the class structure. He had found "labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dustbins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous w.c.'s."

But Wigan today, on a cold overcast morning in June, had a somewhat countrified look—like a market town, its winding main street on a little hill, with red brick hotels and two railway stations and many public houses fitted with bright mirrors and brasswork. I walked out of the center of the town, and it seemed to me that Crook Street, with its cobblestones, and hemmed in between the railway embankment and the Colliers' Arms, could not have changed for a hundred years. The dark red terrace houses had flat fronts and leaded windows and soot on the pointing of the brick that emphasized the bricks' redness. This was what Orwell had seen.

It was now lifeless. The town had once been a center of coal mining and cotton mills. Both industries were gone. Orwell had thought Wigan illustrated the evils of industry and the miseries of workers' lives. But he would have found that unthinkable today, because the only industry left was a canning factory. There was a kind of grubby vitality in
The Road to Wigan Pier
(the title was a lame joke—there was no pier), and a ferocious indignation that working people were treated so badly. But now there was very little work. This was an area of desperately high unemployment, of a deadly calm—which was also like panic—and of an overwhelming emptiness. Orwell's anger had made the suffering Wigan of his book still seem a place of possibility. Better labor laws, compassionate management, conscientious government, and more self-awareness ("the working classes
do
smell!") would, he suggested, enable Wigan to be resurrected.

What Orwell had not reckoned on—no one had—was that the bottom would fall out, and that in this postindustrial slump, with little hope of recovery, Wigan would be as bereft of energy and as empty a ruin as Stonehenge. So there was a terrible poignancy in his complaints about the working conditions in the mills and the factories and the mines, for when the mills did not run and the factories were shut and the pits were closed, the effect was more terrible than the worst industrial defilement.

The real nightmare of northern England today was not the blackened factory chimneys and the smoke and the slag heaps and the racket of machines; it was the empty chimneys and the clear air and the grass growing on slag heaps, and the great silence. No one talked about working conditions now; there was no work. Industry had come and gone. It was as if a wicked witch had heard Orwell's carping ("factory whistles ... smoke and filth") and said, "Then you shall have nothing!" and swept it all away.

One of the most famous passages of Orwell's book described a young woman he saw from a train near Wigan. She was kneeling on stones and poking a stick into a waste pipe to unblock it. "She looked up as the train passed" and her face wore "the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen." Hers was not "the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her." And Orwell closed with the thought that she understood all the implications of her filthy job and realized what a "dreadful destiny" she faced.

That vivid description made me watchful in Wigan. I was walking back to Wigan North-Western Station when, passing a row of "little gray slum houses at right angles to the embankment"—a train was just passing—I saw an old woman hanging out her washing. A light rain had begun to fall. It seemed sad for an old woman to be hanging gray laundry on a line in the rain, but it made a peculiarly Wiganesque image. And she could have been the same woman who had been kneeling on the cobbles and unblocking the waste pipe in 1936, now grown older and still enduring her destiny.

I was overcome with curiosity and wanted to talk to her. It meant climbing a fence, but she was not startled. She asked me if I was lost.

I said no, I just happened to be passing by—and she smiled, because she had seen me eagerly climbing the fence by the railway embankment.

Her name was Mrs. Midgeley, she was a widow, she was seventy-one. Her age was interesting. The woman Orwell had seen from the train was about twenty-five, and that was in 1936; so she would be seventy-one today.

At the age of fifteen, in 1926, Margaret Midgeley began working in a factory, sewing shirts. She worked from eight in the morning until nine-thirty at night, with slightly fewer hours on Saturdays; her Sundays were free.

"They wouldn't do that today, would they?" she said with pride, and she added, "No, they'd rather go on the dole!"

She was in Wigan, working, when Orwell came. She thought she had heard the name before, but she had never read the book. She said that outsiders seldom had a good word to say about Wigan, but she had been very happy there. She worked for fifteen years in the factory and then got married. Now her husband was dead, her children had moved away; she was alone. She said she often thought about her working days.

"How much did I earn? I
had
to earn thirty-two shillings."

I said, "What do you mean,
'had
to'?"

"I was on piecework," Mrs. Midgeley said. "If I didn't earn thirty-two bob, it meant I was slacking. Oh, the foreman used to talk to us about that! You got shouted at! Maybe you'd only earn a pound, and then you'd be in lumber."

In lumber
meant in trouble, Mrs. Midgeley said, but when I checked it in a dictionary of slang, it was described as an obsolescent phrase for being in detention or in prison.

Mrs. Midgeley did not see herself as having been exploited. Her memory of Wigan in the 1930s was of a kind of prosperity, with coal and cotton and a sense of community, and work for anyone who was willing.

"And you could better yourself if you wanted to," she said.

But Wigan was hopeless now, she said. It was laziness and the dole and no prospects. Mrs. Midgeley was nostalgic for the smoke ("Mind you, it could play merry hell with your washing!") and remembered with pleasure her workmates at the factory and their annual outing to Blackpool.

She said it frightened her to think of all the young people with nothing to do. It made her feel unsafe. It was a world without work—and that was a terrible thing to her, who had worked her whole life.

"And where are you off to, then?"

I said Blackpool.

"Lucky old you," she said, and laughed.

On my way out of Wigan on the train I looked out the window and saw a group of white-faced children. The rain had plastered their hair against their tiny heads, and their clothes were soaked, and their bare legs were dirty. They were struggling to pull down a fence at the back of a ruined house. They were busy and violent, they hammered at the pickets, they looked like small dangerous men. When they saw the train, they spat at it and then they went on breaking the old fence.

M
OST
of the horror cities of northern England were surrounded by smooth hills and cow pastures and the hopeful contours of green space; so it was painful to see how Blackpool sprawled along the eastward bulge of Lancashire, displacing the grassy coastline with a fourteen-mile fun fair, from Lytham St. Anne's to Fleetwood. There was no relief. And now I began to reassess Southport—it is only hindsight that gives travel any meaning—and, looking back, I realized that Southport had been modestly elegant. I had called it cluttered, but Blackpool was real clutter—the buildings that were not only ugly but also foolish and flimsy, the vacationers sitting under a dark sky with their shirts off, sleeping with their mouths open, emitting hog whimpers. They were waiting for the sun to shine, but the forecast was rain for the next five months.

The Falklands War had entered a new phase. British troops were creeping across the main island, preparing to retake Port Stanley. The headlines of the gutter press were
QUEEN LASHES ARGIES
and
THREE BRITISH SHIPS HIT
and
THE MARCH TOWARDS STANLEY
. This harsh news certainly colored my feelings toward Blackpool, because one of the sights of seaside Britain that I knew would stick firmly in my mind was the long Promenade and the three piers at Blackpool: the people sleeping in deck chairs, clutching copies of the daily paper, news of the bloody war. They woke snorting and vengeful-looking, with pink sleep welts on their cheeks, and then they slapped their papers and went on reading. Tomorrow they would be using it for wrapping the fish and chips.

There was no landscape here. The mass of cheap buildings that had risen up and displaced the land had in its bellying way displaced the sea, too. Blackpool was perfectly reflected in the swollen guts and unhealthy fat of its beer-guzzling visitors—eight million in the summer, when Lancashire closed to come here and belch. This was northern gusto! This hideous Promenade was "The Golden Mile"! This bad weather was "bracing"!

But it was just swagger and sandwiches. "Bracing" was the northern euphemism for stinging cold, and it always justified the sadism in the English seaside taunt "Let's get Some color in those cheeks." It was another way of making a freezing wind compensate for the lack of sunshine. And yet not everyone in Blackpool was deceived. Beneath mountainous storm clouds, seventeen people on North Pier paid forty pence each to sit in the Sun Lounge—a sort of greenhouse on the pier with salt-spattered windows—and listen to Raymond Wallbank ("Your Musical Host") play "I'll Be Seeing You" on his console organ until the windows trembled. They sat and listened and read the
Daily Mail
—FIVE ARGIES DIE IN EXPLOSION
—and when Raymond Wallbank took a breather, they chatted. Once again I noticed that the Falklands' news made the English nostalgic about rationing and the blitz.

Mr. Gummer wanted the Argentine mainland to be bombed—why not flatten Buenos Aires? After all, the Argies had captured a British sheep station. Those bloody bean-eaters had to be taught a lesson. Mr. Gummer liked to say that he had been a socialist his whole life, but he had a lot of respect for the Prime Minister. She had guts, and he agreed that it was a good idea to call the British troops "our boys."

He had come to Blackpool to fish. He was retiring this year and lived with his wife, Viv, in a cottage in Swillbrook, just off the motorway. He had paid a pound to stand on the pier with his fishing pole, and after a morning of it he was almost out of the live maggots he used as bait. Mr. Gummer wondered: Should I have a longer pole?

"Hae ye caught owt?" This was Ernie Fudge. The Fudges said they would be stopping a week in Blackpool. Ernie had known Harry Gummer for donkey's years. They were both in wholesale decorating equipment, supplying do-it-yourself shops in this part of Lancashire.

"Nay," Mr. Gummer said. "I want more tackle." He was thinking of the longer pole.

"Got tackle there in 'and!" Mr. Fudge cried. "Too bloody mooch tackle in fishing."

Harry Gummer said, "That's true of every 'obby tha takes oop. Me soon 'as a bloody bamboo pole can reach to bloody flagpole yonder."

Ernie shrugged. He did not want to argue. Fishermen always looked helpless to him, dangling hooks blindly in the sea. But Harry was his friend.

"Hae ye seen 'odges?" Ernie said.

"Aye," Harry said. "He waar at t'oother end. I boomped into 'im. He waar wi' scroofy booger—a big thick bloke." Harry showed with a gesture that the man had a big potbelly. "Union bloke, 'odges says, and I says 'Oh, aye,' and he gives me 'is union bloody card. And then I says—"