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.