"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.
14. The West Cumbria Line
MOST 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 Blackpooclass="underline" 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—"
I took a tram to Fleetwood, but there was no footpath to Lancaster that way. I returned to Blackpool and realized that the tram system made this part of the coast bearable. I had enjoyed the ride, even if I had used it to list all the features of Blackpool I disliked. And when I asked local people to tell me Blackpool's virtues, I was confirmed in my dislike.
"But it's quaat naas soomtimes," Murine Mudditch said. "We've been living 'ere ever since Ian was made redoondant."
I asked her how she spent her time.
"Drinking and bingo," she said.
"Every day?"
"Most days."
"What if you don't like drinking and bingo?"
Mrs. Mudditch had a bubbling bronchitic laugh.
She said, "Then you've 'ad it!"
I wanted to leave Blackpool, and I was annoyed that it was not possible to walk away. I went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Morecambe. Five of us boarded the bus, and the bus went everywhere, stopping every quarter of a mile, at villages and at isolated public houses, where sad-faced women waited with string bags.
Mrs. Buglass was from Lancaster, but she hated the Lancashire type. She had lived too long in the south of England, she said — it had spoiled her.
"They're dead nosy up here," Mrs. Buglass said. "They want to know all your business — always talking, always asking questions. The people in the south are very polite. They don't go on and on, they don't ask you about your private affairs. That's the big problem up here — no privacy."