"I think I'll get off here," I said.
"I've got things to do in Corkickle," Cutbill said. "I'm not like you blokes with your rooksacks," and he smiled. "I've got to fill the unforgiving minute."
Kipling, the great standby in the English oral tradition. The English often quoted with approval writers they hadn't read, just as they damned, as vulgar or dull, places they hadn't been.
I walked around St. Bees ("named from St. Bega, a 7th-century Irish maiden") and then, because Cutbill had aroused my curiosity with his talk of submarine coal mines, I walked on to Rottington and Whitehaven.
I could smell the coal and the potash before I saw the town. Whitehaven was old and moribund, and like many another bad place in England, its only hotel was dreary and expensive — the equivalent of $25 for a narrow room and a damp bathmat. Writing my diary that night, I generalized on this, concluding that every large hotel at which I had stayed in England was run-down or badly managed — overpriced, understaffed, and dirty, the staff overworked and slow; and all the smaller places were preferable, the smallest always the best. The English were great craftsmen but poor mass-producers of goods. They were brilliant at running a corner shop, but were failures when they tried their hand at supermarkets. Perhaps this had something to do with their sense of anonymity? Person to person, I had found them truthful and efficient and humane. But anonymity made them lazy, dishonest, and aggressive. Hidden in his car, the Englishman was often impatient to the point of being murderous; over the phone, he was unhelpful and frequently rude. They were not timid, but shy; shyness made them tolerant, but it also gave them a grudge against foreigners, whom they regarded as boomers and show-offs. It was hard to distinguish hotels in England from prisons or hospitals — most of them were run with the same indifference or cruelty, and were equally uncomfortable. The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people — they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.
I called the Haig Pit the next day and asked whether I could go down the mine. I thought it would make a good story, another Orwell footnote, and an underground railway as well, "The Railway Under the Sea," sweating Cumbrians toiling at the coal face by the light of flaring lamps, here in the bowels of the earth, the sewer of the Lake District; all of it strange news — and you thought you knew something about England!
"Because it's more than my job's worth," Jack Smale was saying in a discouraging way. "If I let you go down there and something happens, I'll be in dead trouble. How do I know you're not going to throw a fit or something?"
"I promise not to throw a fit," I said.
"You can bloody promise anything you like, but if you've never been down a mine before, how do you know what's going to happen? You might come all over queer."
"I suppose I can't promise that I won't come all over queer," I said.
"I don't make the rules," Mr. Smale said. "It's just that our insurance people are always on at us."
"I only wanted to have a look," I said.
Mr. Smale said, "I don't want to be rude, mate. But—"
It was one of the rudest expressions in English; it was certainly the tetchiest.
We were of course speaking on the phone. If I had asked Mr. Smale that question in the Colliers' Arms on Whitehaven harbor one evening while he was smiling into his pint of beer ("Aye, it's brain damage, but it's loovely stoof—"), he would probably have said, "I'm supposed to say no, but I don't see the harm in it" — the English workingman enjoyed a conspiratorial posture—"Pop round in the morning and I'll sort you out" — and would wink—"I'll see you right."
I decided to leave Whitehaven. It was partly because four different people told me that George Washington's grandmother was buried in the local churchyard. It was a disappointing town — hundreds of small dark houses pitched across a bare hillside, and an air of doom about it. Coal-mining towns always seemed to wear an expression of fatigue, and they had a scattered volcanic look, the itch of coal dust, the atmosphere of eruption.
The rest of the coast, from the window of the train, was low and disfigured. There were small bleak towns like Parton and Harrington, and huge horrible ones like Workington, with its steelworks — another insolvent industry. And Maryport was just sad; it had once been an important coal and iron port, and great sailing ships had been built there in Victorian times. Now it was forgotten. Today there was so little shipbuilding on the British coast, it could be said not to exist at all. But that was not so odd as the fact that I saw very few vessels in these harbors and ports — a rusty freighter, a battered trawler, some plastic sailboats — there was not much more, where once there had been hundreds of seagoing vessels.
I watched for more. What I saw was ugly and interesting, but before I knew what was happening, the line cut inland, passing bramble hedges and crows in fields of silage and small huddled-together farm buildings and church steeples in distant villages. We had left the violated coast, and now the mild countryside reasserted itself. It was green farms all the way to Carlisle — pretty and extremely dull.
KESWICK PUNKS, a scrawl said in Carlisle, blending Coleridge and Wordsworth with Johnny Rotten. But that was not so surprising. It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose jewels and tattooed earlobes. I had seen green hair and swastikas in little Llanelli. I no longer felt that place names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls, like those of noble Carlisle, crowned with a castle and with enough battlements and city walls to satisfy the most energetic vandal, VIOLENT REVOLUTION, it said, and THE EXPLOITED and ANARCHY! and SOCIAL SCUM. Perhaps they were pop groups? THE REJECTS, THE DEFECTS, THE OUTCASTS, THE DAMNED, and some bright new swastikas and THE BARMY ARMY. And on the ancient walls, SKINHEADS RULE!
Some of it was hyperbole, I supposed, but it was worth spending a day or so to examine it. It fascinated me as much as did the motorcycle gangs, who raced out of the oak forests and country lanes to terrorize villagers or simply to sit in a thatch-roofed pub, averting their sullen dirty faces. I did not take it personally when they refused to talk to me. They would not talk to anyone. They were English, they were country folk, they were shy. They were dangerous only by the dozen; individually they were rather sweet and seemed embarrassed to be walking down the High Street of dear old Halt-whistle in leather jackets inscribed Hell's Angels or The Damned.
The graffiti suggested that England — perhaps the whole of Britain — was changing into a poorer, more violent place. And it was easier to see this deterioration on the coast and in the provincial towns than in a large city. The messages were intended to be shocking, but England was practically unshockable, so the graffiti seemed merely a nuisance, an insult. And that was how I began to think of the whole country; if I had only one word to describe the expression of England's face I would have said: insulted.
15. The Boat Train to Ulster
THERE WAS a gloomy irritable air about the passengers on the boat train to Ulster. It was not only that they had been on board for five hours and had three more to go before the ferry. It was worse than tiredness. It was resentment — as if they were being exiled or forced back to school or jailed after a period of freedom. But in fact they were homeward bound.