Begbie had a grudge, but though there may have been some truth in what he said, there really was no work here. I looked in the local paper at the want ads. Very few jobs were listed, and most of them asked for people with experience.
But Sunderland was not a lively nightmare of poverty. It was dark brown and depressed and enfeebled. It was threadbare, but it was surviving in a marginal way. The real horror of it took a while to sink in. It had stopped believing there would be any end to this emptiness. Its hellish aspect was the hardest to see and describe, because it had a sick imprisoned atmosphere: there was simply nothing to do there.
The weather made it worse. It was a summer afternoon but so stormy and dark that the street lamps were on, and so were the lights in the train. I moved south again on the coastal line toward Hartlepool. Even the sea was grim here — not rough, but motionless and oily, a sort of offshore soup made of sewage and poison. We passed the coal-mining town of Seaham, with its pits next to the sea and the shafts going under the sea floor. The house roofs were like flights of steps on the sloping coast and the slag heaps had rivulets scored into them from the drizzling rain. It was a completely man-made landscape, a deliberate monstrosity of defilement. It was as different and strange as a coastal town could possibly be, with the sooty symmetry of a colliery grafted on to the shore. I had never seen anything like it in my life, and oddest of all were the people — small children laughing in a barren playground, and families picnicking on the foul-looking shore, and a glimpse between the crusted roofs of men playing cricket in spotless white flannels.
I wondered in Hartlepool how people could stand to live in such a place. Mine was not the breezy condescension of a traveler but a sense of puzzlement at the state of decay. For most people there was no choice, but I also guessed that what made it bearable was the English people's habit of living indoors most of the time. They loved squashy sofas and warm rooms and the prospect of tea. What difference did it make that the town's graveyard was squeezed between the cement works and the metal-box factory, and that the steelworks that had disfigured half the town were now shut, and the rest of the place was just cranes and pipelines and Chinese allotments? Everyone agreed that it looked like a dog's dinner.
"You've got soup kitchens in the States," a man named Witton said to me. This was in Hartlepool. Witton was a self-employed decorator. He hadn't worked since Easter. "It's much worse in the States. I saw a program about it on the telly."
But Richard Jellyman, a traveler for Morgan Crucibles, told me that when he came up north he always made a list of people to see. Inevitably, half of them would have gone into liquidation between his trips. Recently he had made a list of nine places to go in Leeds — prospective clients or people he had done business with in the past. He found, on arriving in Leeds that week, that eight of them had gone bankrupt.
I came to Stockton. The railway station was very grand; this was understandable: the first public railway in the world steamed down this line in 1825. But Stockton seemed just as terrible as every other town I had seen in this area. At Middlesbrough I was told that if I was smart, I would look at the auctions in the newspaper. Each time a company went bankrupt, it auctioned everything — machinery, chairs, lights, desks, everything. I could get them at a good price and sell them in London. Out of curiosity I checked the newspaper and found it to be full of bankruptcy auctions.
"It's the blacks, see," a respectable-looking man named Strawby told me. "We whites are the original inhabitants of this country, but they make all the laws in favor of the blacks. That's why it's all gone bad."
Mr. Strawby saw me making notes. He was not alarmed. He gave me a little lecture on racial characteristics and offered me tea.
"You can get a soobstantial tea here," Mr. Strawby said at a Middlesbrough cafe, and handed me the tattered menu.
Chip-butty: a bread sandwich filled with fried potatoes. Pease pudding: green oatmeal. Black pudding: dark knotted entrails fat with pig's blood. Faggots: hard shriveled sausages that looked like mummified slugs.
I said I wasn't hungry.
This made Mr. Strawby smile. "Soom people don't know what's good for them."
"And some people do," I said.
"Aye. That's true, right enough," Mr. Strawby said, and ordered a chip-butty.
***
STRIKE NIGHT, the Middlesbrough newspaper said and, in another Story, MAD KILLER LOOSE IN YORKSHIRE.
The Mad Killer overshadowed the railway strike. He was crazy and had a gun. He had already murdered three people, two of them policemen. There was particular anger directed against armed criminals in Britain, and cop-killers were especially hated, because few policemen were armed. People said, "Pretty soon it will be as bad as America, with all our policemen carrying guns." In Yorkshire the rural policemen carried nightsticks and rode bicycles and wore helmets that looked like old fire buckets. When they suspected foul play, they took out a little whistle and blew hard on it.
Barry Prudom, the killer, was psycho. He hated the police. It was said that he planned to wipe out the Yorkshire police force. He had been a commando. He knew how to live off the land. "Do not approach strangers," the police said in public warnings. They published Prudom's picture — he was unshaven, jug-eared, rather wolflike, and dark. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? the posters said. Four hundred people reported that they had. Every day there were fresh sightings. No one said his name. They said, "Haven't they caught that bloke yet?" People were giddy and talkative, excited by the danger. It was the classic example of the Mad Killer on the loose — a form of public theater.
Because of it, no one around here talked about the strike. This was very odd, because the entire railway network in Britain was shutting down tonight. I wanted to say But what about my trip?
Mr. Swales, the conductor on the 17:53 Middlesbrough-to-Whitby train, said, "They want to close this branch line. They've been trying to for years."
I thought: You might know! It was a beautiful line. But the opponents of these branch lines said that so few people used them, it would be cheaper to give the passengers taxi fare to their destination.
"This is the last train to Whitby," Mr. Swales said. "This is probably the last train to anywhere."
That was very British. The strike was not actually supposed to start until tomorrow, but the British impatience to wind a thing up — they characteristically left work early and always shooed the customers out of a store well before closing time — meant the strike would start this evening.
A fat lady named June Bagshawe said to Mr. Swales, "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She also shouted it into the guard's van and then out the window at every railway employee she saw. "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She used the train every day to get to her job at a knitting mill in Acklam.
But when she saw me, Mrs. Bagshawe hurried away heavily, pulling her legs along. And then I realized that, unshaven and square-faced and rather dark, I somewhat resembled Barry Prudom. I even had a knapsack like the former commando, and I wore commando-type oily shoes. She had taken me for the Mad Killer.
I sat alone. Ten minutes out of the gray trough of Middlesbrough, and this lovely train was passing through the green valleys of the Cleveland Hills in North Yorkshire. It was a bright evening — sunshine as soon as we were out of the city: it was like stepping out of a tent. All around the train were woods and fields and scarred hills, with trees blowing and earth the color of fudge. And at the rural station of Battersby (What's a train doing here? you think, but it had once been a railway junction!) the wind was making the dog roses wag.