Everyman's England (3 page)

All around was a wild, barren beauty, a rude beauty which grew upon me, wooing by direct assault and battering me into admiration, until I was aware only of the crying of the sea-birds, the thunder of the breakers flinging their white crests over the cobble-drafts, and the tossing of the thin spikes of dune grass before the oncoming flames.

Allonby is no more than a handful of houses, halfway between the two towns. A small stream runs by the side of the road through the village, and as I entered a little old lady was standing on a trestle bridge that crosses the stream, her shawl pulled about her against the wind, while she fed a pair of swans with bread from her basket.

It may well be that her grandmother was feeding the ancestors of those same swans on that day when Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins came to Allonby. They stayed at the old Ship Inn during their northern tour, described in Christmas Stories. They had been in the rugged John Peel country of Caldbeck, climbing Carrock Fell, when, a mist descending upon them, Collins slipped on a wet boulder and sprained his ankle. After describing other adventures Dickens tells of their reception at Allonby:

I did not arrive in the style of Dickens and his companion. I was cold and longing for a hot drink and my coat was wet with melted snow. I pushed upon the door of the inn and found myself in a cold passage-way. After a few shouts the landlord appeared from somewhere in the back of the house and I was shown into a room hung with coloured prints of game birds where a coal fire burned cheerfully.

Attentiveness must be a trait of Allonby landlords, for very soon I was warm before the fire, my coat was drying over the back of a chair and I was drinking scalding hot cups of tea and attacking a plate of new bread and butter, while the landlord entertained me with an account of his life as a collier in a mine near Whitehaven.

Maryport in Dickens's day was a thriving town full of contented people. If he could visit it today, it would probably evoke from him the one literary vice of which he has been accused, an occasional tearful sentiment; sentiment – ‘that odious onion,' as Birrell called it. Maryport today would call forth tears from any man, were he not conscious of the impotency of tears to remedy such state as Maryport has fallen to.

In the midst of all the wild splendour of this coast, Maryport is a tragedy. The town is built on and around a hill which overlooks the sea. From the top of the hill you can look down upon the houses which cluster around the dock-side, their grey slates marked by gulls. The streets are narrow and steep, and in places there are zigzagging steps that climb the hillside. It is a larger, darker, unhappier Clovelly of the North. In the harbour fishing boats tilt on the mud at low tide, and at night the white column of the small light at the end of the breakwater shines like a dim candle.

About the whole town is an air of dejection, as though it were brooding over past glories, and it may well be so, for once Maryport was alive and active. There were pits that employed hundreds of men, rolling mills, shipbuilding yards where some of the finest ships in the world had their birth beside the brawling River Ellen, and a constant traffic of cargo boats into the harbour to keep the dockers busy.

Now, all that has gone. The lifeblood has been drained from Maryport by forces beyond the control of the townspeople. Almost all the pits are closed, the yards have not known the ring of hammered rivets for years, the rolling mills are silent, and few cargo boats come into the harbour.

On the corners I saw groups of patient men with time on their hands, hours in which to brood over their misfortunes, and up and down the streets the tight-lipped women hurried about their shopping. The poverty of a town may well be determined by its shops. There are no luxury shops in Maryport. The atmosphere of the town was distressing, though it could not dull the laughter of the children in the streets as they played. There was a happy clatter of clogs where small boys raced up and down the stone steps.

By the harbourside things are more cheerful. There is still the fishing, though that is not so profitable as it used to be. On the tide the boats go out beyond the harbour light to find the herring and the cod, and in the inns the rough seamen jostle one another, talking of fish and boats, of nets and tides and prices. Unshaven, some of them, their caps and jerseys silvered with the loose scales of fish, they play their favourite game of dominoes and drink their beer happily enough, but they are not unaware of the tragedy of the rest of their townsmen. No man could live in Maryport and ignore it. Silloth may not be so large or picturesque as Maryport, yet it must be happier.

Whenever I think of that coast, of the seabirds and the wild sweeps of sand and shingle, of the grey houses and the sheep with their fleeces tossed by the wind, and the farmers who do not seem to feel the cold, I shall remember the men I saw along the beach as I came into Maryport. Stretching away until they were lost in the snow haze, they were bent to the shingle, like gleaners across an immense field. In their bended forms was a suggestion of grimness and evil.

My curiosity aroused, I walked over to one of them to see what he was doing. I soon learned. The men were foraging the beach for the small pieces of coal cast up by the tide from some underwater reef. The pieces of coal were hardly bigger than large peas, and stooping to the beach these men were picking the black lumps from the litter of shells and pebbles and painfully filling their sacks. A morning's work might half fill a sack, I was told by the man I spoke to, and then it had to be carried, sometimes as much as five miles, to keep the fires going in homes where fires were luxuries hard to come by. I was cold enough walking along the beach in the wind. It was only too easy to imagine what the cold would be to those men, thinly clad, and moving slowly over the pebble ridges.

Talking to this man, I was, and not for the first time, suddenly ashamed of myself and the age I lived in. He told me some details of his life and his struggle to keep his wife and children sufficiently nourished upon his relief money, and he spoke of the possibility of gaining employment in the wry, cynical manner of a man who has had most of his hope taken from him by ten years of enforced idleness and poverty. I expected him to be bitter, but instead of bitterness was resignation and apathy.

‘I was bitter at first,' he confessed. ‘Who wouldn't be? But it's no good to get like that. It doesn't do you any good and it only worries your family. For myself I wouldn't mind what happened. It's having a family and watching them do without things that—' He broke off and stared out across the sea. I left him, trying not to think of his thin body shivering in a wretched suit, a scraggy scarf his only extra protection against the wind…

A coast of birds, of beauty and courageous fishermen, and a coast of ghastly paradox, where men grabble in the shingle for small coals, while about Maryport stand the gaunt frames of silent pitheads that guard enough coal to fill those sacks a million times… If ever men and women had cause to despair, those men and women of Maryport and the peoples of towns that share a like fate have cause; and if ever men begin to pride themselves upon their efficiency and high civilisation let them think of the peoples of such stricken towns and be ashamed.

CHAPTER 3

Of the Yorkshire industrial towns which I know, I like Halifax best of all. Most Yorkshire towns of the industrial area assault you with their ugliness and befuddle you with miles of tortuous tram-lined roads, flanked by pitheads and mounds of slag.

That the towns are shapeless and unplanned is a fault they share with hundreds of others. That they overflow into one another so that a stranger hardly knows when he is in Bradford or Leeds, or Wakefield or Dewsbury, and after a time begins not to care, is a fault which it is impossible to forgive and hard to bear with.

Halifax is different. It possesses everything which makes other towns ugly and yet it is beautiful. Gasometers, which would offend the eye anywhere else, in Halifax are part of a picture which is essentially titanic and grim.

As I stood on the road that runs steeply down from Beacon Hill to the valley, there was no mistaking where the town began and ended. It lies in the deep valley of the Hebble with the dark peaks of the Pennines around it, shutting it away from the rest of the world. The hills sweep around the town in almost a full circle and, in the valley-bottom and running partly up the hill-slopes in terraces, is Halifax.

It was some time before I could find the River Hebble. Standing on the iron bridge, which carries the road over the railway in the valley, I first heard and then saw the river. There it was, hemmed in by the bulk of brewery, carpet factory, railway station and goods yards, rushing and foaming along an artificial bed, bravely pretending to be a moorland stream. There is little hope for a small stream like the Hebble in a growing town. Not large enough to influence the building development, as the Thames did at Oxford and the Avon at Bath, and too small to merit special attention like the Lea and the Fleet in London, it is pushed and thwarted, forced from one channel to another and sapped to provide water for factories and laundries, until finally it disappears altogether and is remembered only by old men drinking their half-pints who call to mind the days when they fell, fished and swam in it. Someday the Hebble must disappear and the sound of rushing water in Halifax will be gone and then the silence of the brooding, impressive hills will, alone of Nature, be left to contend with the shriek of siren and the steam-crested roar of the hooters.

Oxford has been called the city of dreaming spires but, unless you know your Oxford well, you will find it difficult to choose a spot where you can see those spires to their full advantage. Halifax is a town of smoking chimney stacks, rotund gasometers and melancholy church towers and steeples, and there is no need to seek a special vantage point to see them, for every road which runs down to Halifax will give you an aerial view.

I counted nearly a hundred of the stacks from Beacon Hill before I gave up in despair. There is no denying the impression of power that comes from those chimneys. Perhaps it is the bold effect of their number. Perhaps not; but for a moment I had a glimpse into the mystery of Mammon worship. It was easy to see how firmly a man could come to believe in and reverence his own powers. Those chimneys were the smoking candles about the altar of a devilish god, a god who still remembered the child sacrifices that appeased its majesty not so long ago. Over the chimneys drifted tiny plumes of smoke, thinning in the wind down-valley.

Mixed with the stacks are the church steeples and, at the lowest point of the valley stands the beautiful square tower of the parish church, not at all out of keeping with the industrialism that surrounds it, for the Church has always been a great ally of industry, in many places preparing the ground for its advance.

The buildings of the town are constructed from the dark brown local stone. The back-ground of hills to the rows of streets and the thrusting chimneys give a feeling of immensity. Halifax is the embodiment of industry, holding all its melancholy power and strange, compelling beauty.

Halifax, I found, was a town of surprises. My first view of it coming down the hill gave me a pleasant surprise. I had expected the usual monotony of an industrial centre, and the same sordid litter which characterises most large woollen towns. I discovered instead a town which had wrung dignity and beauty from such things as stacks, gasometers, canals and mills, and, if the stone of the houses was smoke-blackened the windows and doorsteps were spotless as though every wife was house-proud.

The distinction of Halifax arises, I think, from its honesty of purpose. It pretends to no more than it is and, by its frankness and because of its unique position in a deep-valley, it has achieved a definite beauty.

There were few signs of depression in the town and unemployment, I was told, was comparatively low. A Halifax man I talked to advised me, if I knew any family man who was unemployed and worrying about work for his children, to urge him to come to Halifax.

‘There may be nowt for t' old man,' he said, ‘but there's plenty to be found for t'lads and lassies.'

How an unemployed man was to transfer his family to Halifax he did not say, but he was emphatic about the ease with which young people could find employment. And he was probably right, though it is not in Halifax alone that it is easier for young boys and girls to find employment while the older folk must stay idle. This preference for young men and women in industry would be a good sign if it were correlated with some system for the maintenance of their elders. Most men and women are not so fond of work that they would not be glad to give up their posts at forty and devote the rest of their lives to doing the things they have always wanted to do. It may be the rearing of bantam fowls or a study of football coupons, and there are many who, like Richard Jefferies, would be happy to stuff their pockets full of seeds and roots and walk the countryside planting bare patches or barren corners. In ten years of such leisure as this England could rival the hibiscus and bougainvillea of the West Indies with its roses, canary creeper and periwinkle. I am afraid the Great North Road will not flower with altruistically planted rows of giant hollyhocks for any of us to see them!

The man I spoke to was a typical working-class Yorkshireman. He was of middle height, with enormous shoulders and hands of a size which made the cigarette he held look ridiculous. It was Saturday and he was dressed in his weekend finery: a black bowler hat, white collar and a navy-blue suit from the pocket of which protruded a folded evening paper.

Halifax, he told me, was becoming more like Birmingham every day. I said I hoped it was not. He did not hear me. Although Halifax was primarily a woollen town, making worsteds, and carpets, other industries were springing up. There were – and I had only to look around me to confirm his words – toffee factories, silk factories, machine-making shops, brickworks, toy factories, mills and a brewery. As he spoke he was emphatic, but courteous. He often swore, yet was careful to add each time: ‘You'll excuse me swearin'?' which I gladly did, for he was better than any guidebook, and his oaths lost their harshness in his mouth, for I felt that without them he would be incomplete.

There was nothing about him to suggest that he had ever in his whole life moved beyond Yorkshire. His eyes were mild and his manner that of the man who loves his friends and home town too well to wander. To my surprise, as we talked on I found that I was in the company of a Marco Polo. Here was no factory worker who had never seen more than the dark Pennines and the rugged dales. His adventures, and I would vouch for his honesty, sounded the more astounding coming from him so soberly clad in his blue suit and neat bowler.

As a boy he had gone to South America to live with a much older brother. The brother, apparently a man who relied upon his wits for a living, had to leave for Mexico hurriedly and my friend, Marco, went with him. In Mexico the brother fell in love with a Mexican dancer, shot her lover and decamped with the dark-haired lady, leaving Marco Polo behind to fend for himself. The authorities, with some reluctance, looked after Marco until he felt it was time to assert his independence, which he did, three days before he was to be shipped back to his relations in England. From Mexico he wandered north and found himself at early manhood working for gold in the Klondike, where he was often hungry and more than once escaped unpleasant deaths. An Englishman out there, who had been lucky, paid for his passage home – and he spent the money on a new outfit and a trip to New York. His money gone, he worked in steel and coal as smelter and hewer in America until the call of the Old Country was too strong. Then he worked his passage over and landed at Liverpool with very little save a fund of stories and a host of experiences, enough to set up three prolific novelists for a lifetime. And he came back in time to earn his forty pounds a week in the palmy pre-war days of northern commercialism and to save enough to make his old age very comfortable. Before I spoke to him I should have said that the nearest he had ever been to Klondike was with Charlie Chaplin in
The Gold Rush
.

From Marco I learned the story of Wainhouse's Tower, which is a prominent landmark in the town. It was built, at a time when individualism in the North was an excuse for many things, by a wealthy manufacturer so that he might overlook the garden of a neighbour who had a strong objection to being overlooked. Marco seemed to find this a great joke; but I could not help feeling sorry for that long-dead, meek (I am sure he was meek and inoffensive) man who liked the privacy of his garden to sit and smoke and watch his marigolds and to feel that he was alone. I wonder what he did to annoy the manufacturer? Perhaps his son had dared to ask to marry the manufacturer's daughter and, not getting his consent, the two had eloped and he had vented his spleen by destroying the other father's solitude.

Halifax, like America today, believes in individualism (though America has tacked the adjective ‘rugged' before the noun), and has always been reluctant to give up any of its ancient rights and privileges.

As recently as the seventeenth century it cherished its curious Gibbet Law, which, established primarily to protect the wool trade from thefts, gave the inhabitants the power to execute anyone, after a trial by a jury of burgesses, found guilty of the theft of more than 13d. The site of the gibbet is still preserved by the present day Gibbet Street. With men like pleasant Mr Wainhouse about, I wonder how many innocent citizens found an undeserved death on the gibbet.

A well-known guidebook, to which I referred, devoted six of eight pages on Halifax to a description of the parish church. Interesting as the church undoubtedly is I cannot think that it deserves, in such an interesting town, so great a preponderance of attention. Guidebooks are too much given to lengthy descriptions of architectural features, and say all too little about the town and its people. When I entered the church I found it so hot and stuffy that I could only suppose that the writer of the guidebook got mazed in the dark aisles and went on making notes until he found his way out, and that he then left Halifax hurriedly.

I might have stayed in the church a little longer than I did, had it not been for the curious wooden effigy of a bedesman, holding an alms-box. It was coloured and, although not quite life-size, had such an air of reality that I felt the eyes were following me around. Perhaps he thought I was after the altar candlesticks. A bedesman was a man appointed to say prayers in return for alms. The word
bead
means a prayer, and the phrase ‘telling his beads,' has nothing to do with keeping a tally of prayers with a rosary, but means ‘saying his prayers.'

Most alms houses were founded for the benefit of bedesmen so that they could live in them and pray for the soul of the founder. It seems that there have always been some men too busy to say their own prayers.

The eyes of this bedesman followed me around the church. I thought the mild reproof in them arose from my disturbing his peace. I dropped sixpence in his box to appease him. His expression never changed and gradually he began to make me feel uncomfortable until I reached a point when I was ready to see ghostly things in the gloom of the nave. I came out and left him alone. As I cast a last glance at him as I went through the doorway he seemed to be smiling with satisfaction as though he were saying ‘Well, that's got rid of him!'

Two things exist in Halifax which I had not seen for a long time anywhere else. The first is the familiar figure of childhood days – the lamplighter. I met him again in Halifax, making his round of the streets with his long pole and zigzagging from one side of the road to the other. I followed him for a while, taking pleasure in his movement, and from the number of greetings which he gave and received I could see that he was still as popular as ever. The lamplighter, the closing light of winter afternoons and somewhere the rattle of teacups and the smell of toasting muffins – how many men and women as children have dropped their books when the light faded and the print became a dark patch on the page, and then, moving from the fire, have stood with their faces pressed against the cold windowpane, breath frosting the glass, waiting for the lamplighter. There was a magic in such moments, as the world dozed between day and night and the figures of the street swirled in and out of a brown haze.