The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

13. The 16:01 to Southport

NOW I SAW British people lying stiffly on the beach like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea — and I thought: They are symbolically leaving the country.

Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person's way of going abroad — standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

I was in New Brighton ("Here Sibelius's music, conducted by the composer, was first publicly heard in England"), strolling past the green-haired punks and the Rockers, who carried booming transistor radios as big as suitcases, and listening to the pop group Raw Sewage howl their hit, "Kick It to Death." I had skipped Chester, considering it too far inland for my coastal purposes, and I had taken a train to Birkenhead.

Five miles down the west bank of the River Mersey was Rock Ferry, a yellow and green ferry station made of wood and girders. It was the sort of grand Victorian structure the British were eager to demolish and replace with a building that did not need repainting — something made of corrugated plastic sheets bolted to iron pipes. That very day, the Kensington Town Hall in London had been pulled down, for although it was a fine example of a mid-Victorian baroque façade, the Tory Council said it was worth only half a million pounds. The site, they claimed, was worth eight times that to a property developer for a bombproof, high-density, Manhattan-style condo. So much for the Victorian baroque. Kensington needed cash, the councilors said. "We can't afford to be sentimental." It seemed only a matter of time before such a lovely building as this ferry landing was bulldozed into the river.

Liverpool — it was obvious from the ferry — was full of elegant old buildings. They were heavy but graceful. The city had three cathedrals and many church spires, and just as many open spaces from the blasts of German bombs. (We live in a time of short memories. A German tourist in Liverpool told me that he found the city rather wrecked and depressing — he much preferred Scotland.) Liverpool was not pleasant — no city was — but it was not bad. It was elderly, venerable, tough, somewhat neglected, and it had a very exposed look, because it was a city on the sea, one of the few large cities in Britain that was subjected to ocean gales. That was the Liverpool look: weatherbeaten.

I had expected it to be frightening: it was known as a city of riots. But it struck me as good-humored, and inhabited by many people as alien as I was, living more or less as they pleased in what had once been extremely fine houses — the Somali Social Centre was in a cracked Georgian house. It was the most Irish city in Britain, and so the most Catholic. The Pope had just visited and been wildly welcomed. The papal flags, yellow and white, were still fluttering from the beer signs on public houses and on streets down which the "pope-mobile" (it was bulletproof, in spite of its silly name) had passed.

Emboldened by the apparent calm, I decided to walk from the pier head to the black district of Toxteth, which everyone called Liverpool Eight. The previous summer at about this time the district had been in flames. Most of Liverpool's forty thousand blacks lived in Liverpool Eight.

I met a lady tramp. She was more gray than white, about sixty-odd, and had the self-indulgent look of the drunken duchesses who were pictured in the society pages of the Tatler. She wore a woolly hat. She was pulling a loaded cart and had a dog on a leash. I had never met a lady tramp with a dog. I had the impression that this was her whole household on the cart — all her clothes and furnishings. There was a stink in the cart that may have been food. Her name was Mary Wilson. She quickly pointed out that she was not the same Mary Wilson who was married to a former British Prime Minister.

She said she would show me the way to Toxteth if I pulled her cart for a spell. I did so and nearly wrenched my arm, the thing was so heavy. She said she had picked up some bottles. There was money in bottles if you knew where to flog them.

She took a blackened pipe from under her rags and puffed it.

"Like Harold," she said. "I enjoy my pipe."

She meant Sir Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister.

Mary's uncle and aunt had gone to the United States. They had intended to settle, but they had returned to Liverpool.

"There was a depression on at the time," she said. "Like this one." And puffed her pipe. It smelled of burning rags. "We'll never see the end of this one."

She had the Liverpool knack of being able to speak without moving her lips.

"What do you want in Toxteth?" she asked.

"Just looking."

"They had riots there," she said. "They bayned the place."

"Who did?"

"The kids!" She didn't say blacks.

Liverpool used to be peaceable, she said. It wasn't peaceable anymore. It was a blewdy disgrace. It was dangerous.

But it did not look disgraceful to me. It was better than the corresponding part of New York City, near the docks in Brooklyn, but had the same bricks and the same pong of dirt and oil and old iron.

Mary Wilson finally shuffled away. Her little dog's claws scratched on the sidewalk like matches being struck as he trotted beside her.

Mr. Duddy, a street-sweeper I met at the corner of Windsor Street, said, "Toxteth. Go to the cinema that's bayned to the ground, and when you coom to Princes Road, tayn right."

But I was still smiling at him.

He became shifty. "What is it?"

"What was it like to sweep up after the riots?" I asked.

"Shocking," Mr. Duddy said.

"Give me an example."

"They baynt a car," he said.

"A lot of property was burned, I understand."

"They tried to bayn a skule," he said.

"But the whole place was in flames."

"They was poodles of petrol," he said.

"You must have seen some amazing things."

Mr. Duddy thought a moment, then said, "I saw a pule of blood."

I walked on, down Princes Road. It was shabby gentility mixed with unobtrusive ruin. There was something gothic about lovely old buildings half-burned to the ground, or turned into brothels (surely doorbells labeled Fiona and Janine and Miss Tress meant that?). Loud music came from the open windows of the Nigeria Social Club, and at the Sierra Leone Social Club there were fat blacks in bowler hats and shabby business suits on the steps, drinking beer out of cans. I assumed that the "social club" was a way of evading Britain's strict drinking hours, and the names suggested not racism, but rather nationalism or even tribalism; I could not imagine anyone from Upper Volta or Nigeria being welcome in the Ghana Social Club.

Princes Road was a wide boulevard lined with trees. I followed it down to Granby, counting policemen — eight in a matter of minutes. They walked in pairs, carrying steel-tipped canes about a yard long, the sort of weapon that usually has a poetic name, like "wog-basher." The policemen gave the impression of friendliness, and deliberately chatted with bystanders and small children, seeming to ignore the graffiti that said pigs out and Why are coppers like bananas — coz they yellow, they bent, and they come in bunches.

The shops on side streets had either boarded-up windows or else steel-mesh grates, and the same grates sheathed the public phoneboxes. I stepped into one of these phoneboxes and called the Central Police Station and asked the information officer how many black policemen there were in Liverpool.

"Who wants to know?" he asked.

"Just a curious American," I said.

"I should have known," he said. "I'll tell you something — Liverpool is nothing like America. I know about the trouble you've got over there, and compared to that, this is nothing. I could give you figures—"

"For starters, how many black policemen?"

"Twelve colored officers," he said. And the entire force was forty-six hundred.

"Twelve!" I laughed and hung up.

And the "colored" was interesting, too. Policemen were "colored," convicted criminals were "West Indian," and purse-snatchers were "nig-nogs." But when a black runner came first in a race against foreigners, he was "English." If he came second, he was "British." If he lost, he was "colored." If he cheated, he was "West Indian."

I kept walking. The riots had left marks on Liverpool Eight that were visible a year later: the broken windows had not been fixed, there were signs of scorching on walls and doors, and temporary barricades had been left in place. And there were posters advertising lectures by members of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party — very angry lectures, judging by the titles ("Fight Back!" "We Demand Action!" and so forth). And yet this area was not the ruin I had expected. I had been promised a wasteland, but it was no more than fine decaying houses and rotting odors.

In a ploy to gain entrance to a house, I asked a shopkeeper (Ma-nubhai Patel, formerly of Kampala, Uganda; dry goods and sundries) if he knew of a person who might sew a button on my leather jacket. Yes, he knew a karia — Gujarati for black — just around the corner.

"Thanks very much," I said.

"Kwaheri, bwana."

God, I thought, that feels good. It had been years since anyone had called me bwana.

Mrs. Luster was from Barbados. She had lived in England since 1953, when West Indians were encouraged to leave their homes and immigrate to Britain by the Conservative government — it was thought there would be a severe labor shortage very soon. Mrs. Luster had worked for about twenty years in a shirt factory, and then it closed ("all these imports from Hong Kong"). She was fifty-seven and had been married twice; both husbands had died. Every night she said a prayer for God to send her another husband: it was no fun living alone. In her Council flat, four upstairs rooms of an Edwardian terrace house (rent: £9 a week), she had pictures of the Queen, the Pope, Prince Andrew, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, and Jesus Christ showing his heart in flames. Most of the pictures she had cut from magazines, but she also had postcards stuck to the wall, and five calendars, and there was so much furniture, I had to walk very slowly, sliding between heavily upholstered chairs.

I asked her what she thought of Britain.

Mrs. Luster said, "It ain't what it was."

Not far from Mrs. Luster's house I saw three young men standing on the sidewalk. Their names were Pitt, Oliver, and Peery. They had all been born in Liverpool and were out of work. They were each about twenty years old. When I approached them, they were discussing the fortunes of a man who rejoiced in the name Funso Banjo. They claimed I knew him, but I said I had never before heard the wonderful name of Funso Banjo.

I asked them whether they thought there would be riots this year in Liverpool Eight.

Peery said, "We already had a riot!"

"April," Oliver said. "Pretty big one, too."

This was news to me. It had not been in any newspapers that I had seen.

They said that there was often trouble but that it was seldom reported by the national newspapers.

"They can't report everything," I said. "How big was the riot?"

They said that hundreds of people had taken part and that three cars had been burned. It had happened after the arrest of a black boy by the police — rumors had spread that the boy had been shot or beaten up by the police. The rumors were not true, but the riot had taken place just the same, and no one was sorry, because (Oliver told me) the police were always stopping black people and searching them.

I said, "Do you think there will be more riots?"

"Depends on the police, don't it?" Pitt said.

I said, "Then why not join the police?"

They reacted like scalded cats, and then they laughed, as if I had suggested the most improbable thing in the world.

"Just give me one reason," I said.

"No one would talk to you," Oliver said.

Peery said, "You wouldn't have a friend left!"

I said that I had expected to find a devastated area, but instead this part of Liverpool seemed to me rather pleasant, with a good bus service and plenty of shops, even if they did have boarded-up windows.

Oliver said, "It's not bad now." And he smiled. "But it's different when it gets dark."

Sundown found me walking rapidly out of Liverpool Eight.

***

The train to Southport was a busy branch line, because the whole nineteen miles of coast that was designated Merseyside was inhabited by Liverpool's commuters. The first few miles were taken up with warehouses and the cranes of the dockyards. It was grimy and Brooklynesque, especially in the dark brick of the railway cut at Bank Hall, and again at the two Bootle Stations, the first with a black brimful canal and an old factory sign saying treacle for health, the second Bootle Station, New Strand, with its flattened buildings and vacant lots.

Even after six miles, it seemed to me that we had never really left Liverpool — an unbroken line of dirty buildings continued up the coast, the same age as the buildings in Liverpool proper but, because they were darker and lower, very dreary. Waterloo ("founded in 1815") was a decrepit place, and it was nine miles before I saw any grass growing beside the line. At last the stations had a countrified look, and a lighter, leafier aspect. They had names like High-town and Freshfields, but they were fine — places in Britain with names like Freshfields I had found almost invariably to be slums.

We came to a grassy duney heath, with hundreds of low burial mounds, or tumuli. Perhaps they were bunkers from the war, though they may well have been bunkers from the golf courses that proliferated here — six so far, and we were not even in Southport. The land continued flat, the commuters got off the little train and walked home through the pink and purple lupins, and then, forty minutes after leaving Liverpool, we arrived at the back end of Southport.

It seemed odd for a seaside resort to be built in one of the rainiest areas of Britain, but that was not the oddest feature of Southport. Odder still was its Promenade, which was a quarter of a mile from the beach; and at low tide it was a mile along the beach to the water on the hard brown sand. When the tide was down, the beach was a long ludicrous desert, but flatter than any desert I had seen. Cars drove across it. The pier was high and dry. The sun at nine-thirty P.M. seemed to be setting at the far end of Egypt. There was no watery shimmer, no indication that it was setting in the ocean. It bumped the planet and was gone. Southport was a cluttered seaside resort without much sea, at the edge of seemingly limitless sands.

Because swimming had always been so hard to manage in Southport, the town had erected salt-water swimming pools, and a large mosaic on a bathhouse on the Front advertised, Victorian Seawater Baths — Entirely New Turkish, Russian and Swimming Baths — Finest in District. That was an old red brick place, but there was a new one not far away with an Olympic-size pool, or "pule," as they described it.

I stayed in a Southport bed-and-breakfast place with a family, the Bertrams: Herb, out of work and suspicious and always eyeing me nervously when Trish ("I find I can really relax with Americans") got down on all fours on the parlor carpet to retrieve Jason's Happy Family playing cards from under the sofa, or to sweep, or to shampoo the carpet. Trish was frequently on her hands and knees when I was sitting in the room. It was a posture that unnerved Herb. It was as if, in ape terms, she was "presenting" to me — the bum show that matters so much in baboon society. Was she symbolically submitting to me as she sponged the carpet? Herb picked his teeth and narrowed his eyes, daring me to look.

They were a young couple, they had always lived in Southport, and they hated it. Two days with the Bertrams made me gloomy, and sometimes in the evening I felt we were three baboons in the room — no conversation, but a great deal of meaningful posturing. They had pawned their best wedding present, a silver After Eight Mints' dispenser in the shape of an old English coach and horses — the box of mints went into the coach. Twenty-eight pounds it was worth, but the pawnbroker would give them only eleven. They often grumbled about this, using it as a personal illustration of their hard times. Their hopelessness and depression were infectious. They believed that nothing would ever happen to them to change their lives for the better. I had always imagined that people in this plight would become curious about the world and its possibilities; but they were indifferent to it.

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.

"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.