chapter Eighteen
I TOOK A TRAIN TO LEEDS AND THEN ANOTHER TO MANCHESTER - A long, slow but not unpleasant ride through steep-sided dales that looked uncannily like the one I lived in except that these were thickly strewn with old mills and huddled, soot-blackened villages. The old mills seemed to come in three types: 1. Derelict with broken windows and TO LET signs. 2. Gone - just a grassless open space. 3. Something non-manufacturing, like a depot for a courier service or a B&Q Centre or similar. I must have passed a hundred of these old factories but not until we were well into the outskirts of Manchester did I see a single one that appeared to be engaged in the manufacture of anything.
I had left home late, so it was four o'clock and getting on for dark by the time I emerged from Piccadilly Station. The streets were shiny with rain, and busy with traffic and hurrying pedestrians, which gave Manchester an attractive big-city feel. For some totally insane reason, I had booked a room in an expensive hotel, the Piccadilly. My room was on the eleventh floor, but it seemed like about the eighty-fifth such were the views. If my wife had had a flare and an inclination to get up on the roof, I could just about have seen her. Manchester seemed enormous - a boundless sprawl of dim yellow lights and streets filled with slow-moving traffic.
I played with the TV, confiscated the stationery and spare tablet of soap, and put a pair of trousers in the trouser press - at these prices I was determined to extract full value from the experience -even though I knew that the trousers would come out with permanent pleats in the oddest places. (Is it me or are these things totally counter-productive?) That done, I went out for a walk and to find a place to eat.
There seems to be a kind of inverse ratio where dinner establishments and I are concerned - namely that the more of them there are, the harder it is for me to find one that looks even remotely adequate to my modest needs. What I really wanted was a little Italian place on a side-street - the kind with checked tablecloths and Chianti bottles with candles and a nice 1950s feel about them. British cities used to abound in these places, but they are deucedly hard to find now. I walked for some distance but the only places I could find were either the kind of national chains with big plastic menus and dismal food or hotel dining rooms where you had to pay £17.95 for three courses of pompous description and overcooked disappointment.
Eventually I ended up in Chinatown, which announces itself to the world with a big colourful arch and then almost immediately loses heart. There was a scattering of restaurants among big office buildings, but I can't say I felt as if I had wandered into a little corner of the Orient. The bigger, better-looking restaurants were packed, so I ended up going to some upstairs place, where the decor was tatty, the food barely OK and the service totally indifferent. When the bill came, I noticed an extra charge beside a notation marked 'S.C.'
'What's that?' I said to the waitress, who had, I should like to note, been uncommonly surly throughout.
'Suhvice chawge.'
I looked at her in surprise. 'Then why, pray, is there also a space here for a tip?'
She gave a bored, nothing-to-do-with-me shrug.
'That's terrible,' I said. 'You're just tricking people into tipping twice.'
She gave a heavy sigh, as if she had been here before. 'You got complaint? You want see manager?'
The offer was made in a tone that suggested that if I were to see the manager it would be with some of his boys in a back alley. I decided not to press the matter, and instead returned to the streets and had a long, purposeless walk through Manchester's dank and strangely ill-lit streets - I can't remember a darker city. I couldn't say where I went exactly because Manchester's streets always seem curiously indistinguishable to me. I never felt as if I were getting nearer to or farther from anything in particular but just wandering around in a kind of urban limbo.Eventually I ended up beside the great dark bulk of the Arndale Centre (there's that name again). What a monumental mistake that was. I suppose it must be nice, in a place as rainy as Manchester, to be able to shop undercover and if you are going to have these things at all, much better to have them in the city than outside it. But at night it is just twenty-five acres of deadness, a massive impediment to anyone trying to walk through the heart of the city. I could see through the windows that they had tarted it up inside since the last time I had been there - and very nice it appeared now, too - but outside it was still covered in those awful tiles that make it look like the world's largest gents' lavatory, and indeed as I passed up Cannon Street three young men with close-cropped heads and abundantly tattooed arms were using an outside wall for that very purpose. They paid me scant heed, but it suddenly occurred to me that it was getting late and the streets were awfully empty of respectable-looking fellows like me, so I decided to get back to my hotel before some other late-night carousers put me to similar use.
I awoke early and hit the drizzly streets determined to form some fixed impression of the city. My problem with Manchester, you see, is that I have no image of it, none at all. Every other great British city has something about it, some central motif, that fixes it in my mind: Newcastle has its bridge, Liverpool has the Liver Buildings and docks, Edinburgh its castle, Glasgow the great sprawl of Kelvingrove Park and the buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, even Birmingham has the Bull Ring (and very welcome it is to it, too). But Manchester to me is a perennial blank - an airport with a city attached. Mention Manchester to me and all that swims into my mind is a vague and unfocused impression of Ena Sharpies, L.S. Lowry, Manchester United football club, some plan to introduce trams because they have them in Zurich or some place and they seem to work pretty well there, the Halle Orchestra, the old Manchester Guardian and these rather touching attempts every four years or so to win the bid for the next summer Olympics, usually illustrated with ambitious plans to build a £400-million velodrome or a £250-million table tennis complex or some other edifice vital to the future of a declining industrial city.
Apart from Ena Sharpies and L.S. Lowry, I couldn't name a single great Mancunian. It's clear from the abundance of statues outside the town hall that Manchester has produced its share of worthies in its time, though it is equally clear from all the frock coats and mutton chops that it has either stopped producing worthies or stopped producing statues. I had a look around them now and didn't recognize a single name.
If I haven't got a very clear image of the city, it's not entirely my fault. Manchester doesn't appear to have a very fixed image of itself. 'Shaping Tomorrow's City Today' is the official local motto, but in fact Manchester seems decidedly of two minds about its place in the world. At Castlefield, they were busy creating yesterday's city today, cleaning up the old brick viaducts and warehouses, recobbling the quaysides, putting fresh coats of glossy paint on the old arched footbridges and scattering about a generous assortment of old-fashioned benches, bollards and lampposts. By the time they have finished, you will be able to see exactly what life was like in nineteenth-century Manchester - or at least what it would have been like if they had had wine-bars and cast-iron litter bins and directional signs for heritage trails and the G-Mex Centre. At Salford Quays, on the other hand, they have taken the opposite tack and done everything they can to obliterate the past, creating a kind of mini-Dallas on the site of the once-booming docks of the Manchester Ship Canal. It's the most extraordinary place - a huddle of glassy modern office buildings and executive flats in the middle of a vast urban nowhere, all of them seemingly quite empty.
The one thing you have a job to find in Manchester is the one thing you might reasonably expect to see - row after row of huddled Coronation Streets. These used to exist in abundance, I'm told, but now you could walk miles without seeing a single brick terrace anywhere. But that doesn't matter because you can always go and see the real Coronation Street on the Granada Studios Tour, which is what I did now - along with, it seemed, nearly everyone else in the North of England. For some distance along the road to the studios there are massive waste-ground car and coach parks, and even at 9.45 in the morning they were filling up. Coaches from far and wide - from Workington, Darlington, Middlesbrough, Doncaster, Wakefield, almost every northern town you could think of - were decanting streams of sprightly white-haired people, while from the car parks issued throngs of families, everyone looking happy and good natured.
I joined a queue that was a good 150 yards long and three or four people wide and wondered if this wasn't a mistake, but when the turnstiles opened the line advanced pretty smartishly and within minutes I was inside. To my deep and lasting surprise, it wasactually quite wonderful. I had expected it to consist of a stroll up the Coronation Street set and a perfunctory guided tour of the studios, but they have made it into a kind of amusement park and done it exceedingly well. It had one of those Motionmaster Cinemas, where the seats tilt and jerk, so that you actually feel as if you are being hurled through space or thrown off the edge of a mountain, and another cinema where you put on plastic glasses and watched a cherishably naff 3D comedy. There was an entertaining demonstration of sound effects, an adorably gruesome show about special effects make-up and a lively, hugely amusing debate in an ersatz House of Commons, presided over by a troupe of youthful actors. And the thing was, all of these were done not just with considerable polish but with great and genuine wit.
Even after twenty years here, I remain constantly amazed and impressed by the quality of humour you find in the most unlikely places - places where it would simply not exist in other countries. You find it in the patter of stallholders in places like Petticoat Lane and in the routines of street performers - the sort of people who juggle flaming clubs or do tricks on unicycles and keep up a steady stream of jokes about themselves and selected members of the audience - and in Christmas pantomimes and pub conversations and encounters with strangers in lonely places.
I remember once years ago arriving at Waterloo Station to find the place in chaos. A fire up the line at Clapham Junction had disrupted services. For an hour or so hundreds of people stood with incredible patience and implacable calm watching a blank departure board. Occasionally a rumour would rustle through the crowd that a train was about to leave from platform 7, and everyone would traipse off there only to be met at the gate by a new rumour that the train was, in fact, departing from platform 16 or possibly platform 2. Eventually, after visiting most of the station's platforms and sitting on a series of trains that went nowhere, I found myself in the guards' van of an express reputed to be departing for Richmond shortly. The van had one other occupant: a man in a suit sitting on a pile of mailbags. He had an enormous red beard - you could have stuffed a mattress with it - and the sort of world-weary look of someone who has long since abandoned hope of reaching home.
'Have you been here long?' I asked.
He exhaled thoughtfully and said: 'Put it this way. I was clean shaven when I got here.' I just love that.
Not too many months before this, I had been with my family to
Euro Disneyland. Technologically, it had been stunning. The amount of money invested by Disney in a single ride would make any part of the Granada Studios Tour look like amateur night in a village hall. But it occurred to me now, as I sat in the immense conviviality of Granada's mock House of Commons debate, that not once at Disneyland had there been a single laugh. Wit, and particularly the dry, ironic, taking-the-piss sort of wit, was completely beyond them. (Do you know that there isn't even an equivalent in American speech for 'taking the piss'?) Yet here in Britain it is such a fundamental part of daily life that you scarcely notice it. Just the day before at Skipton I had asked for a single to Manchester with a receipt. When the man in the window passed them to me he said: 'The ticket's free . .. but it's eighteen-fifty for the receipt.' If he had done that in America, the customer would have said: 'What? What're ya saying? The ticket's free, but the receipt costs £18.50? What kind of cockamamy set-up is this?' If Disney had had a House of Commons debate, it would have been earnest, hokey, frighteningly competitive and over in three minutes. The people on the two sides of the chamber would have cared deeply, if briefly, about coming out on top. Here, things were so contrived that there wasn't the remotest possibility of anyone's winning. It was all about having a good time, and it was done so well, so cheerfully and cleverly, that I could hardly stand it. And I knew with a sinking feeling that I was going to miss this very much.
The one place you don't find any humour on the Granada Studios Tour is on Coronation Street, but that is because for millions of us it is a near-religious experience. I have a great fondness for Coronation Street because it was one of the first programmes I watched on British television. I had no idea what was going on, of course. I couldn't understand half of what the characters said or why they were all called Chuck. But I found myself strangely absorbed by it. Where I came from, soap operas were always about rich, ruthless, enormously successful people with $1,500 suits and offices high up in angular skyscrapers, and the main characters were always played by the sort of actors and actresses who, given a choice between being able to act and having really great hair, would always go for the hair. And here was this amazing programme about ordinary people living on an anonymous northern street, talking a language I could barely understand and never doing much of anything. By the time the first adverts came on, I was a helpless devotee.Then I was cruelly forced into working nights on Fleet Street and fell out of the habit. Now I am not even permitted in the room when Coronation Street is on because I spend the whole time saying, 'Where's Ernie Bishop? So who's that then? I thought Deirdre was with Ray Langton? Where's Len? Stan Ogden is dead?' and after a minute I find myself shooed away. But, as I discovered now, you can go years without watching Coronation Street and still enjoy walking along the set because it's so obviously the same street. It's the real set, by the way - they close the park on most Mondays so that they can film on it - and it feels like a real street. The houses are solid and made of real bricks, though, like everyone else, I was disappointed to peer in the windows and find through gaps in the curtains that they were empty shells with nothing but electrical cables and carpenters' sawhorses inside. I was a bit confused to encounter a hairdresser's salon and a pair of modern houses, and the Kabin, to my clear distress, was much smarter and well ordered than it used to be, but I still felt uncannily on familiar and hallowed turf. Throngs of people walked up and down the street in a kind of reverential hush, identifying front doors and peering through lace curtains. I latched on to a friendly little lady with blue-rinsed hair under a transparent rain hat she seemed to have made from a bread wrapper, and she not only informed me who lived in which houses now, but who had lived in which houses way back when, so that I was pretty well brought up to speed. Pretty soon I found myself surrounded by a whole flock of little blue-haired ladies answering my shocked questions ('Deirdre with a toy boy? Never!') and assuring me with solemn nods that it was so. It is a profoundly thrilling experience to walk up and down this famous street - you may smirk, but you would feel just the same and you know it - and it comes as something of a shock to round the corner at either end and find yourself back in an amusement park.
I had only intended to stay an hour or so at the park, and hadn't got anywhere near the guided studio tour or the Coronation Street gift shop, when I glanced at my watch and discovered with a snort of alarm that it was nearly one o'clock. In a mild panic, I hastened f$om the park and back to my distant hotel, fearful that I would be charged for another day or, at the very least, that my trousers would be overcooked.
In consequence I found myself, three-quarters of an hour later, standing on the edge of Piccadilly Gardens with a heavy rucksack and a pretty near total uncertainty about where to go next. I had it vaguely in mind to head for the Midlands, since I had given this noble if challenging region of the country pretty short shrift on my previous foragings, but as I was standing there a faded red double-decker bus announcing WIGAN in its little destination window pulled up beside me and the matter was out of my hands. It happened that at this very moment I had The Road to Wigan Pier sticking out of my back pocket, so unhesitatingly - and wisely - I took this for a sign.
I bought a single and found my way to a seat midway along the back upstairs. Wigan can't be more than fifteen or sixteen miles from Manchester, but it took most of the afternoon to get there. We lurched and reeled through endless streets that never seemed to change character or gain any. They were all lined with tiny terrace houses, of which every fourth one seemed to be a hairdresser's, and dotted with garages and brick shopping precincts with an unvarying array of supermarkets, banks, video takeouts, pie and pea shops, and betting establishments. We went through Eccles and Worsley, then through a surprisingly posh bit, and on to Boothstown and Tyldesley and Atherton and Hindley and other such places of which I had never heard. The bus stopped frequently - every twenty feet in places, it seemed - and at nearly every stop there was a large exchange of people. They nearly all looked poor and worn out and twenty years older than I suspect they actually were. Apart from a sprinkling of old men in flat caps and dun-coloured, tightly zippered Marks 8c Spencer's jackets, the passengers were nearly all middle-aged women with unlikely hairdos and the loose, phlegmy laughter of hardened smokers, but they were unfailingly friendly and cheerful and seemed happy enough with their lot. They all called each other 'darlin' and 'love'.
The most remarkable thing - or perhaps the least remarkable thing, depending on how you look at it - was how neat and well looked after were the endless terraces of little houses we passed. Everything about them bespoke an air of modesty and make-do, but every stoop shone, every window gleamed, every sill had a fresh, glossy coat of paint. I took out my copy of The Road to Wigan Pier and lost myself for a bit in another world, one that occupied the same space as these little communities we were passing through, but was impossibly at odds with what my eyes were telling me when I glanced up from the pages.
Orwell - and let us never forget that he was an Eton boy from afairly privileged background - regarded the labouring classes the way we might regard Yap Islanders, as a strange but interesting anthropological phenomenon. In Wigan Pier he records how one of the great panic moments of his boyhood years was when he found himself in the company of a group of working men and thought he would have to drink from a bottle they were passing round. Ever since I read this, I've had my doubts about old George frankly. Certainly he makes the working class of the 1930s seem disgustingly filthy, but in fact every piece of evidence I've ever seen shows that most of them were almost obsessively dedicated to cleanliness. My own father-in-law grew up in an environment of starkest poverty and used to tell the most appalling stories of deprivation - you know the kind of thing: father killed in a factory accident, thirty-seven brothers and sisters, nothing for tea but lichen broth and a piece of roofing slate except on Sundays when they might trade in a child for a penny's worth of rotten parsnips, and all that sort of thing - and his father-in-law, a Yorkshireman, used to tell even more appalling stories of hopping forty-seven miles to school because he only had one boot and subsisting on a diet of stale buns and snot butties. 'But,' they would both invariably add, 'we were always clean and the house was spotless.' And it must be said they were the most fastidiously scrubbed persons imaginable, as were all their countless brothers and sisters and friends and relatives.
It also happens that not long before this I had met Willis Hall, the author and playwright (and a very nice man into the bargain), and somehow we got to talking about this very matter. Hall grew up poor in Leeds, and he unhesitatingly confirmed that though the houses were barren and conditions hard, there was never the tiniest hint of dirtiness. 'When my mother was to be rehoused after the war,' he told me, 'she spent her last day there scrubbing it from top to bottom until it shone, even though she knew it was going to be torn down the next day. She just couldn't bear the thought of leaving it dirty - and I promise you that that wouldn't have been thought peculiar by anyone from that neighbourhood.'
For all his professed sympathy for the masses, you would never guess from reading Orwell that they were capable of any higher mental activities, and yet one Leeds neighbourhood alone produced Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse and Peter O'Toole, while a similarly impoverished district of Salford that I know of produced Alistair Cooke and the artist Harold Riley, and I am sure the story was repeated countless times all up and down the country.
Such was the picture of appalling squalor Orwell painted that even now I was startled to find how neat and well maintained Wigan appeared to be as we entered it by means of a long hill. I got off at the bottom, pleased to return to the fresh air, and set off in search of the famous pier. Wigan Pier is an arresting landmark, yet - and here's another reason to be a bit cautious with regard to old George's reporting skills - after spending some days in the town, he concluded that the pier had been demolished. (So too, for that matter, did Paul Theroux in Kingdom by the Sea.) Now correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you think it a bit odd to write a book called The Road to Wigan Pier and to spend some days in the town and never once think to ask anybody whether the pier was still there or not?
In any case, you could hardly miss it now since there are cast-iron signposts pointing the way to it on almost every corner. The pier -it is really just an old coal shed on the side of the Leeds-to-Liverpool Canal - has (inevitably) been refurbished as a tourist attraction and incorporates a museum, gift shop, snack bar and a pub called, without evident irony, The Orwell. Alas for me, it was shut on Fridays, so I had to content myself with walking around it and peering in the windows at the museum displays, which looked reasonably diverting. Across the street was something nearly as arresting as the pier - a real working mill, a mountain of red bricks with the name Trencherfield Mill emblazoned across an upper storey. It's now part of Courtauld's, and is a sufficient rarity these days that it is something of a tourist attraction, too. There were signs out front telling you which way to go for the guided tours, the factory shop and the snack bar. It seemed a bit of an odd notion to me, the idea of joining a queue to watch people making duvets or whatever it is they do in there, but in any case it too appeared to be closed to the public on Fridays. The snack bar door was padlocked.
So I walked into the centre, a fair hike but a not unrewarding one. Such is Wigan's perennially poor reputation that I was truly astounded to find it has a handsome and well-maintained town centre. The shops seemed prosperous and busy and there were lots of public benches to sit on for the many people unable to take an active part in all the economic activity around them. Some talented architect had managed to incorporate a new shopping arcade into the existing fabric of the buildings in a simple but deceptively clever and effective way by making the glass canopy of the entrance matchthe line of the gables of the surrounding structures. The result was an entrance that was bright and modern but pleasantly harmonious - precisely the sort of thing I've been going on about for all these many pages - and I was delighted to think that if this sort of thing is going to happen just once in Britain that it should be in poor beleaguered Wigan.
To celebrate, I went off to have a cup of tea and a sticky bun at a place indoors called the Corinthia Coffee Lounge, which boasted, among its many other advertised features, a 'Georgian Potato Oven'. I asked the girl at the counter what that was and she looked at me as if I were very strange.
'It's for cooking potatoes and tha',' she said.
But of course. I took my tea and sticky bun to a table, where I spent a little time going 'Ooh, lovely,' and smiling inanely at some nice ladies at the next table, and afterwards, feeling strangely pleased with my day, went off to find the station.