Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

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.

MOST of the horror cities of northern England were surrounded by smooth hills and cow pastures and the hopeful contours of green space; so it was painful to see how Blackpool sprawled along the eastward bulge of Lancashire, displacing the grassy coastline with a fourteen-mile fun fair, from Lytham St. Anne's to Fleetwood. There was no relief. And now I began to reassess Southport — it is only hindsight that gives travel any meaning — and, looking back, I realized that Southport had been modestly elegant. I had called it cluttered, but Blackpool was real clutter — the buildings that were not only ugly but also foolish and flimsy, the vacationers sitting under a dark sky with their shirts off, sleeping with their mouths open, emitting hog whimpers. They were waiting for the sun to shine, but the forecast was rain for the next five months.

The Falklands War had entered a new phase. British troops were creeping across the main island, preparing to retake Port Stanley. The headlines of the gutter press were QUEEN LASHES ARGIES and THREE BRITISH SHIPS HIT and THE MARCH TOWARDS STANLEY. This harsh news certainly colored my feelings toward Blackpool, because one of the sights of seaside Britain that I knew would stick firmly in my mind was the long Promenade and the three piers at Blackpool: the people sleeping in deck chairs, clutching copies of the daily paper, news of the bloody war. They woke snorting and vengeful-looking, with pink sleep welts on their cheeks, and then they slapped their papers and went on reading. Tomorrow they would be using it for wrapping the fish and chips.

There was no landscape here. The mass of cheap buildings that had risen up and displaced the land had in its bellying way displaced the sea, too. Blackpool was perfectly reflected in the swollen guts and unhealthy fat of its beer-guzzling visitors — eight million in the summer, when Lancashire closed to come here and belch. This was northern gusto! This hideous Promenade was "The Golden Mile"! This bad weather was "bracing"!