Everyman's England Read online

  ‘Cold?’ he questioned.

  I blew on my fingers and he laughed again and then spoke in the Cumberland accent which is hard at times for a southerner to follow.

  ‘How would you like to lie out on yon moss for three hours waiting for the geese to come back at night?’ he asked.

  I told him that if geese-shooting entailed such endurance it was not likely to find me among its enthusiasts.

  His eyes were creased at the corners with crow’s-feet wrinkles and were a hard, healthy blue. He stood easily against the wind as he talked, his hands in his breeches pockets, a cap to one side of his head, and his jacket open to show an old woollen yellow waistcoat. I was almost shivering in a top-coat; he seemed oblivious of the cold and the sudden spurts of snow.

  We stood looking over the marsh towards the coast, talking of the lambing season that would come in March, and he explained that the characteristic rounded thatched haystacks of the district were raised on circular stone platforms, about eighteen inches high, to prevent the rainwater that runs off the thatching from soaking into the bottom of the rick. In no other part of England which I have visited have I seen this precaution so generally adopted.

  He lived in one of those grey Cumberland houses which, having no pretensions to beauty, being no more than four walls and a slate roof, somehow seem to harmonise perfectly with the countryside. When men, it seems, make use of local materials, build they never so badly, the stone carries with it the fitness which it had in its natural state and which defeats ugliness even in its new condition. The stone houses and flaked tiles of the Cotswolds, the red-bricked thatched cottages of Kent and the flint-walled houses of Hertfordshire have this beauty.

  When I left the farmer it was snowing heavily. Down on the marsh some men had set fire to the dead grass and reeds to keep down the vermin that find a refuge there. Great streamers of smoke and flame flared away in the wind, twisting and coiling like angry snakes beneath the lowering sky. I stood, forgetting the cold in the beauty of the scene. A dark purple, gravid sky showed long barriers of cloud hurrying in from the sea to pile in great fantastic mounds above the fells inland. The green rock-brake on the stone walls trembled in the wind beneath the bracken skeletons, and a lapwing skirled through the air above me. The lashing tongues of flame were beaten close to the earth by the wind and fled from tip to tip of the clumps of dead grass, forming a string of tiny pyres that flared and wickered for a while and then died to a smouldering, smoky red gleam. The clouds swung lower, swathes of snow slanted earthwards, lodging in the wall crevices, and suddenly I became aware of something apocalyptic, some awful purpose in the play of natural forces, the fire, the snow, and the growl and smash of the sea mixed with the high whine of the wind. My whole being was tensed towards that awful moment when all these powers should break loose and run, maddened and uncontrollable, across the country, the fire roaring and devouring, the wind flattening and cruel, while the soft, pitiless snow followed softly behind them, covering the ruin with its uncharitable mantle. Human life was very insignificant before that display of elemental things…

  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:

  “Allonby, gentlemen,” said the most comfortable of landladies, as she opened one door of the carriage.

  “Allonby, gentlemen,” said the most attentive of landlords, as he opened the other.

  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 t
he 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

  TOWN OF SURPRISES

  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.