Everyman's England Page 5

  It was at this inn that I got, for a ridiculously small sum, a lunch which more than ever endeared me to Wharfedale, for after a man has had a morning full of beauty there is no better cap to it than a lunch which in itself is a thing of beauty. There was a rich, dark soup which was not only hot but full of the flavour of vegetables, then turkey with thyme and parsley stuffing, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, a fruit tart with a crust it was a shame to break and a joy to eat, a portion of Wensleydale cheese and a cup of as good a coffee as you could expect in England. I found it did not do to encourage the landlord’s tabby with titbits. It misconstrued my lamentable kindness and leaped to the table to feed direct from the plate!

  From Kilnsey I went on up the valley, branching right at Buckden, and climbed to the top of the Pennines through the tiny village of Cray, and it was here, on the saddle that leads down into Wensleydale, with the grim line of Buckden Pike overshadowing me, that I felt the true majesty of the hills.

  Here was no attempt at prettiness; there was none of the fragility of the Cotswolds, or the purple distances of Dartmoor, only the barren sweeps of grass, the thick stone walls and the rough limestone crags. It was impossible to repress a feeling of awe and fear. I was standing alone on one of the great vertebrae of the backbone of England, above me the immensity of the sky and below, a complex, seething world, as frightening as the one above. I thought of Pascal and his imaginative conception of man standing between two immensities, above the universe, infinite and beyond the comprehension of human mind, and below that other universe in which the tiniest insect has all the complexity and activity of man himself. ‘Le silence éternal de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.’ I wondered on what mountain-top he once stood between earth and sky and feared the immensities of loneliness and space. Perhaps on one of the crater-scarred tips of the mountains of his own Auvergne.

  To my left and right might lie the turmoil of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but up here was a land which belonged to no county, was a region which owed allegiance only to the winds that ruled it and the cold, pale sky, all colour drawn from it by the bite of winter…

  As I stood with the noise of the Gray Gill fall in my ears, whispering what might have been a protest at my intrusion, a bluster of wind swept down from the Pike and sprinkled me with snow. Here was a place, it seemed to howl at me, for grouse and sheep, for wheatear and hawk, but not for men.

  I took the hint and hurried on my way down into Wensleydale, and now whenever I think of the Pennines I remember Wharfedale and the road that winds up and down by the river until it finally begins that steep climb to the head of the pass, where the most prosaic of men could not but feel that he has escaped ‘from the contagion of the world’s slow stain.’

  CHAPTER 5

  BETWEEN TWO RIVERS

  It is not always wise to visit the places which one dreams about. I have never seen Mexico, though I have often longed to go there. Who would not want to go to a town with a name like Ciudad Las Casas?

  But I am sure that the picture of Mexico which I have created in my mind (and my imagination has been aided by the films and the National Geographic Magazine) must be a gaudy exaggeration of the truth. And how many people on going to the towns which they have ringed with ink in a school atlas have wished they had never gone? This is an unfortunate human tendency. It is distressing to discover that the colourful image of the mind is so mundane and disappointing that it can never again be entitled to a place in the imagination.

  These places of the mind exercise a queer fascination. Yet it occasionally happens that the creation of your imagination is quite wrong and you are still delighted. Instead of finding a beautifully arranged garden you discover a luxuriant wilderness.

  Until recently I had been to the Wirral peninsula only in imagination. There was something about that rectangular bluff of land lying between the rivers Dee and Mersey which always excited my interest when I looked at a map of England. I felt sure that it must be vastly different from anything else in England. I used to think about it at those times when I sat down with a map and planned journeys to places I had never seen. If you are very good at the game you even go so far as to look up train connections and enjoy yourself working out alternative routes in a Bradshaw, a book with more romance in it than many a modern novel, besides being cheaper. The Wirral… there was a medieval strain in the name, suggestive of long-bows and men in green. There it was on the map a stout, defiant barrier between the industrialism of Lancashire and the wild beauty of North Wales. I pictured the noble remains of the great oak forest which had once covered it, and all the shore that stretched beside the Dee gained a dim, eerie splendour in my fancies.

  Now I have seen the Wirral and if I am offered a free trip to Mexico I am not sure whether I shall go. No! man is ever hopeful and I should go, but with some misgivings. My picture of the Wirral was wrong and I have not made up my mind whether the reality has disappointed or chastened me.

  My own Wirral was too highly coloured and lacked any genuine shadows. The real Wirral is a substantial, material, illuminating place; a great natural, or unnatural, textbook on mankind, containing within a few square miles many types of human industry and desire.

  When I got back from the Wirral I wrote an article on it which had been commissioned from me by the editor of a national daily newspaper. The article was never printed. The editor decided that it would be unwise to publish it. He was right. No paper can afford to offend a considerable section of its circulation. This may be a pitiable bar to truth, but nevertheless it exists. But what newspaper readers will not tolerate in newspapers they very often have to endure in books, for authors, from some unknown reason, have been given a greater measure of liberty than editors.

  It may be that the man who has been annoyed by an author calling his town a stew reads on and gets a vicarious pleasure when the author throws other towns into the same pot. Again there is that sense of miraculous immunity which all readers enjoy. When George Bernard Shaw calls the English ‘a race of constipated cow-eaters’ you and I on reading this are quite sure that he does not mean specifically you and me, but the man next door and that awful Simpkins who bores us in the train and looks as though he never had any exercise in his life.

  ‘Is the Wirral as gloomy as you make it?’ asked the editor.

  ‘It is,’ I replied honestly.

  ‘But there must be some beauty in it,’ he insisted.

  ‘I never said there wasn’t. There is a great deal of beauty, of a kind. There is also much more ugliness.’

  ‘Then write an article about the beauty alone.’

  ‘And not mention anything about the ugliness?’

  ‘Not if you can help it.’

  I could not help it. It may be easy for those people who write town guides and advertisement pamphlets to omit the ugliness, after all that is part of their job and anyone with sense reads between the lines and knows that there is much omitted which could not have wisely been written. But I had been asked for my impressions. I went home and wrote another article, wrote two pages and then gave it up, for all the time the real Wirral was before my eyes, mocking the Wirral of my imagination on the paper. We decided that it might be better not to write about the Wirral. Some of the substance of that original article appears in the following pages and if you have any of the instinct of a great editor you will be able to identify it.

  The sky was overcast with a grey pall of cloud while I was in the Wirral, but the greyness was nothing to the gloom which gradually swamped my soul. Never, I thought to myself, have I seen a district which exemplifies the prodigal and prodigious powers of man so shamefully. The whole district is one vast paradox, one gigantic contrast between man’s powers for good and evil. At his best man is more industrious and efficient than any ant; at his worst there is no creature on this earth so stupid that it would be fair to compare it with man. The Wirral is a forcible example of man’s two natures, the good and the bad, for the contrast between the Deeside and the Merseyside is not on
ly remarkable, but saddening.

  Here, on this peninsula, man has recognised in himself the twin desires to labour and to laugh, the need to work and the need to laze, and as such the Wirral is a sociological study no student of humanity should miss.

  Before I saw them the sands of Dee had an appealing mystery which, I suspect, dates from the poetry readings of my schooldays. Mary calling the cattle home across the sands of Dee was a slightly pathetic and yet heroic figure, fit subject for one of those dark etchings you sometimes see in second-hand shops framed in a tawny wood; and I left Chester in a mood of expectation.

  The country I travelled over was flat and cut into fields. All that remained of the great oak forest which I could see were the trees that lined the hedges, and their thick, tight-budded branches had a faintly mocking air in the winter light, as though they were deriding me for my imaginative simplicity. I was immune from derision before I had finished with the Wirral.

  The oak forest has gone and its scattered survivors seem to have lost that essential Englishness of the oak and to have become no more than the accessories of a mocking, slightly macabre landscape. The peninsula coast on the Deeside is, in the south, fringed with long stretches of marsh, where flocks of sheep crop, as they do on the saltings of Norfolk, and seagulls float on the pools that litter the green of the marsh like scattered silver paper. Here and there a boat lies tilting high and dry, with its timbers rotting.

  Far out beyond the rim of the marsh was the sea, hugged by a low blanket of mist and cloud that hid from me the distant Welsh mountains. There was a wildness and mystery in the long stretches of marsh which heightened my expectations of the rest of the coast.

  I was disappointed. After the marshes come the famous sands, and in a few miles the loneliness of the first marshes and countryside gives way to a crowded colonisation. The Deeside has become a residential area, a succession of holiday resorts for the people of Birkenhead and its adjoining towns, and the whole stretch of coast has achieved a quite unique degree of ugliness. The country has disappeared under a litter of bungalows and shoddy houses in which even the few good buildings have their virtues obscured by the horror that crowds so closely around them. It is impossible to escape the awful houses and buildings.

  Heswall, Thurstaston, West Kirby, Hoylake… they all have that same look and atmosphere. They are all places which should make a man stop and ponder upon the ugly effect of uncontrolled building. At one time there was beauty there. Indeed, there still is in fleeting patches. Then the great exodus from the cities on the other side of the peninsula began. People wanted to live in the country, by the seaside, and travel daily to their work in Liverpool and Wallasey, so they built themselves houses on the Dee. They built them hurriedly, a fault to be condoned sometimes, and they soon found themselves surrounded by other houses, built by other people who wanted to have fresh air and sea breezes, with the result that in no time the lovely views were obscured by brick walls and built over by other people seeking the freedom of the country. Nowadays I should prefer to live in the heart of Wallasey rather than anywhere on that coast of Dee.

  There is one place on the Dee which has escaped some of man’s awful eagerness, and that is Parkgate. Here, for a moment, it was almost possible to imagine that I was in some Cornish fishing village. Rows of small boats and yachts swung at anchor, gulls screamed in wild clouds over my head, and at the end of the promenade stood a group of fishermen in yellow oilskins and sea-boots. The buildings along the front were pleasantly white in contrast to the grey-green sea. I was tempted to speak to the fishermen, but I resolved not to do so. I was still suffering from my disappointment with the coast and did not wish to risk another.

  The Deeside has become a playground for hundreds after the toil and strain of a Birkenhead week, and a haven for those workers who are able to afford to live away from the towns where they work. I could not help feeling what a terrible pity it was that this admirable resolution to get away into the country and to the seaside should have been pursued with such enthusiasm that very soon the conditions from which the families were removing were being recreated around them. We cannot all live in the country, although most of us would like to, and the people who do live in places which enjoy a lovely isolation and freedom from the presence of cities may wonder at our joy when we are able to get away from the welter of buildings and tramways into the peace of a suburb. Many of the places in the peninsula are suburbs of the large industrial areas, and to hundreds they represent the country and freedom from smoke and grime. That these places are now losing the charm and peace they once held out to tired business men and wives anxious for the green of fields is a tragedy, and the blame belongs to no one in particular and yet it belongs to every person living in the peninsula. If the dwellers by the Dee want to preserve the rural beauties which drew them from Birkenhead and Liscard they must do it themselves – and do it soon. If they do not the time is not far distant when they will begin to long for the peaceful industrialism of Birkenhead, twenty minutes away.

  The appeal of the peninsula lies more in its human interest than any natural or historical features. On the Deeside are the famous sands, littered with cigarette cartons and fronted by an almost continuous growth of houses which I shall not be sorry if I do not see again. And then there is the Merseyside, a vital, dominating place where it is never impossible to find something interesting and stimulating.

  There is no pretension on the Merseyside. It is frankly industrial and commercial, and the sprawling masses of houses, factories and docks which are Wallasey, Liscard and Birkenhead offer no excuses for their ugliness. There is no doubt about the feeling of these towns. It is here that work is done, and everywhere is a frankness of purpose that mitigates the ugliness, and even achieves beauty in the gaunt jibs of cranes and about the busy traffic of ships lying in dock. There is always the continuous flow of sea – traffic up and down the river and at Eastham Ferry is the beginning of that great engineering masterpiece, the Manchester Ship Canal. It is surprising that the same people who have produced the dignity of the Merseyside should also have perpetrated the urban monotony of the rest of the district, for it is literally true that the whole of the peninsula has become a suburb of Liverpool and Birkenhead.

  In Birkenhead it was slightly disconcerting to discover in the middle of the town, after wandering around acres of dingy streets, the entrance to the Mersey tunnel, an omnivorous mouth guarded by coloured pay-boxes and sentinelled by a tall black column, decorated in an Egyptian fashion that struck a bizarre note amongst the dirty buildings of the rest of the town.

  As I stood by the tunnel a couple of Lascars from some ship walked by me and stood staring a while at the gilded column and the dark tunnel mouth. They were undersized, thin men, dressed in crumpled reach-me-downs and wearing caps too large for them. They had that timid, chastened air which characterises poorer orientals in a foreign city. They stood for a moment eyeing the tunnel and I wondered if each time they came off ship at Birkenhead they walked solemnly to this place to pay silent homage to the one touch of the Orient in the town.

  I lost myself several times in the maze of Birkenhead’s streets. One thing I could not lose and that was the docks; Birkenhead has been a shipbuilding town since the beginning of the nineteenth century and the feeling of ships and the sea is everywhere.

  It was from the great Laird yard here that the ill-fated Alabama sailed in 1862, during the American Civil War. The Alabama, a disguised privateer, was allowed to sail from Birkenhead, despite the fact that the United States consul at Liverpool had acquainted the authorities with her real character. For two years she harried the shipping of the Northern States until she was sunk off Cherbourg. That she had ever been allowed to sail was a direct breach of England’s neutrality. It also showed how ignorant of American feeling were the statesmen of that time. ‘If Lord John (Russell) had known Boston society as well as he knew the Italian exiles,’ says G. M. Trevelyan, ‘he would have taken a little more trouble than he did to
prevent the sailing of the Alabama.’ And he would have saved England, and future tax-payers, the enormous claim of over three million pounds which was awarded against her ten years later by an international court of arbitration.

  From the Laird yard, in 1829, came the first iron ship ever launched in England, to mark the beginning of the mythical Mother Shipton’s prophecy that ‘iron should float and carriages without horses run.’

  I wanted lunch while I was in Birkenhead, and I asked a policeman to direct me to a good cafe.

  ‘You won’t do better than that,’ he said, nodding across the roadway to where a notice was fixed to the railings of a tall house.

  I thanked him, and crossing the road, went down the area steps which led to the cafe. I found myself in a large room, lit by two windows that looked out into the well of the area and brightened by the polish on the brass utensils which hung upon the walls. At the far end of the room a huge kitchen range smiled the blackest and shiniest smile I have ever seen. I knew that I was in a place where I should be well satisfied for a few people, obviously regular patrons, looked at me with the scarce-hidden annoyance which comes over one’s face at the intrusion of a stranger into one’s favourite cafe. In Birkenhead, the city of the tunnel, perhaps all good things are found underground.

  At the next table were two young men and it was obvious from their talk, which I could not help but hear, that they were actors met for a while in Birkenhead before passing on with their respective companies. Their talk was mostly of common acquaintances, and went like this: