Notes from a Small Island

by Bill Bryson

  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.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I TOOK A TRAIN TO LIVERPOOL. THEY WERE HAVING A FESTIVAL OF litter when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape. They fluttered gaily in the bushes and brought colour and texture to pavements and gutters. And to think that elsewhere we stick these objects in rubbish bags.

  In another bout of extravagant madness, I had booked a room in the Adelphi Hotel. I had seen it from the street on earlier visits and it appeared to have an old-fashioned grandeur about it that I was keen to investigate. On the other hand, it looked expensive and I wasn’t sure my trousers could stand another session in the trouser press. So I was most agreeably surprised when I checked in to discover that I was entitled to a special weekend rate and that there would be money spare for a nice meal and a parade of beer in any of the many wonderful pubs in which Liverpool specializes.

  And so, soon afterwards, I found myself, like all fresh arrivals in Liverpool, in the grand and splendorous surroundings of the Philharmonic, clutching a pint glass and rubbing shoulders with a happy Friday-evening throng. The Phil (you can call it this if you have been there twice) was in fact a bit too crowded for my liking. There was nowhere to sit and scarcely any room to stand, so I drank two pints, just enough at my time of life to need a pee - for there is no place in the world finer for a pee than the ornate gents’ room of the Philharmonic - then went off to find some place a little quieter.

  I ended up back in a place called The Vines, which was nearly asornate as the Philharmonic but infinitely quieter. Apart from me, there were only three other customers, which was a mystery to me because it was a very fine pub with wood panelling by some Grinling Gibbons wannabe and a plaster ceiling even more ornate than the panelling. As I was sitting there drinking my beer and savouring my plush surroundings, some guy came in with a collecting tin from which the original label had been clumsily scratched, and asked me for a donation for handicapped children.

  ‘“Which handicapped children?’ I asked.

  ‘Ones in wheelchairs like.’

  ‘I mean which organization do you represent?’

  ‘It’s, er, the, er, Handicapped Children’s Organization like.’

  ‘Well, as long as it’s totally legitimate,’ I said and gave him 20p. And that is what I like so much about Liverpool. The factories may be gone, there may be no work, the city may be pathetically dependent on football for its sense of destiny, but the Liverpudlians still have character and initiative, and they don’t bother you with preposterous ambitions to win the bid for the next Olympics.

  So nice was The Vines that I drank two more pints and then realized that I really ought to get something in my stomach lest I grow giddy and end up staggering into street furniture and singing ‘Mother Machree’. Outside, the hill on which the pub stood seemed suddenly and unaccountably steep and taxing, until it dawned on me, in my mildly addled state, that I had come down it before whereas now I was going up it, which seemed to put everything in a new light. I found myself, after no great distance, standing outside a Greek restaurant and surveying the menu with a hint of a sway. I’m not much of one for Greek food - no disrespect to a fine cuisine, you understand, but I always feel as if I could boil my own leaves if I had a taste for that sort of thing - but the restaurant was so forlornly empty and the proprietress beckoned at me with such imploring eyes that I found myself wandering in. Well, the meal was wonderful. I have no idea what I ate, but it was abundant and delicious and they treated me like a prince. Foolishly I washed it all down with many additional draughts of beer. By the time I finished and settled the bill, leaving a tip of such lavishness as to bring the whole family to the kitchen door, and began the long process of stabbing an arm at a mysteriously disappearing jacket sleeve, I was, I fear, pretty nearly intoxicated. I staggered out into the fresh air, feeling suddenly queasy and largely incapable.

  Now the second rule of excessive drinking (the first, of course, is don’t take a sudden shine to a woman larger than Hoss Cartwright) is never to drink in a place on a steep slope. I walked down the hill on unfamiliar legs that seemed to snap out in front of me like whipped lengths of rope. The Adelphi, glowing beckoningly at the foot of the hill, managed the interesting trick
of being both near by and astonishingly distant. It was like looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope - a sensation somewhat enhanced by the fact that my head was a good seven or eight yards behind my manically flopping appendages. I followed them helplessly, and by a kind of miracle they hurtled me down the hill, safely across the road and up the steps to the entrance to the Adelphi, where I celebrated my arrival by making a complete circuit in the revolving door so that I emerged into open air once again, before plunging back in and being flung with a startling suddenness into the Adelphi’s grand and lofty lobby. I had one of those where-am-I moments, then grew aware that the night staff were silently watching me. Summoning as much dignity as I could and knowing that the lifts would be quite beyond me, I went to the grand staircase and managed - I know not how - to fall up them in a manner uncannily reminiscent of a motion picture run in reverse. All I know is that at the very end I leapt backwards to my feet and announced to the craning faces that I was quite all right, and then embarked on a long search for my room among the Adelphi’s endless and mysteriously numbered corridors.

  Here’s a piece of advice for you. Don’t go on the Mersey ferry unless you are prepared to have the famous song by Gerry and the Pacemakers running through your head for about eleven days afterwards. They play it when you board the ferry and they play it when you get off and for quite a lot of time in between. I went on it the following morning thinking a bit of a sitdown and a cruise on the water would be just the way to ease myself out of a killer hangover, but in fact the inescapable sound of ‘Ferry ‘cross the Mersey’ only worsened my cranial plight. Apart from that, it must be said that the Mersey ferry is an agreeable, if decidedly breezy, way of passing a morning. It’s a bit like the Sydney Harbour cruise, but without Sydney.

  When they weren’t playing ‘Ferry ‘cross the Mersey’, they played a soundtrack outlining the famous sights from the deck, but the acoustics were terrible and 80 per cent of whatever was said was instantly blown away on the wind. All I could hear were snatchesof things like ‘three million’ and ‘world’s biggest’ but whether they were talking about oil refinery capacity or Derek Hatton’s suits I couldn’t say. But the gist of it was that this was once a great city and now it’s Liverpool.

  Now don’t get me wrong. I’m exceedingly fond of Liverpool. It’s probably my favourite English city. But it does rather feel like a place with more past than future. Leaning on a deck rail gazing out on miles of motionless waterfront, it was impossible to believe that until quite recently - and for 200 proud and prosperous years before that - Liverpool’s ten miles of docks and shipyards provided employment for 100,000 people, directly or indirectly. Tobacco from Africa and Virginia, palm oil from the South Pacific, copper from Chile, jute from India, and almost any other commodity you could care to name passed through here on its way to being made into something useful. So too, no less significantly, did some 10 million people bound for a new life in the new world, drawn by stories of streets paved with gold and the possibility of accumulating immense personal wealth, or in the case of my own forebears by the giddy prospect of spending the next century and a half dodging tornadoes and shovelling snow in Iowa.

  Liverpool became the third richest city in the empire. Only London and Glasgow had more millionaires. By 1880 it was generating more tax revenue than Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds and Sheffield together even though collectively they had twice the population. Cunard and White Star Lines had their headquarters in Liverpool, and there were countless other lines, now mostly forgotten - Blue Funnel, Bank Line, Coast Line, Pacific Steam Line, McAndrews Lines, Elder Dempster, Booth. There were more lines operating out of Liverpool then than there are ships today, or so at least it can seem when there is nothing much along the waterfront but the ghostly warble of Gerry Marsden’s voice.

  The decline happened in a single generation. In 1966, Liverpool was still the second busiest port in Britain, after London. By 1985, it had fallen so low that it was smaller and quieter than even Tees and Hartlepool, Grimsby and Immingham. But in its heyday it was something special. Maritime commerce brought Liverpool not just wealth and employment, but an air of cosmopolitanism that few cities in the world could rival, and it still has that sense about it. In Liverpool, you still feel like you are some place.

  I walked from the ferry to the Albert Dock. There were plans at one time to drain it and turn it into a car park - it seems a miracle sometimes that there is anything at all left in this poor, stumbling country - but now, of course, they have been scrubbed up and gentrified^ the old warehouses turned into offices, flats and restaurants for the sort of people who carry telephones in their briefcases. It also incorporates an outpost of the Tate Gallery and the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

  I love the Merseyside Maritime Museum, not merely because it is well done but because it gives such a potent sense of what Liverpool was like when it was a great port - indeed, when the world was full of a productive busyness and majesty of enterprise that it seems utterly to have lost now. How I’d love to have lived in an age when you could walk to a waterfront and see mighty ships loading and unloading great squares of cotton fibre and heavy brown bags of coffee and spices, and when every sailing involved hundreds of people - sailors and dockers and throngs of excited passengers. Today, you go to a waterfront and all you find is an endless expanse of battered containers and one guy in an elevated cabin shunting them about.

  Once there was infinite romance in the sea, and the Merseyside Maritime Museum captures every bit of it. I was particularly taken with an upstairs room full of outsized ships’ models - the sort that must once have decorated executive boardrooms. Gosh, they were wonderful. Even as models they were wonderful. All the great Liverpool ships were here - the Titanic, the Imperator, the RMS Majestic (which began life as the Bismarck and was seized as war reparations) and the unutterably lovely TSS Vauban, with its broad decks of polished maple and its jaunty funnels. According to its label, it was owned by the Liverpool, Brazil and River Plate Steam Navigation Company Limited. Just reading those words, I was seized with a dull ache at the thought that never again will we see such a beautiful thing. J.B. Priestley called them the greatest constructions of the modern world, our equivalent of cathedrals, and he was absolutely right. I was appalled to think that never in my life would I have an opportunity to stride down a gangplank in a panama hat and a white suit and go looking for a bar with a revolving ceiling fan. How crushingly unfair life can sometimes be.

  I spent two hours wandering through the museum, looking with care at all the displays. I would happily have stayed longer, but I had to check out of the hotel, so I regretfully departed and walked back through central Liverpool’s fine Victorian streets to the Adelphi, where I grabbed my things and checked out.I had a slight hankering to go to Port Sunlight, the model community built in 1888 by William Lever to house his soap workers, as I was interested to see how it compared with Saltaire. So I went to Liverpool Central and caught a train. At Rock Ferry we were informed that because of engineering works we would have to complete the journey by bus. This was OK by me because I was in no hurry and you can always see more from a bus. We rode along the Wirral peninsula for some time before the driver announced the stop for Port Sunlight. I was the only person to get off, and the most striking thing about it was that this was patently not Port Sunlight. I tapped on the front doors and waited for them to gasp open.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but this doesn’t look like Port Sunlight.’

  ‘That’s because it’s Bebington,’ he said. ‘It’s as close as I can get to Port Sunlight because of a low bridge.’

  Oh.

  ‘So where exactly is Port Sunlight then?’ I asked but it was to a cloud of blue smoke. I hooked my rucksack over a shoulder and set off along a road that I hoped might be the right one - and no doubt would have been had I taken another. I walked for some distance, but the road seemed to go nowhere, or at least nowhere that looked Port Sunlightish. After a time an old man in a flat cap came dodder
ing along and I asked him if he could point me the way to Port Sunlight.

  ‘Port Sunlight!’ he replied in the bellow of someone who thinks the world is going deaf with him, and with a hint that that was a bloody daft place to want to go. ‘You want a boosel’

  ‘A bus?’ I said in surprise. ‘How far am I then?’

  ‘I say you want a boosel’ he repeated, but more vehemently.

  ‘I understand that. But which way is it exactly?’

  He jabbed me with a bony finger in a tender spot just below the shoulder. It hurt. ‘It’s a boose you’re wanting!’

  ‘1 understand that.’ You tedious-deaf old fart. I raised my voice to match his and bellowed near his ear: ‘I need to know which way to go!’

  He looked at me as if I were unsustainably stupid. ‘A bloody boose! You want a bloody boose!’ And then he shuffled off, working his jaw wordlessly.

  ‘Thank you. Die soon,’ I called after him, rubbing my shoulder.

  I returned to Bebington where I sought directions in a shop, which I should have done in the first place, of course. Port Sunlight, it turned out, was just down the road, under a railway bridge and over a junction - or perhaps it was the other way round. I don’t know because it was now pissing down with rain and I tucked my head so low into my shoulders that I didn’t see much of anything.

  I walked for perhaps half a mile, but it was worth every sodden step. Port Sunlight was lovely, a proper little garden community, and much cheerier in aspect than the huddled stone cottages of Saltaire. This had open green spaces and a pub and pretty little houses half hidden behind drifts of foliage. There wasn’t a soul about and nothing seemed to be open - neither the shops nor the pub nor the heritage centre nor the Lady Lever Art Gallery, all of which was a bit of a pisser - but I made the best of things by having a long slog around the rainy streets. I was a bit surprised to see a factory still there, still churning out soap as far as I could tell, and then I realized that I had exhausted all that Port Sunlight had to offer on a rainy Saturday out of season. So I trudged back to the bus-stop where I had so recently alighted and waited an hour and a quarter in a driving rain for a bus onward to Hooton, which was even less fun than it sounds.