The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson

  They had a nice chat and Larry told me that David Beckham was an extremely nice man. And I can tell you sincerely that I was very, very pleased to hear that.

  I thought about that happy story now as I sat with my book and my pint, secretly hoping that somebody famous would come in and sit near me, until gradually it dawned on me that I wouldn’t recognize them because I don’t read newspapers any more.

  Chapter 22

  Lancashire

  I

  I TRAVELLED BY TRAIN to Preston, then transferred to another so rattling and threadbare that I think it may have begun its life in a coal mine.

  Outside, an endless run of industrial estates and general grottiness flashed past and then suddenly we were in a little oasis of comeliness: Lytham. I alighted to find myself at a strikingly handsome station – actually a former station, now converted into a bistro, but with a still-functioning platform. Just beyond, leading into the town, was a small park.

  Lytham is a tidy little town of rosy red brick: prosperous, neat as a pin, comfortably Victorian, with a great sward of lawn standing between it and the estuary of the River Ribble on which sits a picturesque white windmill with black blades. Beyond, across the shiny mudflats, were hazy views to Southport, ten miles or so to the south.

  I dropped my bags at the Clifton Park Hotel overlooking Lytham Green, and immediately set off on foot for Blackpool, eight miles along the coast. It was a bit of a trek, but splendid. The seafront was lined with a paved promenade all the way to St Anne’s, another little outpost of northern elegance. The sky was grey and heavy, like a pile of wet towels, but the day was dry and the sea air felt great. I was very happy.

  You see Blackpool long before you reach it, thanks to the distant eminence of Blackpool Tower, Lancashire’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Blackpool Tower is actually only about half the height of the original, but it seems as big because it is so solitary and striking, and it is nearly as venerable. It was built just five years after the Eiffel Tower.

  Blackpool has a spanking new promenade. The town spent £100 million upgrading it, mostly to improve sea defences, but the exercise also gave residents two miles of broad, artfully sinuous, thoroughly pleasing walkway. It isn’t so much a promenade as a piece of sculpture that you walk on. It curves and dips, divides into multiple levels, incorporates ramps that must be wonderful for skateboarding and steps that can serve as seats. It is the nicest promenade in the world, as long as you keep your gaze fixed firmly out to sea and don’t look over your shoulder at the town facing it, for poor old Blackpool isn’t much to look at these days.

  When I came to Britain, 20 million people – equivalent to a third of the population – visited Blackpool each year. Now it is fewer than half that. Blackpool has always been cheerfully down-market, but in those days it was good-natured and fun. Today it is depressed and half derelict, its streets empty by day and intimidating by night.

  According to the Blackpool Gazette, more than a hundred business premises in the town centre were empty. One hundred and fifty hotels were for sale. In June 2014, the Guardian declared the New Kimberley Hotel, in a prominent position facing the sea, the worst hotel in Britain after the owner, Peter Metcalf, was jailed for eighteen months for fifteen serious safety breaches, including having no fire alarms, nailing shut fire escape doors, and supplying water to only half the hotel’s ninety rooms. This followed an earlier conviction for twenty food hygiene offences and the revoking of the hotel’s alcohol licence.

  All the statistics for Blackpool are depressing. It lost almost 11 per cent of its jobs between 2004 and 2013, making it the third worst-performing town in the country after Gloucester and Rochdale. In 2013 it was declared the unhealthiest community in Britain. It has the highest proportion of alcohol-related deaths. Forty per cent of pregnant women in Blackpool smoke. Men die five years earlier than they do elsewhere in Britain. Like many other seaside towns it has become a sink for deprived people. The patrons of the New Kimberley Hotel weren’t holidaymakers. Those people stopped coming long ago. They were the indigent and semi-homeless who stayed in a squalid, dangerous fleapit because it was all they could afford. At the rate Blackpool is going, soon that is all there will be.

  That is a pity because Blackpool should be a pleasure. The air is invigorating, the views lovely, the beaches vast. Blackpool Tower remains one of the jauntiest structures in Britain. The town has two piers, the world’s finest ballroom, its venerable amusement park, some good theatres, a lot of fine Victorian buildings.

  All Blackpool needs is to make itself safe and wholesome again, and give people worthwhile things to spend their money on – some decent shops, amusing shows, a selection of clean and inviting restaurants. Personally, I would turn the whole thing over to Wetherspoon’s. They seem to know how to give working people a happy experience in decent surroundings at a reasonable price. Why not let them run Blackpool?

  Here is an even zanier idea. Why not have the government get involved? The things Blackpool needs to do – smarten itself up, create decent jobs, improve its hotels and restaurants and amusements, make itself appealing to respectable visitors – are things that are clearly best achieved with a big, well-directed master plan involving grants and incentives and targeted investment. What is actually happening? Well, according to a Guardian report, Blackpool’s principal recent big idea for regeneration is to introduce an improved park-and-ride scheme and to provide charging points for electric cars in its main car parks. Somehow I don’t think that is going to swing it.

  The first thing I would do if I were put in charge of Blackpool (and I am not saying I want to be put in charge of a place where the favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again) would be to bring back the traditional seaside shows. These have changed in a most dismaying way. All along the front were advertisements for shows that featured either Elvis or Queen tribute acts or comedy revues with names like Cirque du Hilarious starring people that no one has ever heard of. Something very important has been lost.

  Years ago, I spent a month in Blackpool for a National Geographic assignment, and I made a point of taking in all the shows. I particularly remember the comedy duo Little and Large. They were splendid – amazingly so. They were quick-witted, likeable and absolutely expert at engaging with the audience – choosing people to chat to or tease, with a quip for every person’s profession or hometown or spouse or style of dress. I have never had so much fun in a theatre. Afterwards I interviewed them backstage and was taken aback by how drained they looked. Performing before live audiences is clearly hard work. Eddie Large (who had a heart transplant soon afterwards – no wonder he looked tired) made the point that there was no one coming up behind them, that they were in effect the last music-hall performers. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he was of course right.

  After that, I took our younger children to seaside shows from time to time, and they were always great. We saw the Krankies at the Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth, for instance, and it was delightful. I refuse to be a snob about this. The music was loud and infectious, the jokes broad but enjoyable, the support acts deft and accomplished. The whole thing moved along at a noisy, lively clip and was done with considerable polish. It was something the British did superlatively well, and now it is all gone. I find that very sad.

  I walked quite some distance along the front, past one dying hotel after another. It would soon be time for the Illuminations, when people come from all over the north to marvel at the spectacle of light bulbs. But this innocent pastime of yore has come increasingly to clash with the new Blackpool tradition of drinking and being menacing. Three days after my visit some five hundred youths gathered in the centre of town and began to destroy property at random. Loose objects were picked up and hurled at the police. What exactly provoked this outburst of high spirits wasn’t specified in the press, but presumably it involved the volatile chemical reaction you get when you combine strong lager with small brains. Three policemen were hurt a
nd twelve youths aged thirteen to twenty-two were arrested. And Blackpool took another step towards suicide.

  I retraced my route towards Lytham. When I reached the end of the promenade, I turned and had a last look. The lights in the seafront amusements were just coming on. The Tower stood grandly above the town. From a distance, Blackpool looked great.

  It was quite late, getting on towards evening, when I shuffled back into Lytham, and I was tired, but fortunately there was an excellent and restorative pub called the Taps just behind my hotel and an Indian restaurant called Moshina’s (hygiene rating of five – well done, fellows), a door or two down from it, and the combination of these two left me with warm feelings towards Lytham and the world for some distance beyond. I had a little stroll through the town after dinner and was delighted to find that Lytham on close inspection was even better than on my earlier flying appraisal. It had terrific old-fashioned shops. I was particularly taken with a menswear palace called George Ripley’s. It was gloriously of another age – the kind of place that sold cardigans with stripes and chevrons, jumpers with zippered pockets, ties with patterns that look like champagne bubbles on hallucinogens, jackets with pointed collars that could be used as weapons in a street fight. I didn’t wish to own any of these clothes – I am a Splendesto man myself, as we know – but I was very pleased to find that there are evidently still people in the world who do want them. Long may Mr Ripley prosper, say I.

  Nearby was ‘Tom Towers’ Tasty Cheese Shop, est. 1949’, which I thought was impressively venerable until I came across Whelan’s Fish and Chips, ‘est. 1937’. They both looked awfully nice. The town also boasted an old-fashioned department store called Stringers and a good-looking bookshop, Plackitt and Booth. A sign in the window announced that Victoria Hislop was due imminently, and I very much hope she had a good time.

  On the basis of all this, I nominated Lytham as best small town in the north and in a spirit of celebration I wheeled into a cheery-looking establishment called the Ship and Royal for a quick one before bedtime.

  II

  One of the things that impresses me about Belgium – and we are of course dealing here with a very short list – is how reliable the train timetables are. You can be confident not only that the 14.02 to Ghent will be on time, but that it will always arrive at and depart from platform two. The platform numbers for each train are actually printed on the timetables; that’s how reliable they are.

  The people who run Britain’s rail network take a slightly more relaxed approach to getting people from place to place. I remember one day at King’s Cross station in London, not long after we moved to Norfolk in 2003, I found that the ticket machines wouldn’t give me a ticket to Wymondham, so I went and stood in a long line and explained the problem to a man who had once answered a British Rail ad that said: ‘Wanted: cheerless git to deal with public.’

  ‘You have to go to Liverpool Street for trains to Wye-mund-ham,’ he said flatly, mispronouncing the name. (It’s pronounced windum.) ‘Trains to Wye-mund-ham don’t go from here.’

  ‘Well, for the past month I have been going to Wymondham from here via Cambridge.’

  ‘Can’t do that,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mean I physically can’t do it or that it isn’t permitted?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘But I have been doing it. Look,’ I said and dug out an old ticket that stated clearly: ‘Wymondham to London Stations via Cambridge.’

  He studied the ticket but refused to allow it to be entered into evidence.

  ‘So what’s it going to be?’ he said. ‘People are waiting.’

  ‘Just give me a single to Cambridge,’ I sighed.

  ‘You won’t get to Wye-mund-ham from there,’ he promised darkly.

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ I answered and he shrugged and gave me a single to Cambridge, where I bought another ticket on to Wymondham but missed the connection because I was standing in a ticket queue when the Wymondham train left. I wrote a letter of complaint and the next time I went to the ticket machines at King’s Cross, they allowed me to buy a ticket to Wymondham. So now thanks to me you can travel from King’s Cross to Wymondham, though I wouldn’t actually recommend it as there is bugger all there. In that respect, it is rather like Belgium.

  I had reason to reflect on all this the next morning when I bounded cheerfully off a morning train from Lytham to Preston, intending to transfer to the 10.45 to Kendal. I clutched a sheet of printed instructions that made this seem a reasonable ambition, but there was no 10.45 train listed, to Kendal or anywhere, on the television screens or on the printed timetables on the wall. So I walked to an information desk and asked the man there about it.

  ‘Ah,’ he said as if I had touched on an exceedingly interesting point. ‘The 10.45 to Kendal is actually listed as the 10.35 to Blackpool North.’

  I stared at him for a long moment. A voice in my head said, ‘If you are expecting the 10.45 train to Kendal but are told it is the 10.35 to Blackpool North, you could be having A STROKE.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you see, the train divides here. Half of it goes to Blackpool North. That’s the 10.35. At that point the remaining part of the train becomes the 10.45 Windermere train, which calls at Kendal en route. But there isn’t enough room on the television screens to put all that, so we don’t put anything, to avoid confusion.’

  ‘But I am confused.’

  ‘That’s the problem!’ he agreed enthusiastically. ‘In trying to avoid confusion, we seem to have created even more. People come up to me almost every day asking where the 10.45 is. Shall I show you where to stand?’

  ‘That would be very kind.’

  He walked me to platform three and positioned me very specifically. ‘The train will arrive at 10.28. On no account get on the front four coaches or you’ll end up in Blackpool.’

  ‘I’ve just come from there.’

  He nodded significantly. ‘Quite. Be sure to get on the rear four coaches only.’

  ‘So this is where I stand?’ I said, pointing to the ground directly under my feet, as if a move a few inches to right or left might spell catastrophe.

  ‘Right there, and don’t get on the next train or the one after that, but the one after that.’ He looked slightly concerned about me. ‘All right?’

  I nodded without confidence, then stood and waited. Across the way, on the facing platform, a small group of trainspotters stood with clipboards and notebooks. They all looked like the sort of people who had never had sex with anything they couldn’t put in a cupboard afterwards. I tried to imagine what the rest of their lives was like if this was the fun part, but couldn’t.

  Two more trains came in, and then the flickering screen confirmed that the 10.35 to Blackpool North was the next train due, but was running a bit late and was expected at 10.37. More people came along, many of them accompanied by a station employee, and were positioned on an exact spot, with considerable pointing at feet. Well, you can imagine the frisson of bewilderment that swept along the platform when a train pulled in unexpectedly at 10.29. Was this the 10.35 arriving early or another train altogether? Who could tell? There were no railway employees to be seen now. I was reluctant to move from my spot, having been told on no account to leave it, but the man beside me volunteered to go and find out. He left and never came back. After a few minutes, I boarded the train and an older couple sitting at a table asked me anxiously if this was the Windermere train.

  ‘I think so,’ I said, sliding in opposite them, ‘but we should be ready to jump off at a moment’s notice.’

  They nodded and clutched their things tight in readiness.

  A moment later an announcement told us that this was indeed the Windermere train and that those wanting to travel to Blackpool North should get off now and join the other four coaches. At this, a man at the back of the carriage got up and hurriedly left.

  My new friends were a couple from Widnes having a day out to Windermere. They had brought a picnic made up e
ntirely of things that needed a lot of careful attention – little bottles with caps to take off, Tupperware containers that had to be opened in a particular sequence, a miniature pot of jam whose lid came off with a satisfying pock. They had two hard-boiled eggs with shells that they picked off with great care, collecting the fragments on an open serviette with forensic attention, as if they thought they might have to reassemble them later. I suppose this was how they filled their days.

  We got on very well. They gave me a chocolate digestive biscuit and I told them how on my last visit to the Lake District I travelled to Windermere from Wymondham, which meant that the station abbreviations printed on my ticket were from ‘WMD’ to ‘WDM’. I wondered if I was the first person ever to have done that.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said the woman admiringly.

  ‘Not long after that, I went from Diss to Liss,’ I added.

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman, still full of admiration.

  ‘I don’t suppose many people do that either.’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose.’

  ‘It was a wonderful time for me,’ I said, and we all fell into a dreamy silence.

  I bade farewell to my new friends in Kendal, where I had arranged to pick up a hire car, public transport being pretty well impossible in the Lake District. When the railway age came along, William Wordsworth and others of a refined and romantic disposition ferociously opposed the spread of the railways’ noise and smoke and low-class daytrippers into their cherished valleys, so the railway only goes to the edge of the Lake District and stops there. It means the Lakes never got giant factories and suburban sprawl, but also that the modern traveller has little option but to visit by car.

  I decided to go up the outside of the Lakes, around the western, seaward edge, a much quieter way in than through Windermere and Ambleside, and so twenty minutes later I was heading towards the pleasant old resort of Grange-over-Sands on the northern side of Morecambe Bay. We used to go to Grange a lot when my children were small. Grange was a place of simple amusements – putting and swings and a lovely little park with a lake with ducks to feed, and a nice tearoom to which we were partial. I hadn’t been to Grange for many years, and I was pleased to see that it was still handsome, though quieter than I remembered and with more empty shops than can be good. On the plus side, Higginson’s of Grange, the best butcher and pie maker you will find anywhere, was still there and crowded with customers. I bought a small pork pie and went with it to the park where I found a bench with views across the water to Morecambe. The pie was delicious. The British are surely the only people in the world who have made a culinary feature of boiled cartilage and phlegm.