The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  Pahl opened his search for reality in Chatham and Rochester, where he “sat around in cafés and visited people in their homes”.19 He found himself looking onto “a Dickensian, rather colourful stage where ‘the characters’ live in a world of second-hand cars and bikes and stalls at the market, and flitted from one derelict house to another”. His interlocutors shared a “spirited and aggressive” view of the world — including one petty criminal who vanished into jail, allegedly sent down by the very judge “whose house he had recently re-wired ‘for cash’”. These initial encounters also seemed to justify Pahl’s suggestion, made in an article published in 1976, that while “It may not take long for a nation of shop-keepers to turn into a nation of hustlers”, it might also turn out that considerations of locality and community matter more than the post-war modernisers had grasped, and that, with conventional work giving way to less formal livelihoods, “a society based on whom you know rather than what you know, may be a more humane, pleasant and happy society in which to live”.

  [ONE OF MY FRIENDS IN SHEERNESS]

  Since you have a son in the navy, I will add something that happened to one of my friends in Sheerness recently. Purser in the merchant marine by trade, employed by one and the same shipping company for the past thirteen years, he was suddenly, totally unexpectedly, fired for “incompetence”. That’s how he tells the story, but you never like to hear that someone you know is inept and bad at his job, so I asked various people in the know and discovered that it was probably because of his generosity: for example, he raised the pay for a Hong Kong-Chinese crew from the lower level it had been set at to the normal amount for European sailors, and as a not unexpected result received a warning for having exceeded the estimated expenses, and then another warning, if not the third that would have led per his contract to his being fired. This background, however, apparently lies farther back behind another background, in which shipping companies would rather spare the expense of a purser’s salary altogether and replace his job by installing coin-operated machines that the crew members can use to obtain their own pre-cooked meals on the ships, reheated in microwaves, entirely without any selection, preparation, or service from a person who has learned how to do just that and is currently sitting around in Sheerness on dry land, forty-five years old and without much earning potential among three million unemployed. Admittedly, there are other negotiations taking place through his union, which in the best scenario will end with a hearing before an industrial tribunal, but the shipping company’s plans and wishes are too well-known: he would be saying good-bye to the usual severance pay and possibly even his pension, which in any case it has been hard to claim due to his type of position. Due to incompetence, a Christian shipping company. The victim, formerly talkative and always ready with a laugh, is walking around gloomily, with only just enough of his former pride left to make so-called good (and actually stupid) encouragement repellent to him, no matter who attempts it.

  [Uwe Johnson, Letter to Herr Ogrowsky, 5 July 198220]

  We might now regret that Pahl resisted the temptation to write a paper, or at least an article for New Society or the New Universities Quarterly, entitled “The Urban Pirate: A Contemporary Style of Getting By”.21 But not, surely, that this geographically-trained sociologist soon headed down stream along the river Medway to the Isle of Sheppey, by now assisted by the Nuffield Foundation, which funded him to carry out a pilot study of the transforming economy of the “industrial island” he would soon turn into his own “laboratory”.22

  Pahl’s drive over the Kingsferry Bridge was not just a crossing from the “macro” to the “micro” level of analysis,23 nor, in the terms that his PhD student and co-researcher Claire Wallace would borrow from the sociologist Basil Bernstein, from the “elaborated” code of middle-class language to the more practical and allegedly “restricted” code of working-class speech. For Pahl, crossing the Swale also meant preferring “hard, obdurate reality”24 against the “disembodied” theories gripping many of his colleagues at the university.25 Sheppey was where Pahl would take his stand, seeking to go beyond the vivid but far from “scientific” investigations carried out by Mass Observation and by writers such as George Orwell and J.B. Priestley in the Thirties. As time went on, he would also claim common cause with E.P. Thompson, the Marxist historian and activist who asserted the case for experience, agency and the historically dynamic nature of social class against what he called the “poverty of theory” in a blazing English tract published in 1978.26

  Building the Kingsferry Bridge. Postcard, 1960.

  Arriving in Sheerness several years after Uwe Johnson and his family, Pahl found himself in a world where many of the changes associated with the coming transition to “post-industrial” society had already happened following the closure of the dockyard and garrison in 1960 — an event that, as Pahl counted the figures, had terminated or “displaced” all 2,500 jobs in the dockyard and also removed five thousand sailors from the local economy at a stroke. The closure had caused a severe rise in unemployment from which the island and its 33,000 inhabitants had never fully recovered. It had also turned the island into the site of an experiment that had been running for nearly two decades without anyone — neither politicians nor sociologists nor any of Britain’s literary novelists — bothering to come over to see how the unfortunate guinea pigs were getting along. By the time Pahl and his fellow researchers finished their investigation in 1983, they had established that Sheerness was by no means just a busted town sinking into a marsh at the end of the world. It was also an accidental test-bed on which the “post-industrial” future was being pioneered.

  One of the first things Pahl did was to make his way to Sheppey School to see how school-leavers were handling the prospect of going out into a world without the jobs, apprenticeships and domestic possibilities that had existed in the time of the naval station and dockyard. Situated at Halfway, between Sheerness and Minster, this was the largest school in Kent, set up in 1970 after a locally unpopular amalgamation of the Isle of Sheppey’s three education authorities. The school, to which the Johnsons sent their daughter Katharina, was a rare comprehensive for Kent, although its first headmaster, Cyril Poster, may have been more inclined to think of it as a “community school” of the progressive kind he had extolled in a book published shortly after his arrival on the island. Poster was inspired by the example of the Danish Folk Schools, by the child-centred education espoused by the American pragmatist John Dewey and by his own experience of the village colleges set up in the Thirties under Cambridgeshire’s Secretary for Education Henry Morris, who had seen the school as a way of countering the disintegration of rural life: engaging the rural population, combining “good government” with “self-government” and reaching out into its community as “one of the freest of our English institutions”.27 He identified the mission of the community school with the help of an American educationalist of the Fifties, who had declared that “What we once took to be the essence of community — the common purpose, loyalty, integration, solidarity — are no longer by-products of adjacent habitation”.28 Such was the primary challenge the contemporary school must address, and in doing so it should not waver in its commitment to the “relevance” of its curriculum — despite the contemptuous remarks of Kingsley Amis, whom Poster condemned for mocking that consideration as only fit for the lower circles of “vocational training”.29

  Poster held out with his liberal co-educational vision for six years, insisting that the only true discipline was self-discipline, defending his refusal to countenance corporal punishment while also admitting, as Johnson may well have gathered from his copy of the local paper, that “Hair-pulling and scratching were things I don’t think I had seen before I came here”.30 His successor at the Sheppey school, Richard Barson, confessed to being a “disciplinarian” by comparison: “I am in favour of good order”, he reassured the Sheerness Times Guardian on his appointment in December 1976.31 He would soon be talking about introducing a schoo
l uniform too.

  Barson permitted Pahl to devise an experiment that would help him investigate how sixteen-year-old school-leavers with poor (if any) qualifications were coping with the prospect of joining an island economy with “one of the highest levels of unemployment in the south east”32. With the help of teachers, he asked pupils who would be leaving in about ten days’ time to imagine that they were actually in their sixties and about to retire, and to write the story of their working life as they imagined it might by then have turned out.

  Having received ninety essays by boys and fifty-two by girls, Pahl informed readers of New Society that he was “staggered by the warmth and sensitivity which the youngsters revealed despite the rough and rather coarse first impression one gets from meeting them in a classroom”.33 Beyond the predictable fantasies of wealth, adventure and sexual prowess, he noticed that the essays showed a level of awareness and introspection that was both “impressive and alarming”. They revealed a heart-rending expectation of disappointment and failure — epitomised by a boy who anticipated dragging himself through a sequence of dreary low-paid jobs in “a hearse of a life that would eventually lead me to the cemetery gates”.34

  Alongside this devastating sense of futility, Pahl noticed that the economic climate was putting both boys and girls in breach of traditional gender roles. The boys seemed to be placing more value in home, marriage and having children as sources of possible satisfaction, and also in the superiority of working for yourself rather than for an employer. They were heavily reliant on personal loyalties, and exhibited a fierce mistrust of the state, which they believed could only see them as a servant, informer or statistic.

  The girls in this “isolated and very traditional working-class community, where the ties of kinship are strong”,35 proved to be clearheaded about the low-paid factory and clerical jobs they would eventually have to give up in order to care for their anticipated two children. Though struck by their “cruelly correct perception” of the lives awaiting them, Pahl nevertheless speculated that the island’s girls might actually have “a more varied range of satisfactions” open to them than the boys. “For the girls to despair, they would have to despair of life itself”. Allowing that biological assumption to pass, he suggested that the girls’ awareness of children, household responsibilities, sickness and death might make it easier for them to place the difficulties of employment and money in a wider perspective: “Somehow the girls had the rich tapestry of life as a source of satisfaction. The boys were more dependent on their work”.36

  Pahl ventured that significant levels of domestic stress might be anticipated since the boys would not be out of the house as much as their fathers — who had almost certainly spent the day at work, and then perhaps the evening at one of “the many working-class clubs that flourish in the community”.37 Indeed, it seemed possible that these girls might manage pretty well without husbands. “I predict a pattern in the future in those working-class communities with high levels of unemployment, where female-headed households become increasingly common”.

  He also guessed that there might be “a switchover in traditional roles”, with girls showing more interest, and even finding some relief, in the kind of jobs they might do, and boys relying more on their roles as “husband and father”. These changes, which Pahl also sensed in his wider encounters around Sheppey, convinced him that women were likely to “play an increasingly dominant role in employment”, while men were more susceptible to cynicism, and the belief that “I’d be better off on the dole”. He imagined a future way of life in which “levels of unemployment will stay high, but much of it will be voluntary”. Anticipating that “Home and domestic activities” would become “the central binding element in working-class marriages”, he adopted them as a central point of enquiry for his later investigations into the way the “household”, as distinct from the full-time and predominantly male job (of the type that had both “abstracted” the worker from his life and, as Pahl would later suggest, blinded sociologists, planners and civil servants from understanding what was really going on in the country38), was becoming the central institution of the new economic reality. “I admit that I am clutching at straws in the wind”, repeated Pahl at the end of his article, but his reading of the school-leavers’ essays left little doubt that “endemic unemployment does affect the relationship between the sexes and the nature of marriage”.

  [NOT AT ALL, CHARLIE]

  Oh, I hope this letter can catch up to yesterday’s! For I wrote you something yesterday that is not the way it actually was. Specifically, last night at the Sea View the reflective question came to me: Did “Linda Gibbons”’s husband really and truly take a hammer and… Not at all, Charlie! He jumped up and down on the bonnet and everything, he is a biggish man, you know. The rest is true: the car is now useless except to the Sheerness steelworks, where they melt down broken cars into sheet metal used to manufacture new cars.

  We stayed on the topic of this “Linda Gibbons” a while longer. Since her separation from her husband, she’s been working as a stewardess on our ferry… and now you are shaking your head. Yes, it’s true, Sheerness has a car and passenger ferry, and I don’t mean across the Thames to Essex, no — to Vlissingen in the Netherlands, which we Anglo-Saxons call Flushing of course, two departures from each location daily, seven hour trip. A little before six in the evening we see it diagonally across the wide mouth of the river bearing down on the port of Sheerness, in as much of a hurry as a fire truck and reminiscent in the distance of a brave little mail boat looking forward to its mooring. And it’s at least as big as the Halberstadt, on which we left Warnemünde two years ago, for Gjedser, except ours in its modesty foregoes railroad cars and contents itself with busses. The woman works there, she makes enough to pay for someone to watch the children, who in any case are all old enough to go to school, and now the people from social security come, a kind of unemployment assistance, and they tell her she should give up her job and live on the dole, for the children’s sake, who are in a better situation now though. What a thing to say! A lot of people do that in West Germany, Charlie says. Please, that’s completely different! Joe Francis Adams, whom, by the way, Charlie’s daughter is letting stay in his (Charlie’s) house for the length of Charlie’s trip to the continent (as we Anglo-Saxons are absolutely incapable of not calling it) — Joe has, in his very own street, a few houses down on the other side, a similar case: an unemployed man on the dole, the man goes for a walk in the morning with an umbrella (I mean really!) while Joe is driving to work. He would really like to whack him one every time, if that weren’t so unthinkably impolite. So there we sit, taxpayers every one, and we wonder: Where is it all going to end? But that is a ritual; everyone has to answer, in chorus: In the great big Shepherd Neame Beer factory up in the sky — hallelujah!

  [Uwe Johnson, letter to Erika Klemm, 24 September 197539]

  Claire Wallace, who joined Pahl’s investigation as a researcher in 1979, would use different language than Pahl’s to confirm that the closure of the naval dockyard had created a formidable “fracture” in “the island’s processes of social and cultural reproduction”.40 Her point, which she would later elaborate with the help of various Parisian “theorists” including Pahl’s despised Louis Althusser, was that the roles into which the young had been socialised were no longer there to be performed. The “fracture” was having a palpable impact on the experience of work in an island economy where full-time jobs and apprenticeships had been unsatisfactorily replaced with short-term state-funded youth training schemes. It made an aggravation of the rising pressure on the young to engage with “leisure styles and youth cultures”, the branded trappings of which would surely be too costly for many would-be participants. It also increased pressure on the family, which was severely tested both in its expectation of traditional gender roles and in the now challenged assumption that “work” was dependable and normally took place outside the home.

  This was a challenging prospect, and yet
Pahl seems at first to have considered it with near nonchalance. He would claim to have gone to Sheppey with the aim of assessing “the possible importance of the informal, the personal, the small-scale and the slightly illegal as the basic ingredients of a new style in the next decade”,41 and he appears to have been encouraged by his initial findings. Repeatedly, in his early articles, he insisted that unemployment was now “different in some important respects from what it was in the 1930s”.42 He would justify this observation by pointing out that the post-war welfare state had removed many of the direst threats from the experience of unemployment, and that the availability of new kinds of devices — washing machines, freezers, portable power tools — made it possible for people to enter into various kinds of informal activity that should surely now be recognised as “work”. The dawn of this imagined new Black & Decker age was being encouraged by two further considerations. The levelling of wage expectations was making it difficult to employ others to do things: “Hiring a cook or a chauffeur has always been limited to a minority” and the same was “now coming to apply to carpenters and glaziers”.43 Thanks, however, to the rise of DIY as a popular interest promoted by diverse magazines and television programmes, the much discussed “de-skilling” of the workforce in the formal economy was also being accompanied by a “re-skilling” in the informal one.

  [WELCOME BACK]

  . . . On Saturday a young man, unsummoned and unknown, rang the bell and announced that he had enough Sandtex (a patented plaster substance) left over from a job around the corner to be able to smooth out the façade of my house, badly dinged up by the sea wind, as good as new! Since he gave me a written guarantee, he’s been hard at work scraping and painting since yesterday morning. You can pay cash and we’ll both just forget about the VAT, agreed?