There is an old song by Ewan MacColl, a favourite in folk clubs thirty years ago and more, ‘Dirty Old Town’. It’s about Salford and enshrines all the often-parodied clichés of social realist art of the time, mucky canal and all. One day, though, the singer is going to tear that dirty old town down. Then it will be goodbye to the dark, Satanic mills for ever.
Well, the dark, Satanic mills are gone for good now. Manufacturing industry has departed this country and the great Northern cities have died even more speedily than they were born, when they doubled, tripled, tripled again their size, filth, complexity, poverty, wealth during the course of the nineteenth century. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher accomplished in eight years a more radical razing of mill and foundry and pit and shipyard than any pinko troubadour ever dreamed of.
But this peremptory cleansing has left these cities bereft of everything except their inhabitants, who eke out their scant resources picking over the local tip, as described by Ian Jack in Birkenhead, in 1985. Or they can set out to scour the country for work, like post-industrial versions of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.
Or they can turn to crime, for there is money around, lots of it, and if the Inland Revenue has opted out of the property redistribution business it is high time for private enterprise to take over.
If all that is solid really is melting into air, this time we are too bewildered by the speed of the vanishing to register anything but a diffuse blur. All the material evidence of the life of Ian Jack’s father has gone – birthplace, workplaces – in an abrupt divorce from history, as if there was a conspiracy to ensure the old man left no trace he had ever been born.
‘In this way,’ says his son, ‘de-industrialisation has disinherited the sons and daughters of the manufacturing classes; a benign disinheritance in many respects, because many of the places my father worked were hell-holes, but also one so sudden and complete that it bewilders me.’
Beryl Bainbridge says: ‘Whenever I go back to Formby, the Lancashire village in which I grew up, I find in it nothing that reminds me of the past.’ And yet, as she says somewhere else, the heart lies back there in the past, buried under the new supermarket, the multi-storey car park, the Job Centre.
Before the Oil Ran Out and Forever England are both collections of journalism about Britain in Year One of the Thatcherite revolution. Ian Jack used to work for The Sunday Times; there is a pungent coda describing his last days at Fortress Wapping.
The novelist Beryl Bainbridge’s book is tied in with a television programme, an investigation of three families from the prosperous South, a symmetric three from the deprived North. She was fortunate enough to find close-knit, loving kin. One of them, a member of the long-term unemployed, opines: ‘All we’ve really got is family.’ In an era of privatisation, our greatest pleasures are private ones.
Her title suggests, in spite of everything, continuity. Ian Jack’s, more ominous, suggests that our present plight, mass unemployment, homelessness, drug abuse, violence, is but the calm before the storm.
Both writers include large sections of family history, as if they feel they must offer their class credentials before seizing the nettle of present-day Britain.
And quite right, too. The national passion for Orwell surely springs from the opportunity he gave the reader to identify with an old Etonian grubbing about amongst the underclass, rather than having to face up to the fact that most of us are of working-class origins in the first place. The Road to Wigan Pier reminds me of what a Black American I once knew said about Uncle Tom’s Cabin: ‘I used to weep buckets over the plight of those poor people until I realised those poor people were me.’
Ian Jack made a trip to Wigan – a Lancashire-born Scot, he did not find it so alien – and found a newsagent who remembered ‘when the top of an egg were a luxury’. Recalled Orwell, too: ‘I remember some folk thought he was a nark of some kind, what these days you’d call a snooper from the Social Security.’
In this solid Labour town, The Lady sells more copies per week than all the socialist weeklies put together. I can enlighten Ian Jack on this apparent paradox. The Lady carries ads from the affluent South seeking clean, reliable Northern lasses as live-in nannies.
This is a collection of descriptions of Britain moving apparently inexorably into the Third World. Sidetrips – Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe, the Falklands before the war, Turin – only reveal the shabbiness of our pretensions. However, Ian Jack has chosen as frontispiece a family portrait. His father’s. There will survive one splendid monument to the old man. It is a most moving account of a life which his son, with good reason, sees as having been exemplary. It is also a lament for the stoic, republican virtues of the old Scottish left.
It was a hard life, well lived, that of a skilled artisan, a socialist of the old school, an autodidact, a Burns lover, a good father, and, on the evidence of excerpts from the memoirs he compiled in his old age, possessed of a prose style that, alas, puts Norma Dolby’s way with a pen to shame, although they would probably have recognised one another as beings cut from the same cloth.
Looking back on the earlier self who had just discovered politics and plunged into Marx, Jack London, Upton Sinclair like a dolphin into a delighted sea, Mr Jack wrote: ‘We intended, and may have succeeded just a wee bit, to make the world a better place to live in. But we expected too much to happen too soon, and we did not realise how heavily the dice were loaded against us.’
Mr Jack died before the NUM strike of 1984–5 revealed just how heavily the dice were still loaded. That strike might have broken his heart. It nearly broke mine.
Norma Dolby’s is an artless, month-by-month account of the slow erosion of a small mining community’s faith in and respect for the police and the processes of the law, though not, finally, in justice itself: ‘We want justice and are willing to fight for it.’
Mrs Dolby found her feet as a public speaker during the strike. One day, on a platform, her shyness suddenly vanished. ‘All my thoughts spilled out. I really let myself go . . . If we went down, what hope had anyone else of surviving Maggie’s slaughter of jobs.’
Impossible not to recall Brecht: ‘When I say what things are like/Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds/That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself/Surely you can see that.’
But by the strike’s end, her village, Arkwright Town, in Derbyshire, had almost gone down. The divide between those who stayed out until the end and those who did not ran deep. ‘People dropped their eyes when they passed you and did not answer when you spoke to them.’
Mrs Dolby’s husband opted for redundancy. There are rumours the pit will close. The community disintegrates, the great strike recedes into memory – but too many of us remember it for it to suffer the white-out of the past under Thatcher, even if they try very hard.
Mrs Dolby talks a great deal about the kindness of strangers – the gifts of food and money, toys, clothes, hospitality, support, from all over Britain, Europe, the world. ‘Never can you measure such kindness.’
Norma, kindness had nothing to do with it. We weren’t being kind when we shelled out for the collecting boxes. We were doing it for ourselves, because you were standing up for us, too. We were doing it for our children, and for the old men and women who wanted to make the world a better place to live in and, for a time, thought they had succeeded, even if only a wee bit.
(1987)