THE FESTIVE SEASON afforded Craig the opportunity to enjoy a well-earned service and a good hoovering, though in the event I chose not to grant him that opportunity. My innards reacquainted themselves with forgotten food groups, and my family at least considered forgiving me for having burst into their bedrooms at 3.40 a.m., wild of eye and brown of mouth. With the new year upon me I considered afresh the balance of my itinerary, with particular emphasis on the basic failures of intelligence that had left me rattling padlocked doors at wax museums and the like. In the end I targeted the February half-term sweet spot to head back north and pick up where I’d left off, a time when many of the seasonal attractions I wished to visit would be creaking open their gates, and in weather likely to make them regret it. So six weeks on there I was, back in the sticky saddle, Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant just a sleet-blurred chimney in Craig’s rear-view mirror as we grumbled into Barrow-in-Furness past the toilet-paper factory.
‘Hello, I’m conducting a survey on behalf of Cornhill Insurance.’ Words that to most of us are an invitation to test out those click-brr reflexes, yet which evidently exert a come-hither appeal upon some – I’m seeing a person who lives alone, and has a hill of corn to insure. At any rate, the firm’s relentless market-research drones apparently harvested at least one opinion, and published the result in a press release headed: IDIOTICALLY SPURIOUS PHONE-POLL NAMES M6 AS BRITAIN’S DULLEST ROAD.
As it was only weeks since the chocolate-powered all-nighter that had taken in all 232.2 miles of the M6, reacquaintance with 170.9 of them should have driven me to the edge of reason and beyond. Four hundred miles of certified tarmac tedium! Thankfully there’s a simple remedy for motorway ennui, even in its concentrated M6 form. As Dr Johnson so very nearly said: ‘Nothing more wonderfully concentrates a man’s mind than ragging the nuts off a 1.3 Maestro up the fast lane.’
Dull moments are rare behind a British Leyland steering wheel. What’s that flapping noise? Hang on, I think I can smell burning plastic. Sorry – not sure what this bit is supposed to do, but it just came off in my hands. All that before you’ve even started moving. Attempt to drive almost the full length of the M6 at speed, and you will find such fascinations magnified many times. The passenger sun visor flopped off onto the dashboard as we passed Crewe. A sixth sense and a faint whiff of sooty despair drew me into a Welcome Break near Preston, where Craig gulped down one of the bottles of Tesco Value engine oil I’d given him for Christmas (along with a new petrol cap, the spoilt bastard). To add to the fun, I started sticking up for him whenever he was bullied, which was often. Right, I’d think, clenching my jaw as yet another BMW dismissively cut across Craig’s bows at close range, bet you never thought a Maestro could do THIS! Then, to his spiritual and mechanical disadvantage, Craig would very noisily fail to do it. Despite the view, the drizzle and The Best of Robson & Jerome, boring it was not.
I turned off at junction 36 and headed west, leaving the sketchy Lakeland peaks in the damp twilight behind. An excitable landscape of tilted pastures and wandering drystone walls settled into somnabulent corrugations of cold mud. The bare roadside trees were festooned with shreds of carrier bag, their branches swept back into ragged quiffs by a lifetime of steady, buffeting westerlies. Settlements were few and far between, then fewer and further. I caught a whiff of coal smoke and a lonely cry of, ‘Fookinell!’ A little orange light flashed up on the dashboard: acclimatisation process complete.
Great Yarmouth, Hull, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough: so many of the places I’d visited were dead ends, towns en route to nowhere and so deprived of passing trade and its life-giving succour. But Barrow-in-Furness was right out on a limb – so far out that the limb had been amputated and thrown off the Isle of Man ferry. Marooned at the end of Furness, a long and lonely peninsula halfway between Carlisle and Liverpool, Barrow is amongst the most isolated towns in Britain. The current population is seventy thousand: head out of Barrow in search of somewhere bigger and you’re looking at a 70-mile drive in the direction of your choice (tip: unless you’ve got Jim Davidson trussed up in the boot, don’t try west). In short, it’s an excellent place for doing things you don’t want to be seen doing, like tipping depleted uranium down the sink, making bog roll, or chasing an Austin Maestro hubcap along a dual carriageway.
Barrow didn’t actually score too badly in any of the civic-performance charts. It was just one of those places, like Slough or Coventry, that everyone automatically assumed would feature on my itinerary, me included. But now, as the lights of Barrow beckoned me forth, I tried to think what it had done to deserve such reflex derision. As a boy, I knew it only as the team that always propped up Division 4: in 1972, Barrow AFC was booted out of the Football League on the rarely invoked grounds of perennial uselessness. Thereafter I lost contact with the town until 2002, when a faulty air-conditioning unit at Barrow’s arts centre triggered the UK’s worst outbreak of legionnaires’ disease. Factory closures, a bit of radioactive contamination: this wasn’t a town with a good-news vibe, but there still had to be more to it. Slowing to 30 and approaching its trading estates, I wondered if Barrow might be damned by no more than its own blunt, grim name. A town carting itself off to the dump. And that was before I’d heard a local unleash the blunter, grimmer, sawn-off ‘Barra’.
The tyre-fitters and bus depots thinned out, and I passed into the familiar post-industrial urban landscape: retail sheds set in empty tarmac fields, the night lit up by totem poles clustered with gaudy logos. Carpet Right, Pizza Hut, PC World and – by now I could feel when one was coming upon me – a Tesco the size of Denmark. For once I’d found a Travelodge with spare overnight capacity, but suddenly felt certain that part of me would die if I even set foot in that overgrown bungalow opposite a twenty-four-hour Asda. Presently I spotted a parade of handsome old civic buildings, all towers and arched windows, and impulsively yanked the wheel. Almost straight away I was pulling up outside the River Kwai Guest House.
‘This is supposed to be a hotel, not the Burma railway!’ Basil Fawlty’s reaction to the overnight death of a guest rang through my head as I stood at the porch. The breakfast menu almost wrote itself: no breakfast for you, foreign devil! I knocked again but no one came. Still, the broad pavements ahead were flanked with creaky old Edwardian piles that all looked like b.& b.s, and indeed largely proved to be. I walked under the first VACANCY sign and found myself at a porch flanked with red-lettered notices: DID YOU CLOSE THE GATE? on one side, NO MUDDY BOOTS on the other. A digital ding-dong ushered me into a hall edged with further printed exhortations, though my attention swiftly attached itself to the laminated card that read WE ARE NOT TOYS, affixed as this was to the trunk of one of the several hundred elephants with which I shared the room. From thumb-sized wooden miniatures to hefty renderings in garish ceramic, they stared in tight, silent ranks from every shelf and ledge and massed menacingly beneath every hallway chair and table. The largest, a pair of knee-high golden trunk-wavers, stood guard either side of the staircase, beneath the legend, THIS IS A RESPECTABLE HOTEL – KEEP IT THAT WAY.
One of the unsung joys of individual enterprise is the scope it offers for the indulging of personal eccentricities. My gaff, my rules, my whimsical derangement. For a long while it was just me, the pachyderms, and the diktats I now took the time to peruse in full. BREAKFAST IS SERVED FROM 7.00–8.30. DON’T BE LATE AS A “NO” CAN OFFEND; NO HOT FOOD OR UNPAID GUESTS IN BEDROOMS; DON’T START WITH ME – YOU WILL NOT WIN. Presently a bespectacled boy of about twelve appeared, and processed my accommodation request in efficient silence. He led me up two dark flights of elephant-lined stairs, and along a wandering elephant-lined corridor, then held out a hand to indicate my allotted bathroom. I put my head round its door to be met with yet another printed order: PLEASE LEAVE THIS BATHROOM AS YOU WOULD LIKE TO FIND IT, which meant a delay while I took down several framed safari scenes and installed a sunken Jacuzzi. Then he opened a door opposite, gestured at the darkness within, and departed.
My appointed quarters were very small and unbelievably pink. The Dralon buttoned headboard, the sink, the bedspread, the curtains, the small bits of wall visible between no-smoking stickers: all was violently cerise. All except the inevitable grey mammal or three, and a mysterious rosewood and aluminium box that filled the bedside table. With its speaker grille and many knobs and rocker switches, it looked like something an early Miss Moneypenny might have employed to let M know that 007 was here to see him. None of the controls bore any identification, though a faded typewritten label above one read, PLEASE ENSURE THIS BUTTON IS DEPRESSED AT ALL TIMES. I smiled and nodded for a while, then quickly leant forward and clicked it out. Nothing happened, of course, though I did later learn that at precisely this moment Dumbo fell out of the sky in nearby Morecambe, damaging a bus shelter.
I walked back to town in a stiff wind that carried before it the sweet-and-sour dishwater whiff of Chinese takeaway. Little tornadoes of dust and litter rose up and stung my eyes; the wind turned and I was overtaken by skittering beer cans. Dalton Road, the desolate main drag, was full of pawnbrokers (one day I’m going to walk into a Money Shop and ask to buy a tenner) and soap-windowed errors of commercial judgement. (‘You know what would do really well in Barrow? A casino. A casino called The High Street Casino.’) I allowed myself to be blown past the grand but gloomy town hall and out to the waterfront, epicentre of the town’s explosive awakening.
Barrow was a fishing village of thirty-two dwellings when the first Victorian industrialists arrived in 1840, attracted by its huge natural harbour, the legacy of a long, thin island that kept the ebullient Irish Sea at bay. Throw in the ample availability of local iron ore and a new railway, and you begin to understand how within fifty years Barrow-in-Furness found itself hosting England’s busiest shipyards and the largest steelworks on earth. It was an extraordinary tale even by the standards of this golden age of industrial boom towns. You might, for instance, imagine that the New York Times would be busy reporting upon its own mercantile miracles, but in 1881 the paper felt compelled to report on the Barrow phenomenon, in an article dramatically headlined: AN IRON CITY BY THE SEA – THE GREAT SHIP-BUILDING YARDS AT BARROW-IN-FURNESS. FROM VILLAGE TO METROPOLIS – BUILDING OCEAN STEAMERS. It reads just like a story you might find today about some rampantly expanding industrial port in China, full of awed statistics and the same thinly veiled sense of economic dread and envy. At least it does for a thousand words or so, at which point the journalist abruptly runs out of portentous things to say about Barrow, and lets the reader know as much with this sentence: ‘In the boiler shop a number of Mr Tweddell’s hydraulic riveters are in use.’
Lights twinkled fetchingly along and across the harbour, and by narrowing my eyes slightly I managed to blur out the superstore car parks that the brighter ones shone down upon. There was a lively, fresh bite to the wind, and that stirring sense of quest and adventure that always hangs in the air by a large, dark sea. Somehow it seemed larger and darker on this side of the country: I had a palpable feeling that here stood a gateway to grander, more epic voyages – ocean voyages – than those suggested at previous docksides I’d bestridden. The New York Times reporter had sailed into Barrow aboard the town’s weekly transatlantic steamer service. At Great Yarmouth, or Hull, or Methil, a salty old pipe-puffing cove might fix his flinty gaze at the grey horizon and murmur, ‘Out there lies a land that some call Belgium.’
The gale died away, replaced by a thin drizzle that hung in fuzzy orange halos around the streetlamps. I quickened my step across the quayside retail compounds, mixing regret and relief for all the stevedores and ironworkers who had once earnt their grubby crust here. But Barrow is still doing something it’s always done, and it’s doing it in the enormous beige shoebox – the tallest building in Cumbria, no less – that now reared up behind the Tesco Extra and across a stretch of black water. Over 120 years since the world’s first torpedo-firing submarine rolled down a Barrow slipway, almost three thousand locals clock in at the BAE submarine yard, producing nuclear-powered jobbies for the Royal Navy. If I was going to see another Maestro it would be here: as a town with three thousand welders and easy access to rust-resistant submarine paint, Barrow is renowned as a Shangri-La for shitheaps.
There was certainly a Life on Mars timewarp feel to the balance of the evening, though no Craig-alike asserted his boxy features amongst all the eerily preserved Capris and Cortinas. I tramped down street after wet and empty street of cramped little Victorian terraces and – once it became plain there was nothing else to do of a night – in and out of a succession of timeless and exclusively male pubs. I’d recently read that the average British man spends over £65,000 and an entire year of his life down the pub. This man lives in Barrow.
It’s a long time since I’d heard anyone order a pint of black and tan, or hum along to ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’. My world was suddenly full of tubby blokes in under-sized knitwear, sipping brown froth, reading the sports pages of crumpled tabloids, stooping to release a clatter of pool balls with two fifties and a ratchety yank. And, as I noted after a while, doing it all in silence. There were nods, raised eyebrows and the odd phlegmy chuckle: every one of the principal communicative tools of restrained male companionship, but no words beyond those required to procure a fresh draught of ale or conduct a game of eight-ball pool (to wit: ‘spots’, ‘stripes’, ‘two shots’).
Some website recently declared Barrow ‘the most working-class town in Britain’, on the grounds that it was home to more chip shops, bookies, working men’s clubs and trade union offices per capita than any other. However fatuous all that might sound, Barrow was plainly a town clinging tenaciously to its roots. I could just tell by looking at my hefty, oily-fingered fellow drinkers that they didn’t work in retail security or customer care or anything else that might have been on offer at the Job Centre Plus in Middlesbrough – these were men who made stuff in factories, even if it was Andrex. As a British industrial town Barrow must have endured its fair share of economic kickings, but somehow the bottom had never fallen out of the place. In fact, the population has barely changed in the past hundred years, stuck at seventy thousand. Perhaps it was all down to the arse-end-of-beyond factor: the grass might well be greener, but when the fence is 70 miles wide who’s going to cross it and find out?
ANYONE SEEN ON CAMERA DOING DAMAGE TO THIS HAND DRYER WILL BE BARRED. THE MANAGEMENT DO NOT CONDONE ILLEGAL DRUGS IN ANY FORM. ALL INCIDENTS WILL BE ENTERED IN OUR DRUGS REGISTER. Reading these and many similar notices in a succession of silent public houses, I began to see a civic trend developing. Was this how people communicated up here? Perhaps every Barrovian carried about a bundle of printed cards, to be displayed as appropriate in lieu of conversation: SEE YOU MONDAY, THEN, A CHOCOLATE DIGESTIVE, IF YOU’VE GOT ONE, WE’LL GET THAT PAEDO WHEN HE COMES BACK FROM THE BOGS.
I had a pint in a low-ceilinged Sixties blockhouse, where an old man alone at the next table drank three double whiskies in half an hour, then fell asleep, chin on chest. I had another in a bijou shrine to Manchester United, shared with the young David Beckham, seven Roy Keanes and the heady scent of marinading urinal cakes. My third and last was slowly sunk at a sepulchral old dockers’ pub just back from the waterfront. I was draining it when an enormous young man walked in out of the rain, sat down at the bar and immediately let forth the most protracted, buttock-rippling guff it has ever been my misfortune to endure. ‘Two-twenty for your Worthington,’ said the barman, when at last he was done, ‘and a tenner for a new seat cover.’ It was the longest speech I heard all night.
Extremely fresh air and my curious failure to take onboard any solid calories since a Welcome Break near Preston made the walk back rather a light-headed adventure. Stepping carelessly off a kerb I was nearly mown down by a motability scooter: when the driver turned to berate me I recognised him as the old chap I’d seen an hour before, deep in blended-malt slumber. I rolled straight past my guest house, plunged in silent darkness as it was, then suffered a panicky pocket-patting key-hunt at its front door. By the time I found it my racing mind had imagined every fate that might befall those who committed this most deadly of guest house sins, all of them too complex and terrible to be encapsulated on a laminated card. And that was before I tripped over three trunks on the half-landing.