Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  In the Coastal Command Control Room in Rumford Street Liverpool the little wooden ships were pushed around on big maps.

  ’Tis all a Chequerboard of Nights and Days4

  Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays;

  Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

  And one by one back in the Closet lays.

  There was a viewing room where the top brass could overlook the patterns of pursuit and death and there were beds where they might sleep. The battle lasted the whole of the war.

  In June 1944 Captain Johnny moved his forces to the D-day landings. Not one U-boat got past him. In July he died of exhaustion. He was forty-seven.

  Also on the wharf, not far away, was the statue of Billy Fury, who died young as well, though he is better known.

  Monica brought me up a cup of cocoa. John Lennon was out yesterday morning, I said, when I went to buy a paper. There he was, standing in a corner, bronzed and quiet, opposite the Cavern Club. Hi John, I said, loved ‘Woman’.

  Your rat, he said.

  And last night I got up for a pee and looked out through the window and they had lit up the Echo Wheel on Salthouse Dock. It is a bit smaller than the London Eye but it was doubled in the basin.

  I saw Eternity the other night,5

  Like a great Ring of pure and endless light

  A cold day and the narrowboats churned on – now the new channel and old wharfs decayed to sad basins, now and then a lock.

  Ahead something monstrous, out of scale, not of our planet or time, grew until it occupied earth and heaven.

  When the tobacco warehouse on Stanley Dock was built in 1901 it was the largest building in the world. It is a rectangular brick building fourteen tall storeys high, beautifully detailed. It covers twenty-six acres. It was still in use in the eighties. The PM2 ran alongside it and we marvelled at something so right in its proportions, so handsome, even when someone had got the decimal point in the wrong place.

  Liverpool was a centre of the tobacco trade, and once the biggest slave port in the world.

  Blood on the leaves,6 and blood at the root.

  We rose through more locks into Litherland.

  * * *

  A long way away I heard a voice singing –

  O how amiable7 are thy dwellings

  Thou Lord of Hosts, Thou Lord of Hosts!

  My soul hath a desire

  And longing to enter:

  To enter into

  The courts of the Lord.

  My heart and my flesh rejoice

  In the living God.

  The voice came nearer and I realized it was my voice. My mother was holding my hand. There was pain. My father was there too. You have been singing for half an hour – how do you feel?

  I was in Cardiff Royal Infirmary. I had been playing bows and arrows and an arrow had hit me in the eye.

  Where was his guardian angel? my mother asked.

  Losing the sight of an eye was a dreadful thing but it is hard to assess the effect it had on my life. It certainly weakened me emotionally. It made me less physically attractive, and I was no looker already, but to my surprise girls don’t care how many eyes you have got. I have never really worked out what girls look for but I have known some crackers and married a beauty queen. When I find out how this can be I will let you know.

  I had to give up my plans to be England’s main spin bowler. The sports I could play could not be ball games, as my judgement of distance was now compromised, nor physical contact sports, because I was a coward, nor games involving agility, because I was clumsy. That left rowing and running, which I pursued with enthusiasm for much of my life.

  I didn’t appreciate my hair as a teenager. It was thick and black and wavy. I greased it and tried to make it look fashionable but as I didn’t know what fashionable was all I did was spoil it. Anyway the grooming process was probably what mattered, getting prepared in order to go and find a mate.

  Then I cleaned my shoes and put on my suit and picked up my clarinet case. Ian George (my middle names) and his Band were all set to enslave the audiences of the UK and beyond.

  The core of the band was three people – Roger,8 who was a fine musician and pianist; Tony, who did his best with a drum kit I had bought for ten pounds; and me. A guitar would also join us, and a trumpet. We played New Orleans style, inasmuch as we could claim any style at all, but we were really a little dance band. It was tremendous fun.

  I would hustle for gigs at youth club dances and harvest festivals and at our zenith we could play in tune for two hours without repeating ourselves.

  My idol was Sid Phillips – five years later his band played at a Jesus College Commemoration Ball. I get paid for doing what I enjoy most, said Sid.

  I still love his records – he had a fluent clarinet style, perfect pitch, and time has been kind to his music, as it is to the best.

  One evening the sound system failed at an Oxford dance and I got up on stage with half a dozen guys and played. The college Captain of Boats was there and went back to college and asked Why has this chap not been accepted in one of the eights? What do you mean he is no good at games? That chap can play the clarinet for Chrissake!

  After our practice in Roger’s house we would head out to catch a bus, because every Saturday night we would go to a dance. The City Hall was grand, though a touch municipal. The Marina on the pier at Penarth was more louche and there was a pub opposite and it had a better band and you could go out on the balcony and snog. I was never lucky at either venue, despite years of faithful attendance. Girls were pleasant to me but not interested in moving on to the next stage, whatever that might be.

  Many years later I realized why. These girls had been brought up with males who had not gone to grammar school. Grammar school boys seemed like sexless creatures, and might even be the enemy, with their posh voices and posh ways.

  There was one girl who liked me – she was called Anne Poole – Hi Anne – but she lived in Newport and it might as well have been Alpha Centauri.

  * * *

  Coming out of Liverpool the water is clear, so you can better see the extravagant mix of objects that the loyal citizens of Litherland throw into the canal. The colours of their food containers rival the very kingfisher, and their plastic bags mock the soft hues of the canal bank flowers, though not the water lilies, which shine yellower than yellow among their pads, or the marsh marigolds, which shine yellower again; flakes from the heart of the sun.

  Among the lilies coots coots coots, bald, black and bustling, with little coots that were nothing like as smartly turned out and here were even more coots and families of ducks, the colours of the yukkers9 a downy echo of the mother duck. And there were herons, and families of swans, the new ones grey and untidy and going cheep cheep like laptops. The rubbish thinned and ceased and the weeds under the surface shifted and pulled.

  We lifted the whippets on to the roof. Jim went to sleep in his bed in the sun, and Jess walked up and down wondering how you are supposed to kill a rabbit from up here.

  Round the corner our first northern lock, which would take boats of fifty-eight feet, like the PM2. The Phyllis May would never have got through, for she had been on the long side of sixty. The lock was wide, with heavy gates and heavy gear, and a little white cruiser was waiting for a partner to share the passage. The gentleman was slim and grey, and the lady was plump and grey with bulging blue eyes. I drew alongside.

  Watch out, she said. That couple coming towards us. We met them last year. The man is bad-tempered and violent.

  Watch that couple, I said to Monica – they are bad-tempered and violent.

  I just spoke to him, said Monica, seemed OK.

  She and the gentleman closed the lock without exchanging a single blow.

  Different couple, said the lady – looked the same – very deceiving. Now be careful – just down there, on your side. There is a wide shelf under the water. If you stay too far back your stern will hang up as the lock empties, and your bow will
drop and – boat sunk, you in bottom of lock. So many deaths like that.

  I moved the boat forward – watch out, shouted Monica, you will get your fender caught in the front gate.

  In Staffordshire we have seventy feet of lock – ten feet to play with. But in a sixty-foot lock I am dealing with inches. Back a bit – there just wasn’t enough room. I centred the boat as best I could. There was enough room and there was no shelf.

  There is no shelf, I said.

  The lady said something incoherent.

  No shelf, I said.

  I didn’t want to let it go but I let it go.

  On we went – a call from a passing boat – Watch out at the next lock. There is a fierce breeze coming over the fields.

  The lady addressed a crew coming up the other way. Be careful – there are fierce bees coming over the fields.

  Once you have paired with another boat to go through a passage of locks you are stuck with them for as long as you both want to move along. Sometimes relationships are formed that last until death.

  You have got to stop, said Monica. That wretched woman is too much for me. She told me you can tell when the lock is empty by the feel of the gates slackening – I have been boating for fifteen years and someone is telling me when a lock is empty.

  We’re stopping here, I called to our partners. Have to do something to the boat (like getting it the hell away from you, I thought).

  Look at the grass in the big field, said the lady. It looks like waves.

  I looked and could see nothing, then kept looking and I began to see how the wind was stroking the grass into water and pushing it across the field. The very earth was alive and flowing, as in a Van Gogh painting. I realized I had never known how to look at a field.

  It takes the mad to show us how to see, said Monica.

  * * *

  Poetry comes to get you – a fire in the brain, a need, a desire that offers its own satisfaction.

  Lord send me some comfort,10

  For here it is hard to find

  Send me a sign or heal me Lord I pray

  And fondly ask and hear a word in my mind

  Sing sing it seems to say

  If you can sing, what else matters, what else can compare? You can describe heaven and hell, you can win love and honour. You can see through conspiracies and destroy enemies. You can walk in the clouds, fly with gulls and eagles –

  Gulls’ wings, deep driven into the shoulders

  Feather spread on muscle, bound on bone

  Climb away from me white in the sun

  Tight into the wind

  I was sixteen and poetry had come to get me.

  I hang from a rope of light

  Oh Lord switch off the light

  Let me fall

  It had come to warn me too.

  Some of the books of poetry I found in libraries or borrowed from teachers were printed on rough yellowish paper and the pages were not the same sizes and the books were small. These books often had the best poetry in them. It was as if they were magic texts. T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was like that, where in a strong start he compares an evening sky to a patient etherized upon a table.

  Another poem in a little shabby book from France was Louis Aragon’s ‘Ballad of the Man Who Sings under Torture’.

  And if it had to be

  I’d tread this path again

  A voice speaks low to me

  Of days that will remain

  Poems of the Resistance, the struggle against the invader. Yes, these were magic texts.

  I translated Aragon’s ballad for our French assistante. I was quite good at translating, perhaps because I would without hesitation change the sense of a verse to fit in with my rhymes. There are a lot more rhymes in French so I don’t know what they are complaining about.

  Do you have a pen friend? asked our assistante.

  Sainghin-en-Weppes is a small red-brick town of gripping ugliness near the Belgian border not far from Lille. There I was privileged to be a temporary member of the family of Alexandre Barrez, a hugely fat butter merchant. Alexandre worked hard in his factory next to his house and was a rich man. His son, my friend, was called Louis.

  Ten years earlier Alexandre had been in a Resistance cell and one of the members had been captured by the Gestapo. Il n’a pas parlé, explained Louis – he didn’t talk. I often think about how Alexandre felt going about his business that day, waiting for the black Citroën to pull up outside.

  Louis and I got on well, and I ran with the pack of French boys that he led and I learned to speak French.

  Butter was rationed in England, but here I could eat my fill. And the crispy bacon, and the omelettes they make in the north by chucking a lot of butter in a pan and eggs and bacon on top of it. I can taste them now, and the chips, the chips.

  You are English – you must like chips! All the Tommies liked les frites!

  There was no talk of Vichy in Sainghin-en-Weppes – there were the allies, and there were Les Boches.

  Around the town the poppies bloomed, to mark bodies never found, like my dear uncles, paratrooper Douglas Godfrey, and stretcher-bearer Roy Darlington.

  In the busy kitchen was one record, a twelve-inch disc with ‘Moonlight Serenade’ on the front side and ‘American Patrol’ on the backside. We played it all the time.

  Louis and his gang came to England. One summer we were in pursuit of a group of French girls who had turned up in Roath Park, Cardiff, and I was on a bench pressing my attentions upon a rather nice young lady with short dark hair when she said – My God, you are English – I thought you were French!

  I don’t know for how long my French was that good, but I love to speak French and it became a part of my academic success and then important to our business. I could use French in northern Italy, and in Canada, and in countries where I did not have the language people seemed comforted by the fact that I was not just another ignorant Brit – I did have another language though not theirs.

  The night I met Monica I chatted about French poetry and the language became essential in our voyage to Carcassonne and our book.

  I owe a lot to Louis and miss him. He married the daughter of a local wine merchant and in his middle years they bought a chateau in Normandy and he worked for the European Commission. When my firm did research for the Commission we saw each other but Louis did not much want to carry on being friends.

  He had failed his baccalaureate and I had won a scholarship and got into Oxford and Louis was the leader of the pack.

  I saw an American TV programme the other day about a school – Roswell High.11 The proposition was that this school was under the control of an alien presence so vicious that only the highest courage and intelligence could frustrate its shameful purposes.

  I recognized Whitchurch Grammar School at once.

  In the fifties people didn’t want to think. People didn’t want to go forward – let’s settle on what we saved from the inferno – let’s enjoy it. No, no questions, no change. Follow the rules – it worked in the war – do as you are told – it worked in the war.

  South Wales had its own forces of reaction. The shameful thirties with the Means Test had made you an angry socialist, and centuries of English domination had made you a Welsh nationalist. My problem was I was neither, and having been brought up without a father I was not much good at following rules.

  My father decided that he did not like the look of most of the socialist nationalization programmes because they would lead to waste. I agreed with him, and having carried out as an adult many studies of public sector activity, I still do. They don’t speak Welsh in South Pembrokeshire and at the time of the birth of the United Nations Welsh nationalism seemed a move the wrong way.

  School life was highly politicized through debates and arguments and talks and not to go with the tide was a bit like announcing in an English public school that you had your doubts about fair play as a concept, were not too sure about God and telling the truth, an
d any chance Matron is up for a shag?

  The central annual event in a Welsh school is the eisteddfod, which is a series of competitive turns, mainly musical, and literary competitions. I was entered for the Impromptu Speech. I was fourteen. The theme, revealed just before the speech, was ‘The Welsh Language and Culture’.

  They might as well have given me a hand grenade.

  Welsh, I explained to my audience, four hundred people having a slow day, was a language rich in proverbs. I offered a proverb in Welsh – as I don’t speak Welsh I just made a series of Welsh sounds. As you are all aware, I went on, this proverb means Never fly your kite near high-tension electric cables. The house went up with a roar. I won.

  Next day the headmaster called me in. He had received complaints from the governors about my making fun of the Welsh language. He wanted me to know people had been upset and I had let him down and let the school down. I felt pretty let down myself and my father went round twice to his house to sort him out but fortunately he was not in.

  I was told much later that the headmaster was a placeman12 – a political appointee, who had gained his job by hanging round the local Labour Party. (Welsh local politics was not known for its purity.) He was proud of his position, but edgy, humourless and out of his depth. He didn’t like me at all. When I won a State Scholarship13 he called me in to say he had been told that these scholarships were awarded for promise not achievement but had not realized what that meant until now. He sounded as if he had rehearsed saying that.

  I said I wanted to try for Oxford. He lent me a book about Oxford and wrote me a decent enough reference listing what I had done for the school and since no one else was interested I wrote my own syllabus and tutored myself.

  The English master was a slimy little bastard everyone knew as Slug. He had a sallow face and a small moustache, and was just over thirty. He was clever, with a first from Cardiff, and a follower of Professor Leavis from Cambridge, the daring new literary critic. He had a record of violence in the classroom.