Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  My room, with two small bedrooms attached, was on the second floor in the second quadrangle. My eye had disqualified me from national service but my room-mate had served two years as an able seaman.

  The culture of the able seaman was largely to do with rum and women. The seamen did not like women, but accepted their need for them. My room-mate was proud of his nickname – ‘The Tombstone Shagger’ – a title won in the graveyard of some distant port.

  Good afternoon, sir, I’m Bill.

  Bill looked after the half-dozen rooms on our staircase. He would wake us with a cup of tea in the morning and clean our room and make our beds. He was called a scout.

  Jesus College had its famous alumni – the poet Henry Vaughan, Lawrence of Arabia. In the hall there was a portrait of the founder, Elizabeth I.

  A small college, an old college, a Welsh college, a college with three small quadrangles, in one of which I would live for two years, and a chapel where I would marry Monica.

  The dominant culture was tribal Welsh. There were several undergraduates to whom English was a second language, and a few could hardly speak English at all. Dylan Thomas was the great father in the sky, and rugby was the sport and the drinking and singing rarely ceased. Jesus College was doing well – a Jesus College undergraduate won the university Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Death of a Clown’, and another the national Hawthornden Prize6 for his first book of poems. The eights were gaining places on the river and the college was a force in university theatre.

  The mix of public school and tribal Welsh worked fine. The public school boys were not always very bright, but always confident and cheerful. A lot of the time they would talk to you almost as if you were one of them. Many of them went to single-sex schools and were not much good with girls. I decided the upper classes reproduced themselves vegetatively, like rhododendrons.

  Our literature tutor was a war hero – a proud and mannered man who seemed to have read less than I had. We were taught in pairs – none of the famous one-to-one Oxbridge tutoring. Our other teacher was the world’s greatest expert on etymology, and so good that I almost began to care about how words changed over time.

  Professor Tolkien7 lecturing on the topic of dragons – I could see the dragon on the floor in front of the podium. I could hear its claws scratch, feel the heat of its breath.

  Allen Ginsberg8 reading ‘Howl’ to the Henry Vaughan Society. Thirty undergraduates in Harris tweed sports jackets sitting on the floor, struck dumb. Don’t you ever feel like you want to fuck the stars? he asked.

  The wrinkles of W. H. Auden9 went deep. Had he fallen over he would have shattered into pieces like a chocolate orange. Later I came to love his poetry, but that evening I understood only three words in a half-hour reading. The words were cold rewarding soup. Don’t ask me the context.

  And the mist on the river and the smell of smoke in the autumn and the crumbling black stones of the colleges (they had not been cleaned yet) and the wisteria outside my window and the swing of the current on the Isis and the crack as your blade hits the water and the beer and the jokes and the friends and the songs.

  Was Oxford worth the sweat, the breakdown? Yes, it was great – I loved it. I worked hard and trained hard and the study and the sport toughened my mind and body. My father, the chimney sweep’s son who would never become a senior officer, may have been held back by a conspiracy of the upper orders – but now I was part of the conspiracy.

  And yet, and yet, and yet …

  In the fifties nearly half the Oxford undergraduates came from private education and today the proportion is the same. The class system, defined by the secondary school you attend, is here set in concrete, though Oxford is supposed to serve the whole country.

  And I bought the proposition that my friends and I were little marvels, better than all the rest. To compound this delusion, like everybody else at Oxford from the lower orders I tried to take up the accent that no one could get right unless they had been to public school – the snorting laugh, the tortured vowels, actually, yah. I bought the élitism and the snobbery and became ashamed when I realized it was all bollocks.

  The glittering path led to the past.

  But perhaps Oxford had made me a gentleman? To be a gentleman was considered a very good thing. My father, from the humblest of backgrounds, was without doubt a gentleman. In fact an officer and a gentleman. He spoke softly without an accent, and moved quietly as if looking for a way to make things easier for you. He asked the family if they minded when he smoked at the table. In the war he knocked someone’s hat off in the Grand Cinema in Pembroke Dock because they did not take it off for ‘God Save The King’. I understand that is the sort of thing a gentleman would do. He kept his promises and paid his debts. He lied to me once in my life – when I was on the way to hospital with my destroyed eye I asked him if I was going to have an operation. I didn’t want an operation because I knew they hurt. No, he said, you will not have to have an operation.

  But it wasn’t really a lie because he didn’t know, did he?

  I was not a natural gentleman like my father. I did not have his military grace. Some would have put me into the class defined by Somerset Maugham in the Sunday Times the year I went to Oxford –

  I am told that today rather more than 60 percent of the men who go to Universities go on a government grant. This is a new class that has entered onto the scene … they are scum.

  One day Bill our scout took me aside – Mr Darlington – the young man who had your room before you would go out every night with his friends. When he came back he would go into the Common Room and tear the curtains down and roll himself up in them and go to sleep on the floor. Ah, Mr Darlington, he was a real gentleman.

  This is Henry Hall10 speaking, said Jinny Fisher. He’s here for a fortnight.

  We opened the door from the kitchen and could just hear the soft voice.

  Jinny Fisher was our boss, the owner of the hotel on the shingle beach. She was small and fat and fierce. My friend from Oxford and I were at her hotel for the summer. To stay solvent as a student I had been a gardener, an ice-cream bike man, a tutor, an income tax clerk and an agricultural labourer, and now I was a waiter.

  I have never understood how The Waves prospered. It was not luxurious, the owners were not very nice, the beach was stones, and the staff were students who were often disaffected and did not know what they were doing. The Waves must have found a tiny niche before the jet planes came – a niche for rich people to enjoy a seaside holiday right on the gravel beach in a Sussex village. Perhaps they had never seen a proper beach – for sure they had never been to Pembrokeshire.

  I put seven plates up my arm and forged out into the dining room. The best thing about the dining room was Anne Rogers,11 Henry Hall’s daughter-in-law. She was here with her husband, Mike Hall.12 Anne Rogers was twenty-two, dark-haired, with skin like white porcelain, and was playing the lead in The Boy Friend in London. She looked very like Monica, but I had not met Monica yet.

  Henry Hall spoke to me as if I was a human being and he was an ordinary bloke, not a world-famous bandleader. I did not take the opportunity to have a chat with him about running a band. I mean it must be different anyway if you have thirty musicians and are on the BBC.

  The Waves operated a system of tipping whereby the guests offered their gratuities to something called the tronc. This evil entity was in the hands of the management who doled out the money to all the staff at the end of the week. The trouble was that I knew damn well that all the money did not get doled out, and I resented accepting as a gift from management the money I had already been given by my customers.

  More guests are arriving in the dining room – the captain who comes to dinner in his uniform, the self-made builder surrounded by his family (set a little out of the way so he did not disturb the class hierarchy), the head of the Suncrush soft drinks empire, the couple who are uneasy all the time because they can’t afford it here, the au pair with whom my mate spent last night grappli
ng on the sofa.

  Time to fetch Clemence Dane13 her beer. She was in bed upstairs – huge and not well favoured, her grey hair drawn back over each ear. She made me feel like Red Riding Hood – What big bosoms you’ve got, Grandma!

  Clemence Dane was a famous author but to this day I have not read any of her books. She thanked me and perhaps decided to give something to the tronc later.

  Off to the dance on the pier tonight.

  My mate found a blonde girl – so many more blonde people down here than in Wales or Oxford.

  I made friends with a Swiss gym mistress some years older than me. I kept her picture for years – she looked sweet in her fifties tailored suit but Monica found her and tore her up.

  Before arriving at The Waves I had attended a selection course and been chosen as a Unilever senior management trainee. Now I had to go to London to attend an interview to place me somewhere in the organization, so that I could take root and grow. The night before I went for a swim with my gym mistress under the pier in Eastbourne. It was a night to remember, particularly her cartwheels along the rim of the waves with no clothes on.

  At the interview in Unilever House I was not at my most alert and was placed in Transport Division, where they wanted people to look after fleets of bloody lorries all their life, and it took me a month to sort that out.

  My Eastbourne story should end with me marrying Anne Rogers, but remember she had a husband already. Mike Hall came to Lever Brothers as a consultant on public speaking and the poor chap had to tutor me when I was a rather senior executive. Anne Rogers appeared in the news recently. She had been upset because she wondered if the profession fully appreciated she had played the lead in The Boy Friend sixty years ago. Monica seems to be better tempered than Anne Rogers – she doesn’t get upset like that even when there is no water in the pounds and the boat gets stuck.

  Clemence Dane is long dead and Henry Hall and the Fishers. The Waves is a pub. It was so long ago.

  But if we went to the beach at night in the fifties and picked up a handful of gravel and threw it hard down it made sparks and I bet it still would.

  * * *

  The Lancaster Canal is over two hundred years old. It has no locks, because it goeth neither up nor down, but followeth a contour for forty-two miles between the Irish Sea and the foothills of the Pennines. It begins at Preston, leaves Blackpool and Fleetwood away to the west and closes on the Irish Sea at Glasson, then goes to Lancaster, Morecambe, Carnforth. It stops at Tewitfield, and further north you cannot go on an English canal.

  I have always said that the Trent and Mersey from Stone south to Fradley is the most beautiful canal I have seen, and I have found people who agree with me. There is of course the Gloucester and Sharpness, the ship canal, with its broad towpaths hanging with wild fruit and the walks by the Severn. Then there is the Shropshire Union north of Norbury Junction, which looks over the Shropshire plains, and the Monmouth and Brecon clinging to the hills among the oaks and then of course the Caledonian through Loch Ness and elsewhere there is the Camargue and North Carolina – what the hell – can you count the ways?14

  The Lancaster Canal reminds me of the Trent and Mersey, with its reeds, and green slopes, and its views. But it turns more, the water is clearer and there is more wildlife. Moorhen chicks like tin toys hopping along. A nest of grey swan youngsters with their arms around each other asleep. Herons. Coots coots.

  You might meet three boats in a day. On the side of the cut, cruisers and narrowboats, bought for folly or vanity and left to decay. But not so many that the canal is spoiled.

  Infinite riches of lilies. On the towpaths and in the fields elder, the glorious weed. So much sweetness will be wasted in the autumn, because Monica will not be here to make her elderberry wine. Once when I was running with Stone Marathoners after the rain I ran alongside an elder bush and knocked it – a perfumed shower, free of charge.

  Because of the clear water you can see the fish. First you see through a glass, darkly,15 but then face to face. Roach – silver with fiery fins. Bream – deep-chested as whippets. Tench – green and black and gold. You will see single spies, and then battalions.16 You will see the shoals sweep and curve as if they shared one mind, and you will feel the twist of an ancient lust and be a hunter again.

  The sea is on your left – there is an extra layer of clouds and the wind is always coming from there and the rain which is a Pembrokeshire spindrift or drizzle and the wild gulls crying.

  When we returned from the Gulf of Mexico Monica and I decided to stay at the Ritz Hotel in London for a few days to celebrate.

  The dining room in the Ritz is perhaps the most beautiful in the world – huge and high and so well proportioned and the paintings up the walls delicate in yellow and rust and green.

  Although we were staying at the hotel they did not want to serve us tea because they were booked up with tourists and I ate one of their prawn cocktails in our room and was in bed for a fortnight. See what happens when you venture above your station in life.

  Breakfast at the Ritz, I had thought, I bet that’s something. If you can improve on a classic English breakfast I bet they can do it here. I bet they have things that I have never heard of; things which taste even better than black pudding. I know, I’ll have a kipper! Kipper at the Ritz – what joy – it will be the fattest, richest, most beautifully cooked kipper that the world has known. It will come on a silver platter, with little shellfish around it, a slip of seaweed, and breads specially chosen to match the taste of the kipper. It will be Kipper Royale, Kipper Suprême, Killer Kipper!

  My kipper came on a plate – little slabs of smoky-smelling something that was no longer a fish. It was a dark varnished colour. This boneless wonder looked as if it had been boiled in a bag last Friday and tasted of salt and grease.

  I would have been better advised to turn left off the Lancaster Canal not long before I reached the University City. Here you step down, lock by lock, to the sea. There is such room on these green treads that your dogs may run free and the grass at the lockside is mown and all ahead you can see the mist over the sea and the little port of Glasson.

  There are on this earth, in this valley of sorrow, places that take you away, magic places, where things make sense and there is room and time and soft winds and rings to tie up to and pubs and boats bobbing and a smokehouse17 where you can get kippers as kippers should be.

  Kippers hairy with bones, kippers that curl up off the plate as if greeting you, kippers that are light-coloured and fine-fleshed, kippers that offer forksful and then crumble in your mouth. A thousand generations in our sceptred isle have smoked the herring over a wood fire, and metabolized its richness into muscle and brain and bone, and our bodies are telling us At last, the kipper, the kipper – that’s the stuff!

  Jim and Jess ran in safety along the shore and Monica and I walked behind them. The PM2 knocked at its mooring and the light came from all sides at once, soft and white.

  If I could snare18

  Her beauty in my halting rhyme

  Then words so fair

  Would ravish time

  Enchant the clock and still its chime

  If I could break

  And mould those words to match her grace

  Then they would take

  To them a face

  No bronze or quiet stone could trace

  And yet I own

  No painted words for all my care

  Will blend this tone

  Eyes blue as air

  The gold the gold that dusts her hair

  What’s that? asked Monica over my shoulder.

  Just a little thing I wrote for you at Oxford, I said. Thought it would go nicely in the book – change of pace and all that.

  Change of husband if you don’t watch out, said Monica. First of all you didn’t know me when you were at Oxford, and secondly my eyes are green and thirdly my hair was dark.

  What you don’t understand, I said, is that I knew you long before we met. Every night
when I went to bed there was a gap on my left-hand side exactly your shape. I hungered for my little Welsh darling. I knew you, I could smell you, I could hold you, talk to you, years before we met.

  It was that bloody Staff Nurse, said Monica.

  Most city basins have grown a crop of apartments. Often these are based on the elegant shells of warehouses, but in Lancaster they were designed by the mayor’s cousin, who had read a book about post-modernism. They crowd on you, pompous and dark, and give you a small ache, just in the middle of your forehead.

  On the evening of our arrival I popped up on to the bridge for a pint. No Jim, sorry – they wouldn’t let you in, old dear, or Jess – omiGod the betrayed eyes.

  The ground floor of the hotel had been stripped out and painted black – a weekend drinking factory. There was a line of twenty pumps.

  What bitters do you do?

  John Smith’s.

  I have nothing against John Smith’s, which is a good beer for drinking, but I will have no truck with an organization that thinks lager is twenty times more important than bitter. I crossed the road to a pleasant-looking pub. Lots of tables – maybe eat here tonight.

  I opened the menu and inside was a fly, pressed like a flower.

  The next morning the whole crew of the PM2 set out into the University City. From the canal you have to cross the road. Round here the towns are pushed up alongside the coast and the motorway is pushed up alongside the towns. Traffic tears up the motorway and when it comes off the motorway it keeps on tearing. Not just cars – container lorries and giant wagons up and down and round corners with one wheel on the pavement. It’s a bit like the French traffic game of Kill the Pedestrian and His Dogs, but played with bigger pieces. The worst town is Tarleton, to the south, but Hest Bank and Lancaster run it close and run you close too if you walk their pavements, where there are any.