Life by the Slice

[steepholm]

Hearing the sad news of Alan Plater's death reminded me of some thoughts I had in Bolton about my relationship with writing from, and about, northern England.

Bolton, as my host pointed out to me, was the long-term home of Bill Naughton, a less celebrated writer than Plater, and perhaps best known today for having written the play on which the Michael Caine film Alfie was based. For schoolchildren of my generation, though, he was more familiar for his collection The Goalkeeper's Revenge - a series of gritty tales of northern working-class lads with names like Spit Nolan. Along with the books (and subsequent films) of Alan Sillitoe, Barry Hines, Keith Waterhouse and Stan Barstow, and the dramas broadcast on Play for Today through the 1970s, these gave me a strong cumulative sense of The North as a place as mythical as the Wild West - a world of manual labour, frothy beer and short vowels, tea and hardship, pits and cotton mills (depending which side of the Pennines you were on).* By the time I actually came to see Lancashire the mills had all been converted to museums and apartments (c.f. that episode of Life on Mars), which added to my sense of it as a kind of storybook world. As for the pits - well, I actually lived in Yorkshire throughout the miners' strike, but in York itself, which perhaps doesn't count. I never saw a miner, to my knowledge, and it wasn't until I came to Bristol that I found myself living in what had been an actual mining area. It's not that Yorkshire felt like a museum, exactly - and Doncaster in particular seemed to be full of scary people, to judge by the ones who got on and off the train there, who oozed a kind of violent northernness that I didn't know how to cope with - but neither did it have much in common with the malnourished, black-and-white world of Kes.

Now I look into it, I see that the stories in The Goalkeeper's Revenge are actually all set in the 1930s. Did I notice that when I read them at school? I don't remember doing so, which is perhaps telling. Mythological places have no chronological time, after all. In fact, I suppose that my attitude to the North (or perhaps the way in which it was used by my teachers) amounted to a kind of orientalism - or borealism, maybe - to which historical change, or indeed flesh-and-blood northerners, were fairly incidental. The point was that the idea of the North encapsulated certain qualities valued by those who selected the books we were to study: the qualities of a life unwarped by capitalist greed - honest and communitarian. Personally I found it all pretty unappealing.

The irony is that these stories were fed to us as slices of Real Life. Being Real was a significant part of their function, in fact. Indeed, I came away with the impression that the black-and-white life of the North was considerably more Real than my own lower-middle-class life in a Hampshire market town, and also that the working class children I knew at school weren't as truly working class as northern kids, because their dads worked on farms and at the brewery rather than down a mine. What was intended as a lesson in what Real Life was like, had the ironic effect of making both the North and my own environment seem slightly less real, in different ways.

* Writing this I've become conscious for the first time that I see Lancashire as a female county, and Yorkshire as a male one. I wonder why? Perhaps it's to do with their positions on the map. Lancashire is on the distaff side of England, and its identity is appropriately bound up with textiles, while Yorkshire is associated (in my mind at least) with coal and steel, spear-side trades of delving and cutting. Then again, the Lancashire accent (outside Manchester at least) has much more pitch variation, which is generally the case with women vis-a-vis men. I don't know - does anyone else make this assocation?

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post. I lived in Manchester for 4 years (I was at university there) and watching Life on Mars, which was set 10 years earlier, brought a lot of stuff back: we lived in one of those little terrace houses with an alley running between the backs. I don't come from a particularly posh background (I'm from Gloucester, but not the classy bit of it) so there was an element of culture shock, but it wasn't overwhelming. It was a violent city, but so was Glos., to be honest (smaller, so less of it) and one of the most dangerous cities I've been to in this country is Bristol. But Manchester was also very friendly. It being the early 80s, there was a lot of conversion going on, but now the city has changed out of all recognition.

Trevor lived in a mining district - i.e. Midsomer Norton. I know exactly what you mean about the north seeming more 'real' - it's a British thing of working class life being in some sense idealised, the reverse of the pastoral but somehow related to the mechanism that drives the pastoral, if that makes any sense. Idealisation, I guess is what I'm getting at.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it is a kind of urban pastoral, you're right.

Until yesterday I would probably have disagreed about Bristol being a particularly violent city, but having just witnessed a woman more or less being throttled by a car-park-rage stranger at Tesco's, I'll just nod and move on!

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Put it this way - I don't often park in the city because I like my car unlit, and with its full complement of tyres!

OTOH someone got badly glassed in Glastonbury y'day, so we rural/alternative types can't talk.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

A very interesting post. I grew up in Moston in North East Manchester during the 50s and 60s and that was the time of transition out of the poverty of the depression and post-war austerity. Though I went to infant school with kids who wore boots rather than shoes (no clogs, thank heaven!), by the time I got to secondary school, Manchester was starting to shed its old image and becoming known as a vibrant centre for youth culture. Top of the Pops started out in Manchester and local groups like Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders were up there in the charts with the Beatles.

As it happens, my husband is from Doncaster and thus we personify your EW Male/Female divide. :) There could be something in it, actually. I do associate Yorkshire with a more macho image. Over in Lancashire, women could work in the mills and though the work was hard and the hours long, once work was finished, they were their own person with a wage to spend how they liked, unlike the girls who were in service and scarcely got any time to call their own and were at the mercy of the family they lived with. Thus I tend to see women in Lancashire as more assertive because since even before my grandmother's generation, they've had more choice than a woman living in a rural area or where the only industry is heavy industry.

Of course Lancashire had plenty of mines and factories too. My great-grandfather left the land and moved to Manchester to be a miner because the wages were so much better. My maternal grandfather worked for Avro who build aircaft like the Lancaster and Vulcan bombers. My dad started his working life with ICI (who had both chemicals and dyestuffs divisions).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point about women having financial independence from mill work. Also these were places where women gathered in numbers, outside a domestic setting: it must have allowed for the cultivation of a type of large-scale female community that couldn't have existed in other circumstances.

[joyeuce]

Purely anecdotal I'm afraid, but I have a similar macho mental image of Yorkshire. As late as the 1980s, among the parents at my very middle-class Doncaster prep school, there was a clear sense that boys were more important. I don't think this is just resentment at my childhood, because it rarely happened in my family; what I saw in my friends' families was time and money and encouragement being lavished on the boys, while the girls made do. It was quite common for the boys of a family to be sent on to a public school while the girls went to the local school, or at best on a scholarship to Wakefield Girls High. My brother and I were also very unusual in having a mother who worked when her children were under 11, and some families made it clear that they pitied us for this.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I live in Durham, which is like York in being a middle class University and Cathedral (on second thoughts, I shall capitalise that) city and therefore Not Counting; but unlike York in being smaller, and without an affluent hinterland (we're surrounded by pit villages, though the pits are long closed) and so maybe counts after all.

Certainly the miners' strike was very immediate here, and I bitterly resented its treatment in Billy Elliott - I may well use your word 'borealism' to describe the sense of 'appropriation' it gives me.

Good point about the selective nature of 'realism', too.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

On the subject of appropriation, do you remember Strike!? One of the Comic Strip's more successful efforts, as I remember it, though I don't know how well it would stand up today.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I remember it (vaguely) as being more about Hollywood than about the strike itself - I was (vaguely) amused, I think, but nothing more.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

I've just watched Strike! as I go through the Comic Strip box set, and thought it was excellent (I was a kid in the eighties, but I do remember the events and the players). The last five minutes or so are amazing, just (deliberate) fractal Getting It Rongness, as the Hero rides on a motorbike in an hour from North Wales to London to plead before the House of Commons, all in their morning suits...

And I think of Yorkshire as built on wool.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I moved to the Manchester area in 1976- and have lived here ever since. The old north of Plater and Barstow was on its last legs when I arrived- and is now almost completely gone. Oldham in its heyday had God know how many cotton mills- and now they've all closed. A majority of the buildings have been demolished- the rest converted to other uses. You look round and where once there was a forest of tall chimneys, now there's maybe one.

It was a very brief period- the period of the mines and the mills. I guess it lasted about 150 years. Now that its detritus has been largely cleared away you are more likely to notice the remnants of the culture it replaced- the stone built 17th century farm houses, the modest 18th century Wesleyan chapels...

I'm too up close to the culture of the contemporary north to really figure what it's all about. It's still in the making I guess- and by the time it's sufficiently well fixed in our minds for us to memorialise it, it will already have turned into history.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's a good point about the brevity of it all. This was the world's first modern industrial landscape, but it was still a brief efflorescence even in the scale of historical time. That perspective was incompatible with the mythical North I was exposed to in school, though, which was industrial through and through, and could change (if at all) only in becoming more so. Factories and pits might stand idle, but there was no sense that they'd ever be grassed over.

[gillo]

So strongly was the "mythical North" implanted in my consciousness that when I was summoned to interview for a place at Durham University, I seriously expected to see miners in pit helmets with lights on them. I never have seen one to this day except on TV and film.

I have taught

The Goalkeeper's Revenge

many times now - short stories can be a godsend at the end of term, and several of these have an awful lot packed into a small space -

Seventeen Oranges

, for example, always delights twelve-year-olds. I do always teach them as historical stories now - as I do Kestrel for a Knave, for that matter - there are significant elements that no longer make sense to children without being contextualised. Old money, for example.

The North, like the South, is always much more complicated than you think. I'm a Midlander, and nobody has much in the way of preconceptions or expectations of us beyond a Brummie accent. Northerners hear me as "posh", southerners as "Northern" very often. When you look at Yorkshire you realise that it's full of affluent enclaves - not just York, but Harrogate, Beverley, many of the coastal towns like Scarborough and Whitby - as well as several quite distinctively different types of industrial or post-industrial area - Bradford and the Woollen District (J B Priestly territory) are very different to Doncaster, and Sheffield is different again. The thing I always notice about Yorkshire is the suddenness of the transitions, too - from Bradford to Haworth, for example. Lancashire is smaller but has a similar mix - Lancaster is a total contrast to Rochdale for example.

Mrs Gaskell got something of the feel of this a century and a half ago, of course, in

North and South

, which I consider her greatest book. Preconceptions about each do neither any good.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've never actually read North and South. I must make that good!

[gillo]

You have to allow for the usual Gaskell death-rate, but in other respects it's wonderful.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Kes, the film, was in colour. Or do you mean morally? I'm not even sure of that.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

No, I wouldn't call it morally black-and-white at all, in the sense of being good-vs-evil simplistic. But its world seemed monochrome to me.

[joyeuce]

I grew up near Doncaster, but in one of the posher outlying villages. Your description seems about right to me. :-)

We read The Goalkeeper's Revenge at school too. I must have realised it wasn't set "now", if only because of the money, but I don't think I thought of it as quite as long ago as the 1930s. But then I didn't pick up on settings very well at that age; when I first read What Katy Did, aged 6 or 7, I was convinced it was set in England.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

when I first read What Katy Did, aged 6 or 7, I was convinced it was set in England.

That seems entirely reasonable. Any differences could easily be attributed to its being the Old Days. By contrast, I just marked a student dissertation that asserted several times that it was set in Canada. I can only assume the author confused Katy with Anne of Green Gables, but dear me!