"Depends on the police, don't it?" Pitt said.
I said, "Then why not join the police?"
They reacted like scalded cats, and then they laughed, as if I had suggested the most improbable thing in the world.
"Just give me one reason," I said.
"No one would talk to you," Oliver said.
Peery said, "You wouldn't have a friend left!"
I said that I had expected to find a devastated area, but instead this part of Liverpool seemed to me rather pleasant, with a good bus service and plenty of shops, even if they did have boarded-up windows.
Oliver said, "It's not bad now." And he smiled. "But it's different when it gets dark."
Sundown found me walking rapidly out of Liverpool Eight.
***
The train to Southport was a busy branch line, because the whole nineteen miles of coast that was designated Merseyside was inhabited by Liverpool's commuters. The first few miles were taken up with warehouses and the cranes of the dockyards. It was grimy and Brooklynesque, especially in the dark brick of the railway cut at Bank Hall, and again at the two Bootle Stations, the first with a black brimful canal and an old factory sign saying treacle for health, the second Bootle Station, New Strand, with its flattened buildings and vacant lots.
Even after six miles, it seemed to me that we had never really left Liverpool—an unbroken line of dirty buildings continued up the coast, the same age as the buildings in Liverpool proper but, because they were darker and lower, very dreary. Waterloo ("founded in 1815") was a decrepit place, and it was nine miles before I saw any grass growing beside the line. At last the stations had a countrified look, and a lighter, leafier aspect. They had names like High-town and Freshfields, but they were fine—places in Britain with names like Freshfields I had found almost invariably to be slums.
We came to a grassy duney heath, with hundreds of low burial mounds, or tumuli. Perhaps they were bunkers from the war, though they may well have been bunkers from the golf courses that proliferated here—six so far, and we were not even in Southport. The land continued flat, the commuters got off the little train and walked home through the pink and purple lupins, and then, forty minutes after leaving Liverpool, we arrived at the back end of Southport.
It seemed odd for a seaside resort to be built in one of the rainiest areas of Britain, but that was not the oddest feature of Southport. Odder still was its Promenade, which was a quarter of a mile from the beach; and at low tide it was a mile along the beach to the water on the hard brown sand. When the tide was down, the beach was a long ludicrous desert, but flatter than any desert I had seen. Cars drove across it. The pier was high and dry. The sun at nine-thirty P.M. seemed to be setting at the far end of Egypt. There was no watery shimmer, no indication that it was setting in the ocean. It bumped the planet and was gone. Southport was a cluttered seaside resort without much sea, at the edge of seemingly limitless sands.
Because swimming had always been so hard to manage in Southport, the town had erected salt-water swimming pools, and a large mosaic on a bathhouse on the Front advertised, Victorian Seawater Baths—Entirely New Turkish, Russian and Swimming Baths—Finest in District. That was an old red brick place, but there was a new one not far away with an Olympic-size pool, or "pule," as they described it.
I stayed in a Southport bed-and-breakfast place with a family, the Bertrams: Herb, out of work and suspicious and always eyeing me nervously when Trish ("I find I can really relax with Americans") got down on all fours on the parlor carpet to retrieve Jason's Happy Family playing cards from under the sofa, or to sweep, or to shampoo the carpet. Trish was frequently on her hands and knees when I was sitting in the room. It was a posture that unnerved Herb. It was as if, in ape terms, she was "presenting" to me—the bum show that matters so much in baboon society. Was she symbolically submitting to me as she sponged the carpet? Herb picked his teeth and narrowed his eyes, daring me to look.
They were a young couple, they had always lived in Southport, and they hated it. Two days with the Bertrams made me gloomy, and sometimes in the evening I felt we were three baboons in the room—no conversation, but a great deal of meaningful posturing. They had pawned their best wedding present, a silver After Eight Mints' dispenser in the shape of an old English coach and horses—the box of mints went into the coach. Twenty-eight pounds it was worth, but the pawnbroker would give them only eleven. They often grumbled about this, using it as a personal illustration of their hard times. Their hopelessness and depression were infectious. They believed that nothing would ever happen to them to change their lives for the better. I had always imagined that people in this plight would become curious about the world and its possibilities; but they were indifferent to it.
Even Jason, who was twelve, was lacking in hope. He was a bright boy, but he said he was in the B class. "All the posh woons are in the A class. Teacher's pets and that." He said he was planning to leave school when he was sixteen.
"What would your mother say about that?"
"Me moom don't care."
The dislike of school was not unusual, but the widespread distrust of education was another matter. Perhaps it was justified. Everyone said the schools were bad—the only good ones were private ones—and it was a fact that many well-educated people were on the dole. And yet it depressed me to think of this young family dying of indifference.
Lord Street in Southport was a grand boulevard with arcades and Victorian iron canopies. It was gritty northern splendor—wide streets and big drafty buildings. But there were a great number of elderly people on it, and they added to Southport's atmosphere of feebleness and senility. Herb explained that this was June, the low season, and old age pensioners had special rates at hotels all over the Lancashire coast. I would see masses of mentally defective people, too, he promised; mental defectives also got special rates in the low season.
The day I left, I walked up to Marshside Sands, where Merseyside meets Lancashire, and then walked back again. A car followed me along the beach, passed me, and then stopped. The driver got out and sat on a bench, staring at me. I thought it might have been Herbert Bertram having another apish fit of jealousy. But no—it was a youth in a leather jacket. I kept walking. I reached Marine Drive. He had got back into his car and followed me again. He drew up beside me.
"Want a lift?"
I said no.
"Pity," he said, and drove away.
Love on all fours. It wasn't passion; it was just more pathetic sex.
On the branch line to Wigan, I opened the local Southport newspaper and read an advertisement for pornographic films. Two big screens—Live strip tease—only £2—This Week "The Hot One"—Reduced admission for unemployed, students, and Old Age Pensioners.
That, surely, was a sign of the times, and a vision of the world to come: discounts on pornography if you were unemployed or a student or very old, for the chances were much greater that if you were one or the other, you would have enough spare time to turn porn shows into a habit.
Blackpool was only ten miles from Southport, but there was no direct road or train—the River Ribble was in the way—so I went via Burscough Bridge and Parbold and through flat green vegetable fields to Wigan to change trains. Almost fifty years before, George Orwell had come here and used this manufacturing town to examine English working life and the class structure. He had found "labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dustbins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous w.c.'s."
But Wigan today, on a cold overcast morning in June, had a somewhat countrified look—like a market town, its winding main street on a little hill, with red brick hotels and two railway stations and many public houses fitted with bright mirrors and brasswork. I walked out of the center of the town, and it seemed to me that Crook Street, with its cobblestones, and hemmed in between the railway embankment and the Colliers' Arms, could not have changed for a hundred years. The dark red terrace houses had flat fronts and leaded windows and soot on the pointing of the brick that emphasized the bricks' redness. This was what Orwell had seen.