CLANCY SIGAL
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or me at my commonest. She hated mean vulgarity. But I think she
would have understood why I keep going back to certain grimy,
breathtakingly lovely landscapes in the North. I'm not into industrial
archaeology. But Sigal's Guide to Beautiful Britain lists Tyneside, the
Mersey piers and Hull docks, Glasgow's Clyde, Port Talbot, the moors
above Huddersfield and Bradford - as well as those amazing examples of
interracial coexistence, Manchester's Moss Side and Liverpool 8 - as na–
tional treasures to be cherished alongside Blenheim and Hampton Court.
Whole regions of my life are now either wastelands or sub-bohemias
for bad poets and displaced earth mothers running Little Shops of Hor–
rors called boutiques. Step by step one part of Britain grows at the ex–
pense of another; provincialism at its best is replaced by false urbanity;
people start to have second lives like second homes by wiping out a past
that is a common heritage. I saw it happen in America once.
Nostalgia, like literacy, has its uses. Sometimes at the U.S. Air Force
cemetery in Cambridge I see combat-crew veterans trying to explain to
puzzled wives and bored kids what a dogfight was like. It becomes
terribly important to recall Mike and Charlie and Vic lying there under
white crosses or Stars of David in the Fen snow. They're the part of us
we have to remember to stay alive as human beings.
My ghosts are more earthbound: the Barnslcy and Merthyr miners,
Blackburn mill hands, Coventry auto workers and CIU clubmen -
ostensibly racist and anti-foreign - who let me in with an openheart–
edness I failed to find in London . Here and there, in a mining village or
(former) textile town, I'm still Kilroy among the survivors. Well, almost.
"No, lad, can't say I do remember you," a South Yorkshire retired
checkweighman recently told me in a pub that had once been my second
home. "Or that Doherty fellow. Was you that Yank who was always
asking questions and couldn't hold our beer? Heard you died - or went
to America. Same thing, if you ask me."
This "other" Britain hardly exists any more. Its trench-warfare men–
tality and naked maleness are unfashionable today. The hard shoulders are
being removed from the road to Wigan Pier. It had its middle-class
counterpart, mainly among those who were under fire in World War
Two. I can excuse a sloppy drunk in my local a lot if he was at Arnhem
or Kohima. Or a woman who became another kind of casualty in the
Blitz. It was a long, tedious, dangerous war ... we forget.
My first serious woman friend here once spat, "Stop romanticizing
us, especially the workers. They're like any of us - they'd move up in a
moment if they thought they could." It sounds briskly unsentimental but
isn't always true. Little Englandism sometimes also involves class loyalty.
My
own has been burned and hammered away - by crazy strikes, embar–
rassment at the difference in outlooks, relief that I don't have to live that
