When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (32 page)

The two Scousers hankered for the lost city of their youths – ‘Twenty years ago, whatever Liverpool did, the rest of the country followed. All the vitality, that's what I miss. Beatles and that. I used to go to the Cavern,' said one. ‘Now if you go to Liverpool, everything's boarded up, a wasteland. All my friends have grown up and gone. It's a jungle. The kids have to be streetwise. The kids down there would leave the kids here standing.' (It's as hard to find a middle-aged Scouser who never went to the Cavern as once it was to find an Irish Nationalist who was not inside the O'Connell Street GPO during the Easter Rising.) Another said: ‘I used to get off the bus or train in Liverpool and say: “Great, it's great to be back.” Not now, I wouldn't.'

As we talked we drank beer solidly. The club's environment was thoroughly masculine: women were not allowed to be full members or to play snooker. ‘I'd tear up my card if they were,' said one of my companions, and it was hard to tell if he were joking. A gutsy woman sitting nearby took him up. She had a job, she said, was buying her own house. Why shouldn't she be a full member of the club? She didn't get far. A man renowned because his father had once won the pools asked me whether I could drive him to London. He turned out his pockets to show he was broke. Whatever share he had had of the fortune had long since gone. A young man, playing the slot machines, hit the jackpot, and £100 in one-pound coins came splashing out, a veritable cataract of money, echoing across the momentarily hushed room before he went berserk. For a few hours there was companionship, laughter, booze, and even an unsuspected romantic streak – ‘Skem's a frontier town,' said one. But the connotation was one of survival in the middle of nowhere rather than of adventure and possibilities. The atmosphere was jokey – ‘Give me your address in case I don't like your book.' Skem, they said, was a comfortable place, a friendly place, where a man need never lack for company.

Early next morning I visited ‘Mary' and ‘Doreen'. The two women were ‘single parent' families. Mary was a pretty woman of twenty-four, tall, with blonded hair and painted red nails, who was unmarried. One child had died ‘of a tumour on the lung' when he was a few weeks old, and Mary now had a lively two-and-half-year-old who batted an orange balloon around as we talked. Mother and son lived in one of Digmoor's most depressing streets – rows of prefabricated, pebble-dash houses, set at right-angles to the road, which looked as if a decent wind from the Irish Sea would flatten them. An above-average ration of Skem rubbish disfigured the neighbourhood and swirled about in a strong breeze. Mary's gas had been cut off three years before – and £16.50 was deducted at source each week from her supplementary benefit. She and her son lived on £33.50 a week. The gas debt had originally been £800, but was down to £300. ‘The bills just mounted up,' she said fatalistically.

What did she buy to feed herself and her child? A chicken, you could get two meals out of that. Hearts, they were cheap – 70p a pound. ‘I can't buy other meat, or little things for him, like cakes. I can't manage at all. By the weekend we're down to bread and milk. The money seems to have run out.' With no gas, she had kept three electric fires burning throughout the bitter weather of 1987, with inevitable large electric bills. Monday is ‘money-day' when the Giro cheque comes. By then she usually owes about eight pounds at the local shop. Clothes? Her mother bought them for the child. ‘Me? I have to make do with what I've got. I was used to having clothes before I had the baby. I get dead depressed all the time. I'm just bored stiff during the day.' Was there a garden? Yes, but they hadn't been out in years because she'd lost the key to the back door. When had she last had a holiday? She had to think. When she was ten, at Butlin's at Pwllheli. She goes to a disco about once a month when the family allowance is paid.

Her friends faced a similar bleakness. A nineteen-year-old had just come home from hospital after a nervous breakdown. ‘She smashed the house up, couldn't cope at all. Her little lad died in the house. She was in hospital three weeks, on tablets. There's a lot of it in Skem.' A 21-year-old friend had been on Valium for two years. ‘The doctor is trying to break the habit; says she's too young to be on them.' She paused and added: ‘My mum says there are people worse off than myself, but I can't think of anyone worse off than I am. There are loads of us, just like me.'

Doreen's husband had walked out five years before, owing, she said, ‘a gas bill', as a result of which her gas had been disconnected. Three years later the council had installed gas central heating: radiators that had never been used were now rusting while carpets rotted with damp and walls went green. One child was so severely asthmatic – ‘really bronichal' [sic] – that she was in a residential school in the Wirral, coming home at weekends. Doreen heated the child's bed with an electric blanket, and kept two fires burning round the clock. I visited her in the first week of February, and her meter had just been emptied – £253 since Christmas, all in 50p pieces. ‘I've got to keep my fires going: all I'm bothered about is my heating.' The amount required to get the gas connected would have been about £100, the sum a businessman might spend on lunch or a middle-class woman on a new jacket. ‘I went down to the Gas, and asked them to put it on for me. I told them I'm on the social and on my own. The doctor told me that even a note from him wouldn't do any good. I'd have to have one from the consultant.'

Doreen had come to Skem ten years previously from the Liverpool suburb of Speke. She had left her first Skelmersdale home because ‘we got broke into that many times'; her husband's work ‘went redundant'. One son lived with his father, and Doreen had two children and her asthmatic daughter at weekends. Her weekly income was ninety pounds, including family allowance, of which thirty pounds usually went on electricity. It cost one child six pounds a week to get to school by Skem's pricey and erratic bus system. Doreen put money aside each week – for her Christmas hamper, for her ‘catalogue'. When I asked when she had last had a holiday, she laughed that anyone should consider such a possibility, ‘I'd love to take the kids away; I just don't have enough money.' They had been to Blackpool on a day trip – £2.50 return for Doreen and half-price for her children. Had the day been expensive? ‘In Blackpool? Oh God, yeah.'

She was ten years older than Mary, and more philosophic. ‘I've always been used to not having anything, so it's not bothered me. We get by. I don't think I'm too bad off considering some people.' People had been happier when she was a child, she said, although they had less. Lack of money wasn't the essential problem. ‘More money would only mean more debt. All I need is help with my heating really. I'm for ever putting up wallpaper. I had to throw a carpet out at Christmas.' Liverpool was firmly consigned to the past; she would never go back. ‘All them muggings. I wouldn't like my kids to grow up to drugs and muggings.' Skem wouldn't be a bad place if there was something for the teenagers. ‘My daughter's fourteen: all she does is babysit. I used to go ice-skating; you can't go ice-skating in Skem. Nothing for them to do. All you see is them walking round with their ghetto blasters: they're even frightened of that because they get took off them.' She'd given up on politics – ‘whoever gets in, I don't think the state of the place will be any better' – and was pessimistic about Skem – ‘promises, and it's just a big flop.'

The day I met the two women the
Skelmersdale Advertiser
ran a front-page story under the headline ‘
WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO
…' It told of two Skem householders whose lives were close to intolerable, and illustrated their plights with pictures of filth and dereliction. The home of the first victim, a divorced woman, had been broken into four times in as many months. She had to stay at home continuously to guard her property. ‘I feel trapped. I am too afraid to leave the house in case it is broken into, but I don't feel safe when I am at home.' Vandals, she said, were making everyone's life on her ‘square' a misery, and one couple had been driven from the area. Their empty house had been totally destroyed: the windows and doors had been ripped out and what wasn't worth stealing strewn around the street outside. The second victim's house was surrounded by a deep bed of rubbish that came spilling out of dustbin bags that other residents hurled from their flat balconies a few yards away. ‘It's like living on a council rubbish tip,' the woman said, a statement that was no less than the truth. The contents of the shattered bags included used disposable nappies.

Virtually the whole front page of the previous week's
Advertiser
had been taken up with the destruction of a Roman Catholic junior school by an arsonist. All that remained were a few twisted metal spars, which a week later had been scooped up into giant dumper trucks, leaving a barren patch of scorched earth. The school doubled as a church, and was a central part of local community life. Two small fires were started at other schools in the next two days. The local reporter told me that there was at least one arson in Skem each week.

Skelmersdale is not a natural community with social and occupational gradations. Its inhabitants are totally removed from the experience of most of Britain. The professionals who service the town, with very few exceptions – some of those are ‘missionaries' like clergymen – live elsewhere. Eighty per cent of council tenants – the vast majority of the town – receive some form of housing benefit. Some unmarried mothers are so socially incompetent that the idea of going to a community centre for a cup of tea – in the words of a social worker – ‘freaks them out, they can't handle it'. Even the Scouser accent sets them apart. Unlike a Yorkshire or Lancashire accent, it is an entirely working-class accent. With rare exceptions, the minute a Scouser opens his mouth, fellow countrymen can accurately pin him down as a man likely to be without skills or higher education. Skem offers few of those toeholds towards advancement, such as the back-street garage where a man can do his own thing, by which the enterprising can often survive in a settled community. The town lacks human compost. The relative of one family that had fled Skem back to Liverpool after two and a half years said: ‘It was rather like plastic surgery. Because you get a new nose you think it's a new you. Once the novelty of the house wore off, that was it. No one went to visit them. They felt marooned, completely isolated.' Back in Liverpool the family had to live with relations, but at least there was work for the kids in a fast-food joint.

Skelmersdale is blighted first and foremost by the lack of jobs. ‘There's nothing,' people like to say, ‘that a good dose of employment wouldn't cure.' I became dizzy writing down figures that looked more like individual cricket scores than unemployment percentages – on the Digmoor estate, the male unemployment rate is 43 per cent. The big factories will never come back. If the national economy did improve significantly, Skem's unemployment rate would probably benefit most from the export of prime males to other parts of the country. But the town suffers not just from unemployment, but also from the kind of planning that looks wonderful on the drawing-board but is hell to live with. Father Michael McKenna, who, when I met him, was working on Archbishop Worlock's staff in Liverpool, had been leader of the Catholic Team Ministry in Skem for fifteen years. ‘Every time they built a new estate, some idiot had another bright idea. Planners should be put against the wall and shot: they have no concern for the people. The disaster of Skem was that it was built on an island: no one crossed its boundaries. It wasn't a town, but a group of villages.' A Labour councillor said: ‘There was no democratic control: every crackpot had free range for every fashion and whim.'

Each of these ‘villages' – of which Digmoor is one – is separated from the others and from Skem's ‘centre' by the elaborate road network, designed in the grandiose days of ‘Wilsonia' for car-owning citizens. The footpaths were not entirely ornamental, but they took the lazy, decorative, planners' route from A to B, with the result that the carless citizens of ‘Doletown' walk almost everywhere on the roads. I was told before I had had a chance to see for myself that it was only the skill of local drivers that prevented wholesale slaughter, an observation I had put down to hyperbole. At dusk that evening I was amazed to find mothers pushing prams in the fast lanes of the town's dual carriageways, and gaggles of people marching straight across major roundabouts.

After a few hours in Skem I also drove with the presumption that the roads are as likely to be occupied by pedestrians as by motorists. It is perhaps a blessing that strangers seldom do find their way to Skem, or road fatalities would indeed be substantial. (There is on Merseyside a general and dangerous contempt for cars: Liverpudlians dart across streets with little regard for the traffic. I always drive through the city prepared to slam on the brakes at a second's notice. Careless pedestrians were noted by J.B. Priestley more than fifty years before: he reported that on his way from the city boundary to the Adelphi Hotel several ‘had started up not three yards from our radiator and slithered about as if bent on suicide'. Perhaps the cavalier attitude towards the roads has to do with the seafaring traditions of the area.) Obviously, not everyone in Skem walks all the time, and, in the absence of private cars and a decent bus service, taxis do a roaring trade. There are more black cabs outside the Concourse, Skem's shopping centre, than one would find outside the Ritz. Mothers, shopping baskets on wheels, kids, push-chairs, fathers, grannies, are all loaded aboard for the journey home. The plain stupidity of the town's layout was summed up by a clergyman: it was, he said, 150 yards from the front to the back of the ecumenical centre, centre, but by road it was two and a half miles.