When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (33 page)

Another disastrous planning legacy was the design of many estates. Presumably believing that people raised in slums would only be happy in back-to-backs, the planners re-created something of the street structure of the industrial north, with the results that the view from one house is frequently the back of another, that people walk directly past each other's windows, that the houses open on to complex warrens rather than on to streets. Such a layout is bliss for vandals and almost impossible to police. Finding my way through the warrens became a game of skill. People living a few yards away with the same street address often cannot help the stranger. Even with a decent map I allowed five minutes between leaving my car and finding the front door I wanted: in the dark it was safer to make that ten.

Most of the houses are poorly built; some genius even thought that flat roofs were appropriate in a region of gales, rain and snow. A professional plumber and do-it-yourself enthusiast – he had been out of work for most of the previous four years, so had had plenty of ‘doing-it-himself' time – showed me round his house. Where he had repapered five weeks previously, the black stain of damp was already showing through; there was no roof insulation, so he was putting in false ceilings to create some protection against outside temperatures, and the recently redecorated bathroom was green with mould – ‘Don't worry,' he joked, ‘the fungus won't get you.' Many homes were prefabricated in now discredited factory-built systems. I was told that twenty million pounds was to be spent curing basic design faults. Ashurst, the most popular estate – least vandalized and cleanest: it bears almost no physical resemblance to the rest of Skelmersdale – is the exception, comprising traditional, brick-built houses, laid out along residential streets.

When Skelmersdale was still the promised land, you had to be vetted and to have a job within a twelve-mile radius before you were allocated a house. ‘You had to
earn
your place in Skem,' said a Labour councillor. One family told me that their previous home in Liverpool had been inspected for cleanliness, and their finances were checked to ensure they were not in debt. Local Skemmers, appalled at the prospect of people they regarded as Scouser riff-raff being dumped on their doorsteps, were reassured with these ‘precautions' at public meetings. One original inhabitant remembered the slogan ‘No Scum for Skem' from those days. But after the town's economic collapse in the mid-seventies, there were no jobs to come to: the Skelmersdale Development Corporation at that time had empty houses on its hands and no takers. So the rules were changed, people were allowed in who hadn't got jobs, and they were drawn from a wider area. Existing families complained that Skem became a dumping-ground for problem families and unmarried mothers. A former member of the Development Corporation told me they were caught ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea', and decided that it was a greater social evil to have empty houses than it was to have problem families.

The do-it-yourself plumber's one moment of employment in the previous four years had been on the necessary task of whipping radiators and boilers out of houses the moment that tenants quit, and putting them back as the new tenants moved in. All empty properties in Skem are heavily boarded, but even so vandals frequently smash their way in. It is the knowledge that there is nothing worth stealing inside rather than the boards that deters further breaking and entering. That was in the winter of 1985–6, and he was able to observe that the tenants leaving were usually conventional families, while those coming in were often unmarried mothers. The plumber's own teenage daughter had unmarried friends who had become pregnant and been offered three-bedroomed houses. ‘Good' families bettered themselves by coming to Skem, and then bettered themselves further, either by getting out or by moving from a run-down estate like Digmoor to an area like Ashurst. Turnover in Skem is high – a Digmoor doctor estimated that he lost half his panel every two years.

But if Skem's housing is poor, its social problems chronic and its layout idiotic, its amenities are wretched beyond compare. There is no hotel, nor so much as an ordinary café. The health authorities had closed a Chinese restaurant, and the premises had become an ‘amusement' arcade. There were a few run-down fish'n'chip shops. I met a Londoner who had come from a poor area south of the Thames, where he had been accustomed to having takeaway food shops on his doorstep. He was amazed in his new home to find that he couldn't slip out for a hamburger at nine o'clock at night. Skem's two outlying shopping centres were dismal: the busiest shops by far were the sub-post offices, where supplementary benefit Giros were exchanged; queues formed long before they opened. In one there was a rack of worn, cheap second-hand clothes in a corner. Jumble sales were advertised in nearly every window. Graffiti were everywhere, painted, scratched, etched into concrete, drawn, spray-gunned. Most of them were simple names, assertions that in this abandoned town in the middle of nowhere there were human beings who could define their existence on walls, doors, stairways. Sometimes there were plus signs between the names – ‘Donna + Frankie + Cheryl' – as if together they could mean something, could make a difference. The competing graffiti were mainly concerned with football – Everton and Liverpool being as much a passion in Skem as they are in Walton or Anfield.

The centre of the town is the Concourse, a white hangar-like construction which houses the town's principal shops. It is connected by an overhead metal walkway to Whelmar House, the hub of ‘Doletown' in that it contains all the essentials – the Housing Department, the Job Centre, the DHSS benefits office. Teenagers with white, pinched faces, inadequately clothed against a biting wind, pushed babies across that clanking walkway, while below, the black taxis hooted and jostled. I sat in the Concourse, watching bored youths trying to set off bangers. Middle-aged women clutched plastic bags – ‘You'll be impressed at Presto' and ‘Buy British at Norweb' – and gossiped, ignoring both the youths and a tiny old man, with sunken cheeks, a cloth cap, a white tieless shirt buttoned at the collar, a filthy, cheap overcoat, worn black boots. He clutched a stick and stared into the middle distance, a survivor in a world not of his understanding.

The shops were paradoxically cheap, yet expensive. They were cheap in that they catered for poor people, so goods tended to be flimsy and second-rate: they were expensive because their customers comprised a captive market. ‘You could boycott a shop in Liverpool that charged too much: you can't here,' one woman said. Even petrol cost more in Skem that it did in the neighbouring town of Ormskirk – only half Skem's size, but affluent enough to stimulate competition. Poverty emasculated Skem. There was no point in starting a small restaurant, marketing higher quality goods, or providing a new service. Ten per cent of nothing is nothing. In the depth of winter, Skem offered its citizens a choice between television at home or the pub – you couldn't even ‘window-shop' in the evenings because the Concourse was sealed off, and all other shops heavily shuttered. The local cinema, the ‘Première Film Centre', appeared to be closed.

The first pub I visited was a desolate barn, with Liverpool soccer pennants, faded and dirty, pinned above the bar. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and a few youths were playing pool without much heart. The red, vinyl seats were split and slashed in several places. Someone had scribbled a list of ‘coming attractions' on a board – ‘Bobby Buzz, brilliant singer' and ‘Randy King, brilliant vocalist'. A jukebox played ‘Talking About My Generation', a song written for another generation than the one whose representatives leaned here upon their cues. ‘They all try to put us down, Jus' because we get around.'

Two analogies were inescapable in Skem, the wartime evacuee and the new world emigrant. It must have seemed to many of the original ‘woolly-backs' that they had been invaded not just by a few slum children with labels in their buttonholes, but by the entire alien population of the Mersey docklands. Pasty-faced young people still looked as if they had slum air in their lungs. Alongside ruddy, raw-boned Lancashire farmers, they seemed anaemic and weedy. They were the descendants of generations who had been overworked and underfed, and who lived in polluted, unhygienic environments. It will take further generations to breed inherited disadvantages out of them. I asked a health administrator whether, if you took a control sample of northern industrial workers to California and offered them everything they desired, their grandchildren would still be physically inferior to people with more favoured ancestors. He said he was sure they would be. Each generation of worker throughout the industrial revolution and well beyond, he said, was punier than the previous one. When we measured men for war, we found startling differences between classes. Edwina Currie's exhortations to cut back on chips, beer and cigarettes were aimed at people who, if they dined alternate nights on steak and salmon, never smoked and restricted themselves to one glass of decent claret daily, would still have a shorter life-expectancy than their distant Surrey cousins.

Many who came to Skem had the spirit of emigrants. They were getting out and they were getting on, creating a new life for themselves and their children: they went with some of the expectations and trepidations with which families leave for Australia. The plumber who fought the bathroom fungus, Barry Nolan, and his wife were such a pair. When the good life in Skem juddered to a halt in the mid-seventies, they actually did emigrate to Australia – twice! In the early days Skelmersdale had been all it had been cracked up to be. ‘I had umpteen jobs, me. If I lost one, I'd get another the next day. That's how easy it was,' said Mr Nolan. In the early seventies he was earning £100 a week with an American-owned company, and bought a house outside Skem. He was later sacked by another firm after a row over pay. He won his case at an industrial tribunal, but, he claimed, was blacked in the town. He'd get a job, only to have it withdrawn at the last minute. So the family departed for down under.

After an initial shock – the converted barracks in Adelaide where they were first housed were nothing like the ‘come hither' brochures – they had a successful first stay. ‘We expected another England, and found a country more like America. We had a ball. I had a job I would give the world for today,' said Mr Nolan. They returned on holiday to Skem, and Mr Nolan took a two-year job helping to build the last estate at Ashurst. His Sydney job was kept open for him, but, when he returned, a friend persuaded the family to go instead to Perth, and everything went wrong. Back in Skem, Mr Nolan had been unemployed for most of the four years since, though he was about to start on his own as a heating engineer.

Politically, the Nolans were torn. They were buying their house, and were sure that salvation for the litter-strewn, dog-fouled warren in which it was situated was more homeownership and the pride that created. Mr Nolan was a pillar of the residents' association, which was investigating ways of blocking off entrances into the warren, restricting entry to those who lived or had business there. But Mr Nolan was also convinced that under a Labour government he would work again. His own house – apart from the persistent damp – was immaculate. His wife said: ‘We have been very low, but there is always someone worse off than you. Barry has his hobbies, the garden, the garage. I live for the house. We're not ones to sit and watch TV.' It was a defiant little speech, but a sad epitaph on the lives of two determined people, still in their early forties, who had ‘emigrated' three times.

The Nolans told me a story that could be taken as a parable. When Skem was in its infancy, a number of thorn bushes had been planted behind the row of houses in which they lived. The idea was to beautify the estate. However, in the fullness of time the bushes became a dumping-ground for all manner of rubbish, black bags spewing forth orange peel, detergent bottles, coke cans. The bushes grew and their thorns became fierce, deterring stout-hearted council workers from clearing up the mess. The authorities told the complaining residents that it would cost £500,000 annually to trim all the bushes across Skem to a size that would make them penetrable by rubbish men. The residents had a brain-wave – why not rip the bushes up, a once-for-all cure? So it was done, and now rubbish bags are easily retrievable from the waste ground where the bushes once stood. Mr Nolan was very proud of the residents' association's part in this – ‘These people,' he said, meaning the council, ‘are paid to think these things out, not us.'

The thought occurred to me that, since a great many members of the residents' association were able-bodied unemployed men, perhaps a more positive solution would have been to have organized a rota of bush trimmers amongst the residents, who might at the same time have cleared the rubbish. Michael Caine, the actor, returning to Britain in late 1985, made such a point. He castigated people who sit in council houses watching the wallpaper peel away while waiting for someone else to stick it back. ‘It never occurs to them to buy a pot of paint and do it themselves.' He added: ‘People say the most extraordinary things: “When are
they
going to get me a job?” Who are they talking about? God?'

Frank McKenna was twenty-four, a local young man charged with a task that might have daunted the great social reformers of the nineteenth century. He was Skelmersdale's Community Development Officer. Previous generations of officials who bore such titles had got it wrong, he told me, which I was quite prepared to believe. ‘Community work in the seventies was rubbish basically, professionals trying to impose their ideas. We're trying to do things the other way round, and see what they want, give people more say in how the town is run.' That also I was happy to accept: in the ‘them and us' divide, the people of Skem were clearly ‘them', vulnerable to the best intentions of ‘us'. Mr McKenna's own family story illustrated how difficult it is to build a community amongst people living in a workless new town.