When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (35 page)

The Revd Deryk Evans, superintendent Methodist minister, who wore a large silver cross over a blue smock, gave me some gritty figures about the sort of problems he encounters. Although Skelmersdale comprises only one third of the West Lancashire district, it has 55 per cent of the mentally ill and half the referrals to child psychologists. We met in his comfortable, cluttered study – pipe racks, squash rackets against the wall, the
Guardian
on the floor. Mr Evans came into the ministry from industry, and had been three and a half years in Skem after thirteen years in Swindon. He found the contrast between the affluent, naturally expanding Thames Valley and the artificial north-western new town overwhelming. On a visit to Swindon a few days earlier he had ‘broken down and cried' in a shopping centre that ‘was bigger and wealthier than the whole of Skem put together.' He looked at the fine things and prosperous people, and remembered ‘cheapy Skem shops with stuff that won't last three months.' He began our conversation with the usual dose of brutal honesty: ‘Skem was badly conceived and badly planned; an inner-city population dumped fifteen miles away on a community that did not want it, and have gone on not wanting it and hating it.' Even the existing churches rejected the newcomers, he said. ‘The essential planning problem was aggravated because hardly had the town begun to grow when every kind of tragedy happened … Soon we shall have a ghost town populated by ghost people.'

The phone rang. It was a parishioner in some anguish, and Mr Evans counselled in jocular, broad-brush terms – ‘God does not promise pastures ever new. He says: “There's a stony path – get on up it” … stop taking your spiritual temperature all the time.' The caller, he told me, had a dilemma. He was intellectually frustrated through lack of education. Now in middle age he had an opportunity to take a degree; but this would mean his family suffering yet more financial hardship. What should he do? If he gave up the degree he would not become the sort of person he ought to be. It was a question of ‘wholeness'. ‘In Skem,' said Mr Evans, ‘there was very little chance of people being whole.'

He listed some of ‘Doletown's' more obvious afflictions. The single-parent family: ‘no fun living in a terraced house with mum and dad out of work and rowing. “Sod this,” they say, “I'm off.” In Skem they can get a flat and £800 to furnish it – a small fortune to them.' The workforce, thirty thousand Scousers: ‘semi-skilled, because that's the only thing Liverpool has offered in the past hundred years – stevedore work. Where in the technological, microchip world do they fit in?' Depression: ‘Valium is part of the barter economy – six for a pound.' Unemployment: ‘We do have a rush hour – seven minutes at four o'clock.' He told of visiting a woman, who excused herself at the sound of a car engine outside and went to the window, peeping through the net curtains. When she returned, she explained that she liked to watch the only employed man in her street leaving for work. Mr Evans was preparing an ‘I love Skem' campaign with leaflets and stickers. He professed to love it himself: ‘I'm glad I'm here. I laugh all the time – I've never beaten a Scouser verbally yet; never put one over. And I've tried very hard.' But he added that if he had not got colleagues, he would face ‘burn-out'. Trying to improve things is to beat your head against several brick walls at the same time. ‘Only BFs come to work in Skem, and thank God for them.' He spent an hour every week watching people's faces in the Concourse. ‘Resources are needed to enable them to become full human beings and not just highly frightened people.'

A young man, who had been unemployed virtually since he left school, told me his routine. ‘If I got up at the normal time, I had everything done by 11.30. So I was getting up later and later, usually about lunchtime.' He went to the Job Centre, then to the library – ‘a different four walls' – then bought the ingredients for the tea he would make his wife when she got home from work. The greeting in Skelmersdale, he said, was not ‘How are you?' but ‘Got a job yet?' He had married at twenty, which at first had given him a great boost, but he later had difficulty paying bills, and had nearly been evicted. Skem had thousands like him.

The town's public assets are the responsibility of the Commission for New Towns (CNT), and – unlikely though it might have seemed – ‘Doletown' was being ‘privatized', by selling factories and houses to tenants; 26 per cent of the houses had already been sold. What hope there was for the future lay in these developments, and people were beginning to assert pride in their properties. Some industrialists showed their faith by putting their money where their factories were, proving they had no intention of crating
their
machinery and flitting from town. The CNT, charged with disposing of the town as quickly as possible, was pouring money into the rehabilitation of the shopping areas in order to make them saleable.

There were other hopeful signs. A small number of people – some, in their own words, driven by ‘necessity' – were starting businesses, though there was a shortage of suitable factory units for them to grow into. Mark Sheeran was twenty-five. He had trained as a welder, but had not worked since a brief first job, though he had earned seventy pounds a week for a year as a twice-weekly ‘resident' disc jockey at a club – which was more than most of the available Job Centre vacancies paid. Two of his aunts had married Chinese men, and the family came together for Chinese banquets. With time on his hands, he himself began cooking, experimenting with spices. He would go into Liverpool to get his ingredients, and Skem friends started to give him orders – perhaps £200 worth on one trip.

‘I thought, “Hello, hello, hello. There might be market for it,”' he said. That was two years before I met him, and he had spent the intervening time preparing himself to go into business buying and selling Chinese ingredients. He had been on a course, caught up on a maths deficiency from his school days (‘came maths Friday afternoons, I always had a headache,' he said), and prepared a business plan. Raising money had been difficult and time-consuming. Enterprise schemes would say, ‘We'll give you “x” so long as you first get “y” elsewhere.' With no experience and living in rented accommodation, he was starting from an unpropitious base. He had wanted a shop, hoping to be able to offer employment to others, but had been disappointed. ‘Waiting for suitable premises, with no money coming in, I was beginning to feel it would never get off the ground,' he said. However, after market research and trial runs testing the market – he had put advertising leaflets through doors – he was convinced that Skem and the surrounding district could support a business operated out of his home. He would also sell equipment such as woks.

One of the grants he did finally get was from a fund under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and he had met Prince Charles and Princess Diana when they visited Skem. The day before I met him he had got his first chequebook, and was a few weeks away from his official launch. ‘It's a great boost to be able to hold your head up. I had never a wink of sleep last night, I was so excited,' he said. He had bought an answerphone, and was about to get an estate car to make his deliveries. Skem might not have seemed a natural market for his ‘Spice and Things', but his business plan had obviously been impressive, and a local enterprise trust had put its faith in him.

However, Skem was designed for the industrial workers, not as a nursery for future captains of commerce and manufacturing, or even for purveyors of spices and woks. It would in any case, as a Labour councillor pointed out, take about one thousand small businesses to mop up the town's unemployed. (Thorn and Courtaulds who had pulled out eleven years earlier had employed 1,600 each.) There were a few schemes to train school-leavers with marketable skills – an Information Technology Centre and ‘Tomorrow's People Today' – but they could not help more than a minority of the better motivated teenagers.

My last day in Skelmersdale was a Saturday, and I arrived early, just as a wintry sun had broken through thin clouds of differing greys. There were very few people about: a boy cycled across a footbridge, silhouetted against the pale morning light, a man with a fishing rod and basket waited by the old town's war memorial for a lift, a young woman stood by a bus stop. Beyond the ‘New Jerusalem' flats, the dark hills rose towards Ashurst Beacon, inviting a brisk morning walk. At the town's edge, birds chirruped and whistled – it was seven days to St Valentine's – and the first snowdrops had appeared in the gardens of the small professional enclave at Elmer's Green. For a moment, ‘Doletown' was transmuted once again into ‘Wilsonia'. I drove slowly back towards Digmoor, and the illusion was shattered even before I reached the estate's wretched row of shops: a large mongrel was defecating outside the Up Holland Labour Club – or, as the sign said, the ‘
UP HO LAND LAB U CLU
'. I turned east and took the road to Wigan Pier.

Warehouses around the Wigan canal basin have been renovated, and now house the ‘Orwell Bar and Restaurant', a gift shop, and an exhibition showing life in the year 1900, ‘The Way We Were'. A plaque said that the Queen had opened the refurbished quay. The work had been carefully, if a little preciously, performed – like Covent Garden in London or an American historical site. Some feel strongly that turning Britain into a museum merely emphasizes the country's decline, yet it seemed that morning that the Wigan waterfront was a preferable place to be than Skem. But it is easy to succumb to images.

Across the water from ‘The Way We Were' stood a terraced row of houses, which appeared from their battered and boarded backs to be uninhabited. I walked across the bridge, and past a renovated mill, to have a closer look. The houses were all occupied, and from the front window of one an elderly woman stared hopelessly at the traffic that flooded past her door: the ground shook under the weight of lorries. Her living conditions could not have improved greatly in the fifty years since Orwell. ‘The Way We Were' scarcely needed a museum.

Barry Nolan, the Skelmersdale plumber who had tried his luck in Australia, had said: ‘The working man's biggest downfall was the finding of the oil. At one time they used to depend on the working man. Now, with this “Big Bang”, they don't need him any more.' Those who are no longer wanted have been dumped in reservations like Skem, stacked in high-rise flats in the inner city, or left where their grandparents were, in shoddy terraces. The moral failure of Mrs Thatcher's government is not that it tries to encourage wealth creation, but that it has abandoned its responsibility for those who lose out during a period of such fundamental change. Robert Hodge and his Conservative councillors understood their liability for a community not of their making, nor of their liking. Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative Cabinets – with honourable exceptions like Peter Walker and Michael Heseltine – have applied the same competitive laws to the dispossessed as they have applied the BMW brigade.

The door to the George Orwell Restaurant was open, so I went in for a coffee. I was met by a short, toothless cleaning woman of about sixty, polishing the new brass. ‘Coffee's seasonal,' she said. ‘There's no call for it at this time of year, and the bar's not open till a quarter to twelve.' ‘Could I at least use the toilet?' ‘Yes, nip in the ladies. I'll keep watch. There's someone doing something to the urinals.' She told me on my return how the cotton bales used to be loaded from this building on to barges, and how the railway lines ran from the collieries to the waterfront. Each had had its own little pier.

Did she, I asked, know of anyone who remembered this George Orwell, in whose honour she was polishing brass so faithfully? She looked dubious ‘George
Formby
now, they liked him. They've got his picture upstairs.' ‘Wigan Pier' was Formby's joke, not Orwell's. Formby was owed the last laugh.

Knutsford is an ancient and comfortable market town, twenty miles south of Manchester. Its name comes from ‘Canute's (or Knut's) Ford' – water clearly had a compulsive attraction for the good king. The town was billeted by Prince Rupert's marauding army during the Civil War, and was the ‘Cranford' of Mrs Gaskell's novel – the town centre, with its surviving cobbles and arches, and the heath facing the Georgian Gaskell home would still be recognizable to her mid-nineteenth-century neighbours. Its two narrow main streets – Princess and King, known locally as ‘upper' and ‘lower' and studded with classy clothes boutiques – indicate the affluence of many of its modern residents. A few miles away Jodrell Bank telescope tilts towards the heavens, and the town and surrounding villages provide, in country houses, up-market corporate headquarters for several national companies. Other professional and business people commute to Manchester.

But to the east – past a green shed on which a freshly painted sign intriguingly offers ‘clog-mending' – a Manchester overspill estate called Longridge borders the tamed Cheshire countryside. Its residents have been plucked from the dingier Manchester slums, and at night many congregate somewhat morosely at the Falcon Bearer pub, the estate's sole amenity. When news reached one drinker that his wife had been rushed eight miles to hospital after a fire at their home, he stoically held his ground at the bar – there was still half an hour's drinking time, and why waste good beer money on a taxi? – reasoned this transplanted Andy Capp. While I was there, a senior policeman announced that, after a local crime, they always searched first for culprits in Longridge, which may have been good policing practice, but was shocking PR. The estate was up in arms.

There is little to bind these disparate communities together. The overspill residents find the town's bijou charms alien and expensive; while prosperous Knutsfordians seldom head their Volvos or Porsches beyond the executive estates in which the town nestles, unless perhaps to drive a cleaning lady home. Two Englands exist cheek-by-jowl, yet – with the exception of a few people coming together in one common institution – see or know as little of each other as they did before the town planners ripped up the Manchester terraces and exported the tenants. That binding institution is Knutsford County High School, the town's comprehensive and only secondary school, which lies a few hundred yards beyond Mrs Gaskell's home on the opposite side of the town from Longridge. Across the open fields one can just hear the distant hum of the M6; a more severe blight, suffered by rich and poor alike, is the unholy din of planes labouring into flight from Manchester Airport. It was to the school that I had gone to investigate whether the comprehensive ideal, so bitterly denigrated by so many, could – in circumstances that gave it a sporting chance – stretch the bright child and fulfil the dull.

The comprehensive conundrum lies at the centre of a web of national anxieties. When my family was about to come home from the United States, one insistent question peppered the inquiries of our relatives and friends. ‘What,' they asked, ‘are you going to do with the children?' The question was swathed in layers of unspoken thought, touching class, ‘standards', political philosophy, accent and aspirations. Nowhere has such a deep seismic fault opened in Britain as that between state education, symbolized by the horrendous populist caricature of the comprehensive school, and private fee-paying schools, which are building as fast as they can to cope with swelling demand. More than forty years after the 1944 Education Act had promised decent secondary education for all, British children each morning depart to thoroughly separate experiences, so perpetuating differences between us which are no longer even quaint.

Businessmen and industrialists, pragmatically concerned more with the quality and abilities of school-leavers than with the nature of the system, know there is a gathering emergency. The week I returned from Knutsford, Sir Peter Parker, the former British Rail chairman, called for a ‘war cabinet' on education. ‘Somehow we must see the educational crisis in terms of a national emergency … disaster stares us in the face for the 1990s,' he said, pointing to the critical shortage of first-rate teachers, especially in maths, the early school-leaving age in comparison to Britain's industrial rivals, and the failure to educate adequately the least bright forty per cent.

None of Mrs Thatcher's Cabinet educates their children in state schools. A teacher wrote to me: ‘Those responsible for administering and financing the system have decided that it is not good enough for themselves … would you buy a Ford car if you knew that
all
Ford managers bought Japanese cars?' The gulf isn't just in quality, but in kind, as if working- and lower middle-class children still do not require the critical intelligence and cast of mind that most professional people wish for their own children.

Although, by the time I began this inquiry, one son had completed a year in a comprehensive, I felt I was little wiser about whether these schools – to which more than nine out of ten British schoolchildren go – ‘worked'. So much of the concept and the practice was alien to my own distant experience at a famous public school a quarter of a century ago. There and then the aim had been – in monastic isolation – to turn out people with an education which would prepare the best to be top civil servants or lawyers. Such an education takes a tight grip on the psyche, not as strong as the Jesuits' grip, but real enough. Surely, our prejudices tell us, one cannot be truly ‘educated' without learning large chunks of Wordsworth or Shakespeare by heart: ‘poetry' now means free-form composition without rhyme or scansion – my eleven-year-old son thought that if you put a capital letter at the start of each line, you were a poet; and an educated man is one with Latin tags at the tip of his tongue. But a comprehensive – taking children of every ability and origin – cannot be expected to provide the high flyer with the environment of Winchester or Manchester Grammar School, or to achieve on behalf of its pupils all a grammar school did and more. Comprehensives are new beasts, not yet fully fashioned, and certainly not yet fully understood. It does them a grave disservice to judge them for what they are not.

The casual evidence is startling in its contradictions. There was the sixteen-year-old girl at Woolworth's, eight months on the job, without the self-confidence to look a customer in the eye, monosyllabic, and inefficient to the point that I had to suppress a strong urge to shake her. She had an infuriating way of expecting the customer to know the procedure – perhaps because she was too inarticulate to make herself understood – then muddled her own part, so that minutes were wasted while a supervisor came to sort out the nonsense she had made of her till entry. She was, my son told me, a former pupil of his school. With such examples in mind, a British teacher, who had worked much of his life in the United States, wrote to me asserting: ‘The neglect of education in England, except for a thin line of the truly privileged, is perhaps our supreme national disgrace.'

Yet at Oxford, where I had gone to report Olivia Channon's death from a heroin and alcohol overdose – not a good advertisement for schooling of a very different sort: her drug problems were said to have started at a public school – I met well-adjusted, bright former comprehensive students who swore by the system that had educated them. Indeed, a radical chic had seized the university, and ‘cred' points were gained for not going to the ‘right' school. No one, I was told, was more determinedly proletarian that the Wykehamist leader of one of the university's main Marxist groups. It was bad form to embarrass public-school boys by quizzing them on their educational origins.

But the difficulty in seeking dispassionate information about comprehensive schools is that it is impossible to find a typical school, and hard to find a representative one. In inner cities I could have visited ‘sink' schools – though these are seldom measured against the problems with which they must contend: some of the apparently crazier manifestations of anti-racism, for example, are sincere attempts to cope with schools where well over half the pupils are black or Asian. In the depths of Surrey, on the other hand, there is no doubt a comprehensive school exclusively peopled by the children of accountants and stockbrokers. What I needed was a school that had enough advantages to give its pupils a fighting chance, while it was not so exceptional that it would instantly be dismissed by the agonized reader with the thought ‘of course, if I lived there I'd have no problems with the local comprehensive.'

A friend had alerted me to potential comprehensive school disasters. His own two daughters had gone to a well-considered London comprehensive – ironically, he had pulled strings to get them in. He told me: ‘Violence was endemic with middle-class kids – the “melons” – being picked on as individuals and attacked as groups.' One daughter got caught up in a murder case – a former pupil killed another – and was threatened by the killer's sister, who was in her class, when she had to give evidence. His second daughter ‘joined a group of disaffected punk kids who didn't work, played truant, took drugs, went shoplifting, etc., and finally dropped out of school altogether.' Another parent wrote a moving article in the
Guardian
about her own son changing from ‘a willing, enthusiastic child to a surly, unhappy individual, who didn't want to get up in the mornings.' She quoted a poem by her son:

He is the outsider

he one they all mock

He is the one they can't accept

Just because he is different

Because he works hard

Instead of talking

Because he's interested

In school work.

He gave up in the end

He just wanted to stay at home.

I was that outsider

I was the one they couldn't accept

I was the one they mocked …

Knutsford was suggested by John Tomlinson, Professor of Education at Warwick University and a former Chief Education Officer for Cheshire. He is a passionate and committed man, who might do wonders for the image of state education if he got the sort of media platform offered to the glamorous heads of big public schools. Even the
Observer
invites public school rather than state school headmasters to write on the problems of the state system. Our collective anxiety over comprehensives, he pointed out, ‘is that the ideal runs counter to our national tradition and philosophy. Society is hierarchical and divided, while the schools attempt to treat people of differing abilities according to their needs in a common community.'

Such is the tarnished standing of the media with many teachers, I knew I would have to persuade the school I chose that I did not have horns and would not be making a beeline for kids smoking on the playing field. The Knutsford head, Mike Valleley, was nervous: ‘What “control” would he have?' he asked. Three of his senior colleagues wanted to veto my visit. They were fearful that reporting the continuing effects of the long teachers' dispute – at that time officially over at least for a while, but still causing the senior school to be locked at lunchtime because of lack of staff cover so that children wandered the town centre – or mentioning scarce resources would cost them students. Mr Valleley was terrified of litter being featured: ‘It's the one thing the local press will seize on.' But he clearly saw that exposing his school to a writer was a test of self-confidence that he and the school ought to be brave enough to take.

My first (and later confirmed) view was that Knutsford could stand the scrutiny. It became a comprehensive in 1973 through the amalgamation of two secondary-modern schools, each standing in generous playing fields – Mr Valleley, like an eighteenth-century landowner, was master of all he surveyed – and linked by a path that runs between a field of clover and pleasant suburban gardens. The town never had a grammar school: eleven-plus scholars had had to travel. As well as drawing children from the town's divided communities, the school takes pupils from outlying villages, so the school's catchment area is socially mixed. Although a quarter of local parents pay for their children's secondary education, the school is ‘comprehensive' in that it is the only state secondary school, takes both sexes, and educates pupils to A level.

A sixth-form block and sports facilities (which include an indoor swimming pool and are shared with the community) were added to the former boys' school – now the upper school. The newer, former girls' school – now the lower school for eleven- and twelve-year- olds – has such thin floors that it frequently sounds as if indoor hockey is being played upstairs. Paint has been at a premium since the school's opening, and the litter – as in most schools – blights the grounds. But there are well-maintained lawns and shrub gardens. In the autumn sun, as teachers' voices drifted through open windows, it seemed a positive and congenial school in which to pass one's youth and learn. Children are well-mannered – no bowling strangers over in the long corridors – and usually wear smart school uniforms. Sixth formers are allowed mufti – jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. Several of the staff are distinctly snappy dressers. One senior woman would have perished at the thought, but she would have looked in place on a Conservative platform. Discipline, I sensed, was not a great problem. At one assembly I attended, five boys were singled out for having played hoaxes on parents, including one with a heart condition: the offence was being taken as seriously as it would have been at any school. Sanctions include detentions and suspensions, and I was told that the school would not hesitate to remove a child who was a disruptive influence.

Knutsford has just under 1,300 pupils, two hundred of them ‘refugees' from a neighbouring authority that still has selection, a number of whom passed the eleven-plus. The mother of one such boy told me that, ironically, they had moved to the selective area because they once thought ‘comprehensives were the bottom of the heap'. Now, having rejected the old-fashioned limitations of their local grammar school and the divisiveness of selection, they are ‘terribly, terribly impressed' by Knutsford. The two hundred in-comers have buttressed the school against the worst effects of falling rolls, which, in causing widespread school amalgamations and closures, add to the national crisis of morale.