Footnotes Page 20
I wander over to ‘Little Germany’, as the area behind the cathedral is marketed by an anxious tourist board. When he was young, Jack was star-struck by the community that lived and worked here – musical, cultured, alien – they made Bradford ‘at once one of the most provincial and yet one of the most cosmopolitan of English provincial cities’. The houses here are majestic and just waiting for an influx of eager residents or entrepreneurs or anyone who’s going to make this area hum again. Perhaps they’re on their way. But as Jack says, the city lost something when the German-Jews disappeared in the war, changing their names or going out of business or leaving for good. What he wrote in 1933 is horribly, upliftingly familiar today:
I liked the city better as it was before, and most of my fellow-Bradfordians agree with me. It seems smaller and duller now. I am not suggesting that these German-Jews were better men than we are. The point is that they were different, and brought more to the city than bank drafts and lists of customers. They acted as a leaven, just as a colony of typical West Riding folk would act as a leaven in Munich or Moscow. Just lately, when we offered hospitality to some distinguished German-Jews who had been exiled by the Nazis, the leader-writers in the cheap Press began yelping again about Keeping the Foreigner Out. Apart from the miserable meanness of the attitude itself – for the great England, the England admired throughout the world, is the England that keeps open house, the England of Mazzini, Marx, Lenin – history shows us that the countries that have opened their doors have gained, just as the countries that have driven out large numbers of its citizens, for racial, religious or political reasons, have always paid dearly … Bradford is really more provincial now than it was twenty years ago. But so, I suspect, is the whole world. It must be, when there is less and less tolerance in it, less free speech, less liberalism. Behind all the new movements of this age, nationalistic, fascistic, communistic, has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger.
Jack (being Bradford to his bones) blamed Londoners for the death of his city. The creepiest character in Bright Day is a chancer called Nixey, who is sent by London head office to reorganize a wool firm’s local ‘Bruddersford’ branch. Nixey doesn’t know much about wool or textiles, and doesn’t care about anything other than his own advancement. As Gregory, the-character-who-is-really-Jack, writes, ‘I never met a man who had an expert knowledge of things or the making of things who hadn’t a decent and honest core to his character; and I never met a man who thought first of money and profits and cared nothing about the things he dealt in who seemed to me a satisfactory human being.’ It is the lament of a Bradford man, who has watched his city and the hard, solid, useful, profitable work it once did upturned by a system that values the extraction of profit over the creation of goods. Years later, Jack/Gregory meets Nixey again, and he’s now Lord Harndean, a hollowed out, successful man, and ‘there was nothing about him, I decided, that you could lay a finger on and declare to be wrong, yet what he offered you, in his dapper and pleasant fashion, never added up to anything satisfying and right. He was never quite there on the spot with you.’
And if I am loitering in the pages of Bright Day, it is because Jack could not be more accurate, or insightful, about what has happened to his beloved Bradford and so much else. At some point the Nixeys of this world won the argument – or simply sidestepped it – and we all decided, or passively accepted, that it didn’t really matter what a business or organization made or did, or where it was based, they could all be run to the same formula. And nor did it really matter who was doing the work, so long as they could be slotted in or pulled out with the minimum of fuss. Jack, a self-proclaimed romantic, and an old textiles hand, thought that was a miserable, soul-sapping proposition. And time has proved him right.
Beryl and Jack agree that the best thing about Bradford (‘a city entirely without charm’, grumbles Jack, misleadingly) is the moor that surrounds the city. It’s so easy to get out there. Just one bus ride and you’re in the hills with Heathcliff and some of the finest walks and pubs in Britain. They both headed for Hubberholme, with its ancient church and inn, and this is where you’ll now find Jack, slumbering in the churchyard, not too far from the nearest pint. But I want to stay in Bradford a while longer, wandering the windblown streets. I visit the National Science and Media Museum, which has had its main collection removed to London, and spend a happy hour in the basement, looking at old Kodak cameras and images of a vanished world. Jack’s world! And Beryl’s. And mine … that model of Polaroid camera now looking awkwardly analogue in the display case was once my pride and joy.
It is such a relief, halfway down another empty street, to come across the Sparrow bar. Just as I’m passing, the door opens and a fug of music and beer floods out – and I follow its irresistible path straight inside. ‘Well, I hope he likes the banjo,’ the young fair-haired woman on stage drawls at me, and everyone in the little packed bar (about forty of them) rumbles their sardonic West Riding welcome. Jack and Beryl loved live music, especially the kind where you could join in – and I think one of them must have led me here, at this moment, because the young woman is brilliant, with a voice that wraps the room in honey and hope, and everyone is uninhibitedly hanging on her words, and urging her on, humming or singing or thumping out the rhythm. I am squeezed in, with my back to the bar, and I’ve somehow managed to separate a young British Asian couple (whom I have to say I’m very pleased to see, having read far too many po-faced articles about the deep and irreversible schisms of Bradford), but they don’t seem to care – in fact no one seems to care about anything that’s happening outside the dripping windows, because the music and the beer is flowing and all is right with the world. Jack liked to pound away at the piano at these moments, although what he loved most was chamber music, and there’s not so much of that in Bradford these days.
I sit outside after the music has stopped and smoke a cigarette (yes, I know, but that’s my last) and when I stub it out in an empty ashtray, a hugely apologetic young woman hurries across the street and wonders if I’ve now finished with the butt. It’s shocking. There was terrible poverty here when Jack and then Beryl visited. Beryl was told by a local reporter that ‘at least fifty percent of the Asian community are unemployed, but it’s difficult to get exact figures because they all deny it and some of them don’t like signing on’. And Jack was heartbroken when he discovered that some of his old comrades from the trenches did not feel able to attend the reunion battalion dinner because they were so ashamed of their lack of funds.
They ought to have known that they would have been welcome in the sorriest rags … They were with us, swinging along, while the women and old men cheered …when the crowds threw flowers, blessed us, cried over us … and then they stood in the mud and water … saw the sky darken and the earth open with red-hot steel … came back as official heroes and also as young-old workmen … and now, in 1933, they could not even join us in a tavern because they had not decent coats to their back.
People said Jack never wrote about what happened to him in the war, but that is just not true. He raged about it. And he despised those who were nostalgic for war, or thought another one would bring us together or solve anything at all. It is never war that is right, he said, it is the peace we have made that is wrong. The sight of the absolute poverty blighting parts of Bradford today would have felled him.
I wander up to Hanover Square, which Beryl visited with her TV crew in 1983. Back then it was derelict, but saved from demolition and transformation into something anodyne or ugly by the fact that many British Asian families had chosen to live here and would not move. It is now a charming little three-sided close, with honey-coloured houses backed by an old mill tower, and a strip of grass in the centre, behind iron railings, over half of which the residents have chosen to park their gleaming cars. I am admiring the square, and taking photos, when a man suddenly erupts out of one of the houses (which is a centre of some kin
d) and starts shouting, ‘Where are you from?’ He yells it over and over: ‘Where are you from?’ I mumble something about J. B. Priestley and Beryl Bainbridge, and that I’m looking for the places where they once roamed. ‘I don’t think so,’ he shouts. ‘I don’t think so. I know who you are really looking for. I know!’
He’s British Asian, not a very tall man, about forty years old, lushly bearded and wearing traditional Pakistani dress. He’s also furious and standing too close and I turn quickly to leave the square. I have watched too many films and TV shows loaded with negative imagery (haven’t we all?) and I am already thinking about violence and knives. Even though, as I’ve said before, ‘Where are you from?’ is the most human question in the world. We love to know the answer to that one – about others and ourselves – but at the same time ‘Where are you from?’ can be freighted with rejection. You’re not from around here. You’re not one of us. Perhaps you don’t even know? In the mouths of Jack’s small town louts it carries menace and threat.
I still feel sad that I hurried away. It is always better to try and connect. Maybe this obsessive, instinctive categorization of each other will run its course, undone by love, sex, music and market forces, leaving only ‘unknown’ or even ‘not important’ – although the need to be part of a community (and the associated suspicion of outsiders) runs deep. Anyway, if we don’t categorize people, how can we root out discrimination? And (I go on) how awful when people feel they have to deny or subsume their identity. Bring back the Flemish-Welsh and their psychic sheep shoulder-blades! We all have multiple identities, of course we do, and they wax and wane, and they are there to be enjoyed, or rejected, or slipped between, even though I think we are right sometimes to be suspicious of the helpfulness of hyphens. Really, I don’t think we know what we want, but it is surely a matter of hope that there are so many people and groups in Bradford doing so much to try and bring people together. Festivals and twinned schools. Sport, art and commerce.
These pompous half-thoughts (and more) are rattling in my head as I scuttle out of the square, but when I look back I see that the short, angry man is already screaming at some other hapless fool, for parking his car badly, and it strikes me, but too late: OK, he’s just another local busybody. You get them everywhere. And so much of this hand-wringing is unnecessary. It is easy to get on. Isn’t it? We could at least start by not jumping to conclusions about whole groups, communities, even nations, based on the behaviour of one random individual.
On his way back from a day on the moors Jack was dropped off on Market Street by his friends, who couldn’t understand what he wanted to do all alone in Bradford city centre on a Sunday night. He drifted from pub to pub, with a light but flattening drizzle in the air, and that is exactly what I do – except Jack had many more pubs to choose from and wherever he went there were subdued young men and women sipping at their Sunday beer. He even came across a crowd of pipe-smoking men watching a Salvation Army band blasting out their tunes on a street corner, and Jack decided that if ever he were to become religious, he would join the Salvation Army. Or maybe become a Catholic. Both of them had a passion for what they preached. All I find is a couple of almost empty pubs, in which it is hard to linger. But still, this means that I end up earlier than expected in a curry house up the hill, which is glowing and packed and extraordinarily welcoming. Jack had a ‘pitiful evening’, he decided, ‘a miserable, barbaric affair’, and Beryl clearly couldn’t wait to get out, but I’ve finished my time in Bradford in the right place, surrounded by a crowd of happy, well-fed, uncategorizable people, united in their enthusiasm for good cheap food. Although, with my soft southern palate, I can’t help finding the meal teasingly over-spiced.
There is sunshine on the hills when I leave Bradford the next day. I am driving to Liverpool, the city that in 1983 Beryl still called ‘home’, even though she had left it for London in 1952, returned to get married and start a family, and then finished with it for good in 1963. She said that she went back at least six times a year, and would go to the barricades for the place if the call ever went out (which, in 1983, with Margaret Thatcher in full flow, she felt fairly sure it soon would).
As soon as Beryl had checked into the Adelphi Hotel (where Jack also stayed – he described it as ‘hot from mingled shame and vexation’ ever since the Atlantic passenger traffic was moved from Liverpool to Southampton), the first place Beryl visited was 22 Huskisson Street, the house in Toxteth that was her home for five years from June 1958. She lived there with Austin, her husband, and their two young children (the second, Jo Jo, was born soon after they moved into the house; the first, Aaron, had been born a year earlier). It doesn’t sound like she was very happy there. Austin was preoccupied with establishing himself as an artist, and spent much of the time out working (and carrying on with other women); and then Austin decided to go to Paris to find himself and Beryl started an affair with a solicitor called Mick, who lived down the road; and in 1959 she turned on the gas cooker, lay down with her head near the oven, and waited to die: she was saved only by Austin coming home early with a few friends. Austin moved out in October that year, with Beryl filing for divorce almost immediately afterwards.
And yet, Beryl once wrote that ‘nothing shall be as sweet as the Liverpool days’, and some of those must have been during the time she lived in the house in Huskisson Street. It sits in the Liverpool 8 area, also known as Toxteth, and at the time it was a shabby, bohemian part of town, frequented by artists, actors and the down-at-heel. Beryl wrote here, and started painting, and in October 1959, just before Austin left, they held a party which was attended by members of the Liverpool Philharmonic and three of the Beatles, before there even was such a thing, and a drunk, sixteen-year-old George Harrison managed to offend the orchestra’s principal flautist by demanding they find some Elvis records to play. Or so the legend goes … and Liverpool does love its legends. When Beryl came back in 1983, accompanied by her TV crew, she found the house derelict and burnt, the balcony toppled into the street and one of her dining room chairs tossed into the rubble of the backyard (she had always meant to send for her possessions, she said, but had never had the money – and once she did, she no longer had the space). She got straight into a taxi and spent the rest of the day in her room at the Adelphi, mourning for everything that was lost.
The area around Huskisson Street is now known as the Georgian Quarter, on account of its beautiful Regency houses. Many of them are still flats, but just go to No. 22 today. There’s no sign of any rubble or burnt balconies: it’s a picture-perfect, creamy-white, large-pillared home with a rippling wave of black railings leading to a shiny green door and immaculate sash windows. It’s more Jane Austen than Beryl Bainbridge – and anyway Beryl wouldn’t have bothered with painting the outside and she kept a stuffed water buffalo in the hallway of her London home and her study/bedroom upstairs was a chaos of strange knick-knacks and unusual artefacts she could never throw away, because she liked to be able to touch tokens of her past, even if she was notoriously unreliable in her interpretation of it. If she’s haunting No. 22 Huskisson Street, I think she’d soon be driven away by the stench of fresh paint and property developers.
A middle-aged man in a beanie hat shouts across the road, and I get ready to tell him that I don’t have any cigarettes (Bradford is still hanging heavy), but all he wants to do is help. ‘All right, mate, you lost?’ He is eager – desperate – to make sure I know where I am going. Is that a Liverpool thing? I ask him the way to Hope Street, because I’m worried he might implode if I don’t give him something, and he insists on leading all the way, even though there it is, in plain view, at the end of the street.
When Jack walked among these Georgian houses in 1933 he grumbled that ‘the owners lived here no longer; the crew had taken possession’. They were all slum tenements, ‘the buildings were rotting away, and some of the people were rotting with them. Faces that had shone for a season in brothels in Victoria’s time now peered and mumbled at us.’ I don’t
think that Jack – from across the Pennines – much cared for Liverpool. He kept calling it a ‘great city’, but he found it dark and unsettling, and it bothered him, and the docks and slums were depressing, and that comes out in an uncharacteristic and troubling rant about the many Irish who had settled here and done so much to build the place. ‘From such glimpses as I have had’, he sniffed, ‘the Irish appear in general never even to have tried; they have settled in the nearest poor quarter and turned it into a slum.’ He reckoned ‘Liverpool would be glad to be rid of them now’, except de Valera would never have them back: ‘he believes in Sinn Fein for Ireland not England’. Beryl makes no mention of Jack’s outburst, but it’s a rare moment when his assumptions of what is acceptable are so obviously out of kilter with our own times. Before slapping him down, or walking away, we should probably see how the rest of us stand, ninety years from now.
By the way, not long after Beryl had completed her trip following Jack around England, she had ‘a marvellous’ lunch with him and his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes. By this time Jack was almost ninety years old, somewhat deaf (‘which I took to be more of a convenience than an affliction’) and still writing every morning. Beryl was nervous, as she wrote in The Times.
When we were alone for a few minutes, I said to him: ‘It’s confusing, isn’t it … this television business?’ He said, ‘What?’ a shade tetchily, and beckoned me to sit closer to him. ‘What are you on about?’