Pierless Youth
The Sunday Times Magazine
2 January 1977
O, Wigan is a grand old town;
The Romans knew it well.
It always had its Good King Coal,
As long as folks can tell.
-- Wigan Grammar School song
George Formby, who was born there, invented the joke
about Wigan's Pier. His birthplace, founded literally on coal, was a
slag-heap compared with clean and breezy Blackpool and Southport by the
seaside, 20 miles west. When we lived in Wigan, during the last war and the
six years after, smoke smutted Monday's wash on the clothesline and
blackened the Parish church like the faces of the miners clogging home from
the pits.
Our four-bedroomed semi was on a main bus-route between the dark
cobbled slums of the centre and the posher suburbs which edged on to the
grey fields skirting the town. We were secluded from the extremes of poverty
and status. In 1949, we celebrated my father's income as Borough Engineer
hitting £1000 a year. Like most of Wigan, my parents voted Labour. When
George VI and Queen Elizabeth drove through the town, I asked my father what
the King's politics were. "He's a good old Tory, I should think."
The King and Queen visit Wigan
The great leveller in Wigan was the local accent - flat vowels shared
by all, regardless of income. The town itself belonged to all and our family
took full advantage of its communal amenities. There were half-a-dozen
cinemas, Frank H. Fortescue's weekly rep. company, municipal baths and the
children's library where the books were imprisoned behind wire-netting.
Across our road was Mesnes Park, with its swings, tennis court, broad
walks (good for roller-skating) and its shrubberies (good for surprising
lovers). Twice on summer Sundays a brass band boomed at the ducks on the
park pond. It would be heard over at the cricket club at the bottom of our
garden. The local team played visitors from the South Lancs. League;
foreigners from distant lands like Altrincham, Warrington and Leigh. I
scored for the second eleven, after Sunday school.
Beyond the far boundary of the cricket-ground ran the LMS Railway, my
childhood's horizon. It linked Blackpool (where I went only once, for the
Illuminations) and London (five hours away by steam). On that line we
spotted the first diesel engine on its practice run. And, in 1944, along it
travelled the Levicks (Mrs and two children) evacuated from Middlesex.
Before they stayed with us, we knew the war first-hand only through Mickey
Mouse gas-masks, blackout at the windows and nights under the iron shelter
in the back room.
Wigan had no bombs that I remember and, only after peace resumed
(Union Jacks in the streets on VJ Day), did I realise that war wasn't
normal. There'd been no sweets at home, except the Horlick's tablets my dad
got from the ARP. Enough sugar - we swopped it for tea coupons and drank
water with our meals. Little butter - on Saturdays we blended
top-of-the-milk, marg and the real thing - and that ran out by Thursday. My
mother baked twice a week. Parkin was favourites.
After the evacuees, there was a German soldier from the local
prisoner-of-war camp, who spent Christmas Day with us. After him, other
German visitors, pre-war friends of the family. Once, Henry stayed, an
African, more shining black than any miner. Wigan was my only world and
these strangers were from outer space. So, too, seemed the actors,
magnificently striding back from the Hippodrome past our house to their digs
with, perhaps, Mrs Merrifield in Park Road. Sundays she played Bach on the
harmonium to wake her Catholic guests in time for early mass and, at a later
hour, Wesleyan hymn-tunes for the sluggard nonconformists.
My haircut cost 3d for a scalping back-and-sides, singeing with a wax
taper and a rub-over with Bronco lav. paper. So the most glamorous of all
strangers were the greasy, long-haired fair-hands from Silcock's Brothers
who twice a year set up Moon Rocket, Big Wheel and Caterpillar on the Market
Place. There was the Fattest Woman (whom I once glimpsed under her tent
flap); Anita, at 18 inches, 'Their Majesties' Smallest Subject'. The
Sullivans boxed, showgirls danced and Siamese Twins were pickled in a jar.
On the same market place in summer Smith's coaches prepared for the
Lake District, North Wales, London and even the Continent. I imagined as
they waited to leave, full of locals in best hats and Sunday suits, that the
buses had newly arrived whence they were going. And I paraded up and down
them, proud to belong Wigan, tourist attraction and centre of the world.
Most likely I was en route for the market arcade - Santus Sweet Stall - 3d
pocket money lavished on treacle toffee or Uncle Joe's Mint Balls. Then on
to the Saturday Market, where Autolycus and his mates peddled lucky charms
from India, cure-all medicines from Africa and plastic gadgets 'direct from
the Ideal Homes Exhibition in London'. They were the first performers I saw
working close to. Few had much glamour (the one selling hair-restorer wore a
wig) but they had an energy, a confidence and an optimism that lifted them
beyond the shoddy they traded in. They made me want to become an actor.
So much delighted me as a child -- the pop made on the spot in a
corner shop for a penny; the lamplighter; the horses that delivered our coal
and milk; the blacksmith whom I visited at his forge on my way to school.
When, in 1951, we removed eight miles across the border to Bolton they were
still there. So was the coal dirt; now even that has gone, along with the
rest. Last year I returned, stranger, and the Parish Church was clean as
sand. They'll be building a pier next, on the canal somewhere.
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Ian McKellen, 1977
Photo by David King
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