"Bryson, Bill - Notes from a Small Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bryson Bill)
Once this was one of the greatest congregations of Victorian architecture anywhere, but you would scarcely guess it now. Scores of wonderful buildings were swept away to make room for wide new roads and angular office buildings with painted plywood insets beneath each window. Nearly everything in the city suffers from well-intentioned but misguided meddling by planners. Many of the busier streets have the kind of pedestrian crossings that you have to negotiate in stages - one stage to get to an island in the middle, then another long wait with strangers before you are given four seconds to sprint to the other side - which makes even the simplest errands tiresome, particularly if you want to make a eater-corner crossing and have to wait at four sets of lights to travel a net distance of thirty yards. Worse still, along much of Hall Ings and Princes Way the hapless pedestrian is forced into a series of bleak and menacing subways that meet in large circles, open to the sky but always in shadow, and so badly drained, I'm told, that someone once drowned in one during a flash downpour.
You won't be surprised to hear that I used to wonder about these planning insanities a lot, and then one day I got a book from Skipton Library called Bradford - Outline for Tomorrow or something like that. It was from the late Fifties or early Sixties and it was full of black-and-white architect's drawings of gleaming pedestrian precincts peopled with prosperous, confidently striding, semi-stick figures, and office buildings of the type that loomed over me now,
and I suddenly saw, with a kind of astonishing clarity, what they were trying to do. I mean to say, they genuinely thought they were building a new world - a Britain in which the brooding, soot-blackened buildings and narrow streets of the past would be swept away and replaced with sunny plazas, shiny offices, libraries, schools and hospitals, all linked with brightly tiled underground passageways where pedestrians would be safely segregated from the passing traffic. Everything about it looked bright and clean and fun. There were even pictures of women with pushchairs stopping to chat in the open-air subterranean circles. And what we got instead was a city of empty, peeling office blocks, discouraging roads, pedestrian drains and economic desolation. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but at least we would have been left with a city of crumbling old buildings instead of crumbling new ones.
Nowadays, in a gesture that is as ironic as it is pathetic, the local authorities are desperately trying to promote their meagre stock of old buildings. In a modest cluster of narrow streets on a slope just enough out of the city centre to have escaped the bulldozer, there still stand some three dozen large and striking warehouses, mostly built between 1860 and 1874 in a confident neoclassical style that makes them look like merchant banks rather than wool sheds, which together make up the area known as Little Germany. Once there were many other districts like this - indeed, the whole of central Bradford as late as the 1950s consisted almost wholly of warehouses, mills, banks and offices single-mindedly dedicated to the woollen trade. And then - goodness knows how - the wool business just leaked away. It was, I suppose, the usual story of over-confidence and lack of investment followed by panic and retreat. In any case, the mills went, the offices grew dark, the once-bustling Wool Exchange dwindled to a dusty nothingness, and now you would never guess that Bradford had ever known greatness.
Of all the once thriving wool precincts in the city - Bermondsey, Cheapside, Manor Row, Sunbridge Road - only the few dark buildings of Little Germany survive in any number, and even this promising small neighbourhood seems bleak and futureless. At the time of my visit two-thirds of the buildings were covered in scaffolding, and the other third had TO LET signs on them. Those that had been renovated looked smart and well done, but they also looked permanently vacant, and they were about to be joined in their gleaming, well-preserved emptiness by the two dozen others now in the process of being renovated.What a good idea it would be, I thought, if the Government ordered the evacuation of Milton Keynes and made all the insurance companies and other firms decamp to places like Bradford in order to bring some life back to real cities. Then Milton Keynes could become like Little Germany is now, an empty place that people could stroll through and wonder at. But it will never happen, of course. Obviously, the Government would never order such a thing, but it won't even happen through market forces because companies want big modern buildings with lots of car parking, and nobody wants to live in Bradford, and who can blame them? And anyway, even if by some miracle they find tenants for all these wonderful old relics, it will never be anything more than a small well-preserved enclave in the heart of a dying city.
Still, Bradford is not without its charms. The Alhambra Theatre, built in 1914 in an excitingly effusive style with minarets and towers, has been sumptuously and skilfully renovated and remains the most wonderful place (with the possible exception of the Hackney Empire) to see a pantomime. (Something I positively adore, by the way. Within weeks of this visit, I would be back to see Billy Pearce in Aladdin. Laugh? I soaked the seat.) The Museum of Film, Photography, Imax Cinema and Something Else (I can never remember the exact name) has brought a welcome flicker of life to a corner of the city that previously had to rely on the world's most appalling indoor ice rink for its diversion value, and there are some good pubs. I went in one now, the Mannville Arms, and had a pint of beer and a bowl of chilli. The Mannville is well known in Bradford as the place where the Yorkshire Ripper used to hang out, though it ought to be famous for its chilli, which is outstanding.
Afterwards, with an hour still to kill, I walked over to the Museum of Television, Photography and Whatever, which I admire, partly because it is free and partly because I think it is deeply commendable to put these institutions in the provinces. I had a look through the various galleries, and watched in some wonder as throngs of people parted with substantial sums of cash to see the two o'clock Imax show. I've been to these Imax screenings before and frankly I can't understand their appeal. I know the screen is massive and the visual reproduction stunning, but the films are always so incredibly dull, with their earnest, leaden commentaries about Man's conquest of this and fulfilling his destiny to do that -this latest offering which had the crowds flocking in was actually called Destiny in Space - when any fool can see that what
everybody really wants is to go on a roller-coaster ride and experience a little here-comes-my-lunch aerial dive-bombing.
The people at Cinerama Corporation understood this well some forty years ago and made a death-defying roller-coaster ride the focus of their advertising campaign. The first and last time I saw This Is Cinerama was in 1956 on a family trip to Chicago. The movie had been on general release since 1952 but such was its popularity in the big cities, and its unavailability in places like Iowa, that it ran for years and years, though it must be said that by the time we saw it most of the audience consisted of people in bib overalls chewing on stalks of grass. My memories of it were vague - I was just four years old in the summer of 1956 - but fond, and I couldn't wait to see it now.
Such was my eagerness that I hastened out of the Museum of Various Things Involving Celluloid and across to the nearby entrance of the Pictureville Cinema half an hour early and stood, alone in a freezing drizzle, for fifteen minutes before the doors were opened. I bought a ticket, stipulating a place in the centre of the auditorium and with plenty of room for vomiting, and found my way to my seat. It was a wonderful cinema, with plush seats and a big curving screen behind velvet curtains. For a few minutes it looked as if I was going to have the place to myself, but then others started coming in and by two minutes to showtime it was pretty well full.
At the stroke of two, the room darkened and the curtains opened perhaps fifteen feet - a fraction of their total sweep - and the modest portion of exposed screen filled with some introductory footage by Lowell Thomas (a sort of 1950s American version of David Attenborough but looking like George Orwell) sitting in a patently fake study filled with globetrotting objects, preparing us for the wonder we were about to behold. Now you must put this in its historical context. Cinerama was created in a desperate response to television which in the early 1950s was threatening to put Hollywood clean out of business. So this prefatory footage, filmed in black and white and presented in a modest rectangle the shape of a television screen, was clearly intended to implant a subliminal reminder that this was the sort of image we were used to looking at these days. After a brief but not uninteresting rundown on the . history of the cinematic arts, Thomas told us to sit back and enjoy the greatest visual spectacle the world had ever seen. Then he disappeared, rich orchestral music rose from every quarter, thecurtains drew back and back and back to reveal a majestic curved screen and suddenly we were in a world drenched in colour, on a roller-coaster on Long Island, and gosh was it good.
I was in heaven. The 3D effect was far better than you would expect with such a simple and ancient projection system. It really was like being on a roller-coaster, but with one incomparable difference: this was a 1951 roller-coaster, rising high above car parks full of vintage Studebakers and De Sotos and thundering terrifyingly past crowds of people in capacious trousers and colourful baggy shirts. This wasn't a movie. It was time travel.
I really mean that. Between the 3D wizardry, the stereophonic sound and the sparkling sharpness of the images, it was like being thrust magically back forty years in time. This had a particular resonance for me because in the summer of 1951, when this footage was being shot, I was curled up in my mother's abdomen, increasing body weight at a rate that I wouldn't match until I quit smoking thirty-five years later. This was the world I was about to be born into, and what a delightful, happy, promising place it seemed.
I don't think I have ever spent three such happy hours. We went all over the world, for This Is Cinerama wasn't a movie in a conventional sense but a travelogue designed to show this wonder of the age to best effect. We glided through Venice on gondolas, watched from the quaysides by people in capacious trousers and colourful baggy shirts; listened to the Vienna Boys Choir outside the Schonbrunn Palace; watched a regimental tattoo at Edinburgh Castle; saw a long segment of Aida at La Scala (bit boring, that); and concluded with a long aeroplane flight over the whole of America. We soared above Niagara Falls - a place I had been the summer before, but this was quite unlike the tourist-clogged nightmare I had visited, with its forests of viewing towers and international hotels. This Niagara Falls had a backdrop of trees and low buildings and thinly used car parks. We visited Cypress Gardens in Florida, flew low over the rippling farm fields of Middle America, and had an exciting landing at Kansas City Airport. We brushed over the Rockies, dropped into the staggering vastness of the Grand Canyon, and flew through the formidable, twisting gorges of Zion National Park while the plane banked sharply past alarming outcrops of rock and Lowell Thomas announced that such a cinematic feat had never before been attempted - and all of this to a swelling stereophonic rendition of 'God Bless America' by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which began with a melodic hum
and rose to a full-throated let's-give-those-Krauts-a-licking crescendo. Tears of joy and pride welled in my sockets and it was all I could do to keep from climbing on to my seat and crying: 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is my country!'
And then it was over and we were shuffling out into the drizzly twilit bleakness of Bradford, which was something of a shock to the system, believe me. I stood by a bronze statue of J.B. Priestley (posed with coattails flying, which makes him look oddly as if he has a very bad case of wind) and stared at the bleak, hopeless city before me and thought: Yes, I am ready to go home.
But first, I additionally thought, I'll just have a curry.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I FORGOT TO MENTION CURRY HOUSES EARLIER IN MY BRIEF LIST OF
Bradford's glories, which was a terrible oversight. Bradford may have lost a wool trade but it has gained a thousand excellent Indian restaurants, which I personally find a reasonable swap as I have a strictly limited need for bales of fibre but can take about as much Indian food as you care to shovel at me.
The oldest of the Bradford curry houses, I'm told, and certainly one of the best and cheapest, is the Kashmir, just up the road from the Alhambra. There is a proper restaurant upstairs, with white tablecloths, gleaming cutlery and poised, helpful waiters, but aficionados descend to the basement where you sit with strangers at long Formica-topped tables. This place is so hard core that they don't bother with cutlery. You just scoop the food in with hunks of nan bread and messy fingers. For г3 I had a small feast that was rich, delicious and so hot that it made my fillings sizzle.
Afterwards, bloated and sated and with a stomach bubbling away like a heated beaker in a mad-scientist movie, I stepped out into the Bradford evening and wondered what to do with myself. It was just after six o'clock on a Saturday evening, but the place felt dead.
I was acutely and uncomfortably aware that my home and dear family were just over the next range of hills. For some reason I had it in my head that it would be cheating to go home now with the trip half finished, but then I thought: Sod it. I'm cold and lonesome and I'm not about to spend a night in a hotel twenty miles from my own home. So I walked to Forster Square Station, took a rattling,
What a joy it is to arrive after dark at a snug-looking house, its windows filled with welcoming light, and know that it is yours and that inside is your family. I walked up the drive and looked through the kitchen window, and there they all were gathered round the kitchen table playing Monopoly, bless their wholesome little hearts. I stared at them for ages, lost in a glow of affection and admiration and feeling like Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life when he gets to spy on his own life. And then I went in.
Now I can't possibly write about this sort of thing without making it sound like an episode from The Waltons, so what I'm going to do is distract your attention for a moment from this animated and heartwarming reunion in a Yorkshire Dales kitchen and tell you a true but irrelevant story.
In the early 1980s, I was freelancing a lot in my spare time, principally for airline magazines. I got the idea to do an article on remarkable coincidences and sent off a query letter to one of these publications, which expressed serious interest and promised payment of $500 if published - a sum of money I could very handily have done with. But when I came to write the article, I realized that, although I had plenty of information about scientific studies into the probabilities of coincidence, I didn't have nearly enough examples of remarkable coincidences themselves to give the article sufficient zip or to fill 1,500 words of space. So I wrote a letter to the magazine saying I wouldn't be able to deliver and left it on the top of my typewriter to post the next day. Then I dressed myself in respectable clothing and drove to work at The Times.
Now in those days, Philip Howard, the kindly literary editor (I would, of course, say that, in view of his position, but in fact it is true: he's a proper gent), used to hold book sales for the staff a couple of times a year when his office became so filled with review copies that he'd lost his desk. These were always exciting occasions because you could acquire stacks of books for practically nothing. He charged something like 25p for hardbacks and lOp for paperbacks, and then passed the proceeds to the Cirrhosis Foundation or some other charity dear to the hearts of journalists. On this particular day, I arrived at work to find a notice by the lifts announcing a book sale at 4 p.m. It was 3.55, so I dumped my coatat my desk and eagerly hastened to his chamber. The place was already full of mingling people. I stepped into the melee and what should be the very first book my eyes fell on but a paperback called Remarkable True Coincidences. How's that for a remarkable true coincidence? But here's the uncanny thing. I opened it up and found that not only did it offer all the material I could possibly need, but the very first coincidence it discussed concerned a man named Bryson.
I've been telling this story for years in pubs and every time I've finished it, the people to whom I've told it have nodded thoughtfully for quite some time, then turned to each other and said: 'You know, it occurs to me there's another way to get to Barnsley without going anywhere near the M62. You know the Happy Eater roundabout at Guiseley? Well, if you take the second turning there. ..'
So anyway, I spent three days at home, immersed in the chaos of domestic life, happy as a puppy - romping with the little ones, bestowing affection indiscriminately, following my wife from room to room, doing widdles on a sheet of newspaper in the kitchen corner. I cleaned out my rucksack, attended to the mail, strode proprietorially around the garden, savoured the bliss of waking up each morning in my own bed.
I couldn't face the prospect of departing again so soon, so I decided to stay on a bit longer and make a couple of day trips. Thus it was that on the third morning I picked up my good friend and neighbour, the kindly and gifted artist David Cook - it is his painting that graces the jacket of this book - and went with him for a day's walk through Saltaire and Bingley, his native turf. It was awfully nice to have some company for a change and interesting to see this little corner of Yorkshire through the eyes of someone who had grown up in it.
I had never properly been to Saltaire before and what a splendid surprise it was to me. Saltaire, in case you don't know about it, is a model factory community built by Titus Salt between 1851 and 1876. It is a little difficult to know what to make of old Titus. On the one hand he was one of that unattractive breed of teetotalling, self-righteous, God-fearing industrialists in which the nineteenth century seemed to specialize - a man who didn't want merely to employ his workers but to own them. Workers at his mill were expected to live in his houses, worship in his church, follow his
precepts to the letter. He would not allow a pub in the village and so saddled the local park with stern restrictions regarding noise, smoking, the playing of games and other indecorous activities that there was not much fun to be had in it. Workers were allowed to take boats out on the river - but only, for some reason, so long as there were never more than four out at any one time. Whether they Uked it or not, in short, they were compelled to be sober, industrious and quiet.
On the other hand, Salt showed a rare degree of enlightenment in terms of social welfare, and there is no question that his employees enjoyed cleaner, healthier, more comfortable living conditions than almost any other industrial workers in the world at that time.
Though it has since been swallowed up by the great sprawl that is the Leeds-Bradford conurbation, when it was built Saltaire stood in clean, open countryside - a vast change from the unhealthy stew of central Bradford, where in the 1850s there were more brothels than churches and not a single yard of covered sewers. From bleak and grimy back-to-backs, Salt's workers came to airy, spacious cottages, each with a yard, private gas supply and at least two bedrooms. It must have seemed a very Eden.
On a sloping site overlooking the River Aire and Leeds to Liverpool Canal, Salt built a massive mill known as the Palace of Industry - in its day the largest factory in Europe - spreading over nine acres and graced with a striking Italianate campanile modelled on that of Santa Maria Gloriosa in Venice. He additionally built a park, a church, an institute for 'conversation, refreshment and education', a hospital, a school and 850 trim and tidy stone houses on a formal grid of cobbled streets, most of them named for Salt's wife and eleven children. The institute was perhaps the most remarkable of these undertakings. Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had manual workers been given a more lavish opportunity to better themselves, an opportunity that many scores enthusiastically seized. One James Waddington, an untutored woolsorter, became a world authority on linguistics and a leading light of the Phonetic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
Today Saltaire remains miraculously intact, though the factory has long since ceased to manufacture cloth and the houses are now privately owned. One floor of the factory contains a wonderful -and free - permanent exhibition of the works of David Hockney, and the rest is given over to retail space selling the most extraordinary range of designer clothes, posh and stylish housewares, books and arty postcards. It was a kind of miracle to find this place
- this yuppie heaven - inhabiting a forgotten corner of metropolitan Bradford. And yet it seemed to be doing very well.
David Cook and I had an unhurried look around the gallery - I had never paid much attention to Hockney, but I'll tell you this: the boy can draw - then wandered through the streets of former workers' cottages, all of them snug and trim and lovingly preserved, before striking off through Roberts Park to Shipley Glen, a steep wooded dell leading to a sweep of open common land of the sort where you can usually find people exercising their dogs. It looks as if it has been wild and untended for ever, but in fact a century ago this was the site of a hugely successful amusement park
- one of the world's first.
Among the many attractions were an aerial gondola ride, a big dipper and what was billed as The Largest, Wildest, Steepest Toboggan Slide Ever Erected on Earth'. I've seen pictures of these, filled with ladies with parasols and mustachioed men in stiff collars, and they do actually look pretty exciting, particularly the toboggan ride, which ran for perhaps a quarter of a mile down a formidably steep and perilous hill. One day in 1900, as a earful of smartly dressed tobogganers were being hauled up the hill to be despatched on another hair-raising descent, the winch cable snapped, sending the passengers hurtling out of control to a messy but exciting death at the bottom, and that was pretty much the end of the Shipley Glen Amusement Park. Today all that's left of these original thrills is the poky Glen Tramway, which goes up and down a nearby slope in a discreet and sedate fashion, as it has since 1895, but among the tall grass we did find a remnant of old track from the original toboggan ride, which thrilled us mildly.
The whole of this area is a kind of archaeological site of the not-too-distant past. A mile or so away, up an overgrown track, is the site of Milner Field, an ornate palace of stone built by Titus Salt Junior in 1870 at a time when the Salt family fortunes seemed boundless and perpetually secure. But weren't they in for a surprise? In 1893, the textile trade went into a sudden slump, leaving the Salts dangerously overextended, and the family abruptly lost control of the firm. In consternation and shame, they had to sell the house, mill and associated holdings. Then began a strange
and sinister series of events. Without apparent exception all the subsequent owners of Milner Field suffered odd and devastating setbacks. One whacked himself in the foot with a golf club and died when the wound turned gangrenous. Another came home to find his young bride engaged in an unseemly bout of naked bedtop wrestling rwith a business associate. He shot the associate or possibly both of them - accounts vary - but in any case he certainly made a mess of the bedroom and was taken off to have his neck stretched.
Before long the house developed a reputation as a place where you could reliably expect to come a cropper. People moved in and abruptly moved out again, with ashen faces and terrible wounds. By 1930, when the house went on the market one last time, no buyer could be found for it. It stayed empty for twenty years, and finally in 1950 it was pulled down. Now the site is overgrown and weedy, and you could walk past it without ever guessing that one of the finest houses in the North had once stood here. But if you poke about in the tall grass, as we did now, you can find one of the old conservatory floors, made of neatly patterned black and white tiles. It was strangely reminiscent of the Roman mosaic I had seen at Winchcombe, and scarcely less astonishing.
It seemed remarkable to think that a century ago Titus Salt Junior could have stood on this spot, in a splendid house, looking down the Aire Valley to the distant but formidable Salt's Mill, clanging away and filling the air with steamy smoke, and beyond it the sprawl of the richest centre of woollen trade in the world, and that now it could all be gone. What would old Titus Senior think, I wondered, if you brought him back and showed him that the family fortune was spent and his busy factory was now full of stylish chrome housewares and wooftah paintings of naked male swimmers with glistening buttocks?
We stood for a long time on this lonely summit. You can see for miles across Airedale from up there, with its crowded towns and houses climbing up the steep hillsides to the bleak upland fells, and I found myself wondering, as I often do when I stand on a northern hillside, what all those people in all those houses do. There used to be scores of mills all up and down Airedale - ten or more in Bingley alone - and now they are virtually all gone, torn down to make room for supermarkets or converted into heritage centres, blocks of flats or shopping complexes. French's Mill, Bingley's last surviving textile factory, had closed a year or two before and now sat forlorn with broken windows.One of the great surprises to me upon moving North was discovering the extent to which it felt like another country. Partly it was from the look and feel of the North - the high, open moors and big skies, the wandering drystone walls, the grimy mill towns, the snug stone villages of the Dales and Lakes - and partly, of course, it was to do with the accents, the different words, the refreshing if sometimes startling frankness of speech. Partly it was also to do with the way Southerners and Northerners were so extraordinarily, sometimes defiantly, ignorant of the geography of the other end of the country. It used to astonish me, working on newspapers in London, how often you could call out a question like 'Which of the Yorkshires is Halifax in?' and be met with a tableful of blank frowns. And when I moved North and told people that I'd previously lived in Surrey near Windsor, I often got the same look - a kind of nervous uncertainty, as if they were afraid I was going to say, 'Now you show me on the map just where that is.'
Mostly what differentiated the North from the South, however, was the exceptional sense of economic loss, of greatness passed, when you drove through places like Preston or Blackburn or stood on a hillside like this. If you draw an angled line between Bristol and the Wash, you divide the country into two halves with roughly 27 million people on each side. Between 1980 and 1985, in the southern half they lost 103,600 jobs. In the northern half in the same period they lost 1,032,000 jobs, almost exactly ten times as many. And still the factories are shutting. Turn on the local television news any evening and at least half of it will be devoted to factory closures (and the other half will be about a cat stuck up a tree somewhere; there is truly nothing direr than local television aews). So I ask again: what do all those people in all those houses do - and what, more to the point, will their children do?
We walked out of the grounds along another track towards Eldwick, past a large and flamboyant gatehouse, and David made a crestfallen noise. 'I used to have a friend who lived there,' he said. Now it was crumbling, its windows and doorways bricked up, a sad waste of a fine structure. Beside it, an old walled garden was neglected and overgrown.
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