If you didn't know where the Santus Toffee Works was located, you could find it by smell. It's tucked away on Dorning Street between Wigan Wallgate station and the Pear Tree pub and the whole street is suffused with a heavy, sickly-sweet perfume. 'What's that smell?' asked my friends Anita and Tony on a recent visit to Wigan. 'It's gorgeous.' And I suppose it is if you're just passing through or you're six years old. But what must it be like to live next door to Uncle Joe? Every day must be a kind of Christmas morning, cheering at first and then somehow cloying and claustrophobic, like living off selection boxes for ever. It must get into your washing and drive your dog mad.
Anita and Tony are 'in telly'. They wanted to see Wigan because they were developing a project set in the town. The sun was shining as we met at Wigan North Western station – we have two, you see – and I took them for a stroll in what Bill Bryson was 'truly astounded to find ... a handsome and well-maintained town centre'. No need to be shocked, Bill. Your predecessor Celia Fiennes, a travel writer of 1698, found it 'a pretty market town built of stone and brick'. You could never call Pemps pretty, a nightclub not far from Santus Toffee Works. It looks like an abattoir, or possibly a nuclear bunker for minor North Korean civil servants, a shuttered and windowless hellhole. Who would think then that this was once, maybe still is, one of the greatest nightclubs in the north, ruled as a personal fiefdom by the formidable Barbara, who stood guard in fur coat and riding crop and personally chose who, from the enormous queue, would be blessed with admittance. Here you could dance to Gwen Guthrie, Mantronix and Grandmaster Flash till dawn, at which point, if you were one of Barbara's chosen few, she would send out for bacon sandwiches for breakfast. Now that's a nightclub, Peter Stringfellow and Ministry Of Sound.
Cross the road from Pemps and you're in King Street. In an attempt to make this fabled, barbarous thoroughfare more Bourbon Street than Bigg Market, the council have inlaid a kind of plaque featuring a guitar and some musical notes in the pavement. A broken bottle of WKD and a half-eaten doner would have been more in keeping. Even at ten on a fine sunny morning, just the ambience of the street makes me feel slightly drunk and weirdly in the mood for a fight and a quick shag. This is where Wigan comes to let off steam in one of several dozen clubs and bars. If it's not a bar, it's a takeaway. One sports huge and hugely incongruous black and white pictures of Audrey Hepburn and Bob Marley. If it's not either of those, it's a solicitor's. Wonder if they stay open late at weekends?
Market Street is where celebrated Wigan Casino DJs Russ Winstanley and Richard Searling had their Northern Soul record shop (called, cryptically, Russ and Richard's). Every Saturday afternoon I spent my pocket money here on ultra-obscure seven-inch singles on long-defunct US labels. In the eighties, it became an indie record shop under the auspices of Alan, the town's leading skatepunk. He called it Alan's. We're crazy like that in Wigan. Here in the mid-eighties, I spent my part-time lecturer's wages on Jesus And Mary Chain and Shop Assistants records. I always enjoyed that continuity. As we turn into Market Street, I'm saddened that the shop appears to be gone.
There's a record shop across the road, though, so I pop into Elite Vinyl (Dance Music Specialists) to ask about Alan. The girl in Elite Vinyl has, like most twenty-first-century Wigan girls, a sunbed tan so deep and chocolate brown she wouldn't look out of place in Rawalpindi. She tells us, in an accent soft and broad and wide enough to gently punt on, that Alan now has a bike shop on Market Street.
The tail has wagged the dog. Wagged the dog right off, in fact. Alan always had skates and bikes as a sideline; now they've become his bread and butter. There's not a twelve-inch copy of 'Sheila Take A Bow' to be seen. I haven't seen Alan for ten years but we start talking as if he'd just popped into the other room to put the kettle on. He makes some wry references to my 'media superstardom'. He talks about how his grandma spilt tea on his old Slade albums. He talks about buying Bowie's David Live for £9.99 and leaving the sticker on as evidence of the unbelievable cost of nearly £10 for a record. He tells me about Frank Sidebottom's recent triumphal return to live work at Darwen Library and how this week he's playing a Hotpot Supper in Leyland. Not for the first time on these trips, I get a real pang of homesickness. I want to come back here and eat hotpot in Leyland watching Frank Sidebottom. I never want to queue for the lifts at Goodge Street Tube station again.
We have lunch at Mr Chips of Hallgate. There is a 'sit up and beg' bike advertising the shop propped outside. The ladies have white hats and smile like the sun coming out and call me love. The actual sun does come out and Tony, Anita and I decide to sit outside at some pavement tables. They have chips, steak pie and gravy. I have another great northern delicacy, the steak pudding. I once asked for one of these in a chip shop in Bermondsey and the proprietor looked at me as if I was mad. 'A facking pudding? What, a Christmas facking pudding?'
A steak pudding, as any fule kno, is a sort of dome of suet filled with minced beef and gravy. It is sometimes known as a Babbies Yed (Baby's Head) for its resemblance to that soft, vulnerable appendage. Containing an adult male's recommended calories for a week, they are not high on any nutritionist's '5-A-Day' list. But when you really fancy one, nothing else will do. This lunchtime, I really fancy one. We eat with plastic forks in balmy spring sunshine; across the street, the Memorial Gardens are a riot of blossom, where for generations winos and truants have drunk industrial-strength ciders from bottles the size of U-boats. All is well with the world.
Sated and happy, we drive out to Skelmersdale, where I used to earn those part-time lecturer's wages back in the mid-1980s. Because of its Brutalist architecture, concrete walkways and houses on stilts, and the defiantly anti-Thatcher culture of the area, we used to call it the People's Republic of Skelmersdale.
Skem goes back a long way, though, to the ninth century when it was settled by a Viking called Skjalmar, hence Skjalmar's Dale. It was long established by the time it featured in the Domesday Book. 'Old Skem' is how locals now refer to the typical Lancashire pit village which in the sixties became absorbed within a huge new town built to accommodate the overspill from Liverpool slum clearances. Sociologically, it's fascinating; the red Ribble single-decker bus turns a corner just through Upholland and suddenly you go from Lancashire into Liverpool, from wild woollyback badlands to Scouse street life.
Skem sits astride the ghostly M58, Britain's most underused motorway, and the whole town is a fork wound round the spaghetti strands of various bewildering traffic systems. It's the town of a thousand roundabouts, the largest of which is known as 'Half Mile Island'. There's not a traffic light to be seen. When I worked here, the locals had a mildly politically incorrect joke about the lack of Asian families in the town. Apparently it was because there were no corners for them to open shops on. Nothing thrived here in the seventies and eighties. When the subsidies ran out, all the major employers left town and abandoned the people to years of poverty, drug abuse and crime. Now those metaphorical green shoots of optimism can be glimpsed. The shopping concourse or 'connie' has been cleaned up; most of the shops are open and busy; the indigenous packs of scrawny wild dogs are gone.
I've not been back for nearly twenty years and as we begin to negotiate the ramps and slip roads near the town centre, I feel a strange sensation in my chest. I loved it here. Every economic and political cudgel had been used to bring these people to their knees and they simply would not submit. You threw them out of work and they responded in a variety of ways. Some of them signed on, went underground and smoked dope all day listening to Pink Floyd's Meddle. Some of them became, shall we say, entrepreneurs in the town's thriving black economy. Others, from sixteen to sixty, single mums, scallies out of school and car workers thrown on the scrapheap like last year's Lada, decided to go back to college, which is where I came in.
I can see it ahead of me, the college. Here I spent afternoons talking about Max Weber and Emile Durkheim – sociologists, not Bayern Munich wingbacks – and nights at wild parties in council flats and estate pubs. I was in m
y early twenties and most of my students were my age. It's still the most rock and roll job I've ever had. Like I say, I loved it.
There's a new receptionist now and feeling a tad self-conscious I try and justify being here by asking after some of my old colleagues. Notorious roue Keith Platt is gone, leaving a trail of betting slips behind him. Gareth the Marxist Mathematician is gone (two years ago, headship somewhere probably). Lovely Pat, the gentle Scouser with the waist-length hair, is gone. All gone. Would I like to leave a number? No thanks. Time to move on, I think.
On the edge of town, unsignposted and shy, is another symbol of the town's spirit. You wouldn't have Skem down as a religious citadel, a place of pilgrimage, a Lourdes or a Mecca. But it is the British headquarters of a major world religion, one that has contributed a great deal to the town's fortunes and for its pains has been left high and dry by its parent church.
Followers of Transcendental Meditation or TM (or, as it's a trademark, TM) tend to get chortled at on a regular basis. This is due largely to their belief in something called Yogic Flying. From what I've seen of it, Yogic Flying should probably be called Really Energetic Yogic Cross-Legged Jumping. I'm loath to join in the chortling, though. For one thing, some of the chortlers believe pretty rum stuff of their own, such as virgins having babies who can rise from the dead or that cutting bits off your baby's genitals tells God that you love them or something. A spot of low-level flying seems fairly believable and humane by comparison. You pays your spiritual money and you takes your choice from the range of arcane magic on offer, as far as I'm concerned.
I have other reasons for feeling indulgent about TM. George Harrison was into it and if you were in The Beatles you can pretty much do what you like in my book. Also, TM has been rather good to Skem. When the Maharishi's people came in 1980, no one had a shred of faith in the town. Now looking around the gleaming new Stansted-airport-style shopping centre, a far cry from the grim old connie, there are no vacant outlets and hardly any spare business space in the town. The Maharishi European Sidhaland, as the Skem TM community is officially known, has even been awarded Best Practice in Urban Regeneration by BURA, the British Urban Regeneration Association.
I arrived in town five years after the TMs did and by then 'the trannies' had gone from being thought of as freaks to fondly regarded local curiosities. It was rumoured that the good vibes the TMs generated through meditation had brought down the crime rate. More practically, Skemmers welcomed the cash and jobs they brought to town: the gym, a business centre, new houses and, most significant of all, a new school.
The Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment has been the TM's big, unqualified success in the community. It's housed in a lovely stone barn in a quiet corner of Skem. As a school, it's completely non-selective, which makes its dazzling academic record even more amazing. Anna Selby, in The Times magazine of September 1998, 'watched in disbelief as a class of eight- and nine-year-olds went into their classroom after playtime, sat at their desks and started working before their teacher arrived'. Three years ago, every member of Years 10 and 11 won or was runner-up in a national poetry competition. Last year all the pupils got ten or more GCSEs at C grade or above, one of a handful of schools in the country to achieve a one hundred per cent top pass rate. It ranks consistently in the top 2.5 per cent nationwide in league tables, a ranking that puts Eton and Harrow to shame. Anecdotally, I can add that a friend of mine's daughter, a timid, introverted little girl who was struggling in the local secondaries, has blossomed since attending the TM school. Wags can chuckle at Yogic Flying but no one can belittle the achievements of this school, where the kids meditate as part of their daily routine. No one here is worried about knives or truancy. Maybe John Lennon was right and the Maharishi allegedly did try to put his hand up Mia Farrow's skirt in Rishikesh. So what? Lennon was an old fraud too. He got an airport. The Maharishi gets a really cool, successful school.
Half a mile away from the school is the Golden Dome, built the year after I left town and something the 'trannies' are touchingly proud of. It cost approximately £400,000, was inaugurated on 19 March 1988 and is a 10,000-acre space where between fifty and a hundred people start and end each day with a spot of meditation. Yes, there's some Yogic Flying here, apparently on designated flight paths so that you don't get nasty mid-air collisions. They say it is full of a 'lively silence'.
It seems the current Maharishi could do with lightening up a little. In a froth over Tony Blair's role in George Bush's Middle Eastern adventures, he has ordered the cessation of all TM teaching in Britain, describing us as a 'scorpion nation'. This seems harsh, since he's not done the same thing to America itself. I guess the yankee dollar is stronger than his Eastern principles. Many of Skem's 400-strong TM community, not unreasonably, wonder why their home country has been singled out and the US left alone. Whisper it, but many are simply carrying on as if nothing has happened. Good for them, I say, and good for Skem. I'll come back again in another twenty years and see how you're getting on. By then I hope to see you all sailing gently over the connie.
* * *
Skem scallies are West Lancastrians, eyes turned to Liverpool and the coast. They think of the whole hinterland of East Lancashire as an undulating moorland dotted with dark, sooty towns and villages populated by bucolic dolts. Accrington, Blackburn, Bolton, Colne, Nelson, Oldham, Ramsbottom, Rochdale, Wigan; a rolling rhotic mantra of Peter Sallis vowels and gently dupable woollybacks.
I can't think of a more 'wool' way to travel than a tram. Except maybe a pit pony. Today, I'm sitting on a tram en route to just such a town, a real dyed-in-the-wool woollyback town where the people eat unspeakable parts of animals and watch the rain sheet in from the Pennine hills.
You can tell a real native of Shrewsbury by the fact that he says Shrew as in the little vole thing rather than as in Shrove Tuesday. East Midlanders say Durby not Darby for Derby. Only an out-of-towner says Theydon Bois as in the French for Wood rather than the English for Boys. These are shibboleths, markers of identities, and generally the more refined the pronunciations the more obvious it is that, well, you're not from round these parts, are you, boy? Or maybe Bwah.
My tram is taking me to Bury. Not Berry. Not the fruit. Not what you do with dead people. Burry. As in... Well, anyway, it's a very nice tram though its proper and rather soulless name is the Metrolink. It's one of the new fleet that operates out of Manchester heading north and south and west to Altrincham and Bury and Eccles. We clank gently out of Piccadilly station and swing round by the new Piccadilly Gardens stop. This is Manchester's very own Berlin Wall, a daunting-looking grey concrete erection that obscures the garden completely from one side. The Mancunians I've spoken to say that the new high-luminosity lighting and towering wall have discouraged the tramps and Special Brewheads, who used to treat the gardens as their very own Groucho Club. Seen from Deansgate or a passing tram, it looks like it would only need a few Alsatians and an armed guard or two to make it look like something from Sven Hassel.
The tram leaves the city centre and passes through Crumpsall and Heaton Park before heading for the relative greenery of Bowker Vale and Besses o'th' Barn. Here a huge unruly pack of schoolkids pile aboard; young lads reeking of Lynx with puberty raging in their faces and hormonal energy to burn. Then suddenly they fall silent and meek as little lambs. Into their midst has come a girl a year or two older than them, very pretty and standing three inches taller than most of them. On her blue blazer lapel is an enamel badge reading Transport Monitor. Whenever a fight or shouting match or Lord of the Flies-style beastliness threatens to break out, a disapproving glance and a flash of her eyes is enough to silence them instantly. Whoever thought of this strategy – putting in charge of the vile little oiks a tall, clever, cute girl that they all clearly worship and are desperate to impress – is a genius. Can't we make that man or woman head of the police force?
Bury is the end of the line, a busy town buttressed by low hills. The escalator on the platform is broken and harasse
d staff are having to placate mutinous old ladies with bulging shopping trolleys returning from the fleshpots of Manchester. Quite why they bothered though is beyond me. Five minutes' walk from Bury station is a shoppers' mecca, a retail nirvana rich with exotic bargains, a fabled bazaar, a veritable souk of the north. Come with me to Bury Market.
Pies and Prejudice Page 16
