You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  It was foggy, it was cold, and at 10.30 a.m. it was utterly deserted – the first and only gathering of townspeople I encountered was a crowd of females, old and young, piling purposefully aboard two coaches parked outside a civic centre. It looked for all the world like the evacuation of the womenfolk, first phase of full withdrawal from a town deemed unfit for purpose. The men they were leaving behind, all six of them, seemed aimless and bereft. Two were walking stout little dogs across the empty car park outside a Massive Clearance Sale of Ex-Hire Formal Menswear. Two were wobbling around a playing field on what looked very much like their sons’ mountain bikes, knees out, fags in mouth. And two had devised a pastime that shall define Hartlepool for me whenever I think of the town again. Why don’t you give it a try? All you’ll need are two baseball bats, two cricket balls, string, plenty of gaffer tape, and a fierce belief in pain as the only cure for boredom.

  I’d asked Ozzy to direct me to Jutland Road, having chanced upon it in a local man’s Facebook request for input into the Hartlepool Monopoly board he was designing. ‘I know there are plenty of scruffy streets, but don’t know what order to put them in.’ There was one constant in the replies: anyone looking for an Old Kent Road need look no further than the street most knew simply as ‘Jutty’. It didn’t seem up to much at first: blameless, well-sized pebble-dashed semis, set back from the road, a Sky dish on every chimney. The first suggestions of a darker side emerged with the chicanes, elaborate deterrents to anti-social driving habits, there in essence to take the joy out of joyriding. Then I spotted CCTV towers pointing down at me from all sides, the cameras secured in heavy-mesh cages, above a medieval array of spike-tipped anti-climb deterrents. But when, at length, Ozzy announced that I had raiched my f-f-f-fookin dustinoition, the satellite-decreed centre of Jutland Road, I wasn’t paying attention. Blocking the street ahead, oblivious to me or the watching eyes above, two stocky men in their thirties were lethargically belabouring each other with home-crafted maces, assembled from the components listed above. A swing, a yielding thwump of bodily contact, a low grunt of discomfort. Repeat.

  Loath to alert them with a provocative toot of Craig’s whiny horn, I watched and waited, in thrall to their vacant, workmanlike demeanour. No snarls, no sneers, no deranged cackles; one was even wearing a high-visibility jacket, which bolstered the impression that they were engaged in some tiresome blue-collar obligation, like welding window grilles onto an abandoned factory, or half-demolishing a street of houses, or pop-riveting a Londoner’s nose to the bonnet of his Austin Maestro. Swing, thwump, grunt. It was simply the sort of thing people did in Hartlepool when there wasn’t a fictional monkey to not string up. After half a dozen exchanges, one took a mighty blow to the neck, which had him holding a hand up to request a brief recuperative intermission. At this point his yellow-jacketed opponent noted my presence, and waved me idly through, as if I’d been waiting to drive aboard a cross-channel ferry. As I gathered speed I glanced in my mirror and saw his head pitch abruptly to one side and his knees buckle gently beneath him. It might not have been quite what the curry-house couples had meant, but I knew what I had witnessed: a skull-smiting three-pointer in the Hartlepool Mindgame.

  The sky had spent all morning knitting itself into a heavy, grey blanket, and heading out of Hartlepool this began to leak weather that Craig’s porous underpinnings eagerly blotted up. In this manner I was made aware that the sole of my left shoe now sported a hole. Having stopped at a petrol station to change into new socks, I was compelled to first tackle the conundrum of the unopenable boot in which they were entombed. Pleasingly, my cure-all remedy instantly sorted the boot, even if effecting it did mean having to buy another can of WD40 to supplement the one already in there. Duly inspired, I opened the bonnet and hissily lubricated the choke mechanism, more familiar to me as the entire engine bay. In the process I blundered across the dipstick: withdrawn and inspected, it bore no more than a black fingernail crescent at its tip. I felt exactly as I had when some student-era neighbours went away and I realised three nights on that I’d forgotten to feed their cat – in fact, worse, as I couldn’t look back on seventy-two hours of wanton debauchery to offset the guilt. It required almost two litres of distressingly expensive lubricant (‘Haven’t you got anything for low-performance engines?’) to get Craig back up to his mark. When I checked the manual I found I’d been working him like a pit pony: he’d been creaking through the agony with less than a litre of relief in his sump. It was difficult to know what was more impressive – my criminal neglect, or the dedicated incompetence required to design and manufacture an engine that after just 16,000 miles of social and domestic pottering was already burning oil like an aged tramp steamer.

  It really didn’t take much to top the charts in the mid Seventies. Here is Wikipedia’s encapsulation of the 1976 worldwide hit that seeped dismally forth from the speakers as I headed away into the sodden coastal mist: ‘The story within “Disco Duck” centres around a man at a dance party who is overcome by the urge to get up and “get down” in a duck-like manner.’ Weave that epic fable around a studiously insipid rent-a-boogie riff, throw in some sub-Donald quackery and you had yourself a Billboard number one.

  What you didn’t have, being a Memphis-based DJ, is a song with any British connections whatsoever. My in-car jukebox promised death by a thousand cuts, but halfway through ‘Disco Duck’ I realised this was one little stab to the eardrum that I need never have endured. When a jab at the next-track button unleashed the plinky, parpy opening strains of ‘I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester’, I felt like cranking the volume up to the max, winding down the window and filling the mist with a chest-swelling roar: Absent people of Cleveland and Durham’s defunct mining settlements, this terrible, terrible music is ours and ours alone!

  The fog thickened; I slowed down and clicked the high-intensity rear-light button, savouring the intrepid thrill that doing so unfailingly instils. ‘Rear fogs activated, Captain. Steady as she goes.’ For an hour or more there was nothing to see but the occasional misty reminder that up here the seaside was – or had been – a workplace, not a day-trip destination. A skip depot fronting a mountain of landfill rubble that loomed above the dunes; greasy, grey vessels on a greasy, grey horizon; a horseshoe sweep of sand bestrewn with old tyres and twisted sections of gantry. Then the weather closed in, hard, and it was just screechy wipers, Geri Halliwell and an oncoming convoy of battered lorries piled high with rusty scrap, as if the post-industrial wastelands ahead were being hastily dismantled and taken away before I arrived.

  Somewhere out to my rain-lashed, fog-shrouded right lay Blackhall Colliery beach, the most thrillingly desolate and despoiled location in all of Britain. It was there that the 1971 classic Get Carter romped to its feel-good finale, one introduced with Michael Caine pursuing a Scottish gangster across the blackened sands. Caine, as Carter, presently batters his quarry to death and heaves the corpse into a coal-slag hopper; Carter then fulfils the film’s entitled imperative by being got as he strolls breezily back across the shoreline, shot square in the forehead by a distant, faceless hitman. But even as the credits roll and the North Sea surf caresses Michael’s gingery curls, the contemporary viewer is still struck dumb by the spectacle bridging the two murders: did I really just see that coal-slag hopper unload itself straight into the sea?

  Indeed you did, and if you’d stood on any east Durham beach in 1971 you’d have seen conveyor chains of coal-slag doing the same, right around the clock. Several million tons of the stuff had rendered this entire stretch of coast one of the most polluted in the world by 1981, when Blackhall Colliery was closed down. Elsewhere in Durham the practice lingered briefly on. In 1924 the county had been home to 304 pits, employing 170,000 men. By 1969 that was down to 34 and 36,000 respectively. The graph-line had been heading one way fast for sixty years, and Margaret Thatcher’s government did no more than usher it to the axis. Today not a single County Durham mine survives.

  In thinning mist I drove now i
nto one of the more feted casualties, a town that abruptly sprang forth from the tumbling coastal hillsides of east Durham in 1910, and on a wet December noon a century on was melting back into them, earth to earth, slag to slag, coal ashes to coal ashes. To enthusiasts of statistical calamity, Easington is notorious as the English town with the highest per-capita rates of obesity, unemployment and long-term sickness. Easington’s pensioners are the poorest in Britain. Two out of five of its adult men claim invalidity benefits. By whatever basket of dispiriting data employed to arrive at the conclusion, it is the most economically deprived town in the United Kingdom. But to members of the Moore household, with all respectful apologies to its woebegone citizenry, Easington is known only as a place of glory and celebration. For it was through the front door of an Easington miner’s home, as reimagined on a West End stage for the musical production of Billy Elliot, that my son dashed three nights a week for nine heady months in 2006, fixing the Equity-certified NUM strikers therein with a look of imploring horror, then captivating full house after breathless full house with a dynamic and flawlessly regional announcement: ‘The police are coming down the street – they’ve kicked in Jimmy Milburn!’

  The depth and vigour my son brought to the cameo role of ‘Tall Boy’ proved a mixed blessing. Victim of his own Day-Lewisian versatility, he was also called upon to portray the pivotal martyrdom of ‘Posh Boy’, accosted later in the production by the eponymous young Easingtonian, and slapped, kneed, headbutted or rabbit-punched, depending on which particular Billy was on duty. In any event, I felt something of a bond with Easington, though sadly one liable to earn me the Posh Boy treatment had I opted to reveal it.

  Easington Colliery mine was one of the last to be opened in Durham; the coal seams here headed straight out under the North Sea, and tapping into them from the clifftop pithead required eleven years of grim and awkward toil. Specialist German engineers were called in to penetrate the watery strata using an experimental freezing technique: one worker fell down a shaft thus treated, and emerged three years later entombed in a block of ice.

  A deep, dark hole in the ground is a compromised working environment, and there were few deeper and darker. Easington’s miners would end up hewing coal from seams 1,700 feet under the seabed, 8 miles off the coast. But if Easington was never going to be a great place to work, in Edwardian Britain there were few better places for a miner and his family to live. By virtue of being built at a time when our industrialists could call upon an informed and sympathetic awareness of what was bad about old mining towns, and were blessed with the cash and philanthropic decency to put up a really good new one, Easington Colliery – attached to one of a cluster of blue-riband ‘super pits’ built along the east Durham coast – was assured of a gilded start in life.

  Sited just down the hill from the old Saxon-founded village of Easington, the town was a top-of-the-range, state-of-the-art new-build, with the full set of optional civic extras: a working men’s club, a miners’ hall, even a cinema – an extraordinary embellishment for that time. The terraced houses were twice the size of their typical Victorian predecessors, and two imposing schools – one for girls, one for boys – went up side by side on Seaside Lane, as the high street was cheerily dubbed. Coal was king in 1910, and Easington Colliery was one of its grandest palaces.

  Mindful of the many industrial towns that had swiftly outgrown themselves – Middlesbrough wasn’t far away – Easington Colliery was future-proofed to soak up the inevitable decades of growth. I parked above the high street and looked out across what had clearly been intended as no more than phase one: lone columns of dark red terraces strode out up the wet green hills, north towards the allotments and pigeon lofts, east towards the fuzzy grey sea, still waiting for the cross-streets that would link them all together. The headstones were packed neatly into the distant far end of a huge cemetery, like the very early stages of a round of Tetris. Towering over all stood those his-’n’-hers school buildings, full-on, Harrods-turreted temples of academe.

  It was hard to accept that the community huddled beneath these gigantic, neo-baroque edifices could ever have managed the frenzy of reproduction required to fill them. It certainly couldn’t now. I hadn’t passed a soul under the age of forty by the time I walked up to the schools’ padlocked gates and looked through at the weed-pierced playground tarmac. No BOYS or GIRLS to walk in beneath the porticos thus grandly engraved, or stifle a ribald giggle by the door marked MANUAL INSTRUCTION. Easington Colliery pit closed in 1993; the two schools four years later. A survey taken twelve months afterwards established that only one in five former pupils of working age had found employment. And a decade on their schools were still looking for a job: as a weathered sign nailed high up the façade announced, the buildings remained a redevelopment opportunity.

  Just a year after Easington hauled up its first buckets of black stuff, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admirality, announced that the Royal Navy would henceforth be powered not by coal – bulky, labour-intensive, calorifically inefficient – but by oil. It was to prove a tipping point. Demand fell away, and the market for British coal in particular declined dramatically after the First World War, with the availability of cheaper foreign substitutes. Durham’s coal output peaked in 1913, and Easington would never employ more than 3,200 miners, way below the projected estimates. The twin schools, built for 1,300 children, were never more than three-quarters full, and by the Second World War were more than half empty. To the plucky band of Billys and Tall Boys roaming its lonely corridors in the early 1980s, the place would have seemed almost godforsaken.

  It felt a bit like that down Seaside Lane, home to an endless parade of small shops and perhaps half a dozen stooping female pedestrians. Easington Colliery’s population peaked at ten thousand, but its local traders now had just 2,100 heads to coif, minds to feed, hearts to clog. The usual preponderance of bookmakers and undertakers was broken up with dusty, shuttered victims of steady economic decline or blindly irrational optimism: an appliance repair shop, a mortgage broker, a chiropody clinic. I struck off down a terraced side street and at last spotted some Easingtonian males: grey-faced Jimmy Milburns and Elliot pères in dockers hats and baggy tracksuits, tinkering with small, old, cheap-to-run cars, or walking small, old, cheap-to-run dogs. Born and bred miners to a man, living 100 miles from the nearest working pit.

  I’d anticipated – OK, feared – that men like these might still be looking for someone to take it out on, their bitterness matured to violent perfection over twenty-five years. But the mood, as far as I could gauge it – from the null-and-void expressions, from the round-shouldered, silent shuffle with which everyone went about their non-business, from the way that long-abandoned premises were left to rot slowly where they stood, without the fast-tracking input of vandalism or petty theft – was one of profound resignation. The Bransholme Effect: people who’d never expected much from life, and weren’t getting it. The spark had been snuffed out of a whole community, and how bright that spark had once burnt. When the inter-war collapse in profitability reined in the mine owners’ philanthropic urges, the miners’ pooled their own meagre free time and resources. They built a home for aged miners and a welfare ground with sports pitches and a clubhouse, and organised a communal doctors’ surgery and a new bus service. Even by mining-community standards, Easington was a proud, defiant, all-for-one kind of town. You’ll never guess what happened one summer’s morning in 1984, when the colliery’s striking miners discovered that a single scab had turned up to clock on with an escort of two thousand riot police. The Milburn-avenging re-enactment catalysed by my son necessarily underplayed events.

  The 1984–85 miners’ strike was by no means Easington’s introduction to communal adversity. The town suffered horribly in the 1918 flu epidemic, and its miners endured a thirteen-week lock-out in 1921, as well as a very lean seven months during the 1926 General Strike. The colliery’s practice of tipping red-hot ash from its boilers straight on to the beach (where else?) accou
nted for a number of recklessly curious youngsters, and provided a handy navigational beacon for the Luftwaffe, who killed nine locals in a bombing raid. Above and beyond all were the self-evident occupational hazards. Two other shaft-diggers had joined their deep-frozen colleague in the churchyard before Easington Colliery had even opened, and before it closed a further 191 miners would lie beside them. Almost half were killed on 29 May 1951, when a huge explosion sent walls of flame roaring through 9 miles of deep galleries. Britain has never since endured a more deadly mining tragedy, and doubtless never will. At the end of the 1950s, annual fatality rates in the industry were half what they had been in Victorian times, yet still ran at around one death for every thousand workers. Those are not attractive odds. Would you go to a cup final knowing that eighty spectators wouldn’t get out of Wembley alive? The miners, of course, didn’t have the luxury of a choice.

  The very real risk of being killed was just one chapter in the Bumper Book of Mining Badness. In 1937, George Orwell went down three Lancashire coal mines while researching his sociological treatise The Road to Wigan Pier, and offered a swift encapsulation of the underground working environment: ‘… the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.’

  As a man who spent much of his late twenties as a full-on tramp, Orwell was no whinging milksop. Rare is the novelist who can call upon an informed experience of what it is to shovel two tons of earth in an afternoon above ground, while assessing its subterranean counterpart. Yet nothing he had experienced – or would experience, in a life so rich with voluntary suffering that most obituaries found space for the word ‘masochist’ – could ever compare with the manifold horrors Orwell witnessed down the mines. The seams were often no more than 3 feet thick, obliging miners to hack and shovel for seven hours hunched in a squat. Still worse was the simple act of reaching the coal face, which involved creeping for long miles down black passages, usually bent double, sometimes on all fours. Every miner sported ‘buttons down the back’: permanent scabs on each vertebra caused by knocking against beams. Orwell got a good look at these, as the ambient temperature in many underground areas encouraged most miners to work in nothing but clogs and kneepads. ‘By no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner,’ he concluded. ‘The work would kill me in a few weeks.’