Trevor Hoyle
Reversing Orwell’s most famous route He went North looking for Wigan and inequality; my trip would take me in the opposite direction – from Wigan to Bognor Regis
B
e careful what you throw away. Clearing out some old files, dumping them into a waste bin, I noticed a label that read, The Road to Bognor Regis. The title stirred a long-lost memory. I retrieved the battered folder, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to revisit what my idealistic younger self had been up to thirty-odd years ago. The top sheet – a letter to my publisher, John Calder – brought it all back. It was the god-awful 1980s. The UK was being throttled and Thatcherised to death, what with the miners’ strikes, the poll tax, the headlines shrieking about the North-South Divide. Two of my novels: The Man Who Travelled on Motorways (might have been a prescient title for Dominic Cummings’ autobiography) and the dystopian Vail, the latter being my state-of-the-nation screech from the heart, had been published by Calder’s. This is the letter I wrote to him in November 1986.
Dear John,
The Road to Bognor Regis In January 1936 George Orwell set off on a seven-week tour of the industrial areas of the north of England. As an intellectual upper-middle class observer his purpose was to investigate and report on the conditions of the working class, and to bring to the attention of the disinterested, relatively affluent south the plight of millions of working people in the “forgotten” half of the country in the depths of the Depression. Orwell was, amazingly, only thirty-three when he wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, which was published by Gollancz in 1937. In 1986 millions of people are suffering the social consequences of economic change; and once again there is in the north a mood of bitterness, apathy and despair – a feeling that central government and The South, while perhaps better informed than before, are really just as disinterested and uncaring as they were fifty years ago. As someone who was born in Lancashire (where Orwell did much of his research) and who still lives here, these changes are for me an everyday living reality, affecting people I know, and not just the
26 ColdType | Mid-June 2020 | www.coldtype.net
distant, abstract result of economic policies. The North-Side Divide might be a handy cliché for broadcasters and newspaper editors; for those of us on the “wrong” side of the line it’s more than just a glib sound-bite on the six o’clock news. An opposing and (as far as I know) original approach to the task Orwell set himself would be, quite simply, to reverse the process. Instead of following in Orwell’s footsteps and reiterating the tired familiar tale of gloom and bleak despair in our northern towns and cities, perhaps it would be more useful and illuminating if a northerner set off on a tour of the south, and by inference rather than direct comparison, obliquely demonstrated the differences and inequalities which divide the two halves of the nation. In just the same way that Orwell sought to convey a highly subjective, impressionistic vision of the north, its conditions and its people, my idea is not to produce a colourful travelogue, or a catalogue of facts and figures, but to feel free to rearrange times and places and events to suit the narrative structure; and, again like Orwell, to employ the novelist’s technique of combining several individuals into a
