VT Coughtrey - Skelmersdale

NOTES Skelmersdale featured in a film made by Channel 4 and shown in the series All Man (2016). See Topic 2	In attempting to describe Skelmersdale and life there, I find I'm lost for words. In fact, I don't think there are any words to describe the place - as it was in the 1980s, at least. Despite the swathes of gutted houses, it was far from uninhabited. The people who went round offering to sell the new owners everthing they had stripped out of the houses were the upper crust - those with initiative and a certain amount of intelligence. The rest of the adults, mostly unemployed, kept a low profile. They allowed their feral children and adolescents (and their neurotic dogs) to roam the streets at will, and it was these creatures who ruled the manor. I had never met anything like them before, and haven't since.
	The first thing that struck you about them was the extraordinary uniformity of their appearance. The boys (and men) were all dressed in blue anoraks of identical design, with grey trousers, and their short hair was cut into a 'wedge', as they called it, at the back. The girls, most of whom seemed to be called Joanne (pronounced 'Jwaaan') were allowed a little more variety of dress, but all had an extraordinary arrangement of hair, whereby a stack of it was piled up to one side of the head and tied up with a large ribbon. We also noticed a perpetually angry, sneering expression on the hard faces of all of them. They were totally intolerant of any deviation from the regulation appearance. This caused me a lot of problems, of course, from being kicked on the shins by infants to having abuse (and occasionally stones) hurled at me in the streets, almost every time I ventured out in the early days. There was no question of allowing Felix to attend the local school. We arranged for him to go to a small primary school outside of town, then to a secondary school in Upholland, where he began to do well.
	There is no point in trying to go into too much detail about the state of that God-forsaken place - the litter, the destruction of anything in the streets it was possible to destroy, the fires, the packs of stray dogs. I'd had a foretaste of all this some 17 years earlier in the suburbs of Liverpool (see Chapter 34) - and that's exactly where most of the people in this new town had come from. It wasn't long before small gangs of children began banging on the front door and windows (without ever smashing them, it has to be conceded). I tried at first to to grow vegetables in the garden, but these were uprooted by the monsters climbing over the fence from the alley at the back.
	Angela got a job in one of the workshops of the 'Ideal Village' of Transcendental Meditators (which was at the far edge of the town and away from the main trouble zones) and spent more and more time at the council flat we had in addition to the house. I slid into a routine of walking to Upholland most weekday mornings after Felix had gone to school and getting the train to Wigan, where I would spend the days in some of the very interesting unspoilt Edwardian pubs of the town (does anyone remember the Park Hotel, pulled down in the late 80s to make way for the shopping mall?). This activity was financed by the single parent benefit I was now able to get, because to all outward appearances, Angela and I now had separate homes. At that time, single parents could continue to receive benefits, without having to look for work, until the child was 16. Not that there would have been any danger of getting any offers of work in that blighted place. I wasn't exactly doing nothing in those Wigan pubs, I was continuing with the short story writing I'd started while working at Davall Gears - and putting a lot of hard, if inebriated, mental work into them. It seemed extraordinary to me that such an attractive and friendly town as Wigan could be just a few miles down the road from the hell-hole of Skelmersdale.
	Although we made an effort to maintain the house in the first year or two, we gradually lost interest in it, as our thoughts turned more and more to escape. I began to lose control when confronted by The Enemy as I now called the under-25s of the place. This led to some potentially very serious incidents. On one occason I hurled a garden fork at at some brat - it would probably have done him a lot of damage had it not missed. On another occasion I lashed out wildly at a gang of them with a broomstick, which landed on a girl of about ten. It did the trick insofar as they all ran away, but later the house was under seige for an hour by an angry mob, which presumably included the parents of the girl. I slipped out the back way with Felix and made it unscathed to the flat. Strangely, there were no further repercussions when I returned to the house next day, except that a couple of older people said, as I passed them in the street, "That's 'im. People like that are the scum of the earth." I must admit I was rather confused by that.
	One of the theoretically dreadful things about the place turned out to be of considerable advantage to us. The planners of the town in the 1970s though that what they needed to do to preserve the 'community spirit' of the people uprooted from Liverpool was to build the estates like rabbit warrens, with narrow alleys rather than streets between the blocks of houses. You could actually learn how to use these alleys to nip quickly to and fro with less danger of detection and inevitable confrontation. The winter was also a help, because the worms went underground, surprisingly enough, after dark. In the school holdays and at weekends, they seemed not to get up until midday. School itself wasn't much help, as truanting was on a substantial scale. I began to visit my mother in Barnet quite often, and always felt like an escaping prisoner as the London train pulled out of Wigan North-Western station, with me on board.
	For a couple of years I was hooked on CB radio in a big way. It had been legalised in the UK in 1981. I soon discovered that legalisation had been a disaster, in that the legal CB frequencies had been invaded to a large extent by the sort of idiots who thought it funny to jam channels with music, or simply by keeping their thumbs on their 'transmit' buttons, without saying anything. There were also those who used the equipment to broadcast an endless and meaningless stream of obscenities for hours on end. Then there were the 'ankle-biters' - children who had been given CB rigs for Christmas! As a result of all this, the serious CB-ers were forced to stick to the old illegal frequencies that they had always used. The nutters and parents of the ankle-biters wouldn't have known where to get the illegal rigs. The trouble was, neither did I. Eventually I came to a compromise. I kept my perfectly legal rig but operated it with illegal accessories. I found it was easy enough to acquire an illegal antenna, a ⁵⁄₈‑wave one, about 25ft long, which I mounted on the end of a pole that was higher than the house, thus even the base of the antenna was above the roof. This was also illegal, as antennae were not supposed to be higher than the house. That restriction, together with the deliberately inefficient designs of legal antennae were intended to greatly reduce the range of the set-up, to something like 5 miles at best - I'm not sure why. I went further and acquired a very naughty amplifier that could amplify my signal from the legal maximum of 4 watts to 40 watts. This was known as a 'burner' or 'having wellies on'. Furthermore, you were supposed to reduce your signal to 0.4 watts when transmitting locally, but I kept mine on maximum at all times, thus transmitting with 100 times the legal power when talking to people not very far away.
	Why did I act in this irresponsible way? Because CB was a war - well, it was in Skelmersdale, anyway. Unless you used a bit of dynamite to blast your way through all the idiots and the children, few of whom knew how to produce the big signals, there was little hope of making a sensible hobby of it. As it was, I enjoyed many an all-night session talking to some very interesting people (with similarly illegal gear) in places up to 60 miles away. It was a means of escape from the realities of Skelmersdale. It's said that it was Internet-based 'social networking' that finally killed CB. The trouble is, it doesn't seem to be as much of a sport. With CB you sometimes had to spend hours fishing around the airwaves trying to catch some interesting person a good distance away, with whom to have a chat. Does anyone remember 'Jolly Green Giant' who used to transmit from the top of a mountain in the Peak District, using a hand-held?
	At the height of my CB period, Angela came up with an escape plan. We would each do an A-level English course at Wigan Tech and apply for University places. The hope was that we would be offered places at the same university. I'm not sure why we chose English. At Wigan Tech, we found ourselves in a class of 16-year-olds. As the teaching methods were geared to them, it was rather uncomfortably like being back at school, at the age of 42. This was 1984, so you can probably guess what one of the set texts was. In the summer of 1985, we travelled to a number of universities and to various colleges of London University for interviews. The only place where I was told that mature students were very welcome - in fact they said they were renowned for it - was Royal Holloway College, Univ of London. Unfortunately a different interviewer at the same college and for the same course told Angela that they weren't at all keen on mature students because they didn't fit it! The following summer, after we got our our A-level results (only one A-level required for mature applicants), I was accepted by the Royal Holloway but Angela was accepted by Westfield. This was also a London University college, but the two were a considerable distance apart. In our immense relief to be escaping from The Pit, we didn't consider the fact that halls of residence were only for young students, so there were going to be big accommodation problems.
	Before taking you away from Skelmersdale (for the time being - remember that the house had not been sold), I would like to confess something to Thatcher-haters everywhere. One day, while walking through a smart little village just outside of the town, where there was no destruction and no litter, it dawned on me that these people were paying high rates to the council to pay for all the vandalism and cleaning at my end of town. The fact is that Skelmerdale had caused another of my periodic extreme political swings (which you must be tired of hearing about by now) and I formulated a scheme whereby every individual, not just houseowners, would have to pay the same local authority charge regardless of income, and rates would be abolished. A poll tax, in fact. I actually wrote to Maggie, setting out my ideas in detail - the general principle, the administration and the justification. All I got back was the usual note from the secretary of a secretary: "Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted". Nevertheless, Maggie introduced her hated Poll Tax four years later. Pure coincidence, you'll say. I wonder.