Two joke towns

Roy Kerridge

That's Wigan Pier', said the young man, pointing. I gazed at the jutting- out piece of towpath by the canal, which faced a decaying boathouse on the other side. Could he be pulling my leg, or had out-Orwelled Orwell?

Long before I had heard of Orwell, I was a devotee of the old 'Knockout' comic strip, which featured a small backstreet boy who lived in a world of cobbled streets, fac- tory chimneys and scrubbed doorsteps. This comic town, full of fantasy characters, was supposed to be Wigan, and the strip was headed 'Our Ernie, Mrs Entwhistle's Little Lad'. It even had its own phrases, 'What's for tea, Ma?' and 'Daft, I call it'.

I found no statue to Our Ernie, even though his style of cap has been borrowed by Rastafarians. But the Wigan telephone book listed 33 Entwhistles, so perhaps he was one of them. Darlington Street East, a long red-brick terraced road, stretched out of town to where the canal cut through peaceful meadows, its banks lined with anglers. Even the children owned expensive rods, but the only fish I could see were sticklebacks. A swallow skimmed over the water, and on the horizon the steam from the cooling towers billowed out and merged with the white clouds in the blue sky. Orwell should have gone there in summer.

Back in the street, housewives gossiped by the spotless steps, one clutching a broom, her hair in curlers. Washing hung across the back alleys, but the old-joke atmosphere ended at the neat net curtains, for a glimpse into the interiors always revealed a telly-advert room of shiny three- piece suites and glass circular tables with buckled-in chromium legs. However, the shops still had the dark cosy atmosphere of old, with tin posters screwed to the walls outside and friendly smiles inside.

Following the road into town, I soon came to a demolition area, although Wigan has suffered less from 'progress' than most industrial towns. There are a few skyscrapers, and may be more when the site of Orwell's tripe shop digs is finally cleared. I saw no plaque on the desolate row of ruins, and guessed that the writer had stayed in the building marked 'Chinese Restaurant', chop suey having superseded tripe.

A vigorous bustling atmosphere characterised the centre of Wigan, although the mines have closed and unemployment is said to be high. No one had told the many robust old ladies that they ought to be gloomy and they greeted and chaffed one another, and gave their many purchases to their stout easy-going husbands to carry. It was a town of shopping arcades (I counted four) with many fine old pubs, a beautiful mediaeval church, All Saints, and a splen- did Mining and Technical College of red sandstone, with William Morris-y stained glass windows. To the regret of nearly everyone except the local council, the Market Hall, built in 1877, is to come down, and may already be gone by the time you read this. On my visit it still dominated the market square; a grand old building, full of character.

Inside All Saints Church, I admired the pew-end carvings of various animals. The old lady l asked couldn't tell me much about them. Instead she began a rambling story all about a man she knew who had been murdered by a stranger inside the local Roman Catholic church. To allay her fears, I walked slowly away in as pious a manner as I was able, and gazed in surprise at a painting of angels adoring the Lamb. It most impiously struck me that the Lamb was depicted as a full-grown sheep, which added an odd pagan element to the picture. I wondered if the artists had been un- consciously influenced by the sheep cults of the pre-Christian north, which survive as 'hobby sheep' parades in remote parts of Derbyshire.

As yet, I had seen few young people, but contrary to the local paper's headlines, 'Youth Jobless Gloom', Young Wigan ap- peared well dressed and roaring with laughter, as the various shops, small fac- tories and offices began to close.

Three girls sauntered out of a factory, arm in arm and giggling, and one of them looked so unusual that I ran after her and begged her to explain herself. She had clown's red circles on her cheeks, strips of coloured plastic and ribbons tied to her hair and dangling down her back, and a large staring eye, complete with lashes, eyebrow- pencilled on her forehead.

'Excuse me, but why are you dressed like that?' I asked her.

'Because I'm getting married next Friday', she replied blushing. 'My friends did it to me'.

They were surprised when I told them that girls in the south didn't dress up in such a way before marrying. It turned out that I was witnessing a 'footing', a party- like occasion when girls bring tea and cakes to work, and dress up the bride-to-be in the ribald manner of apprentices or of sailors crossing the line.

'I hope you are very, very happy', I said, as gravely as I could, considering that I was talking to a three-eyed person, and then caught the next bus out of Wigan. My destination was a joke town of even greater antiquity — Gotham, near Nottingham.

The Wise Fools of Gotham have been a subject for funny stories ever since the Middle Ages, when the villagers are said to have pretended to have been mad to avoid having to pay taxes. Funnily enough, the same stories are told all over the world, and always attributed to a real village. My Danish grandmother told me all the

Gotham stories, which she had heard as a girl from her father, a former handloom weaver from a small village near Copenhagen. The Danish Gothamites had some extra adventures not noted in Britain, and tried to drown an eel, mistaking it for a snake, as well as beating a ringing alarm clock to fragments as they thought it was a monster. In America, the Adventures of Batman are set in Gotham City.

Stepping from the bus in some excite- ment, I set foot for the first time in Britain's earliest tax haven. Nobody looked par- ticularly unusual at first sight, and there was no duck pond being raked by men who thought the reflection of the full moon was a cheese, but this did not deter me. Suburbs had encroached on the village, and some of the fools were evidently commuters to Not- tingham, but red-brick farm buildings and small thatched cottages remained as testimonies to a wiser age. Wooded hills stretched along the horizon, and one of these was crowned by what appeared to be a giant chimney pot with smoke pouring from its two stacks. This proved to be a nuclear power station, product of technical wisdom well compounded by folly. I walk- ed into the church.

To my pleasant surprise, I found many memorials to the Wodehouse family, in- cluding that of Frederick Armine Wodehouse, a former vicar of Gotham.

'Yes that was P. G. Wodehouse's uncle', a lady flower-arranger confirmed. 'When P. G. Wodehouse was a boy, he often stayed at the Rectory next door. I like his stories, don't you?'

'Like' is an inadequate word to describe my feelings for the Master. Reverently, I gazed at the Rectory, a beautiful white house, now privately owned, and set in an attractive garden. Gothamite humour may have influenced the youthful Pelham, who may also have inherited a zany streak from his hairy ancestors, for one meaning of 'Wodehouse' is 'wild man of the woods'.

An old man toddled past me, leading a Jack Russell terrier. He greeted me courteously, and we walked down to the pub together. Jack, as my new friend was called, was a genial Toby-jug of a fellow, with a purple-tipped nose and cloth cap. His dog was ten years old, he said.

'I left school Wednesday and went down pit Thursday', he continued. 'In Stafford- shire, that were'.

So he was not an old Gothamite at all, though he looked the part. As he went into the pub, I stopped to admire the sign, 'The Cuckoo Bush'.

This referred to one of my favourite Gotham stories, also told of the good peo- ple of Borrowdale. Apparently, the elders of Gotham held a meeting one day, and voted unanimously to abolish the winter, on the grounds that it was too cold. So far so good, but then they quarrelled about the means of doing this. Finally, they decided that as the winter began as soon as the cuckoo flew away, they had only to keep the cuckoo in Gotham for it to be summer all the year round. Accordingly, they planted and tended a hedge around the tree where the cuckoo sat all day crying 'Cuckoo'.

By the autumn, the hedge had grown tall, and the villagers waited expectantly to see if it would trap the bird into staying. With one last cry of 'Cuckoo', the bird flew t°, the top of the hedge, perched there, looked around, preened its feathers and then fie* off to Africa amid a chorus of groans.

'Look at that!' cried one of those pre- sent. 'He only just reached the top of the hedge on his first bound. If only we had made it a couple of feet higher!' Inside the pub, I found a hundred spirited conversations going on among young and old, for it was a place of great humour and character. Jack sat in the brick hallway, near the fire, seemingly content without a drink, but willing to be persuaded to take a mild shandy. In the bar, a grouP of young men in boots, evidently farm‘ workers, were involved in a noisy argil' ment.

you, a male duck cannot quack!' a young man with dark bushy eyebrows declaimed with passion. This seemed quite worthy of Gotham. I was reminded of a gnarled Sussex cowman' an expert at his job, who once insisted to me against all the claims of reason that a bull has no teeth on its lower jaw. Such topics seem designed for timeless and tin" topical conversation, a good way of passing, the hours after the day's work is done, On they obviously stem from an age before radio, television or even newspapers. Soon the 'Cuckoo Bush' conversation drifted to the effects of a fox on a loft full of pigeons (bad) and I left for Nottingham well con- tent with my search for wisdom and folly; 'Irish jokes' have nowadays replaced Gotham stories and, the Troubles not,: withstanding, this only confirms my hit opinion of the Emerald Isle. Painting the pillar boxes green, as they do over there, while leaving the Royal initials intact, is wise folly on a par with the gardeners in Wonderland who painted the roses red' There is something sublime about it, and as I cannot afford the fare to Ireland at pre- sent, I shall do the next best thing and walk to Kilburn, which surely must be the joke' town of the future.