18 OCTOBER 1924, Page 8

TRAM ROUTE.

THE roads run out from the centre of the city, filo. the spokes of a wheel, to Stockport and Hyde, Oldham, Rochdale and Ashton-under-Lyne. They diverge in long lines, mile upon mile of houses, straight and monotonous. Cutting across them, from south to north in a great arc, like the rim of the wheel upon the spokes, goes a circular route. Like the excavator who in the ancient Gaza or Carthage, cutting a section into the earth, unveils the evidence of many, civilizations, one upon another, so on this eirculaz route the traveller opens up strange, unexpected strata which otherwise would remain lost between the main shafts that lead from the neighbouring towns to the hub of the great city.

Its general lineaments may be read in its politics, for it begins in a land of clerks and Nonconformity and small professional men, who send Liberals or Conservatives to Parliament, and then it plunges into grimmer tracts where Labour men have firmly made their seat. Its inhabitants are mostly English, but it crosses an Irish belt and ends among the Jews. Throughout the whole of it there is but one sign of uniformity, whatever the status or the rent of the inhabitants. This is the sacred

In The Trimmed Lamp.

emblem of respectability, the aspidistra in the parlour window, often unwashed and frayed, but still making a firm assertion of character to the outer world. There are thousands- of houses to be passed; and there is scarcely one where you will not see the aspidistra in its china pot and, gleaming in the darkness of the room behind, a mirror over -a sideboard which bears a dim, tall pair of vases, or a clock in a glass case. Common humanity and convention exact no less than this,. but the character of the route- only- unveils itself when the comparative comfort of the southern quarters has been passed and we are deep in Phippin's Terrace, Soapery Street and Grey Mare Lane. • Those wh6 toil at the human mess, planning towns and houses, swift transportation and model factories, complain of the sins of our fathers. If they packed mean houses and narrow streets together, they might have planted works and factories afield. If they were forced to found their manufactories close in, they might have settled the population farther out, in air and sun.. So we say, for- getting that electricity is of our day, and that there is a deep-seated human instinct for living over the shop. What our fathers did along the circular route was to plant works and houses together, thrutched up the one against the other, works sometimes towering over cottages below, sometimes threatening others like themselves across a narrow street, with straight high cliffs of wall running up on either side, canalizing the traffic and cutting off the light, so that the one-storey tram rattles and roars its way like a tube-train in its tunnel.

More than anything else the workshop, the machine by which these people live, insists upon its presence. It is there at their doors, it awaits them at their goings- out and comings-in, it looks in at their windows, urgent and unescapable. In a long, high wall above the pave- ment are giant double doors from under which issue lines of metal crossing the tramway and disappearing between like doors on the far side of the street. The doors slide open, and there, within stone's throw of the street, surrounded by the crowded dwellings which they dwarf, two pithead erections tower into the air, laughing and leering over the clever men that set them up, two of whom move about the summit of the great machine, tending the wheels and the cables, proud of the work of their hands, the instrument of industry, the slave who is their conqueror. He laughs best who laughs last: Every few yards side-streets spring off from the main • route which feeds them from interminable rows of little shops. The long vistas of these streets fade away into a cloud of smoke, or are closed by the outline of factory roofs and chimneys that soften in the haze. On a square of derelict ground two teams, in blue and red, play foot- ball. The surface is bare, hard soil. Mounds of red and shaly gravel are waiting to be spread upon it. On two sides enormous chimneys arc dressed in ranks, looming up over the play, file upon file, giants who are tolerant of this little respite from their service but sentinel always, unperturbed and calm, awaiting the renewal of the service that will not be refused.

From the hoardings some gaudy posters shout suddenly like a gunshot out of silence. Yards upon yards of posters are filled with rows of girls, gaily and lightly clad, with a he-feathered film star in the middle, crying the existence of colour to the drab and sombre street. Last it out, as the children say, for there will not be another hoarding for some time. There are other sights to see. This is Saturday afternoon, and the hawker of meat and fish comes with his open cart. When he stops and the women ,come out to make their purchases, from doors and windows round the r expectant eats collect and, scuffling among the women's feet, while the man cuts off and throws down heads and eyes, the troop devours the offal. A line of funeral carriages crosses the road, conveying grief that dwindles down from the convulsed and covered faces of the first 'carriage to demure smiles in the third and the complacent joviality of the smug men in the last. Dirty and tattered fragments of election posters flap from miserable walls. Smith for ever, Smith is the man for us. Smith is His-Majesty's Minister now with five thou- sand pounds a year, and Smith's wife receives hundreds of guests in her splendid drawing room, and Smith's young • son, in Court rig-out, goes to the King's levee. Red is pale pink in these parts, and down with Bolsheviks.

The road is carried over a bridge whose six-foot parapet denies the sight of the canal beneath, though this canal, like most, has a certain dignity. Another bridge, and you must jump or peep about to see the gleaming lines of metal that run underneath. Where the route crosses a main road outward bound, a railway passes overhead, cutting diagonally across them both, and trains, at the foot of factories, roar noisily above. Here, for once, comes a splash of living colour. It is a miracle, a doll come to life. Her lips are red, her looks are free, her locks are yellow as gold. Her eyelashes are unnaturally black, her shoes are red. Alas, for the Scarlet Woman in the temple of industry ! Alas, alas, that the Scarlet Woman should be -so grateful to the weary eyes ! But what is this ? A crowd pours out from a building whose every feature proclaims it for a chapel. Surely they are hilarious .worshippers. A signboard announces that it is a picture-house. God has forsaken His sanc- tuary.

A smell of gas subtly pervades the air. Within a few feet of the road a gasometer rears its enormous, threaten- ing bulk. Four others fill the background, and the space between is strewn with a weary litter of material and debris. Opposite the gasometer lies a cemetery. It stretches over a great curving slope behind the route. The graves are crowded, head to head and toe to toe. Here all the stones are upright, there they rest in long, flat- rows. It is so well packed, so economical of space. Except upon the fringe there are no trees or shrubs. God's acre wears a harsh, unsoftened face. In the peace and beauty of a southern cemetery the mind may find a temporary balm for sorrow, and may think without shame of the spirits of the dead hovering about their graves, but these grim regiments of tombs are bleak and hard as the streets and works that fill them, and the souls of the dead, if they return, can occupy themselves in reading the name of a great engineering firm, written in giant letters across the sheds upon the sky-line. There are many women in the cemetery. A group, beshawled and be- clogged, stands by a new-filled grave. One says : "She was eighteen on the Friday, and on Monday she was dead," and " A nice day, Mr. Smiles ! " and Mr. Smiles, M.P., goes by in neat black overcoat and neat black suit, with trousers neatly creased, saying, " Yes, but a little cold," and some day, perhaps, with his neat black stone, he will bring honour to our cemetery. A man in shirt- sleeves of vivid blue scrubs at a tombstone. Ile has bucket and polish and cloth and, as ever and anon he stands back to admire his handiwork, the stone begins to shine among its dowdy neighbours. But there are few men. Women have the pain of bringing life into the world, and they can mourn for it when it is dead. Besides, it is a Saturday and there are football matches.

The route draws towards its end. The road plunges downward towards a long bridge of five arches. The top of a tall chimney appears above street level. Its lower half must be rooted in a deep valley below. The roofs and smoke-stacks of a nest of streets can be seen filling the depths: A railway embankment is piled up in the middle. In a gorge at the bottom runs a filthy river. The road ascends the other bank. From the top there is always to be seen a pall of smoke covering the valley, an indiscriminate haze in which the black smoke of factories mingles with the blue smoke of the houses and both with the grey smoke and the white smoke of engines that fuss to and fro. This is Irkdale, the valley of the little river Irk. At the crest, where the route ends, the defiling hand of man has done its worst. The ground below is a scarred waste of hummoeked rubbish, a tip, a desolation where man has spoiled and gone his way.

There may be those who at the end of the route would track the misused Irk still farther. Half-a-mile away, through a narrow opening in a vast bridge over a dozen lines of rails and down steep flights of fifty steps, they will find the little river, penned in between neglected tene- ments and railway arches that gape with broken window panes. Its thick brown water pours over a weir, and at the bottom churns up a foul pink scum. Then it .disap- pears under the railway bridge and is no more seen, huddled away beneath the streets among the sewers.

W. P. CROZIER.