Postscript .• •
By CYRIL RAY
WAS beginning to get worried about Lanca- shire. Not so much that unbroken series of county championship draws and defeats before they gave Surrey a tows- ing last week, but all this talk about Americanisa- tion, and mid-Atlantic accents, and cotton giv- ing way to plastics. Stood Lancashire where it did? And I drove up to my native county to find out— to that north-eastern corner between Pendle Hill and the Rossendale Valley, with the Yorkshire border only a well-judged spitting distance away, where in my time to speak in a standard middle- class English accent was to be accused of 'talking Manchester' (Manchester being as far south and as la-di-dah as the mind of man could conceive), and to be taken for a grammar-schoo' bug- shooter at that. Not to put too fine a point on it, I went to Burnley.
There was no missing the changes. I put myself up at the new, skyscraping Keirby Hotel, where every room has its bath and WC, and every WC its sterilised seat, which must come as something of a surprise to many an honest Lancashire bum, and across the road there was Silver Dollar Bingo, a Wimpy Bar, and a queue of girls waiting for a pop singer's autograph, in the hopes that he could sign his name.
But all is not yet lost. It gladdened my ear to find that the vowel are as flat and as open as ever (Lancashire men ought to be the best confidence tricksters in the world—they always sound so damned honest), and only just round the corner from the Wimpy Bar, with its 'Shanty: the golden fried fish fillet with crisp lettuce and tangy lemon,' there were stalls in the market selling tripe as they always had, just as the same sort of stall in London still sells winkles and jellied eels, to be eaten in situ and drenched with vinegar— honeycomb tripe, leaf tripe and seam, cow heels'' and sheeps' trotters, Bury black puddings and beef lump, to say nothing of 'freshly-boiled elder' (which is udder), roll tripe (which is the throat, and sometimes called wezzel, if I'm thinking of the same thing, and that's how, to spell it), and tripes that I'd never seen before, or never known the name of. 'That one?' said the man at the stall, 'That's black tripe, or you can call it "rag": it's the seventh stomach of the cow. All the stomachs do different things. . . .' And he pointed to the honeycomb and said, 'Them's the grinders.' And then added that rag was also called 'lady's tripe,' and I was reminded of the story they used to tell in Bury, which is a sophisticated southern neighbour of Burnley's, about the two ladies in the tripe shop, having their tea, one of whom said to the other, 'Ee, love, this tripe is stringy,' to which the other replied, 'Nay, lass, taak thi veil off.'
There was the same old view from the cricket ground, where Lowerhouse was playing Rawten- stall, of mill chimneys and moorland tops, and a cloth-capped crowd of no more than a couple of hundred sucked its pipes and nodded shrewdly as the West Indian pro of one side clouted the bowling of the other side's Indian pro: there's -no time for fancy work in Lancashire League cricket, for there's got to be two innings played and a match lost and won between two o'clock and seven of a Satyday, and if there isn't any clouting there'll be nowt in the pro's collection at the close of play.
Here's the true working-class cricket, as far ;"-zemoved from the village green, with the squire in his I Zingari cap, and the vicar's Authentic sons, as it is from the dentlemen of England at Lord's. And how sad to be told that it is dying of society's affluence—that now that the lads can afford motor-bikes they take their girls out of an evening, instead of repairing to the nets, and now that there's a five-day week complete families go off to Blackpool on a Saturday morning, for a whole day out, instead of off to the cricket as soon as the mill or the pit has loosed at Saturday midday, and Dad's had his dinner.
So it's true, I suppose, that the old Lancashire ways are dying, even if they are taking an un- conscionable time over it. But it isn't every new- fangled device and diversion that sweeps so successfully into the life of Lancashire as bingo has, motor-bikes, the five-day week and the brunchberger. I set off, on Saturday evening, to find one of the two Burnley night clubs that had actually•got themselves mentioned in the Sunday Times colour section, though there were those Who warned me that it was only a night club in a Pickwickian sense, for it would have to close at eleven, like everything else; some to say that they'd heard that it wasn't much more than a working-men's club, like, and the beer not so good as most; and others to express the belief that I wouldn't find it open, as it hadn't what you'd call caught on. I couldn't come across any- one who'd actually been, and when eventually I found it, at ten o'clock at night; after driving past the girls' high school and round Burnley ceme- tery, and asking the way at a fish-and-chip shop, sure enough it was closed, with so many letters stuffed into the letter-box that the telephone bill was sticking more than half out, and the posters on its walls rather more faded than the one on the Methodist chapel next door, announcing that a month ago Miss Cynthia Scragg was going to be crowned Sunday School Queen.
I don't suppose the Immune moyen sensua de Burnley is any less inclined to go gay and be wicked than any other chap, but presumably he finds night clubs a daft way of going about it: 'Now Manchester's the place to see a bit of life,' said the man I told my adventures to at the bar of my hotel, and he meant to convey not only that he knew a thing or two about the ways of the wicked world, but that that hot southern blood was capable of all sorts. He fingered the cuff of my shirt, and volunteered that it was a nice bit of stuff, seeing that he was in cotton himself, and it must have come from Bolton: can't beat it for shirtings. And went on to have his say abotn the bar we were drinking in, which is indeed very pretentious (and had left detergent suds in the bottom of the glass I nearly poured my drink into). No draught beer, he pointed out; and half-a-Crown a'time for a bottle or Bass! He thought for a moment, and then said, quite seri- ously, 'Mind you, I .quite understand why they do it: it mun keep a lot of folk out.'
And that's true, too, and the thick end of a highly un-Lancastrian Wedge.
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