A bit of a Bolshie
Richard West
Bedford
The Secretary for the 'Environment' dis- closed last week that the Central Elec- tricity Generating Board is going to dump nuclear waste at the village of Elstow, where John Bunyan was born. It is just south of Bedford where Bunyan spent much of his life in the jail and started his masterpiece, The Pilgrim's Progress. The waste will include 'low level' items such as contaminated clothing. There will aslo be the more serious 'short-lived intermediate' waste which has a radioactive life of hun- dreds of years. The waste will be buried and, naturally, the Department of the En- vironment swears it will not be dangerous.
The local politicians are aghast at the decision by NIREX, the Nuclear Industry Radioactive Waste Executive. What a wonderful name! A Mr Jerry Fitch, of the also wonderfully named South East Anti- Nuclear Network, stated: `Nirex's brief was to choose areas of low population. To name Elstow just four miles from the homes of 55,000 people . . . means that they have failed dismally.' The clerk to Elstow Parish Council told the Bedfordshire Journal: `Our hands go up in horror. I have a physics degree myself and I'm a nuclear scientist. I've been to various nuclear power stations and been impressed with them, so I'm, cer- tainly not against nuclear power. But I would like to know the reasons for picking Elstow.' The nuclear dump may well depress the value of property in this village of fine 17th-century houses, an abbey, two expensive restaurants, ('a special Yumsters' menu for the youngsters') a Bunyan Centre, Bunyan's Mead and Green with Moot Hall. ('Members of the public are requested to preserve the attractions and amenity of the Green by not leaving litter or allowing dogs to foul the grass' — Bedfordshire County Council Leisure Committee). There is also local agitation against the Government's plan for civil defence training. The chairman of the North Beds Branch of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, Dr David Josephs, stated the other day: 'As doctors we realise that prevention is the best form of cure, whereas these new regulations are lulling people into a false sense of security by making them believe a nuclear war is survivable. If a one-megaton bomb was dropped on RAF Chicksands, 98 per cent of the people in the immediate area would be killed within the first few seconds.'
This terror had also presented itself to John Bunyan. On the first page of The Pilgrim's Progress, Christian says to his wife: 'I am for certain informed that this our City will be burned with fire from Heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my Wife, and you my sweet babes shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered.' A bit of the same dread has returned to modern Elstow. The hostess of the Swan (which carries a Warning to Bat- chelors: 'The face that over cocktails seems
so charming, Oft at breakfast looks alarm- ing') remarked on Monday: 'There was a joker who came in here and ordered a horseradish-and-nuclear-waste sandwich. I told him to go outside and put up a sign, "No coach parties but demonstrators welcome" .'
Looking south, Christian could see the Delectable Mountains, also the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The latter is a better description of Elstow's neighbourhood with its brickyards and raw quarries from which they scooped the clay. The heat and stench of the brickfields was dreadful. 'The worst job in the county,' I wrote on a visit there more than 20 years ago. Two old gaf- fers I met last weekend recall a brickworker friend: 'Jack had the worst job. He was a drawer, a "drorer", that's the sweating job. That's taking the bricks out when they're baked. He'd start work at four in the morning and come to the pub at two o'clock, regular. They'd have three pints pulled and set on the bar. He drank them off like that. The first two he wouldn't taste, they went down so fast. The third one he'd take a bit more easy.' Most of the brickworks had closed. 'They've got a surplus of bricks, haven't they? Also, peo- ple complained about the air pollution, so they moved some of the works to Cam- bridgeshire . . ."So now they're polluting Cambridgeshire?"No, they're polluting Norway. They reckon they're poisoning off the fish round Norway . .
Twenty-five years ago, when there was a big demand for bricks but few English peo- ple willing to do this noisome work, the companies imported labour, mostly from southern Italy, but also Pakistan and the West Indies. There was already a big Polish community in Bedford, as you can see from the Klub Polski and Dom Polski, just by the railway station. At one time 10 per cent of the Bedford population was south Italian. The Italians, the Poles and Pakistanis have integrated well. The worst districts are those housing the 'overspill' from the East End of London. Their estates are covered with broken glass, aerosol swastikas and racial abuse. I heard one of these women discussing the neighbours: 'He's a sexual pervert and she enjoys murdering cats. I said the best thing you could do for her is buy her a bottle of surgical spirit to drink.' Bedford must have been that 'Town of Carnal Policy, a very great Town, and also hard by from whence Christian came'.
'Halloween's just a date as far as I'm concerned. You're not going to get me dressing up with a pumpkin on my head.' Oddly enough, this was said in a pub called the Angel. Elstow people are particularly pious or very conversant with things like the meaning of Halloween. Probably John Bunyan would not have approved of such a festival, smacking of `Pope and Pagan', two of the villains he met on his pilgrimage. Talk at the Angel, or Fallen Angel as it is known to the regulars, was earthy. The topless bathers in France ... The `Eyetie' neighbours . . . How you could buy a house before the war for £200, and a suit of clothes for a week's wages, and beer at 4 1/2d a pint. 'Islovember'll be a bad month.' 'How do you know? Do you feel it in your corns?"No, in my bunions. I work at the Bunyan Centre.'
In a way, it is rather comforting to find that Worldly Wiseman, Pagan and Pope (in the shape of all those Italians) are still to be found in and around Bedford. There is something a little annoying in Bunyan. Like Christian, he abandoned his wife and children — in his care — by going to prison. The Bedford magistrates practically begged him not to insist on preaching dissent. Even when he was in jail, he was treated leniently and allowed to travel as far as London, where he caused more trouble with his fanatic, dissenting oratory.
He was what they called in the army a bit of a Bolshie, a bit of a barrack-room lawyer. The word pilgrim comes from the German Pilger. Bunyan could express his faith and love of God in language of un- matched beauty. Going back to The Pilgrim's Progress is to get away for a while from the ugly language and lies of modern bishops, sociologists and Sunday Times commentators. Bunyan, as Christian, put up a good fight against some of the monsters who threatened him and still threaten us. 'And with that Apollyon spread forth his Dragon's wings, and sped him away, that Christian for a season saw him no more.'
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