Everyman's England Read Online Free PDF Page A

brooding over past glories, and it may well be so, for once Maryport was alive and active. There were pits that employed hundreds of men, rolling mills, shipbuilding yards where some of the finest ships in the world had their birth beside the brawling River Ellen, and a constant traffic of cargo boats into the harbour to keep the dockers busy.
    Now, all that has gone. The lifeblood has been drained from Maryport by forces beyond the control of the townspeople. Almost all the pits are closed, the yards have not known the ring of hammered rivets for years, the rolling mills are silent, and few cargo boats come into the harbour.
    On the corners I saw groups of patient men with time on their hands, hours in which to brood over their misfortunes, and up and down the streets the tight-lipped women hurried about their shopping. The poverty of a town may well be determined by its shops. There are no luxury shops in Maryport. The atmosphere of the town was distressing, though it could not dull the laughter of the children in the streets as they played. There was a happy clatter of clogs where small boys raced up and down the stone steps.
    By the harbourside things are more cheerful. There is still the fishing, though that is not so profitable as it used to be. On the tide the boats go out beyond the harbour light to find the herring and the cod, and in the inns the rough seamen jostle one another, talking of fish and boats, of nets and tides and prices. Unshaven, some of them, their caps and jerseys silvered with the loose scales of fish, they play their favourite game of dominoes and drink their beer happily enough, but they are not unaware of the tragedy of the rest of their townsmen. No man could live in Maryport and ignore it. Silloth may not be so large or picturesque as Maryport, yet it must be happier.
    Whenever I think of that coast, of the seabirds and the wild sweeps of sand and shingle, of the grey houses and the sheep with their fleeces tossed by the wind, and the farmers who do not seem to feel the cold, I shall remember the men I saw along the beach as I came into Maryport. Stretching away until they were lost in the snow haze, they were bent to the shingle, like gleaners across an immense field. In their bended forms was a suggestion of grimness and evil.
    My curiosity aroused, I walked over to one of them to see what he was doing. I soon learned. The men were foraging the beach for the small pieces of coal cast up by the tide from some underwater reef. The pieces of coal were hardly bigger than large peas, and stooping to the beach these men were picking the black lumps from the litter of shells and pebbles and painfully filling their sacks. A morning’s work might half fill a sack, I was told by the man I spoke to, and then it had to be carried, sometimes as much as five miles, to keep the fires going in homes where fires were luxuries hard to come by. I was cold enough walking along the beach in the wind. It was only too easy to imagine what the cold would be to those men, thinly clad, and moving slowly over the pebble ridges.
    Talking to this man, I was, and not for the first time, suddenly ashamed of myself and the age I lived in. He told me some details of his life and his struggle to keep his wife and children sufficiently nourished upon his relief money, and he spoke of the possibility of gaining employment in the wry, cynical manner of a man who has had most of his hope taken from him by ten years of enforced idleness and poverty. I expected him to be bitter, but instead of bitterness was resignation and apathy.
    â€˜I was bitter at first,’ he confessed. ‘Who wouldn’t be? But it’s no good to get like that. It doesn’t do you any good and it only worries your family. For myself I wouldn’t mind what happened. It’s having a family and watching them do without things that—’ He broke off and stared out across the sea. I left him, trying not to think of his thin body