V—TEN HOURS AT BLACKPOOL
Manchester is a right place to start from. And the vastness of Victoria Station—more like London than any other phenomenon in Manchester—with its score of platforms, and its subways romantically lighted by red lamps and beckoning pale hands, and its crowds eternally surging up and down granitic flights of stairs—-the vastness of this roaring spot prepares you better than anything else could for the dimensions and the loudness of your destination. The Blackpool excursionists fill the twelfth platform from end to end, waiting with bags and baskets: a multitude of well-marked types, some of the men rather violently smart as to their socks and neckties, but for the most part showing that defiant disregard of appearances which is perhaps the worst trait of the Midland character. The women seem particularly unattractive in their mack-intoshed blousiness—so much so that the mere continuance of the race is a proof that they must possess secret qualities which render them irresistible; they evidently consult their oculists to the neglect of their dentists: which is singular, and would be dangerous to the social success of any other type of woman.
“I never did see such a coal-cellar, not in all my days!” exclaims one lady, apparently outraged by sights seen in house-hunting.
And a middle-aged tradesman (or possibly he was an insurance agent) remarks: “What I say is—the man who doesn’t appreciate sterling generosity—is no man!”
Such fragments of conversation illustrate the fine out-and-out idiosyncrasy of the Midlands.
The train comes forward like a victim, and in an instant is captured, and in another instant is gone, leaving an empty platform. These people ruthlessly know what they want. And for miles and many miles the train skims over canals, and tram-cars, and yards, and back-streets, and at intervals you glimpse a young woman with her hair in pins kneeling in sack-cloth to wash a grimy doorstep. And you feel convinced that in an hour or two, when she has “done,” that young woman, too, will be in Blackpool; or, if not she, at any rate her sister. *****
The station of arrival is enormous; and it is as though all the passenger rolling-stock of the entire country had had an important rendezvous there. And there are about three cabs. This is not the town of cabs. On every horizon you see floating terrific tramcars which seat ninety people and which ought to be baptised Lusitania and Baltic. You wander with your fellow men down a long street of cookshops with calligraphic and undecipherable menus, and at every shopdoor is a loud-tongued man to persuade you that his is the gate of paradise and the entrance to the finest shilling dinner in Blackpool. But you have not the courage of his convictions; though you would like to partake of the finest shilling dinner, you dare not, with your southern stomach in rebellion against you. You slip miserably into the Hotel Majestic, and glide through many Lincrusta-Walton passages to an immense, empty smoking-room, where there is one barmaid and one waiter. You dare not even face the bar.... In the end the waiter chooses your apéritif for you, and you might be in London. The waiter, agreeably embittered by existence, tells you all about everything.
“This hotel used to be smaller,” he says. “A hundred and twenty. A nice select party, you know. Now it’s all changed. Our better-class clients have taken houses at St. Anne’s.. . . Jews! I should say so! Two hundred and fifty out of three hundred in August. Some of ‘em all right, of course, but they try to own the place. They come in for tea, or it may be a small ginger with plenty of lemon and ice, and when they’ve had that they’ve had their principal drink for the day.. . . The lift is altered from hydraulic to electricity. . . years ago. . .”
Meanwhile a client who obviously knows his way about has taken possession of the bar and the barmaid.