The Road to Little Dribbling (43 page)

“I
think
so,” I said, sliding in opposite them, “but we should be ready to jump off at a moment’s notice.”

They nodded and clutched their things tight in readiness.

A moment later an announcement told us that this was indeed the Windermere train and that those wanting to travel to Blackpool North should get off now and join the other four coaches. At this, a man at the back of the car got up and hurriedly left.

My new friends were a couple from Widnes having a day out to Windermere. They had brought a picnic made up entirely of things that needed a lot of careful attention—little bottles with caps to take off, Tupperware containers that had to be opened in a particular sequence, a miniature pot of jam whose lid came off with a satisfying
pock
. They had two hardboiled eggs with shells that they picked off with great care, collecting the fragments on an open napkin with forensic attention, as if they thought they might have to reassemble them later. I suppose this was how they filled their days.

We got on very well. They gave me a chocolate digestive biscuit and I told them how on my last visit to the Lake District I traveled to Windermere from Wymondham, which meant that the station abbreviations printed on my ticket showed me traveling from “WDM” to “WMD.” I wondered if I was the first person ever to have done that.

“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,” said the woman admiringly.

“Not long after that, I went from Diss to Liss,” I added.

“Oh,” said the woman, still full of admiration.

“I don’t suppose many people do that either.”

“No. I don’t suppose.”

“It was a wonderful time for me,” I said, and we all fell into a dreamy silence.

—

I bade farewell to my new friends in Kendal, where I had arranged to pick up a rental car, public transport being pretty well impossible in the Lake District. When the railway age came along, William Wordsworth and others of a refined and romantic disposition ferociously opposed the spread of the railways’ noise and smoke and low-class day-trippers into their cherished valleys, so the railway only goes to the edge of the Lake District and stops there. It means the Lakes never got giant factories and suburban sprawl, but it also means that the modern traveler has little option but to visit by car.

I decided to go up the outside of the Lakes, around the western, seaward edge, a much quieter way in than through Windermere and Ambleside, and so twenty minutes later I was heading toward the pleasant old resort of Grange-over-Sands, on the northern side of Morecambe Bay. We used to go to Grange a lot when my children were small. Grange was a place of simple amusements—miniature golf, swings, a lovely little park with a lake with ducks to feed, a nice tearoom to which we were partial. I hadn’t been to Grange for many years, and I was pleased to see that it was still handsome, though quieter than I remembered and with more empty shops than can be good. On the plus side, Higginson’s, the best butcher and pie maker you will find anywhere, was still there and crowded with customers. I bought a small pork pie and went with it to the park where I found a bench with views across the water to Morecambe. The pie was delicious. The British are surely the only people in the world who have made a culinary feature of boiled cartilage and phlegm.

Morecambe Bay may be the most beautiful bay in Britain. Thanks to the tides, it drains more or less completely twice a day. You can be standing on sand that a short while before was under thirty feet of water and vice versa. It’s the vice versa that you have to worry about because the tide comes back in very quickly, though not in a line like an advancing army, but in fingerlets and channels that can easily surround you and catch you by surprise. People sometimes go for walks, then belatedly notice that they are on a giant, but steadily shrinking, sandbar. The worst incident was in February 2004 when at least twenty-one cockle pickers—nobody knows the actual number because they were all illegal, undocumented immigrants from China—were caught out in the bay and drowned when they misjudged or misunderstood the tides. They were paid 9p a pound for cockles.

—

Some years ago, I made a television series based on
Notes from a Small Island,
which necessitated traveling around the country for a couple of months with a film crew. One day we arrived in a place I didn’t recognize.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Barrow-in-Furness,” replied my friend the producer Allan Sherwin in a sunny tone. Over the course of our weeks together, I learned that producers’ minds don’t work like normal people’s minds.

“Why are we in Barrow-in-Furness, Allan?” I asked.

“Couldn’t get Bolton, mate,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We couldn’t get permission to film in Bolton.”

“So you chose Barrow-in-Furness instead?”

He frowned thoughtfully, then counted off his reasons on the fingers of one hand. “It’s a northern town. It’s industrial. It’s depressed. It starts with a B. That ticks the boxes, doesn’t it?”

“I’ve never been here, you know. I didn’t write about it in my book.”

“Yeah, but they’ll let us film here,” he explained patiently, and gave my arm a friendly squeeze. “You’ll think of something to say. It’ll be great.”

So we filmed for a day in Barrow-in-Furness, and I don’t remember a single thing about it. I thought I would have a quick look around now, as I was in the neighborhood, to see if any of it came back to me.

Barrow is just about the most out-on-a-limb, end-of-the-line place in England. It inhabits its own peninsula and is miles from anywhere along slow roads. Once it was a seat of industry—for a while its steel mill, now long gone, was the biggest in the world—but these days it is famous for being forgotten and depressed. On a sunny morning, it didn’t look so bad. I parked on the edge of the business district and had a walk around. The streets were broad and clean and lined with imposing red sandstone buildings, reminders of its age of greatness. At each corner was a roundabout with flower beds and a statue of some forgotten worthy, but I couldn’t read the inscriptions from across the road and wasn’t about to venture into the speeding traffic to get a closer look just to find that I was looking at a statue of Josiah Gubbins, inventor of the cat flap or flat cap or whatever. At all events, around the periphery, Barrow looked OK—clean, reasonably prosperous, respectful of its past. But as I penetrated farther into the center it became increasingly bleak.

The heart of the business district was a long, curving pedestrianized street, and it was fairly busy, though it seemed to be more a place for congregating than for shopping. Groups of men, nearly all tattooed and dangerous-looking, hung out in clusters of four or five, giving the area something of the air of a prison yard.

I stopped at a Costa coffee bar and suddenly, rather startlingly, I was in a world of well-dressed, employable people. I had a refreshing cup of coffee, then stepped back out into the prison yard, walked to the far end of the pedestrian precinct, into a kind of forest of “For Rent” signs and men with genetically fierce dogs straining on leashes, and concluded that I had pretty well exhausted the possibilities for amiable diversion in central Barrow-in-Furness. So I returned to the car and headed for the more familiar Cumbria, the one with sheep and green hills and dogs you can pet without losing a hand.

Chapter 23

The Lakes

I
N 1957,
B
RITAIN WAS
doing awfully well at a lot of things. It still produced about a fifth of all the world’s manufactured goods. It owned the world’s land, sea, and air speed records, and now once again held the record for the mile run: Derek Ibbotson won it back from the Australian John Landy with a time of 3:57.2 in July.

Britain’s aviation industry was the greatest in the world outside the United States. The Atlas computer made by Ferranti, a British company, was the world’s most powerful mainframe—more powerful than anything even IBM had. Britain had just built a hydrogen bomb—something beyond the fiendish wits of all other nations except the United States and USSR. And at Calder Hall at Sellafield, on the Cumbrian coast, it had installed the world’s very first working nuclear power station.

I hadn’t realized quite how extraordinary Britain’s nuclear achievements were until I did a little reading before this leg of the trip. It turns out that in 1944, as the Second World War was winding down, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt signed an agreement pledging to share information on the development of nuclear weaponry and energy after the war. But then Roosevelt died, and two years later Congress passed the McMahon Act, making it a crime punishable by death to give any information on nuclear reactions, peaceable or otherwise, to any third party, including Britain. So Britain had to develop its nuclear industry and hydrogen bombs wholly independently. That it did so successfully and quickly was a signal achievement.

So as 1957 got under way Britain was on top of the world. But then it all fell apart, and it was at Sellafield (then known as Windscale) that the unraveling began. In October 1957, during routine maintenance, a reactor overheated and caught fire, and it quickly became evident that no one knew what to do. The reactor cores at Sellafield were air-cooled. That was supposed to ensure that they never overheated. Since overheating was not supposed to happen, no contingency plan had ever been considered. Cooling the reactor with air now would just fan the flames. The only possible alternative was to hose the core down, but nobody knew what would happen if water were poured onto a hot nuclear core—this was all new technology. The fear was that the water would cause a massive detonation—a nuclear explosion, in effect—sending radioactive material high into the stratosphere and causing chaos across Europe and the North Atlantic. At a minimum, the Lake District would need to be evacuated, and several hundred square miles of Cumbria would be placed off-limits to humans for years, if not decades. One of the loveliest landscapes in the world would be lost for at least a generation. The cost to Britain, in prestige, reparations, and lost earnings, would have been colossal.

In the event, the water solution worked, and there was no great disaster. Some churns of milk had to be poured away and sheep glowed for a few years, but all in all it was a lucky escape. But it was also a disastrous PR blow, and it meant that nuclear energy would never be trusted or embraced in Britain as it was in France.

—

I have to say I haven’t trusted the nuclear industry one bit since I read an article in
The New Yorker
some years ago about the giant Hanford facility in Washington State. Hanford may be the single most irresponsible achievement of modern man. Between 1943 and 1980, Hanford released 6.3 trillion liters of liquid waste containing strontium, plutonium, cesium, and sixty-three other dangerously toxic substances into the groundwater of the Columbia River basin. Sometimes these releases were careless and accidental, but more often they were intentional. The Hanford engineers did this and then lied about it. They insisted that the Columbia River water was wholesome and clean, and cited tests on salmon as an example of how safe it was, arguing that a person would have to eat one hundred pounds of salmon at a single sitting to ingest enough radiation just to reach detectable levels. What they knew but didn’t say was that salmon don’t eat when they are in the Columbia River. They come there only to spawn, and salmon don’t eat when spawning, and in any case are not there long enough to absorb significant quantities of radiation. However, as the scientists well knew but failed to say, other types of aquatic life—crustacea, plankton, algae, and all the permanent fish—had concentrations of radioactivity that were on average one hundred thousand times greater than natural levels. What a lovely bunch of people.

I read all this in pained astonishment—I honestly didn’t know that Americans could be so deceitful to other Americans—and hoped the British example would be better. In fact, no. British nuclear authorities were perhaps less callous but no less hypocritical. In 1972, Britain joined the other nuclear powers of the world in signing up to something called the London Convention, which prohibited the dumping of high-level radioactive wastes at sea from ships. But the agreement didn’t mention pipelines, so Britain built one and pumped unknown tons of dangerous wastes straight into the Irish Sea without any idea, or evident concern, as to the consequences. By the late 1980s, according to Jacob D. Hamblin, an environmental scientist at Oregon State University, the people at Sellafield had exposed the whole of Europe to more radiation than “the combined levels of exposure from…all other nuclear sites, weapons testing, the Chernobyl accident, and packaged solid wastes,” all while claiming to be a virtuous adherent of the London agreement.

There is still a lot of other toxic stuff at Sellafield, including the world’s largest stockpile of plutonium (28 tons of it), but nobody knows exactly what is lying around the place because record keeping was so poor. According to the
Observer
newspaper, Building B30 at Sellafield is the most hazardous building in Europe. The building next door is the second most hazardous. Both are filled with slowly decaying fuel rods and old, contaminated hunks of metal and machinery.