Dumfries to Huddersfield
August 7th 1995
We aimed to set off early, but of course, we didn't get moving till early afternoon. I was going to get out in Huddersfield, which is about half way back to Maldon, to visit an old friend there, so i drove that part of the journey. To get to Huddersfield by motorway, you have to go via Manchester, which looks like a long way round and i made the mistake of getting off the motorway and taking what looked on the map like a shortcut. It was probably less distance, but it certainly took a lot longer than it would have taken going the long way. This was partly due to roadworks and partly due to the fact that England is basically one gigantic town and when you're not on a motorway, you're stuck in town traffic wherever you go. Also, of course, the scale of the maps confused me. I'm used to driving in Australia and looking at australian maps and the distance we would have saved by coming off the motorway was much smaller than it looked to me on the map. I'd forgotten England's such a tiny and heavily urbanized place.
Anyway, we eventually got to Huddersfield and i went to the pub where i'd arranged to meet Margaret. I don't remember its name now, but it was a weird place, faked up as some sort of rural irish pub i thought, although i wasn't exactly sure why it seemed to be pretending to be a hardware shop too. Maybe that was what pubs are like in Ireland, i didn't know, but it didn't seem too likely. Anyway there were brooms, wellington boots, buckets, scrubbing brushes, pots and all sorts of junk hanging around the walls and from the ceiling. It was all new and it each thing had a price ticket on it with some ridiculous price written on it. I thought it was bizarre what went on in the imagination of the people that did these places up!
I spent a week in Huddersfield and, although it's not a bad little town, in its own weird way, there isn't really a lot to say about it.
Margaret and her friend Tonya lived in a back-to-back in a muslim indian area, somewhere out the Manchester side of town. I'd heard of back-to-backs quite a few times, but until then, i never really knew what they were. They must be one of the pokiest, most cramped form of working class housing in Britain. They're like the ordinary two-storey terraced houses that you find all over the place - in the south, anyway. But instead of each house being one house, it's two. They're separated into front halves and back halves. The front house has a door onto the street and the back half has a door onto the back yard.
In their house, you came in the door to the bottom of the stairs. On the left there was a doorway into the small living room, which would originally have been a tiny living room and a tiny, dark kitchen. Downstairs, the cellar had been converted into a damp, cold and dingey kitchen. Upstairs would originally have been two rooms, one for the adults and babies and the other one for the children. But the smaller of the two had been made into a bathroom and the bigger one had been divided up to make one small bedroom, with a window onto the back yard and one tiny bedroom with no real window at all. It was bad enough with two people living there, with a family it must have been a real nightmare.