The most remarkable thing or perhaps the least remarkable thing, depending on how you look at it was how neat and well looked after were the endless terraces of little houses we passed. Everything about them bespoke an air of modesty and makedo, but every stoop shone, every window gleamed, every sill had a fresh, glossy coat of paint. I took out my copy of The Road to Wigan Pier and lost myself for a bit in another world, one that occupied the same space as these little communities we were passing through, but was impossibly at odds with what my eyes were telling me when I glanced up from the pages.

 Orwell and let us never forget that he was an Eton boy from afairly privileged background regarded the labouring classes the way we might regard Yap Islanders, as a strange but interesting anthropological phenomenon. In Wigan Pier he records how one of the great panic moments of his boyhood years was when he found himself in the company of a group of working men and thought he would have to drink from a bottle they were passing round. Ever since I read this, I've had my doubts about old George frankly. Certainly he makes the working class of the 1930s seem disgustingly filthy, but in fact every piece of evidence I've ever seen shows that most of them were almost obsessively dedicated to cleanliness. My own fatherinlaw grew up in an environment of starkest poverty and used to tell the most appalling stories of deprivation you know the kind of thing: father killed in a factory accident, thirtyseven brothers and sisters, nothing for tea but lichen broth and a piece of roofing slate except on Sundays when they might trade in a child for a penny's worth of rotten parsnips, and all that sort of thing and his fatherinlaw, a Yorkshireman, used to tell even more appalling stories of hopping fortyseven miles to school because he only had one boot and subsisting on a diet of stale buns and snot butties. 'But,' they would both invariably add, 'we were always clean and the house was spotless.' And it must be said they were the most fastidiously scrubbed persons imaginable, as were all their countless brothers and sisters and friends and relatives.

 It also happens that not long before this I had met Willis Hall, the author and playwright (and a very nice man into the bargain), and somehow we got to talking about this very matter. Hall grew up poor in Leeds, and he unhesitatingly confirmed that though the houses were barren and conditions hard, there was never the tiniest hint of dirtiness. 'When my mother was to be rehoused after the war,' he told me, 'she spent her last day there scrubbing it from top to bottom until it shone, even though she knew it was going to be torn down the next day. She just couldn't bear the thought of leaving it dirty and I promise you that that wouldn't have been thought peculiar by anyone from that neighbourhood.'

 For all his professed sympathy for the masses, you would never guess from reading Orwell that they were capable of any higher mental activities, and yet one Leeds neighbourhood alone produced Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse and Peter O'Toole, while a similarly impoverished district of Salford that I know of produced Alistair Cooke and the artist Harold Riley, and I am sure the story was repeated countless times all up and down the country.

 Such was the picture of appalling squalor Orwell painted that even now I was startled to find how neat and well maintained Wigan appeared to be as we entered it by means of a long hill. I got off at the bottom, pleased to return to the fresh air, and set off in search of the famous pier. Wigan Pier is an arresting landmark, yet and here's another reason to be a bit cautious with regard to old George's reporting skills after spending some days in the town, he concluded that the pier had been demolished. (So too, for that matter, did Paul Theroux in Kingdom by the Sea.) Now correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you think it a bit odd to write a book called The Road to Wigan Pier and to spend some days in the town and never once think to ask anybody whether the pier was still there or not?

 In any case, you could hardly miss it now since there are castiron signposts pointing the way to it on almost every corner. The pier it is really just an old coal shed on the side of the LeedstoLiverpool Canal has (inevitably) been refurbished as a tourist attraction and incorporates a museum, gift shop, snack bar and a pub called, without evident irony, The Orwell. Alas for me, it was shut on Fridays, so I had to content myself with walking around it and peering in the windows at the museum displays, which looked reasonably diverting. Across the street was something nearly as arresting as the pier a real working mill, a mountain of red bricks with the name Trencherfield Mill emblazoned across an upper storey. It's now part of Courtauld's, and is a sufficient rarity these days that it is something of a tourist attraction, too. There were signs out front telling you which way to go for the guided tours, the factory shop and the snack bar. It seemed a bit of an odd notion to me, the idea of joining a queue to watch people making duvets or whatever it is they do in there, but in any case it too appeared to be closed to the public on Fridays. The snack bar door was padlocked.

 So I walked into the centre, a fair hike but a not unrewarding one. Such is Wigan's perennially poor reputation that I was truly astounded to find it has a handsome and wellmaintained town centre. The shops seemed prosperous and busy and there were lots of public benches to sit on for the many people unable to take an active part in all the economic activity around them. Some talented architect had managed to incorporate a new shopping arcade into the existing fabric of the buildings in a simple but deceptively clever and effective way by making the glass canopy of the entrance matchthe line of the gables of the surrounding structures. The result was an entrance that was bright and modern but pleasantly harmonious precisely the sort of thing I've been going on about for all these many pages and I was delighted to think that if this sort of thing is going to happen just once in Britain that it should be in poor beleaguered Wigan.

 To celebrate, I went off to have a cup of tea and a sticky bun at a place indoors called the Corinthia Coffee Lounge, which boasted, among its many other advertised features, a 'Georgian Potato Oven'. I asked the girl at the counter what that was and she looked at me as if I were very strange.

 'It's for cooking potatoes and tha',' she said.

 But of course. I took my tea and sticky bun to a table, where I spent a little time going 'Ooh, lovely,' and smiling inanely at some nice ladies at the next table, and afterwards, feeling strangely pleased with my day, went off to find the station.

 CHAPTER NINETEEN

 I TOOK A TRAIN TO LIVERPOOL. THEY WERE HAVING A FESTIVAL OF litter when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrierbags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape. They fluttered gaily in the bushes and brought colour and texture to pavements and gutters. And to think that elsewhere we stick these objects in rubbish bags.

 In another bout of extravagant madness, I had booked a room in the Adelphi Hotel. I had seen it from the street on earlier visits and it appeared to have an oldfashioned grandeur about it that I was keen to investigate. On the other hand, it looked expensive and I wasn't sure my trousers could stand another session in the trouser press. So I was most agreeably surprised when I checked in to discover that I was entitled to a special weekend rate and that there would be money spare for a nice meal and a parade of beer in any of the many wonderful pubs in which Liverpool specializes.

 And so, soon afterwards, I found myself, like all fresh arrivals in Liverpool, in the grand and splendorous surroundings of the Philharmonic, clutching a pint glass and rubbing shoulders with a happy Fridayevening throng. The Phil (you can call it this if you have been there twice) was in fact a bit too crowded for my liking. There was nowhere to sit and scarcely any room to stand, so I drank two pints, just enough at my time of life to need a pee for there is no place in the world finer for a pee than the ornate gents' room of the Philharmonic then went off to find some place a little quieter.