I'm with Ricky T on this one
Yep this... When i was a kid me and my mates used to hang around Rice Lane Cemetery. One of the lads Mum and Dad lived in Hornby Close so we'd hang around in the cemetery itself building dens, climbing trees, even making bivouac's all over the place and sleeping in there.
One of the most fascinating things at that age, apart from the porn we used to find stashed behind old grave stones, and the home-brew we had on the go, was the grave of Robert Tressell (Noonan). I'd never once before seen a grave with someones image on it and always wondered how special you had to be for that type of honour. So I became determined to read the book and got a copy out the local library, but being a kid I sort of gave in after a bit.
But in my twenties I got a copy and went right through it. Brilliant, and I still re-read it to this day, a scary comparison is that I read "The Road To Wigan Pier" just after that and even though its written around thirty or so years later nothing had changed..... nothing at all, if anything it seems worse.
When the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg want this country to retreat into some misremembered past, to an England of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, WG Grace, Jane Austin, the Bronte's And Victoria on the throne. They'd do well to read Tressell's book alongside Orwell's 'Road to Wigan Pier' and reflect upon a society that Attlee and Bevan fought so hard to change.
Imagine being ill and having to appear before the parish council of a vicar, the mayor's wife, an alderman and the local bank manager to ask for funds just to see a doctor, This is what these monsters in charge want back again, almost Taliban-esq in there rush to embrace the past of forelock tugging and deference to our "betters"....
"Light after light goes down,
England and the Kingdom,
Britain and the Empire,
the old prides and the old devotions,
glide abeam, astern,
sink down on the horizon,
pass-pass,
the River passes,
London passes,
England passes..."
www.waterstones.com
