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The road to Nab End

Secular shelf life: deprivation in hard times

Deprivation in hard times

THE ROAD TO NAB END
By William Woodruff
Abacus. 384 pages.
ISBN 978 0 349 115 214

It seems a bit lazy to recommend a book which is out of print and over 15 years old.

I did read a current book (Andrea Levy’s The Long Song) with the intention of reviewing it here, only to find it second rate and unconvincing.

So I’ve fallen back on a book which, I’m glad to say, I can praise unreservedly. Apologies to those who read this years ago.

The Road to Nab End is a memoir of ‘an extraordinary Northern childhood’. Actually, I think this childhood of great poverty in the 1920s and 30s was probably ordinary, but it is narrated in an extraordinary manner. It tells of a family’s rise to a house with a flushing toilet and descent to a squalid lodging house at the peak of the depression. We hear about the aftermath of the First World War, the Jarrow March and the reasons for the collapse of the textile industry in the UK. Just as at present, the troubles of an international market economy and short-sighted planning, as well as straightforward greed, brought impoverishment; the workhouse was a real threat, people died of starvation, and once proud workers were employed to smash up their looms.

The book is written in an extremely fresh and simple style, evoking the smells and sounds of a weaving town and of the hills beyond, which makes it accessible for younger readers. It will raise questions for them, as for the rest of us, about the welfare state, the limits of capitalism and the importance of family structures. What a timely read! Yet this isn’t a misery memoir. The characters, even those with real flaws, are described with genuine compassion while sentimentality is avoided. The heart-breaking scenes, such as when a new born dies and is wrapped in newspaper, are narrated alongside more prosaic and humorous events.

Of course, this book is about a period in which chapel and church were a very real part of society in this country, providing welfare, education and a social calendar, as well as a vocabulary for explaining life. William Woodruff tells of the children’s cynical exploitation of denominational rivalries, but also of the hope that provided his mother with a reason to persevere. You won’t really find the gospel here, but you will, I think, be helped to see how much our society has changed for the better and for the worse, in the way that the welfare state has removed such devastating poverty but has destabilised the family and provided an alternative to the church. Now that I’m living not too far from Blackburn, in a post-industrial town, this book has prompted me to think and to pray more deeply about how we can offer hope to a generation growing up with appalling spiritual and moral deprivation in an unreliable economy.

Sarah Allen