Billy Wright Is Dead
A day in the Black Country
© Jon Horne  

   In the slight hollow behind my left funny-bone is a circular scar. None too impressive, it no longer even aches in damp weather. I only mention it because we have just passed the place where I got it - where thirteen years ago I fell off my pushbike at the bottom of a hill on the Birmingham New Road just outside Dudley.
   We are stuck in a traffic jam under a railway bridge that has been turned into an advertising hoarding for Hanson’s bitter. The advertisement shows, next to a foaming pint of beer, a thick chain. A sternly-lettered slogan reads: “A Strong Link with the Past”.
   Underneath this, someone has sprayed the words: “Billy Wright is dead”.
   I’m driving Chris to Wolverhampton so that he can see his grandmother’s grave. I used to live in Wolverhampton; I went to the polytechnic, so it was the first home I had on my own. But now my links with it are gone. Friends have moved away and I haven’t visited thÚe town in years. This little scar is about all I have left to remember it by.
   
   Chris’s mother came to visit yesterday, with new husband in tow. Listening to them as they bantered, I felt some envy for a family close enough in age to have things in common - tastes, experiences and (though none of them would admit it) values.
   Which shows how much I know. When his mother and stepfather were gone, Chris fell silent. Later he said: “Something’s changed - it’s like a link that’s been broken.” Then he went off on his own to write a poem.
   This morning he was snarling.
   “It won’t fucking work!”
   He meant the poem, but what was hurting him was the subject matter.
   “What do you want to do about it?” I asked.
   “Let’s go out,” he said. “You’re stuck too, aren’t you.”
   True enough.
   
   The Midlands Arts Centre is a glassy piece of 1960’s architecture, all redbrick and chipboard like a comprehensive school. This is a problem: watching a subtitled film or listening to a sitar master, you keep expecting a bearded English teacher to tell you to stop sniggering at the back.
   “What do you think, Chris?”
   “It could do with a lick of paint.”
   The MAC is saved from from suffocating under a pillow of paternal worthiness by being located on the edge of Cannon Hill Park. This small sloping expanse of grass and trees is my favourite place in Birmingham.
   When I moved here, the park became my place to go on summer Sundays. It would be crowded, which helped when I was tired of my own company. Every so often there would be a jazz festival or some sort of multicultural happening - contrived by the council, but invigorating nonetheless. Every Midsummer’s Night, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra playoed Handel behind a huge firework display, on a makeshift stage in front of fifty thousand picnickers.
   I got into a habit of falling in love in Cannon Hill Park - with almost anyone I met. Very occasionally I would get a response. Whether in the greenhouse amongst tropical plants, on the cycle path by the River Rea, or behind the Elizabethan farmhouse, it is a fine place for requiting.
   Of course, when things broke down, I blamed Cannon Hill Park for making me fall for someone I shouldn’t have.
   It was with this mix of feelings that I walked around the boating lake. Chris had other things on his mind: for example, wondering what it was that I saw in this slightly drab city park. He was also nervous about the geese - large and cutely-aggressive Canada geese who follow people around the lake, honking and begging for scraps.
   “When I was this big, one of these bastards ∏bit me.” Chris said, indicating a point head-high to a goose. “It’s not funny,” he added, when I started giggling at him.
   We went back to the MAC for something to eat. The main effect of being part of Cannon Hill Park is that the MAC behaves as an Arts Centre is supposed to. Everyone comes here, not just the privileged classes. On days like this, the patio is awash with mini-skirts and chewing gum, tattoos and football shirts, with just a smattering of beards and sandals. Add to the mixture Chris, a Belfast poet in search of a language for all cities; and me, his co-writer, or just a friend along for the ride. I don’t know which yet.
   Tucking into a sandwich, Chris said: “How easy is it to get to Wolverhampton?”
   “Easy,” I replied, surprised. Last week he said he wanted to go there alone, because seeing his Gran’s grave would upset him. Either he’s hardened his heart or he trusts me more.
   
   There is a point when travelling west out of the city, where one leaves Birmingham and enters the Black Country. Thwere is a never-ending and never-interesting debate as to where the true border is (each side claims as much territory as it can; both sides deny responsibility for Smethwick), but wherever it begins and ends, the Black Country’s separate status is a tangible reality.
   Chris, whose home city has more serious divisions, won’t accept this.
   “Did you spot a field anywhere? Come on, it’s all Birmingham.”
   One only has to look though - not for fields but for the feel. Passing Blackheath, the land changes. Whereas in Birmingham, every square foot is used for homes, factories and parks, and anywhere not used is waiting to be; in the Black Country there are patches of genuine waste: high ground worn away and useless, low ground creaking with subsidence; mining scars that gave the region its name. In the near distance, Samson quarry, Turner’s Hill and Dudley Castle stand bare and anciLent above the urban sprawl. This is not Birmingham.
   It’s in the names too: Gorsty Hill, Brierley Hill and the Gornals simply sound wrong unless spoken in the broad, pouting Black Country accent. City voices do not do the words justice.
   Black Country parochialism is well-known - and is overstated. Nonetheless I have known people from Dudley and Netherton (bright and quick-witted people working in industry as technicians, shop-floor managers and the like; not the gormless primitives of Brummie legend) who have never been to Birmingham. They treat the city as a necessary evil and ignore it as best they can.
   I once knew an American who lived and worked in Lower Gornal, just west of Dudley. He was from Mississippi, the deepest of the deep South, and had, from the end of the Vietnam war until the late 1980s, been an agent in the CIA (I£’m not making this up by the way, and I don’t think he had the imagination to do so). Something happened in Bulgaria (he wouldn’t say what) and afterwards he was told he was no longer welcome in the United States. Homesick and depressed, he somehow found his way to the Black Country and immediately recognised Home, its people as kin. The last I heard of him he was the Production Manager in a foundry, had married a divorcee from Swan Village and was helping to raise her two children as God-fearing Confederates. He never went to Birmingham either.
   
   The black tower of St. Peter’s church rises next to the grey monolith of the Mander Centre. We are approaching Wolverhampton and I’m starting to get edgy. Give or take a fortnight, it is ten years since I put my belongings into a Transit van borrowed from work and made the short journey to Birmingham. Over the next few months I returned occasionally, but these visits dried uÜp as people moved and I outstayed my welcome with those who remained. In those days my behaviour was not what it could have been. You might call it problematic, but I prefer the term åstupid’. I haven’t been back at all in five years.
   Chris drums his fingers on the dashboard. That’s where the nerves are coming from; he is radiating tension. It’s getting near rush hour, which doesn’t help. We jolt our way along the ring-road between traffic-lights and four-way junctions until we reach Tettenhall Road.
   “Turn here,” Chris says as we come to Albert Road. His eyes are wide with childhood visions. I was going to anyway. This is where Whitmore Reans begins. Bordered by West Park on one side and the racecourse on the other, Whitmore Reans is an area of wide streets set at illogical angles to each other. Every wave of immigrants has set up home here. The stragglers remain, mingling (and often tangling) with students who are shoe-horned, six or sevˇen at a time, into three-storey terraced houses. It was my home for four years.
   “OK, slowly... Stop!”
   I let the car roll to a halt while Chris breathes deeply.
   He gets out of the car and walks back along the road to the front of a large detached house. It is a nursing home.
   “This is where she went after my Grandad died.”
   “Ah.”
   I can imagine how it was: an undignified decline watched over by half-trained nurses calling her by her christian name. People don’t live long in places like this.
   Chris continues: “She bought a moped.”
   “Sorry?”
   “Yeah, you should have seen her every morning dragging it through those gates. Remarkable woman, my Gran.”
   He takes me to her house, an unprepossessing semi just around the corner, opposite West Park. It’s the first time he has been here since he was a boy, but by now everything is familiar. We cross the road and peer through heavy iron railings into the park. That was where I was happiest, wandering across the park’s wide paddo˝cks on my way to college. In the summer I pretended to read textbooks by the boating lake while Asian boys played cricket and we all tried to ignore the student couples who mimed lovemaking on the grass.
   One Sunday morning, crossing West Park on the way home from a party at the far side of town, I sat in the shade of the white-domed bandstand and nursed my hangover with a bottle of lemonade. I leaned back and closed my eyes. When I woke up, my headache had gone and two camels were standing in the paddock, idly chewing. I shut my eyes once more and cursed my imagination. I ruminated on the thought of life without alcohol.
   I wasn’t tired any more. I stood up and the camels were still there, peering at me and exchanging glances as if I was the exotic creature. A piebald horse trotted into view. I ran home and crawled into bed. The following morning, the circus packed up and went on its way.
   Chris likes this story and says: “You know the boating lake?”
   “Yes.”
   “That’s where thet goose bit me.”
   We must have passed each other many times in the park. He would have been one of the kids loafing around next to the swings, a little too old to play on them and perhaps regretting it. I was at college. A friend of mine had just left to have a baby, and she and I spent many hours sitting by the playground, she pondering her child’s future and me pestering her for ideas on essays I was stuck with, that she no longer had to write.
   “Weird, isn’t it,” says Chris.
   It is. It’s also heartening to be somewhere familiar with someone who has a different story of the same place. But this glow of nostalgia is starting to worry me.
   
   Billy Wright is dead. The graffiti on the railway bridge could only have been written by a West Bromwich Albion fan. He would be amused if he knew that his words have come to mean something to me, quite removed from their simple malicio∆us intent.
   The major tourist attraction in the Black Country is The Black Country Museum. Essentially a theme park, it is nonetheless a major piece of work, re-creating elements of Victorian life with love and an obsessive attention to detail. It is a slightly antiseptic re-creation, but short of introducing smallpox to the site, it could hardly be anything else.
   This though is where the problem lies; it looks so damned attractive. Even the artificial squalor has an aura of sepia beauty. The museum represents an institutional nostalgia for the days of coalmining and ironworking, for stable families whose mutual struggle is so alluring to those brought up under the cynicism of the last twenty years.
   Nostalgia amongst ordinary Black Country people is centred on the foundries. Most are gone, but those which remain run under much the same conditions as they did a hundred years ago. It is the nature of the work. No one seriously w ants to work in a foundry; conditions are at best unpleasant and at worst lethal - but choking heat and the horror of accidents are what give these men stories to tell.
   This is a friend-of-a-friend story which happened in a foundry:
   A boy of eighteen was apprenticed to his father. They worked together, maintaining a vat of molten aluminium which would then be poured into casts. The boy was stirring the metal, removing scraps which failed to melt, and he made a mistake - forgot a safety-check or used the wrong tool for the job. He slipped and fell into the vat up to his chest in white-hot metal. The father acted immediately. He pushed his son’s head down under the surface, losing a hand in the process but killing the boy instantly. It’s not worth guessing how long it would have taken the boy to die otherwise.
   Everyone knows a tale of heroism like this and everyone feels inadequate after telling it. For most, life is easier, but there is no myth attached. In the Black Country it is too easy to hark back.
   When the heroes needed an escape, they went to the Molineux and worshipped their own idols. Billy Wright was chief amongst these. He won championships, beat the Moscow Dynamos, married a Beverly Sister, played 105 times for England and was part of Wolverhampton Wanderers until the day he died; he was the sort of man who can only be spoken of in clichÈs.
   In truth, the team that Billy Wright led were a dirty outfit that specialised in kick-and-chase and who flooded the pitch before matches. This makes no difference; they won things, which is more than has happened for a very long time now. More importantly though, his was the last Wolves team to run out in front of fifty thousand working men.
   
   The foundries are not going to return, any moreà than the coal mines are. The Black Country Museum is just that, a museum; it is not an ideal for living. Billy Wright is dead and it’s about time people got used to it.
   We get back in the car and drive up to Tettenhall, a thickly-wooded parish which overlooks Wolverhampton. There is a cemetery here, where Chris’s Gran is buried. We find the cemetery resting on a hill just beyond Tettenhall. It is shut. We turn back to the village.
   A few days after I fell off my bike, I was lying in bed awake. It was a hot, close summer night, my arm was sore and still in a sling; I couldn’t sleep. I got up and walked the mile or so from Whitmore Reans to Tettenhall, where I sat on the Upper Green and watched the red morning sun reflecting the first wispWs of smoke from the factories. It is one of the loveliest sights I have ever seen.
   Nostalgia is oppressive and the Black Country is thick with it. There are better ways to deal with the past than regretting its passing. Billy Wright’s name adorns a new stand at the Molineux, which is a start. On the field, Steve Bull has spent the last ten years playing with a bloody-minded passion that might one day get Wolves back where they belong. Then he’ll retire and the whole misty-eyed business will begin again.
   “It doesn’t matter about seeing the grave,” Chris says, “at least I know where it is.”