Ian Jack

Of recent decades, the 1970s is the most reviled. I once had a colleague who'd been a little girl in the 1970s, and not a particularly poor one, yet she would shudder and say: ‘Oh, it was like Eastern Europe then, all stews and root vegetables and wet holidays in caravans.' Her austere picture didn't fit with my own memories, but it remains a popular view.

‘Well,’ Wallace said, ‘if you were on HMS Black Prince or HMS Emerald, oh you couldn’t wear that cap ribbon. You used to write to Ward and get a Vengeance, Revenge, Powerful, Terrible they were the favourite cap ribbons. The only time you wore it [was] when you were on leave . . . because girls come along – “Oh, look at the ship he’s on – Vengeance! – Terrible! – Powerful!” – flirt.’

Southern Britons may be forgiven for thinking that most people in Scotland grew up in cottages among the purple bens, or in tenements dwarfed by shipyard cranes, or in douce villas where grace was said over every scone. This is the legacy of Scottish literature and Scottish comedy, which in the course of this century has replaced one romantic stereotype with another – J.M. Barrie’s soft mothers with William McIlvanney’s hard men, Harry Lauder’s but-and-bens with Billy Connolly’s tenements – and it is in large measure a lie. In the decades between Attlee and Thatcher, Scotland could fairly be described as a nation of council tenants. During these years the towns and cities of the Lowlands accelerated a process which had begun before the war and decanted their populations into houses built by and rented from the local authority, an internal migration which gave Scotland the highest ratio of public to private housing of any country in Western Europe, and higher even than many countries in the Eastern bloc. Old industrial towns such as Coatbridge still accommodate four-fifths of their population in council houses. England, even its New Towns, has never seen the like; but then England, even in Victorian Salford or Limehouse, never quite attained the degree of squalor which Scotland’s new council houses were supposed to remedy.’

In the opening pages of Thomas Mann’s novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the hero debates a question which has always worried him: which is better for the careerist, to see the world small or to see it big? The small view has its attractions. Great statesmen and empire-builders must see the world this way, Krull thinks: like a chessboard, with human pieces that can be manoeuvred coldly and boldly as the player rises above the mass of mankind. On the other hand, such detachment might just as easily lead to indolence and indifference – ‘to one’s doing nothing at all’. Moreover, a coolness of attitude might put other people off and prevent ‘any possible success you might have achieved involuntarily’.’

Dervla Murphy made her name as a writer who got on her bike and travelled bravely and alone through the less accessible parts of the non-European world. More recently, she stayed closer to her Irish home and investigated the religious and social divisions of Northern Ireland. In this book she turns her attention to the non-European populations of two British cities, Bradford and Birmingham, and there confronts the hazards and complexities of inner-city life with the same fortitude – sometimes amounting to pig-headed ness – which carried her through Baltistan, Ethiopia and the further reaches of Nepal. Her physical courage is manifested on many pages, most notably in her prolonged confrontation with some West Midlands Rastafarians. But no less courageous is her remarkably open treatment of a theme, race in modern Britain, which for too long now has been narrowly viewed – by the white population at least – through the wrong end of two faulty telescopes: the one cracked by guilt and ideology, the other by complacency and hate.