Bill Dick – Blood and Porridge

April 30, 2024June 30, 2024

Nostalgic wallows 2: youth hotels

I’ve been meaning to write about youth hostels since last July. That was when the journalist John Harris penned an article for the Guardian that was both a tribute to and a lamentation about them. Harris reported: “The Youth Hostel Association of England and Wales (YHA) has announced the sell-off of 20 of its 150 hostels, and identified a further 30 for possible uploading over the next three years – which, in total, would mean the loss of a third of its properties. Its spokespeople blame ‘pandemic shutdowns, the cost-of-living crisis and steep inflation.’” He also observed: “Insiders… talk about how Brexit has hugely reduced the number of school trips to the UK from Europe, thereby hitting a crucial part of the YHA’s revenue.”

For a long time, I was a member of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA), or Hostelling Scotland as it is now, and I assume the situation north of the border is bleak too. The youth hostel in Melrose, the one closest to my home address in the Scottish Borders, ceased trading some years ago. Indeed, as far as I know, the Borders region has only one SYHA hostel these days, in Kirk Yetholm. It’s insane when you consider how the Borders is choc-a-bloc with beautiful countryside and offers great opportunities for walking, hiking and cycling. It should have half-a-dozen such hostels offering holiday accommodation for outdoor enthusiasts who are on a budget.

The first youth hotel association I was a member of, though, was the Northern Irish one. I joined it during the summer of 1982, when I was 16 and temporarily employed on an uncle’s farm in County Tyrone. I was making plans to go to the French-speaking part of Switzerland that October and work as a grape-picker, and then travel around Europe, and as I didn’t have much money to finance this it made sense to get a youth-hostel membership card that’d allow me to use any cheap European hostel I came across. The autumn arrived, I headed abroad and I ended up staying in a slew of hostels. These included ones in Lausanne, Fribourg, Grindelwald, Lucerne and Zurich in Switzerland, in Vaduz in Liechtenstein, in Munich, Ulm, Freiburg and Bonn in Germany, in Brussels in Belgium and in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

To my young, innocent mind, it seemed marvellous that every city and decent-sized town in Switzerland, Liechtenstein – well, Vaduz was the only town in Liechtenstein – Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands should have an establishment where you could get basic but adequate accommodation for a price that was as cheap as the proverbial chips.

From those 1982 wanderings, the Grindelwald youth hostel remains most vivid in my memory. I arrived in the Alpine town one evening when everything was shrouded in fog as well as in darkness and I had no idea what my surroundings looked like. The next morning, I woke in a hostel dormitory, put on some clothes and emerged onto a balcony. The hostel was sited high on one side of a valley and across from it, confronting me, was the vast craggy awesomeness of the Eiger. Wow!

From pixabay.com / © Goodlynx

There were downsides, of course. At the time, many of those hostels were strictly run – especially the Swiss ones. They had ten o’clock curfews and the wardens showed their guests as much humanity as Victorian schoolmasters showed their pupils in Charles Dickens’ novels. In one hostel, I noticed some graffiti scrawled on the inside of a toilet door. “The warden,” it said bluntly, “is a fascist.”

I also met a wide range of humanity in those places. In the common rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and dormitories, I had conversations with philosophers, poets, communists, anarchists, rabid Irish nationalists, belligerent English football hooligans, drunkards, thieves – a sweater was swiped from my rucksack in Brussels – and more. I met an old Australian guy who talked about the months he’d spent roaming the Sahara Desert and hanging out with the Tuareg. I met an American woman who couldn’t understand a single word I uttered – I ’d say something in my hybrid Northern Irish / Scottish accent and, panic-stricken, she’d look to her travelling companion for a translation. In Rotterdam, on my way from the station to the youth hostel, a guy pulled a knife on me and tried to rob me, and then at the hostel I was consoled by a devout Dutch Christian. After telling him about my misadventure, he exclaimed, “Thank God for saving your life!”

The following summer, I worked in Switzerland again, this time on a farm, and I did a little more hostelling – in the Swiss cities of Zug and Berne and in the French coastal town of Boulogne, from which I caught a ferry back to the UK. And soon afterwards, I spent a couple of weeks tramping around England’s Lake District and stayed in several youth hostels there: Ambleside, Keswick, Grasmere, Windermere, Borrowdale.

It wasn’t until 1988, when I was in my early twenties, that I was reacquainted with the youth hostelling world. This was shortly after I’d graduated from college in Aberdeen. Needing employment for the summer, I was taken on as a seasonal warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel on Queen’s Road. I worked under the supervision of the hostel’s head warden, the relaxed and affable Bill Dick, and alongside fellow wardens Andrew Gordon and Paul Hunter. It was a pleasant summer on a personal level – even my memories of wrestling a lawnmower over the building’s extensive and unruly back garden seem idyllic now. That said, it was a traumatic one for Aberdeen generally because, on the night of July 6^th-7^th, the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded in the sea 120 miles north-east of the city, resulting in 167 deaths. In fact, some of the guys staying in the hostel were looking for employment in the local oil industry. Before they did anything else, they had to complete a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) course at the city’s Robert Gordon Institute of Technology (now Robert Gordon University) and they’d tell me about how they were strapped inside a mock-up of a helicopter fuselage and then dunked in a giant tank of water.

Bill Dick was a laidback boss but one thing seriously worried him. That was the thought of a fire. The premises contained cheap plastic furniture that might give off toxic fumes if it burned and, also, the external fire escapes were showing signs of wear and tear. He’d raised these issues with the SYHA but so far nothing had been done about them, presumably due to a lack of funds. Thus, Andrew, Paul and I had the procedures to follow in the event of a fire, and the locations of the fire extinguishers and fire alarms, drummed into our heads.

From wikimedia.org / © AlasdairW

One evening, just after eleven, I was completing a shift at the front desk. The hostellers all seemed to be in bed and Bill and the other staff had gone out for a drink, save for Nicky, the night-porter, who was upstairs, and Mary, the cook, who was finishing up in the kitchen. I was wrestling with the usual end-of-day headache of counting up the till – not an easy job because youth hostels in those days (and maybe still now) used elaborate systems of discounts and vouchers that meant guests were often paying less than the official prices. Then an agonisingly loud, shrill noise pierced through the building – the fire alarm.

I grabbed the phone and dialled 999. Yelling above the noise, I gave the emergency-services operator our address. By this time, guests were shambling down the stairs, into the front lobby, wearing pyjamas, dressing gowns and other nighttime attire. “Get outside,” I ordered, even pushing a couple of them towards the door, “get outside!” Mary appeared from the kitchen – Nicky, it transpired later, was detained because he’d been in the middle of using the loo when the alarm went off – and we headed into the building’s interior in search of the fire. We didn’t find it. We did, however, find a fire alarm with its protective glass broken. Some wanker, who’d probably been in the pub all evening, had smashed it and pressed the activation button inside for a laugh. Meanwhile, the windows at the front of the hostel brimmed with dazzling white light, as if the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) had just landed in the front yard. It was actually the headlights of a couple of engines arriving from Aberdeen Fire Station.

Later, after I’d filled in forms confirming the fire had been a false alarm and a number of disgruntled Aberdonian firefighters had returned to their vehicles, Mary remarked, “My hands are still shaking.” I realised mine were too. I felt pretty stupid about summoning all those firemen for nothing, but when Bill returned and heard what’d happened, he assured me I’d done the right thing.

I’m sure that later, as health-and-safety regulations became more stringent, the SYHA sorted out the hostel’s furniture and fire escapes. However, that’s academic now, as the the building was put up for sale in 2022 and I assume Aberdeen, like so many other places, is now youth-hostel-less.

During the 1990s I lived in Japan and in 1995 I got a temporary job as a researcher for the Fodor’s Guidebook company. My assignment was to update and rewrite two chapters in the previous edition of their Japanese guide, about Hokkaido and Tohoku, for a new edition. As Hokkaido and Tohoku constitute the northern third of the Japanese landmass, this involved a lot of travelling around. To cut costs, I stayed in several youth hostels – in the cities of Hakodate, Aomori, Hirosaki and Akita, and by Lake Tazawa, which is up in the mountains to the east of Akita City and is Japan’s deepest lake. The hostels were pretty basic but, crucially, they were warm – I was carrying out this job in March, when northern Japan was still in the grip of winter and buried in snowdrifts.

From pixabay.com / © hydroxyquinol

My visit to the Lake Tazawa youth hostel was a spooky experience. I’d phoned earlier in the day from Akita and booked a bed there – a friendly-sounding lady had answered and confirmed the booking – but it was dark when I arrived on the train. To get to the hostel, I had to walk along a silent, lonely road that had snow banked high along its sides. Indeed, the wind had sculpted the tops of those snowbanks into weird, twisted shapes that in the glow from the sporadic streetlights, and the attendant shadows, looked like props from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Finally, I reached the hostel, entered it… and found it totally deserted. Its lights were on, but however much I wandered around its interior, and however loudly I shouted, I couldn’t locate another soul.

Yet I had spoken to a real human being on the phone… hadn’t I? By this time, with the wind moaning outside and flinging shards of snow against the hostel’s walls and roof, I’d stopped thinking about Alien and started thinking about the traditional Japanese ghost stories famously transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn. Maybe I was a character in one of those ghost stories now. Maybe one also involving the yuki–onna…

But after staying there for a bewildering half-hour, I ventured outside again – and discovered a second building close by, one I hadn’t noticed earlier. Inside it, I found the youth hostel staff, including the woman I’d spoken to earlier. What I’d entered first of all had been an annex building of the hostel. I hadn’t been ensnared in a wintry Japanese ghost story after all.

After Japan, I lived in East Anglia – one of the loveliest parts of England – on three occasions. These were for a couple of months in Norwich in 1998, while I was doing a course to get a teaching diploma; for half-a-year working in County Suffolk in 2002; and in Norwich again from 2008 to 2009 while I was doing a Master’s Degree at the University of East Anglia.

When I first turned up in Norwich in 1998, I checked into the town’s youth hostel assuming I would then find normal accommodation in a flat or bedsit for the duration of my diploma course. However, I soon decided that, because it was off-season, I might as well just stay in the hostel, attend the course and do its homework assignments in the usually-quiet common room. Elsewhere in East Anglia, I have fond memories of staying at the youth hostel in the Suffolk village of Snape and, from there, exploring the tidal estuary of the River Alde; and using the hostel in the north Norfolk town of Wells-next-the-Sea as my base while I went walking in the local salt marshes. Sadly, all three of those hostels, Norwich, Snape and Wells-next-the-Sea, appear to be defunct in 2024.

Also, from 2002 to 2005, I worked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. My family didn’t live that far away from Newcastle, being on the other side of the English / Scottish border, and by that time I’d become an ardent cyclist. Thus, several times, I cycled north from Newcastle to visit my folks. The journey took the most of two days by bike and I’d break the journey by staying in youth hostels along the way – either in the midge-infested village of Byrness just south of the border in England, or in Kirk Yetholm just north of it in Scotland. The Byrness Hostel – yes, you guessed it – has given up the ghost since then too.

© YHA Alston

I also cycled westwards from Newcastle, visited the Lake District again and stayed in some of the youth hostels I’d been in two decades earlier. While returning to Newcastle I had another eerie hostel-related experience. Again, I planned to break the journey, this time spending a night in the hostel in Alston, which is said to be the highest market town in England. To get there, I cycled through Penrith and, afterwards, had a gruelling time getting my bicycle up the mercilessly steep A686 road to Hartside Pass. It was evening-time when I finally reached the pass and by then I felt about 200 years old. But, unexpectedly, the road descended gently for the next few miles. I coasted along it, barely pedalling, gradually getting my strength back. The ride was also discombobulating, though, because the light was fading and everything around me was shrouded in mist. Finally, I scooted into Alston. The town had a dream-like quality – almost phantasmagorical as it materialised out of the dusk and mist in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the Alston Youth Hostel and – hurrah! – it’s still on the go.

After that, I stayed in youth hostels only a few times more, in Edinburgh and London when I had a plane or train to catch early the next morning and didn’t feel like splashing out on a hotel-room. In the last decade I haven’t youth-hostelled at all. Nowadays, I’m able to afford less spartan accommodation and, as I’m old, cranky and ‘high maintenance’, I doubt if a youth-hostel bunkbed would meet my expectations for comfort. Still, though they were called ‘youth’ hostels, I was frequenting them into my forties, long after my youth had ended. I certainly got plenty of mileage out of them.

Now, as John Harris observes, they appear to be heading for extinction, in Britain at least. Yes, I know, modern phenomena like Airbnb have vastly widened people’s options when they search for and choose accommodation. But that’s only if people have money. If you’re to believe the figures, some 12 million people in Britain – 18% of the population – are living in absolute poverty, including 3.6 million children. I assume the majority of them live in the cities. I doubt if the existence of Airbnb and the like enables them to travel far from home and see much of the countryside. Now more than ever, young folk need the humble youth hostel as somewhere to provide a warm berth and a roof over their heads while they wander, and explore, and broaden their horizons – cheaply.

And yet, though they’re so needed, youth hostels are being allowed to die out. That’s another indictment of Britain in 2024, a country where the powers-that-be know the cost of everything but the value of absolutely nothing.

From pixabay.com / © Sabrinayrafa

April 30, 2022

A threadbare future

© BBC / Nine Network / Western-World Television Inc

I can’t imagine what has prompted me to repost in April 2022 this entry about Threads, the BBC’s terrifying 1984 drama about a nuclear strike on Britain, which I’d originally put on this blog four years ago to coincide with a remastered version of it being released on Blu-ray. I mean, it’s not as if anything is happening in the world at the moment to kindle fears of a holocaustic nuclear war breaking out. Is there?

It’s said that everyone remembered where they were and what they were doing on November 22^nd, 1963, when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Likewise, I remember where I was and what I was doing on the evening of September 23^rd, 1984, when BBC2 broadcast the apocalyptic drama Threads.

I was staying in the youth hostel in Aberdeen, with my second year as an undergraduate at Aberdeen University due to begin in a fortnight’s time. Having worked abroad for the summer, I was now back in the city trying desperately to arrange accommodation for myself for the year ahead. I’d spent the past few days trudging around flat-hunting without any luck and, to make matters worse, I’d just been informed that I wouldn’t be eligible for a student grant for the next year either. So I was feeling pretty low about my residential and financial situation that evening when I wandered into the youth hostel’s lounge and sat down among a crowd of hostellers who were about to watch something on television called Threads, a much-anticipated documentary-drama showing what would happen if a nuclear conflict broke out between America and the Soviet Union and the UK was struck by 210 megatons of nuclear weaponry.

It’s fair to say that by the time Threads ended 112 minutes later, my mood had not improved any. Mind you, nobody else in the lounge looked like they were bursting with joie de vivre. Bill Dick, the hostel’s usually easy-going and affable head-warden who’d been in the audience, couldn’t have looked more down in the dumps if he’d been buried to his neck in garbage. (I got to know Bill four years later when I spent a summer working at the hostel as a warden and had him as my boss.)

A while ago, something compelled me to view Threads again. Here are my thoughts on it from a 21^st century perspective. I should warn you that the remainder of this blog-entry will contain spoilers, though you’ve probably gathered already that in Threads absolutely nothing good happens.

Directed by Mick Jackson and written by the late Barry Hines, author of the 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave that a year later established Ken Loach as a cinematic force when he filmed it as Kes, Threads consists of three sections. There’s an initial 45 minutes showing life during the build-up to the cataclysmic nuclear strike. Then there’s another 45 minutes showing the strike and its immediate aftermath. And lastly there’s a 25-minute epilogue chronicling Britain a year, a decade, ultimately 13 years into the future when, with its natural environment, economy and social infrastructure pulverised, the country reverts to the Middle Ages. That’s the Middle Ages minus the chivalry, balladry and pageantry, but with plenty of fallout, nuclear winters, depleted ozone, ultraviolent radiation, cataracts, skin cancer and genetic damage.

The gruelling central section imprinted itself on my 19-year-old memory. I’ve carried its images around in my head ever since: milk bottles melting on doorsteps in the heat of a nuclear detonation, a charred cyclist (still on his bike) lodged amid the branches of a burning tree, cats igniting, dolls melting, a crazed woman squatting amid the rubble cradling her baby’s burnt corpse, a traffic warden with a bandage-swathed face holding off a starving mob with a rifle, doctors in an overrun hospital sawing away a leg while the un-anaesthetised patient screams through a gag, and several dozen other things involving flames, rubble, cadavers, rats, blood, wounds, excrement, vomit and general mayhem and horror. In particular, I’ve never forgotten the moment when a mushroom cloud rises terrifyingly above the skyline, causing one poor woman to wet herself in the middle of a street – something that led to the actress Anne Sellors having the briefest and most poignant entry ever on IMDb.

But having seen Threads again, I now appreciate the queasy effectiveness of the opening section too. Here, Hines and Jackson establish the focus of their story, two families in the Yorkshire city of Sheffield. These are the working-class Kemps and the middle-class Becketts. The Kemps’ eldest boy Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale) has been courting the Becketts’ daughter Ruth (Karen Meagher) and Ruth has just realised she’s pregnant. Jimmy and Ruth resolve to get married and start renovating a flat to live in while their families uneasily make each other’s acquaintance. Interestingly, this reflects the uneasy working relationship between Hines and Jackson themselves. According to Threads’ Wikipedia entry, the working-class Hines saw Jackson as something of a middle-class prat.

Meanwhile, ominously, news reports chatter in the background about escalating superpower tensions in the Middle East. The characters are initially oblivious to what’s brewing. Early on, we see Jimmy fiddling with his radio, wanting to get away from some boring news bulletin about the crisis and find the latest football results. Apathy gradually changes to shoulder-shrugging helplessness, something summed up by Jimmy’s workmate Bob (Ashley Barker). In the pub, he declares that they might as well enjoy themselves now because there’s bugger-all else they can do. Plus, if things do kick off, he hopes he’ll be ‘pissed out of his mind and straight underneath it.’ Ironically, Bob survives after nearly everyone else has perished and we last see him tucking into the raw and probably irradiated flesh of a dead sheep.

By the time the characters try to respond to what’s coming, it’s too late. The bomb goes off while the hapless Kemps are still assembling a fallout shelter comprised of a couple of doors propped against a living-room wall. The Becketts, being posher, have a cellar to retreat into. Not that they fare any better in the long run.

For me, it’s this opening section that brings home what Threads is about. A preliminary narration talks about the economic threads necessary for a society to function: “…everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.” However, my impression is that the truly important threads – which are obliterated once the missiles hit their targets – are the ones between people, of feeling and compassion, which have been refined by centuries of civilisation and, today, are the essence of what it means to be human.

Thus, we see Jimmy (whom we know has been cheating on Ruth and is a bit of a tosser) standing in the aviary in his family’s back garden, doting over the birds kept there. We see Mr and Mrs Beckett (Henry Moxon and June Broughton) trying to look after an ailing relative discharged from hospital after the NHS is ordered to clear its wards in anticipation of a flood of war casualties. We see Clive Sutton (Harry Beety), the local government official put in charge of an emergency team that will run things from a bunker underneath Sheffield City Council, attempting to reassure his nervous wife. But empathy for our fellow creatures rapidly disappears as, in the war’s aftermath, humanity degenerates into a shell-shocked, zombie-like rabble fixated only on its own, scrabbling-in-the-dirt survival.

This is made explicit in Threads’ final stages when, years later, we’re introduced to Jane (Victoria O’Keefe), the daughter of Ruth and Jimmy. When Ruth dies, sick, exhausted, blinded by cataracts and looking decades older than her true age, an impassive Jane reacts by stealing a few items from her mother’s corpse and then clearing off. The few kids born post-holocaust are a scary bunch, by the way. Their language is limited to phrases like “Gizzit!” and “C’mon!” and they generally act like feral mini-Neanderthals.

Threads came in the wake of the bleak 1983 American TV movie The Day After, directed by Nicholas Meyer, which depicted the effects of a nuclear strike on Kansas City and caused a considerable stir on both sides of the Atlantic. But while I like The Day After, I think the altogether more graphic and relentless Threads beats it to a bloody pulp. For one thing, Meyer’s film is disadvantaged by its cast of familiar actors like Jason Robards and John Lithgow, which means you can’t ever forget you’re watching a dramatic fabrication. In Threads, the cast is comprised of unknown performers, which adds to its harrowing sense of authenticity.

That said, saddoes like myself might recognise David Brierley, who plays Ruth’s father, as the voice of K9 in the 1979-80 series of Doctor Who; and a couple of voices heard from the early blizzard of news reports are familiar, like Lesley Judd from the BBC’s famous kids’ magazine programme Blue Peter, and Ed Bishop, star of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi show UFO (1970). I’m glad Jackson decided not to go with his original casting idea, which was to use actors from the venerable north-of-England TV soap opera Coronation Street – disturbing though the sight of Jack and Vera Duckworth puking their guts up in a makeshift fallout shelter would have been.

Threads also contains the sonorous tones of the great voiceover actor Patrick Allen, whom the UK government had hired to narrate its Protect and Survive public information films that would be broadcast if nuclear war looked imminent. By 1984, the media had got hold of these films and discussed them at length and they’d been derided for their epic uselessness if Armageddon really happened. (At one point in Threads we hear Allen crisply and matter-of-factly advising the public on how to deal with corpses: “…move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets.”) Earlier in 1984, Allen’s Protect and Survive voice-work had been sampled in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s hit single Two Tribes – for which he sportingly added the lines: “Mine is the last voice you will ever hear. Do not be alarmed.”

The futility of Protect and Survive and officialdom’s attempts to deal with the holocaust generally are embodied in Threads by Sutton and his team, who utterly fail to provide leadership and control once the bombs have gone off. Trapped in their bunker under the rubble of the flattened council building, with insufficient training, malfunctioning equipment and limited supplies of food, water and air, they succumb to bickering, despondency, hysteria and – finally – asphyxiation. Predictably, when order is re-established in Sheffield, it’s pretty brutal in nature.

Brutal too is the narrative as it moves forward in time, with Telex-type captions flashing up on the screen giving statistics about fallout levels, the nuclear winter, the ozone layer, epidemics and an ever-rising death-toll. Things climax with the now-teenaged Jane giving birth after she’s been raped by another of the feral kids. The baby is stillborn and deformed, and Threads’ last image is a freeze-frame of Jane’s face as she recoils in horror from it. Early on, Jimmy’s kid brother Michael (Nicholas Lane) had embarrassed his parents by asking, “What’s an abortion?” Threads ends with the implication that humanity has unwittingly aborted itself.

It isn’t perfect. Thanks to budgetary restrictions, there’s a reliance on stock footage and stills from previous wars and conflicts, which don’t necessarily look like they’re occurring in Sheffield in 1984. And despite valiant efforts by the make-up department, the actors playing the long-term survivors are a bit too plump and healthy-looking – by then they should have resembled death-camp inmates. Additionally, the fact that Threads takes place in a pre-Internet, pre-social media world gives it a quaint distance now. Imagine the reaction if the equivalent events happened today. While the first warheads exploded over Britain, Twitter would be babbling with idiots blaming everything on immigrants or Muslims or woke-ism or the Covid-19 vaccine. But, as a traumatic account of what might engulf us if our political leaders are possessed by a moment of trigger-happy madness, it’s still unbeatable.

And, in April 2022, with Vladimir Putin making threatening noises about nuclear retaliation against NATO for helping to thwart his military campaign in Ukraine, Threads seems no less relevant than it did 38 years ago. That’s a sentence I take no pleasure in writing.