The Orwell Prize

HMV's Christmas results are out: Waterstone's sales were down 2%, which was presented as a good thing on Radio Four this morning.
If you read the comments thread at The Bookseller you will see there's a lot of bitterness at the proposed redundancies.
Meanwhile, we have entered Inspector Gadget's book Perverting The Course Of Justice for this year's Orwell Prize.
We've also entered Gadget's blog, and that of PC E E Bloggs, for the special 'blog' prize category. At the bottom, there are links to the 10 posts from each blog that were submitted.
I doubt we'll win in any category, but it would be nice to make it to the long list.
Coincidentally, I'm re-reading Orwell's Road To Wigan Pier.
In a week when 40,000 people have lost their jobs, his descriptions of the lives of the poor and unemployed in the northern industrial towns of the late 1930s make chilling reading.
In one passage, he watches unemployed miners jumping on to moving slag and shale trains in order to dig through the detritus to look for pieces of discarded coal as small as hazelnuts.
“A couple of hundred ragged men, each with a sack and coal-hammer strapped under his coat-tails, were waiting on the ‘broo’. When the dirt comes up from the pit it is loaded onto trucks and an engine runs these to the top of another slag-heap a quarter of a mile away and there leaves them. The process of ‘scrambling for the coal’ consists in getting onto the train while it is moving; any truck which you have succeeded in boarding while it is in motion counts as ‘your’ truck. Presently the train hove in sight. With a wild yell a hundred men dashed down the slope to catch her as she rounded the bend. Even at the bend the train was making twenty miles an hour. The men hurled themselves upon it, caught hold of the rings at the rear of the trucks and hoisted themselves up by way of the bumpers, five or ten of them on each truck. The driver took no notice. He drove up to the top of the slag-heap, uncoupled the trucks and ran the engine back to the pit, presently returning with a fresh string of trucks. There was the same wild rush of ragged figures as before. In the end only about fifty men had failed to get onto either train.”
As with almost all of the book, with its talk of shabby dwelling houses and broken roofs and outside lavatories and filthy smoke, you can almost smell the despair and hopelessness.
The line that stands out to me is, 'The driver took no notice.' For the scramblers, there was precious little of the 'health and safety culture' we all like to mock.
“No one was hurt the afternoon I was there, but a man had had both his legs cut off a few weeks earlier, and another man lost several fingers a week later.”
If unemployment was harsh, Orwell's descriptions of the way the miners worked (and died) are astonishing. This passage only hints at it - he gives it several pages in the book:
“When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze or to win the Grand National.”
Some things, though, were better in the 1930s:
“There is just this to be said for the unemployment regulations, that they do not discourage people from marrying... Families are impoverished, but the family system has not broken up.” Contrast this with the current system which, despite all the evidence that children in two-parent homes are happier and better off than those in single parent homes, actively incentivises parents to be apart.
Although the book becomes more political and less interesting later on, it's full of Orwell's dry wit and perceptive observations, all written in his very spare prose. Often, he pulls you up and makes you think. Here is one example:
“We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will - unless another war breaks out - never have a real job this side of the grave.”
I urge anyone who hasn't read The Road To Wigan Pier, or hasn't read it recently, to find a copy. It is an outstanding piece of journalism, and it makes us see our own modern privations and difficulties - even if you are one of the unfortunate 40,000, or one of those who accepts redundancy from Waterstone's - in a new light. Things are bad, but they are not as bad as they were in Wigan in 1937.