30 May: St. Helens

Wesley Methodist

It's been a busy few days, and so I'm only just writing things up now - a few days later than planned. Over the next couple of days (writing this on Weds 3rd) there will be at least a couple more posts as well! Saturday saw me revisiting the place where I lived after Uni, trained as a Local Preacher, and Candidated from: St. Helens, the place I called home from 1995 to 2003, and had connections with until leaving for Manchester (and my first appointment) in 2008. I mentioned in the post about Billingham about it being a Company Town, and in many ways the same can be said about St. Helens. 

It's a bigger place, and has in the past had other strings to its' bow: there used to be lots of Coal Mining in the area, it was where Greenalls Brewery was until the 1970s, and was also home to Thomas Beecham's pills and powders. Of the Brewery, all that remains are some of the pubs - the Greenalls name is now long gone, except for a brand of Gin; the frontage of the Beechams building now forms part of St. Helens College. But it was the third that brought me to St. Helens: Pilkington Glass. I started in their IT Department as a Graduate in 1995, and lived and worked in and around St. Helens for the next 13 years - mostly at the Head Office, but also at the Technology Centre out near Ormskirk. 

In parallel, I was a member at Wesley Methodist in the centre of town; it was there that I had a conversation with Mona, the Minister at the time, about Local Preaching; it was the St. Helens and Prescot Circuit that nurtured me as a Preacher; it was at Wesley that I was recognised as a Fully-Accredited Preacher in 1999. It was from there as well that I was sent on my way to Manchester after successfully candidating for Ministry.

Now, almost 20 years later? The church no longer meets, and although the building still has the signage up I have the feeling that, together with the Council Building it is part of, it could well disappear completely in the not too distant future.

The same fate is already undergoing a large part of the Town Centre, with demolition in progress as I wandered round. As in so many other places, what's left is also changing much; Cafes, Vape Shops, Opticians, Hairdressers - the things that have to be in person or simply can't be waited for to arrive from online retailers; others moving to the retail parks on the edge of town where it's easier to park your car.  I'm as guilty of that as many others: we live in a world now where the convenience of knowing that a supplier has the exact item and can have it in your hands the next day - and for cheaper than a shop - is very hard to resist. 

I walked up to the Town Hall, because there was a Heritage Event running - and representing a local Park was someone who'd been my Boss for a while in my days at Pilks. I say Boss, but Les was always more than that; he was a friend and helper too. We hadn't seen each other for a long time, but the years seemed to melt away - we both found it funny when someone tried to recruit us for a local Choir...

It was great to talk, albeit it did at times feel like we were remembering those who've now passed on. It's inevitable in a way - it's more than 30 years since I started at Pilks, and I was a fairly callow youth of just 22; even those in their mid 30s when I joined will now be retiring and of course time isn't always kind.

As I walked on, I found some of the words of Paul Simon's song "The Obvious Child" sprang to mind: in the song, Sonny, the character in it, as he has grown older, looks back: 

Sonny sits by his window and thinks to himself

How it's strange that some rooms are like cages

Sonny's yearbook from high school

Is down from the shelf

And he idly thumbs through the pages

Some have died

Some have fled from themselves

Or struggled from here to get there

Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls

Runs his hand through his thinning brown hair

In some ways it feels that that's part of what I've been doing. Going backwards and forwards, thinking of places and people, and discovering that for all I can be thankful of them, that you cannot press pause on the ever-flowing stream of time, let alone rewind. And beware of those that tell you that they can bring the good old days back - they were probably never as good as you remember them being....

At the same time, when changes seem to be making things worse, you can understand why stopping the clock seems attractive. A couple of years before I left, Pilkington was taken over by a Japanese Company half its size - the way it was sort of presented was that it was easier to do it that way round than for Pilkington to take over its Japanese Partner. For a while, it looked like a case of not a lot of real change - by the time I left, I had shirts that were branded NSG Pilkington rather than just Pilkington. Driving past the Technology Centre, I noticed that it didn't have the Pilkington name on the board at the entrance anymore; Les told me as well that there are moves afoot for an American Asset Management Company to take the whole group private, and what that means for the 200 year old Pilkington, and its remaining employees in St. Helens, no-one is quite sure. Even when I was there, it no longer employed nearly as many people  as it used to; the Head Office Site is now so empty that the Bird i'th Hand, the Pub that was a regular haunt on a lunchtime for those at Head Office, closed down two years ago. 

When NSG bought Pilks, I remember there being campaigns to try and stop it; one of the members at Wesley, who'd been one of the foremen when the company developed the Float Glass Process now used for almost all flat glass, was among those who felt strongly that it shouldn't be allowed to happen. There was more than sentimentality to this: Pilkington had a strong history of innovation and development, and St. Helens had fostered and benefitted from that over a long period of time. If a major multinational company was now owned by distant overseas interests, what value would they place on that history? Would they retain their paternal interests in the town? What would be left if and when the jobs that had sustained the local economy went away? 

The street where I lived

Like so many places, St. Helens has a feeling of being left behind. Some families have lived, worked and died in the place for generations and never felt the need to leave. Two people I know of moved to houses so close to their parents that a Cordless Phone would have worked in either place; one tale I heard through the churches was of someone upset that her daughter was moving away, and she wasn't going to see her as often. Where was she moving to? Haydock - the neighbouring town, a 20 minute bus ride away. I struggled to understand this way of thinking, living 150 miles away from my parents in a terraced house of my own; and yet, not that many years before, it was pretty much the norm. In these towns where you could live in the same street as much of your own family, go to work for the same company, and keep that job your whole life long, the world might now seem a very uncaring and unsympathetic place. When you could say that you came from somewhere with good jobs, world-renowned industry, a Rugby League team up there with the best in the world, you could be proud of it. Do people feel the same way about the place now? Do they yearn for the "good old days"?

Not that it was always a great place to be when I lived there. I bought a place I could afford, but in hindsight maybe I should have looked harder; I was burgled twice in my years there, and that was far from unusual in that area. When some of the more modern (60s era) houses in the neighbouring street were being cleared for demolition, some of the local youths were more than happy to help the process along with petrol cans and matches. For all I know, as I walked those streets again, some of them were still there. I didn't go past the shop known to one and all as the local fence of stolen goods; even that may have moved its business online these days. 

Was it better earlier? Maybe - but I have my doubts. I suspect even the Golden Age that people might look back to was never more than a thin coating of gilt. Thursday was still the night for going out in St. Helens when I arrived, even though hardly anyone was still getting paid weekly on that day; how many back in the day drank most of their wages that night? How many would want to do some of the hard, physical, and sometimes dangerous work that was part of heavy industry in those days? Be ready to do without the modern conveniences of our life now? Live with the social mores of the time that meant hardly anyone would get a shot at higher education or to better themselves, that saw women expected to give up work upon marriage, and live with who knew what going on behind closed doors without protest? Even so, it still seems more attractive to many than a reality that suggests a job in a Cafe might be the best their son or daughter can hope for. And that makes space of course for those that try and promise a return to the old times and old ways, even if they have little idea on what would really be involved in bringing them back.

What do we in the church have to say into this? We can offer a hope in something that's more constant than the vagaries of human political systems, but what more concrete hope can we bring? Can we stand up for the dignity of work, the need for people to be valued and not just treated as a commodity? For the wealth to not be concentrated only in the hands of a few? To offer a voice to those who feel left behind, without patronising them, but also without blaming the other, the outsider, for the way our world is? 

To quote HL Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." We seem to have some people prepared to offer those clear and simple answers at the moment - but we do have to wrestle with the fact that those complex problems exist, and we in the church need to seek God's wisdom on how to be part of the solution. 

For me - well, St. Helens helped nurture me, nurture my faith, and helped it grow to the point where I was accepted into Ministry. It was a significant waymark on my journey. For that, I will always be thankful.