Everyman's England by Victor Canning

Casas?
    But I am sure that the picture of Mexico which I have created in my mind (and my imagination has been aided by the films and the National Geographic Magazine ) must be a gaudy exaggeration of the truth. And how many people on going to the towns which they have ringed with ink in a school atlas have wished they had never gone? This is an unfortunate human tendency. It is distressing to discover that the colourful image of the mind is so mundane and disappointing that it can never again be entitled to a place in the imagination.
    These places of the mind exercise a queer fascination. Yet it occasionally happens that the creation of your imagination is quite wrong and you are still delighted. Instead of finding a beautifully arranged garden you discover a luxuriant wilderness.
    Until recently I had been to the Wirral peninsula only in imagination. There was something about that rectangular bluff of land lying between the rivers Dee and Mersey which always excited my interest when I looked at a map of England. I felt sure that it must be vastly different from anything else in England. I used to think about it at those times when I sat down with a map and planned journeys to places I had never seen. If you are very good at the game you even go so far as to look up train connections and enjoy yourself working out alternative routes in a Bradshaw, a book with more romance in it than many a modern novel, besides being cheaper. The Wirral… there was a medieval strain in the name, suggestive of long-bows and men in green. There it was on the map a stout, defiant barrier between the industrialism of Lancashire and the wild beauty of North Wales. I pictured the noble remains of the great oak forest which had once covered it, and all the shore that stretched beside the Dee gained a dim, eerie splendour in my fancies.
    Now I have seen the Wirral and if I am offered a free trip to Mexico I am not sure whether I shall go. No! man is ever hopeful and I should go, but with some misgivings. My picture of the Wirral was wrong and I have not made up my mind whether the reality has disappointed or chastened me.
    My own Wirral was too highly coloured and lacked any genuine shadows. The real Wirral is a substantial, material, illuminating place; a great natural, or unnatural, textbook on mankind, containing within a few square miles many types of human industry and desire.
    When I got back from the Wirral I wrote an article on it which had been commissioned from me by the editor of a national daily newspaper. The article was never printed. The editor decided that it would be unwise to publish it. He was right. No paper can afford to offend a considerable section of its circulation. This may be a pitiable bar to truth, but nevertheless it exists. But what newspaper readers will not tolerate in newspapers they very often have to endure in books, for authors, from some unknown reason, have been given a greater measure of liberty than editors.
    It may be that the man who has been annoyed by an author calling his town a stew reads on and gets a vicarious pleasure when the author throws other towns into the same pot. Again there is that sense of miraculous immunity which all readers enjoy. When George Bernard Shaw calls the English ‘a race of constipated cow-eaters’ you and I on reading this are quite sure that he does not mean specifically you and me, but the man next door and that awful Simpkins who bores us in the train and looks as though he never had any exercise in his life.
    â€˜Is the Wirral as gloomy as you make it?’ asked the editor.
    â€˜It is,’ I replied honestly.
    â€˜But there must be some beauty in it,’ he insisted.
    â€˜I never said there wasn’t. There is a great deal of beauty, of a kind. There is also much more ugliness.’
    â€˜Then write an article about the beauty alone.’
    â€˜And not mention anything about the ugliness?’
    â€˜Not if you can help it.’
    I could