SEARCHING FOR depravity among the milk bars is a quest that could happen in no time and in no place but ours. We are in Graham Greeneland, among the morose haunts of former innocence. It is here, in the fun fairs and the soft-drink establishments and the once-gay places with entrance halls of distorting mirrors at which nobody laughs any more, that corruption waits to strike.
Can Greenery curdle even a milk bar? Dr. J. L. Burn, medical officer of health for Salford, seems to think so. He sees some of them as rather sinister places where ╥young people flock at night when they ought to be in bed.╙ Illegitimacy is on the increase. Partly to blame, he suspects, is the growing number of ╥snack bars and milk bars of an unsatisfactory type.╙ Not all milk bars, he hastens to add: some of them are as candid as on the day they were born. But there is what he darkly calls ╥the other kind.╙
Setting out to find ╥the other kind╙ is a suitable pastime for a January night, nagged by an indeterminate wind and spattered with icy rain. You start, on
the final stroke of nine, in the region of dog-meat shops, corner pubs, Chinese laundries, and people who stand brooding and sniffing at the ends of streets
for no reason that they seem able to remember.
Very soon you understand the lure of the milk bars. Anywhere showing a light has an irresistible attraction. You flutter towards it damply and blindly; you grope for the door and stumble into a place that is warm and bright, at any rate in comparison with the street outside.
This is a snack bar. It says ╥Open until after midnight, including Sundays,╙ and you wonder why. It is empty but for a couple in a corner, eating snacks in a forbidding pool of private silence that does not seem to merge into the public silence of the rest of the establishment, and a woman behind the counter who regards you without welcome. She has indigestion, and you do not wonder. She stares with what is probably a good deal less like open hostility than it looks, and she hiccups. Perhaps she does not have to speak, for directly above her head is a notice which says ╥Wishing you all a happy New Year.╙
A thin line of paper streamer circumnavigates the brown walls and at the end of the long counter is the mighty geyser-like apparatus that gives such places their definition and rank. It fumes and mumbles to itself, like a symbol of the strictly private life that goes on here.
╥Mind the step,╙ says the woman as you carry off your tea. These are her first and last words. You wonder how many people, bemused by endless soft drinks or blinded by half a lifetime of snack-bar steam, have fallen on their faces at this point. You leave swiftly, stumbling up the step, and find not far away a milk bar that might be one of the sort the health officer had in mind. It is full of children in their teens, some obviously at the lower end.
They look like nice children. The boys are bright-eyed and gay and the girls wear bright head-scarves and excitedly discuss the rival merits of this place and others of its kind. It is obvious that most of them are habituÄs. You cannot feel that corruption has yet struck deeply here, though one or two of the older boys hold their drinks a shade ponderously, like Humphrey Bogart.
On the serving shelf the drinks stand ready poured out, like whiskies at a brisk dance, suggesting rapid sales ╤ soft drinks in all their enchanted colours: yellow, and black, and pale and hectic red. Ices are popular, too. You shudder more deeply into your damp coat collar as you watch the sleet patterning the blackness of the uncurtained windows and wonder anew at the extraordinary habits of the English.
The table-tops are scrawled with what may count as sociological data, but it looks too innocent for anybody╒s report. At any rate it would be considered so if scrawled on the tolerant bark of trees. You read conjoined names like Jim and Betty, Walter and Flo, with here and there a message, a bucolic message scrawled on a milk-bar table, a mid-winter╒s night╒s dream, perhaps.
What looks at first like the oldest inhabitant ╤ twenty if a day, with thick soles and draped mackintosh ╤ hangs over the chromium-edged bar with an air of dissociation. Such kid╒s stuff is not for him. Soon he is joined by a girl of his own age, incredibly tense and self-conscious and stupid-looking. The really sad thing here seems to be that the cheery little boys and girls will one day be like these.
Policemen are likely, in confidential moments, to call the places ╥a bit of a darned nuisance with all those youngsters hanging about.╙ But the police do not appear to regard them as hatching-grounds for crime or any serious misbehaviour. Asked if any special eye is kept on them, an officer said, ╥We don╒t go out of our way.╙ He added that as ╥long as they don╒t obstruct the pavement outside they don╒t particularly worry us.╙
