open to him other than getting an apprenticeship in the‘ smithy’, or the blacksmiths, symbolises the low paid, hard physical work people had to do just to try and get by from one week to the next in communities such as Wigan, and again, highlights the way in which Wiganers feel a sense of separateness from the rest of British society.
The language the narrator’ s father uses again highlights how dialect, and in this case the father’ s own idiolect, is used to convey a negative message. When he says‘ they’ l tak thi for a foo./ As soon as tha’ s done serv’ in thi time./ Tha’ l end up back in’ t dole queue’, the particular choice to use‘ serv’ in thi time’, implies a critical perspective. When someone serves time, the immediate thought is about someone serving a prison sentence. Therefore, through using this common turn of phrase to refer to apprenticeships, as is often the case in Wigan dialect, the implied meaning is that doing an apprenticeship is something someone does because they are being forced to. Apprenticeships are akin to‘ slave labour’; the low wages paid during the training periods were seen as an indulgence people from working-class Wigan could not afford. Therefore, for the narrator to be taking up an apprentice role would have been viewed as selfish, and it might be said that the rest of the family would have felt as though they were being subjected
SotA Anthology 2015-16
to a prison sentence as they would have to work hard to support the narrator. This illustrates the mentality among working-class people that there are certain things‘ people like us just don’ t do’. Wigan is an industrial town, so unlike the cities, there were never the same opportunities for education and work in the service industry as there may have been elsewhere, and for many, hard labourintensive jobs were the only real option. Yet, there was a sense of pride and camaraderie amongst the people working in these jobs together, which may explain the offence the narrator’ s father seems to take at hearing the news his son won’ t be joining him at the local colliery.
Therefore, as the poem goes on the father continues to tell his son that‘ thaah should have come ter’ t Maypow / Where aah could sort thi eawt’.‘ Thaah’ is the Wigan dialect version of‘ thou’, and Wright explains:‘ To show respect you say you to th’ owd‘ uns … but to everyone else use that and thee.’( Wright, 1991: 22). Therefore, whilst the narrator’ s father seems to be lambasting him here, the use of‘ thaah’ seems to indicate some level of endearment, This illustrates the kind of‘ tough love’ that is a stereotype of personal relationships among northern working-class people, and how it sets this social group apart from the rest of society. The indexical meaning of the‘ Maypow’ here is also incredibly significant, as it suggests Unsworth is making a critique of the traditional‘ gormless Lancashire man’( Wright, 1991: 11). The‘ l’ deletion discussed earlier is again present here, as‘ Maypow’ refers to the Maypole Colliery that was situated in Abram, Wigan. While‘ maypole’ may conjure up images of children dancing around the maypole, which has happy, positive connotations, the Maypole Colliery has a poignant significance in the Wigan area due to the pit explosion that occurred in 1908, killing 75 men. Using a colloquial name to refer to one of the local collieries, Unsworth allows the reader to comprehend the ignorance of the narrator’ s father and highlights the dangerous work that the working-class people in mining towns such as Wigan were forced to take just to try and get by. This almost reverses the roles, where the father is the one that appears ignorant of what he is telling his son he should have done instead of getting himself an apprenticeship, while his son seems to be the more intelligent one who has‘ aspirations’ of social mobility and‘ bettering’ himself.
The hostility people such as the narrator of‘ Aspirations’ would have been met with within a community such as that of the working-class Wiganers comes from a sense of betrayal at him wanting to live a different lifestyle to that which was generally prescribed for