by Tim Moore
The realm of David Brent and the butt of John Betjeman’s come-friendly-bombs jibe, Slough is a trailblazing bad joke of a town – and just 15 miles down the road from me, the proverbial shit on my doorstep. I’d arranged to view this curious Maestro on a Saturday morning, and as the sun was out I went there on my bike. In fact, Slough proved disappointingly acceptable beneath blue skies, and via a route that bypassed the witheringly drab centrepiece structures featured in The Office title sequence. The last street I turned into was an inoffensive suburban cul-de-sac of recent construction, fronted by a petrol station with an en suite Tesco Express, and lined with compact pale-brick houses. A gawky, angular presence on one drive meant I didn’t need to check the door numbers.
It was a very long time since I’d seen an Austin Maestro in the flesh. The design had a flimsy, creased and somehow unconvincing air, too tall, too thin. And what an awful lot of glass: there’d be no hiding place in that Popemobile. But what really struck me about the car had nothing to do with all Maestros, just this particular one. From bumper to bumper it was almost eerily pristine, and gleamingly, sombrely black. I knew straight away that I would never find a more appropriate conveyance for my valedictory tour of rubbish Britain.
The vendor was a van driver called Craig, mild of manners and smooth of pate. Craig was a sensible, straightforward bachelor whose single eccentricity was a passion for the kind of anti-charismatic vehicles that Jeremy Clarkson likes to drop anvils on. (In addition to his Maestros – there was another parked across the road – he was bringing a dumpy 1980s single-decker bus back to whatever passed for its original glory.) He told me he’d bought the car I’d come to see from an elderly gent in the Midlands, who’d owned it from new; in twelve years’ combined ownership, the pair had clocked up just 14,546 evidently gentle miles. And why only twelve years, when the newest Maestro should just have turned sixteen? Craig smiled a little ruefully. ‘You’d better come inside,’ he said.
A cup of tea later I had the whole story. After the Maestro went out of UK production, Rover’s management team sought to offload the obsolete manufacturing machinery to East Europeans, echoing the deal that FIAT had struck with Soviet Russia to spawn the Lada. An arrangement was soon made with the Bulgarian government: in 1995, a production facility opened on the Black Sea coast, manufacturing Maestros tailored for the domestic market. To cope with Bulgaria’s challenging roads they were endowed with more rugged suspension and gearboxes, and to satisfy the nation’s evident Windbreak Extreme sense of hair-shirted unworthiness, there would be only one dourly spartan model. The intention was to sell ten thousand of these cars a year. When production ceased after seven months, the new company had managed to persuade just two hundred Bulgarians to buy a Maestro. Two hundred! Bulgarians!
It’s hard to imagine a more pathetic finale for the British motor industry, though the hapless Maestro managed to contrive one anyway. Around six hundred of the unsold Bulgarian cars were shipped to Britain by a West Country entrepreneur, who converted them to right-hand drive in a big shed round the back of a petrol station in Ledbury, Herefordshire. At £4,995 on the road they were the cheapest new cars you could buy in 1997, but it still took him four years to shift them all. And here I was being offered one for £500. A shiny, pampered motor vehicle with almost nothing on the clock and a full year’s MOT – that had to be worth £500 of anyone’s money. But at the end of the day, this was a Maestro. I offered Craig £450 and we shook on it.
In any other low-value second-hand-car transaction, that would have been that. Instead, like a father quizzing a prospective son-in-law, Craig began to probe my intentions. What was I planning to do with his pride and joy? Without lying, though not without feeling like a bit of a tosser, I said that I just fancied a tour around the country. For the first and only time his features hardened. ‘And what about when you’re done doing that?’ So it was that a while later, sat at Craig’s kitchen table over the registration documents and a pile of twenties, I heard myself pledging that when the moment came to part with my new acquisition, I would offer it exclusively to the membership of the Maestro Owners’ Club. ‘I’m very happy to hear you say that,’ Craig said quietly, as we walked out to the car. ‘It’s been bothering me all night.’ Then I bullied my bike into the boot, slammed it shut at the fifth violent attempt, and under Craig’s sombre gaze drove away.
Chapter Two
‘F-F-FOOKIN LEFT TURN ahead!’
In 2008, a team of British linguistic researchers asked volunteers to estimate the intelligence of people recorded speaking in a range of regional accents. One emerged as the runaway loser, ajudged even less astute than the section of total silence included as a statistical control. Five years earlier, a sociological study found that the same accent ‘consistently fares as the most disfavoured variety of British English’. Or put another way in an online forum discussion: ‘Brummie is so droning and depressing, it makes people sound stupid and lazy, like moaning six-year-olds.’
So it was that via a downloaded package of celebrity voices, I had placed my satellite-guided navigation in the hands – or rather the filthy, stuttering mouth – of John Michael ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, Birmingham-reared lead vocalist of Black Sabbath and fuck-happy, semi-coherent paterfamilias in MTV’s long-running reality series The Osbournes. With the M25 still to be broached, Ozzy’s relentless nasal profanity was already causing my jaw to clench, and my brain to run through the less awful guiding voices that were just a few screen-clicks away: Sean Connery, Darth Vader, George and Zippy from Rainbow (in fairness, a few months later I gave that last pair a go and almost put my fist through the LCD at the first roundabout). But Ozzy had to be and would be endured. The unwritten ground rules of my trip allowed for no backsliding, no weakness. It was the same with the soundtrack: no fast-forwarding, no next-tracking, just a dour vigil through a Bermuda Triangle of bombastic guitar wails and plinking novelty gibberish, the very worst of British music as voted for by us, the public, or them, the critics, or you, the time-rich, poll-happy internet curmudgeon.
Once again, digital technology had made all my nightmares come true. A little memory-card-cum-transmitter wedged in the Maestro’s fag lighter had transformed the humble neighbouring radio into a jukebox packing 3.8 gigabytes of terrible sounds, and with no display screen I never knew what was coming next. Great artistes at their addled, deluded or indulgent worst; total idiots yammering their way through awful one-hit rubbish. The tuneless, the endless, the cloying, the Wurzels: 358 native musical offerings that wouldn’t have me tapping my fingers on the wheel so much as repeatedly dashing my forehead against it.
The compilation process was a grim ordeal with two fleeting moments of joy: the first when I found out that Crazy Frog was Swedish, and therefore ineligible, and the second when I gave up trying to trace a copy of Urban Renewal: the Songs of Phil Collins. (I was initially mystified as to how this collation of hip-hop-inspired covers should have disappeared off the face of the earth, but the explanation turned out to be quite simple: spontaneous combustion and a vengeful god.)
In the pick-and-mix iPod age, we are no longer exposed to the character-building effects of terrible music. We don’t have to tolerate duff album tracks or cheesy chart-toppers, and have therefore lost that shade which lets the light shine through, those dismal troughs that put the majestic peaks in their full and glorious perspective. Thus did I attempt to convince myself that this sonic suffering was for my own good, before giving up somewhere near Stansted Airport, when Mr Lennon and Ms Ono began to address each other thus:
‘Yoko?’
‘John?’
‘Yoko?’
‘John?’
So they went on for twenty-three minutes, unaccompanied by any other sound, except a loop recording of their heartbeats and the steady drip of my puréed cerebellum en route from nostrils to lap. In that time I travelled two and a half miles, and forgot many important online passwords. When the pub-piano intro to ‘Grandad’ struck up, I began to whoop with joy. The
n I remembered that Clive Dunn was only five years older than I was when he recorded it, and stopped.
Into Essex, into darkness. The Saturday traffic was thinning now, and for the first time I was able to find out what Craig was really made of. Answer: corrugated iron and chewing gum. I’m not sure exactly when I started to think of the Maestro as Craig. At some point during my obsessive classification of all things rubbish, I’d done a little research into out-of-favour first names and found it near the top of a list of those that had fallen most dramatically from grace. From a peak in the late Seventies, its popularity with British parents had dropped away so steeply that even in the Craigish heartlands of Scotland, fewer than eighty male bairns were given the name in 2009. The original inspiration wasn’t my Craig, Craig’s previous owner Craig, but him out of The Royle Family. It somehow seemed a perfect name for the Maestro – unpretentious and well-meaning, but at the same time pudgy, unfashionable, clueless, shabby and just generally a bit crap.
Craig’s CV – fewer than 15,000 miles patiently accrued over twelve years – pointed to light suburban pottering with the odd leisurely weekend run, no doubt heading a long queue of apoplectic horn-jabbing Clarksons through the byways of the West Midlands. Sustained high speed was a novel experience, and one he reacted to with a touching blend of exuberance and fear. The little engine – a very modestly updated variant, let’s remember, of a 1952 design – seemed eager, in fact over-eager, to prove it was still up to the job.
‘Well, look at me go! We must be doing, what, fifty? Sixty, you say! Gosh – how … how exciting!’
After twenty minutes or so the engine began to race, sounding desperate and overwhelmed; I kept thinking I’d put Craig in third gear instead of fifth.
‘Listen, there’s absolutely no problem here, and I’m definitely coping with this, but I just wanted to check – you do realise those big numbers are miles per hour? That we’re doing sixty miles per hour?’ The under-bonnet skeleton was pleasuring himself with reckless gusto, and I pulled over before he could blow his bony load all over the hard shoulder.
To a man in search of the inadequate and disheartening, few British catering options exert a more magnetic pull than our native garage chiller cabinets. I strode towards this example expecting to be spoilt for pallid, strip-lit choice, but happily there was one stand-out winner. Grabits Original Chicken on a Stick – 75g of impaled poultry, reduced to clear at 90p. As demonstrated by the success of the microwaveable burger, Britain’s forecourt diners do not lightly reject a snack product. I unsheathed my neglected Grabit in ignorance of a recent product recall related to ‘raw chicken meat’, and took a nibble as the trees closed in. A dash of camphylobacter might at least have added a little zing: this was the most tasteless substance I have ever willingly put into my mouth, and that included the many strips of Guardian I chose to ingest during childhood. As drab and watery as the prostrate landscape hiding out there in the gloom, as Craig and I were Ozzied off the f-f-fookin motorway, up the f-f-fookin A11 and into the middle of f-f-fookin nowhere.
The road was dead straight, dead flat and – beyond a blurt of excitement at the oppressively floodlit, stop-who-goes-there entrance to USAF Mildenhall – dead dull. After bypassing the orange glow that was Norwich, we pretty much had the tarmac and its dim hinterland all to ourselves. There was a pitch-black, small-hours feel to proceedings, but a glance at the frail butter-scotch digits on Craig’s LED clock told me that the 3 p.m. kick-offs weren’t yet into added time.
The final stretch towards Britain’s eastern extremity emphasised that no one goes where I was going by mistake. In a protracted silence that I later traced to another long moment of Lennon/Ono pretentiousness, we made an unwavering dash across reclaimed land, atop a narrow raised road flanked by old drainage windmills and red warning triangles. The net effect was of driving down a long, narrow pier to the end of the world. Or Great Yarmouth, as it’s known to online connoisseurs of English seaside decay.
‘No! No, I won’t have that!’ cries the Major, in retort to a fellow guest who has just damned Fawlty Towers as the worst hotel in western Europe. ‘There’s a place in Eastbourne.’ I’d recalled these words when that Leysdown Guinness drinker had nominated the Norfolk resort as one whose depths out-plumbed his own. I recalled them again now, as Ozzy swore me away from the signs marked ‘seafront’ – and the evocative promise of clean and cosy beachside b. & b.s – and off down a gloomy, silent road that arced past shadows of corrugated warehouse sheds and the occasional cargo vessel.
These were the ghostly docksides where Yarmouth had once made its stinky mint as the world’s busiest herring port, home in the mid-Victorian, pre-seaside age to ten thousand fishermen working one thousand boats. My Scout troop used to belt out a dedicated shanty: ‘It was on a fair and a pleasant day, out of Yarmouth harbour I was faring, as a cabin boy on a sailing lugger, for to hunt the bonny shoals of herring.’ Ah, what bitter-sweet emotion those lines stirred within me: both a celebration of the red-cheeked spirit of adventure I’d hoped would define Scouting and a poignant requiem for a hope that died on the Flora Gardens housing estate, when a young Scout realised that hurling huge bin-liners full of collected jumble off a fourth-floor balcony thrilled him in a way that clapping out jokes in Morse code never would.
‘You have raiched your f-f-fookin dustinoition.’
I pulled over and looked up: ahead reared the stately clock-towered bulk of what looked like, and proved to be, Great Yarmouth town hall. To my left, gazing out at the long and empty quayside across a matching taxi rank, stood the half-timbered, monochrome-gabled frontage of the Star Hotel. It was a disarmingly grand face for an establishment that had attracted my attention as the most poorly reviewed hotel in town, indeed in all of East Anglia. TripAdvisor’s contributors laboured to trump previous criticisms: ‘The worst I have ever stayed in’; ‘I can safely say that I will never stay in this hotel again’; ‘Although most hotels in Great Yarmouth are in need of a lot of TLC, this one exceeds them all’; ‘Falling apart’; ‘I felt uneasy about sleeping in the beds, using bathroom, etc.’ The only consistent positives were praise for the staff’s Dunkirk spirit.
I bullied open Craig’s increasingly reluctant boot catch, pulled my bag out and made towards the Star’s entrance. Shortcomings now asserted themselves: the window frames were flaky and crevassed, as if they’d been knocked up from driftwood, and the columns supporting the first-floor veranda were set at a jaunty tilt. A certain sort of guest would already have been making unkind mental notes, but as I pushed through the mahogany revolving door and walked into a panelled, low-beamed lobby dominated by a big old fireplace, I felt a prickle of excitement, a sort of nostalgic anticipation. I had entered a building of character, marinaded in salty marine history, a place with tales to tell, where adventures had begun and ended. It wasn’t built for your kiss-me-quickers or your stag-weekenders, or the self-loathing, churlish carpet-tile sales representative who I’d already begun to think of as TripAdvisor’s archetypal hotel reviewer. The Star dated from the days when Yarmouth was indubitably Great, when the people who checked in here were shipping merchants and fishery administrators, when the civic ambience was more Onedin Line than Quadrophenia. I saw it all encapsulated in a sepia photograph on the wall opposite the little reception desk: a throng of smart and happy Edwardians promenading across the quayside on an early summer’s evening, with a line of horse-drawn carriages in front of the Swan and the town hall clock at ten to six. And a one-night slice of this heritage could be mine, as the quiet old chap at reception now gently informed me, for £33 including a full breakfast. Stick that up your Travelodge, carpet-boy.
There had been a suggestion of it in the receptionist’s strained smile, the smile of a good man making the best of a bad job. There was another when the lift revealed itself as one of those manually operated, double-shuttered, concertina-door-grate affairs, which meant my ascent was preceded by an entire Porridge title sequence of clanking and creaking, then accompanied by
the terrible conviction that an errant trouser hem or coat sleeve would billow out through the open grating and snag in some protuberance in the lift shaft, ensuring I’d arrive at the second floor one limb down. But full realisation that the TripAdvisor misanthropes might in fact have had a point only took hold when I yank-clunk, clunk-yanked my way out of the lift. The corridor was a study in mothballed neglect, panelled with the flanks of a derelict caravan and carpeted in mismatched strips of rusty doormat. It was so cold I could see my breath, a phenomenon I hadn’t experienced indoors since a week spent re-enacting 1474 at a castle in the Alsace with a party of living-history fundamentalists. Two dungeon-weight fire-doors later, I heaved my way into a post-war annexe and a thick wave of old heat, heavy with the fetid legacy of waste-water mismanagement. The silence was deafening. I opened my door with something close to morbid curiosity.
Compact would be the first word that sprang to mind, with regard to everything but the beefy old telly that teetered on an occasional table at the foot of the bed: I could have changed channels with my big toe – and later did so. Everything else seemed to have been designed for the very little. The bed itself was a thinly padded church pew: in the morning I didn’t so much roll out of it as off it, winding up flat on the floor. Of such modest plumpness was the pillow that I initially took it for a folded towel; the folded towel I initially took for a flannel. I stooped to open the wardrobe, expecting to find Peter Rabbit’s waistcoat hung up inside. Instead there was a blanket the size of a dishcloth.