If you do drink from the famous Old Sulphur Well at the Pump Room (known as the Stinking Well and reputedly the most sulphurous well in the world), the trick is to hold your nose. You might be able to get it down if you don't actually smell it. Better still, the trick is to avoid it completely. Until the coming of the Pump Room, the waters used to be dispensed by one Betty Lupton, octogenarian 'Queen Of The Wells'. Betty has gone but she gives her name to a famous Harrogate landmark, Betty's Tea Rooms, which has the august address 1 Parliament Street. Betty's is as much about old-world ambience as the menu – you can have a live Mozart piano trio with your rarebit although the nosh is very good and is described enticingly as Swiss-Yorkshire. An under-publicised fusion cuisine this, but I can recommend it. Try the spring onion and mushroom rosti with raclette or the Käseschnitte – 'A traditional hearty alpine dish, made with Gruyère cheese, white wine and fresh chives, served on toasted crusty bread.' Cheese on toast essentially but if even that sounds a bit fancy for you, you can wash it down with a pint of Black Sheep.
I once knew a girl who worked at Betty's for a summer and she said that there was something about the starchy, lacy white uniform that drove men wild. She was forever fending off amorous middle-aged punters in cardies and her boyfriends were always asking her to wear it at home. Maybe that's why the book you can buy about the history of Betty's is called Hearts, Tarts and Little Rascals. Probably not, though.
Though it will never be anything as vulgar as a franchise, there are six Betty's branches now - although the family firm has steadfastly refused to open any outside God's own county. Very Yorkshire, that. There's one down the road in Ilkley, a lovely little town which is in its own way just as classy as Harrogate but more subtly so and definitely shyer about saying as much. Ilkley folk seem to want to keep the place to themselves. I don't blame them.
However, having the world's most famous moor somewhat stymies them in this regard. It brings, in their Bank Holiday droves, the day-trippers, the tourers and the ramblers in their coaches and cars. It brought me too, ambling up the gentle slopes and through the bracken. If you're used to Pen-y-ghent in the Dales or the high fells of Cumbria, Ilkley Moor is a hands-in-pockets stroll along well-marked paths. But there's a lot up there to commend it. It's quite wild and woolly, littered with rocks – thrown around by a local giant after a tiff with the missus, so legend has it – and it has one genuinely weird and compelling place. This is known as the Swastika Stone. There in its own little enclosure high on the moor is an ancient carving that looks like the Nazi emblem done by some really stoned hippies; the unmistakable configuration but in soft, round, blurry curves like a Grateful Dead cover. It's been here since a millennium and a half years before Christ, and from it you can see the Pennines range away into the misty distance. But what's it for? No one's really sure, to be honest. Some think it's sun worship, some a fertility symbol. Terry Deary, author of the Horrible Histories kids' books, thinks it's a prototype four-armed boomerang. 'It's the earliest representation of a boomerang. There's nothing else it could be.' Next time I see him, I'll ask Julian Cope. He knows about these things and generally his feeling is that they're a lot less mystical and esoteric than we think. It's probably a bit of graffiti by a Pict who'd drunk too much fermented birch sap.
Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor and Exmoor might dispute my claim about Ilkley being the world's most famous moor but, think about it, do they have their own theme song? 'On Ilklah Moor Baht 'at' is sung lustily by Yorkshiremen everywhere and by the Yorkshire diaspora around the globe. It's sung by non-Yorkshiremen everywhere too, usually without understanding a word of it. Essentially it's a meditation on mortality and the cyclical nature of existence prompted by a bloke going for a walk with his girlfriend on the moor. Said bloke does this without a hat (baht 'at), which prompts the unnamed narrator to speculate that such behaviour will result in his catching a cold and subsequent death – from pneumonia, I imagine. But the cheery morbidity doesn't stop there. Then, says the sinister narrator, we'll have to bury you and the worms will eat you. In turn, they will be eaten by ducks. (Ducks? On a moor? Let it pass.) But in an ending that will please Buddhists, the ducks will be eaten by humans and the great wheel of life will continue to turn. Invigorated by the strong wind and feeling reckless and hatless, I sang a verse or two as I strolled along. A doughty rambler who I hadn't seen emerged from behind a tree and gave me a look as if to say, 'They all do that, you know.'
If the Swastika Stone didn't convince you that underneath the doilies and dainties Ilkley, like much of the north, has stuff that is old, dark and weird, then pop into the church. There's a saint with the head of a bull, a variety of phallic symbols, two Roman altars with runnels to carry away the blood after live sacrifices and what is thought to be a carving of the water goddess Verbeia clutching two very primordial-looking serpents. It's a long way from The Vicar of Dibley.
So, in Harrogate, Ilkley and their, ahem, ilk, the north has its Cheltenhams, Marlboroughs and Leamingtons, slightly faded, prone to tears after a few G&Ts but with a lot of class and still a hell of a looker. And in the golden triangle of Cheshire, it has its Cannes and Nice; suntans, beautiful people, yacht showrooms. But does it have its Islingtons, its Hampsteads and Hoxtons, its bohemian enclaves, what the Americans would call its 'crunchy granola' belt? The answer is yes, and not far from Ilkley, actually. If Yorkshire is Texas, then Hebden Bridge is its Austin; hidden in the hills, a groovy outpost of liberal hippy cool in the middle of redneck cowboy country.
It began in the late 1960s when the unassuming mill village of Hebden Bridge went into the same seemingly terminal decline as its neighbouring Pennine textile towns. The former workers fled to find jobs elsewhere and Hebden Bridge slumped; at one point in the seventies there was talk of terraced houses changing hands for the price of a night out. Whole streets were demolished. But as the mill workers deserted Hebden, impoverished hippies heard that here and ripe for settling was a lovely town set in beautiful landscape with artistic connections (Brontëland is over the hill in Howarth, Ted Hughes was born two miles away in Mytholmroyd and Sylvia Plath is buried on a hill overlooking Hebden). Word got around that you could squat in real stone cottages and sturdy artisans' terraces, grow your hair and grow your own without too much hassle. The hippies told their friends. They came, they saw, they set up juggling shops and wholefood delis and over three decades Hebden Bridge has blossomed into what's been called 'the Hampstead of the north'. The tolerant atmosphere has made it 'the lesbian capital of Britain' – ladies of Sapphic tastes outnumbering their hetero sisters by six to one, it's said – which has led the arguably local, definitely unhinged Bernard Ingham to call it 'tantamount to Sodom and Gomorrah'.
In a recent survey in Highlife, British Airways' in-flight magazine, Hebden Bridge was rated the fourth 'funkiest' town in the world behind Daylesford, Australia, the Brazilian town of Tiradentes and Burlington, Vermont. I've never been to any of those three – though I'm open to offers, naturally – but I have been to Hebden Bridge. I can vouch for its funkiness, man. My mate Terry's dad had a business delivering pop and crisps to pubs and clubs around East Lancashire and when we helped out, we'd often detour to Hebden Bridge just to soak up the boho atmosphere, sip half a bitter on the canal and sigh over hippy girls in faded denim. On reflection, maybe they were all lesbians. It didn't matter. This was the nearest to San Francisco I was going to get at seventeen, especially within ten minutes of the A646.
If you arrive by train and you're a romantic, you'll do a bit of billing and cooing over the cute little station. You'll feel sure you've just seen Trevor Howard helping Celia Johnson get something out of her eye. Actually, the real Brief Encounter station is Carnforth in Lancashire but that's been allowed to fall into disrepair, unlike Hebden's.
And then you're into Hebden itself, a relaxed, vibrant, pretty little town that's a riot of antiquarian bookshops and organic delis, if you can have a riot of such things. A vigil, perhaps. While never quite losing its Yorkshire bluffness, H
ebden has become comically right-on. There's an alternative technology centre and a Montessori school, there are percussion workshops and Human Rights Awareness seminars. A gentle tide of lentils and natural fibres runs along the main street. If you listen hard enough, they say you can even hear a distinctly Hebden Bridge accent among the teenage kids of those original hippy incomers; a coolly offhand fusion of their parents' Estuary and the local Pennine accents.
One local resident, a writer called John Morrison, began to gently parody the town's achingly liberal credentials in a series of on-line columns that grew into three books: View From the Bridge, Buck to the Bridge and A Bridge Too Far. He writes about recognisable local archetypes such as Willow Woman, a befuddled tree-hugger, and Wounded Man, 'not gay, exactly, but happy to pitch in if they were ever short-handed'. Wounded Man is a founder member of the Holistic Plumbers Collective who 'try to put plumbing problems into a more global context. Instead of just mending leaks or plumbing in washing machines they like to sit around at the customer's house, drinking coffee and consulting the I Ching. Only when they have fully explored their feelings do they make any effort to get down to work. By which point, in an unconscious homage to more conventional plumbing procedures, they usually find they've forgotten to bring any tools with them.'
If this hasn't made you warm to Morrison already, here he is on Hebden Bridge's sworn enemy Bernard Ingham, who's often railed against the town in print and on telly. 'The last time he was in town, chaperoned by a film crew, he announced it was exactly fifty years since he'd last set foot inside the Hebden Bridge Cinema... Bernard lambasted the lesbians and complained, bizarrely, that there were too many trees, before buggering off back to Purley where he belongs. Somebody please tell me why this buffoon isn't drummed out of town every time he shows his fat ugly face?'
In a bitter reversal of the sixties trend that made Hebden what it is, house prices are now spiralling and some fear the town is becoming a dormitory for the yuppies of Leeds and Manchester. Local activists are resisting this, though. One of them, Susan Quick, says: 'We refuse to contemplate the possibility of becoming a rich commuter belt and losing the very thing that makes Hebden what it is – all those weird and funny people who can afford to live here and do their own thing, the eccentrics, the off-beats and the drop-outs.'
Pippin and Sorrell and the other children of that first hippy generation can't afford to live where they were born. Two years ago, they took over Hebden's vacant tourist information centre – a site earmarked for redevelopment – and set up the People's Information Centre. Though their plight is not uncommon, you can't help wishing them well. Hebden Bridge is that rarity, a small town without small-mindedness. It would be sad if it lost its unique and heady aroma but it may be already happening. John Morrison says that, nowadays, 'If you see somebody mumbling a mantra, it's probably the FT-100 share index.'
Morrison has left town now, sold up and gone to the flesh-pots of the Lake District. We're leaving Hebden Bridge too. Having spent a chapter telling you that the north can be every bit as chichi, funky and 'bleeding edge' as your moneyed south, we now step into a different picture. Put your head through this hole, madam, and find yourself in a saucy postcard, where a diminutive balding man with a red face and an undernourished leek is having an amusing misunderstanding about sexual organs with a huge lady in a floral print dress. In the background you can just make out a teenage girl in a Stetson vomiting on the log flume. Just smell that bladderwrack, wee and stale Tetley's. I do like to be beside the seaside.
Beside the Seaside
I don't remember anything before Blackpool. A lot of people have probably said that, as they lie in intensive care waiting for the stomach pump. But what I mean is that Blackpool is one of my earliest memories. Right at the furthest, most distant outpost of recollection where the receding railway tracks of your memories meet as a pinprick on the horizon, there lies Blackpool. It's right there with my white plastic guitar with George Harrison's face on it and my next-door neighbour's Andy Capp cartoon books and the music to Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
Working-class Lancastrians go or at least went to Blackpool so often and so regularly – for day trips, holidays, stag dos – that it's impossible to date accurately when my first trip was. The mid-sixties, I imagine. Probably in a romper suit and on reins, always being likely to stray under a passing tram to Cleveleys.
I remember my first proper holiday there, in an abstract way, anyway. We were with my Auntie Molly and Uncle Cliff and cousin Steven. The boarding house was full of Scottish people. They were the first Scots I'd ever met and seemed tremendously exotic creatures to me, with their milky skins, freckles, outlandish accents, incendiary ginger hair and a massive capacity for a sticky orange fizzy pop that tasted like metal. One of them was a fat boy of about twelve who got so sunburned that he spent the rest of the week in bandages and cotton wool. Sotto voce, people were sympathetic but they did say it was his own fault. What with his skin and everything.
I thought I'd get some more accurate detail by ringing my mum. This, I now acknowledge, was foolhardy in the extreme. If you've read the interview with my mum about The Beatles in a previous book of mine, Cider with Roadies, you'll know just what to expect.
'Oh, that would be, oh, let's think, we'd just found out that we'd got that council house in Worsley Mesnes and so we were moving from your nana's – 1968, would it be, yes. Us and Molly and Cliff and Steven. On the front, right down by the baths... No, no, I'm wrong. It was nowhere near there, it was up Gynn Square, miles from the front. (Shouts off) What was the name of that hotel in Blackpool where we stayed with Molly and Cliff? Wait, I'll put your dad on.'
Then there comes the unnecessarily loud phone voice adopted by all dads of a certain vintage who still don't really believe that this newfangled contraption can possibly work.
'HALLO? HALLO? Hallo, cock! Now this hotel. It was called the Seagull and it was next to the Seagull coach garage. I don't know if it was the same firm...'
Instantly and clearly audible in the background my mother disputes this. 'No. No way, Peter. You're wrong. The Seagull garage was owned by a distant relative of Kathleen Ellison. We never went there with Molly. We were there with Maureen and Brian. Don't you remember? Walking down the prom we saw Theresa Mears with their Arnold. We were staying in a hotel in Gynn Square next door to a boarding house that was next door to Pat Marsh's brother-in-law Tommy. He'd just been signed off by the doctor...'
In case you think these kinds of conversation are an invention of Peter Kay's fertile mind, think again. This is how people in the north actually talk. If you're recounting a story, however trivial – be it a holiday in Blackpool or a recent visit to B&Q for rawlplugs - everybody in the story must be identified by their family lineage or by some significant event in their life history. In this, we are true northerners, inheritors of the Eddas and the Icelandic sagas of our forefathers. In the Eddas, you might encounter Grolnir, he who slew the troll by the waterfall. In my mother's sagas, you may encounter Gerald, he who fell off a ladder at the Bleach Works. In this way, telling the tale of your recent trip to the chiropodist can take two hours. My mum and dad were still arguing when I gently replaced the receiver. By the way, there really was a Bleach Works in Wigan, which even after it was demolished gave its name to that particular part of town, as in, 'He's going out with a girl from up by the Bleach Works.' Evocative, eh?
But returning to Blackpool, I guess that I must have been there four or five times a year for the first dozen years of my life. In that I was by no means unusual. Different towns – in Lancashire and in Scotland – would have different holiday periods or Wakes Weeks in which the factories would close for a fortnight and the town would pretty much decamp to Blackpool. Preston would have certain weeks, Blackburn others. Wigan's weeks were the same as Glasgow's, which made for a lively old time, I can tell you. Factor in countless day trips and all Lancastrians and most Scots of a certain socio-economic group got to know Blackpool as well as the
ir own home town.
In the last couple of decades, I've hardly been back at all. Stone Roses and James concerts at the Winter Gardens in the nineties, the odd football match. I've not really had much cause to venture there, to be honest. That's the thing about the coastline. You're never just passing through. You have to really want to go there. It puts off the faint-hearted. That's why Philip Larkin liked living in Hull so much. Journalists would set out to interview him and then seeing how bloody difficult it was to get to, would stay on the train and head for Newcastle to doorstep Basil Bunting instead.
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