There's one high-profile position being advertised while I'm in town: King of Piel Island. It's a teardrop-shaped chunk of land half a mile out to sea from modern Barrow and reached from the ferryhouse at Roa Island. There's no mains gas or electricity and communication is by ship-to-shore phone. But there are six cottages, habitable only in summer, a castle and a pub. To paraphrase Le Morte d'Arthur, whosoever pulleth the draught bitter from this pump at the Ship Inn shall be King of Piel Island.
It's all something to do with Lambert Simnel, pretender to the throne, who arrived there from Dublin on 4 June 1487 trying to pass himself off as Edward VI, King of England, in a sneaky Yorkist plot. The cheek! In Lancashire as well! Somehow this has become a tradition in which the landlord of the Ship Inn is the de facto King of Piel. But during my time in Barrow, the town was suffering its own abdication crisis. It's not as dramatic as that famous one where the Nazi playboy went off with the American bird. All that's happened here is that the landlord fancied a change of career after fourteen years. But that means that as I write, the pub is currently closed and undergoing refurbishment by the council. The Ship Inn needs a new genial host and Piel Island needs a new king. The Ship is a magnet for day-trippers, so with the pub closed, the ferry trade has collapsed. Understandably, the ferryman has applied to be the new landlord.
Piel Island's one irregular 'situation vacant' hasn't really helped Barrow's job market down the years. When the shipyards and steel mills laid people off, thousands of Barrow's workers went up the road in search of work. Literally. Up the very road I'm on now and, I have to tell you, this is a fabulous way to get to the office. As the road and, hopefully the car, hug the contours of the high shoreline, you'll see on your right that the spoilheaps are grassing over and turning green. On your left, though, is a panorama that will stop you mid-suck on your Murray Mint and have your nervous passenger grabbing the wheel and turning your slack jaw to face the road.
The sea fills the low sky westward and a glittering, serpentine arm insinuates its way up the warm, muddy thighs of the Duddon Sands. Behind is the vast whaleback bulk of Black Combe, forgotten giant of the Cumbrian mountains, where you'll walk all day and never see a soul. But your eye is drawn now beyond Black Combe to the distant splendour of the high fells of the Southern Lakes, a vast, rumpled duvet of smudgy blue retreating ridges lit by a watery sun. As a commute, it beats the Circle Line. Even if, some would say, you're off to stoke the pits of hell.
I remember a broadsheet cartoon from the mid eighties that made me chuckle. It was just after the Chernobyl disaster when the story was doing the rounds that Soviet nuclear power chiefs had asked Britain's advice in dealing with the devastated plant. Two white-coated British boffins are reporting back, and one is saying, 'We suggested that they change the name.' The sign on the door reads Sellafield.
The joke being that the world's oldest commercial nuclear power plant began life as Calder Hall, has bits called Magnox and Thorp and changed the name of its main site from Windscale to Sellafield in 1981. OK, so strictly the names apply to different sections but it all added to a perception that there was something sordid and shameful about the place, like a cheap conman with a roll-call of aliases.
Environmentalists and Irish pop stars have a very poor opinion of Sellafield. 'They' say it has become a dumping ground for the world's nuclear waste, which is true even if British Nuclear Fuels Limited dress it up as a 'reprocessing facility'. That waste, by the way, has to be kept away from people for 250,000 years, fifty times longer than the history of the written word. That's a long time. They also say that it accounts for the abnormally high rates of childhood leukaemia along this coast, though British Nuclear Fuels Limited dispute this. They say that it pumps radioactive waste into the Irish Sea, which certainly was true though arguably much less so today. They say that it can't be justified on the grounds of producing clean, non-fossil fuel energy because it doesn't. They're right: it ceased being a power plant in 2003. They say it's a target for a terrorist attack and an accident waiting to happen. That may be the case although that would also apply to most airports, chemical plants and gasometers. There's no two ways about it, though. However gung-ho you are about the place, you'd definitely be happier having a nice cake shop at the bottom of your garden.
The trouble is that when West Cumbria fell on hard times there just weren't enough cake shops looking to take on staff. Sellafield offered a lifeline to devastated communities. Life has been tough enough in Frizington and Barrow and Egremont and Dalton. Without Sellafield, it would have been hell. Sellafield employs 12,000 people in the region and its benefits extend further than this, boosting local service industries and infrastructure. A few years back, I stayed at a very good country house hotel not far inland from the plant nestling by the shores of England's deepest lake, the vast and gloomy Wastwater. On a Monday night, the place was respectably full with smart professional types, clearly not holidaymakers, chatting discreetly over the amuse-bouches. The next day I asked the proprietor what brought these sober industrialists in steel-rimmed specs to Nether Wasdale. 'Sellafield,' was the answer. 'We couldn't survive without it.'
Sellafield doesn't have to convince most West Cumbrians of its importance to their survival. Most will have a family member or a neighbour who either works there or whose job depends on it. But Sellafield knows it has an image problem. At best it's thought of as a necessary evil like septic tanks, maximum security prisons or ear wax. Most view it as a bafflingly enduring but unlovable relic of a bygone age, like Michael Portillo. And those who loathe it think of it as Hades-on-Sea.
So over the last twenty years or so Sellafield has doggedly fought the PR battle. You wouldn't exactly call it a charm offensive – they know that they're never going to make it an ideal destination for a romantic mini-break – but they have at least tried to soften its image. There's an award-winning visitors centre and on arrival at nearby Seascale station on the forlorn coastal branch line that somehow survived Beeching's axe, you should find a couple of courtesy cars waiting to drive you to it.
The centre is open every day of the year but, as I found, having snaked up the coast road behind a tractor, they do shut promptly at five. I got to the massive car park with half an hour to spare, which the smartly dressed ladies in reception clearly didn't think would be enough to fully appreciate its many delights. But I insisted. I think on the whole I was right.
It is a very impressive place: cavernous, ultra-modern and sexily lit, like a Bond villain's lair from which might come global destruction. Maybe not the best of looks for a nuclear plant, I suppose, but I was childishly taken by it. I half expected and secretly rather wanted, to find the place nakedly and unashamedly partisan in its zeal of nuclear power. I looked in vain for giant figurines of Eileen the Isotope beaming her pale phosphorescence down on grateful kids or for posters showing horribly polluted industrial towns where bronchial children wheezed while their mothers fought hand to hand over lumps of coal under a slogan reading 'IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT? BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN! FOSSIL FUEL IS FOR FOSSILS! EMBRACE NUCLEAR POWER OR DIE!'
There was none of this. Sellafield is more politically correct, more wincingly guilt-ridden than a Guardian columnist defending her SUV and Umbrian holiday home. Text projections swim across the floor, walls and ceiling offering competing opinions on nuclear power, opinions couched in the most placatory, considered tone. 'Nuclear power, it's a bit worrying, isn't it? I don't really know what to think.' 'Well, perhaps you're right to worry, Sandra. But I'm sure it's all going to be all right. And after all, those oil wells aren't going to last for ever, are they?'
OK, these aren't the actual messages. But they're like that. It's all very civilised and really rather to Sellafield's credit. They even have a display devoted to the history of anti-nuclear protest; yellow smiley face badges saying 'Nuclear Power? No Thanks!', copies of 'Two Tribes' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, those scary Protect And Survive videos and CND's response, Protest And Survive. Sellafield is so rela
xed and reasonable about criticism I half expected to see T-shirts in the gift shop saying 'MY MUM WENT TO SELLAFIELD AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY DEFORMED AND EYELESS SECOND HEAD'.
There isn't really a gift shop but there are lots of feel-goody things that could be in a gift shop or, more accurately, a nursery. I have a theory – a fairly crabby one, I have to admit – that Britain has become a filiocracy. We are increasingly ruled by children in the sense that everything has to appeal to them or to those adults that think like them. TV presenters, weathermen, priests; every one of them talks to you like you're six. Pretty much everything at Sellafield is presented in this way. There are leaflets saying 'Be A Scientist For A Day!' featuring Dad and the kids with ridiculous Albert Einstein specs and moustache ensembles with their hair standing up. There's a sign advertising forthcoming events, obviously aimed at the little ones, that says 'Be A Human Bubble For A Day!' Personally I think Sellafield's PR material should avoid anything that even hints at freakish mutations but that's just my opinion.
At five on the dot I emerge from Sellafield into the deep honeyed light of a late spring afternoon and head north and inland away from the coast through the towns of West Cumbria that depend on Sellafield. Egremont, home of gurning. Cleator Moor where once they made Kangol hats. Frizington where Hunter Davies once asked a local what living there was like and he replied, 'Desperate.' That was in the blighted eighties, though, and maybe life is better now. There are St George's flags fluttering from windows in preparation for the World Cup, some kids and a dog are playing football in the park and the sun glints off a sign standing on the pavement outside the grocers. I squint at it.
It reads 'No Pies Today'. Desperate indeed. And so I leave Cumbria on the Silk Cut Road to the Far East.
The Great North
Sorry, I didn't quite catch that?
Am I a true northerner? I beg your pardon, Tarquin? Perhaps you'd like to ask me that question again in the car park. I'm sure Sebastian here will hold your blazer and your spritzer...
Sorry. Red mist. Conforming to all regional stereotypes, I know. But the cheek. Am I a true northerner? Of course I am. I like pies. I am childishly pleased when Chelsea, Fulham and Arsenal lose. I say 'bath' and 'care' properly. I have my dinner at dinnertime and my supper in my dressing gown. But in my quieter moments, when the fire is guttering and the last dram of the evening has slipped down, I am plagued by doubts. Dark memories return unbidden and with them a sudden chill.
It's the early 1980s and I'm in the college bar one Friday night. My mate Stod from Gateshead enters with two of his friends from home, who are visiting for the weekend. After introductions, one of them hands me a pint and cheerily engages me in conversation. Or rather, tries to.
'Haddaway yous and Newky Broon divna gannin wor marra.'
Pardon?
'Howay the tabs bonnie lad wor Jackie Milburn.' Sorry?
'Clarty South Shields hinny wor high level bridge down the netty, pet.'
Or something like that. Basically, I can't understand a word he's saying. No, that's not true. I can grasp the odd word here and there, as a drowning man might clutch at a bit of driftwood. But the overall sensation is a torrent of alien sound. It's like listening to a kind of Norse Doppler effect; stretched vowels, random emphasis and arcane dialect flow from his mouth and right over the top of my head. I feel acutely uncomfortable. This is the sort of difficulty an effete fop from Purley or Esher would have but not a kindred spirit. Stod notices my difficulty and starts to translate. All seem amused. I'm mortified and I say so. After all, we're all northern brethren here. A small bout of genial scoffing ensues. 'Nah, bonnie lad, divn't say yor from the north. Yor from the Midlands alreet.'
Lancashire? The Midlands? But this is a cast of mind that these far northerners often take, Cumbrians, Teessiders and Geordies alike. Some even speak of the Great North as in Great North Road and Great North Run. The Great North is England north of Yorkshire and Lancashire, which may look lonely, wild and empty in parts but has a greater population than Wales. They will tell you that the north-east is the real England, that the very word England derives from 'land of the angles' or the north-east. They will tell you that they are Vikings and the rest of us are suburbanites.
The north-east is the bit of the north that I don't really know. Basically it's a long way away – one of the things Philip Larkin loved about it – and it's not on the way to anywhere except Berwick or Oslo via slow boat. If Larkin were alive today, he'd find that thanks to the staggeringly improved East Coast Main Line, he could have breakfast in Hull and still make it to the capital for a bloody good lunch at Claridges with Kingsley Amis. He probably wouldn't have bothered, though. In that, he'd have a lot in common with his adopted kinsmen of the east. They love that East Coast Main Line, not for how quickly it can get them to London but for how fast it gets them back to the northeast. Back to its two and a half million people, its five universities, two major ports, two international airports, and vibrant cities and towns including Darlington, Durham, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Sunderland, all of which any self-respecting member of the North-East Regional Development Council will tell you about at the drop of a massive Andy Capp-style cloth cap. But for all that they're fiercely proud of their region, Geordies don't display the bellicose mouthiness of the Manc or that garrulous over-confidence of the Scouser. This is why Geordies are the southerners' favourite northerner.
They even sound lovely, while having by far and away the strangest accent in England. It has more to do with the speech patterns of medieval Denmark than modern Didcot, more Eric Bloodaxe than Enid Elyton. In the middle of quite ordinary words like 'market', 'talkative' or 'university', the vowels will 'wow and flutter' as if someone had stopped a vinyl record with a finger and then let it go again. J. B. Priestley hated it, called it 'the most barbarous, irritating and monotonous twang . . . and the never-ending "hinnying" of the women seems to me equally objectionable.'
But in this he seems to be completely alone. Major organisations like Orange have rushed to set up call centres here, realising that most callers find the accent warm, friendly and helpful. The Samaritans love Geordie volunteers because their down-to-earth but quietly reassuring tones are proven to turn people's minds away from the gas oven and tablets. For all its alien ring, this fine tongue doesn't sound as disagreeably blunt and aggressive to the people of the Home Counties as the rest of us northerners. Britain has been conditioned via Ant and Dec, James Bolam and Rodney Bewes, Vic and Bob, Steve Cram and Brendan Foster, Kevin Whately and Jimmy Nail, Chris Waddle and Gazza, to think of Geordies as kindly, funny, roguish, tough but not nasty, bluff but warm. They're a long way away, you see, so you're less likely to have one demand a cigarette with menace outside Soho House and thus they are sweet and charming and exotic. Everyone loves Geordies.
Sometimes, though, this benign mask of tolerance slips. Writing in the Spectator in 2004, one Rod Liddle wrote a sneering bit of fluff attacking north-easterners. He recounted a story from his time at the BBC when a Newcastle woman was harangued in the supermarket queue by some busybody from Radio 4's Today programme, which he edited. Her basket, apparently, didn't meet with the Today programme's approval as it had some unhealthy food in it. 'But I don't like healthy food. I like unhealthy food,' she said. This perfectly reasonable remark was seized on by Liddle – no stranger to the family-sized sausage roll himself, by the look of him – as evidence that north-easterners were, quote, 'monkeys' and 'morons'.
Behind the soft soap and patronising cant, here is the real face of the metropolitan Uncle Tom (Liddle was brought up in North Yorkshire); frightened, insecure, a snob. Worse still was the wheedling excuse offered by Stuart Reed, the magazine's deputy editor, claiming disingenuously that 'Rod Liddle's piece has an element of satire about it'. He went on pleadingly, 'We actually admire the common sense of Geordies and think they are far bigger in spirit and have a better sense of humour than to let this type of thing bother them too much.' In other words, it's the Geordies' fau
lt if they can't rise above this glib, unfunny public-school put-down, which was actually some ironic meta-textual thing that they weren't bright enough to get.
Pies and Prejudice Page 30