Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  But let's not be selfish. Hartside Café should be saved for the nation and celebrated by as many as can fit onto its pine-effect chairs and picnic tables, a national treasure in a way Buckingham Palace will never be; a home from home, a place to dream of when you're lost on the tops with bootfuls of brackish bogwater or trying to refold the soaking map over the bonnet in the rain.

  Where else can you eat your sausage buttie (sauced from a plastic tomato) and sip your rich dark tea (sugared if required from a glass sphere with a chrome nozzle) while gazing over glorious, wild landscapes in every direction? East are the brooding, lonely Pennines, highest of them Cross Fell, so high it keeps a shawl of snow across its shoulders till May. In ancient times it was known as Fiends Fell, believed to be a haunt of demons and the only mountain in England that's been exorcised. To its west, on a clear day, you might see Ireland and the Isle of Man seemingly afloat in the sky rather than the Irish Sea. Between you and they are the mountains of the Lake District.

  Finally above you is Dumfriesshire and the lands of the Tweed. Due north but then again not really north. After the wall, after the Solway Firth, after that bloodstained border country, whatever the map and the GPS tell you, you're not heading north but south. Because south is a cast of mind just like north is; the Scots of Ullapool regard Gretna like Geordies think of Devon. Southern, more civilised, a little warmer and softer. 'Bright and fierce and fickle,' whereas the north is 'dark and true and tender', as Tennyson said in his poem 'O Swallow, Swallow'.

  A long way below you, just visible in the gathering blue dusk, is the mighty tributary of the M6 running south and that silvery stream of twinkling light is a continuous phalanx of traffic heading south for rendezvous and reasons that you'll never know, roaring there, in fact, as fast and even faster than the law will allow.

  So turn up your collar, turn your back and be glad that for the moment, at least, you are not.

  Epilogue

  The last thing I expected was to fall in love. I didn't plan for it, it didn't fit with my schedules, and now that I have fallen, I don't really know what I'm going to do about it. But I do know that the months I spent wandering the north were some of the happiest times of my life. As I said 100,000 words or so ago, I didn't want to carve out a slice of soft soap. I was desperate to avoid writing one of those books that add to the north's already brimming reservoirs of self-esteem or the sort that you parcel up and send off to Uncle Royston to remind him of the good old days of rickets, gaslighting and Geoffrey Boycott, as he sips Zinfandel in his harbourside flat in Vancouver or Capetown.

  I was determined – and believe me, so was my editor – that this shouldn't become some cloying hymn to God's Own Country, one of Bernard Ingham's Rent-a-Rants or a print version of 'Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs'. But that didn't stop me going utterly, desperately head over heels. It was a love that I knew had always been there but in the spring of 2006, when I thought I'd got over it or at least got used to it, it came back and knocked me off my feet, like seeing a childhood sweetheart who's grown into a beautiful woman. It would hit me in the chest and grab me by the heart when I least expected it; on Alderley Edge, in Alan's bike shop in Wigan, on Blackpool prom and on Bury Market, on the banks of the Tyne and the Mersey.

  But before I get too warm and soppy, I'd like to let off a little steam.

  I came to realise, more than a little narked, that when columnists and commentators, poets and pundits sing the praises of things 'typically English', they inevitably mean southern English. They mean thatched cottages and village greens, willow on leather, rolling downs. When John Major made his daft little speech misquoting Orwell on Englishness, he talked dreamily of warm beer and spinsters cycling to evensong. He didn't mention Chestnut Mild, rugby league, high lonely fells or colliery towns, things every bit as quintessentially English – just not the sort of thing that pops up in Midsomer Murders or Joanna Trollope. John Betjeman once put together a book called Betjeman's Britain which sums up beautifully some southerners' attitude to the north's riches. It's a book about the delights of Britain's cities, towns, villages and landscapes. It's 318 pages long and a mere twenty-two are about what you could generously call the north of England. Ten are about Leeds. Seven, bizarrely, are about the Isle of Man. Nothing on Lancashire or Yorkshire or Cumbria or the great cities of the Great North. It just didn't occur to him.

  On a rainy drive across the Lancashire moors, I caught a short Radio 4 'issue-based' story about childlessness but, for me, it was the minor detail that provoked the most thought. The protagonist was an academic with a cut-glass accent. She had lost a daughter called Cordelia and her neighbour was a TV producer. At no point was there any suggestion that these people and this milieu were in any way out of the ordinary. This was incredibly telling, I thought. Most people have never met either a Cordelia or a television producer. But as they discussed their (literally) extraordinary lives in voices of crystalline poshness, their remoteness from life as most of us live it was never acknowledged.

  If, however, you turn on a Radio 4 play and the voices are northern, it will inevitably be all about 'being northern'. About how poor or cute or funny or indomitable we are. It will never be simply set in Sheffield or Hull or Wigan because it can be and should be. It will never be about an adulterous dentist who just happens to live in Bootle. It will be in some way about his Scouseness. If it's about a young woman hairdresser in Bury, it will be somehow about the essential good-heartedness of northern lasses or the comically parochial nature of Bury life. Some writers may think this is complimentary. In fact, it's patronising. It's in effect saying that you have to have a strong dramatic reason, a 'hook', in order to set your play outside the M25. The fact that most of the country actually lives there isn't good enough evidently.

  While I was writing this book, London Transport decommissioned the Routemaster bus, the big red kind they used to have in London. Hardly anyone outside London has ever heard the name 'Routemaster' but that didn't occur to the many media institutions that talked about its passing as if it were the Flying Scotsman, the jumbo jet or parliamentary democracy. I'm ashamed to say that the BBC joined in all this with gusto and actually devoted a night of programmes to the bus's demise. They seemed unconcerned or possibly unaware that, as many of my friends told me forcibly, 'No one outside London gives a fuck about Routemaster buses, whatever they are.'

  Some of the above programmes were commissioned and written by northerners, which brings me to another of my bugbears – and a new one, excitingly. I have come to loathe Uncle Toms; yes, even to the extent of using that expression unironically. When I hear some exiled northerner talking about how he supports Spurs or Arsenal because he used to take his son in the seventies or because he fetched up in Hampstead when he first moved down, my lip curls. Almost as much as when I read some disparaging piece about how small and shabby the old town looked when we took Tabitha and Josh back 'up there' to see Mum at Christmas. I look at these people and in my mind's eye there forms an image of a stooping figure tugging his forelock and 'massa'-ing in front of the plantation owner. Is this a bit strong? Sorry. If you find my use of the term Uncle Tom over-dramatic and insulting, I apologise. How about 'collaborator'?

  I'll be all right in a minute. Hate, said Kurt Vonnegut, is a great motivator, but in the end it's about as nutritious as cyanide. Love and hate, though, as tattooed on a Barnsley Teddy Boy's knuckles, would flare up intermittently.

  I love the places and the people in this book. I hate how they've become enfeebled and turned into a nation of reality TV freaks and Trisha-trash but I love their spirit and their humour and their indomitable sense of fun. I hate the way they vomit in the street but I love the energy they bring to their lifelong commitment to fun. I can't put it better than J. B. Priestley did in English Journey in 1933:

  Far too many opinions about staying quietly at home happened to be expressed by comfortable professional men writing in warm, well-lighted, book-lined apartments thirty feet long by fifteen
broad. And again, even if they have pleasant homes, the fact remains that most young people like to go out at the weekend. It is not some temporary aberration of the tribe; such is their nature. They want to go out, to get on with their individual lives, which have a secret urgency of their own ... to join their friends, to stare at and talk and giggle and flirt with and generally begin operations upon the opposite sex... Such is their nature, fortunately for the history of the race.

  JB would have hated Big Brother, but he wouldn't have minded the Bigg Market, I fancy. He understood that when you worked hard all week in a job that dulls your spirit or chokes your throat or rubs your hands raw, you need the sheer escapism and the capacious bosom of indulgence and excess. I know in my heart that I do. I'm a northerner. If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing to excess. You're only young, ohh, eighteen or nineteen times. If I die with fifty pence in my pocket, that's bad budgeting. Everything in moderation, including moderation. These are my mantras.

  I watched spring come to the north. It burst open across it like blossom on flowers. In his poem 'The Waste Land' T. S. Eliot said, 'April is the cruellest month'. Away with you, man. It's a beautiful month. I watched it come across the north as if God had drawn back the curtains on Winter Hill and Cross Fell and Blencathra. Everywhere I went I saw people who looked glad to be alive. Calderdale – the borough that includes Todmorden, Halifax and Hebden Bridge – has more inhabitants over seventy-five than anywhere else in Britain. It's obvious why. They have more to live for: better beer, better scenery, cleaner air, nicer people. They're dancing in the streets, honest. Get up there and take a look.

  If all this sounds partisan and partial, then I'm not sure that northernness is geographical. It's philosophical. I've met people from Devon who had the right stuff and people from Preston who made my heart sink. Just like Doctor Who said, lots of planets have a north. By which I like to think he meant that northernness is a cast of mind, not a set of co-ordinates. It's about appreciating that an afternoon's snow is an excuse for sledging, not a state of emergency. It's about realising that the best place to drive a Range Rover is Cumbria not Islington. It's about embracing that life is short and work is hard and that London is not the answer to everything. I love us being smart and aspirational but I hate the idea that we might turn into the Home Counties. We are not the Home Counties. We are the far, far away counties and all the better for that.

  I've tried not to bang on too much about Mark E. Smith of The Fall but if we do secede, he will be on the banknotes, the proud but self-satirising laureate of 'the northern white crap that talks back', as he once said. One of his finest songs is 'The NIRA' – The North Will Rise Again. But if he were writing that great baleful, bilious anthem of dissent and defiance again, it would be the NIRA. The North Is Rising Again. I know. I was there to see it.

  In the end, this is a love letter and a love story. I don't know how it ends. But I know I want to go back and see the north rising and be a part of it. Go 'where the weather suits my clothes', as Harry Nilsson once sang in 'Everybody's Talking', even if I leave my jacket at home in November because I don't want to look soft.

  Goodbye Piccadilly. Farewell Leicester Square. I'm packed and I'm nearly ready to leave.

  I already have the tabard. And I know where I'm going for my dinner.

  Which is at midday, by the way.

  Cider With

  Roadies

  ALSO BY STUART MACONIE

  Ebury Press hopes that you have enjoyed Pies and Prejudice, and invites you to sample a chapter from Stuart's hilarious coming-of-age memoir, Cider with Roadies...

  Introduction

  According to an opening gambit much better than this one, Laurie Lee tells us he was 'set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three'. It's the first sentence of Cider with Rosie and I've read it many times.

  I have no idea what it means though. It seems to suggest that his family bought him from Argos.

  Whatever it means, I love Cider with Rosie. It's one of the few books to have survived a thousand draughty classrooms and come through unscathed. I loved it even though Laurie Lee's evocation of a Gloucestershire childhood struck no chords of recognition with me. I never 'carved a switch' or 'scrumped' an apple or tickled a trout, although I did once empty some tropical fish into the drainage culvert of the Leeds-Liverpool canal.

  My first memory finds me at three years old as well. But there are no 'white roads, rutted by hooves and cartwheels, innocent of oil and petrol'. All the roads of my childhood have rainbows of petrol in every gutter. There was also little sign of horses in the streets, though much evidence of dogs. But maybe there are similarities. We both grew up in working-class homes far from the centres of cultivated learning and we both dreamed of being writers, a dream that came true. Laurie Lee wrote about the glories of nature, the quasi-spiritual truth of early experience and the myriad complexities of love. I wrote about Shaun Ryder and Kraftwerk's curious dress sense.

  Our love of words led us both far from home. Laurie Lee walked across the Pyrenees to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. I once spent four days in a van in France with Napalm Death. I do not know what it is like to share an Andalusian cell with battle-hardened Ukranians. But I do know what it's like to share the changing room of a Dusseldorf leisure centre with MC Hammer. I feel Laurie and I are brothers beneath the skin.

  1 With The Beatles

  George Orwell wrote that 'only by resurrecting our own memories can we realise how incredibly distorted is the child's vision of the world'. If you've read The Road to Wigan Pier you may remember Orwell also claimed that people who drank orange juice were the henchmen of Satan so he wasn't always right. I have read The Road to Wigan Pier, partly because of a keen interest in sociopolitical British class analysis and partly because it's got 'Wigan' in the title. That's where I'm from, you see, and that's where a lot of what follows takes place. Not this first bit though. Excitingly, that takes place in Swinton.

  I'm in bed in my auntie's house in Swinton, a suburb of Manchester. The room is airy and filled with light. It's a sunny day, the windows are open, curtains are billowing and the bedspread is fluffy and white. Of course, bearing in mind Orwell's words, it's possible that I've mentally mixed the whole thing up with a Daz advert. For instance, in my memory the bedspread is a duvet although logic dictates that this can't be true, the duvet not making its incursion into British bedrooms till some years later, along with other racy innovations like radio alarms and the works of Dr Alex Comfort.

  In the room though, definitely, are my cousins Eileen and Elizabeth. They'll be about eight or nine I'd guess. They're obviously teasing me in some pleasant girlish fashion as I can picture a smiling blonde female face above me and some tickling under the chin. But most memorably, and this is the one element of this tableau that I can't have subconsciously filched from a Daz advert or George Orwell, Laurie Lee or A Taste of Honey, somewhere nearby a record is playing. And the effect is utterly electrifying. Even I, a romper-suited toddler, can feel the sheer visceral thrill of it. Every time I've heard it since, a shivery echo of that first encounter grips me.

  The Beatles recorded 'Can't Buy Me Love' on 29 January 1964 at the studios of EMI Pathe Marconi in Paris; knocking it off swiftly in an hour remaining at the end of a session that was devoted to German language versions of early hits. I didn't know this. But I was in love.

  Instantly in love, and I've never been the same since. I loved it so much that I decided to 'check out the buzz' and catch this hot new band live. The fact that I was three years old, and almost certainly not on the guest list, would not deter me.

  We didn't live in Swinton. We lived in Wigan and the trip to my aunt's must have been some glamorous, cosmopolitan weekend break. Throughout my childhood the Mancunian branch of the family would always seem exotic and thrilling, particularly when, a few years later, Eileen was asked out by George Best. Blonde, pretty, stick-thin and a girl about town, it's not surprising she caught George's eye, although
in the family legend George 'must have felt sorry for't lass and thowt she could do wi'a good feed'. That's what they were saying over in Wigan anyway where we weren't quite as steeped in showbiz.

  From the earliest of ages, I was dimly aware that there was something funny about my home town. The name cropped up in all kinds of seemingly unrelated contexts on telly. Mirth would always be evinced when it was mentioned and once I saw it referred to as a 'music hall joke' in my dad's Daily Mirror. Even today, comedians will say things like, 'It was like a wet Wednesday night in Wigan', with that chortle in their voice that is the trademark of the chillingly humourless.

  Mention Neasden, Wilmslow or Cirencester and the mind is a blank slate. Mention Wigan and a host of images flash across the screen of the mental multiplex in quick, grimy succession. Darkened mills belching smoke, men in flat caps hawking up phlegm into spittoons in pub vaults accompanied by the maudlin clack of domino on Formica, scrawny whippets, hard-faced women in aprons dolly-stoning the steps of terraced houses in a thin drizzle, dirty-faced urchins eating tripe in the street, shin-kicking contests, canal boats, rickets, possibly a ukulele.