The morning was grey and damp and the walk through Leeds southern urban sprawl not the prettiest. Along the way I checked by text with Gary about the etiquette of my visit. I should simply open the door and enter, no appointment needed. I should wear long trousers and long sleeves (as if I would wear any other kind in Leeds in October), should not be drunk (he knows me so well) and should cover my head (yes, my flat cap would be fine). Around 1pm, I turned into Lady Pit Lane, a drab terrace with one dominant building – a squat Victorian structure that looked like it might have once been a mill or an old school, carrying as it did that air of old, cold hard times and unyielding officialdom and authority. ‘Security cameras monitor this building twenty four hours a day’ read a stern black-and-white notice. But above the door was a bold sign of eggshell blue and above that the weakly fluttering orange flag that bids welcome from miles around to Sikh and non-Sikh alike.
I stand for a long time in the street. I feel self-conscious and uncomfortable, unsure of etiquette and protocol and aware that the odd kid passing on a bike or taxi driver is wondering what I’m up to. I push the door. It won’t open and I feel a mild swell of relief. Pull yourself together I think, and I push again. This time it opens and I’m in an unprepossessing vestibule strewn with a few boxes of clothes, household goods and tins of paint. On the wall is a mirror in which I can see myself looking shifty and awkward and a welcome sign which spells out the protocol for visiting the Gurdwara. I should ‘wear modest attire and remove shoes when entering the congregation hall. This is a sign of respect to the sovereignty of the Guru Granth Sahib. All gurdwaras have shoe racks. You will see Sikhs bow in front of the Guru Granth Sahib upon joining the congregation. Non-Sikhs are not required to bow, but should enter and quietly join the congregation.’ And I am asked to keep my head covered at all times, ‘as a sign of respect to the Guru Granth Sahib. Flat caps and baseball caps are not suitable, but there are headscarves provided in the box below.’
Thanks Gary. Realising what the mirror is for, and remembering how useless I am with a bow tie, I spend the next six or seven minutes trying and failing to tie the orange scarf successfully around my head in a way that does not make me look like a bad Keith Richards impersonator or a 1940s charlady in an Arthur Askey film. This proves impossible. I try simply placing the scarf on top of my head but this makes me look like a granddad on the beach in the same 1940s Arthur Askey film or Michael Palin in his D P Gumby guise from Monty Python.
Whilst doing all this I become aware that I am being watched by a small Indian lady on my left who has peered around the partition. I start to speak but she disappears into the interior of the Gurdwara again. I wonder if there is any kind of bell I can ring or ding in the manner of a hotel reception. I’m sure there isn’t, and I’m sure even thinking there is is mildly objectionable, but I’m not really sure where to go from here. Just as I am starting to think about removing the headscarf (which wouldn’t take long) putting my shoes back on and sloping sheepishly back onto Lady Pit Lane, admitting failure in my adventure in multiculturalism, a tall, young Indian with a superbly knotted turban that makes me feel distinctly inadequate comes through the door behind me carrying a bag of tools. He eyes me with mild curiosity, and my headscarf with what I think is pity. ‘Can I help you?’ I explain as best as I can in a couple of sentences about the march, the anniversary, the marchers’ reliance on hospitality, my curiosity about the temple. He pauses, thinks for a second and then with a puzzled smile says, ‘Well, you’d better come in then. Have you had any lunch?’
Inderpal turns out to be the most thorough and amiable guide to Sikhism and the Gurdwara that any traveller could have. Devout but not stuffy, he is charming and easy going, and clearly proud of his faith, his community and his temple. He indicates his bag of spanners and wrenches. ‘You’ll have to excuse us, we’re not quite at our best. We’re having work done, as you can tell.’ For the first time I become aware of hammering and sawing from somewhere deep within the temple. We take a seat at one of the long benches in the kitchen area. There is one other diner, a beaming, leathery old boy missing a few teeth. He sits by the door in a long cream robe, chewing on a fresh green chilli. ‘I’ve had ten of these today!’ he says, grinning.
The Sikh kitchen or ‘langar’ was introduced in the sixteenth century by the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak. It was intended as a place where all can eat together in equality, regardless of creed, class, race or social standing. It has come to embody much of the Sikh faith’s philosophy and a Sikh prayer goes ‘Loh langar tapde rahin’, or ‘May the hot plates of the langars remain ever in service.’ Today’s langars are run along almost industrial catering lines. The benches we sit at are alongside several large ranges on which sit huge pots and tureens stirred by four or five Sikh ladies. Behind them, the woman who observed me struggling with my headscarf (which is proving remarkably stable if hardly stylish) is chopping bags of onions and green beans whilst chattering gaily in Punjabi to a companion. The kitchen runs 24 hours a day, its doors never close and the food is 100 per cent vegetarian.
One of the ladies comes from behind the cookers to speak to me. ‘You like curry? You know Indian food?’ Oh yes, I reply, and seemingly delighted with this answer, she scurries away returning with two metal trays divided into sections containing vegetable curry, chana dahl, rice and chapati. She hands one each to me and Inderpal. It’s predictably delicious and as we eat Inderpal explains more about the Gurdwara.
‘It is not just a kitchen and not just a temple. It is partly a school and partly a community centre. We have classes upstairs in music and dance. There is a nursery and a library and we have rooms. At the moment we have a student from the Punjab staying with us while he studies in Leeds for his degree. He will be with us for a few years. And we have the main hall of worship which is called the Dahar Sahib. In there is our holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, which is the last of our gurus and the only one that is not a human man. We’ll go there when we’ve eaten,’ he says, scooping another mouthful of rich, aromatic yellow dahl with his folded chapatti.
‘You should try one of these. Try it raw,’ says the genial man at the next table, holding up a transparent plastic bag in which I would say there were 500 green chillies, gleaming as if painted and radiating latent heat and pain like mini hand grenades. ‘Hand them over,’ I hear myself saying and I take the bag. I grab a fistful and pass a couple to Inderpal. ‘I love chillies,’ I say bullishly and take a few big bites as a horse might into an apple proffered over a fence. Inderpal looks at me in a kind of horror, which turns to amusement and finally, I’d like to think, admiration. I’d like to think that but I can’t really think of anything right now, much less say anything, because after a few seconds in which the mild burning sensation on my tongue was faintly pleasurable in an odd way, twin geysers of electric heat are pulsing upwards from the area of my (long gone) adenoids and threatening to burst my eardrums and eyeballs simultaneously. As a student, using some knock-off madras powder a mate’s dad had got from Liverpool docks, I once made a curry so hot my flatmate Nigel went blind in one eye for several hours. That was a korma by comparison.
It’s said that beer is a much better coolant after a hot curry than water, which is why Cobra, Lal Toofan and Kingfisher are so popular on the subcontinent. But clearly none of these are to hand so I content myself with drinking, in three or four draughts, the entire contents of one of those metal water jugs you used to get at school dinners. By now, I am crying a little which amuses and delights the small crowd of Sikh ladies who have gathered around me. One of them actually claps. Another pats me on the head, dislodging my headscarf. She pops it back on, as you would a bonnet back on a baby in a buggy. ‘That will keep the doctor away,’ says the small fellow who gave me the chillies as he takes back the bag grinning, helping himself to another couple which he proceeds to crunch his way through as blithely as if they were mini carrot batons or mint-flavour Matchmakers at Abigail’s Party.
When I think I can stand un
aided, I get up and Inderpal takes me up to the next floor and the main hall. Women of various ages are grouped along the walls of the room and one is seated at its head under a canopy. She is reading into a microphone in a low monotone from the holy book. Inderpal and I lurk at the entrance to the room and he whispers in my ear, ‘She’s reading from the Granth Sahib, our holy book. Someone is here reading from it all day and all night. Twenty-four hours a day.’ The women in the room listen intently, eyes closed, some gently nodding to the recitation. ‘Come on, come with me,’ says Inderpal, beckoning me into the Dharbar. We pad quietly right up to the reader and the holy book. Inderpal drops to his knees, bends forward and lowers his head to the floor to kiss it. I follow suit. Then we rise and gently exit backwards. I am worried about doing something wrong, but Inderpal and the ladies smile indulgently and I get the feeling that unless I behave badly, my ignorance of Sikhism and its etiquette is no problem. I am their guest, and they are happy to have me here.
If you are used to the traditions of Christian churches, possibly synagogues too though I’m not qualified to say, a Sikh temple is almost disconcerting in its informality. No gilt, no statuary, no reliquary, no icons, no religious pictures. The most holy part of it, where the most ‘sacred’ things are happening, is just above what resembles at most a very basic works canteen with vats of dahl and sambar on the go. How different it feels from my altar boy days spent in a fug of perfumed incense swinging a thurible around my head in front of a burnished gold tabernacle. Although to be honest, here too the sacred and profane sat side by side. Just on the other side of the wall from the altar, they were pulling pints of Guinness and playing snooker in the Catholic Club.
We ascend another flight. There is a large room for teaching, kids’ paintings adorning the walls, and there’s a handwritten message of thanks for their service to local life from the local police. Inderpal opens a side door and we emerge onto a wide section of flat roof high above the cramped terraced houses of Beeston. ‘This,’ he says indicating a tall flagpole with its bright triangular pennant of silk, ‘is the Nishan Sahib. It is the flag of the Gurdwara intended to be seen from miles around and saying that this is a place of safety, originally in time of war but now just for any who wishes to come, Sikh or otherwise.’ We stand under it for a while as it flaps damply. In the distance I can see the stand at Elland Road.
I have the feeling that, just as the recitation of the holy book will continue around the clock, Inderpal would be happy, keen and capable of talking passionately about his community all day. There is something sweet and winning about this, whatever your faith or lack of it. But I have my own pilgrimage to continue with, not to Amritsar’s Golden Temple, which many Sikhs aspire to one day visit, but to Wakefield, the next stage on the march’s itinerary. Inderpal wants to show me one last thing though, the rehearsal rooms where one can study the classical music traditions of India. ‘I don’t know if there are classes there today. But I hope you can hear some.’ We arrive at the door a floor below though just as a class is breaking up. Two older Sikh gentlemen are leaving, behind them a young ginger-haired British guy. His headscarf is as poorly knotted as mine and seeing each other’s, we tacitly acknowledge our shared incompetence with a wan smile.
Inderpal asks one of the older gentlemen to tell me about the instrument he plays. ‘It is an Indian instrument,’ smiles the man, fingering a fine wiry grey beard, ‘that you may never have heard of it.’ Keen not to be thought a fool, but in fact being an idiot, I randomly name some Indian instruments I have heard of, such as the tabla and the sitar. Still smiling, the man shakes his head patiently. ‘No, I play the santoor. It is a trapezoid instrument with 72 strings. ‘Wow,’ I say, establishing my idiot credentials even more decisively. ‘Is that difficult to play?’ He turns to the young Western man. ‘John, is it difficult?’ ‘Well, I’ve been coming here to learn for ten years and I’m still a beginner,’ he says, pushing his headdress back up out of his eyes, where it has slipped down like an outsized party hat on a toddler.
We descend the stairs together, me just about persuading Inderpal that it was really not necessary for the musicians to go and get their instruments out again and play. As the Sikh men fall into conversation in Punjabi (I imagine something along the lines of, ‘Who’s the doofus who can’t tie a headdress?’), John tugs at my sleeve to pull me back a little behind the group. ‘I’m a music teacher in Bradford. I fell in love with Indian music and when I found out that he was here,’ his voice drops to an awestruck sotto voce as he points at the older musician walking ahead, ‘and would give me lessons … well, I come here every week, have been doing for ten years. His name is Ustad Harjinderpal Singh, and he’s one of the great virtuosi of Indian music. Look him up.’
I jot a decent approximation of this name in my black moleskin notebook for later research. John and Ustad leave and I say my goodbyes to Inderpal. It has been a fascinating couple of hours. I’ve been wonderfully fed, I’ve learned a great deal and I’m very grateful to my young host. Gauche to the end, I fumble in my pocket and pull out a fiver, wondering aloud if there’s a collection plate or a community charity or, who knows, a fund for a new flag like they have for new roofs on old churches in the Cotswolds. ‘No, no, no,’ he waves it and me away. ‘It has been a pleasure. Where are you going now? Wakefield? Well, when you have seen Wakefield, come back here. There’s a wedding on tonight. We’ll be here from 6.30 to 9. You must come. No drink here. But people will have drink later. You can have more food. More chillies!’
It was tempting then, and even more so after an afternoon spent trudging along the anonymous drizzly main roads of Yorkshire. I walked through quaintly named Robin Hood, past the Old Halfway House Pub (To Let), outside which a young lad in a Wakefield Trinity Wildcats replica shirt mends a puncture, past the Wakefield Diesel Centre and down Meadowgate Drive (where I sang a variant of an old Suzi Quatro hit some of you might remember) and eventually past a sign that welcomed me to Wakefield. Here the marchers enjoyed a quieter reception than in Leeds. But then that night in the grand town hall would prove the most splendid of the whole three-week trip. In Wakefield, they were given potted meat ‘butties’ and tea and then taken to their lodging at a disused chapel on Salem Street.
I have treated myself to accommodation that’s a little nicer and lying on the bed after checking my blisters (hardly any: I was hoping for at least a few battlescars) I tap the musician’s name that John gave me into Google, hoping I’ve got it roughly right. Hits galore pop up; links, YouTube clips, recordings. Thus it become apparent that the older, bearded gentlemen I met earlier is one of the greatest exponents in the world of the santoor, ‘the hundred stringed instrument of the valleys’, which I assume is poetic licence. His CV is dense with achievements and accolades. ‘Born in Jabalpur, India in 1953 … age 14 years his father sent him to learn Tabla … made him the disciple of the santoor maestro Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma … toured extensively for SPICMACAY (Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth) and gave concerts, lectures and demonstration programmes in schools and colleges … He has toured abroad and performed in various cities around the UK.’ There is a clip of him playing the santoor in Manchester’s glitzy and prestigious Bridgewater Hall, home of the Halle Orchestra, and in chamber concert at Opera North’s Howard Assembly Rooms, the very room where I had heard Steven Osborne play Debussy and Ravel and discuss the Chuckle Brothers.
So it was rather as if, earlier that day, I had bumped into Yo-Yo Ma in a back street near Hunslet and had him explain to me patiently and sweetly, as if to a stupid child, what a cello was. And then almost asked him to get his instrument out again and play a few of the Bach Solo Cello suites for me, there amongst the chickpeas and the bags of gram flour and the okra. It was a real shame that the Gurdwara wasn’t here in 1936. The Jarrow marchers would have been welcomed with open arms, and 200 orange headscarves and a handful of glossy green chillis to make that welcome even warmer.
STAGE NINE
WAKEFIELD TO BARNSLEY
15 October, 10 miles
‘Jarrow Marchers R.I.P in Ancient Wakefield City.’
It may not be quite as striking as ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ or as infamous as ‘Gotcha!’ but the above headline in Wakefield’s Evening Chronicle for 14 October 1936 shows how even then the British press was confidently finding its unique voice reporting gleefully and punningly how the marchers had bedded down next to a cemetery.
Even then though, independent local papers were beginning to be swallowed up by the giant national groups and chains. Circulation of newspapers boomed among the working classes in the interwar years and differences of style began to develop between low sale, upmarket publications like The Times and popular sensationalist dailies like the Express. Competitions and promotions were a major part of these papers’ sales drives, some of which seem quite bizarre now. The Daily Mail offered certain types of free insurance to subscribers such as a hundred pounds in school fees to any child whose parent had suffered ‘a fatal accident’ and ten pounds to any Girl Guide who broke an arm. The popular titles would sometimes employ five times as many canvassers as editorial staff and these would tour the country offering inducements such as clothes and gifts to subscribe. One report said ‘it was rumoured that a whole Welsh family could be clothed from head to toe for the price of eight weeks’ reading of the Daily Express’. Quite why they had to be a Welsh family is not clear, but it gives an idea of the promo budgets of the new mass market press.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 16