‘I make him listen to you, educate him a bit, wean him off all that dance stuff of Radio One. His dad’s the boss of the firm and it’s his van. But I’m the senior worker!’
Jake smiles wanly. If I regularly ruin his day, he is too polite to say. Kev’s a season ticket holder at Northampton Town. He once saw a train on the Brampton Valley Line when he was a kid in the 1970s – ‘Definitely still going then’. In their working life, the pair cover all the little towns and villages hereabouts. Work is plentiful and they are kept busy. When I tell Jake that some of the Jarrow men had worked two days in ten years he looks genuinely appalled. ‘Were they on benefits?’ Yes, but not much. Nothing like today. ‘I’d hate to be on benefits. People say it’s an easy life but I’d rather be getting out and about. Even with his weird music. No offence.’ Their busy schedule is a testament to how our economy has changed. We manufacture very little now, but the cash-rich, time-poor, long-hours working middle manager or teacher or IT specialist has neither the free time nor the skills to plumb in a new bathroom suite or plaster a bedroom or install double glazing. And so people who can, like Kev and Jake, tradesmen as they would once have been known, are always in work. Good, reliable ones are as rare as neurosurgeons and spoken of and recommended in the same reverential whispers. Even as we’re chatting a work call comes in on the van hands-free. I keep quiet while Kev and Jake’s dad discuss the scenario: ‘Thing is, the client, they don’t want that door going in there … what with all the wheelbarrows going backwards and forwards … and I can see their point.’
As we near Northampton, they recommend a cheese shop, the old Saxon church at Brixworth and a pint at the Malt Shovel. ‘Northampton’s alright. Everyone slags it off but that’s the British way, isn’t it? There’s worse places that’s for sure. And we’ve probably put their windows in. If you see what I mean …’
Towns always feel complicated, crowded, strange and disorienting as I march in after the quiet of country tracks or even the droning anonymity of the highway. It’s late on a very ordinary Monday afternoon but there’s a detectable hubbub as I negotiate the traffic islands and pelican crossings and make my way into the heart of the town to be met by flashing lights, screams, whirling machinery and the unmistakeable tang of the fair. According to a leading online encyclopaedia, ‘The St Crispin Street Fair is an annual fair held the town centre of Northampton England organised by Northampton Borough Council though it is not held every year.’ I like an annual event that’s not actually held every year, it adds a little frisson of unpredictability. Maybe we should try it with Christmas.
The St Crispin’s designation sounds nicely ancient but the fair is relatively modern, erratically staged, and not to everyone’s liking. A local fancy dress shop owner complained to the local paper in 2012 that, ‘there will be a tremendous amount of noise which will make it difficult to talk to customers and the smell from the food vans will get on the costumes’. The smell from the food vans was certainly making an impression on a visitor who’d walked the best part of ten miles and not eaten all day. Within minutes I had my feet up at a plastic table in the square watching terrified townspeople flung high into the air on what seemed to be a gigantic piece of knicker elastic while I set about devouring unidentifiable but delicious meat slathered in fried onions and ketchup. From the Dodgems an enormously amplified, scratchy version of the Supremes’ ‘Baby Love’ was blasting out. So far, I was greatly enjoying the shoe capital of the Nene Valley.
St Crispin’s may be a contemporary invention but autumn is the traditional season for the great British fair, some of which have achieved world renown. Scarborough Fair lasted an astonishing 45 days in its Middle Ages heyday and lured merchants from all over Britain as well as Norway, Denmark, the Baltic states and the Byzantine Empire trading wine, silk, jewellery, lace, glass and spice for wool and leather. Some fairs specialised in single commodities, like Nottingham’s famously riotous Goose Fair or the impressively niche Dish Fair in York. I’m not sure what St Crispin’s speciality is; bingo possibly, or Hook-A-Duck, where you can win a giant banana that looks like a Rastafarian.
I got out quickly, pushed through the crowds at the Kentucky Derby horse racing game and back into town. Professional curiosity generally drags me towards a bookshop and in this one there was an interesting conversation going on at the counter. The young goth sales assistant was talking animatedly with a wizardish-looking man of about 60 with plastic bag and grey beard. They were discussing the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, she enthusiastically, he more analytically, and I got the feeling that this was some kind of ‘catch up’ between a regular, perhaps eccentric customer and a pleasant, keen member of staff. She made a few concluding remarks about ‘the surreal darkness’ of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and then brightly suggested, ‘OK, well, if I get you a chair and a pen and a cup of tea, maybe we could put you over there and you could start signing some stock for us, Alan.’
Slowly, realisation dawned. Alan Moore is perhaps the most eminent and critically acclaimed British writer of speculative fiction and graphic novels of our time, and I had bumped into him in a suburban branch of Waterstones on a slow Monday afternoon. Cognisance of this came to me by virtue of his distinctive appearance and the fact that we were in his home town. Northampton has haunted his work from his very first novel, Voice of the Fire, which consisted of connected Northampton stories from several eras of history, and the town is at the very heart of his new book Jerusalem, a hefty tome here stacked into piles, which he is now seated behind and signing.
Moore came to prominence in the British comic scene in publications like 2000AD and then succeeded in the American mainstream, the first British writer to do so, with his work on Batman and Swamp Thing. Moore’s fiction, whilst thrilling enough on a purely visceral level for any fan of superhero schlock and action movies, generally has a deeper dimension and darker purpose. His best work like Watchmen or V for Vendetta has always been implicitly political, anarchistic and anti-Establishment, preoccupied with the individual and the state. In the latter, a fascist regime of Mosley-style Blackshirts called Norsefire rule Britain, helped by big business and the Church, exterminating their enemies in the minorities and on the left. Ironically, the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the hero, designed by David Lloyd, has now been appropriated by the tendentious right wing blogger Guido Fawkes, which must surely gall Moore immensely.
Jerusalem is not just his most major venture yet. It is one of the biggest novels ever written. At 600,000 words, it’s considerably bigger than the Bible. He considers it his crowning achievement and magnum opus and Northampton and its people are at its centre. Jerusalem is not just an epic imaginative exploration of several centuries of Northampton’s history, it is specifically about Spring Boroughs, the working-class area where he was born and still maintains links with. The Guardian described it as ‘a sprawling behemoth, this teeming leviathan, this pythonic mammoth of a novel’. Some have baulked at its sheer size and ornate prose but most have agreed it is some kind of masterpiece. I haven’t read it of course. Its bulk would compromise even my capacious litreage. But I decide that the coincidence of chancing upon the laureate of Northampton here in the streets he writes about, he and I the only non-employees in the shop, is too fabulous not to act upon and I go and introduce myself.
If he regarded this as an imposition or distraction, he did not show it. Gracious and genial, as anarchistic mavericks often are, he seems genuinely interested in my project (‘How fantastic!’) and warms to my suggestion that this centre of England, cradle of the Civil War, seems to have a secret darkness, even violence about it beneath the reassuring stereotypes about middle England.
‘There’s an insurrectionary tradition here. The Civil War kicked off around here, or at least came to its conclusion here at Naseby. Bedford, where you’ll be going, is of course John Bunyan’s home town. He was a Roundhead who spent the last 30 years of his life in Bedford prison. They’d let him out to do the odd bit of insurrectionary preaching because
he was very popular. There were a lot of disenfranchised Protestant sects about round here. The Quakers, say, who were nothing like that nice man on the Oats packet. They believed in the violent overthrow of earthly monarchs to be replaced immediately by the kingdom of God, they’d tear off their clothes to make a public display.
‘Yeah we had all of them. All around Northampton. I think you’re right, there’s a darkness beneath a lot of what are today very sedate English towns and villages, especially here around the middle of the country. This is the navel of the nation. This is where all the bad blood gathers. The main history of Northampton is of brilliant troublemakers … and that was before the Jarrow marchers turned up.’
I leave Alan to his signing. Sheepishly I admit that I don’t have room to take a copy of Jerusalem with me, but Alan generously offers to put one by for me to collect later. Delighted by the encounter, I head back into the throng of St Crispin’s fair, steeling myself against the smell of sizzling sausage and then out into the quieter streets. The Guildhall is a truly fabulous building and tonight, there’s a performance of Dracula, more Northamptonian darkness. At the opposite emotional extreme though, Northampton has a Bar Hygge, a smart, upscale café founded on that Scandinavian notion of cosiness and wellbeing currently being simultaneously promoted and mocked in several hundred fey broadsheet articles. I like a spot of Hygge myself, but think it works best in Tromsø or Gothenburg so I pass by leaving the gravadlax, dill herring and cake untouched. A few doors down is the Saigon Vietnamese café, reminding one how cosmopolitan Britain has become in its dining. Next door to this is a vintage record shop with a collection of jazz vinyl in the window – Miles Davis, Terje Rypdal, John Surman – so achingly impeccable that it hurts. I pop in naturally just in time to overhear the long-haired owner having an involved conversation about who has shown the more genuinely experimental tendencies, Madonna or Kylie. Past the Shoe Museum, I notice a hybrid that speaks of modern Britain; a store named Sklep Na Rogu, the Polish for corner shop. I wonder how the mood behind the counter has changed since June.
Evening is coming on in the English midlands. The King Billy Rock Bar doesn’t appeal with its twin connotations of sectarianism and Bon Jovi, so I make for the recommended Malt Shovel to read and make some jottings with a pint. Googling on my iPad, I seek out some of Alan Moore’s recent interviews, and find one he did with his local paper the Northampton News about Jerusalem. We seem to have been thinking about much the same things.
If people do talk about what we fondly call the working class then there seems to be a choice of two registers in which they talk about it: they either deplore it for its vulgarity and, yes, I’m looking at you Martin Amis, and they produce spiteful parodies of the way that they perceive working class people living, behaving and thinking. The other mode is to pity these poor victims. Nobody sees themselves like that.
Jerusalem acknowledges that. It is saying these are people with lives, with histories, with stories that are as gigantic as any Royal family or bloodline. The Windsors, Bourbons, Spencers, Tudors – the aristocrats – are apparently entitled to their genetic mythologies, so this is a genetic mythology for people who have not previously had one … because when we talk about history we talk about the history of church, of state and maybe a dozen families. What about the rest of us? Weren’t we doing anything while all that was going on, or were we minor players in their drama? This is insisting that everybody has their own drama and mythology and story.
Across the web, Jerusalem is being feted by many as the great speculative novel of 2016. At the time of the Jarrow march, those accolades were being bestowed on the newly filmed Things to Come, from a novella by H G Wells. This was a vision of the future clearly fuelled by the fears and hopes of 1936. Wells’s story was typical of the kind of fiction and themes preoccupying the literary intelligentsia of the day; technology, war, free will, disease, propaganda and dictatorship. It is set in the British city of ‘Everytown’, in a world beset by a seemingly permanent global war that began at Christmas 1940 (remarkably, Wells was only three months out). The conflict drags on into the 1960s which in Wells’s vision is not a blissed-out era of promiscuity, groovy sounds and kaleidoscopic kaftans but a new Dark Age of endless pointless war and a biological plague called the ‘wandering sickness’ which kills half of humanity and destroys the last vestiges of civilisation. By 1970, a warlord known as the ‘Boss’ or ‘Chief’ rules southern England by force and intends to conquer the ‘hill people’ of the north next to obtain coal and shale to fuel his machines. It’s not hard to see something of the Fuhrer and Il Duce in the ‘Boss’, or something of Jarrow in the now-desolate hill people’s tradition of mining and delving. Eventually a new world order based on a benign technocracy comes to power, and the film ends with a faintly fascistic speech about progress and conquest. Though inevitably dated now, the film’s expressionist style and Arthur Bliss’s strident music are hugely impressive. For a student of the thirties zeitgeist, it’s invaluable. In the tremendous opening scenes, the phalanx of marching working-class men carrying placards predicting war has definite shades of the Jarrow march.
The big comic book sensation of the day was Flash Gordon, invented in 1934 and debuting at ‘the flicks’ while the Jarrow men marched. (They may well have seen it on one of their many free hospitality nights at the cinema.) Flash was basically the archetypal square-jawed, two-fisted adventurer of classic boys’ adventurer yarns transplanted into the future in a somewhat unsafe-looking, cigar-shaped craft that showered sparks. Flash was a star polo player and Yale graduate, who becomes a sort of arch preppie in space. Played by the equally implausibly named Buster Crabbe in the 1936 movie, he travels to the planet Mongo where he encounters the evil Emperor Ming the Merciless, a tyrannical inhuman nutjob. Perhaps sensing a subtext, the Nazis banned the strip.
Flash Gordon was a child of the US depression and was embraced by thrill-hungry readers of 1930s Britain. In a world of shortages and murky morality, the unambiguous moral superiority of the handsome nice guy proved irresistible. And it was easy to read. Maybe even a Jarrow marcher had one stuffed in his overcoat pocket for when he dossed down on the next drill hall floor. Or, as in the case of Northampton, on straw on the floor of St James school after a rousing meeting at the town hall. Alan Moore’s Jerusalem was going to prove less portable so thanks to the pub’s free wifi I decided to download the ebook and take a look. Almost immediately, my eye was caught by a line that seemed to capture what I (and I think Moore) still see as the defining division in British society. It’s the one that is still proving difficult for some to understand, the great social rift that drove the Jarrow march and may well be driving the flight into the political unknown now, away from consensus and towards demagogues and anger. ‘Despite the very real continuing abuses born of antisemitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none that are poor.’
Of course, in their defence, it is hard to be poor with an income of £74,000 a year but the point holds I think. Despite a genteel nervousness about it these days, class supplied the great splintering fault line through British life in 1936 and the crack is still wide. As I ventured further south, I, and the men of Jarrow, would feel it between our feet.
STAGE EIGHTEEN
NORTHAMPTON TO BEDFORD
26 October, 21 miles
The great American cultural critic Greil Marcus came up with the resonant phrase ‘the old weird America’ to describe what his country was once like before the levelling and sanitising effect of modernity, before industry, homogenised culture and the mass media. America when it was still a place of dark secrets, odd corners, vast and unknowable. England is a great deal more ancient and complex than its colonial offspring. The old weird England is far older and weirder than America.
Even had I not had my conversation with Alan Moore, Northampton seemed to have very strong echoes of the old, weird England, especially on a damp, silent autumn morning. I
walked through a shrouding mist up Black Lion Hill, down Chalk Lane, following the Knights Trail, a walk through the town that takes in some of its oldest and more storied crannies. Just by the railway station, there’s a funny little hump with some railings around it and an information board. If you make your way up there, you’ll find that this is not some old landfill or the remains of a shed for the locos. This was in fact Northampton Castle, mentioned in Shakespeare’s King John, where turbulent priest Thomas à Becket was tried. At the parliament of 1381, the last to be held in Northampton, the hated Poll Tax was introduced. This led to the Peasants Revolt and was revived, you may recall, to similarly negative popular response by Mrs Thatcher’s government in the 1990s. As Santayana said, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And as Einstein said, doing the same thing over again and expecting different results is a good working definition of madness.
In 1662, the king knocked the castle down pretty much on a whim. Then the Victorians built a railway station over it. That’s gone too now. So it goes. The plaque on Black Lion Hill also states that in 1349 when the Black Death came to Northampton the town was ‘decimated’ when ‘half the town succumbed to it’. In my mind, I tried very hard not to be the sort of person who points out that this is not what ‘decimates’ really means. A kind of Pedants Revolt if you will.
Surrounded by dripping trees, mist hanging like lace across the Nene valley, in the heart of the old, dark weird England, it feels like it could be the fourteenth century rather than the twenty-first. If, that is, it wasn’t for the National Lift Tower thrusting rudely and concretely 120 feet towards the sky just on the horizon. Even that has a strangely heraldic and Excalibur-ish feel to it, though only built in 1978 by Express Lifts, later Otis lifts for the testing of, yes, lifts. It’s a Grade II listed building though, which is perhaps why the plans for a 100-seat theatre and café came to naught in what the late Terry Wogan called the ‘Northamptonshire Lighthouse’. Do the people of this quiet shire look out for it as a beacon of home like Geordies look out for the Angel of the North? Twitter correspondent Phil Ashby suggested that, ‘It’s full magnificent grandeur is best viewed from up the road at Sixfields, from the car park by the rubbish tip’. But it looked strange and imperious enough rising in the mist from where I stood.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 28