The whole story is told with clarity and candour in the museum, which is genuinely fascinating. I tell the helpful trust member on reception that the Jarrow march would have passed down this very Bedford street when the Society was still a going concern, but just after Octavia’s death. She laughs wryly. ‘Probably just as well she wasn’t around. She was very conservative in her social attitudes. She thought socialists were “reds under the bed”. She did have a couple of Suffragette members but she wasn’t very nice to them. She threw one of them out in fact. She wasn’t very progressive at all.’
If you should find yourself in Bedford with some free time on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday between mid-February and the end of October, I can recommend the Panacea Society Museum as another peek into the old, slightly weird England. When you have taken in the wireless room where the members would listen communally in the evenings whilst knitting, or the chapel or the bedrooms and rehearsal room where the Bishops would prepare for the opening of the box (once they had seen sense and agreed), you can take a turn in the actual Garden of Eden of Book of Genesis fame, the handy Bedford location of which had been revealed to Octavia in one of her frequent communications with God. In a shady corner of the pleasant suburban lawn, you’ll find an impressive tree the society believed to be ‘Yggdrasil’, the tree of life in Norse mythology, showing that the Panaceans were nothing if not eclectic in their outlook.
It was darkening as I left the Garden of Eden and even if there had been any forbidden apples on offer, I’d already decided in favour of a pizza and a big glass of red. In a town of 15,000 Italians (some say more), chianti and calzone are as prevalent on the menu as the much vaunted yet untasted Clanger. Why is this Bedfordshire town full of Marios and Marias, Fabios and Francescas, why as many posters for Fiorentina and Napoli than Luton or Leicester? Why is almost a fifth of Bedford’s population Italian or of Italian descent? There’s a short, unromantic answer: bricks.
After the war, Bedford’s Marston Valley Brick Company was desperately short of the labour needed for the huge reconstruction boom and drive. A few thousand miles way, in southern Italy, they were desperate to put the ignominy of Mussolini’s era behind them – and more to the point, they were shockingly poor. Unemployment was far worse than in the prosperous north, and many villagers, and even the post-war Italian government, began to see emigration as the best solution. In 1951, the Marston Valley Brick Company established an office in Naples, sending two employees to recruit 250 men. This was just the beginning. Between 1951 and 1960 over 7,500 Italians were signed up for the scheme. Each man who volunteered from the Mezzogiorno to work in Bedford was given a medical examination, a paid passage to England and a bed. They were lodged communally in a converted prisoner-of-war camp. The English weather and food and sheer homesickness meant that over 60 per cent returned within four years. But many stayed. They worked their contracts, bought their own houses and paid their families’ passage to come and join them. By 1958 around 85 per cent of new arrivals in Bedford were married Italian women joining their husbands. An Italian/Cumbrian friend of mine Guilliano remembers visiting Bedford in the 1960s; ‘It was amazing, full of delis and trattorias, like a little Italian provincial town.’
Again, social media was proving invaluable in uncovering the story of Bedford’s Italians. Tweets chirruped into my devices from native or exiled Bedfordians. Tony Malone told me that at one point Bedford had its own Italian consulate. James Coyne recommended Club Prima Generazione and Amalfi cakes, adding ‘virtually everyone in Bedford has one Italian relative or another’. But as I was on Newnham Street and its 6 o’clock opening time was fast approaching, I was noting hungrily the many mentions of Pizza Santaniello, ‘a proper Italian family pizzeria’. In fact, I could see it. Its bright red frontage spilling enticing light on to the pavement and its white painted slogan ‘Bedford’s Number One Pizzeria’ had a bold machismo that was irresistible. Andiamo!
‘My parents came after the war, early 1950s,’ says Antonio, whirling a disc of pizza base in his outstretched fingers. ‘A four-year contract and then they were given the choice to stay or go. And we stayed. Five couples in one house, that’s how close the communities were. Mostly from southern Italy – Campagna, Foggia, Sardinia.’ Antonio is now head chef at what was Bedford’s first pizzeria, opened by Fiorangelo and Ida Santaniello and now run by their son Geraldo, busy behind the bar as I make a nuisance of myself by the hot maw of the stone baking oven. ‘There were three queues for the Italian men, my dad would say, one for Brazil, one for Venezuela and one for Bedford. We ended up here, at the brick works in Stewartby.’ Geraldo’s son, the younger Fiorangelo, is now the third generation to be here offering ‘the best hand stretched pizzas outside of Naples, as you’ll soon find out’ he says as he passes by with several carafes of wine.
It’s a few minutes after opening time but I still only just manage to squeeze into a corner table. It’s mainly families on half term, but there are a few dining adults like me, an Indian businessman boasting to a pretty younger girl, his secretary maybe, about his friends in St Petersburg and Riga; a quartet of Scottish women swapping stories very entertainingly about their disastrous honeymoons; a white-haired man with a hefty paperback into his second carafe. It is busy, loud and hot, and by now full of delicious pizza and house red, I decide to make way for one or two of the potential diners queuing by the door, presumably being driven nearly insane by the aroma of sizzling garlic and the popping of another cork. I go to say goodbye to Antonio. He’s shovelling another two pizzas into the oven’s fiery recess and, pushing back his bandana, drags a forearm across his dripping brow. ‘Ciao, I hope you enjoyed it my friend … where are you from then?’ I tell him I’m from the north and have been on the road for two-and-a-half weeks on the trail of the Jarrow march. Antonio hasn’t heard of it, but when I tell him the story and how they came to Bedford 80 years ago tonight he cocks his head and says, ‘Like my dad then, like Geraldo’s parents. They just wanted work. They were desperate. They made sacrifices. Working people, you see, same all over the world. They move and they make new homes. There’s still lots of Italy here. There’s an Italian church that the community built. There are community centres. There’s a few Italian bars …’
Really? How would they feel about a stray Lancastrian Italophile dropping by?
‘Try them!’ he laughs. ‘Club Italia, up on Alexander Road by the railway station, bit hard to find down a back street, but if you fancy a late grappa …’
I’d been wondering how to spend the evening and had narrowed it down to the open mike music night at the Standard or the monthly meeting of Bedford Electronic Organ Club (est. 1972). Both now paled before the prospect of Club Italia. Ciao ciao Pizza Santaniello! Allora, Club Italia.
STAGE NINETEEN
BEDFORD TO LUTON
28 October, 19 miles
On a fine warm morning, or a still balmy night, should you take your amante or tesoro for a passeggiata down the riverside banks of the stately Great Ouse, where the ducks and rowers glide by and the lamplight ripples; you will surely find Bedford as lovely as Bath if perhaps not Venezia. The concrete enclave of poundshops and snack bars around the bus station, however: not so much. Although, that said, Venice’s bus station is pretty grim, and Bedford’s is at least brand spanking new, all curved glass and burnished chrome – ‘a travel point the borough can be proud of!’ – including real-time display screens, a travel centre and a new departure hub. ‘A major regeneration project which has transformed the local area,’ is how the leaflet trills it, and I have no reason to cavil.
It’s 9am, and I’m digging out the Nurofen again at a café in Bedford’s Bus Station over a mug of hot brown builder’s tea. I have the address of a shop where I can find a proper Bedfordshire Clanger, and I will, as soon as my head stops banging and my vision clears. I took Antonio’s advice and headed off to find Club Italia. I went across town, up Midland Road by the railway station, Bedford’s own ‘Via Roma’, and into Alexander Road.
Where Club Italia is tucked away is a parade of slightly seedy looking international drinking dens; here a Polish one, there an African, there Turkish. Across a darkened car park I glimpse an Italian flag and, in a pool of light, two silhouetted figures lit by the orange tips of their cigarettes. I had come this far, I had expert local knowledge and I was emboldened by several glasses of slightly rough Chianti. I took my chance.
‘Who you looking for mate? You wanna drink?’ said one of the men. He wore a paint-spattered overall that was definitely not one of either Signor Armani, Dolce or Gabbana, and he pushed open a nondescript hardboard door to reveal a scene of frenetic drilling, hammering and sawing. The bar was open for business though and the barman beckoned so I took my place alongside a couple of other drinkers, cradling small grappas and bottles of Nastro Azzurro. ‘We’re having some work done as you can see,’ said the barman, a doughty fellow in his late fifties with glasses and a salt and pepper moustache, ‘but if you don’t mind that …’ Having come this far, and feeling more foolish were I to leave, I ordered both a beer and a grappa to be on the safe side and took my place at the bar.
The welcome in Club Italia was more cautious and cagey than in Pizza Santaniello and understandably so. I doubt they get many strange northerners dropping by even if 20 days of road walking have given him a distinctly walnut complexion. Club Italia clearly had a community function but that was presumably during daytime and weekends. On a dark Monday evening, this was a place for men to drink and swap stories of the old days, play scopa and drink grappa under posters and murals of the great Italian World Cup teams and their maestros, Gianni Rivera, Luigi Riva, Paolo Rossi. It was a place to crowd round the TV on big football nights draped in the tricolore and sing on the Azzurri, shouting, ‘Dai! Ma stai scherzando arbitro! Mandalo a casa!’ or ‘Come on, you’re having a laugh, ref, send him off!’
As we drank, we shared our stories. I told them of Jarrow and my walk in those men’s footsteps. They told me of their fathers and grandfathers coming to Bedford from much further away in the ravaged post-war world. This time though, the recollections seemed less sunny and celebratory than they had in the pizzeria. ‘My brother was born in 1953 and I was born in 1958 and my parents had been here a few years then and they were amongst the first ones to come. After your four years in the brickworks hostel, well, if you were good, you were allowed to stay. If not you were on the boat back. You were on probation and if you were a good worker, you were OK, but if not they could send you back at any time. They were like slaves really.’
‘Yep, they were slaves,’ one of the young workmen, job done and settling back with a beer, chips in. ‘They were sold by Italy for 400 quid. The Italian government was paid 400 pounds for each person they exported. My dad turned 18 on the boat and because he didn’t have his papers, he thought he’d be sent back. They detained him for a while. Britain was desperate for labourers though, and they were desperate for work.’
‘It was exactly like the Poles and the Romanians now,’ says the barman with an equivocal shrug. ‘They’re poor. Italy was poor. The brickworks may have been hard work but it wasn’t hard compared to their lives back there. No food, no money, no decent housing, no warmth, no toilets. Italy was bad. The husbands came, the wives followed. They all came with the intention of working hard, making their money and going back. It doesn’t happen, does it? You have kids. There’s a good 20,000 Italians here now I reckon. Most of them have got properties over there that they built that have just gone to waste. They just stayed here.’
‘Bedford has this effect on you. I came for a weekend ten years ago and I’m still here,’ says a well-spoken man at the bar with a cravat and ponytail. Another voice, a young bloke in a baseball cap and tracksuit, joins in. ‘My granddad was a prisoner of war, they captured him in Africa, Tripoli. Then they sent him to Yorkshire working on farms for a couple of years. After the war was all done and dusted, they let him go. He came down and joined all the Italians in Bedford.’
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ says the barman, sliding another Nardini across the counter to me, or possibly a Fernet Branca. ‘They weren’t resentful. They were grateful. You and I couldn’t have stuck it. We couldn’t just move to another country ’cos we’ve got everything here. But it’s like these Africans. They have nothing. Wherever they go, they’re grateful even if you treat them like shit. We can’t share these people’s perspectives.’ An old boy gets up from his card game to leave, the barman breaks off to embrace him and there follows a quickfire exchange in Italian with the odd English word standing out as if by highlighter pen: ‘cooker’, ‘worktop’, ‘microwave’.
After these discussions and more like them and more grappa and Nastro Azzurro, the evening unravelled somewhat. More people, all men, came and went and gathered at the bar. ‘People come here for a drink late. Not just Italians. Albanians, Rumanians, Poles …’ Brexit was discussed and there was no consensus. The well-spoken man turned out to be the grandson of an infamous Scottish writer. He had been ‘in the clothing game and a GP in another life’, and now he talked of his mental health problems and wondered if I could help him get some help from social services. The stocky leather-jacketed man on my left turns out to be from Albania. Tirana, I guess?
‘No.’
Shkodër? I guess again. I know the names of several Albanian cities and have decided as a point of honour that this will not beat me.
‘No,’ replies Rudi again.
Hmm. ‘Durrës?’
‘Durrës! You know Durrës! Half an hour south of there!’
I’ve never been to Durrës, or Albania, but it was an obsession of mine during the crazed, insular, appalling regime of Enver Hoxha when it was Europe’s very own North Korea. I buy him a grappa and we talk. ‘Fifty years of communism my country had under a man called Enver Hoxha. What? You know of him? How?’
It’s a long story, to be honest, and you’ll think I’m weird.
‘Well, we are small country and Enver Hoxha made it even smaller. You could say nothing. You could be arrested at school. If you did not agree with Hoxha, or you upset him, you were jailed for life … if you were lucky. You could be shot in the head. You could be hung in front of your family. I was very young. But people tell the stories. We change in 1990. We change for better. But I still come here. I came for better life. I get married. But then I get divorced, and she make a hard life for me. Now my life is over. I haven’t seen my son for three years. He is 13 now. Game over. Everyone is married but not me. It is very sad.’
Rudi went on like this for some time, darker and sadder with every slivovitz. My head was spinning by now but even through the haze of grappa, I knew that this hardworking man was lonely; lonely enough to talk to a complete stranger for a long time while all around noisy card games were played and worktops were ordered. We had talked all night about migrants and borders but loneliness and sadness are countries without borders. My obsession with Albania’s craziness and otherness now seemed very callow, even shameful.
At different times in our history, we have been very happy to allow the free movement of people to our shores when we have needed them, be it German mining engineers to the Lake District of the Elizabethan era, Nigerian cleaners to our midnight office blocks or Polish receptionists to the Malmaisons of our revitalised cities. Brexit and the reasons behind the seismic vote of the summer had cropped up in conversation but not as I thought it would, with entrenched views and clichés. Over the evening, ‘somewhere in England’ had proved itself the perfect description of this English town. It was both typical and utterly unique, full of the same things that we find across the modern country, the ubiquitous, the homogenous, the mass produced and, then again, full of weird secrets and stories, heroism, mystery, madness. ‘Somewhere in England’ was the perfect description, both prosaic and enigmatic, and echoing around my head, along with the wine and grappa, as I crossed the wide lamplit river, through reception and the bar with its change-jingling, late night business drinkers and the lift up to be
d.
Before they left for Luton, the marchers went to look at Bedford’s fine new brickworks at Stewartby. This was the sort of new industry their own deprived town badly needed and surely they must have looked at it with envy. They couldn’t have known, however (though a few of the more gloomy might have feared it) that within three years the world would be at war, and the brickworks of Bedford would then need legions of vanquished men from the Mediterranean to help rebuild England. Bedford had been good to the marchers during their stay. The local Rotary Club and Christian charity Toc H had given them cigarettes and tobacco and put on a night’s free entertainment at the town hall. So warm had been Bedford’s hospitality that the Conservative mayor said that he had been accused of being ‘a convert to Labour, a rigid socialist and even a communist’.
At the bus station I picked up an intriguing magazine. It was called This England and there was something soothing about its lovely cover of a warm russet sunset in an English wood. Being unashamedly of Attlee’s patriotic leftist strain, I can be something of a sucker for this kind of thing and as the magazine seemed to consist of little else except nostalgia and anniversaries, I felt sure the autumn number would have some mention of the Jarrow march. But having scoured the magazine from cover to cover, I could find nothing – though I did find a gloating editorial about leaving the European union, a eulogy to the late TV presenter and extreme right-winger Norris McWhirter and a fun piece condoning violence against ‘atheist teachers with links to the Civil Liberties Association’. Like the Panacea Society, there was a cold meanness underneath the moist-eyed middle England niceties and a kind of ignorance too; the kind that uses Battle of Britain imagery to celebrate Brexit, forgetting that we won that with heroic help from Czech and Polish pilots; or presumes that Vaughan Williams’s music embodies their world view when the socialistic, knighthood-refusing giant of English music would have loathed them. This England would have probably not had much time for the Jarrow marchers and may even have thought the mayor of Bedford was a communist, embodying that particular kind of English sense of fair play, justice and tolerance that wants Rudi the Albanian builder to go home but they to be allowed to retire to Magaluf. Quite how its expatriate readership would fare in the next few years as we pulled up the drawbridge to Europe would be diverting to say the least.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 30