Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  The 256 acres of the Commons, now under the stewardship of a group of conservators, have never been landscaped or cultivated and are loved by Tunbridge folk for their abundant wildlife and their suitability for many kinds of recreation, healthy and unhealthy, approved or otherwise. On the little climb up from the back of the Pantiles, you can see the tawdry little secrets of the town’s fashionable drag, what Wilfred Owen might have called its ‘wrongs hushed up’: a KFC and a branch of Subway, each with requisite pimply youths on both sides of the counter. Feeling literally and philosophically more elevated, I climb the pleasant thickly wooded hill and spy a bench surrounded by primroses with the graffiti ‘Stu’ emblazoned on it. I see this as an omen and so I sit down to take in the view. Feeling devil-may-care, I take my jacket off, fold it into a pillow, stretch out and put it under my head, and instantly drop off.

  I wake to the footfalls and panting and hissing iPod of an Amazonian blonde jogger and the scurrying of a terrier hot on the trail of a tennis ball. Clearly, Tunbridge Wells enjoys its Commons. There are limits to its permitted uses, though, as the bylaws board points out. ‘No bird or animal is to be trapped or hunted’, I’m glad to see, and there is to be ‘No graffiti’. This is hard to read as, ironically, my namesake Stu has graffitied all over it.

  Wandering back deliciously aimlessly into town and in the general direction of my hotel, I reflect on the fact that one website claims that RTW has a large and transient population of homeless people. I’m not doubting this but they aren’t readily apparent in these wide streets where the shoppers go. What is in evidence though is lots of ice-cream cones and shorts and smiling faces on the first really nice day in months. The only wrong notes are sounded by a poster advertising an evening with Alan Mullery at the Cumberland Hotel (I’ve nothing against the former Spurs midfielder, it just seemed more Chadwell Heath than RTW) and, a clanging one this, an argument I witness in the car park of my hotel as I return there in the late afternoon (and again more Chadwell Heath fun-pub than Regency Spa). A couple in their late forties, smoking furiously, glinting with gold and leathery with tans that originate in Ibiza and are topped up at Tanfastic, are pacing to and fro between the barroom door and a flashy Golf convertible. First one and then the other will make as if to drive off whilst the other affects to re-enter the bar and/or chase the other in their preferred direction. It is as choreographed as The Nutcracker. The libretto is somewhat different though.

  She: Oy, I told you I was only facking talking to that old bloke.

  He: I couldn’t give a fack who you were talking to.

  She (forte): What is your facking problem, Jeff?

  He (fortissimo): You are my facking problem. Go and talk to your facking old geezer. I’m off!!

  By the time Jeff does leave, in a roar of engine and a plume of exhaust fumes, I feel I should applaud, as I would in a box at La Scala. Instead I go to my room and lie on the bed watching the football results. I’d booked a taxi to take me back to the Pantiles and dinner but it never came. When I told the hotel’s owners, they were genuinely upset for me and angry at the rudeness of their fellow Tunbridgians. So much so that the head of the family, Publican Pere, as you might say, went straight out to the family BMW, took out his little granddaughter’s car seat and gave me a lift into town. Given that he was driving me to a competitor to spend my money there rather than at the Camden Arms – the hell with it, they deserve a recommendation – I thought this was extraordinarily decent of him. We northerners often like to think that we have cornered the market in friendliness and have a narrow-minded tendency to characterise southerners as terrified and snobbish cold fish who hide behind their Guardians on the Tube. Well, this may be true of Londoners but it is not true of Kentish folk in my experience.

  On the way into town, he told me with evident and understandable pride how he and his family had transformed the pub, and how he was doing the same with another in the area, how he was importing a £50,000 fish fryer from America, and how he was having to lose 50 per cent of the clientele thanks to a clampdown on drug trading under the former regime, another unexpected facet of Middle England pub life, as well as tankards and shove ha’penny.

  At the Casa Vecchia, I have the steak with parmesan polenta, mussels and chorizo and listen to the tinkling laughter of the most well-behaved hen party I have ever encountered. Not a chocolate penis in sight, just some appreciative and girlish giggling over the yumminess of the brûlés, panna cottas and tiramisus. Taking a turn in the mild evening air, I remember the 1871 guidebook. The Pantiles by night feel even more distinctly un-English than they do in the day. Italian almost, with their promenading girls and boys taking their passeggiata along the colonnaded walkway. There is a clump of drunken lads on the bandstand but they are utterly unthreatening, if a little noisy. We are used to hearing that the Shires by night are now an orgiastic bonfire of car crime, drug taking, violence and alcopop-fuelled promiscuity. In reality, it’s young people letting their nicely cut hair down a little. Peckham and Longsight it isn’t.

  On the return leg, my taxi driver was as punctual as the Chigley clock I felt I would find somewhere in Tunbridge Wells if I looked hard enough. He came from an Irish family in south London and moved here in the 1980s. ‘It was tough for first week but then I got stuck into playing rugby.’ He supported Crystal Palace and told me that most of the town supported London clubs, and I recalled the West Ham and Chelsea kits I’d seen in my hotel’s beer garden, although the odd diehard followed Gillingham, Kent’s only League club. ‘And you see the odd Man U and Newcastle top,’ he added with a sigh. He’d had three sons since moving here and he told me with delight they had just got in at Tunbridge Angels. I somehow felt that asking who Tunbridge Angels were would take the sheen unnecessarily off his paternal pride so I simply whistled in admiration. I told him that I’d found Tunbridge folk very accommodating and welcoming. He said, ‘The further south you get from your part of the world and the closer to London, the unfriendlier people become. But then you pass London and go south and we get friendly again!’ Sorry, Luton, Northampton and Watford. I didn’t say it. Take it up with the nice taxi drivers and lunching ladies and genial pub landlords of Royal Tunbridge Wells.

  The day I leave I come across the website of one Helena Frith Powell, Tatler and Mail on Sunday columnist, writer of the Sunday Times ‘French Mistress’ column and author of such august tomes on gender issues and identity as To Hell in High Heels and Two Lipsticks and a Lover. Admitting to some of her ingrained attitudes, she remarks, ‘At the risk of sounding like the legendary “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”, I am just that. Although happily I don’t live in Tunbridge Wells.’

  No, Helena ‘lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert Wright and their three children Olivia, Bea and Leonardo and two stepchildren Hugo and Julia’. Taking in the implications of that lazy, sneering ‘happily’ in that sentence, it occurs to me that whilst the people of Royal Tunbridge Wells may have been disgusting and disgusted in their past, and whilst their taxi firms may sometimes let you down, they are not smug, aloof or condescending. Happily.

  I don’t always trust Channel Four. They did give Britain the culture-sapping cancer that is Big Brother after all (he said, sounding just like Disgusted him-or herself). So when they said that Tunbridge Wells was the third nicest place to live in Great Britain, I thought it was just another southern canard. Now I wonder where the two nicer places could possibly be, and whether they could fit me in for tournedos Rossini and parmesan polenta with mussels and chorizo at seven thirty. Middle England, it seemed to me, was marching towards a new sophistication. And it was marching on its stomach.

  CHAPTER 4

  Let Them Eat Twizzlers

  Just before the 2005 G8 summit, French president Jacques Chirac incurred equal measures of wrath and amusement by cracking a ‘joke’ about the English to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder. ‘How can you trust a people whose food is so bad?’ he joshed.

 
; First, this isn’t a joke in my book. The Sun headlined their riposte, ‘Don’t Talk Crepes, Jacques.’ That’s a joke. Secondly, though, the arthropod-and amphibian-munching leader of those whom Homer Simpson once styled as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ did have a kind of point. Or at least he had the weight of history and opinion on his side.

  The American writer Martha Harrison once speculated that ‘what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal’. More recently, after the fall of Baghdad and Saddam Hussein, American talk-show humorist Conan O’Brien reported that ‘today in Iraq, American and British troops handed out food to hundreds of Iraqis. But to no surprise the Iraqis handed the British food back.’

  Once upon a time, English food was the bees knees. Indeed, it probably even included the bees knees since our appetite for every part of a living thing and our ‘nose to tail’ approach to cooking was notorious. Back in the Middle Ages our national cuisine was colourful and vibrant, full of imaginative mixtures of sweet and savoury. Meat dishes were sweetened with honey and molasses, chickens were stewed in thick milk sauces. Liber Cure Cocorum, a cookbook of the medieval period, has recipes that would not look out of place in modern Thai cookery, viz.: ‘Take good almond milk anon and look you mix it with amidon … or with flour that is baked. Color it with saffron. Season it with powder of ginger, cinnamon, and galingale. Take partridges and chickens and seethe them well.’ In the same book are recipes for hares in onion sauce, tench in gravy, fish blancmange and pork gruel; all original and thought-provoking if not exactly appetising.

  In his polemical book Beef and Liberty, Ben Rogers speculates that our food gradually became synonymous with our character. He traces the relationship in the eighteenth century between the British figure of John Bull, the consumption of vast quantities of beef, and our animosity with the French. Our implicitly manly hearty stews and fatty puddings were a sort of calorific criticism of the French’s effete and foppish cuisine. Rogers even suggests that British cuisine failed to develop because the ingredients were of too high a quality. In contrast, the French had to devise all manner of sauces and marinades to cover up their ropey, poor-quality ingredients. The upshot of this was, as Sicilian nobleman Domenico Caracciolo mocked, ‘In England, there are sixty different religions and only one sauce.’

  For whatever reason, though, English food didn’t develop; in fact, it declined after the Industrial Revolution. Our economic progress was at the detriment of our dishes. Unlike other countries, by the mid-nineteenth century most English people had moved from rural isolation to urban centres. The new working classes had lost contact with the land and with the art of cooking tasty, fresh food. From this spartan existence comes the drab notion of ‘meat and two veg’: food at its dullest and most minimal, regardless of what traditionalists and granddads say. The war didn’t help. As we stood alone against the dark tide of fascism, we did so on powdered egg, whale meat and a grisly tinned South African fish called snoek. This was a fish too far, the people curled their lip and Churchill backed down in a way he never considered with Hitler. (South Africans mildly resent the way we sneered at snoek, and apparently chef Grant Cullingworth of the Table Bay restaurant does a very passable snoek and sweetcorn frikadelle, served with carrot, dhania and cumin seed salad, apricot ice cream and sweet chilli and apricot confit.)

  Though we were far healthier during rationing than we are now with our supermarket aisles of tartrazine and saturated fats, we were understandably bored. Virtue, in my experience, is often intensely tedious. Foreign holidays, immigration and the books of Elizabeth David did help during the 1950s and 1960s. Spag bol, sweet and sour pork and chicken tikka masala became staples of Middle England on a par with steak and kidney pie and jam roly poly, although we’ve had curry houses here since the Hindostanee opened in 1809 in London’s Portman Square. But our restaurant culture would still have made Chirac chuckle. (Though God knows how Schroeder had the gall to join in the laughter. Cabbage and battered veal for me, mädchen! Yummo!) In the 1970s, Berni Inns introduced a generation to the notion of eating out, even if it did introduce it quite badly and out of the corner of its mouth via prawn cocktail, steak Diane and black forest gateau. Generally we were still in the thrall of French cuisine to an absurd degree. Our most celebrated TV cook Fanny Cradock worshipped Escoffier and even claimed there was no such thing as English cuisine. ‘Even Yorkshire pudding comes from Burgundy,’ she sniffed during her last TV performance. (It wasn’t meant to be her last, incidentally, but so haughty and sneering was she that she never appeared again.) Cradock would pepper her dauntingly severe recipes with patronising asides to camera like, ‘This won’t break you’ or, ‘Of course, if you can’t stretch to butter, then dripping will do’. Thrift as much as creativity was at the heart of British cooking. I vividly remember watching the Yorkshire TV show Farmhouse Kitchen with my nan and even the dour Dorothy Sleightholme’s stodgy yet somehow frugal repasts would cause Nan to roll her eyes, tutting at the sheer extravagance of a cheese flan as if it were roulade of penguin. Robert Courtine, for many years the respected restaurant critic of the French newspaper Le Monde, wrote that ‘only the rich can eat well in London, and then only if they dine on French food’.

  But even the jet set weren’t doing much better. The Revolving Restaurant at the top of the GPO Tower – sometimes nicknamed the Revolting Restaurant – was the last word in trend-setting haute cuisine of the early 1970s. But even its menu was an uninspiring litany of bombastic French nosh: suprême de volailles Van Put – chicken stuffed with pâté – avec les légumes, a less than exciting array including les choux de Bruxelles (the Brussels sprouts) and les pommes nouvelles (the new potatoes). I found this out, by the way, when I made a TV documentary about the Tower – now closed to the public on entirely spurious grounds of safety – and leafed through a menu with Tony Benn. I remember he got very irritated with the Tower’s PR man who tried to get him to call it the BT Tower. ‘It doesn’t belong to BT. It belongs to the people of Britain who paid for it with their taxes. Margaret Thatcher gave it to you and it wasn’t hers to give.’ Delicious. Unlike the food.

  I imagine cod and chips on the Grunwick picket line was Tony’s idea of a nice meal out. Probably just as well, as fish and chips was one of the few reliably good things on Britain’s menu, along with some tasty new ethnic arrivals, for most of the 1960s and 1970s. Then, coyly at first but with increasing ardour, Middle England’s love affair with food began. Nouvelle cuisine didn’t travel much beyond Hampstead. As Clive James once said, ‘Here was a cuisine where the price of the dishes was in direct proportion to the number of sides to the plates.’ Insubstantial and dressed up to be something it wasn’t, it was the Spandau Ballet of food. But London’s next culinary innovation was to sweep the Shires like leylandii and Tesco.

  In 1991, Mike Belben and David Eyre took charge of a pub called the Eagle on Farringdon Road and made it over with scuffed wooden floors, menus on blackboards, an open-plan kitchen and simple, high quality food. They called their ensuing revamp a gastropub, and the phrase and concept revolutionised British eating. For decades, pub grub in Britain had meant carpet underlay bread, rubbery cheese and some Branston pickle; emergency rations elevated to the status of food by being called a ploughman’s lunch. Now, almost overnight, even the most basic boozer offered you flageolet beans and sea bream, pane rustica and oaky Rioja. This has been a velvet revolution and an almost entirely welcome one, though there has been the odd dissenting voice. Writing in the Guardian in 2006, Laura Barton grizzled, ‘What I miss are those shabby pubs that smell of dirt and tobacco and stout, where you’re as likely to get into a brawl as you are to find a packet of ready-salted Seabrooks crisps. Where old men hunch over a pint of mild and the only soundtrack is the put-put-put of a game of pool in the back room. No DJs, no Heal’s sofas, no blackened salmon or pilaff or cous-cous. No gastronomy, just pub.’ Having grown up in pubs like the ones Laura pines for, I can say that I don’t mi
ss them at all, largely because I don’t miss getting glassed whilst drinking gaseous urine.

  The Observer’s Jay Rayner shares my feelings. He has ‘never found anything particularly attractive about sticky-carpeted rooms with fake horse brasses festering on the walls, and a cadre of elderly regulars propping up the bar waiting for last orders, or death, whichever might come first’. In the same piece in October 2007, he also points out how the gastropub, so beloved now of Middle England, may be an innovation but is Conservative with a large C, an economic invention driven by market forces rather than changing tastes. In the late 1980s the Monopolies and Mergers Commission decided it was anticompetitive for the breweries to own too many pubs and legislation was passed requiring them to sell off thousands of their properties cheaply. Young chefs found they could buy a pub and go it alone. As Rayner points out, many of the old-school boozer fans who loathe gastropubs can hate them with even more passion now they know these new-fangled foodie boozers are a child of Thatcherism.