Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Ignoring Ricky’s advice, I find myself on a grey wet Sunday in the most mocked town in Britain. No town looks its best, I guess, under these circumstances: sheets of filthy drizzle blown into your face by gusts of chilly wind. But Slough does seem to be looking particularly bleak. Part of the problem is the architecture. It’s ghastly. Slough has ninety-six listed buildings but they must be well hidden since the first impression you get is of every gruesome architectural style of the last century vying for supremacy. Dreary subways, huge inhuman office blocks, grimly functional civic buildings like the college and library and the cavernous Brunel bus station known to millions as the depressing vista from the opening credits to The Office. Buckingham Gardens car park, too, is not as pleasant or verdant as it sounds. It is a squalid concrete patch, lowered over by monstrous tower blocks. Everywhere there seemed to be roadworks, gouging the heart out of the town and making everything feel ad hoc, unfinished and provisional. This, coupled with the bewildering array of races and styles of dress displayed by the townsfolk, all miserably huddling from the rain or dashing who knows where, gives the town the feel of a post-apocalypse shanty town for the displaced refugees of the world.

  Even the council acknowledge that Slough is not Florence. A promotional film they made a few years back contains a verse reply to Betjeman, in which they state that the town is: ‘Not picture book pretty and not claiming to be/But a town that is working not dainty or twee’. This is admirable. But in the murk of a rain-sodden Sunday, unconvincing.

  It didn’t help that on my visit the people looked so downcast and defeated. In 2005, the BBC aired a four-part series called Making Slough Happy, where a team of ‘experts’ attempted to bring happiness to the whole town. As would have been the case in Riga, Florence or Maidenhead, it was only partially successful but was well received outside Slough. Residents, though, understandably, felt that it was further contributing to the negative perceptions of the town – why did Slough in particular need cheering up? – and didn’t reflect the town’s mind-boggling ethnic diversity.

  That diversity is both immediately apparent as you pick your way through the puddle-lined main shopping thoroughfare and one of the more interesting and colourful things about the town. However exotic your shopping list, from plantain to blinis to Somalian otka jerky, you can pick it up here. There is Zimca, a Zimbabwean grocery also selling music and ornaments. There’s an African wig shop. There are Lebanese food stores and Punjabi restaurants. There is a comprehensive array of ‘pound shops’ and Polski Sleps and outside each there seem to be a gaggle of shaven-headed young Polish men arguing and laughing. The town has had a Polish community since the war but that has been bolstered by the recent wave of EU immigration. Apparently the older Poles of the town, particularly the ladies with their crucifixes and neat scarves, are not too happy with the newcomers who swear, drink, miss mass and, they think, are giving the Poles a bad name.

  Marwa, the big Asian superstore on the high street, is foodie heaven and I leave laden down with asafoetida and chapattis, rasmalai and roti and some kielbasa and sweet nalesniki from its several aisles of Polish groceries. I lug all of this down to Pro-Tuga, a Portuguese café on the high street. With its Portuguese newspapers, chain-smoking Portuguese clientele, flags and cakes, it’s like a little piece of backstreet Lisbon transplanted to Berkshire. The two men behind the counter are brusquely cheery as they hand me my egg custard tart and doughnut and strong black coffee (the Portuguese have a notoriously sweet tooth). I fall into a broken conversation with them – about football naturally – but what I really want to say is, before you leave England, visit the Lake District or the Cotswolds or Bath. Please don’t go home thinking that Slough was England.

  If you’re from Slough, you may well be angry with me for that, and I apologise. I come from a town that’s no oil painting either, which is why I feel I can be honest. Maybe it was the day or the mood or the rain, but Slough brought despond for me like it did for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim. There are whitewashed windows and signs proclaiming ‘Last few days!’ everywhere. A jaunty accordionist on a street corner seemed horribly out of place, and the policemen on little chopper bikes wearing body armour are a disconcerting mix of the homely and the menacing. Outside the Queensmere shopping centre, two kids are throwing milk cartons at the poster of a pretty girl advertising a chain clothes store. Inside, in a dimly lit chain chicken joint, a young Asian couple are having what must be the grimmest Sunday lunch ever, unless you count the largely liquid repast being taken by the three men smoking and drinking premium lager behind a sheet of polythene. It is surely the antithesis of what café society should be. The pub they are outside is called Wernham Hogg’s, the name of the paper company in The Office. Is this an act of defiance or defeat, I wonder? Either way, sausage, egg and chips is £3.99 and on Monday there’s a Hawaiian party night.

  The museum is supposed to be nice but it was closed. They say that it is very good on the town’s various communities and the history of immigration, but my eye was drawn to an exhibit in the window, a grisly-looking bladed implement. It is labelled ‘Pig Scud – a tool for scraping the meat off pig carcasses’. I’d have preferred a bonnet or a teapot, to be honest. I leave town vaguely cowering beneath the hulking monolith of the gigantic Fujitsu building and the Ice Arena where Jayne and Christopher brushed up their lutzes and triple salchows. It looks really horrid, like a giant colander inside a chrome lawnmower, surrounded by cheap quick-build offices everywhere. The overall feeling is that of a giant retail park that people have somehow colonised like rats. It isn’t fit for humans now, said Betjeman. It was a sneer but it contained a sad wisp of truth.

  It doesn’t help that the drabness of Slough is surrounded by some of Berkshire and Middle England’s prettiest spots. Windsor and Eton look snootily down on it, six minutes away by train. Gerrards Cross, Ascot, Beaconsfield are all nearby, as is Cobham, beloved of the painter Stanley Spencer. And not far away is the leafy setting for the most famous bit of crepuscular reverie in the English language.

  The curfew is tolling the knell of parting day as I arrive in Stoke Poges churchyard, just as it was when Thomas Gray wrote those lines here three hundred and fifty years ago. Gray’s ‘Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard’ is a beautiful, melancholy meditation on mortality and the transience of human affairs. Stoke Poges churchyard on a wet Sunday evening is a perfect spot for these kinds of thoughts: rain drips from the silent elms, a pony grazes in a twilit field, the gravestones stand in sweet, sombre ranks and there’s an almost refreshing wistfulness about the place after the grime and grimness of Slough.

  Gray’s elegy contains a whole host of famous and quotable lines as well as the opening I’ve mentioned. ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’, ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’ and, of course, ‘The ploughman homeward plods his weary way/And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’

  I was plodding homeward too. I had my travel sweets and my Ginsters Buffet Bar and my AA Book of the Road and my timetables. I was every inch the travelling Middle Englishman. Because the Middle Englishman takes his travel very seriously. And a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single mint humbug.

  CHAPTER 8

  Brief Encounters,

  Missed Connections

  On the Manchester to Liverpool railway line just south of Golborne and halfway between the warring Rugby League towns of Wigan and St Helens, there’s an old halt called Parkside. If, like me, you’re from the area, you’ll know Parkside’s name because of the colliery, the last of the Lancashire coalfields to close in 1993 and where many of my family and friends’ families worked. Some hundred yards east of the bridge that carries the busy A573 road over the railway, there’s a marble tablet mounted on the base of an old water tower. It has to be here, but it’s in an awkward, obscure spot. The best view of it is by train but only if you are crawling along; otherwise it’s a blur flashing by your window. The only other way to see it is by trespassing on the line, sliding d
own the embankment through the condoms and coke cans and rough shrubbery and encroaching on the track. Clearly you’re taking your life in your hands by doing this. And that’s fitting, in a grisly way, as this monument marks the very spot where the railways claimed their first passenger victim, in blood and gore and horror, amidst the bunting and brass bands of what should have been a day to remember for entirely different reasons.

  As you’d imagine, the opening of the world’s first passenger railway on 15 September 1830 was a grand affair and of course a feverishly exciting one. Amidst a hubbub of anticipation, rumour and controversy and in the teeth of opposition from vested interests, the great northern cities of Liverpool and Manchester were to be linked via a new highspeed technology that inspired fear, hatred and awe. About six hundred guests took part in the event and there were thousands of spectators. Among the distinguished guests was the Duke of Wellington, George Stephenson, inventor of the Rocket locomotive, which would enter service that day, and one William Huskisson, the 60-year-old reformist MP for Liverpool. In his terrific book The Last Journey of William Huskisson, Simon Garfield recounts how Huskisson may have been the most accident-prone MP ever. As a child he was frequently laid low with chest complaints and once broke his arm getting out of bed. He tried to jump a moat one weekend at the Duke of Athol’s residence in Scotland, lacerating the tendons of his ankle so badly that he limped for the rest of his life. In 1827 his trachea became inflamed, a condition that rendered his voice permanently rasping. Recovering in Calais he tripped on a cable and nearly cut his foot off. He was particularly unlucky with horses, regularly falling from them and breaking limbs. He was nearly killed on honeymoon when this time a horse fell on him – let’s not ask, eh? – and had been advised not to attend the opening of the railway because of strangury, an inflammation of the kidneys and bladder, causing him a ‘constant but unfulfilled desire to pass water’.

  But attend he did. He’d fallen out with Wellington over parliamentary reform and, ambitious and intelligent, saw this as an opportunity to make expedient amends. Huskisson was passionately pro-railway. Many were not. The canal owners knew that their inflated profits were at risk from a new mode of transport that could make in two hours the Manchester-Liverpool trip that took thirty-six by canal boat. The landowning and therefore ruling class (if this seems polemical rather than factual, consider that Manchester had no MP at all at the time) had spread the lie that people would asphyxiate on trains, pregnant women would miscarry and the milk of line-side cows would be soured. However, after six long years of backbreaking work and astonishing technical ingenuity, the passenger railway had arrived. Huskisson was in the leading coach of the eight trains that set off for Manchester witnessed by hundreds of thousands of excited onlookers on the banks and bridges.

  When they reached Parkside just before noon, the engine Northumbrian stopped to take on water, drawing the Duke of Wellington’s personal carriage up on a parallel line to observe the passing of the Rocket and its carriages. Many passengers, including Huskisson, got down to stretch their legs in the gap between the lines. Then a shout went up. ‘An engine is approaching. Take care, gentlemen!’ It was the Rocket, then potentially the fastest thing on earth but moving almost in slow motion at this point. But even so, unstoppable.

  Most of the assembled dignitaries climbed to safety with ease, though Prince Esterhazy of Austria was yanked in by his lapels. But Huskisson panicked and dithered and ended up clinging to the side of the carriage as the Rocket approached. He grabbed at the door, which swung out into the path of the Rocket and was hit. Huskisson fell beneath the wheels, which crushed and mangled his thigh.

  It was, as one can imagine, a horrific scene. Huskisson lay on the track in gouts of blood, his split limb twitching. As society hostess Harriet Arbuthnot later observed, ‘It is impossible to give an idea of the scene that followed, of the horror of everyone present or of the piercing shrieks of his unfortunate wife, who was in the car. He said scarcely more than, “It’s all over with me. Bring me my wife and let me die.”’ Instead, the Rocket, driven by Stephenson himself at a then incredible speed of 36 miles an hour, rushed him to Eccles parsonage, where he was attended unsuccessfully by surgeons and where he died nine dreadful hours later.

  I find the story of that fateful day awful, compelling and extraordinary. Obviously, it’s a human tragedy. But it’s more than that. If you scripted it, the reviewers would rightly call it far-fetched. At the unveiling and maiden voyage of an incredible new form of transport, a leading politician is killed at the very moment of his rapprochement with the Prime Minister and is rushed away from the scene in a doomed mercy dash by the pioneering inventor of the lethal technology. Imagine if, on the opening day of the new ultra-fast Virgin Monorail service between London and Edinburgh, Gordon Brown was knocked down by it as Tony Blair tried to pull him to safety and in the ensuing mayhem, Richard Branson took the wheel himself to rush the stricken man away. As some people are fond of saying, you couldn’t make it up.

  But what is even more incredible is that not only did we not abandon there and then any ideas of this new-fangled, clearly lethal transport system, we embraced it. Embraced it so fondly and heartily in fact that it became a cherished part of our national psyche. In blood and chaos, England’s love affair with the railways was born.

  America’s defining mode of transport is the road: an endless highway leading across vast and untamed spaces to a date with freedom, destiny and the unknown. But the railways are, or were, emblematic of England: complex, labyrinthine, a network of quiet intricacy and subtle branching, communal and yet deeply private, reflections in windows, glimpses of back gardens, missed connections, parallel lines. Railways are parting and meeting, loving and leaving, coming home and sallying forth. Railway stations are full of little human dramas – tearful lovers, a young girl setting off for university with Mum a gentle word away from crying, a granny arriving for Christmas in an anxious, happy fuss – that service stations can never be. When Auden wrote ‘Night Mail’ for the famous GPO promotional film of that name, his comments on the postal service are really comments about the railways that bring the letters:

  Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb

  The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time

  Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,

  Her driver’s eye upon the gauges.

  Panting up past lonely farms

  Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.

  Striding forward along the rails

  Thro’ southern uplands with northern mails.

  The night-mail train was discontinued in January 2004. I said above that the railway network is or was emblematic of Middle England because our railway network was once far, far more lovely and mysterious. As I write these words, a short series of TV programmes on the BBC is ‘celebrating’ or rather commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of an act of railway butchery unparalleled in these islands except perhaps for the unfortunate events of September 1830. In 1963, the Conservative government led by the patrician Harold Macmillan paused briefly in telling us that we’d never had it so good to make a decision that would make life signally and decidedly worse for every Briton. I presented one of the TV programmes just mentioned and in one section I stopped railway users at Manchester’s Piccadilly station and asked them what they thought of one Dr Richard Beeching. Nearly everyone knew the name; the younger ones creased their brows and recalled some ancient bogeyman but the older ones became alive with contempt. I stopped a retired chemistry teacher, a genial, dapper man in beret, cream suit and neat knitted tie. Rarely have I seen such a sweet countenance darken and purple so quickly. ‘Oh I know that name,’ he spat, his eyes flickering with real hatred. ‘That was the man, the traitor, who ruined the British railway system. A dreadful man, a butcher, a fool. And what really upsets me is that someone who called himself a chemist, who should have had an analytical, intelligent mind, should have been so stupid and short-sighted.’

  By academic trainin
g, Dr Richard Beeching was actually a physicist but by the time his name became known – and subsequently loathed – by the public at large he was Technical Director of ICI Chemicals. A corpulent, bald, thinly smiling man, he could have come straight from the Ruthless Capitalist Bastard department of Central Casting. Macmillan’s government had what they perceived as a problem with the railway network in the early 1960s. Thanks to increased car ownership, it was losing money and needed, of course, to be returned to profitability as soon as possible. They hired Dr Beeching to do just that and on a handsome stipend too; he would be given five years’ leave of absence from ICI on his private sector wage of £24,000 per annum, or £367,000 pounds in today’s money.

  For this they got a report called The Reshaping of British Railways, ‘reshaping’ here being a great early example of the kind of sanitised weasel-word coinage that would later include ‘downsizing’ and ‘friendly fire’. ‘The Wholesale Slaughter of the British Railways’ would have been a more accurate title but skilfully Beeching had acquired the services of an early spin doctor called John Nunneley. He employed twenty-five typists in the production of the report and destroyed every typewriter ribbon every night to prevent leaks. That sounds awfully costly and wasteful to me. Personally I’d rather have subsidised an uneconomic railway, but there you go. Tony Hancock was recruited to front what was essentially a wholly biased TV smear campaign against the railways. Seen now these ads are pretty repellent: full of snobbish dislike of fellow passengers and indeed of public transport as a concept as opposed to the status symbolism of car ownership. For this good work, Hancock asked for the same fee as Beeching: twenty-four grand, about a third of a million today. Nunneley offered him half. He took it.

  The report was published and implemented at speed based on an equally hasty and skewed survey. Some people still find it dubious that the plans to prune the railways and therefore increase road traffic was green-lit by a transport minister, Ernest Marples, who was in the road-building business. Despite all this, Beeching’s axe was wielded on the nod; a third of the British railway network was closed down in the face of massive and sustained public opposition. It wasn’t just about people losing their jobs, though it threw seventy thousand people out of work; ‘fine men now uncertain about their jobs’, as Betjeman said. It wasn’t just about social divisiveness, although it isolated many areas, particularly in the south-west, and condemned them to economic decline. No, it was more than that. Beeching tore some of the heart out of our country. A decent public transport system is, like libraries and schools and hospitals, the mark of a civilised society. It is how families stay in touch and how lovers find each other’s arms, it is how we play and explore and get to work, it is how we city folk get to the lonely hills and how the folk from the lonely hills can enjoy the bright lights of the big cities. As Ian Hislop said in his 2008 TV documentary about Beeching, railways in England have a social and cultural dimension that motorways will never have and cannot be bean-counted. They mean more to us than that as a nation, something indefinable and nostalgic and romantic. As he says, though, ‘For Beeching, the bottom line was, well, the bottom line.’ Whole sections of the country had been given a death sentence.