Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  It used to be said that one reason the Catholic mass was held across the globe in Latin, dead language though it may have been, was so that whatever their race or nationality and wherever they were in the world, a Catholic traveller could enter a church and be comforted and uplifted by a familiar, shared experience. Perhaps then this is the logic underpinning our network of service stations. Know this, weary pilgrim motorist, wherever you are in England, however tired or lost or disorientated you may be, you are only a few miles from an overpriced baked potato, a Bumper Quiz Book the size of a suitcase, a dubious Bee Gees Greatest Hits CD that doesn’t have anything from Saturday Night Fever on it and a notice that says, ‘These toilets are cleaned and inspected regularly, but if you do find a problem please contact us.’

  And yet, and yet, we clearly love them. Perhaps it is a deep residual longing for the turnpikes and the coaching inns but we seem loath to commit to a journey of more than a few miles and positively hostile to a motorway journey at all without the promise of a service station, the modern equivalent of somewhere to get the horses stabled and a pipe and tankard. When the M40 was built, even the most committed environmentalist might have quietly, guiltily hailed it as a bit of a boon: 89 miles of brand-new motorway blasted through the Chilterns – I still give a ‘wow’ of admiration whenever I pass through that chalky steep-sided defile near High Wycombe – and providing a swift, neat alternative to the crowded corridor between the Midlands and London. It had been under piecemeal construction since the swinging sixties. It even appears in the second Thunderbird movie, Thunderbird 6, filmed in 1968; in one sequence, a Tiger Moth flies under one of its new bridges, much to the annoyance of the Ministry of Transport. It didn’t open fully, though, until 1990. And when it did, hardly anyone used it. It was unnaturally quiet; so much so that the convenience seemed outweighed by the disquieting sense that some sci-fi disaster had befallen the rest of England and that you, in your Mondeo, Astra or Peugeot, were the last motorist on earth.

  Nothing of the sort. The reason no one used it was that it had no services. The hell with the slashed journey times and limitless freedom, no one wanted to risk a journey from Brum to Hammersmith without the reassuring thought of a Julie’s Pantry close at hand. It was regarded by most as as much of an oversight as if they had built it with no hard shoulder or slip roads. If you lived for danger or were truly masochistic, it was now possible to drive from Folkestone to Birmingham (M20, M26, M25, M40, M42) without the comfort of a comfort break. A chilling thought.

  The comedian Harry Hill even worked it up into a comic riff. ‘No services on the M40? What are we supposed to do?’ Then, some minutes later, ‘Take a packed lunch, that’s it, take a packed lunch.’ But, of course, a packed lunch is a poor substitute for a Whopper with cheese or a shrink-wrapped blueberry muffin. The nation breathed a sigh of relief when the first service station opened at Cherwell Valley in 1994, and two further service stations opened at Oxford and Warwick in 1998. Traffic is now much heavier. Phew!

  The bulk of Britain’s motorway services are run by one of three big hospitality and catering corporations, namely Moto, Welcome Break and RoadChef. The Welcome Break ones at Oxford are daringly futuristic, all sensual curves and sheer sides of glass and with a timber promenade deck where you can eat your bacon double cheese by a gushing fountain and pretend you’re on the shore line at Lake Geneva for a while, if you ignore the bloodcurdling cries from the play area. It’s rather pleasant really, certainly when compared to Forton on the M6, which seen from afar looks like an early 1970s Stasi Interrogation and Detention Centre somewhere in Rostock, but is actually much less welcoming inside. Or Sandbach, whose grim, dirty, urine-coloured footbridge is a much-loved landmark for those passing in haste bound for the Lake District.

  Some motorway services have attained a semi-legendary status. Tebay off the M6 in Cumbria is talked of in hushed tones by middle-class drivers from Middle England making the trip north. Not only is the nearby scenery stunning – the famous heart-shaped wood on the side of one of the huge, gently elephantine Howgill Fells – but this is the Tuscany, the Waitrose, the Keira Knightley of service stations.

  It looks different: sunken ponds, stony terraces, long, low, slate fort-style buildings all adorned with the distinctive antler logo. Forget Middle England. If they had service stations in Middle Earth, they would look like this; somewhere nice where Frodo could ask Gandalf to get him a carton of strawberry milk and a Guardian while he stopped off to use the loos en route to the evil realm of Mordor. You can actually get a table that overlooks the water. You probably have to book.

  Tebay services – they’re actually a pair spanning the motorway – are testament to the virtues of keeping it small, local and independent. It used to be an isolated farm until the construction of a major trunk road through the site in 1971. So the farmer and his wife decided to cut their losses and build a small rest area with just twenty-eight staff. Now they – or rather their daughter – employ over five hundred good people from hereabouts. There’s a caravan park and a hotel, both of which routinely pick up awards, but what really sets it apart, what makes it totally irresistible, what drives us nice tasteful folk in our German cars on past Charnock Richard and Forton into the Cumbrian night against the demands of our bladders and screaming kids, is that, joy of joys, it’s got a farm shop.

  It’s got two, in fact, one on each carriageway. Prince Charles opened them both in 2004. Of course he did. He may never be the Queen of our Hearts but he is, in many ways, the Prince of our Pork and Leek Sausages, the Baron of our All-butter Shortbreads. With its water features and organic produce, its locally sourced ingredients and community employer credentials, Tebay services is as PC and guilt-free as an institution devoted to facilitating the easy passage of the single most environmentally destructive invention ever can be.

  For me, and for you as well, I imagine, motorway services are no place to linger. Whatever we in our different ways want from them – a wee, a fag, a nap, a dog walk, a John Grisham audio book, a massive bag of Hula Hoops – we want it quick and then to be away before the coachload of football fans arrives. Successive governments though have worried – unnecessarily I think – that left to our own devices we will forgo football and fireside and frolics of all kinds in order to spend all our time hanging around service stations. It is enshrined in policy that ‘motorway services must be stop-off points, not destinations in their own rights’. For many years, the minimum distance between services was decreed as 25 miles (about a half hour’s journey), now reduced to 15 but only for locations where there is a clear need for such a short distance between services on safety grounds. The implication is clear: without the firm hand of government the average Briton would be seduced away from work and family and spend all day hanging around Scratchwood or Hilton Park playing air hockey while the country ground to a halt. Frankly, I don’t think they need to worry.

  Tebay, though, is different. I could happily linger here. This is one service area where I can understand why people get out their Daily Whatever and Thermos and Tupperware and foldable canvas seat with net pouch in the arm for drinks and picnic in the shadow of an HGV. The view is great, the air is sweet-ish and, in case you’ve forgotten, there’s a farm shop.

  If only actual farms could be more like farm shops. No bulls, no body-warmers, no subsidised agro-barons, no black plastic bags, no NFU spokesmen, no barbed wire and illegally blocked off rights of way, no yapping dogs and ugly polytunnels. Just a selection of ripe cheeses and fancy ice creams and damson gin. The PR war would be over. We townies would support the Countryside Alliance wholeheartedly, stop caring about foxes and we wouldn’t chuckle when John Prescott gets punchy or Bryan Ferry’s son goes to jail.

  The last time I was there was a dark Friday evening in midwinter. If the staff were eager to get to the sybaritic pleasures of Penrith or Sedbergh, they didn’t show it. There was no rolling of eyes or pointedly looking at watches as I perused the shelves groaning with good stuff. A large, ge
ntle, vaguely camp young man with an Emo/Goth fringe recommended a particularly smelly local cheese to me. ‘On my wages I should really buy something cheaper but it’s absolutely gorgeous. Melt it on toast when you come in drunk. Stinks the place out but it’s heavenly.’ His colleague, a girl of about twenty with a thicket of blonde hair piled up in a tartan bow, even offered me a taste of various biscuits to go with it. ‘Some people rave about Bath Olivers but I always think they taste like beermats. You can’t beat a digestive for me.’

  Against this kind of gold standard, all other services will naturally be found wanting. But in the course of my researches I did diligently visit several others by means of arduous and extensive research. At Charnock Richard, there is an antiques fair every Sunday, a plucky little theme park called Camelot and, last time I was there if memory serves, a Bocca della Verità. These are surely the oddest amusements you will ever see: a fibreglass replica of the ancient marble image that hangs in the Santa Maria Church in Rome, as featured in the film Roman Holiday. A kind of Roman lie detector, the idea was that you put your hand in the image’s mouth and, should you be a liar, it would bite said hand off. Not sure I would have bothered, to be honest. In the plastic version found at British service stations, you put your quid and your hand in, a few lights flash, a deep voice says something daft and a ticket emerges bearing a strangely cold and forthright assessment of your character. Mine said, ‘You tend to be unfaithful … your capricious and inconstant nature will make it difficult for you to get on in life.’ Thanks a bunch, Bocca.

  On the aforementioned Drivetime show, certain names would ring through the travel bulletins like a Middle England mantra: the Air Balloon roundabout, the Hangar Lane gyratory, the Aston expressway, Clacket Lane services. This latter always made me chuckle, a name straight from an old Hancock’s Half Hour, as British as boiled cabbage and drizzle.

  It nearly wasn’t called that. The story goes that the original planning application for the services had them down as ‘Titsey Woods’, but this was changed at the last minute because, so it’s said, Road Chef feared no one would take the name ‘Titsey services’ seriously or would be able to pop in for a mochaccino and a muffin without giggling like small children. So they went for Clacket Lane; unmusically and bizarrely, as this is merely the unremarkable and undistinguished road where the emergency exits are.

  I’m standing in front of a glass cabinet bearing the legend: ‘The History of Titsey Woods’. I’m not giggling. It’s all very educational. Well done, Road Chef. The chalk downs of this part of the Weald were once the haunt of wolves, pine martens and wild cats. Badgers would be hunted by the Celts who lived with their kin in the hilltop villages at Worms Heath, Walton Heath, Holmbury Hill, and Anstiebury on Leith Hill. In the glass case before me are several Roman artefacts dug up by workmen whilst the modern services were being built. These were left by Caesar’s armies who drove the native Britons into the Surrey hills and settled in the North Downs with their own families.

  Titsey Woods or Clacket Lane still gets its fair share of Roman invaders. And Spaniards and Hungarians and Poles. Clacket Lane is the first real services after the Channel Tunnel port of Dover and I notice the multilingual signs dotted about as I arrive on this rainy Sunday. The array of lorries and pantechnicons is dazzlingly multinational. Peaches from Portugal, cheese from Auvergne and whatever it is that funny man Norbert Dentressangle delivers.

  Perhaps mindful of the nastiness of Forton and Sandbach, the finely tuned minds at RoadChef have tried to make Clacket Lane a more attractive prospect. The buildings are low, timbered and vaguely alpine, as if Grindelwald had been relocated to the M25. The children’s play area is deserted but an Asian wedding party breaking their journey brings a welcome splash of colour and laughter, he in his crisp white three-quarter-length brocade jacket, she stunning in emerald green shantung, the Premier Inn forecourt horribly drab by comparison.

  After this display of romantic optimism, it’s pretty dispiriting to find an advert for a company offering ‘Quickie divorces, 65 pounds’ above the Durex machine in the gents’ loos. But, emerging, I am heartened by the sight of one of Britain’s last surviving Wimpys. These were Middle England’s first greasy delicious taste of the burger revolution, and they are still vastly superior to any of their US rivals; full of what appears to be real beef and real lettuce and actual tomato and in a floury bap that leaves handprints on your jeans. Perfect.

  In the car park I chance upon a strange assignation. Two men, one Asian and Pringle-sweatered, the other heftier, bald and Cockney, are haggling over a set of golf clubs at what is clearly a prearranged meeting. The stockier man takes out a driver and peers along its shaft one-eyed. He juggles it in his hand as if estimating its weight and then gives it a few swishes. ‘Did we say a hundred quid?’ His new friend seems pleased. Cash is counted, hands are shook. Why here, I wonder, on this damp slip road, as they drive away in their separate cars?

  Another little Middle English mystery. And of course Middle England loves a mystery. For a place and a people so outwardly respectable, so proper, so decent, they are a bloodthirsty and savage and sinister lot. They rape and garrotte, they poison and gouge. They may nod and genuflect and cross themselves, but they dance naked around fires and worship the horned one whose names are legion. They love ghosts and devils as much as golf and dinner parties. They may claim to keep the Sabbath holy but after mass, on dark Sunday evenings behind closed doors, they turn to their real god, Mayhem, who holds dominion in the secret killing fields of Buckinghamshire.

  CHAPTER 9

  In Darkest England

  Sunday evening. All is quiet across the Shires of Middle England. The lawns have been mowed, the putts have been holed, the roasting tin is in the dishwasher. But this is the quiet before the blood-spattered storm. The Theremin, a weird sci-fi musical instrument invented by a Russian émigré and most famously used on ‘Good Vibrations’ and the Star Trek theme, is about as un-Middle English as you can get. But eight times a year (ish), its unearthly, keening tone calls Middle England to its lounges for two hours of worship, just as irresistibly as the muezzin calls the faithful of Teheran to prayer.

  The extraordinary success of a Sunday evening ITV detective series called Midsomer Murders proves beyond doubt that Middle England, like Macbeth, is steeped in blood, ‘unmannerly breech’d with gore’, and bloated with ‘slaughterous thoughts’. Ostensibly a cosy countryside entertainment for dozing Sunday-night stay-at-homes, it is actually a charnel house of glistening viscera, a bloodbath, a catalogue of frenzied stabbings, lust-crazed horror, perverted and ingenious slayings; indeed, an ongoing orgy of death.

  Edgy comedies, lavish period pieces and controversial documentaries may get the reviews and the column inches but Midsomer Murders gets the viewers. It is quite astonishingly popular. Sold to over two hundred countries, the series is one of British TV’s greatest ever success stories. The thought of surbanites in Buenos Aires, factory workers in Ulan Bator, doctors in Accra and retirees in downtown Islamabad all watching Tom Barnaby investigating the rash of stabbings at his wife’s watercolour class is both delightful and slightly bonkers.

  Middle England has always had a dark side. As the horror writer Kim Newman says, we are ‘one of the most blood-soaked islands in the world with a strange violent history’. We have been entertaining ourselves with ghouls, villains and horror since time immemorial. Beowulf, the tale of a terrorising monster, is set in Scandinavia but is thought to have been written in modern Warwickshire. From Staffordshire or Derby comes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which an Arthurian round table is called upon to vanquish an elemental spirit. These were tales for the fireside, just as today, except the modern hearth is a plasma screen, but the purpose is just the same: wild and bracing entertainment with a valuable social function, a ring-fencing of darkness and disorder away from our normal lives, a safety valve, a catharsis.

  Midsomer Murders is just the latest and most successful manifestation of the English love of m
urder, mystery and the macabre. We gave the world the notion of curling up with a good murder, the bizarre idea of manslaughter as comfort food. And before detectives came along to solve the crimes and put the world to rights, we were enjoying a drop of the hard stuff as our fireside entertainment with our old friends ghosts, witches and the undead. We are surely the only country in the world that, as part of its celebration of the birth of its saviour, the only begotten son of God, enjoys a date with the devil. The idea of the Christmas ghost story is typically English, a traditional part of our festive entertainment. But what a bizarre juxtaposition it is. I’m amazed that the new breed of crackpot fundamentalist Christians – the ones who think that Harry Potter and pizzas and Game Boys are conduits for Satan – haven’t tried to ban the Christmas ghost story or at least banish it from our Yuletide screens. They would never succeed, though; ghoulishness and terror is as much a part of the classic English Christmas as Harvey’s Bristol Cream, the Radio Times Xmas double issue and sage and onion stuffing. And when we settle down as a family to have our Christian values subverted and mocked by the notion of all-powerful, death-conquering evil, we do like it best if it’s a nice M.R. James.

  Montague Rhodes James was provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and later of Eton, during the first decades of the twentieth century, and a noted medieval scholar and antiquary. But that is not what he will be remembered for. His fame, immortality even, rests upon the forty or so supernatural tales which are now considered perhaps the greatest ghost stories in the English language. Though almost a century old and set in a fusty antique England, James’s stories are masterpieces of quiet terror. A classic Jamesian story will often concern some isolated, reticent don or clergyman, beginning with some mundane business, often academic or clerical in nature, and gradually descending into nightmare. They are lonely in mood and in setting: a deserted stretch of beach, the back room of a country inn, an empty church.