Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  The detail is touchingly, well, detailed. The station platforms are adorned with accurate period advertisements, you can almost smell the produce in the Chris P. Lettis (geddit?) grocery store and the seaside sojourners at ‘Southpool’ have ice creams whose flavours you can almost discern. Up until the 1990s the village was updated annually to keep up with the changing England outside, but after a couple of brushes with closure, it was decided to revert to the 1930s look of its halcyon days. A good move this, I think; Bekonscot is nicely and slightly eerily redolent of an idealised England that probably never actually existed. But in its quiet and impassive sense of tranquillity, a tiny world full of miniature people at peace and ease with themselves and their surroundings, it represents England as England wishes it was on a 1:12 scale. It’s a fantasy, and a very attractive if slightly odd one. There are model villages in other countries like Madurodam in The Hague but no one has taken to them like us. Eccentric, gentle, funny, Bekonscot is quintessentially Middle English.

  The day I’m there it’s full of families, mums with toddlers and the odd mildly boisterous, jokey teenage boy or girl trying hard not to look as if they’re enjoying it but clearly having a great time. There aren’t that many forty-something blokes making notes, though, so it isn’t long before I feel hugely self-conscious and decide to go in search of lunch.

  Bekonscot sits halfway down the Warwick Road. On one side there’s a Catholic church, St Teresa’s (most famous congregation member one Gilbert Keith Chesterton). At the other end sits St Michael and All Angels, so this could be their Garvaghy Road, their flashpoint for sectarian conflict. But no. All is quiet. The green outside the church is delightful. Even the youths who congregate here are merely a handful of faintly lively teenage girls. St Michael’s Court handsomely presides over all this. It must be mock-something (Tudor, Elizabethan, Baroque?), I reckon, and it simply must have been used in Midsomer Murders. It is crying out for a garrotting in the conservatory.

  If this were to occur and Tom Barnaby had his hands full, don’t worry. Beaconsfield has its own police station. Actually it doesn’t. It has what is essentially Trumpton’s police station: hanging baskets effulgent with lobelias, a weather vane, a clock tower and a balcony where PC McGarry might appear and tell the assembled multitudes that there was nothing to worry about and to go about their business. It’s actually offering ‘surplus office space to rent’, which seems to suggest that they’re pretty much on top of crime hereabouts.

  Lunchtime finds me in Smiles fish and chip shop. Instantly I’m aware that I’m not in a traditional northern chippy as haddock and chips is £7.50 and comes with a garlic and tartare dip, there’s a wine list headed by pinot grigio and you can get mint tea. It’s really very nice. Behind me I hear the young waiter say ‘That’s five pound forty short’ to an elderly lady but before I can even begin to suspect some heartless scam, he then helps Eileen – clearly a regular – to the door and out onto the street where he makes sure she’s got everything and waves her off.

  Wandering through the streets I notice both an implausible amount of dry cleaners and the cheerily named Geezers Male Grooming. In the window, there’s a poster run up on a PC showing a cheeky chappy with a mad, gravity-defying lopsided cockscomb dyed blond and a wonky grin. Below reads the legend, ‘Welcome! New Stylist Neil formally [sic] of our Gerrards Cross branch’. Gerrards Cross features extensively in Midsomer Murders, as does the nearby town Aylesbury, which I decide to pop over to as there’s a train in bound for it. It weaves through the Chiltern hills and through a succession of little villages used in the series, all of them adorable in the milky light of a spring afternoon. At Monks Risborough there is a cross on the hillside and, as we sit at the station, a blonde woman with a huge bag of shopping seems to be doing a bit of negotiating with the driver. Then, a bit shiftily, she gets into the driver’s cab. It all feels very rum, especially when, once we’ve moved off, the train makes erratic and jerky progress and after a minute or two the driver announces, a little shakily, that ‘we are now approaching Little Kimble’. Are you now, I think. Is that what you call it round here?

  Aylesbury is nicer than I thought it would be, which is an odd thing to say, I realise. Why didn’t I think it would be nice? Evidently others have laboured under this misapprehension too, though, since a passionate posting on a local website from Steve P. gets really quite stirred up defending the town’s honour. ‘Aylesbury really is going from strength to strength, it is a lovely town – in my job I travel all over the country and anywhere north of Milton Keynes is unpleasant, HOWDARE those people last week send letter slagging off Aylesbury there is far far worse places how about Hull, Wigan, Manchester, Oldham, Birmingham …. shall I go on? Aylesbury is nice. Only 1hr-ish from London all major airports and most importantly NICE people!’

  Steve is right to stick up gallantly for Aylesbury. It has much to recommend it. There are some pleasant winding terraces and funny, quirky little passages. There’s a Roald Dahl museum, an adjunct to the Bucks County Museum which I have a wander into. The region’s brick-and lace-making heritage is celebrated at what can be fairly enervating length if you’re not really into bricks or lace. I rather like a painting called The Jug by John Morgan, which features various local dignitaries and yeomanry, the good men of Aylesbury, all stolidly Middle English. A little touchscreen tells you what they all did. In the Victorian room, you can measure yourself against ‘the ruler’, which is a cut-out silhouette of Queen Victoria who was, it seems, tiny. Then you can play match the kitchen utensil to the food. I can’t see it taking over from the Nintendo DS.

  The squares of Aylesbury were celebrated in ‘Market Square Heroes’, the debut single in 1981 by local prog-rock heroes Marillion. Singer Fish wrote the track in StMary’s graveyard ‘on the comedown from an acid trip and was completed as dawn came up and a ring of policemen moved in on my girlfriend and I who were acting “suspiciously”’. The song, inspired by the riots flaring across Britain at the time, posits a firebrand revolutionary emerging from the streets of Aylesbury and leading Middle England into a ferment of unrest and sedition. It isn’t going to happen this afternoon. There’s not much to detain me beyond a water clock that is apparently never right. Also in the main square stand two statues of two very different local heroes, Disraeli the Tory PM, and John Hampden, an anti-Royalist during the English Civil War who refused to play the King’s illegal naval tax. They probably wouldn’t have got along so warmly and so it’s kind of appropriate that they’ve been placed facing each other in a confrontational alignment that suggests that Disraeli is ‘offering Hampden out’. Hampden brandishes a sword, Disraeli seems to have a sample swatch of carpet. So my money’s on Hampden.

  The underpass has a design award. Since, according to my friend Paula who lives here, it floods instantly and copiously after an inch of rain and becomes a kind of leisure-pool for the local rat population, we conclude that the award must have been given on the day it opened. Certainly before the first light shower. Apparently the town got very excited recently when land was acquired for a supermarket. Rumour had it that it would be a branch of Waitrose, that bastion of lovely bourgeois comestibles, and an expectant Aylesbury palpitated, dreaming of prime organic beef and fresh kiwi fruit and warm walnut bread. In fact, they got not one but two supermarkets; sadly for the gourmets of Aylesbury, they came courtesy of those two bleak, warring German discount chains: Aldi and Lidl.

  As the dusk settles across the Chilterns, I head out of town for a snapshot of Midsomer. In a newsagent’s in Cuddington I ask the shopkeeper, a briskly militaristic man standing to attention behind the Telegraphs and the Mini Cheddars, whether he watches Midsomer Murders. ‘No. Too busy for that kind of thing. No, not for me, thank you,’ he answers in a clipped, disapproving, even offended tone, as if I’d asked him did he go dogging or smoke crack. In another, though, in Turville I think, where that other iconic TV emblem of Middle England, The Vicar of Dibley, is filmed, a lady organising the pile of Radio Times told me tha
t she loved it, thought John Nettles was ‘lovely’ and that ‘it shows off this part of the world in a very good light’, this last said sweetly and without a trace of irony. A hearty fellow in the Crown in Little Missenden told me that his mate had made a ‘nice little packet’ from hiring out his garden for ‘the one where they find a body in the well, I think’.

  These Chiltern villages are sublime, almost to the point of caricature: families of ducks on millponds, the shadows of ancient elms lengthening on tidy greens, higgledy-piggledy manor houses, weirs and a general sense of utter contentedness; apart from the constant slaughter, obviously. Buckinghamshire was, according to a recent survey, the most desirable place to live in Britain in terms of several indicators of quality of life. All new babies born here are expected to reach eighty. The percentage of Bucks residents owning their own homes is 80 per cent, well above average. GCSE results are better than normal too. The county enjoys more sunshine each week than the national average. The average salary in the county is £40,000 and some of the local residents do considerably better than that, thank you, for as well as wonderful wildlife like barn owls and red kites, celebrities haunt the Chiltern hills too; it is home to Cilla Black, Terry Wogan, John Mortimer and the Osbournes and successive lucky prime ministers since 1921 have Pimmsed and croqueted their weekends of R&R away at their country retreat, Chequers.

  It is, then, where money made in London finds a sweeter, nicer, kinder home, tucked in the wooded hills far from the din and jangle and fumes of the West End, far from the shrieking sirens of Dalston and Stoke Newington. It isn’t actually far from any of those; your Cornish pasty bought from the ever-welcoming stall at Marylebone will not even be cold before you enter the welcoming bosom of the Vale of Aylesbury. But it is a world away. In the window of an Aylesbury tobacconist I spotted a flyer advertising a production of Summoned by Bells: ‘an evening of words and music celebrating John Betjeman’. Of course, I thought. This corner of Buckinghamshire – in the same way that nowhere was more typically English than the remote hill stations of Darjeeling – is the furthest-flung but perhaps most representative outpost of Metroland.

  Betjeman’s Metroland, as evoked in his classic BBC documentary of 1973, took its name from the Metropolitan Line’s publicity slogan of the 1920s and 1930s, referring to the towns and villages to the north-west of London served by the new Metropolitan Line. It was clever marketing, promising a suburban idyll that was convenient for but entirely separate from grimy, bustling London. ‘Metroland…Beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks,’ as Betjeman put it. For him Metroland began at Baker Street and extended to the forgotten station of Quainton Road near Aylesbury, pictured in the last shot of the documentary. Metroland as a concept is a companion, then, to Middle England. They are real places and you can map them. But you cannot quite pin them down. They are regions of the mind and heart as well as the map.

  North of Metroland lies Oxfordshire. The original and inventive rock band Radiohead are from Oxford and Colin Greenwood of that band once said of his home city: ‘Oxford is in the centre of England, but it’s not really a rock ‘n’ roll town.’ To a degree, he is right. It’s no LA. But on one level it rivals any US city, any ghetto or downtown or barrio, and that is in its crime rate. If at any rate we are to believe another Oxford Colin, Colin Dexter, and his most famous creation, another Middle English touchstone, Inspector Endeavour Morse of the Thames Valley Police.

  Like Midsomer, the sheer wanton lawlessness of Oxford as presented in the Inspector Morse books and TV series has become something of a humorous cliché. The critic Phillip Wickham says that its murder rate must ‘rival the Bronx’ and many commentators have delighted in pointing out that, at such a rate of slaughter (one hundred and twenty-odd deaths in sixty-odd hours), the entire city would surely be depopulated before long. But crime and death stalked the streets long before Inspector Morse quit the army and signed up for the irascible, snobbish but essentially decent squad of Thames Valley police. There are two Sherlock Holmes cases set here. Dorothy L. Sayers had her Lord Peter Wimsey on the trail of a killer at a girls’ college reunion in her wonderful Gaudy Night. Bruce Montgomery wrote the music for six Carry On films but, as Edmund Crispin, he also wrote six amusing, diverting, occasionally exasperating crime novels involving Oxford don turned detective Gervase Fen. And Sarah Caudwell’s four detective novels, an acquired taste but a growing cult, feature amateur sleuth and Oxford law don Hilary Tamar, so enigmatic a personage that even his/her sex is uncertain (Caudwell apparently rejected the advances of TV because it would be necessary to reveal the detective as either male or female and this would ruin everything).

  But Colin Dexter/Inspector Morse have done most to make Oxford Murder Capital UK. There is good reason to conflate creator and creation; both are diabetic, both enjoy real ale, opera, cryptic crossword puzzles and The Archers. I am sitting in the downstairs bar of the Randolph Hotel, beneath a selection of production stills from the series. A small plaque records that this is where in 1880 the Amateur Athletic Association was formed and is thus, in effect, the home of modern athletics. But it’s dwarfed by a much bigger plaque recording Morse’s comment that ‘they serve a decent pint’ at the Randolph. Predictably, perhaps, where I am sitting is now called the Morse Bar.

  Crenulated and canopied and flying various flags, the Randolph has long been regarded as Oxford’s traditional ‘posh hotel’. It is sometimes claimed that Colin Dexter wrote some scenes whilst enjoying a pint in the bar, but whether this is true or not, the hotel’s connections with Morse run deep. One short story revolved around Room 231, whilst in The Jewel That was Lost, an elderly lady snuffed it in Room 310. As I was planning my trip, Jasper Gerrard in the Daily Telegraph was a tad sniffy about the food in the old place, viz.: ‘The Randolph, where parents have long toasted Firsts and commiserated with Thirds, is so bad that diners may feel they are being set up in a remake of Candid Camera.’ But others love it, and I found the welcome warm from staff from a variety of nations under the skilful, suave, unfussy leadership of a brilliant bloke from the old North Riding of Yorkshire (‘Cleveland, we say now’) with salt and pepper hair and a winning smile. This conviviality was much appreciated since there’d been a bit of alarming business on the pavement outside when a very presentable and proper elderly lady, waiting her turn in the queue for the Playhouse theatre next door, had suddenly and very violently vomited all over her queuing companions and most of the pavement. A chair and water was fetched from the Randolph and she was made as comfortable as she could be, although clearly undergoing the kind of embarrassment that is bad enough in Middle England but in Japan, where a number of the vomited upon seemed to be from, would have necessitated immediate seppuku with a sharp-bladed Tando.

  A little shaken but not unduly stirred, I get the key to my room, where I lie on the bed for a bit watching the football results – ever the adventurer – before heading off into town to eat at a Lebanese restaurant that, from my researches, has the most bewildering, contradictory and downright incomprehensible reviews I have ever come across. The only constant appears to be that it is ‘a legendary Oxford venue’ and ‘unforgettable’.

  I soon see why. The place is packed with diners. Except they aren’t really, in that no one seems to be actually eating. There are a great many staff and all appear to be engaged in a whole host of noisy and complicated tasks involving phones, paper, tablecloths, but none that seem to involve the production of food or the delivery of said food to tables. No one else seems to care, though, so I instruct myself to stop being so Middle English and to ‘chill out’.

  Two young staff seem to be assigned to my table and I soon come to think of them as Heroin Girl and Afro Boy. In case this seems uncharitable, they were both extremely pleasant, but just striking in appearance and oddly disengaged. He sported, as you may have guessed, an enormous afro, certainly the most luxuriant if not the only one I have ever encountered on a person from the Middle East; she seemed so vague and blurry and distracted, if good-n
atured with it, that I begin to suspect something chemical – at the very least Benylin – must be involved. When she takes my order, she stands so close to me and seems so fragile that I think she’s going to sit on my knee. This bothers me as I have no idea what the protocol is for this in the Lebanon. Then she goes away singing softly to herself and he brings me a large silver salver on which are arranged a veritable grocer’s display of raw vegetables: a whole green pepper, a whole head of cabbage and a cos lettuce, several carrots and radishes. This is a customary Middle Eastern gesture but I have never encountered quite such an amount of veg of quite such elephantine proportions and of quite such, well, rawness. No one seems quite sure what to do with them and several are clearly wary of making a ‘drinking the fingerbowl’ style rookie ethnic error, so nearly every table is dominated by a large shopping basket of untouched vegetables, leaving little room for the mezze and baba ganoush and farkeh and such. I nibble a couple of radishes, ‘Just so I could say I’ve had some,’ as my mother would say.

  The food and wine was heady and terrific from what I remember, though, which perhaps explains a) why Oxford seems to have fallen so headlong in love with Lebanese cuisine and has at least five such restaurants and b) how come I got so hopelessly lost on the short and straightforward journey back to the hotel. Still, if you’re going to get lost, Jericho is as good a place as any to do so. On this balmy Saturday evening, young women who all look like Virginia Woolf’s trendier, indie-kid sister spill out laughing from the Jericho Tavern. After a grisly spell as one of those themed horror pubs, this Oxford landmark, venue for the first gigs by Radiohead and Supergrass, is back to its former and happier self. Happy is how I feel too as I eventually find my way back to my room at the Randolph, full of radish and resolving not to get murdered.