Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Not part of the village, in fact a separate entity (though surely ripe for annexation should a dictator ever arise from the Alessi shop), is Blackbrook’s Antique Village. Again, it’s not a village but it is a great place to while away an hour even if, like me, you have not the faintest interest in antiques. Not in the sense of old jugs anyway. The antiques at Blackbrook’s are different, though, multifarious and a bit nuts. Here I thought about buying an early table-top football game made in Birmingham, some old typewriters, huge linen baskets cleared from the cotton mill in Wigan my mum used to work in, some Victorian tennis rackets, a ship in a bottle, a cage cum gazebo, the pews, crucifix and ‘stations of the cross’ from a disused church, and a massive fountain filled with goldfish for five thousand pounds, which makes the sinister cowled monk look like a bargain.

  On a hillside on the North Weald I saw another instance of Middle England at play, one which was entirely new to me. It was sheer chance: what seemed to be an encampment, alive with fluttering pennants and noise, on the gently sloping rise ahead. It was late afternoon, the sun was on the wane but the coming evening was warm and sweet and the home-made sign taped to the folding table at the field gate said, ‘Admission reduced to ten pounds a car’. I gave a tenner to the florid lady in the body warmer with the walkie-talkie and I was into my very first point-to-point.

  A point-to-point meeting is essentially a rough and ready day at the races. The name is of the same derivation as ‘steeplechase’, whose origins lie in a bet between Mr Blake and his neighbour Mr Callaghan in County Cork in 1752, who raced each other from the steeple – or point – of Buttevant church to Doneraile church some four and a half miles away. Though decidedly amateur, I guess point-to-point meetings are at the upper, posher end of what we might call Middle England. Certainly I have never seen so much brush-like ginger hair and pastel-pink polo shirts with the collars turned up. In the hubbub of voices I hear choice selections. A sizzled-looking chap in designer sunglasses and a floppy fringe is cradling his mobile phone between shoulder and ear. ‘Yah, Simon, I’m over by the beer tent but I really fancy one of those ostrich burger thingies and some champers. I’ve had a skinful of Adnams and I need a sit down.’ Two men who both look like Jeremy Irons’s rugger-bugger brother have an exchange over glasses of red wine. ‘We’ve got dinner with the Montgomerys tonight.’ ‘Oh, hard lines.’ ‘I know. Still, the food will be good even if the small talk is ghastly.’ Over the tannoy comes a drawled, laconic announcement, ‘We’ve got a small lost boy in the weighing enclosure. He’s got an ice cream and an orange rugby shirt and we think he’s called Jason. I don’t know why.’

  Throwing myself into the spirit of things, I decide to have a bet. There are proper bookies, most with little whiteboards and dry markers but some with digital displays which I am rather tragically impressed by. I peruse and deliberate for some time before placing my bet. As I receive my ticket, the gentleman gives some winnings to the little girl at the side of me. ‘Thirty-eight pounds, well done, darling!’ I take this to be a good omen.

  I am wrong. For one thing, as I walk away clutching my ticket I realise that what I thought were the odds were actually the horses’ numbers, and so I have picked entirely the wrong horse. Not that my selection was to be trusted in the first place, of course. But now it is completely random. Jockeys and horses are paraded round to give potential punters a chance to size them up. My jockey is toothless, looks older than me and has the unconvincing confidence of a man who’s been drinking aftershave all morning. I’m no judge of horse flesh but his steed will surely become Bostik and meat pies before the week is out. It doesn’t bode well.

  My horse came second, which would have been fine if I’d backed it each way. Or indeed backed the right horse. I screw my ticket up and throw it in the bin by the Countryside Alliance stand. Three men are talking over plastic glasses of beer and each is dressed in the full dress uniform of the Countryside Alliance: Barbour waterproof, white shirt with small yellow check, dull greeny-mustard tweed jacket, flat cap. They probably think of themselves as Middle Englanders but from my travels they are decidedly not. They are its lunatic fringe. As I leave the field in the setting sun, the man on the tannoy makes another weary announcement. ‘So we now have one set of house keys, one dog, one iPod, one handbag and one little boy called, we think, Jason. Someone must remember losing these things.’

  If point-to-pointing is an a typical Middle English pursuit, what could be more middling and suburban than gardening? Not that long ago, gardening threatened to become sexy, or so at least the Sunday papers and TV commissioning editors told us. They told us that benign horticulturalist Alan Titchmarsh was ‘an unlikely sex symbol’ (why do you never hear about ‘likely sex symbols’?) and that Charlie Dimmock, voluptuous, bra-eschewing, Titian-haired temptress of the compost heap, was invigorating men of a certain age all across the Shires on Gardeners’ World every Friday evening. They may even have said that gardening was, oh dear, ‘the new rock and roll’. All that silliness is over now, gardening has returned to its proper place in the schedules – the middle – and the columnists have turned their attention to ‘talent’ and ‘reality’ shows, both of which richly deserve those ironic inverted commas, honest.

  But we still garden. And even those of us who don’t still crave or cherish the garden even if only as ‘the extra room’ it is glamorously sold as in all those makeover shows. Horticultural purists may grizzle at the ubiquity of decking and water features but for those of us with no appetite for dirt, worms and tetanus, the garden still remains an inviolate space of Middle England. A place for crafty fags and glasses of wine on fine evenings, a place for barbecues, bikes, swing ball and giant trampolines.

  In the Botanical Gardens at Edgbaston, though, Middle England’s religious love of gardening has found a shrine. Well, actually a Mount Rushmore. Gardening TV stalwarts Dimmock, Titchmarsh, Monty Don and Carol Klein have been immortalised here in a six-foot-high relief sculpture composed of ‘peat-free compost-containing recycling materials’. It is charming but it is also completely ludicrous, especially since the bottom of Dimmock’s jaw has sheared disastrously away like the Larsen B ice shelf, leaving her with a terrifying zombie rictus. On the subject of Alan, whilst calling him Middle England’s Gardening God, John Vidal writing in the Guardian hit that obligatory tone of metropolitan superiority when he opined, ‘If he were a flower, he would be a busy lizzie – he thrives everywhere, comes up every year and offends no one. You could describe him as Terry Wogan without the wit. The less kind among us might prefer “Mr Bland”. But that’s the point of Titch, and the cult of Middle England now growing around him loves him for his ubiquity and inoffensiveness.’ Successful, rich, good at his job and apparently lusted after, Titchmarsh is presumably immune to this kind of stuff. Let critics sneer if they like. They’ll never get their own peat-free compost Mount Rushmore, I thought, as I tucked into my mushroom soup and shepherd’s pie in the cafeteria. It was full: full of ladies who lunch in cashmere wraps and young mums in Gap and Primark, retired couples and trios of teenagers and school parties with clipboards, all come to enjoy the Tudor knot garden and the national bonsai collection, the woodland walk and the tropical house that makes your glasses steam up. The new Middle England I’d say, coming together under leaded glass and creepers, just by a sign that says, ‘These toilets are not in use. Please use the ones behind the parrot house.’

  It didn’t say why the toilets weren’t in use but I imagine it was due to flooding. I say this because most of Middle England’s woes for the past few years have fallen from the skies. Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire have been largely under water since about 2004, it seems. If this sounds jokey and flippant, the actuality has been biblical, apocalyptic even; thousands displaced from their homes, cars being washed away down the pretty streets of market towns, people taking to the roofs of their semis, rowing boats rescuing people from upstairs windows, people actually drowning. We have grown used
to seeing such terrible images from Karachi, Sichuan or even New Orleans. But this is Tewkesbury.

  Driving into Tewkesbury in the spring of 2008 I thought it was sweet, if a little sheep-like, to see that every, but every, semidetached house in the residential suburbs on the outskirts of town had a caravan in the front garden. Did everyone really have to try so hard to emulate their neighbour and keep up with the Joneses? I felt ashamed a few minutes later when, of course, it dawned on me that these caravans were being lived in. The family homes behind were uninhabitable, a year after the waters had come to this pretty Gloucestershire town.

  The Tewkesbury floods of 2007 were devastating, on a scale once unthinkable in England but now being repeated year after year. Whatever the climate change deniers may say – the ridiculous Nigel Lawson and those few mad scientists – the people of Tewkesbury know that all is not right up there beyond the clouds. Fifty thousand were driven from their homes. Three died. People who popped into Morrisons to get their Friday-night shop came out an hour later to find their cars submerged and useless. The main streets became rivers. The town looked like Venice. The magnificent abbey became an island, literally. Pictures of it from the air, surrounded by water, became the terrible icon of the floods. It soon filled with bedraggled, sodden refugees seeking shelter and sleeping on its stone floors. It was like something from Brueghel or Bosch, almost medieval.

  I walk down Abbey Terrace a year later and every house is deserted. Through the curtainless windows, I can see that many still have industrial dehumidifiers with their huge trunk-like pipes dangling across the bare, concrete rooms where the furniture and carpets have gone. It is a melancholy sight. In the abbey itself, various pictures and displays tell of those terrible July days and how the abbey became a focal point for the town and an emblem of its quiet fortitude and generosity.

  If you were to ask me what the best of Middle England is, I would say it is those qualities: fortitude and generosity with perhaps a side order of tolerance and stoicism and just a dash of spice and mischief. These are not the qualities, though, that some of the trumpeters of Middle England espouse, usually from newspaper offices in London. If you believed them, you’d think that Middle England was a nest of bitter and insular vipers, a frightened, mean-spirited people desperate to complain about something. When the Tewkesbury floods happened, most people in the town rolled their sleeves up, got a bucket and helped bail out. Some, though, preferred to stand around at a metaphorical distance, arms folded, and whinge. As comedian and columnist Mark Steel noted: ‘One inevitable line of whining has been the one pursued by a columnist in the Mail, who complained: “If this biblical flooding was happening in some far-flung Third World country, pop stars would be falling over themselves to record a charity single.” And someone in the Sun said: “If this was happening anywhere else in the world, the government would be sending wads of our cash.” … It is almost as if they’re angry at how Middle England has suffered most, as if this were a politically correct flood that once again attacks the decent, silent majority, because these days a flood daren’t devastate an inner-city area, in case someone accuses it of being racist!’

  Steel is right. And such talk, trickling like the last of the flood water down Church Street from the newspapers to the readers who then parrot it, is bleating by any other name. It is not the authentic voice of Middle England. Ostensibly bullish but really querulous and whiney, it has only become the dominant key, the register, the default tone of Middle England relatively recently. Since 31 August 1997 in fact. I ended the last chapter by saying that the myth of Middle England owes much, not to Robin Hood and King Arthur, but to two women who very definitely did exist. Thatcher was one. It’s time to consider the other.

  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales following a highspeed crash in a Paris underpass in the summer of 1997 is, I’d argue, the most significant, indeed the defining moment, in English culture and society since the Second World War. It has been felt across every stratum of society but perhaps most in Middle England. Diana’s death and the subsequent collective national derangement, that outpouring of grief and hysteria, has changed us utterly and for ever. Before Henri Paul, drunk and speeding, lost control of that Mercedes in the tunnel beneath the Place de l’Alma, Middle England had tended to be thought of as buttoned-up, repressed even, suspicious of gross displays of emotion, given to a little eye-rolling but not censorious, brisk, cheerful and above all sensible.

  The ripples of madness left by the cataclysm of Diana’s death are still with us. They are not the tides they once were but they are still an undertow that shapes our world. The stiff upper lip has been replaced by the trembling lower one. Stoicism has given way to sentimentality or ‘the indulgence of feelings you don’t really have’ as I once heard it defined. Fortitude and generosity have been replaced by selfishness and judgementalism.

  As you may have guessed, I don’t think this change has been for the best. Don’t get me wrong. This is nothing to do with Diana and is no comment on her. Her death was a human tragedy and only someone with a heart of stone could not have been moved, even if some of the excesses of those late summer days seem bizarre now. (When the Princess of Wales’s coffin was driven up the M1, signs from a safety campaign saying ‘Tiredness can kill, Take a break’ were taken down to prevent anyone getting a photo showing the hearse juxtaposed with such a sign.) But the effect of that July night has been deleterious for us all. Nothing genuinely useful has changed (at one point it was felt that we trembled on the verge of republican). But we are that bit quicker to blub, quicker to take offence, quicker to shout the odds, quicker to complain, quicker to tell people exactly what we think of them. Every day, hours of the output of supposed news networks is given over to phone-ins in which the dim and the bigoted, the ill-informed bore who nonetheless is ‘entitled to his opinion’, the single-issue nutter and the monomaniac fundamentalist vie to see who can shout the loudest. And when the shouting day is done, we watch TV shows in which people’s dreams are dashed by snickering juries. If you don’t enjoy this shift, you are elitist, you are antidemocratic. Except this is not democracy. It’s ochlocracy, as the Greeks called it. Rule by the mobile vulgus, the easily moveable crowd, or, in short, the mob.

  I should say that I’m not pining for the days when we kept it all in, kept it under wraps and kept it in the family. I don’t feel nostalgic for a golden age of backstreet abortions or the good old days when outwardly respectable bank managers were thrashing their wives – and worse – behind closed doors. But I wish we, and especially Middle England, wouldn’t let it all hang out so readily. It’s not genuine candour, it’s just exhibitionism. If the next thing you say doesn’t add to the sum total of human happiness, don’t say it. As England used to say when we really were up against it, Be like Dad, keep Mum.

  When I think of Middle England I think of tolerance and kindness. So it irks me that the phrase has become a byword for sour prejudice and insularity. The Daily Mail, generally regarded as the house journal for Middle England, has even tried to extinguish the phrase for what it deems the ‘offensive’ and ‘outdated’ stereotypes associated with its readership. Linda Grant, marketing services director at the Mail’s parent group Associated Newspapers, said of Middle England in 2008: ‘People conjure up an image when they hear it but they can’t really define it. The Mail and Middle England are synonymous but the idea of Middle England is outdated.’ She argued: ‘The results of the group’s research, published today, claim that rather than being “old-fashioned, narrow-minded and conservative”, Middle Englanders and Mail readers are people who are “influential, engaged and vocal” and the “ultimate consumers with the power to make or break almost any brand”.’

  The Labour Party, as I saw in Royal Leamington Spa, has long courted Middle England as its new power base, rather than its traditional constituency, the urban working class. Labour strategist Philip Gould identifies it as a place populated by ‘ordinary people with suburban dreams who worked hard to improve their
homes and their lives; to get gradually better cars, washing machines and televisions; to go on holiday in Spain rather than Bournemouth’. If anything, though, research from bodies like MORI shows that Middle England is characterised not by entrenched loyalty to any party but by their floating, changeable allegiances. Ben Page, managing director of the MORI Social Research Institute, says that the label ‘Middle England’ is used as ‘a convenient shorthand for the 25 per cent of the population who are not surgically wedded to one of the main parties – and who happen to live in marginal constituencies’. That’s why parties of every hue want their vote.

  Leftist commentator Martin Jacques has said that Middle England is a ‘metaphor for respectability, the nuclear family, conservatism, whiteness, middle age and the status quo’. But this is metaphor, not mirror to reality. According to the National Centre for Social Research, Middle Englanders are becoming more tolerant and open-minded with regard to issues like homosexuality and women’s rights, if not crime and immigration. And even here we should be careful not to assume that just because Middle England reads the Mail or the Telegraph, it agrees with every word. When censor-in-chief James Ferman passed Adrian Lyne’s film version of Lolita, the Daily Mail attacked him for a ‘gross betrayal of public interest’, to which Ferman responded, ‘Perhaps the problem is that those who claim to defend the values of Middle England may well be out of touch with Middle England.’