Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Groups of Gypsy teenagers stood around the square, oblivious to their effect on the locals. I have been here before, in May time, and seen the girls come dressed for clubbing, wearing heels half the height of the smaller cottages and somewhat shorter shorts, in lime greens and flamingo pinks. On a coolish October day, they were a touch more demure: the same heels but stretching up towards tight jeans or jodhpurs, even tighter tops and long, flowing hair. They are not oblivious to their effect on the Gypsy boys, all with gelled hair, big forearms and popping eyes, and all rendered seemingly speechless. About a hundred police stood around, staring intently even at my notebook, but they could find no infringement to engage them other than a breach of the back-seat seat-belt laws.

  Why does Stow hate the fair so much? No, no, we don’t hate it, they say. ‘It’s a bit of an anachronism,’ one antiques dealer, Antony Preston, had told me. ‘No one wants to stop them holding the fair. But it may not be right for a small town.’ The complaints come down to two: one is petty theft, not just on the day but all week – ‘Small stuff: chicken-stealing, wood taken from sheds, that sort of thing.’

  But it’s not so much what they take from Stow’s lovingly-tended gardens, rather what they do there.

  ‘They pee?’ I enquired.

  ‘Worse. The other thing.’

  The fair field itself is marked by an official sign saying ‘This is not an organised event’, which is a formal disclaimer from the police, council and every other gorgio body imaginable. And indeed this is probably the largest untoileted event in the country, which explains the problem with ‘the other thing’. But apart from that the fair organises itself. Though there are very few gorgios – representatives of the Muggle-world of non-Travellers – and hardly any Stowites at all, the atmosphere is welcoming and the police inside are relaxed. The most intent representatives of officialdom come from the RSPCA, anxiously scanning the tethered Welsh cobs and caged chickens.

  There was a good turnout, because it was a fine week and dry underfoot. But this was not a happy week for the Travellers. The day before the fair, police, in force and in riot gear, had marched in to take possession of the Dale Farm site in Essex. The story dominated both the morning papers and the quiet conversations of the Gypsy menfolk at Stow. It’s all very well for the authorities to turf them off one site, they said, but they have to offer somewhere to go.

  The Gypsy Council tent had a big sign:

  MYTH: Gypsies are foreign.

  TRUTH: Romani Gypsies and Travellers have been part of British society for over 500 years.

  MYTH: Gypsies are dirty.

  TRUTH: Gypsy culture is built upon strict codes of cleanliness learned over centuries.

  MYTH: Gypsies are criminals.

  TRUTH: Gypsies and Travellers are overrepresented in prison because courts are more likely to give a custodial sentence.

  And so on. Judged by what’s on sale, though, Gypsy culture seems to fit a lot of clichés: bejewelled bra tops that would be a bit extreme on a belly-dancing night; furs ‘as worn by Katie Price’; the girliest little-girl dresses left anywhere outside a Catholic confirmation ceremony; purple thigh boots of the sort normally favoured only by drag artists; armchairs that might have been liberated from Colonel Gaddafi’s compound; and extra-chunky catapults that looked as though they could down a NATO bomber.

  ‘How much are they?’

  ‘Sixty-five,’ replied the man.

  ‘Sixty-five pence?’ I said, suddenly interested.

  ‘Quid,’ he replied, more affably than the question deserved. ‘Look at them. Beautifully crafted. Camel bone, buffalo horn.’

  ‘What would I use it for?’

  ‘Pheasants. On the way home.’

  But no one was buying. It was that kind of year, and Gypsies were part of British society in that respect too. ‘Lots of people,’ said the Irishwoman selling handbags, ‘nobody spending. Nobody’s got any money. We won’t sell enough to pay for the stall.’

  Like many of the stallholders, she had plastic mesh at the front protecting the stock.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘There are a lot of teeves here,’ she said.

  ‘Are you a Gypsy?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied.

  What is Gloucestershire? It is an exceptionally difficult county to encompass. A helpful character from the county council spread out a map and gave me a quick tour, using the council boundaries, which is how local government people always think, even if no one else does. The official pointed to Tewkesbury at the top. ‘They’re all very apathetic up there.’ (This may have been a generalisation.) Then Stroud at the bottom. ‘They’re all very green down there.’ (Ditto.)

  In the middle are what Americans would call the twin cities – Gloucester and Cheltenham – except that one is a city and the other isn’t. Gloucester has the cathedral but was sabotaged by dreadful post-war redevelopment from which it has never recovered. This is not a controversial judgement. Cheltenham, however, has maintained most of its spa-town charm, enhanced its reputation and become known for its festivals: literature, music, science, cricket and – most famously – drinking, which takes place for four days every March, accompanied by an ancillary horse-racing festival for those who misunderstand the main point of the gathering.

  The county as a whole is marked by very high property prices except in the eastern part, the Cotswolds, where prices are exceptionally high. In those much-admired, to my eyes rather pallid-looking, cottages lurk locals who tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, living in valuable houses they can’t sell because they have to live somewhere. There was a story of a beautifully turned-out and much-liked Cotswold woman who would go into town every week to have her hair done. Suddenly, she was not seen around any more. When her body was found, sometime later, it emerged that she had been living in a freezing-cold rat heap.

  There is a thin coating of celebrities, headed by Prince Charles and Princess Anne (performers in a well-loved British soap opera), above a thicker layer of upmarket society. Allied to them are the weekenders, east Gloucestershire being the outer limits of comfortable weekly commuting from London. Nowhere else in the country are the weekenders so significant a part of the economy and culture.

  Their homes are not quite empty all winter, the way a Cornish holiday home might be, but they are not quite full. Mostly, these part-timers do try to contribute. As a council official put it: ‘When they buy their homes they tend to start out wanting to do everything local – going to the farmers’ market, buying from the village shop. But after a while it just gets a bit exhausting. They’ve worked hard all week and they want to spend the time relaxing – reading, walking, that sort of thing – not trudging round buying things.’

  There is one other area, conveniently coloured green on the map. That’s the Forest.

  The Forest! Throughout Gloucestershire, and some way beyond, the word only has to be mentioned to produce a frisson. No one ever has to ask which forest. The Forest of Dean has been a place with a mind and character and traditions of its own since medieval times. ‘He’s from the Forest’ is one of those phrases that explains everything.

  It forms something close to an island between the largely unbridged downstream sections of the Severn and the Wye. And it is a real forest: a place of darkness and mystery and danger that repelled outsiders for thousands of years. Especially as the locals were known to take potshots at passing riverboats. Even Lord Nelson, hunting for oak for England’s wooden walls, only peeked from the outside. The nation’s most gallant sailor declined to wander into the woods.

  The Forest also had minerals – ironstone and coal in particular – which offered a more regular source of income than forestry, and were enough to save the locals from the uttermost depths of poverty. This was a royal forest but also an industrial area. Thus the population remained stable and largely unnoticed by the outside world.

  Inbreeding was one obvious consequence. But so was a remarkable sense of pride and tradition. Perhaps nowh
ere in the southern half of England is there such persistence of dialect. I met a young labourer in Lydney who still greets his mates with the pure-Forest phrase: ‘How bist, o’but?’ The dialect may be more self-conscious now but it’s still there, along with the Forest’s more industrial tastes: chapel, rugby, brass bands. Occasionally, a figure would emerge blinking into the light of the wider world, like the playwright Dennis Potter. And you can see where Potter’s noirishness came from, not to mention – a Forest word he was inclined to use himself – his ‘stubbornyudedness’.

  The Foresters have their rights, and they know them. When Edward I besieged Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1296, he called in miners from the Forest of Dean to undermine (literally) the town’s fortifications. As a reward, he gave them free mining rights within the Forest in perpetuity. And there are still freeminers producing coal from shallow pits. It tends to come out in unmanageably large lumps but burns well enough, apparently. To exercise this right it is necessary to be born within the Forest – ‘the Hundred of St Briavels’ – and to have worked underground. These qualifications are getting harder to fulfil since the Coal Board pulled out, in 1964, and the maternity hospital in Cinderford shut down. But the right is there and is still exercised.

  There are still, in ever-decreasing numbers, ‘badgers’, locals who can run their sheep in the Forest. Some have the right to ‘estivers’ – i.e. firewood. And there is pannage, permission to release your pigs in autumn to gorge themselves on acorns. Strictly speaking, these are not rights but privileges which can only be exercised with a permit. Rob Guest, former Deputy Surveyor of the Forest, was insistent on that point. And there is a particular problem with pannage. Any little piggies wandering out to snaffle some acorns are likely to come face to face with one of their long-lost and rather more voracious cousins. After an absence of several centuries, a sounder (that’s the collective noun) of wild boar celebrated the millennium by escaping from a farm near Ross-on-Wye and returning to their ancestral home. There are now three separate populations, thought to be increasing rapidly. So far, the only reported human injury came about when a man tried to feed one while a small boy simultaneously hit it with a stick.

  The boar have their supporters, who include sentimentalists, traditionalists, wildlife enthusiasts and shotgun-carrying boyos from the Welsh valleys who are happy to take on the ancient role as the boars’ only predator, now that the monarch and court can no longer be bothered. The pro-boar contingent is not thought to include bluebells, dormice, ground-nesting birds like wood warblers, or anyone who likes neat verges. Much of the grass now looks as though it has been attacked by an alliance of giant moles and JCBs.

  Nor does the pro-boar party include Rob Guest. ‘Sooner or later, someone is going to be badly injured by one of these animals. It’s probably going to involve a dog. Even the smaller animals are powerful and the bigger ones are fearful: about 250 kilos.’

  ‘But they are part of the primeval forest, surely?’

  ‘The difference is that (a) they would always have been hunted in the past and (b) you didn’t have 35,000 people living close by and a million people coming in every year. With dogs.’

  This is a problem that vexes Guest’s successors at the Forestry Commission, and the Court of Verderers, a body dating back at least to 1218 – a blink of an eye in the Forest’s history – which still meets in its courtroom in what is now the Speech House Hotel outside Coleford. The court retains some responsibility for the ‘vert and venison’, which is verderer-speak for the flora and fauna, including the wild boar. The four members are elected for life.

  It happened that a vacancy on the court had arisen through death, with an election date set for Gloucester Cathedral on 29 November. ‘It’s the last old-fashioned election anywhere,’ Guest told me. The vote is called by the high sheriff, confined to freeholders of the county (the City of Gloucester excluded) and conducted by a show of hands – none of your new-fangled secret-ballot nonsense. Rob Guest had resolved to stand; I resolved to attend.

  As I headed out of the Forest, I picked up the freesheet, the Review.

  IT’S THE SUPERSTORE DASH

  FIRST SAINSBURY IN THE FOREST – 270 JOBS ON THE CARDS

  Sainsbury’s, the Review explained, had beaten Tesco and Asda to get a site in Cinderford, the Forest’s largest town, and it would be a 32,000-square-foot store, equivalent to Morrisons in Ross-on-Wye – which is a local benchmark, in the way that newspapers always compare a large tract of land to ‘the size of Wales’. The Foresters may also still be unworldly enough to imagine that a new supermarket really creates jobs instead of adding a few – mostly low-grade ones – at the expense of all the others that will vanish. Not just jobs in the small shops that will close but in the ancillary industries that serve them, from accountancy to plumbing. ‘A breath of fresh air for Cinderford,’ said the happy head of a haulage firm, who had managed to sell his prime site for this enterprise.

  Some people in Gloucestershire take a different view. Stokes Croft is an old inner-city area of Bristol, mildly fashionable before it was cut off from the centre by the inner ring road and the notorious horror of the St James Barton roundabout, aka the Bear Pit. Later it had a different type of resident, some of them by 2011 living in a squat known as Telepathic Heights. This was remarkably handy for the shops, in particular a new branch of Tesco Express – the thirty-first branch of Tesco in Bristol – that was opening directly opposite them. Police raided the squat, where they found petrol bombs and made four arrests; a riot ensued and the new shop was duly trashed. Tesco prevailed of course, and was trading calmly but just a little fearfully when I passed by six months later, closing at 6 p.m. instead of the 11 p.m. at other branches, scared as they were of things going bump or boom in the night.

  But Tesco does not sit easily in Stokes Croft. The police might stamp on Telepathic Heights but something was emerging from below which would be less easily eradicated. The guiding spirit was the graffito-genius Banksy, one of whose seminal works, The Mild Mild West, had been on a wall by the Jamaica Street junction for over a decade. It depicts a teddy bear about to throw a Molotov cocktail at a line of riot police. A letter writer to the Western Daily Press blamed Banksy for the riots and attacked the council for encouraging ‘this anarchic graffiti and attitudes’. (Subediting on Bristol’s morning paper has declined since the days when the editor threw typewriters at his staff.) The writer was presumably unaware that the Jamaica Street painting had been defaced with red paint in 2009 by a group who thought Banksy was a capitalist stooge.

  The walls of Stokes Croft are full of contributions by wannabe Banksies. And the whole place was work in progress. It had elements of growing awareness (‘The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’), self-awareness (‘People’s Republic of Stokes Croft T-shirts £10’), gentrification (‘risotto of pumpkin, sage and Stilton’), degradation (‘Massage Club. Staff Always Required’) and homogenisation (Tesco Express). My sense was that categories two and three were likely to come out on top.

  It was raining again on the day of the verderers’ election. By the main door of the cathedral, officials sat handing out pieces of paper marked GUEST STANDING. I assumed I was supposed to take one, as an acknowledgement that, not being a freeholder in Gloucestershire (the City of Gloucester excluded), I was not entitled to vote or to sit down.

  It took a while to realise that was in fact the ballot paper: Rob GUEST v Ian STANDING. Guest was the establishment candidate: not quite the country gentleman who would be calmly slotted in to fill these positions in the old days, but someone the gentlemen knew and trusted. Several people had told me he knew more about the Forest than anyone else alive. And he had told me he would not stoop to electioneering: busing in his supporters, that kind of stuff.

  Standing, though, was not just standing – he was running. Hard. He had been the secretary of HOOF – Hands Off Our Forest – which had sprung up in response to the coalition government’s plans, hastily dropped, to start selling off woodland. He was, some
one said to me with a shudder, political. Despite the weather, several hundred people had turned up, many of them, the whispers suggested, bused in by this, shudder, politician. In theory, the electors could have popped in from the Cotswolds or anywhere else. There was no check and, anyway, heaven knows how you confirm whether anyone is actually a freeholder. But everyone seemed to know everyone else and had an inkling of what would happen.

  The formalities can have changed little over the centuries. We were Oyez, Oyez, Oyez-ed and all persons were told to keep silent, which was difficult for the crying baby at the back. Then we all stood for the high sheriff who was in full fig – ruff, tights, buckled shoes and all – but somehow managed to sit cross-legged while the senior verderer, Robert Jenkins, droned on, milking his moment of glory.

  The two candidates sat at the front, on opposing sides of the aisle, like the fathers at a particularly ill-starred wedding. Both were grey-bearded, but differently. Rob Guest had a full countryman’s beard, a trustworthy kind of beard; Ian Standing had a suspiciously academic goatee. They were allowed to speak briefly. Both were courteous, even chivalrous, to their opponent, but the speeches were full of subtext that, in a very English, understated, coded way, summed up all the divisions of the modern countryside.

  At the difficult art of cathedral oratory, Guest was superior: he spoke clearly and audibly. The Court of Verderers, he said, ‘is not a political party, it is not a campaigning group. It is a court. It is the equivalent of a magistrates’ court.’ (There is a local myth that the court is still entitled to hang miscreants.) He did say that people were important as well as ‘vert and venison’, but the main issues, he said, were essentially technical: ‘Here I feel I have something to offer.’