Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  However, no one seems to have told the latest incomers about shabby chic. ‘When I first moved to Cornwall,’ said the ex-Fowey resident Tim Heald, ‘a smart car was a rustbucket and a smart suit was your grandfather’s. Now a smart car is a four-wheel drive and it’s all bling.’

  Fowey felt rather Italianate to me, with its narrow streets, its precipitous slopes, its umbrella-shaped pines and the sense that everything was just a little bit mad. If God did intend people to live here, He never imagined they would bring their Range Rovers. For those who don’t wish to move the Chelsea tractor (who knows when another parking space might appear?), there is a twenty-six-mile walk north from the Fowey estuary to the Camel estuary, the Saints’ Way, believed to be the route taken by many of Cornwall’s sainted pilgrims as they shook off the sea from their ivy leaves and barrels and set about converting the benighted populace. It now leads to Padstow, the holy shrine erected by and for the soon-to-be canonised Rick Stein.

  I have never come across a place as obsessed with television as Cornwall, not so much with watching it as appearing on it. It has more media tarts than Islington. ‘We were on Time Team,’ someone remarked casually. ‘See Us on Countryfile’ said a sign in Newlyn. ‘Jamie’s Top Ten Fish Available Here!’ said another. Everywhere it was Rick Stein this, Caroline Quentin that, Jamie Oliver the other. ‘Didn’t you see us?’ they will ask, bewildered that anyone could be so remiss.

  And Padstow is the ultimate monument to the peculiar obsession with celebrity chefs, men with a flair for cooking and an even greater flair for self-promotion. They all have their shtick: there’s a Cockney one and a winsome one and a rude one and a sweary one, and nobody remembers anything about the food. As a fashionable venue, north Cornwall generally has over the past two decades caught up and perhaps surpassed the climatically advantaged south, partly because of surfing, partly because of golf, but most obviously because of televised eating.

  In comparison to Stein’s presence in Padstow, St Bernadette in Lourdes is a shadowy and modest figure. ‘We call this place Padstein now,’ whispered the first local I met. His tone seemed to convey a mix of fear, bravado, affection (Stein was well known locally before he got famous), gratitude and generalised alienation, of the sort expressed by the Athenian who hated Aristides the Just because he was sick of hearing him called ‘the Just’.

  By early 2012 Stein had four restaurants in Padstow plus a deli, a patisserie, a cookery school and forty guest bedrooms spread over six different locations. Of course he has brought heaps of money into the town, and most of the population, especially the long-standing property owners, have hitched a ride on the bandwagon. In the early post-war years some of the fishermen’s cottages would have been worth less than a current serving of Rick’s fruits de mer and Bollinger special cuvée.

  But in Padstow, with Tesco commanding the high ground and Stein the waterside, there is not much room for anyone else except for Boots, the banks, a few non-Stein restaurants mopping up the overflow, and the usual shops selling overpriced instant clutter. As Cassius said of Caesar, and the Padstein-whisperer might have done: ‘we petty men walk under his huge legs’.

  Travelling between the two resorts by car, you would probably go through the main-road village of Bugle. I had been there once before, on a whimsical journalistic mission in 1997: this intriguing-sounding place had been named and shamed, along with various dingy inner-city spots, as possessing one of the ten worst-kept railway stations in Britain. The station was and is on the branch line to Newquay, and the train approaches it through the delicious woods of the Luxulyan Valley. But in 1997 it was indeed disgusting. Despite a quick clean-up before I could get there, new graffiti had immediately sprouted: ‘Gavin is a babe’ and ‘Rob and Roger are shit’. The main topic of local conversation was a recent street murder.

  Now, with Gavin presumably no longer a babe, the station was looking much sprucer. The village still looked grim, grey and rather sad, the epitome of inland Cornwall’s drive-by country. It is one of those rare places named after its pub, though it does also have a well-regarded silver band (which does not include a bugle).

  Bugle’s existence always depended on the long-declining china clay industry, but it has had some fair years since the opening of the Eden Project – though by now even that was starting to make staff redundant. The village was looking less distressed too, partly because the china clay slagheaps had been cunningly grassed over. And there were new houses, many of them retro-style starter homes with stone facings, aimed at commuting young couples priced out of the coastal fringes. There was also a new block of flats by the station which looked very inner-city indeed. A woman by the post office, who was telling me about the shortage of jobs, mentioned the flats unprompted: she thought they were horrid.

  ‘So who lives in them?’

  ‘People from up-country.’ England beyond the Tamar, she meant. And she obviously did not mean the kind of up-country people who move to the coasts.

  ‘But why would they come here if there aren’t any jobs?’

  ‘They think they’ll find a better life here. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs.’

  Cornwall may be more nation than county, but if so it is certainly two nations rather than one. And only occasionally do the two meet. Drinkers enjoying a smoke and the sunshine outside the Ship in Mousehole might momentarily pause when they see the plaque to Charles Greenhaugh, the landlord who died in the Penlee lifeboat disaster in 1981. Which, apart from anything else, is a reminder of how, in the traditions of both Cornwall and the volunteer lifeboat service, the land and sea are all of a piece.

  Sometimes one gets a reminder that not every visitor comes in a Mercedes or a Range Rover, as at almost-perfect Trevose Head, where a caravan site pops up from nowhere. Sometimes one gets a reminder, far starker than at Bugle, that in a county with no substantial towns, the migrants have to live somewhere. Outside both Wadebridge and St Austell the new houses march over the hillsides as if this were California or the occupied West Bank.

  And perhaps nowhere on the island of Great Britain is there such a jarring disjunction between beauty and beastliness as on the very tip of it. For about two centuries the 105 acres of cliff top constituting the property of Land’s End were owned by the Neave-Hill family. In 1982 Charles Neave-Hill, known as ‘the 14th Master of Land’s End’, sold the estate to a Welsh property tycoon who easily outbid the National Trust. It was then bought and sold three more times in thirteen years before ending up with its present owners, a company now called Heritage Great Britain plc.

  What an awful shame: I thought the National Trust was richer than anyone. This is a place one would call iconic were one the sort of person who used the word iconic. It is part of Great Britain’s heritage, not part of Heritage Great Britain’s heritage. But I had to approach Land’s End through a faux-Doric portico that looked like a scale model of a Las Vegas casino. There was a cinema advertising a ‘4D’ film, The Curse of Skull Rock, a couple of tat shops and a bar-restaurant with a fantastic view but a depressing menu.

  The whole set-up was not even interestingly, Las Vegas-ishly, vulgar: it was just mildly repulsive. I retreated to the First and Last pub in the nearest village, Sennen. However, the pub has always been bought and sold by the estate, so is also owned by Heritage Great Britain – and had stopped serving food at 1.30. One might like to run as far away from Land’s End as possible. Alas, John O’Groats, notoriously dismal, is also owned by Heritage Great Britain. (I commend instead the beer and the crab soup in the Old Success, Sennen Cove, owned by St Austell Brewery.)

  However, Land’s End is not the last of England. Nor does the First and Last entirely live up to its name. The most westerly, and the most southerly, pub in England is the Turk’s Head on the island of St Agnes, most distant of the Isles of Scilly, population 75-ish. A few hours after driving away from Land’s End, seething, I was in the Turk’s Head, having made the short flight to St Mary’s, Scilly’s bustling hub (in comparison), and then take
n John Peacock’s boat.

  At lunchtime, the shipping forecast had been using the phrase Violent Storm Eleven, a step above Severe Gale Nine and Storm Ten, just below Hurricane Twelve. It is a formulation that sounds rather thrilling when the rain is beating against the curtained double glazing and the Rayburn is turned up, rather less so when about to set out into the Atlantic in a small boat.

  As it turned out, the filthiest weather was to the north and the journey was merely what the islanders cheerfully called ‘a bit bouncy’. Still, I was relieved and pleased to be safe in the Turk’s Head, a pub that normally hunkers down for the winter, the resident population being so tiny and potential visitors wary of the bounce. But it had opened specially for a quiz night: Nicki and Rob had fresh barrels on the real ale pumps, and a dozen people, about one-sixth of the adult population, took the chance of a get-together. Along with a single stranger.

  It is not that difficult to get here. But Land’s End itself is a good six hours by car or train from London (nearly half that time has to be spent negotiating Cornwall), and not much quicker, when you’ve done all the messing about, even if you fly to Newquay. Then there are the two separate island hops. St Agnes is an outpost of an outpost of an outpost.

  Beyond here there are just a few malevolently jagged bits poking out of the sea, lying in wait for mariners who stray too close. To help them steer clear is the Bishop Rock lighthouse, which, in the days of the transatlantic liners, was the first hint of home, a landmark as resonant as the White Cliffs. The next parish, heading due west, is, by my reckoning, Pouch Cove, Newfoundland. I can’t vouch for its ale.

  The stranger took some weighing up. Then I was invited to join one of the quiz teams. And, since I knew that George IV came before William IV, that Nixon was elected US president in 1968 and that it was Lesley Gore who had a hit in 1963 with ‘It’s My Party’, all of which helped our team to victory … why, by closing time, I was practically an islander.

  It was a tempting thought. Just before dusk, an all-but-full moon, looking tropically huge, had risen next to the lighthouse. Later it shimmered on the sandbar, as it does in the Caribbean. The wind was still stiff but the treetops it tousled were palm trees, and when it whistled through the protective hedges, it made a noise like birdsong. Otherwise, there was no light, and no sound.

  By morning the gale had blown itself out and the sun was beating down. I walked around St Agnes, which is easy enough, and across the sandbar to the deserted neighbouring islet of Gugh (rhymes with Hugh). The bumblebees were in business; asters were out in the gardens and violets by the roadside: more like May than early March. Winter is always a rumour here. When even the tiny Land’s End airfield was snowbound in December 2010, St Agnes had a few flakes and the gentlest touch of frost. This time the weather had actually been too mild for Fran Hicks, the flower grower: the early blooms had raced away far too fast for their own good, or his. The dairy farmer Tim Hicks, so his wife Sue confided, has sensitive skin: ‘Sometimes, if he forgets his suncream in February, he gets burned.’

  The name Hicks has been here for four centuries, as has Legg. I walked away from the pub with Harry Legg, Kit the fisherman’s boy, just back from university. All over rural Britain bright young kids leave home because they sense no choice: there is nothing there for them. On St Agnes, to an extraordinary extent, they return. Harry has joined his dad on the boat; he also fixes people’s computers. He was about to move into the house built by his great-great-great-great-grandfather. This is not unusual. ‘There are about a dozen graduates on the island, most of them islanders,’ said Fran Hicks, who is one of them. ‘They want to be here. I can only think it comes from a very deep sense of belonging.’

  The notion of moving to Cornwall is one aspect of the English dream, one that comes true too often for Cornwall’s liking. And the idea of moving to St Agnes would be the ultimate expression of that: a remote, unpolluted island with only a sniff of winter, but also a post office-shop, real ale in the pub, a cricket pitch and the Daily Telegraph arriving (Violent Storm Elevens permitting) on the morning boat.

  The islanders, however, do not consider this to be Cornwall. They are, they insist, not Cornish but Scillonian. No one could satisfactorily explain the difference. But it is true that, under current local government arrangements, the 2,000 people of Scilly have their own toytown unitary council, so tiny it makes Rutland seem like Shanghai and mocks all the theories of size that Whitehall normally uses to decide who should run what. It is also true that St Agnes doesn’t feel very Celtic: there are no Tregunnas, Penberthys or Polzeaths in the churchyard along with all the Hickses and Leggs. The Scilly historian R. L. Bowley said that the Celtic heritage faded quickly because the islands had to be garrisoned and so fresh settlers kept arriving.

  However, according to Philip Payton, the field names across the Scillies tend to be Cornish, which would pre-date the gravestones. And the island’s customs are deeply Cornish. The characteristic sport, as it is all along the Cornish coast, is gig racing. This involves replicas (or, on St Agnes, an original) of the small boats that used to race out to passing vessels to drop on a pilot who could guide them to London or Bristol. This is historic business turned into tradition and fun. As with third-world taxi drivers hustling for passing tourists, winning that race could make the difference between prosperity and starvation.

  And there is a hidden power: the Duke of Cornwall, aka the Prince of Wales. Across rural Cornwall, the Duchy, as the dominant landowner, has fingers in all sorts of pies, so much so that in late 2011 an information tribunal ruled that it was a public authority not a private estate, and thus subject to public scrutiny and potential judicial review. The Scilly Isles are all owned, lock, stock and almost everything but the Turk’s Head barrels, by the Duke of Cornwall.

  Prince Charles came to St Agnes a while back to inspect this distant colony. ‘Camilla was a bit nervous about the helicopter ride,’ recalled Sue Hicks. ‘But she liked the egg sandwiches.’ Fran Hicks believes the Duchy has been the island’s salvation, preventing the establishment of a normal property market and a takeover by outsiders and holiday-home owners.

  Chris Simmonds, the schoolteacher’s husband, an incomer, a food scientist and one of my team-mates in the quiz, explained to me that this was an island of multitaskers long before the word was invented. ‘You are welcomed here for what you can contribute. The island’s not big enough to have an electrician or a plumber or a doctor. There wouldn’t be enough work. So everybody does several things. You don’t want to be the person who’s receiving the whole time.’ He is a co-responder, ready to be bleeped for a medical emergency. I sense that knowing about George IV, Nixon and Lesley Gore might not, day in, day out, quite cut it.

  But I have this in common with the Hicks and Legg boys: I ache to go back. Only one thing worries me about St Agnes. On my walk, I picked up a plastic bottle by the shore, thinking of putting it in the recycling; I’m obsessive that way. Then I saw another. And another, and another, and … there were thousands of them: more Coca-Cola than the islanders could have ever drunk; jetsam blown here by wind and tide. And if this is what has happened to one clump of rocks on one lovely, little island, what the hell is going on out on the ocean?

  The spring spreads slowly north-eastwards from St Agnes. In Scilly, dairy cattle can normally be left outside all winter, which might only be advisable on the mainland on a few south-facing slopes near Land’s End. In Britain the definitive sign of spring is always the daffodil. And west Cornwall and Scilly grow a fifth of the world’s supply.

  The daff was the making of Scilly. When the first Isles of Scilly daffodil show was held in 1886, the Gardeners’ Chronicle predicted: ‘It speaks of new prosperity for the Islanders, of the banishment of famine, of the establishment of industry and of the promotion of happiness.’

  For a time St Agnes depended on daffodils. But the small fields, extra freight costs and uncertain sea conditions cancelled out its climatic advantages. Fran Hicks now concentrates on grow
ing ultra-tender specialist varieties, the tazettas; others have just given up, the final straw being the sense that mainland winters were getting more Scillonian. So the business has shifted. Daffodil growers are not global-warming sceptics. ‘When we were children we used to go for a Christmas Day walk to try and find the first daffodil,’ said James Hosking of Fettongollan Farm near Truro. ‘Now it would be much earlier. Admittedly we’ve got some early varieties. But mostly it’s climate.’ For the same reason, Cornish growers have been threatened by rivals from Lincolnshire, although a couple of retro-style freezes have put a check on that.

  Hosking is a fourth-generation daffodil grower, by no means the biggest: but he has seventy different varieties in his catalogue, from Abba and Actaea to White Lion and Winifred van Graven; and about fifteen million blooms a year, spread over 170 acres, mostly rented, because this crop needs constant rotation. It has another problem: mechanised picking is impossible – the job still requires endless bend-and-stretch. Osteopathy may be considered a dependent industry.

  In the old days, the pickers were fishermen kept shore-bound by the weather, china clay workers between shifts, and housewives looking for holiday money. But fishing and china clay dwindled, and the womenfolk preferred warmer, more reliable jobs in supermarkets. Hosking tried the local unemployed, but daffodil growers are very sceptical about the work ethic of young Cornish males. So the East Europeans took over.

  He was happy to let me talk to his pickers and I tracked them to a field at Polwhele. They were reticent, partly because their English is fragile, partly out of an understandable wariness, and partly because they are on piecework and interruptions are not welcome. The theory of daffodil picking has changed in that the market insists now that they must be picked completely unopened for long life, even though that weakens the intensity of the colour. So if you see a lovely blooming field of Cornish daffodils, it probably means something has gone wrong. Modern tomatoes and apples are picked primarily for looks; daffodils are not. Funny old world.