Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  The method has not changed a bit, though. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 … that’s a bunch … even them up … cut off the bottoms … rubber band out of pocket … tie them together … throw down for collection. That’s 7p …

  1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, bunch, even, cut, band, tie, throw. Another 7p …

  1-2-3-4 …

  Eighty bunches a box, and the best pickers can do twenty boxes a day, which means £112. Two dozen is not unheard of. Less Stakhanovite workers might only manage twelve or thirteen boxes. Fall much below that and the piecework rate dips below the minimum wage; Fentongollan has to make up the difference, which is not a tenable situation for the employer, so non-improvers have to be fired. My back hurt just watching, and I thought that Cornwall could add to its list of saints Andreas Pavel of São Paulo, inventor of the personal stereo.

  However, the workers I met were not unhappy.

  ‘Do you like the work?’ I asked Vesi from Bulgaria.

  ‘I like the country,’ she said carefully. ‘I like the farm. I like the people on the farm. And I like to earn the money.’

  ‘It’s hard but it’s usual, I think,’ said Lena from Lithuania. ‘For Lithuania, it’s much money. As a teacher you earn less. This way I can buy a house.’

  Back home Vesi was a kitchen designer and Lena worked for a phone company. Like most of the workers, they are Fentongollan regulars. The economics are harsh, but evidently realistic. One day East European property prices will rise and daffodil picking will not be a route to home ownership.

  I think then Hosking will have to make daff picking a sport. It could compete with gig racing and the Cornish form of wrestling as a local attraction. Instead of paying everyone, there could be winner-take-all prizes for the men who can bust the twenty-five-box barrier. That would get the lads up in the morning.

  March 2012

  St Piran’s Day 2014 was more Cornish than ever: the county was without a rail link to most of England after the sea had washed away the main line in Devon. St Agnes was also battered by the stormy winter: much of the footpath on the south-west side was washed away; one lump of stone dumped over the quay weighed about five tons. Otherwise, Chris Simmonds told me, the island was flourishing: enrolment in the primary school, which had fallen as low as two, was into double figures (just). Despite the gales, it had not been such a bad winter for plastic detritus: Simmonds explained that the debris on the rocks arrived not on the prevailing winds but when it blew northerly or easterly. ‘We get an awful lot of suntan lotion, not something used by mariners on the big tankers. It comes from the beaches of northern Europe.’

  In April 2014 the Cornish were given minority status under Council of Europe rules. This offers the same rights as the Welsh, Scottish and Irish to be protected against discrimination and have their views taken into account by government. It does not involve any extra money, though.

  12. Covered in blotches

  WARWICKSHIRE

  Istood on the bank with my daughter, and after a while the waterbus came along. It was small and pink and empty and it felt a bit daft when Rory the helmsman recited the safety information, as he must do a hundred times a day, every time anyone comes aboard. ‘If anyone should fall in, we advise all passengers not to panic,’ he said. ‘Please don’t swallow or consume the water, it’s actually quite dirty.’ Rory didn’t have much of a Brummie accent, but he said it in the downbeat, matter-of-fact tone that meant we could hardly be anywhere else.

  And so we set off from the picturesquely named Gas Street Basin past Old Turn Junction, round the Oozells Street Loop, then via Telford’s new route and the narrows into the Worcester and Birmingham Canal and back again to Gas Street.

  I have taken a waterbus across Sydney Harbour, the Star Ferry in Hong Kong, the ferries across the Bosphorus, the Circle Line in New York. The astonishing thing about this one was the quiet. Apart from the chugging of the engine, a recorded, half-audible commentary and Rory’s dire warnings when anyone boarded, there was hardly a sound. Momentarily, I heard a dust cart clearing some bottles; the air conditioning at the Blue Mango Indian Brasserie may have been a bit noisy. Otherwise, barely a squawk. By the water’s edge a goose was sitting on a clutch of eggs. She looked totally secure.

  Birmingham has been the crossroads of England since modern travel began. Now there is Spaghetti Junction, a couple of miles up the road; before that it was New Street Station, even closer; before that it was arguably Oozells. We could see the Convention Centre, the Hyatt and the Crowne Plaza. And Birmingham’s much-admired latest regeneration has turned the derelict warehouses into apartment blocks and the rusting old narrow boats into party vessels. Yet all was peaceful.

  We walked along the towpath in the sunshine, had tea in the pretty Canalside Café and a chat with a couple from Shropshire who had pottered down from Norbury Junction in a sixty-six-footer called Python. There is no mode of transport more conducive to conversation than the narrowboat: you can walk your dog along the towpath faster than it can chug. It was lovely here, we agreed. ‘Bit dodgy further down. You wouldn’t want to moor there,’ they said. ‘We came under Spaghetti Junction. That was weird. Lager cans everywhere. Covered in graffiti.’

  Oh, Birmingham! Birmingham! What is it about Birmingham?

  Brummagem: ‘Counterfeit, sham, cheap and showy (1637)’ – OED

  ‘Flash, pinchbeck, brummagem, tinsel, shoddy’ – Roget

  ‘One has not great hopes of Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound’ – Jane Austen

  ‘I feel as if my throat wanted sweeping like an English chimney’ – Robert Southey

  ‘The frontier station of the Land of Mordor’ – E. R. Dodds

  ‘A disgusting town’ – Evelyn Waugh

  My own favourite quote is from Lady Trevor-Roper, the very grand country-house-going wife of the historian Hugh. Told that some friends had gone to Birmingham for the weekend, she enquired: ‘Oh, whose place is that?’

  The point is that it was nobody’s place. Birmingham grew primarily because it didn’t mind who turned up from the seventeenth century onwards: ‘It awarded almost perfect freedom to all who chose to come,’ according to one Victorian account. ‘Dissenters and Quakers and heretics of all sorts were welcomed and undisturbed … no trade unions, no trade guilds, no companies existed, and every man was free to come and go.’

  The most instructive thing to do in Birmingham after the canal trip is to head across town to Hurst Street, where the National Trust has, almost miraculously, preserved what are said to be the last back-to-backs in Britain. These are real back-to-backs, not the normal Victorian terraces joined on two sides with a yard, a privy and alleyway separating them from the row behind. These houses are joined on three sides, so that those at the rear are accessible only through an alleyway leading into a yard with wash-houses and thunderboxes shared by a dozen or more families, creating the rough-and-ready communalism (and no doubt the stench) of a Chinese hutong.

  Three of the homes have been recreated in the way they might have looked for three generations who lived and plied their trades there: a Jewish clock-hands maker of the eighteenth century; a man who made glass eyes for stuffed animals (and maybe live humans) in the nineteenth century; and a twentieth-century locksmith. Just three of Birmingham’s thousand trades.

  The English ought to marvel at this city. If the North was the engine room of the Industrial Revolution, Birmingham was its workshop. But they don’t marvel, they recoil, as Waugh did. All that freedom, all that coming and going, meant it was a city that was constantly reinventing and rebuilding itself. Unfortunately, the post-war reconstruction of the centre – car-oriented, insensitive, tasteless – entrenched its image for a new generation. What’s it they say? More canals than Venice, more trees than Paris, more hills than Rome, more parks than anywhere. But other cities somehow arrange it all better.

  It’s partly because the football teams, the modern indicator of civic pride, have been underachievers for decades. It’s partly t
he accent, always bottom of the charts in popularity polls, which is why call centres are sited elsewhere. It’s partly what they say in that accent. Miserablism is the shared Brummie religion, and expressed in such deadpan tones that one never quite knows to what extent the grumbling is self-conscious and self-deprecating.

  I know nowhere else in the world so morbidly obsessed with its health. This may date back to the hutongs. And it seems to infest the rest of Warwickshire too. I once overheard a woman outside Marks & Spencer, Nuneaton, say to her companion: ‘Our Elsie’s legs are covered in blotches.’ She sounded so proud.

  However, there is not much else to connect Birmingham to the rest of Warwickshire. Carl Chinn, university professor and professional-Brummie personality (born 1956), insisted to me: ‘Growing up, we were very proud of being in Warwickshire. Very proud of the cricket team. Very proud of being Shakespeare’s county.’ But Wasim Khan (born 1971), who went on to play cricket for Warwickshire, had never heard of it as a teenager: ‘Birmingham City we understood – after all, we lived in Birmingham, didn’t we? Supported the Blues … Copied songs we’d heard taking the piss out of Villa. Yeah, we knew about Birmingham OK. But where was this Warwickshire? Well, who cared?’

  Warwickshire is said to date back to the early eleventh century, but in 1974 Birmingham, Coventry and everything in between – comprising three-quarters of the population – was taken out to be called West Midlands. Has anyone, ever, cared about ‘West Midlands’? ‘Come on, West Midlands!’ Do me a favour. It is, I think, one factor in Birmingham’s rootlessness and miserablism. Far from the only one. But one. Official modern Warwickshire is just a rural rump, very Tory, which overnight was reduced from being the fourth most populous county to the twenty-ninth.

  Birmingham’s exponential growth meant that an unusual degree of minor tinkering with the county boundaries took place in the century before 1974. And it seems fair to say that expulsion from Warwickshire caused less distress in Birmingham than in traditionalist enclaves like Sutton Coldfield or Solihull, or indeed its rival, Coventry. But Birmingham and Coventry do have one big thing in common: both were wrecked more wholeheartedly by their planners than the Germans ever managed. And in Coventry that is saying something.

  On the night of 14 November 1940, Coventry’s old city centre was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in the most infamous of all Nazi raids. Hundreds died, more than a thousand were hurt. Most visibly, the cathedral – the medieval church of St Michael, promoted in 1918 after Coventry became a city – was ravaged by incendiary bombs. The decisive blow was that iron girders, put in to strengthen the roof, buckled in the heat and thus destroyed the masonry which otherwise might have survived.

  The fourteenth-century tower and much of the walls did come through unscathed. And the first and best decision was to retain them as a symbol of both remembrance and reconciliation. The ruin feels almost like a walled garden: very strange, very moving. The new cathedral was much admired at the time, though that time was 1961, an era when architects were full of crap. Sir Basil Spence was constrained from over-exuberance by the proximity of the old building. His creation’s great virtue is its humility. But it does feel a bit like an air terminal. And Sutherland’s Christ does look as though he is dressed as grandma. Against that, the flock-of-birds motif above the choir stalls is compelling, and the morning light through John Piper’s stained glass unforgettable.

  You can also climb the steep steps to the top of the old tower and get rewarded by what might be a fine view. Except that modern Coventry is in the way. To the north: the city centre and ring road (ghastly); to the east: Coventry University (repulsive); to the west IKEA, a rectangle in deep blue (revolting); to the south: a general mishmash. The only things that might be worth seeing are too close.

  The pedestrian precinct that replaced Coventry’s old centre was also much praised at the time, even by such a robust judge as Ian Nairn, who called it ‘probably the best thing of its kind in Europe’. But it is cold and sterile. One local explained that Leamington grew in importance after Coventry was bombed because the locals had to go there to shop, and got into the habit of it. Many never went back.

  I stopped by the rugged cross at Meriden which is supposed to mark the centre of England. In any other country this might be a major tourist trap. But this is England. The cross is pretty enough, surrounded by tulips and gillyflowers, with a few initials carved almost apologetically in the soft, mossy stone.

  The marker showing the presumed geographic centre of the forty-eight contiguous US states is certainly the biggest thing in Lebanon, Kansas. Meriden’s cross is not even the biggest thing on Meriden village green: it is dwarfed by a memorial to the cyclists who died in both world wars, though quite why cyclists warrant a special war memorial is a little mysterious.

  One problem is that measuring the centre of a country is not an exact application of science. Lebanon’s claim is not undisputed, and Meriden’s position has certainly had pretenders: Lillington, Copston Magna, Minworth. I suppose the name Meriden just sounds like middle England. It certainly looks like a place where everyone reads the Daily Mail. Not a world-class tourist attraction, though. There is only one of those in Warwickshire.

  If you come into Stratford-upon-Avon by the leisure centre, you are greeted by the offices of Shakespeares Solicitors. In town you can stay in Cymbeline House, As You Like It Cottage, Twelfth Night, Hamlet House, First Night guest house or Curtain Call. Fancy staying on? You can run the Shakespeare Marathon and, when that gets too hard, see out your days at the Hathaway Court retirement home until you’re ready for the Shakespeare Hospice. Even the pubs are protected from yobboes by Bard-Watch (you’re barred, geddit?) Unexpectedly, the town centre is not full of obvious possibles like the Othello coffee shop, Midsummer Night’s Dream bedding and the Romeo and Juliet dating agency. But that’s only because rents are so high that the centre is dominated by chain stores.

  Stratford is a one-trick town, but by golly it’s a good trick. It is baffling why people from all over the world with only a passing interest, if that, in Shakespeare’s work should be so obsessed with the small, overcrowded and frankly larcenous town he came from. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which runs the five main sites in the town, has reported booming business, especially from China.

  But what’s so interesting about any writer’s life? Now, taken as a whole, Shakespeare’s body of work may well be superior to my own in every particular, except perhaps consistency of spelling. But I don’t imagine that his life, taken up by the process of writing, can have been any less dull. Duller even, Microsoft Pinball and Free Cell not being available to add spice to the writer’s day on the versions of Windows issued prior to 1616. Life? What life?

  I decided to take the open-top hop-on, hop-off bus tour, although, sadly, intermittent downpours rendered the top deck unusable. I suppose I hoped to tuck myself behind some Americans who would say some quotably amusing things the way people do whenever Alan Bennett gets on a bus: ‘Say, is this where Shakespeare wrote David Copperfield?’ ‘Are we going to Julius Caesar’s birthplace?’ ‘Hey, Elsie, your legs are covered in blotches.’

  In fact, when I got on, there was no one else on the bus at all. I opted to hop off at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. The sun was out now and there was a queue to get in, with, in front of me, a group of teenage American girls who took my line on the absurdity of this exercise. ‘We’ll do what we did at Winston Churchill,’ one whispered conspiratorially. ‘Remember? We went in, we went out, we had ice cream and we went shopping.’ Good plan. I whipped through quickly, but by the time I was out they were long gone.

  They couldn’t even have taken time to indulge in the opportunity for self-expression afforded by the message board near the gift shop which had Post-it notes for comment: the tiny ones with barely room for a haiku, never mind a sonnet. A sample:

  This is so fantastic. I’m so glad I came – Susannah, Calif, USA

  Paul and Louise In Love forever xxx

  Greetings fr
om Boise, ID

  Harry Styles I You

  Claire and Hayley on our secret holiday

  I know what you did last summer – Emilio

  WOW Rating: ***** By Rosie 7 years old

  To Shakespeare: Thank you for the genius in your writing.

  [Shakespeare? Shakespeare? Oh, him!]

  and

  We loved the Easter Egg Hunt!

  The gift shop, alongside Diamond Jubilee tea pots and an Olympic Games apron, had a T-shirt with a quote from The Merry Wives of Windsor: ‘There is money. Spend it; spend it; spend more.’ An assistant was able to confirm my supposition that a book entitled Sex in Elizabethan England was outselling The Complete Works.

  My Brummie sister-in-law, Susan, suggested I should take a bus round Birmingham: the no. 11 outer circular, which has a firm place in the city’s folklore. It was a fine trip for a tourist, she said, something she had always wanted to do but had never quite got round to.

  The bus took some finding: no. 11 on the West Midlands travel website is a Coventry route. This was because there is no N0.11 in Birmingham as such but two different routes – the 11A going anticlockwise and the 11C clockwise. Fatefully, it was the 11A that arrived at Acocks Green first.

  I was greeted at the top of the stairs by half a kebab, lying flat with the onion beginning to suppurate. At the back was a young couple, drinking cans of lager; the man spoke largely in an incoherent jumble but from the tone of his voice he was teaching a baby, which I couldn’t actually see, simple vocabulary: ‘ma’, ‘da’, ‘fucking hell’. Alongside me was a group of young girls, all somewhat obese. ‘Shall we go Froydee?’ ‘No, we can’t go Froydee. Mum’s in court Froydee.’

  Acocks Green became Yardley became Stechford became Erdington. The houses were not at all unpleasant and often quite handsome – mid-Victorian railwaymen’s cottages, late Victorian terraces, Edwardian villas, interwar semis, seasidey bungalows. But as townscape they formed an incoherent jumble, like the bloke at the back’s conversation. There was, as they say of towns in the American west, no there there.