We could have been anywhere in Pakistan, except for this. There I would have been a most welcome customer, a prize catch. Here I was a mere curiosity. The bazaar was crowded, on the build-up to the festival of Eid; indeed, it was planning to stay open next day until midnight. But there was no other white face in sight, except for an old woman who stared absolutely daggers through the window into what used to be Poundstretcher. The whites in Nelson all looked pained. That may have been caused by back spasms: the sleeping policemen here indulge in sleeping-police brutality, being built more like hills than humps. But I don’t think that was the reason.
‘Where do the saris come from?’ I asked one of the traders.
‘All imported. Mostly Pakistan. Karachi, Faisalabad, all over. Look,’ he said, fingering an orange number. ‘Only £30. This country too expensive.’
So Nelson has come full circle. Labour was imported to Lancashire from Pakistan to work in the cotton mills in a last-ditch attempt to compete with the subcontinent. Now the sons of those original migrants import their cottons from Pakistan anyway.
But I did know one candidate for Coronation Street. It was nearly fifty miles from Salford. I had discovered it three years earlier when I briefly became public enemy no. 1 in Barrow-in-Furness.
North-West Evening Mail, 31 October 2009. ‘NOWHERESVILLE,’ roared the front-page splash. ‘Anger as national paper reporter slams Barrow’.
It was all over pages two and three as well: ‘FURY AT SLUR ON BARROW’. Next to a large picture of a handsome and dashing young journalist, nearby headlines read: ‘Man awaits sex trial’ and ‘Search continues’, which were not actually related but looked as though they might be. ‘I found some of his comments quite bizarre,’ said the Conservative council leader, Jack Richardson. ‘It may have been a clever piece of writing,’ commented the former Labour leader, Terry Waiting, ‘but then so was Noddy’.
The leader columns and letters continued all through the following week, by which time some people had actually taken the trouble to read the original article, a profile of Barrow for the Financial Times magazine, and began to defend me. It’s true I called it Nowheresville, quoted an anonymous source who described it as the ‘arse-end of the Lake District’ and poked fun at the rush hour – which is not even a rush minute, more like Sunday morning anywhere else.
I also wrote this:
Just five minutes’ walk from the town centre is Hindpool, full of terraced houses – now with satellite dishes and double glazing and new front doors, but essentially little changed … Hartington Street has little front gardens, and every one I saw was lovingly tended. The paper girl was walking down nearby Anson Street (the North-West Evening Mail still commands loyalty, a sure sign of a stable community), and everyone she passed said hello. The ice cream van trilled by, drawing attention from eight-year-old boys wandering around with plastic machine guns (a sign of innocence, not guilt). It felt like a fifty-year-old episode of Coronation Street. Maureen Whidborne, who runs the Neighbourhood Watch, admits she is not overworked: ‘We hardly get any trouble, and we all know our neighbours. This is a lovely area.’
Barrow is the main town of what used to be known as Lancashire-across-the-sands, the detached portion that could only be reached from the rest of the county by a convoluted car journey via the corner of Westmorland; a slow train ride from Carnforth over the Kent Estuary and Cartmel Sands; or the perilous walk across Morecambe Bay, which should never be remotely attempted without the presence of the Queen’s Guide, whether or not Her Majesty is accompanying you. Lancashire-across-the-sands was duly rationalised out of existence as an affront to straight lines and logic in 1974, to more than normal local annoyance, and the whole area dumped into Cumbria.
But I never saw anywhere that fitted that idealised portrait of old Lancashire more than Anson Street. When I went back to Barrow, I did not attempt to make my peace with the town hall. I did go and knock gently on Maureen Whidborne’s front door.
She was never an Ena Sharples-type battleaxe but a woman of considerable energy who ensured that Anson Street got a kids’ playground and anything else it needed: she was the fixed point on which the community turned. No more. Two months after my first visit, she had a stroke; then they diagnosed cancer. ‘They gave her three weeks, and then three months. But she’s still here,’ said her husband, Bill. He was now nursing her fulltime. There was no street party for the Diamond Jubilee in 2012 because Maureen was no longer able to organise it.
She was still sitting outside the front door on fine afternoons, with the kids coming by and saying hello. But she was no longer able to say much back. Bill thought of moving to a smaller house. ‘But you don’t know what your neighbours will be like,’ he said.
Might they consider moving nearer their son? He’s in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Bill shuddered a bit: ‘Nobody cares who you are down there. They walk straight past you.’
September/October 2012
21. The commuter homeward plods his weary way
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
The best-known suburb of Slough has only one industry, one in keeping with Britain’s new emphasis on manufacturing for niche markets rather than the masses. It turns out precision-engineered human beings (male version only): a five-year process conducted in a factory that has been in continuous production since 1440.
The enduring success of Eton College rests on a handful of principles that, like so much in English, and particularly Etonian, life, are instinctively understood even if they have never been formally codified. The school is lavishly funded; it guards its reputation; and it aspires to excellence by being infinitely adaptable, changing slowly but then wholeheartedly, adopting new concepts (IT, male emotions) and discarding the old (flogging, fagging).
And it nurtures this adaptability under a thick mulch of tradition, which the boys find both intimidating and relishable, and outsiders both ridiculous and fascinating. Many of the country’s most successful institutions share this knack, but even the monarchy finds it hard to out-detail Eton: a sign in the window of New and Lingwood, one of several competing school outfitters in the High Street, says there are 110 different designs for official Eton socks.
It was St Andrew’s Day – actually it was thirteen days before anyone else’s St Andrew’s Day, but if Eton says it’s St Andrew’s Day, then so be it. And the crowds were gathering for perhaps the most impenetrable of all Etonian traditions: the Wall Game. The St Andrew’s match takes place, and has done since the 1840s, between the King’s Scholars, spiritual descendants of the original scholarship boys for whom the school was founded, and the Oppidans, which is everyone else. And no sporting event in the world offers a more compelling spectacle in the minutes before it starts.
The Collegers enter the field, arms interlinked, and march slowly forward like policemen scouring a ploughed field for a murder weapon. The Oppidans (literally, the townsmen, as any Etonian Latin scholar ought to know) climb over the wall from the street like intruders and leap down on to the field like SAS men. Both teams, their faces painted, form huddles to perform variants on the Maori haka, and everyone is duly enchanted. Even the referee, Angus Graham-Campbell, was delightfully dressed: in white tie, tails, green tartan trousers, a waistcoat in another green tartan, topped off with a red tartan handkerchief.
Unfortunately, the Wall Game then starts. The Economist once called this ‘the world’s dullest game’. This may be an understatement. For the next hour, most of the players sit on top of each other in an eternal scrum at the base of the wall, notionally trying to release the invisible ball into open space.
The players are not allowed to use their hands, or the customary violence that resolves a rugby scrum. And not much can happen even if they do because the pitch is only about six yards wide, so the oval ball soon goes out of play and the whole process resumes a little further along.
Not surprisingly, goals are rare. In fact, there has not been one in the St Andrew’s match since 1909. They occasionally happen in the mino
r fixtures involving scratch teams and so on, but two world wars have been fought and dozens of Etonian Cabinet ministers have come and gone since anyone scored in this contest. A century and a bit is merely a blink of an eye in the history of Eton, but an hour of watching this stuff is a mighty long time, I can tell you.
The first ‘How long does this go on?’ that I overheard came after four minutes, though we already seemed to have been watching for ever. The game is sometimes decided by a lesser sort of goal, a shy, but by half-time there had not even been a chance of a chance of a chance and even Graham-Campbell admitted this was a particularly dreary fixture.
Despite the absence of any activity, it looked like a total mismatch. The King’s Scholars represent just one of Eton’s twenty-five houses: they have seventy potential players against the Oppidans’ 1,200-plus. They are also, ex officio, swots and, when they emerged from the huddles, one could see they were about half the size of the opposition.
The Oppidan supporters perched on the wall, where you might, if you happened to be precisely above the melee, actually see the ball. They were dismissive and footballish in their chanting: (to ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’) ‘Have you ever seen a KS with a bird?’ The KS had black-gowned choristers, who were at once more erudite and plaintive, adapting that most Etonian of hymns, ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’: ‘We may not be the strongest, we may not be the best
The game dragged on. The parents and siblings (the sisters were first to crack) and Old Etonians had drifted away, as did the Oppidan supporters on the wall. The Scholars’ choir remained, and alongside the wall their players held firm. And with five minutes to go, SOMETHING ALMOST HAPPENED. The KS players broke upfield and launched an attack. The few remaining spectators grew animated, uncertain whether anything had actually occurred. It hadn’t, and eventually the clock struck 12 and the contest was over: 0–0, as usual. Graham-Campbell thought the Scholars had won a moral victory, though.
I have long suspected that Eton doesn’t really have lessons in the conventional sense; and that the college simply inculcates into the boys, over and over again, the mysterious Etonian art of exuding charm and generosity and still getting your own way.
I think now that even the seemingly pointless exercise of the Wall Game teaches something almost as important. The Scholars team, with its tiny pool of players, practises more and cares more about the result: it is important in counteracting their image as spotty and swotty. With the normal brutal methods of winning the ball banned, their persistence and determination were able to nullify what seemed like overwhelming opposition. What a wonderful lesson for life. Just because something looks stupid, it doesn’t mean it is stupid.
I discovered that was even true of Angus Graham-Campbell’s rig-out, when I plucked up the courage to ask. He pointed to his tartan trousers: ‘Graham,’ he said. Then the tartan waistcoat: ‘Campbell.’ And finally the handkerchief: ‘Maclean. My mother was a Maclean.’
Buckinghamshire is the right place for Eton, because this is the county of educational extremism. Milton Keynes has the Open University, the one undeniable achievement of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Yet just up the road is its polar opposite: the University of Buckingham, the independent institution nurtured by Margaret Thatcher, and a bolthole for right-wing academics. I looked at the list of Buckingham’s prominent alumni on Wikipedia. I hadn’t heard of a single one.
More significant for most of the county’s population is that Buckinghamshire has been the last redoubt of wholly selective education. In the early 1970s, Thatcher, as education secretary, supposedly closed down more grammar schools than anyone else. That process continued apace after the Tories lost power in 1974, but Buckinghamshire kept fighting in the courts to preserve its mix of grammar schools, for those who passed the 11-plus, and secondary moderns, for those who failed.
By the time Mrs T returned to government in her own right five years later, she had changed her tune. It was politically and practically impossible to revive the deceased grammars, but she called a truce: the 160-odd grammars that had survived in pockets round the country could remain, and the Buckinghamshire system was allowed to remain intact, a nostalgic relic. (It is still there, though not in Milton Keynes.)
In 2009 I visited two schools next to each other: Aylesbury Grammar for boys and the Grange Upper School. The first had blazers, crests, ties, manners, prefects, a cricket square, 400 years’ continuous history, a fast track to Oxbridge and what the head called ‘expectations’, not rules; the other had bugger all. The Grange’s head had never even been round the grammar school. The distinction was maintained by Buckinghamshire’s own 11-plus, a test of verbal reasoning, evidently designed to find future Scrabble and crossword champions. The words ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ were banned by the county council in an uncharacteristic fit of political correctness, but effectively most were being passed or failed for life.
The first effect of this has been to make Buckinghamshire property even more of a magnet: the chance of a quasi-public school education at zero cost. What pushy parent could resist? The second effect has been to make those parents even more obsessed about their children’s schooling than the rest of southern England’s bourgeoisie. Whole dinner parties are given over to discussing what coaching schemes are available to get through the exam, and how to game the appeals system if it goes wrong (though I was also told that parents liked to keep good wheezes secret for fear of alerting the competition). Perhaps one day a sociologist can assess the third effect: the long-term consequences of near-total segregation from the eve of puberty onwards.
As if Buckinghamshire was not divided enough already. It was never a coherent county, being long and thin: sixty-six miles from Eton to the furthest northern border. Chesham and Amersham are on the Metropolitan Line; Stony Stratford is almost in Northamptonshire. Power and population have been shifting south since Tudor times: Buckingham lost the assizes to Aylesbury in Henry VIII’s reign; 200 years later Aylesbury took over as the county town.
Ignored by the main roads and railways, Buckingham remains agreeably, indeed astonishingly, dozy, hard to relate to the county which takes its name. Although the university campus is within walking distance of the town centre, there is nowhere in England that feels quite so unstudenty. There are stories that the inmates get bused to Milton Keynes for a night out. Most are said to be foreign and obscenely rich. I’m not convinced they actually exist.
This was ever a county of class distinction and great country houses, many of them built by the Rothschilds, and a good few famous for their goings-on. There is West Wycombe Park, once home of Sir Francis Dashwood, leading light of the Hellfire Club; there is Mentmore Towers, home of the prime minister Lord Rosebery and later the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who briefly turned it into another outré Buckinghamshire educational establishment, the Maharishi University of Natural Law; there is Cliveden, where before the war the Astors entertained prominent Nazis, and after it Christine Keeler entertained John Profumo; and then of course Chequers, country home of British prime ministers since 1921 and where, during the reign of Mrs Thatcher (1979–90), the PM bused in strippergram hunks and women police constables from Princes Risborough to entertain voyeuristic visiting heads of government with acts of sexual depravity (note to editor:please check this one).
And yet here, amid all this splendour and fun, are the two most despised towns in the country …
There is only one place to go in central Milton Keynes: the centre:mk, the giant shopping plaza, which in 2010 was Grade II listed as ‘of national interest’ architecturally, to the delight of the concrete-loving Twentieth Century Society and the fury of the owners, who saw themselves being sodded about by planners every time they wanted to change a window frame. They were lucky: it was nearly listed as Grade II*, which would have put it on a par with a lower-division cathedral.
The centre seems to be pretty much the only place to shop, other than outlying supermarkets, in a borough of 250,000 people. But it has its pl
uses: the first thing I saw – entering just before 6 on a wintry evening – was a branch of Patisserie Valerie with one of their tartes aux framboises giving me a come-on from the window. I resisted and walked around, eventually coming out into a frigid uncovered patch, to be greeted by Milton Keynes’s most famous inhabitants, the original concrete cows, lurking grasslessly under what might have been a concrete oak tree.
By now I felt chilly and a bit disorientated: I was fixating on the tarte aux framboises but I couldn’t find the way back, and the signs were confusing. The place was so huge, and I felt old, alien even. By the time I sorted myself out, though all the surrounding shops were in full pre-Christmas cry, the patisserie had pulled down the shutters.
There is something about Milton Keynes that makes it seem like the county town of Stepfordshire. The inhabitants radiate positivity: very defensive, a bit frightening. Uprooted from their families, they had to help each other from the start, and there is thus an exceptional network of local groups, which seem to be more to do with shared problems than shared interests. They know outsiders even hate their football team, moved here from Wimbledon in dubious circumstances. They get revenge by being extra nice and taking refuge in the thickets of their local codes: the H roads and the V roads and the redways and the colour-coded parking zones, all with complex regulations.
Twenty-two million trees were plonked down with the 125 roundabouts. (Or was it the other way round? One gets muddled.) And as the trees mature, there is a growing perception that Milton Keynes is maturing too: increasingly there are three-generational families, because grandparents are now moving here on retirement to be near their offspring.
But it looks to me like twenty-two million houses, and as I drove past them I began to hum Pete Seeger:
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