Against that, had they returned to Ruislip in 2012, they would have seen the place festooned with front-garden placards with the less-than-catchy slogan: ‘SAY NO TO ANOTHER FLOODLIT AND FENCED ASTRO-TURF PITCH ON KINGS COLLEGE PLAYING FIELDS’. Which doesn’t make the suburbs of the capitalist West sound very lovable either.
Outside no. 45 the tree-rose that Helen Kroger planted still blooms every summer.
‘Red?’
‘No,’ said John Paulo, ‘pinky-white.’ Ah, she did do her utmost not to give even the smallest clue.
Urban Middlesex has existed for less than 100 years. But already it has proved as dynamically protean as London itself. The Metroland suburbs have been through one existence as the epitome of dreary English respectability. But now many of those in the inner ring and what you might call mid-Middlesex have mutated again, into largely Asian communities. Neasden, besides being a running joke in Private Eye (whose printers were there in the early days), also has a giant, arrogantly painted branch of IKEA (which the company likes to pretend is in Wembley) and the first Hindu temple in Europe.
‘Beyond Neasden,’ Betjeman told his TV audience, ‘there was an unimportant hamlet where for years the Metropolitan didn’t bother to stop … slushy fields and grass farms.’ Then he told the stories of the failed attempt to build a tower that would dwarf Eiffel’s; of the football stadium; and of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. The Indian Pavilion at the exhibition, with its twenty-seven courts – one for every province – was the nearest thing Britain had seen to the Taj Mahal until the Neasden Temple was built. Now Wembley itself is a major Gujarati centre.
Of an evening the new Metropolitan trains, comprising one long single compartment like a giant sausage, are full of exhausted Asian commuters going home to Wembley, Kenton and Harrow. Their Jewish predecessors have pushed north into Hertfordshire. The very week I stole a look at my aunt’s old house came news that the large Kenton Synagogue, where I had my barmitzvah, had just put its rabbi on short time.
But no change can match the one that has overtaken Southall, away to the south-west on Brunel’s line out of Paddington. It was once a nondescript suburb best known for its bus factory and a substantial contingent of Welsh migrants. In 1979 the police bashed and killed a left-wing activist, Blair Peach, during an anti-Nazi demonstration; in 1981 it was the centre of riots between Asians and skinheads which ended with a pub burning down. But these battles became a rout. Southall found peace by becoming overwhelmingly Punjabi – the front gardens of the Metrolandish semis bricked over to provide parking for two, three, four cars – and most especially Sikh.
It is nondescript no more. Its shopping streets are perhaps the least cloned in Britain, even down to the exotic Asian banks, and bookmakers that advertise Indian cricket matches in their window rather than football or racing. Just about all the other shops are Asian, creating an impression of bottom-up enterprise that might be regarded as an object lesson to the cautious and non-entrepreneurial English.
The springtime Vaisakhi parade is Southall’s celebration of its Sikhness. Vaisakhi was the day in 1699 when the Sikhs, having already narrowed down millions of Hindu gods to one, shrugged off the Hindu caste system: their last living guru, Gobind Singh, told them that henceforth ‘the lowest will rank with the highest’. In the villages of the Punjab the occasion is said to be marked by wild dancing. In the suburbs of Middlesex it has taken on local characteristics by becoming a gigantic traffic jam: a stately, rather lugubrious procession. In the vanguard were swordsmen, performing a ritual battle startlingly reminiscent of the Morris Men’s rapper dance.
At its centre was a giant float containing the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, resting on a cushion, covered with a cloth like a shroud, while priests recited verses and wielded the brushes known as chauris, in the manner of punkah wallahs, protecting their scriptures from insects and heat.
Neither was a problem in Southall this April. Nor were Nazis and skinheads. There was a great deal of food: even the Punjab National Bank had a tent frantically trying to keep up with the demand for naan. It was all free too, a fact I was slow to twig until a passing Englishman urged me to tuck in, before adding, ‘It’s cold. But it’s hot.’ The heirs to the police who killed Blair Peach were relaxed, confident in the improbability of trouble. It was, frankly, a bit dull.
But it was at least the re-enactment of an ancient and meaningful tradition. And in Middlesex that is strikingly rare.
The Middlesex Village Book, published in 1989, was one of a series produced round the country by Women’s Institutes at the time. It contains essays of varying quality and some very nice line drawings. It is very difficult for anyone this close to London or any other major city to use the word ‘village’ without sounding pretentious. But this book is unusual for listing communities that would make even a cabbie scratch his head.
Many of the places mentioned are palpably not villages: Feltham, Greenford, Harrow on the Hill, Shepperton, Twickenham … But what about Botany Bay (not the one in Australia)? Charlton (not the one with the football team)? Cowley (not the one in Oxford)? Cranford (not Mrs Gaskell’s)? And on to Field End, Halliford, Laleham, Lampton, Littleton, Longford (not the one in Ireland) and beyond to the likes of Roxeth and Sipson. Near-at-hand places with strange-sounding names.
Among the WI villages in the north-east are Ponders End (known to old-timers as Ponders Plonk, for obscure reasons, and now very Asian) and Winchmore Hill, which did indeed have an unusually self-contained, forgotten air that one might almost call villagey. Then I headed down the North Circular past Neasden, singing Willie Rushton’s wonderful hymn to the place (‘It’ll work out so much cheaper if you buy a seasden’), towards the more plausible-sounding villages in Middlesex’s south-west corner, the remnant unwanted in London and handed to Surrey. However, they just merged into one another; struggling to find something memorable about Laleham, I found myself in Littleton.
I went west to Staines, a town so bedevilled by its unfortunate name and the unwanted residency of the comic character Ali G that it has uneasily rebranded itself as Staines-upon-Thames. Not such a bad place, I was thinking, as I sat on the Thames-side terrace in the Swan Hotel eating a tuna sandwich and watching the scullers and the narrow boats. Then I realised that, having crossed the river, I had broken the first rule of this book: I was actually in Egham Hythe, which was always in Surrey.
The lesson of Middlesex is that it has long been a place that offers the promise of a better life: for the eighteenth-century gentry; for their contemporaries, the highwaymen; for the homesteaders of Metroland; and in this corner too. The Middlesex WI still lists thirty-eight branches, and I bet they do their utmost to make a community in places that look deeply unpromising to sneery outsiders.
The 1989 book tells the story of a London family that moved out after the war from a cramped upstairs flat to a new house on the edge of Feltham, backing on to Hounslow Heath: ‘Our garden when we moved in was a field of knee-high lush grass left over from the cows on Sparrow Farm. The children could hide if not willing to come in for meals or bed. They spent that entire summer building camps in the woods and, we learned later, trying to dam the Baber Brook.’
Within the year, the council had bought Sparrow Farm and it was turned into a housing estate. The family’s access to the heath was severed. ‘Soon there were too many cars for the small roads,’ the anonymous resident continued, ‘but perhaps some of the families had also come from upstairs flats and needed to share the space and freedom with us.’
Across the A4 from the Three Magpies and the road ‘as rural as anywhere in England’ is the turning to Harmondsworth, a village famous for its huge medieval timbered tithe barn; for being the former HQ of Penguin Books (built on a cabbage field in 1937); and for the presence of two ‘immigration removal centres’. Less than a mile from modern Heathrow’s perimeter fence is Harmondsworth Church, St Mary’s: a much-admired Norman doorway, a brick-and-flint tower and some of the shapeliest yews in any ch
urchyard in England. Some lovely cottages, two shops, two pretty pubs, a school. A real village and a beguiling one too. There is a dull background hum all right, but the village is not under the flightpath; the only really offensive noise came when two motorbikes roared through, which doesn’t happen often because the road leads nowhere.
Among the graves I met Michael and Valerie Coombes, who had moved up from Devon fifty years before when Michael came out of the RAF. ‘It’s a lovely community,’ said Valerie. But if you camp by an active volcano long enough, sooner or later you get buried by hot lava. For years Harmondsworth has lived under the threat of a third runway. Ostensibly this was lifted in 2010 when the coalition came to power. Then the government had second thoughts, but lacked the guts to say so, and chose to prevaricate until after the 2015 election. The latest thinking is that the expansion will obliterate the more transient village of Sipson next door. Harmondsworth, meanwhile, will be ruined without being demolished, meaning the compensation will be pathetic.
But Plans X, Y and Z will be along soon enough. ‘It’s the uncertainty that’s so awful,’ said Valerie. ‘If it’s going to happen you accept things and get on with it. But we don’t know.’
Even closer to the airport, the Three Magpies has a sign by the door asking patrons to be respectful of their neighbours and leave as quietly as possible. I thought perhaps the pilots might have complained about the racket. I now see it as an indicator of people wanting to make the best of life in difficult circumstances. Which is very English, and very, very Middlesex.
April 2013
26. Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
NORTHUMBERLAND
The Border Counties Railway between Hexham and Riccarton Junction closed in 1958, five years before Dr Beeching could have had the pleasure of strangling it personally. It ran for forty-two miles – single track, sometimes a single passenger – through the loneliest countryside in England, and some of the loneliest in Scotland.
North of what was once Kielder Station, where the road jinks away to cross the little North Tyne, the old line now carries on as a path and cart track, towards even more remote territory at Deadwater. But just after Kielder, a walker can turn off left, head up a boggy field, and there it is: a barbed-wire fence dividing the English county of Northumberland from the not-quite-yet nation-state of Scotland to the south.
I repeat, to the south.
It is the merest sliver of Scotland: a field 200 yards wide. No skirl of the pipes, nor hint of tartan, nor whiff of deep-fried Mars Bar, nor swig of Irn-Bru. Then comes Bell’s Burn and the edge of Kielder Forest and England starts again. It is a sort of peninsula, a mysterious product of the strange and bloody medieval process that created the Anglo-Scottish border.
People sitting much further south sometimes imagine that Scotland begins at Hadrian’s Wall, which is wrong by up to sixty miles; that the border is a straightish east–west line; or that it largely follows the River Tweed. In reality it is almost unimaginably complex: sixty miles long to a passing crow, about 110 to an earthbound human, and it runs mainly north-east to south-west. Scotland’s southernmost point, the Mull of Galloway, is about the same latitude as the northern tip of Yorkshire, near Redcar. And the western land border at Gretna is on a par with Newcastle, which is a helluva way from haggis.
Historians have terrible trouble sorting out the logic of the border. Some emphasise the significance of the Treaty of York (1237); others ignore it. It does seem clear that the line was pretty much fixed in the thirteenth century with the exception of medieval Britain’s most marginal constituency, Berwick-upon-Tweed, which was captured once and for all for England by the future Richard III in 1482.
Nigel Tranter, author of Portrait of the Border Country, found the abrupt and capricious deviations of the border unfathomable but ‘no doubt explainable once by the ambitions and positions of the properties of influential magnates, the apprehensions of wardens, the intrigues of courtiers – or by uneasy compromise or sheer accident’. It took me two hours and two separate conversations with the patient owner of Bells Burnfoot Cottage to be reasonably confident I had it right in 2013. Doubtless it will become better marked if Scotland ever becomes independent. Possibly the markers will include Hadrian’s Wall-style forts, lookout posts and armed guards.
The Anglo-Scottish border, however, is what it is and what it has been for centuries – unlike the borders of most English counties. Which is one reason why Scotland has become a country of growing self-awareness, self-assurance and ambition. And why the English often have no idea where they live.
Tranter was equally baffled by the ‘strangely arbitrary line’ that marks the most northerly point of England and the most northerly of the border crossings. It is merely a kissing gate by the solitary meadow – known as Seabreeze – that lies between the London-Edinburgh railway and the edge of the cliffs at Marshall Meadows Bay, across the Tweed from Berwick. Marshall Meadows comprises just an agreeable-looking country house hotel and the Fairbairn family’s sheep farm, three-quarters in England, a quarter in Scotland. On a bright but windy morning (most mornings must be windy up here), I wandered along the cliff path past the Fairbairns’ holiday caravan site, picked up England’s most northerly windblown bit of black plastic, passed its most northerly plants (a dead heat between a thistle and a stinging nettle), crossed into Scotland, watched a southbound express go by and headed back into Northumberland.
The Fairbairns have minor extra complications with government paperwork. John Fairbairn was born in England; his brother and parents in Scotland. He has no problem about who to support at football or rugby since he isn’t interested. He was a bit worried about the possibility of Scottish independence: ‘That might come difficult for us.’ Already, there are wild legal anomalies around here: for instance, the River Till, a tributary of the Tweed, is wholly in England, but governed by Scottish fishing laws.
Thus the border has nothing to do with Hadrian’s Wall, which is a sad, patchy old thing. No one is quite sure of its purpose. Was it aggressive? Defensive? Or just a means of control? It looks now as if it could hardly have deterred a wandering ewe. I considered the possibility that Hadrian had promised his wife he would finish the job, but never quite got round to it, as one doesn’t. But in a single respect Hadrian did get it right. England’s natural, defensible, logical line runs the way his wall does, between Solway and Tyne, not Solway and Tweed.
Travelling through Northumberland, which is essentially the land between Tyne and Tweed, I was at different times reminded of almost everywhere I had ever been in my life. The one place it never felt like was England.
It struck me first at the Temple of Mithras, the archaeological relic by the Wall at Carrawburgh. Mithraism was a cult, its adherents the Moonies or Scientologists of the day; they were into sun worship and bull sacrifice. It was popular with Roman soldiery across the Empire and one can see how appealing both elements of Mithraism might have been to the troops posted to this bleak outpost, the wind scything across the moor, a long, long way from Mediterranean sunshine and mamma’s meatballs.
Northumberland is a breathtaking county, full of big, ever-changing skies, and landscapes that normally belong to more spacious nations. At times, it felt to me like the Wild West: Montana or Wyoming, maybe, with more rounded peaks. At others, it might have been Russia: where there are trees, there are trees (150 million in Kielder Forest); where there ain’t, there ain’t. There were even moments when the sun was on the beige land and I fancied, in a fantastical way, that it was Saudi Arabia. I finally decided it was Britain’s Minnesota: a place with one big urban sprawl (Tyneside playing the role of Minneapolis) and not much else; a tough history of mining; and a reputation for being remote, cold and northerly, notwithstanding that in both cases there is another country even further to the north.
What Northumberland is not is English-pretty or cosy. ‘Toto,’ I thought, hunching away from the gale at Carrawburgh, ‘I don’t think we’re in the Home Counties any more.
’ It is not just a matter of landscape. There is something forbidding about the place: it defies the middle-class homesteaders who have spread across the rest of the English countryside. I have known sensible, sensitive people – and heard of more on this trip – who have tried to settle in rural Northumberland and failed. It was simply too foreign.
There are a lot of factors: the old rural Northumbrian burr has almost gone now but, by golly, it was a daunting barrier to conversation – as guttural as German or, perhaps more to the point, Danish. Even so, the infinite local variations that increasingly get lumped together as Geordie still remain, to the unattuned, both inimitable and largely incomprehensible.
On the upper reaches of the Tyne, especially the North Tyne, any conversations become less likely. Someone dared me to go into the Black Bull at Wark and endure the stares. In the event, no one stared: it took some time before even the barmaid acknowledged my existence. I did not attempt Part 2 of the dare, which was to order a Campari. Places like Wark have never known a yeoman class or a bourgeoisie.
No other county is so dominated by an eponymous duke: the 12th Duke of Northumberland, unable to match his forebears by governing Middlesex, still sits in Alnwick Castle, which the Percy family acquired a mere 800 years ago, with 100,000 scattered acres at his command. The rest of Northumberland is full of minor aristocrats and gentry – and what one might rudely call peasants. Bill Lancaster, former director of the Centre of Northern Studies, explained that there were open and closed (or ‘close’) villages. Open ones had multiple landowners, and thus tended to be comparatively free-and-easy; the others were controlled by a single man. ‘In Northumberland you don’t even get closed villages. What you get are farming hamlets, with a terrace for the workers. In Victorian times the Duke didn’t want villages: they could be centres of dissent.’
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