Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  The heterodox archaeologist Terence Meaden explained to the gathering his theory about Stonehenge: that there is a four-minute gap between the sun rising by the Heel Stone and the shadow penetrating the stone circle itself. For Meaden there was an obvious interpretation about rising, penetration and consummation (although, as we have learned, the Wiltshire sun does not always get it up in the first place).

  This notion was greeted with not only applause, but cheering and whooping. Indeed, cheering and whooping greeted just about everything, even a very arcane lecture on German Earth Mother theory. Through this, it was possible to sit at the back and applaud politely, if not whoop, with everyone else. But looming up were Earth Circle Gatherings ‘for Connection, Discussion and Support’ and ‘a Feast of fabulous two-and-a-half-hour workshops’. One of these was specifically about Avalon, and thus seemed to link the very heart of Glastonbury’s ruling mythology and Somerset’s deepest secrets. However, the programme promised that ‘We will Inhale, Embrace, Ground, and Embody this Energy with Earth Goddess and Avalon Essence Dance’. Terrified, not least by the capital letters, I fled into the High Street and made for what looked like an old stable block, site of the Goddess Temple.

  This is a lilac-painted room, strewn with cushions and suffused with incense. A woman sat cross-legged in front of the altar and kept lighting candles, at a rate of about two per minute, below a picture of an unnervingly busty goddess figure with flowing tresses. Even so, it was profoundly relaxing, just like the bath in Bath, if a bit like how one imagines George Harrison’s living room circa 1969.

  I had grasped one fundamental, I think: the belief that Neolithic humanity worshipped goddess figures, often representing the fecundity of the earth fertilised by the masculine heavens. This would make sense, wouldn’t it? But it was quickly suppressed by patriarchal Judaeo-Christian-Islamism and has not gained much traction anywhere outside Glastonbury.

  But is this a religion, a cult, a belief system, or what? I wanted to ask the conference organiser, Kathy Jones, Priestess of Avalon, who had been in the hall wearing a fetching headdress which might have passed as a fascinator at Ascot. I was directed instead to her husband, Mike, which seemed somewhat patriarchal.

  Not a religion or any of the above, he insisted. ‘Goddess is an experiential spirituality.’ It was, he said, primarily but not exclusively, a path to spirituality for women, adding that ‘for us, the goddesses will arrive through the priestesses’.

  Have you experienced this?

  ‘Oh yes’, he said. ‘Eartha appeared last night. At the opening ceremony in the town hall.’

  He was not immune to sensing I might be sceptical: ‘This is not historical, it is not theological. The scholarship is not important to us. It is what we feel. If anyone turns round to us and says, “That’s not right”, we say, “It is right for us.”’

  I found this answer rather attractive. It made a change from religions claiming a monopoly on wisdom. He was also arguing for a small gesture to sexual equality. ‘In this county there are about 2,000 houses devoted to God and only one to Goddess.’ It also seemed very Glasto, I said. He didn’t disagree with that. ‘Everyone who comes here to do spiritual work finds it a very intense experience.’

  Back at the Crown, Pilton, Allen Powell was in more relaxed mood. He was a little warmer about the festival now. ‘Always pleased to see it come financially. Always glad to see it go personally.’ The financial gain, it transpired, comes not from the festival-goers, still less from any festival non-goers, but from feeding and victualling the contractors before and afterwards. ‘I’m not anti-festival in any way,’ he insisted. ‘It’s been good for the village, brought people in.’

  Thus Michael Eavis borrowed the existing aura of Glastonbury to bump up his own project; nowadays the town, excepting that one hopeless weekend, basks in the warmth generated by the festival. Glastonbury really does have some very unusual people; the festival mostly belongs to chartered accountants from Beckenham, but deep down they must believe they are unusual too. This is the kind of symbiosis of which the Earth Mother must surely approve.

  June/July 2013

  The horrendously wet winter of 2013–14 produced yet more flooding on the Levels. This time it also affected places like Surrey and Berkshire, thus creating more interest among the media and politicians. The government suddenly discovered the money, and the Environment Agency the rationale, for an urgent programme of dredging the rhynes. Ralph Bending was keeping his spirits up. TO LET:

  STREET: Eco-friendly two-bedroom first-floor apartment. Suit someone who farts in a bottle.

  GLASTONBURY: Handy one-bedroom flat. Suit someone in touch with themselves.

  31. Very good in Parts

  LINCOLNSHIRE

  Within two hours of arriving in Lincolnshire, I was recognised. In the café of a fenland garden centre.

  ‘You do double glazing, don’t you?’ said the woman behind the counter.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said.

  She seemed mildly affronted, as though there had been some deliberate attempt at deception. ‘You’re not the double-glazing man from Bourne?’

  ‘I could always try to do double glazing, but I’m not from Bourne. I’m from Herefordshire.’

  She switched tack quickly. ‘Oh, nice county.’

  ‘Lincolnshire’s a nice county too,’ I said.

  If she had ever been paid a compliment in her life, she had never accepted one on behalf of her county. ‘Flat,’ she said, flatly. ‘We like it, though,’ she added in that tone people use to justify a taste for something completely uncool. It was my first experience of what I came to know as the Lincolnshire backward defensive: an apologetic remark, very lightly seasoned with a pinch of truculence.

  Did I mean it? Is Lincolnshire a nice county? Yes. At any rate, it is intriguing, distinctive, full of the unexpected. But it has what you might call issues. And the most serious of these is low self-esteem.

  It was not always so. When the county rebelled against the Reformation in 1536, Henry VIII’s response was withering, even before he embarked on wholesale vengeance: ‘How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beestelie of the hole realme, and of leest experience, to fynde faulte with your Prynce.’ (He would have made a brilliantly provocative newspaper columnist.) It was the brute and beestelieness that gave Lincolnshire its strength as a county. It was near-enough impenetrable, guarded by the sea, the Humber, the Trent and, worst of all, the Fens.

  To that extent not much has changed. Very big, Lincolnshire: famously second only to Yorkshire. But the internal communications are primeval. The roads have encouragingly low A numbers and look invitingly straight on the map, but are curiously inimical to overtaking. The A16 used to unite the county from Grimsby in the north-west to Stamford in the south-east, each town approximately sixteen miles apart from the other. (Supposedly that allowed everyone to get to market and back in a day.) There has been some tinkering with the road numbering in the bottom corner, but it is still more than eighty very slow miles. The once-extensive railway network is now vestigial. And the external communications are no better. There is only one main-line station, Grantham, which sends a few phlegmatic commuters 105 miles to London every day. Nearby, the A1 skirts the outer edge of Lincolnshire, but not helpfully.

  So hardly anyone comes by. Lincoln Cathedral is amazing, but only the most intrepid visitors get there. On the coast, Skegness still attracts its trippers, especially from the East Midlands. But in the words of the Lincolnshire polymath, David Robinson of Louth: ‘They drive like hell into the sun in the morning to get there and they drive like hell into the sun in the evening to get back, and they don’t see anything in the middle.’ Who does?

  There is a perception that the county is indeed flat and boring, though its Wolds are the highest bit of far-eastern England. But no one knows quite what to say about Lincolnshire, whether they live there or not. Few outsiders even know the nickname for Lincolnshire peopl
e, ‘Yellowbellies’, which Robinson, the acknowledged expert on such subjects, insists comes from the yellow facings on the regimental uniform – not because the soldiers all ran away, and not because the Fenmen were all yellow from bog fevers.

  The word one kept hearing was insular, emphasised by the BBC Radio Lincolnshire headlines I caught while stuck behind a gravel lorry for about an hour on the A16: ‘Lincoln City Council is holding consultations on this year’s Christmas market and seventy-seven people have been killed in a train crash in Spain.’ It was mid-July. ‘There is a certain feeling about the place, without anyone quite knowing what it is,’ explained the local author and broadcaster Alan Stennett. ‘There is a pride in being different, there’s a pride in being insular. We don’t want anything to do with that lot, be it London or Poland.’

  Lincolnshire joke: Carload of Cockneys passing through a village; they see an old yokel and aim to have some fun. ‘’Ere, mate, you seen a lorry load of monkeys pass this way?’ ‘No. Why? Have you fell off?’

  It is a county with 600 churches, most of them striking, some amazing. Robinson of Louth told me, as he approached his eighty-sixth birthday, that after a lifetime of studying the county, there were still places he didn’t know and wanted to explore. But the pride is limited, partly because it has never been fostered. The county has never had a county council as such. It used to be divided into three Parts (a word that has no singular), analogous to the Yorkshire ridings – Lindsey, Kesteven and Holland. In 1974 it was top-sliced instead, with most of the county getting its own council and the north placed in something called Humberside. Of all the new counties this was the most total failure, not just unpopular but wholly misconceived. The Humber is not some piddling stream like the Tyne or Tees: it is a barrier, even with the then newly built bridge. The two sides had no interest in each other, and the council was dominated by Hull.

  When this ill-starred invention was abandoned in 1997, two new unitary councils were created called North Lincolnshire and North-East Lincolnshire, which have no connection with official Lincolnshire. So even now, eight slow miles south of Grimsby, as you approach North Thoresby and Utterby, you pass a sign welcoming you to Lincolnshire. Which is Utterby stupid. Here is a county with an identity crisis making the problem much worse.

  Lincolnshire has always had problems finding warm supporters. In its chapter in The English Counties (1948), James Wentworth Day, a rightwing polemicist as trenchant as Henry VIII, strayed from the celebratory tone of the book and called Lincolnshire people ‘uncompromising, dour in parts, ugly in patches’. He went on: ‘They believe in work and making money. The humour is unsparing but seldom subtle. There is a take-it-or-leave-it spirit of local pride, a box-your-ears defiance of people from other parts and a knock-down rivalry between town and town, village and village.’

  This gets somewhere near the nub. As an actual county, Lincolnshire is a waste of a great deal of space. But as a slice of England it has virtues matched almost nowhere else. There is an unusually widespread sense of continuity and stability. Rich Londoners steer clear, partly because the transport links are so dire, partly because the villages, if not the people, are indeed ugly, and not just in patches.

  So much of Lincolnshire has changed remarkably little. This is best appreciated in one of the typical small towns – Louth or Horncastle for preference – over a pint of Bateman’s ‘Good Honest Ale’. Or perhaps in bosky, golfy, eccentric, totally untypical Woodhall Spa, with its enchanting half-timbered Kinema in the Woods and its general air of the Kenyan White Highlands, shortly before Mau Mau. And there is space: on a summer’s morning on the wide expanse of sharp sand at Anderby Creek there was only one other mammal in sight – a distant seal, who took one look at me, decided even this beach wasn’t big enough for both of us and opted for the frigid sea instead.

  Lincolnshire does have incomers, and not just east Europeans: there are loads of refugees from south-eastern England, working-class pensioners who did well out of council house sales and cashed up to bolster their pension in a place where property prices are more like Poland than Pimlico. Static caravans are advertised for £5,950; semis in Boston below £100,000; Skegness bungalows not that far from the sea below £150,000. Lincolnshire hospitals are said to do an unusual number of hip replacements.

  But it remains above all insular. Would-be achievers have always left to explore and/or change the world: Sir John Franklin from Spilsby; George Bass from Sleaford; Captain John Smith from Willoughby; Matthew Flinders from Donington; Joseph Banks from Revesby; Isaac Newton from Colsterworth; and Margaret Roberts, aka Margaret Thatcher, from Grantham. They tended not to come back: Franklin and Bass failed to return from their travels; Flinders also died young; Smith might have died in Virginia had he not been rescued by Pocahontas; Thatcher escaped the IRA in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, and died in the Ritz Hotel, London.

  In the same tradition, the airfields of Lincolnshire sent out the RAF to bomb Germany and save the world; many of those men never came back either. And, should Her Majesty be in need of support, she can always turn to Lieutenant-Colonel John Lindley Marmion Dymoke of Scrivelsby Court, the thirty-fourth hereditary King’s/Queen’s Champion, though if the danger is immediate and physical he might need some help, since he was born, like her, in 1926 and acquired the job six years before she ascended the throne.

  The great men of Lincolnshire who found fame might all have thought their childhood companions a little wanting in vigour; Mrs Thatcher certainly did. Those stiff North Sea breezes seem to induce an unexpected lethargy. Were I to settle here I might find selling double glazing far too stressful to contemplate. I might just about summon enough spirit to ascend the highest point in the Parts of Holland, Pinchbeck Marsh, twenty-six feet above sea level, before taking a nap. But there is much to be proud of. In particular, these lowlands of Holland do more than anywhere else to feed their compatriots.

  The pea harvesters at Wigtoft lined up like an army of invasion: four gigantic juggernauts proceeding at the pace of little old Lincolnshire ladies. They left the lay-by and proceeded into Matthew Tunnard’s seventeen-acre field to chomp up the plants.

  The machines separated the pods, stalks and leaves and then shat them out from their rear end. From deep in the innards the peas themselves were then tipped into a trailer while still on the move, like a mid-air refuel or a drive-by sex act. From the trailer they went on to lorries whose drivers were commanded to get to the factories at Long Sutton or King’s Lynn within two hours. Longer than that, the product starts deteriorating. The Lincolnshire air was suffused with the sweet smell of fresh peas. ‘Wonderful!’ I said. ‘You get sick of it after seven weeks,’ said Steve Francis.

  Francis is managing director of Fen Peas, one of the two large conglomerates that dominate the UK pea-picking business. This is an almost wholly Lincolnshire branch of agriculture. All harvests are stressful but the pea harvest is recognised as the most fiendish of all, because peas – far from being easy-peasy – are temperamental little sods. They don’t like it cold; they don’t like it dry; they don’t like it wet (which is what wrecked the 2012 crop); and they don’t even like it hot, which, after three weeks of heatwave, was piling pressure on Francis in 2013. ‘There is now no such thing as a normal summer,’ he said. ‘Or winter, autumn or spring.’ Then there are the crows, pigeons, slugs and snails (which get into the packaging). The harvest lasts about seven weeks from late June to August: ‘You go to sleep thinking about it,’ says Francis. ‘You dream about it. You wake up thinking about it. And you dread the phone ringing because it will be bad news.’ This is farming; if there is good news no one would mention it anyway.

  But it’s true about peas being difficult. Even the most zealous grow-your-own gardener is usually content to leave them to the pros. A good garden harvest might deliver a few hundred peas. I did a rough calculation with Francis, who is responsible for 5,000 acres round the county, and we reckoned he produced about 100 billion.

  Fen Peas is the kind of co
llaborative effort now out of fashion in agriculture: the farmers do the planting; Francis organises the harvest. For the seven-week season he employs the grand total of fourteen contract labourers round-the-clock, working twelve-hour shifts. There would be no sleep in Wigtoft tonight for the workers nor, I imagine, the neighbours.

  But the balance of power round here is different from that of a Home Counties village where rich incomers move in and moan about crowing cocks and church bells. One paradox of Lincolnshire is that residential property is cheap but agricultural land very dear. This alluvial soil is fantastically fertile. A bit further north from Wigtoft, round Wrangle and Old Leake, are the Boston silts, ‘the best farmland of all’, according to Alan Stennett. The soil is dark and soft and crumbly, suggesting mystical properties; even the cabbage fields looked strangely yummy. Putting a seed into the soil here is like igniting a firework which will go whoosh any moment – light the blue touchpaper and retire. Possibly to Barbados.

  The problem is that the land is so expensive it is unaffordable for a normal farmer. ‘These kinds of farms are fetching up to £30,000 an acre. You couldn’t get a return on capital because your income wouldn’t service the loan,’ explains Stennett. Prices are dictated by outside investors seeking to make use of farmland’s exemption from inheritance tax. And there are fields over 100 acres, the size of a small farm in the west of England.

  Francis’s team will not even have the satisfaction of producing the finest petits pois; that’s a different part of the business. The best of the 100 billion may end up as supermarket own-brand garden peas; the lowest grade may end up in tinned stew. If these peas are too tender, I was told, they can explode. But they make good mushy peas. To be eaten with chips made from Lincolnshire potatoes. And of course fish.