Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  At 7 next morning the bell rang and business began at the Grimsby Fish Market, as it has done every Monday to Friday, bank holidays excepted, since shortly after our own ancestors crawled out of the freezing waters. There is a sense of departed glory.

  The market is a long, low, cold building and it was far from full, either of people or fish. About 100 merchants stood around and followed the three auctioneers in a game of follow-my-leader round three separate stashes: cod, haddock and mixed, which meant everything else.

  In the way of business between professionals, the details were barely comprehensible. The auctioneer pointed to a box, mentioned a seemingly random number, went up or down – usually down – and, without any response being audible or visible to me, announced the name of the successful bidder. Then a handful of tickets were strewn on to the box to indicate the deceased fish’s new owners. Only the cod appeared to register any emotion whatever: a wild-eyed surmise about the sudden turn of fate that brought them to captivity and this indignity.

  It was all over inside three-quarters of an hour, which was middling kind of business, normal for midweek. Monday is a busy day, when the weekend catch comes in, and there can still be 4,000 boxes for sale, each containing maybe four or five large cod or up to fifty tiddlers. But a couple of decades ago there might have been 30,000 boxes.

  Grimsby flourished from the mid-nineteenth century, when the combination of trains and primitive refrigeration allowed its fish to reach London. All Lincolnshire’s great summits are man-made, most of them being ecclesiastical, but the 200-foot brick-built, wafer-thin Grimsby Dock Tower is perhaps the most startling of the lot. Completed in 1852 to provide hydraulic power for the dock gates, it was based, with Victorian swagger, on the Torre del Mangia (the Tower of the Eater, which is appropriate) in Siena. The tower still lords it over an area that is otherwise rotting away and classically ripe for redevelopment: it is easy to imagine the chi-chi bars and restaurants and apartment blocks that might follow.

  Except that this is Grimsby, which is very un- all that. And the docks have considerable resilience. The fish market has suffered not just from the decline, almost to nothingness, of the Grimsby trawler fleet but also because many big buyers now bypass the middle men. Against that there are an increasing number of restaurants (not necessarily in Grimsby) that care about quality, and the market’s owners felt confident enough to do a big modernisation job on the hall in 2012. The docks themselves still have a certain vibrancy, supporting the new offshore wind farms. And Carl Hunnysett, the market’s operations manager, was keen to explain to me – as my mother used to say whenever there was girlfriend trouble – that there were plenty of fish in the sea.

  By the market reception desk there were black-and-white pictures of the old market from 1965: more crowded; somewhat less bio-secure, with the smoking not confined to fish; but recognisably the same place and the same all-male bantering world, with a tubby auctioneer making notes in the same sort of account book. ‘Probably the same book,’ said Hunnysett. A few years back, the market tried to stage its own Big Bang with auctions being conducted electronically from a different room. But the buyers wanted to smell the fish.

  That morning, across the county, a more familiar kind of market was also gearing up. This was Boston, a famous old town, once a port second only to London, home of the Boston Stump, the country’s biggest parish church, grander than half of England’s cathedrals. It dwindled into an obscure and elderly town: I was greeted by signs urging me towards a big exhibition – for hearing aids. Now it has had an influx of energetic, young, go-getting people anxious to better themselves. Boston is not happy.

  It is a town where market day still matters, partly because it is at the centre of such a fertile area: the stalls sell produce that looks as if it has come from the soil and not a conveyor belt at a Chinese lettuce factory. More than that, market day is a social occasion, a chance to chat to friends, and also to whisper sotto voce about the change that has come upon this part of Lincolnshire – suddenly, unexpectedly, unwontedly.

  By the war memorial I met Sue Ransome, matriarch of the most formidable political dynasty to emerge from anywhere called Boston since the Kennedys. There the analogy ends. Sue and Don used to run rival taxi firms until they formed their own coalition and got married. They flirted with all the mainstream political parties until they heard Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, and thought he talked sense. The offspring agreed. In the 2013 county council election the Ransome family stood en masse in different Boston wards as UKIP candidates for Lincolnshire County Council. Sue and her daughters Felicity and Elizabeth stormed in; Don and eldest daughter Jodie narrowly missed out. Their son, Sam, was going to stand too but, at nineteen, he shied away for fear of being thought weird by his mates.

  Sue Ransome was edgy when I called. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘The issues that got you elected.’

  ‘Oh, you mean potholes.’

  Potholes, Poles; similar word, same hopeless anger. Stable, sleepy, hearing-aidy Boston grew by almost 16 per cent from 2001 to 2011, almost entirely due to the arrival of migrants to work in agriculture and its associated processing plants, which form Lincolnshire’s main business. Though peas require almost no human input at all, Lincolnshire’s other vegetables – like cabbages, caulis and sprouts, are highly labour-intensive. It is not soft work.

  Sue Ransome’s complaints about the migrants were not venomous, but not always convincing either. ‘If you see Boston at 2 in the morning, it’s just vile. They’re urinating in the street. Don’t get me wrong. It’s English and foreigners. But the foreigners don’t seem to have any regard for our way of life.’ Some allegations had the ring of truth (‘I’ve heard of Russians going to Latvia and Lithuania to buy EU passports for £100.’) and she was not without sympathy for the migrants themselves: ‘It’s exploitation and it’s being done by our own people. We’ve heard from the workers how much they pay for transport, rent and everything, and the conditions in which they live.’

  Don Ransome looked back to the old days: ‘Fifteen years ago a good cauli-cutting gang would earn £500 a week each. True, they might spend it in the pub and it would all be in cash. But I don’t think anyone gets the chance to get that money now. The locals don’t get the chance to get those jobs.’ Quite. First, the Portuguese undercut the English. Then the East Europeans undercut the Portuguese. The next step was assumed to be a great influx of Romanians and Bulgarians, who were due to receive full working rights across the EU and the chance to undercut everyone else.

  And so Boston finds itself at the sharp end of modern agribusiness. The public buy on price, not quality; the supermarkets screw their suppliers to get their edge; the suppliers screw their workers; the migrants, for whom bad British wages beat good money back home, climb in. It’s modern capitalism. We will come back shortly to the woman who made Britain embrace that.

  Skegness is a classically down-at-heel east coast resort, made famous by its prancing railway-poster symbol, the Jolly Fisherman (created in 1908 by a jobbing artist, John Hassall, who had never been near the place) and the accompanying slogan: ‘Skegness is SO bracing’ – i.e. freezing cold.

  A few miles up the road, nearer to Ingoldmells, is Skeggy’s other claim to fame: the first and almost the last Butlins holiday camp, opened in 1936. Once these camps dotted the coast. Just three are left: Stalag Luft Bognor (see Chapter 8); Minehead, where its presence appals the bien-pensant Somerset incomers; and Skeggy, where somehow – out of town and on this bleak coast – it still seems to work. Like Charles Ryder returning to wartime Brideshead, I mouthed the phrase, ‘I have been here before.’

  I was either four or five, and now have only a handful of memories, all vivid: the chalets; the toilet blocks at the end of each row marked ‘Lads’ and ‘Lassies’; the communal meals in a vast hall (‘Good morning, Gloucester House,’ a voice would say over the loudspeaker); the Glamorous Gran and Knobbly Knees contests; and being forced to remove my vest on t
he beach and having a screaming fit – the weather must have been SO bracing. My father had urgent business to prevent him from joining us: that’s not a memory, it’s a certainty.

  The chalets, which had a basin with a cold tap, have been replaced by low-rise blocks with mod cons. The boarding-school-style house names have been replaced by terraces with signs saying ‘Pebblestone Place’ or ‘Cuttlefish Walk’. The best look like well-designed housing estates; the worst like the Bates Motel. The camp is guarded by an eight-foot spiked fence on a berm rendering the sea invisible except from a few of the uppermost rooms. This is (a) the sea defence that is essential on this frangible coast, (b) to keep out intruders, and (c), I suspect, because Butlins cannot quite shake off its regimental mentality. There is an exit to the beach, though it is hard to find. I assume there is more profit in keeping people in.

  On the whole I was impressed with the way Butlins – sold on twice since Sir Billy Butlin’s heyday – has adapted to the modern world. There is a fancy new swimming pool, almost as warm as the Bath spa, and a tented entertainment complex built like the Millennium Dome. I was just too late for Billy Bear’s Buzz Boom Bang Show, but could have queued for the Barney Photoshoot.

  As I wandered, I came across one very nice touch: an original chalet, preserved and listed. The original furnishings – the sailing-boat pattern curtains and B-monogrammed pillow cases – have all gone, so the interior looks grimmer than it actually was. But the outside still looks attractive in a mock-Tudor Woodhall Spa-ish kind of way.

  A lot of campers passed by and peered, usually approvingly. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ said one.

  A boy of about ten rushed up to the window and stared inside for a moment. ‘Weird!’ he cried, and rushed off.

  The Living Health Chiropractic Clinic and Holistic Retreat takes up two terraced houses on a busy corner on the edge of Grantham town centre. It offers Lava Shell Massage, Body Wraps, St Tropez Tanning, Waxing and Pedicures. Level with the first-floor windows there is a marker stone with gold-leaf lettering. It is both grander than the blue plaque norm, and further out of reach, to deter vandals. ‘BIRTHPLACE OF THE RT. HON. MARGARET THATCHER, M.P.,’ it reads. ‘FIRST WOMAN PRIME MINISTER OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND.’

  This was Alderman Roberts’s famous corner shop, where his daughter Margaret began her long life’s journey to a funeral at St Paul’s. One had imagined a poky backstreet shop – but this must have been a premium site even in those days. The clinic’s remedies sound evanescent and subject to fashion, but it has been there for twenty years, succeeding a restaurant. It seems very un-Mrs T and there is nothing left of her days except a rather lovely fireplace, of dark wood with leaf-pattern tiles, and that has been moved. Carol Thatcher turned up once for a treatment but her mother never did. ‘I don’t think she liked Grantham,’ said Sandra, the practice manager, who has grown bored with such questions.

  One tries to imagine what might have happened had Margaret Roberts remained in Lincolnshire. She would never have stayed in the shop. But she might have married an estate agent, settled in one of the unprepossessing villages and turned herself into Lynda Snell, pouring all that furious energy and intellect into ensuring the success of the summer fete and the Christmas pantomime, reducing her neighbours to terror-stricken admiration.

  She might have joined the council herself and devoted herself to Lincolnshire, perhaps stiffening its backbone and trying to give it some self-respect and identity as a county and not just a random collection of communities. She might even have had a statue by now. As it is, that issue is problematic. Too much hatred, even in a county without much energy for it.

  I wish she had got to work on Lincolnshire, great Yorkshire’s little brother which has drifted into obscurity. Oh, big, amiable lummox of the shires, pull yourself together, take some pride in yourself, move those signs to the proper borders. You’re not flat, you’re not boring, you’re not ugly. OK? Hail to thee, good, honest county. Now buck up.

  July 2013

  32. The horse has bolted

  BERKSHIRE

  Two old boys called John and Jim were reminiscing about life in the Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory that used to dominate Reading. They had started there as apprentices and remained until it closed in 1976.

  ‘Do you remember they used to play Housewives’ Choice and all the women and girls used to sing along? … Certain places you thought “this is a dirty filthy hole”, like the fruit room, you stuck to the floor with currants … The worst place, that was the cheese room … You had some good smells, though, didn’t you? No. 6 especially, the one that did the ginger nuts, that was the one people remember the most, wafting across Reading … When Huntley & Palmers closed down you couldn’t believe it … We were brought up that the factory was there … All the manufacturing was going from the town … I watched the last Cornish wafers come out of no. 2 oven, some of the bakers had been there since the 20s and 30s, they were in tears …’

  I didn’t meet John and Jim, with their ripe, almost extinct accents that would once have been described as Berkshire. They were interviewed as part of the remarkable BBC exercise in recording ordinary life known as The Listening Project. I happened to catch it when it was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2012 and was captivated. It was the story of a living and a way of life that had vanished not because the world had changed – the world has not lost its taste for shortbread and ginger nuts – but because the attitudes of industry had changed and, above all, Berkshire had changed.

  Reading was known for the three B’s: beer, bulbs and biscuits. Suttons the seedsmen went west (Devon) in the 1970s. The remnant of the old Simonds’ brewery (later Courage) closed in 2010. Reading is hardly struggling without them: it has become a high-tech hub and grown so much its phone numbers have had a digit lopped off the code and added on to the number, the British indicator of a serious metropolis. In 2012 it was reported that Reading’s residential property was worth over £50 billion, second pro rata only to London; ahead in total of far larger places like Edinburgh and Liverpool. There is an American swagger to the place.

  The last remnant of Huntley & Palmers’ once-vast Reading estate is a single red-brick building on the corner of Gas Works Road, a name no longer allowed even a road sign. The building itself is equally discreet. The biscuit company name is on the gable but there is just an anonymous side door with bells, and the ground-floor windows are tinted, in a mind-your-own-business way. Maybe flats, maybe not.

  As in most American cities, the heart of Reading is now out of town. I drove to Green Park, which has large plate-glass office buildings with generous space for cars set amidst the vegetation categorised in The Flora of Berkshire as ‘botanically stereotyped post-industrial shrubbery’. It is not an ugly place. Indeed, on a gorgeous early September day at the end of a warm summer, there was a delicious hint of Silicon Valley. Even the numbering is American-style – i.e. inflated and illogical: Brook Drive goes 100, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400. Green Park has everything a high-tech young executive might need: a nursery, a gym, inter-company fun runs. There is even a branch of Costco, the American members-only discount warehouse which functions as a cult for people obsessed with bulk-buying vast quantities of washing powder. Costco has a strange system of class-related faux-exclusivity: retired insurance salesmen are welcome to join; retired biscuit factory workers are not. (And nor are writers.)

  Next door is the football stadium, named – like much of Berkshire – after the businessman, philanthropist and American-style self-promoter John Madejski. The ground is the home of Reading FC, who used to be known as the Biscuitmen but changed their nickname to the Royals. Had I known at school that it was possible to change a nickname I would have got my marketing department to come up with something more appropriate than ‘Worm’ and ‘Bogsy’. It is a different world and one must embrace it. For Green Park is perhaps Britain’s most perfect example of its type: a nowhere place for nowhere people.

  The traditional shape of Berkshire is that of a boot:
not a sexy, slithery, high-heeled boot like Italy, but an old working man’s boot – hard-worn, toe curled upwards, the leather misshapen. A seedsman’s boot, perhaps. This was because the entire northern boundary – bar a little jiggle round Oxford – was formed by the Thames, meandering north, south, east and occasionally even west along much of the river’s 215 miles.

  In mileage and in the English imagination, Berkshire is the quintessential Thames-side county. The eastern stretch is that of blazers and Bolly, of Three Men in a Boat (‘I call the whole thing bally foolishness,’ said Montmorency the dog as they set off). Upstream the river becomes more contemplative; this is the countryside of Wind in the Willows, a work that has never dated even as the water voles, Ratty’s descendants, flirt with extinction. And everywhere, in the mind’s eye, glide the swans, with their air of serene contempt for all human endeavour.

  Two months earlier, with the heatwave of 2013 in full cry, I had joined the gathering at the Compleat Angler Hotel on the Berkshire bank of the river opposite Marlow. The dress code, as at nearby Ascot, was ludicrous. As the temperatures soared into the eighties, the principals had to wear thick braided blazers; the rest of the cast were dressed for bit parts in The Pirates of Penzance. A small flotilla was about to set out on Day 3 of Royal Swan Upping week.

  Swan-upping! The very phrase is redolent of English summer, of languid days on the river, even though hardly anyone can explain its purpose succinctly. This includes the participants. What’s it about? Well, um, it’s about languid days on the river. Very languid. I sat in the press launch all morning. Not much was missing from the idyllic picture except, for us, the chilled Sauvignon Blanc being served on the attendant pleasure boats. And also the attendant swans.

  Three groups of rowers in their G&S outfits took to the water – those representing the Worshipful Company of Dyers in blue, the Vintners’ Company in white, royalty in scarlet, as though it were a more complicated version of the Boat Race. Swans have only four possible owners under British law: the Abbotsbury swannery in Dorset, which is not relevant here, and the two livery companies under rights going back to the fifteenth century; the rest, by default, can be claimed by the Crown, represented here by the Queen’s Swan Marker, David Barber. This is not the same as being owned by the Crown, as you might discover if a swan smashed through your window and you tried to sue Her Majesty.