Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Finally I took myself to the river again, to Buscot Weir, in the north-westernmost corner of historic Berkshire. The day was starting to decline and so was the summer. Some teenage boys were drying themselves off after a dip and picnickers were just packing up for the drive home. I was a little puzzled by the geography, since the path to the river was hidden, and got into conversation with the lock-keeper. He told me this was the border of three counties: Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, Berkshire’s in there somewhere,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose you don’t believe in metric either.’

  Well, actually, now you come to mention it …

  I had to cross over to the north bank to follow the Thames Path, so heaven knows what county I was in, ancient or modern: Gloucestershire, maybe. All was peaceful in the sunlit afternoon: Ratty and Mole were probably dozing nearby. I got as far as a wartime pillbox, one of the hundreds erected along the Thames to protect against a possible German invasion to match the Roman one 2,000 years earlier. It was a long-lost cousin to the one miles downstream at my school near Wallingford, where we used to sit and smoke, pretending to watch out for Jerry, in reality watching out for Josh, the tyrannical housemaster.

  I had a sudden sense that some day, sometime, in a future I cannot possibly imagine, the Thames might become an important border again.

  July/September 2013

  33. First we take Hunstanton …

  NORFOLK

  Owing to personal circumstances, I arrived in England’s fourth-largest county a week later than originally planned. By that time, it had moved closer to being the fifth-largest and further away from being no. 3, several chunks of its territory having opted to secede from Norfolk and merge instead with the North Sea.

  It happened in Happisburgh, which is pronounced ‘Hazebruh’, happy not being exactly the word. The first big storm of autumn had taken several lumps away from the cliffs along Beach Road. This is an ongoing process. In particular, it had removed yet more of Bryony Nierop-Reading’s back garden, leaving her bedroom about fifteen feet from the cliff edge, the last part of that being overhang.

  Mrs Nierop-Reading had not intended to be on the front line of the nation’s feeble costal defences. When she bought her bungalow six years ago it was two houses back from the sea. ‘I’ve got a beautiful view,’ she said, looking out of her patched-up living room to what was left of the garden. ‘Getting better by the day. Unfortunately.’

  Mrs N-R is a grandmother, a retired maths teacher and a plants-woman, the sort one might find running the pony club, the sort usually called ‘redoubtable’. And that is precisely what her house now is: a redoubt, increasingly surrounded by an implacably advancing enemy. The two houses in front of her have fallen; the two behind her have been demolished. She had refused all blandishments to leave.

  She admitted that this last assault had frightened her and that she was starting to waver. The roof on the extension went and the wind had hurled some huge timbers clean over the shed. The problem is that this coast does not only collapse when you might expect it. Most of the damage was done on the third day of the storm, when the wind had largely abated. And even after that, two days before I got there, her neighbour Arthur Richmond, who runs the Seaside Tea Rooms, was blithely walking his dogs along the other spur of Beach Road: ‘I saw a crack in the tarmac that hadn’t been there before. Then I turned away, heard a thud and it had gone: about a six- or seven-foot stretch of road.’

  Bryony showed me what was left of her domain, though mercifully she did not attempt to show me the back garden. Instead we went out the front, where the road now came to a halt at an earth bank left by the tempest.

  ‘That’s what’s really scary. People walking up the bank to see what’s on the other side. On the other side there’s nothing.’

  ‘You’re terrified for them? They’re terrified for you!’

  Happisburgh is in the vanguard of a battlefront stretching up eastern England. There have been half-hearted attempts to defend it but essentially government policy is to let this lonely, often forlorn coastline take its chance. The houses behind Bryony’s were known as Railway Cottages; and the Hill House pub in the village has a half-timbered signal box at the back, now used as a sea-view holiday let. But the trains never did reach Happisburgh, which is one reason it was always a resort for the caravanners and a few bloody-minded devotees who relish the cliffs and beach, even though these are not always where they were last time they visited.

  There is something far stranger about this place. In the past few years, archaeologists have found dozens of sharpened flintstones on the beach. They are thought to represent hand-axes used by our forefathers, Homo antecessor, between 700,000 and 950,000 years ago – shall we say about 35,000 generations? I saw one at an exhibition in Norwich: it was about the size of a large brooch, brightly polished and rather nasty-looking, and not very handy. Maybe they used it to cut up the roast mammoth for Sunday lunch.

  The blurb described it as ‘evidence of the oldest settlement in North-West Europe’ – here, where human existence is now so evanescent and marginal, where Bryony’s bungalow might not survive the next northerly and where the lighthouse, the pub and even the church may not last until the 35,003rd generation. It does not seem the obvious place to set up camp.

  Bryony disagrees even now. ‘I was very, very lucky to get this house and even if I have to leave it, I have had these years of absolute bliss living here.’

  ‘What bliss?’ I asked, looking out at the grey sea and the debris.

  ‘The sheer pleasure of waking up at dawn and watching the sun rising over the sea, moving over the lighthouse and setting behind those trees.’

  It is not just Happisburgh that one can imagine being decoupled from England. ‘If the rest of Britain sank beneath the waves, and Norfolk was left alone, islanded in the turmoil of the seas, it would, I think, survive without too much trouble,’ wrote James Wentworth Day. ‘Norfolk has always stood alone and aloof.’

  Topographically, it is more likely to be the other way round, with Norfolk doing the sinking. But one can certainly imagine it floating off like a giant raft and hardly even noticing. One can argue it is pretty much an island already: the Little Ouse and Waveney both rise at South Lopham, the one heading west and north towards the Wash, the other turning east to meet the sea. These still form most of the landward boundary of the county, which has proved more stable than the seaward one. Or, as someone put it – possibly Malcolm Bradbury: ‘Norfolk is cut off on three sides by the sea and on the fourth by British Rail.’

  It is, quite obviously, the end of the line, to an extent matched only by Cornwall. No one passes through by chance. But Cornwall has more incomers and tourists and is more dependent on Plymouth, over the Devon border. Norfolk is thoroughly self-contained. Norwich is more than just a county town, more like a capital. It even feels like a capital, of an agreeable and small continental country: all those huddled, companionable streets complete with Dutch gables – plus repulsive modern additions that hint at a phase of joyless Communism. A bit like somewhere round the Baltic, maybe.

  The fastest way to cross the world from here is to fly from Norwich Airport (sometimes described as an experience almost like owning a private jet) via Amsterdam, and stuff Heathrow. It is quicker to get to Schiphol than to Liverpool Street. This is the modern manifestation of Norfolk’s old tradition of looking out to the once herring-rich sea and the Continent beyond, not inward to England.

  Professor Peter Trudgill, the acknowledged expert on this subject, has argued that Norfolk dialect was heavily influenced by Dutch migrants fleeing religious persecution during the Inquisition, not just in its vocabulary but also in the S-less verb forms he calls East Anglian zero (‘She look just wholly bee’tiful, she do.’). The old dialect has faded to vanishing point, as it has almost everywhere. The writer D. J. Taylor, who returned to live in his native Norwich after years in London, says he hasn’t heard the old Norfo
lk male-endearment ‘Bor’ in years. But the accent hasn’t gone, nor the zero verbs, nor the complete inability of the acting profession to get it right. It is, quite literally, inimitable. ‘What you do hear all the time are the inflections, the way the sentences are put together,’ says Taylor. ‘I heard a woman in a shop quite recently say to her child, “Wha’ d’ yew want, one o’ them ones then?”’

  It was Taylor who alerted me to the traditional exchange that can be used to identify a proper Norfolk man anywhere in the world, the way spies have to complete a prearranged conversational exchange before being handed the secret papers:

  ‘Dew yew fa’er keep a dickey, bor?’

  ‘Yis, en e wan a fule ter roide ’im, wi ye come?’

  The first line translates as ‘Has your father got a donkey, old chap?’ The reply should be self-explanatory.

  Keith Simpson, the erudite MP for Broadland, was told by his grandfather that the characteristic local sentence was ‘People in Norfolk, they speak so slow, that by the time they’ve got to the end of the sentence, why, blas’ me, they’ve forgotten what the beginning was.’

  Underlying all this are a deadpan manner and sense of irony that, Taylor insists, far eclipses the generic British irony that so foxes foreigners. ‘I remember asking my brother to do something he didn’t want to do. “Reckon I will,” he replied. And it didn’t just mean “Reckon I won’t.” It was much more complex than that.’ There are countless stories of outsiders having baffling encounters in rural Norfolk that leave them completely confused as to who was the idiot in the conversation, but suspecting it might be them.

  There is a tradition of agrarian radicalism that dates back at least to Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and continued, if furtively, in the first three decades after the war when two rural constituencies regularly returned Labour MPs. But they did so with the perversity implied by the old Norfolk saying ‘Do different’. In an era when voters across Britain used to swing between the parties at elections with an almost eerie national uniformity – in that respect the nation has become far more diverse – Norfolk seats used to delight in heading in the opposite direction.

  The rules for place-name pronunciation are of course impenetrable. Every BBC newsreader knows Wymondham is ‘Wyndham’. Everyone in Norfolk knows Hautbois is something like ‘Hobbies’. But then many very-locals call Hunstanton ‘Hunston’ and Stiffkey ‘Stookey’, for example, although I was advised that it would be pretentious for me, or even someone from Norwich, to try to copy them. My researches suggest even that summary is an oversimplification. Some in Stiffkey say Stookey should only be used to refer to the local cockles, Stookey Blues.

  This sort of richly textured local culture is one indicator of a county with a strong sense of self-identity. Another is possession of a first-class cricket team, which Norfolk does not have. But it has something more powerful. Norwich City, the Canaries, are a county football team in a way matched only by Ipswich next door in Suffolk. Football being both more popular and worse-tempered than cricket, it gives the rivalry with ‘Silly Suffolk’ an edge that these days may surpass Yorkshire v Lancashire. It is all of a piece: this flinty, wilful, almost mischievous, occasionally intense semi-detachment from the rest of us. It is no coincidence that the Norfolk morning paper, the Eastern Daily Press, retains a rare vigour (despite being run by the usual avaricious dolts) and is said to outsell the Sun in its area.

  Outsiders think of Norfolk as part of the South-East. But it isn’t. King’s Lynn has a similar latitude to Stafford; Burnham Market – ‘Chelsea-on-Sea’ and Norfolk’s answer to the Range Rover-infested coast of north Cornwall – is level with the Derbyshire pit villages. The roads and railways being slow, the county has few daily commuters. And the north coast is a challenging distance from London for a weekend cottage.

  The county still has its own heroes. A fairly random trio are depicted in a rusting metal tableau at the back of Norwich Station: Horatio Nelson of Burnham Thorpe; Edith Cavell of Swardeston; and Stephen Fry of Booton. The real local heroes are less universally beloved: for some (mostly Daily Mail readers rather than Eastern Daily Press types) there is Tony Martin, the west Norfolk farmer who in 1999 shot two intruders, killing one of them, a sixteen-year-old boy. It was a complicated case, reduced to simplisms by much of the press. Martin was jailed for murder, toned down to manslaughter on appeal. There is also the late Bernard Matthews, pioneer of mass-consumption turkeys, who became famous for his mass-consumption version of Norfolk dialect (‘Bootiful!’) on his company’s adverts.

  For those with a long memory there is the Singing Postman, Allan Smethurst, who in the mid-1960s briefly made the Beatles quake with the popularity of his self-penned signature number ‘Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?’ I still remember the chorus

  Molly Windley, she smook like a chimley,

  But she’s my little nicoteen gal.

  although the lyrics of ‘Dew Yew Fa’er Keep a Dickey, Boy?’ now escape me (I think his managers must have changed ‘Bor’ to ‘Boy’ to reach a Bernard Matthews-size market).

  It all ended sadly, as sensational success in pop music tends to do. Being very Norfolk and some distance from the archetypal 1960s heartthrob in appearance, Smethurst needed a great deal of Dutch courage to get out on stage. The novelty faded fast, and he spent his last twenty years in a Salvation Army hostel in Grimsby. His songs, which he continued writing even in the hostel, were homely and humorous, evoking both lost Norfolk and lost love. His work helped perpetuate the first, but he never did find the second.

  One might add to the county hall of fame Alan Partridge, the disc jockey created by Steve Coogan, first on radio, then on TV and, in 2012, the film Alpha Papa. The Partridge character began as a crass chat show host reminiscent of that other 1960s meteor Simon Dee. As with Dee and the Singing Postman, Partridge’s star fell rapidly, and he ended up doing the graveyard shift on a radio station in Norwich. I happened to meet Steve Coogan at the kind of glitzy showbiz party to which an author of my stature gets invited, ooh, pretty much every night really. So I asked him why he picked Norwich, not a city regarded as inherently funny. That was the reason, he said: ‘I didn’t want somewhere northern and obvious. It hadn’t been degraded.’ Coogan had never even been there. When he finally did go, he found he liked Norfolk for all the reasons one should like it (‘There’s a kind of otherness about it.’). More surprisingly, once the connection became established, Norfolk decided it liked him too: ‘When I went back I was treated as a returning hero.’

  Now this might be taken as a sign of provincial stupidity. But the thing about Alan Partridge is that he has no self-awareness, and the joke is always on him. So, as a stupid incomer, he fits Norfolk’s idea of itself.

  There are two lines about Norfolk that have turned into clichés. One is N4N, the notation supposedly used by doctors at the Norwich Hospital to indicate Normal for Norfolk. Usually applied to patients from Dereham, according to one version. The implication of local stupidity is, I think, more than countered in the other direction.

  The other cliché is ‘Very flat, Norfolk’, an exquisite line in the context of Noël Coward’s Private Lives …

  AMANDA: Have you known her long?

  ELYOT: About four months. We met in a house party in Norfolk.

  AMANDA: Very flat, Norfolk.

  but exceedingly boring when repeated by twerps every time you happen to mention the county. Well, I dare say the tourist trade might be improved if the next earthly upheaval deposited a Kilimanjaro or two somewhere near Thetford. But Norfolk rarely gives the impression of flatness, the way, say, much of Lincolnshire does. And it isn’t dull.

  That’s because of the sheer variety of the county, which includes two mysterious and unique landscapes. In the west there is Breckland – ‘the English Steppes’, according to Simon Barnes – the arid, flinty, piney land once dominated by rabbits and sheep, who picked it so clean the diarist John Evelyn compared it to the Libyan desert. The army and the Forestry Commission have had most of
it, but the fragments that remain are large enough to be haunting and a touch forbidding.

  Then there are the Broads, which have always sounded to me redolent of rainy 1950s family holidays where we never did what I wanted. Not that I had ever been there. But the moment I glimpsed the Wroxham boatyards I felt a slight shudder. Oh, my dear, the noise and the people! One could just imagine.

  But it wasn’t like that at all. We did have privileged access. John Blackburn, warden of the Hickling Broad nature reserve, took Simon and me out in his electric boat, as silent as a Nottingham tram. There was barely a sound except the wind in the reeds as we glided into Hickling Broad itself, which lives up to its name – the largest expanse of water in the system.

  The Broads are far more enigmatic than the old post-Christmas Radio Times ads made them sound. It was 1960 before it was shown they were not natural but man-made: medieval peat diggings which were flooded by rising sea levels to create an accidental canal network. That afternoon Hickling Broad was empty but for a lone fisherman, a fair quantity of rather exotic birdlife, and us. Above was a Norfolk sky of the sort that, in keeping with the normal pattern round here, the Norwich watercolourist John Sell Cotman got more right than the occasional visitors Turner and Constable: always a streak of purple somewhere, always a streak of purple.

  ‘I bet it’s bedlam in summer,’ I said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said John. ‘It depends on the water level under the bridge at Potter Heigham. If it’s too high for the bigger boats to get through. And if you come in the evening when the other boat people are in the pub. And if you pick the nights when the sailing club isn’t meeting, you can have the place to yourself then too.’

  Which puts the Broads one up on Venice. Also, Norfolk has grander churches.