Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Most never bother to acquire it. The whole county is remarkably short of great houses. And up here the pattern of modern agriculture has created an empty quarter which is astonishing given its proximity to crammed Cambridge. From the 1970s onwards the whimsical nature of European agricultural policy created ideal growing conditions for large-scale arable farming. But increasingly this is undertaken not by the owners but by what are in effect landless plutocrats. They rent huge acreages every year – not necessarily or even normally the same land – to grow industrial quantities of veg, often without needing the help of East Europeans, never mind locals.

  The surviving cottages are not attractive to weekenders or incomers. Rex Sly admits many of the villages feel hollowed out. The Fen traditions are fading: wildfowling is rarer; hare coursing is illegal; even the innocent delights of Fen skating (still going strong when I attended the Duddleston Cup during the snows of 1981) have become moribund due to mild winters and uncooperative landowners. All over Cambridgeshire the countryside seemed unusually fearful, full of locked gates and ‘Keep Out’ signs. There is a reason for this: this kind of agriculture uses massive bits of kit; they say a £100,000 tractor can be stolen at midnight, disguised, and parked safely on an eastbound freighter in one of the smaller ports before cockcrow.

  But it goes wider than that. Wisbech, the classic Fen town, has one of the most handsome Georgian terraces anywhere in England, North Brink. But behind this façade lurks a town ill at ease with its new arrivals – not just from East Europe. The roaring demand for property in Cambridge appears to have led to an export trade in problem families.

  Evensong in Ely Cathedral was wonderful, even though the choir far outnumbered the congregants – the pleasure increased, as at King’s, by avoiding the admission charge, £8 in this case; the cash register closes before the service. I did regret not arriving in both daylight and better weather to see whether Newmarket Heath could be seen from the cathedral; the reverse is certainly true. The racing industry should look more to the diocesan seat; it has much to learn about extracting money from the public.

  Next day, feeling the need of a little mountain air, I went back south of Cambridge to reach the summit of the Gog Magog Hills. Now the sun was out, along with the first snowdrops and aconites. Without recourse to crampons, ice axe or oxygen, I reached the trig point in the middle of Wandlebury Hill Fort after an ascent from the car park which took about ten minutes. There was some question, however, as to whether this was indeed the summit; the suggestion was that the neighbouring field might have a hummock 243 feet high rather than a mere 240.

  I descended to sit near the river in Cambridgeshire’s best-known village, as generations of undergraduates have done, having cycled, punted upriver or walked across the meadows (‘the Grantchester Grind’).

  Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand

  Still guardians of that holy land?

  The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,

  The yet unacademic stream?

  Is dawn a secret shy and cold

  Anadyomene, silver-gold?

  And sunset still a golden sea

  From Haslingfield to Madingley?

  And after, ere the night is born,

  Do hares come out about the corn?

  Oh, is the water sweet and cool,

  Gentle and brown, above the pool?

  And laughs the immortal river still

  Under the mill, under the mill?

  Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

  And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

  Deep meadows yet, for to forget

  The lies, and truths, and pain? … oh! yet

  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

  And is there honey still for tea?

  Rupert Brooke wrote ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, his most famous non-war poem, not on some benighted battlefield, but in a Berlin café in the spring of 1912, three years before he died of blood poisoning en route for the Dardanelles. So what might he have seen more than a century on? Elm trees? Alas not. Chestnuts? Yes. Dawn and sunset? Not yet abolished. Hares? Unlikely. Water? Absolutely. Beauty? Some. Certainty? No. That vanished in the trenches. Quiet kind? No, there’s the M11.

  Always ten to three? On the contrary, the clock was unpoetically accurate. Honey for tea? Oh, yes: 60p for a small pot in the Orchard, the long-established café next to Brooke’s old lodgings in the Old Vicarage. Brooke is commemorated on the war memorial in the churchyard in the alphabetical egalitarianism of death, between Walter Bolton and Arthur Cutter. ‘Men of Splendid Hearts,’ reads the rubric, rather patronisingly, I thought.

  The Old Vicarage, late seventeenth century, is now in the hands of another writer, one Jeffrey Archer. Incumbents of St Andrew and St Mary tended to shun the place, but I thought it was a really attractive house, in far darker, richer brick than the Cambridgeshire norm: the sort of place one would like to believe could inspire great writing from its occupant. Whether it has worked for the present owner is a matter of opinion. What one can say is that Lord Archer has never written anything quite as elegant as the crossword clue that appeared in the Guardian, courtesy of Araucaria, the late Rev. John Graham: ‘Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3,3,8,12)’. A scholar of King’s was Araucaria. One of its most fertile minds.

  A few weeks later I returned to Whittlesey Washes on a non-foggy morning to see if they really existed. By now the flooding had spread across the road, which was closed off not just with signs but with concrete blocks strong enough to thwart a terrorist attack: the detour to Thorney is so long and frustrating that too many drivers had skirted round the original barriers and chanced the water, with unfortunate consequences.

  There was indeed an inland sea, about four feet deep across the fields. The morning was cold, breezy and sunny, and the water was rippling and glinting around the bare roadside willows, and as far as the eye could see, which this time was a long, long way. Suddenly the Fens looked as beautiful as any place on earth.

  January/February 2014

  In late February 2014, King’s College caved in and agreed to pay all staff the living wage, the pressure from public opinion and undergraduates having become unendurable. As its great alumnus J. M. Keynes once put it: ‘When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?’ In May, AstraZeneca successfully staved off a bid from the even larger American pharmaceuticals company Pfizer, which was suspected of wanting to move jobs out of Britain altogether.

  The answer to Araucaria’s conundrum is an anagram of the clue’s last four words: The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

  38. And no one to call me m’duck

  NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

  I awoke in Northamptonshire, as I had done many thousands of times before. But this time it was different. There was no birdsong from the garden. The view from the window offered not Dad’s dahlias but a flooded flat roof covered with what looked like the innards of a nuclear power station. Actually they were the necessaries for the Sol Leisure Centre: ‘The Regions [sic] Premier Leisure Complex’.

  Since I left the Barratt Maternity Home a few hundred yards down the road, an experience I do not recall, those thousands of nights – from the dummy to impending decrepitude – were nearly all spent in my parents’ various homes.

  But Mum died first, and Dad on his own was not quite so insistent on seeing children and grandchildren. Still, I was a fairly regular visitor. And even after he died, my brother and sister-in-law were just outside town, and very hospitable if I happened to be passing; any traveller round England is bound to pass Northampton quite regularly.

  Then in 2012 they moved away. Thus it was that, obliged to stay in Northampton for the first time since, I booked myself into the Ibis Hotel, handy for the station, in the midst of the regions premier leisure complex and just opposite a tattoo parlour (‘Tattoos by Dick’). I chose the Ibis because it sounded particularly horrid; it offered a kind of mortification of the flesh. It was a misjudgement as it was a perfect
ly decent hotel. Sources told me if I wanted somewhere crap, I should have stayed in the Travelodge, which has taken over the shell of what was once Northampton’s grandest hotel, the Grand.

  Anurag, Sergio and Krisztina behind the Ibis desk could not have been kinder. But far from home themselves, they could not know that I was not just an anonymous salesman or contract worker staying in an anonymous hotel in this anonymous town; that, after thirty-seven outsider’s chapters, this one was to be personal and heartfelt; that I had come home, even though there was no one to greet me. They did not welcome me with the traditional Northamptonshire endearment ‘m’duck’. And nor, all week, did anyone else.

  Not only did I have nowhere obvious to stay, there was no one even to drink with. I would have loved a game of cheese skittles – Northamptonshire’s great invention – with my mate Dave Hickey, if there was a pub left in town that had a table. But Dave had died absurdly young. And the crowd of newspapermen that used to gather in Shipman’s drinking hole had long scattered. The lovely old bar (established 1790) was still there. But it was, in the mysterious way that afflicts a struggling pub, never quite open. Outside hung a ‘For Sale’ sign, including the ominous phrase ‘suitable for renovation’.

  In 1939 George Orwell published Coming Up for Air, in which his hero, a fat, middle-aged insurance man called George Bowling, goes back to his home town, Lower Binfield. The visit was not, on the whole, a success: ‘Where was Lower Binfield?’ Bowling wailed. ‘Where was the town I used to know? It might have been anywhere. All I knew was that it was buried somewhere in the middle of that sea of bricks.’ Bowling stayed miserably in his old local, which had gone upmarket, but found he had nothing in common with anyone there; I had a perfectly nice steak in what I was advised was now Northampton’s best pub, the Wig & Pen, formerly the Black Lion.

  There was even a kind of cabaret. The woman at the next table was yelling at her husband: ‘That’s it for me now. I’m not fucking coming home. I want a divorce. I’m desperate.’ His replies were discreet and inaudible, which is how marriage break-ups used to be conducted in Northampton. Behind them, two drunken young men intermittently harassed the happy couple before being thrown out. This was the best pub in my home town, just before 9 p.m.

  At the start of the 1970s the brilliant and wayward architectural writer and broadcaster Ian Nairn came to Northampton and made a brief TV film about the Emporium Arcade, which was about to be demolished. Nairn was enchanted by the market square – reputedly Britain’s largest – and appalled by the impending fate of the Emporium, the Edwardian building that dominated its north side. He almost fought back tears as he wandered along its echoing balcony.

  As an enterprise, the arcade can never have been a roaring success. As Nairn pointed out, it never led anywhere and drew no passing trade. And, as the borough council said at the time, it was ‘a hotchpotch of small shops, many of them on the seedy side – an illogical use of a modern town centre’. ‘That’s exactly what a town centre is about,’ wailed Nairn. Despite a 10,000-signature petition, the logicians won. Down it came: Nat Bloom the tailor, Harrison’s Records, Roy Douglas Stamps and all. And the café where the reporters from the evening paper, the Chronicle & Echo – which had the building next door – would go for the mid-morning moan before the lunchtime moan in Shipman’s.

  Demolition came in 1972, just before the arrival of the Chron’s junior-most but mouthiest journalist. The mid-morning moan was moved to the coffee shop in Adnitt’s department store (aka Debenhams) and I now like to believe that I occasionally ceased whingeing about the chief reporter and subeditors to state my unflinching view that the council had made a massive strategic error.

  For the sentimentalists were not just right, but spectacularly right. Given a rear entrance and a refurb, the Emporium Arcade would have been Northampton’s central attraction: a place of boutiques and galleries and vibrant enterprise. It would have been a destination. The bog-standard chain-store shopping centre that replaced it was neither big enough nor good enough. Now, all the way from the market square to Marefair, there is almost nothing but pound shops, tattoo parlours, cheap booze stores, Polish grocers and nightclubs: and not nightclubs with tinkling pianos and Ingrid Bergman in an evening gown. Not the Golden Mile, the Dross Half-mile. A destination all right – for kids who want to get bladdered, puke and fight. In 2013 the New York Times chose it as Ground Zero for a censorious story about Britain’s binge culture.

  The end of Emporium coincided with the start of Northampton’s expansion from a county town of 100,000 to one above 200,000, a similar size to its neighbour Milton Keynes. But having lost its old countytown cosiness, it has not acquired big-city sophistication, nor even Milton Keynes’s own no-one-likes-us-we-don’t-care kind of spirit. Nor its vast and popular shopping centre. Northampton is doughnutted by vapid estates full of transient incomers who don’t know their neighbours and go to Milton Keynes to shop.

  Brian Binley, the Conservative MP for Northampton South, did his utmost to talk the place up, and listed all the things that are happening, including the demolition of the old bus station (‘the gates of hell’, some call it), known to us fogeys as the new bus station. It went up just after the Emporium Arcade went down, obscenely violating what could have been the arcade’s stunning new entrance. ‘It’s the biggest town in England,’ Binley said with a show of pride. ‘I don’t want it to be a mediocre city.’ But the truth is that this town would love to be mediocre again. Last time city status was on offer (when Chelmsford was upgraded in 2012) Northampton wasn’t even mentioned in the betting.

  Northampton is not a complete catastrophe. The Royal and Derngate, the theatre complex built on the site of the old-old bus station, is a triumph, though it would be more of one if the town itself were more attractive. The new and improbable university is a success, and says it is no. 1 in the country for graduates finding jobs: it does construction and leather technology, not philosophy or medieval poetry. The town has always had great parks. Some days the market square is still vibrant. And Tony Clarke, who was the Labour MP before losing to Binley, loves to tell the story of the old lady in town who got a Somali family as her new neighbours. ‘Oh, they’re lovely,’ she said. ‘They’re so kind and friendly, it’s like the old days.’

  But the real story of Northampton is epitomised by the fate of its newspaper. The old scruffy, smoke-filled, graffiti-ridden offices of the Chronicle & Echo where I worked are long gone. It moved into spanking-new premises: with expansion on the way, the bosses talked of upping the circulation from 50,000 to 80,000. Instead it collapsed to 15,000. The old-new offices lie empty and the remnant of the paper – now a weekly, not a daily – is housed in a terraced building that would suit a small firm of chartered accountants.

  This is of course largely to do with the collapse of local journalism; though Northampton now appears to be vying with Milton Keynes as the biggest metropolis in the English-speaking world without its own daily paper, neither may hold that title for long. It is partly to do with the ineptitude of the owners, Johnston Press. And yet there is something particularly chilling about the speed and extent of the Chronicle & Echo’s downfall. Local newspapers depend on people who care about their community. Northampton is what happens when they don’t.

  And yet good things persist. R. E. Tricker Ltd, English Shoemakers since 1829, still operates behind its russet-brick frontage just beyond the town centre, as it has done as long as anyone can remember. It is now under the control of a fifth-generation family member. The family is actually Barltrop not Tricker; the firm’s name changed in 1862 when a Barltrop married a Tricker and was shrewd enough – long before firms paid brand consultants to state the obvious – to decide which name sounded sexier.

  The current Barltrop, Nick, is known to be a shy man and managed to escape the building before I arrived. Thus I never got the chance to ask if he might be related to Mabel Barltrop of the Panacea Society next door in Bedfordshire. But his co-director Barry Jones was welcoming, and
kind enough – even as he displayed the £1,200 hand-crafted shoes that are his firm’s pride and joy – not to comment on my £39.99 made-probably-in-China-untouched-by-human-hand slip-ons.

  Northamptonshire depended on footwear at least from the time Cromwell camped in the county and divined that, contrary to cliché, an army actually marches on its feet. The industry began because the county had cows for leather, wood for tanning and rivers for transport. Now thousands of jobs have gone east, in the normal way. But a residue remains, both around Northampton and in the cluster of small towns further north on the A6. The county no longer sells shoes to the ignorant masses, but to a discerning clientele who appreciate what they are getting: a welted shoe, stitched rather than stuck together. ‘A welted shoe is designed to be resoled and heeled time after time,’ said Barry. ‘Send a pair back after thirty years and it will be made to the same specification.’

  I was briefly the Chronicle & Echo’s boot and shoe correspondent, though I learned little and remember less. So he gave me the tour: the clicking room, where the leather is cut, through closing, lasting, making, finishing and the shoe room, for the final polish. There was a lovely smell of leather, with a slight underlayer of glue. Tricker’s turn out just 1,400 pairs a week, 200 of them by hand. ‘Our biggest markets are Italy and Japan, where people have a different concept,’ said Barry. ‘They’ll spend more on their footwear because they care more. The Japanese will spend a day here trying things on and taking photographs. The same as I’d like to do at the Ferrari factory.’

  A handful of old Northamptonshire names have got big and stayed, like Barker, Church’s, John Lobb, all owned by conglomerates now. Tricker’s and Crockett & Jones fly the flag for family firms. The old single-handed really specialist shoemakers, like Albert Whiting, who made buckskin boots for professional cricketers, have nearly all died off. The mass-market stuff has gone abroad, even Doc Martens, though its current owners are reportedly moving some production back again.