Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  But some people will work tirelessly to fit the stereotype. To sight the snarling Londoner the best method is to ride through the capital on a pushbike. The first time you hear someone lean out of a window and screech, ‘Get out of my way, you fucking cunt!’ you might be slightly peeved. But then it becomes fascinating. Sometimes their rage is so overwhelming you’re captivated by the veins pumping out of their neck, and it seems they’re physically unable to reach the end of the word, so they yell, ‘Cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu’ until you’ve turned right and into the next street never knowing whether they got as far as ‘nt’, or if they had to go to the doctors, still growling ‘u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u’ like a stuck CD until they’re given an injection.

  One morning, on the north side of Vauxhall Bridge, I pulled up at the lights next to a gargantuan lorry. One of the essential rules of cycling in London is, when you’re at traffic lights, to make eye contact with the motorist behind you, to be certain they’ve seen you, especially if they’re driving a gargantuan lorry. Nearly always the motorist smiles or waves or acknowledges you in some innocuous way, but this time the driver wound down the window and snarled as if gravel was swilling round his voicebox, with every consonant emphasised for maximum snappiness, ‘What’s your fucking problem?’

  ‘I’m just making sure you’ve seen me, mate,’ I said, being slightly dishonest with the word ‘mate’. And then he spread his frame and breathed in, as if preparing for a roar like Godzilla, and yelled, ‘I pay road tax. You pay fuck off.’ Just imagine the anguish rolling around in this driver’s head at that moment. Presumably he was thinking, ‘Here is the ideal opportunity for me to convey my thoughts on the iniquities of our road-funding system, whereby he is considered exempt from contributions in spite of using the roads as much as me, albeit on two wheels as opposed to my 184, and that, in my view, is inconsistent and must be redressed. But at the same time, I can’t wait to tell him to fuck off. Oh no, now I’ve combined the two, and it’s come out grammatically incoherent.’

  On the other hand, to spot a swarm of neighbourly northerners chatting to each other on pavements you should try Horwich, a couple of hills from Wigan and four miles west of Bolton, at the foot of the South Pennines. It’s a town of about 23,000 that grew around a railway works, and since that shut down everyone seems to spend all day chatting. I became familiar with Horwich from 2007, when I first met my wife.* That meant I got to know the neighbours, which means everyone, and join them in midstreet chats. One day a woman called Betty tried to stop me for a chat while I was going for a run. ‘Oh, hello love. How you getting on? Only, I’ve been meaning to ask you –’ she said, as she leaned on her shopping trolley while I jogged by in my shorts.

  As I called out, ‘I’m going for a run at the moment, Betty,’ I felt as if I’d committed a dreadful crime, as the etiquette here is always to stop and chat, even if you’re fleeing for your life from a maniac with an axe. Even then you’d probably be all right, because the maniac would have to stop and chat as well, until after forty minutes he’d be told, ‘Anyway, love, I can see you’re busy so I shan’t keep you,’ and all being well you’d both set off again at the same time to keep the chase fair.

  In another forlorn attempt to be physically active I went for a swim at the leisure centre, and in an inept moment I veered to one side and brought my foot down and across those plastic baubles used to divide the pool into lanes. It was enough to cause a stifled yelp and make me turn round to see what damage I’d done. I could see the foot was cut, and little streams of blood were starting to create mesmerising shapes. At that point a woman swimming towards me in the next lane stopped and said, ‘Oo, hello, oh, you don’t know me, love, but I’ve seen you on TV on, oo, what was that programme, anyway I said to my husband I’ve seen you round Horwich, I said to him, “I’m sure that’s Mark Steel I saw popping into the grocers on Winter Hey Lane.”’

  By now I was a bit giddy, and the blood was getting a deeper shade, with some of it drifting her way. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said, adding, ‘I’ve hurt my foot.’ She looked directly at the line of blood emanating from between my toes, which was by now forming clotted patches and fascinating patterns in the water like in a Greenpeace film about whales being harpooned, and said, ‘So have you got family round this way, love?’

  To anyone used to London, the instinct of strangers to talk and help is disconcerting at first. Someone you’ve never met smiles and says hello, and your first thought is, ‘What you after?’

  But after a few months you relax and start to say hello back. This is essential in Horwich, as the town appears to be set in 1957. For example, it takes an hour to buy three sausages from Arthur the butcher, as he’ll go through an itinerary of discussion points that starts with local gossip, moves on to regional issues, international affairs and sport, and feels as if it should end with a traffic report, a weather forecast and a brief look at tomorrow’s papers. Arthur is what Horwich has instead of the internet.

  Or you can enter the nostalgic world of the Salad Bowl grocers, and wait while the customer in front takes twenty-five minutes to buy a cluster of spring onions while describing the pain he has at night in his gall bladder. Then you make your request for, let’s say, two pounds of carrots, and Ted will slowly select a few, amble the three steps to the old metal scales, balance them against the round weights on the other side, take one out and replace it with a slightly shorter one to make it exact, then put them in a brown paper bag and twirl it round and write ‘32’ or whatever the price is on a separate paper bag with a biro. If anyone ran in screaming, ‘Oh my God, please help me, I’ve been stung by a rare insect and the only cure is to rub the wound with three pounds of cooking apples immediately or I’ll die,’ he’d say, ‘Right. Cooking apples, you say. Well, we’ve got some Bramleys just in, so I’ll have a look for some that are just ripe for you. Now hang on, I’ll get Alf’s beetroot ready first, he’s always in for his beetroot on a Tuesday.’

  The fish and chip shop shuts at six o’ clock, exactly the time you’re most likely to want to buy fish and chips, and the most cosmopolitan the town ever seemed was when I heard a group of elderly Spaniards at the table next to me in the café. But after about twenty minutes they all sighed at the same time, then one said, ‘Oo, I did enjoy that,’ and it turned out it was the Horwich pensioners’ Spanish-speaking club. It can seem you’re jammed between two time zones, caught in a space pocket where the pubs have Sky Sports but the Prime Minister is Harold Macmillan.

  Some people not only love all this, they can’t imagine being anywhere else. One man in his fifties told me he’d turned down a job he’d have loved when he was thirty, because ‘It meant going to London, and I knew I’d get homesick for Horwich, ’cos I spent a few weeks in Bolton once, and I got homesick for Horwich there.’

  Horwich people may have this attitude because of, apart from their innate eagerness to chat, the terrain beyond the edge of the town. This leads on to the Pennines, past stone cottages and something that calls itself a hotel for dogs, over stiles and fields where foals are born, past brooks and the sort of ruined follies that kids had adventures in on TV programmes shown on Sunday afternoons in the 1960s. In the other direction, at the opposite end of town is Middlebrook, the retail park attached to the Reebok Stadium, which is Bolton Wanderers’ ground. It dominates the view from the hills around, looking like a giant white upside-down bug that can’t get itself the right way up. Middlebrook boasts a Subway and a Nando’s, a multiplex cinema and a bowling alley, and is described by Eileen in the Bolton News promotional video for the town as ‘a place that’s absolutely marvellous for shops’, while the camera lingers on a branch of Carpet Right.

  It may be convenient, but it’s hard to see how anyone could honestly believe that Middlebrook is ‘marvellous’, because it’s hauntingly identical to every other retail park anywhere. Maybe there are people in Horwich who feel genuinely proud of Middlebrook, as they think it’s the only place like it. One day they’ll drive past the o
ne in Darlington and start screaming, like someone in a science fiction film who comes face to face with another version of themselves in a parallel cosmos. Regarding Middlebrook as somehow special makes no more sense than saying, ‘I had a wonderful drink round at Bob and Mary’s last night. It came in a tin and was called Coca-Cola. I must ask them for the recipe.’

  Middlebrook starts with a huge car park with sections divided by pristine shrubs. Your first thought as you arrive is to remember that you’ve parked by the fourth bush along, five spindly recently planted trees down, in line with the ‘i’ of Pizza Hut. From then on your visit will be almost entirely predictable. You can’t wander down a side street or try a different route from last week, unless you force yourself to get to Dixons by walking past Dixons, then up to the fifth bed in Dreams and back again. If you bump into someone you know, you can’t nip anywhere for a chat unless you say, ‘Fancy popping into Comet? You can tell me about your new job by the tumble dryers.’

  Middlebrook must offer something, or no one would go there, and it may be that some teenagers hang about the place as it’s modern and hip-hop thumps from some of the shops (which doesn’t appear to be company policy at the Salad Bowl). The cinema might be charmless but it does show films, and there’s nowhere else in the town that does. Even if there was a cinema in the town it would show Singing in the Rain every day and shut just as the film was about to start.

  Horwich does have pubs, but most of them are bewilderingly gloomy. You can sit in them on a bright summer’s day by a huge window, and everything still seems hazy and grey, and in the Pheasant Plucker I’m sure it sometimes drizzles on the inside.

  Most nights, by nine o’ clock the two main streets of the town are empty. I’ve heard teenagers discuss whether to go to ‘Nitebar’ in such a way that you think it must be a room under a railway arch where they play Nick Cave and Gorillaz and it never shuts before 2.30 and there’s always a thin bloke called Zippo in the corner available to sell you grass in the toilet and the walls smell of mould, and it’s claimed the Happy Mondays started there. But it turns out that it’s the burger bar that stays open until eleven. Even so, at night as you glance up the deserted street, the fact this place has a yellow light that’s on makes it seem like the wild untameable frontier. If the shoe shop put a blue light on at night, before long it would become a rival to Nitebar, with kids insisting the place was crazy and cool as you could see the sandals through the window right up to midnight.

  One way of solving the problem of living in a place short on thrills is to start a gang. In the 1980s a group called the Horwich Casuals was formed, that boasted it ‘ruled the North-West’. The fascist group Combat 18 also set up a mini battalion in the area, and it was possibly this group that led to a surreal twist in Horwich’s history.

  In 2005 the Loyalist ex-paramilitary ‘Mad Dog’ Johnny Adair, leader of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, was involved in an internal squabble within his group in Belfast which had resulted in several deaths. So he did what anyone would do in that situation: he left Northern Ireland and went to live in Horwich.

  Sometimes he must have popped into the Salad Bowl, where presumably he was told, ‘We’ve got some lovely cucumber just in, Mad Dog,’ and people would stop him in the street and say, ‘Hello, Mad Dog, love. I’m glad to have caught you. I’ve been having trouble with them blooming slugs gnawing at my runner beans. Can I pop round, when you’ve got a minute, to borrow your Heckler & Koch semi-automatic self-loading pistol to get rid of the little perishers?’

  If the local parish council had any guts, as soon as Adair arrived they’d have declared the town independent of the United Kingdom, and applied to become a county in the Republic of Ireland, but as they rejected that strategy he lived there until his son was locked up for drug dealing, and split up with his wife in a manner not usually recommended by Relate, having an all-out fight with her in the children’s park, before heading for Scotland.

  Here then is a town which seems to have maintained its sense of individuality and personal chattiness, but it’s not appreciated by anyone with a spark of youth, as they go mad for a bit and then leave. Yet there’s no fundamental reason why the town couldn’t include a club or a bar in which there might be a band or DJs or something that might attract a crowd more in search of excitement than the Salad Bowl’s target audience.

  There’s no intrinsic reason why there couldn’t be a cinema, or a café with posters for last year’s Reading Festival on its wall and a screen showing MTV and that stayed open until eleven, or even later. But such a place can’t emerge within the retail park, because nothing is allowed in unless it’s part of a chain. There might be a Revolution bar, with a menu designed in a head office, selling onion rings designed in Basingstoke, but no one could set up a venue with an individual local spirit, any more than you could ask the Pentagon if you could hire out a room to set up a quirky little local army of your own.

  But the presence of a retail park also makes it harder to set up a shop or venue within the town. Because it divides a town into two distinct areas: one where people sleep and stay indoors, and the other, a drive away, where you shop and go bowling.

  But there must be some enthusiasm for maintaining a distinct Horwich spirit, because the giant Tesco and the wonderful Carpet Right haven’t destroyed the 1957 town centre. Maybe that’s due in part to the annual walk to Rivington Pike, the highest point in the North-West. Every Good Friday the whole town, at some point in the day, undertakes the walk of around three miles, over a series of fields and up a steep grassy slope, followed by a rocky clamber to the summit, to a stone hut called the Pike, and then back again. And everyone does it, there being no question that they wouldn’t, for no reason that anyone can recall.

  No one asks if you’re going up, only if you’ve been up yet. To say you weren’t going would be as if someone asked you, the week after a relative had died, if you’d had the funeral yet, and you said, ‘No, we’re not bothering. We thought we’d spend the time decorating the bathroom instead.’

  So you stroll up amongst the stream of walkers headed in each direction, some with dogs or pushchairs, and you tell yourself that whatever people have said you’ve obviously misunderstood, because there must be some reason they’re all doing this, like at the top there’s an office open one day a year where you have to register as a resident or you’re driven out by a section of the Mafia that got lost and lives in Horwich, or there’s a sacrifice to the god of idle chatter or something. And lots of people you’ve never met say hello, then you pass a mini fairground perched on a slope, as if anyone’s likely to say, ‘This pointless walk is wearing me out – I’ll take the weight off my feet for five minutes by spinning violently round on a waltzer before carrying on.’

  Then you make your final approach, still wondering whether there’s a little surprise no one’s told you about, so you’ll get to the top and find the Dalai Lama there, who signs his name on your buttock. But you arrive, stop for a moment, and then come back again. Once you’re back, when people ask if you’ve been up the Pike yet you say, ‘Oh yes,’ slightly smug, as if to say, ‘Why, haven’t you been yet, you lazy fucker?’ Or maybe that’s just if you’re from London.

  No one’s exactly sure how this custom started, but the reason it’s maintained with such enthusiasm might be due to the events of 1896. That year the Ainsworths, who owned a bleaching mill, decided to close the gates leading to nearby Winter Hill, which was on their land. Richard Henry Ainsworth declared, ‘We have heard too much of people’s rights and too little of the rights of the landowner.’ Because the big problem in 1896 was that political correctness had gone mad.

  This wasn’t his first campaign: he’d also led the opposition to the opening of Bolton’s library on Sundays. Now he was concerned about his new shooting hut, built so he could take lunch with his guests during a hunt. The hut was near the path up the hill, so he closed it off. A local socialist group responded by placing an advert in the Bolton Journal announcing that there w
ould be a march across this land to defy the ban on the following Sunday.

  Ten thousand people turned up, marching past the bleach works and heading for the new wooden gate. According to the Bolton Chronicle, ‘Amid the lusty shouting the gate was attacked by powerful hands, and it was said a saw was brought into requisition.’ A gamekeeper attacked the marchers with a stick, so he was ducked in a stream, and the marchers tore down the signs warning people not to trespass.

  According to one account, ‘The events of Sunday were virtually the sole topic of conversation in Bolton pubs, mills and factories.’ The next week 12,000 people turned up, and the police had to let them pass. Thirty-two of the marchers were arrested, which led to campaigns for their defence, but the right to walk across Winter Hill was established again, and the tradition of the whole town marching up to the Pike on Good Friday must have seemed more poignant after that, especially as some of those 12,000 are probably still up there, having stopped for a chat with someone coming the other way, until one day they’ll say, ‘Oo, my word, love, look at the time, it’s over a century we’ve been stood here nattering, don’t seem like it, do it? They’ll ’ave invented flying machines an’ all sorts, I shouldn’t wonder. Now I’ve just got to nip into Salad Bowl for me marrow and I’m done.’

  London

  The city in Britain that’s hardest to identify with must be London. There’s no major sports team called London, as there is in Barcelona or Rome or the big cities of America. No one ever shouts ‘Come on London!’, and I suspect whoever wrote the song ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’ was from Dundee, because it’s rare for anyone to be proud of being a Londoner. They might be proud of being from the East End or Camden or Deptford or Fulham, but not London.