by Mark Steel
At the time of the French Revolution radicals set up the Norwich Revolution Society. According to The French Revolution in England: ‘By the spring of 1793 Norwich was covered with a network of small branches, of the lower class meeting in public houses. One of their secretaries, Isaac Saint, afterwards told the Privy Council that at their meetings “they received books as loans from a middle class group that met at The Bell,* and held country meetings at which the village constable would interrupt them to say, ‘Explain this or that word or the people may be misled.’”’
This is possibly the most unlikely revolutionary scenario ever to have come about, that a Norfolk village constable, presumably sent to spy on a local meeting of seditious neighbours, was interjecting with comments like, ‘I think that’d be clearer if you said SMASH the state rather than crush the state. Just a thought, carry on.’
But at the time Norwich was the second city, the accent can’t have seemed so innocent. It would have been a dialect of authority, of importance, of confidence, whether spoken by a landowner or a rebel, as a London or a Manchester accent is now.
Over the last three centuries the attitude of Norwich’s residents towards their town must have altered to reflect its slide down the nation’s hierarchy. Like an old musician accepting that he’s unlikely to have any more hits but who still enjoys playing to a small, appreciative audience, Norwich appears content with its quirky image. Most people seem happy for it to be out of the way, up there on one side of the country, with no reason for anyone from a major city to pass through it or be aware of it until it pops up on the news because one of its MPs gets sacked or Delia Smith gets drunk, and the rest of the country thinks, ‘Oh yes, Norwich. I forgot that was still over there.’
Martin Bell and Stephen Fry support Norwich City FC, which is as it should be, whereas if Noel Gallagher or David Mellor supported them they’d have to be asked to leave and support someone else.
It’s a place enough at ease with itself that when I asked people in the town to send me their thoughts about it, they sent messages such as, ‘Norwich is the New York of East Anglia. There’s even a sit-down Greggs the bakers.’
Everyone in Norwich seems gently proud of the town’s major achievements: mustard, a radical tradition, the country’s first ever lending library, Sale of the Century and the seats at Greggs. It’s a place comfortable enough that someone there could tell me, ‘Norwich is the home of one of Britain’s only two full-time puppet theatres. Fuck knows where the other is, mind you.’
Boston
When Norwich was at number two in Britain’s important-town chart, the unlikely holder of the number four spot was Lincolnshire’s Boston. One of the In Town shows was recorded in Boston, and its most instantly striking aspect is that it’s too flat. I imagine the residents must all travel out to Mablethorpe on a Sunday to marvel at the slight incline that leads to a post office.
As you cross the steppes from Grantham or Peterborough, past miles and miles of unchanging flatness, you keep thinking, ‘I’m sure we’ve passed this bit already,’ and wonder if you’ve become trapped inside a cartoon.
Driving instructors in Boston have complained to their authority that there’s nowhere in the town to teach learners the hill start, except for one spot which they all queue up to use, as it’s the only place where a car might roll if you take the handbrake off.
Maybe the town ought to apply to host the Winter Olympics, to give the tournament some variety. Commentators would gasp, ‘What a toboggan run from the Swiss team, completing the course in three weeks and four days.’
And presumably on the days when there’s heavy snow the kids have a thrilling time, getting in their sledges, sitting there for an hour and then getting out again.
Yet Boston boasts the most magnificent homage to height, a vast church called the Stump, the tallest in Britain that isn’t a cathedral, from the top of which you can see the whole of south Lincolnshire (although you could probably do that from the top of a postbox).
H.V. Morton, in his celebrated 1927 travelogue In Search of England, described his sense of wonder at first seeing the Stump. He wrote: ‘About ten miles away I saw a curious tower standing among the fields. “That’s Boston Stump!” said a man in a cornfield.
‘“And what is Boston Stump?” I asked.
‘He said, “It’s Boston Stump, thickhead.”’
The Stump doesn’t just dominate the town, it dominates everything vaguely nearby, a massive, crumbly-looking tower that’s peered over the vicinity since the 1400s, when any peasant in a cornfield ten miles away must have felt constantly awestruck by this reminder that God and His people could see you all day long, even from a distance of a day’s journey. It would be like a Londoner today flying to New York, then looking up to notice his line manager saying, ‘I can still see you.’
When the Stump was begun in the 1300s it was expected that it would take 150 years to build, with all the vision and patience required to undertake a project that would be completed by the originators’ great-great-great-grandchildren. Maybe in 1456 the people of Boston all threw their hands in the air in exasperation and grumbled, ‘It was supposed to be finished this week. Typical bloody builders.’
One function served by the Stump is to be the obvious place in the area from which to commit suicide. It doesn’t face much competition as somewhere to jump off as a final act, so the vicar of the Stump has to keep a watch for anyone who looks as if they’re heading up the steps to dive off the top. At one point the vicar was Richard Coles, ex-member of the band the Communards. He remembers an occasion when he spotted a bedraggled soul creeping up the stairs, and asked him what had brought him to this state. The bloke said, ‘I’ve spent all morning listening to Communards records, mate.’
But the Stump reveals another side to Boston, and indeed to the universe, which is that there is no natural order. Because when Boston was chosen as the site for this monument, it was the most important port in England after London, and the fourth biggest town in the country. Its position on the River Witham, up which ships could sail to the sea and across to Holland and the centre of international trade, gave Boston an importance it must have believed would last forever. Its inhabitants must have been no more able to imagine that status evaporating than someone in Manchester now could think of a day when most people in Britain would say, ‘Manchester? I think I’ve heard of it.’
Apart from the Stump, there are other reminders of the town’s roots. The middle has retained its original medieval layout, all thin alleys and slightly wonky buildings with wooden beams. In different hands it might have become twee tourist Boston, oozing cream teas and markets selling olives stuffed with woodpecker. But instead the town is known throughout the region as being under the rule of ‘chavs’.
A website dedicated to exposing Boston as a chav stronghold runs for page after page, with such prose as: ‘You will have the pleasure of seeing many a pregnant fourteen-year-old with the obligatory poverty pack of ten Richmond fags. Nightlife revolves around Saturday nights in Eclipse. If you like cheap gold, Richmond fags, wheeling a baby in a manky pushchair with a bottle of tea stuffed in its mouth through the marketplace then Boston could be the place for you.’
It would be hard to overstate the quantity and venom of the comments on sites such as ‘Chavscum’. Those devoted to Boston alone must be the product of thousands of hours of labour, possibly a pyramid’s worth, much of it from people who write simply ‘I FUCKING HATE BOSTON CHAVS’, while others propose solutions to the problem such as, ‘Boston chavs must DIE!’, making you wonder if you’re reading one of those diaries that are discovered in someone’s bedroom after they’ve gone berserk in a bowling alley with a chainsaw.
Much of the contempt for ‘chavs’ appears to be a simple modern snobbery. Someone could behave in exactly the same way as a ‘chav’, but be deemed a colourful rakish japester if they expressed themselves like Noël Coward, sitting at a piano saying, ‘Here’s a little ditty I composed for your delectat
ion about my days in Boston:
‘I recall with some divinity
My earliest ever hump,
At fourteen I lost my virginity
Against the south wall of the Stump.’
The contempt is not for drink but cheap drink, not for fags but cheap fags. Much of the disgust for, and fear of, chavs in their Boston version revolves around Saturday nights in Eclipse, the nightclub down a medieval alley in the centre of town. ‘Oh my God, don’t go down there,’ you’re warned. So I went to Eclipse, where the second oldest person after me must have been nineteen, and I set myself some rules about not making eye contact and what to say when I was threatened.
As I reached the front of the queue to pay and get my hand stamped purple, the stubbly T-shirted doorman looked at me, slightly bewildered, slightly sympathetic, and said, ‘Are you sure?’ as if he was a counsellor at a euthanasia clinic.
‘I’m sure,’ I told him.
‘It’s banging in there, mate,’ he said, as if he was thinking, ‘Ah, this sweet old fool must be an amateur astronomer and thinks he’s coming in to see an actual eclipse.’
Inside were about two hundred teenagers, drinking cheap lager from plastic bottles. They were much politer than we ever were in the punk days. ‘Sorry, mate,’ someone said every few seconds as they accidentally barged into someone else.
‘Rewind, rewind,’ called out the spiky-haired teenage DJ in a south Lincolnshire accent, which sounds as if a bit of Yorkshire is straining but not quite managing to break through the East Anglia. Then he did that DJ trick of turning down the record and calling, ‘All right, let’s have a big shout-out from BOSTON!’ to which a few people muttered ‘Yeeugh.’ So he stopped the record altogether and yelled in exasperation, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Boston, that was fucking SHIT!’
But by two o’clock, when there was no sign of the police being called for the slightest reason, I felt I should ask for my money back.
Boston doesn’t always do itself any favours with regard to its ‘chav’ image. In the middle of the High Street there’s a shop selling electrical goods called ‘It Must Be Stolen’. On the shop front is a picture of a burglar in a stripy shirt carrying a bag.
A parallel tension in the town is between some of the people brought up in Boston, and the several thousand Poles who have come to the area to work on the farms. Even in the Indian Queen, a rock pub where indie bands play and there’s an imposing statue of the Native American Pocahontas in one corner, the charming and eloquent landlady told me, ‘The trouble with Poles is they walk in groups of four on the pavement, so you fall in the road trying to get round them.’
I said, ‘I’m sure just as many English walk in groups of four on the pavement,’ and she said, ‘Yes, but at least they do it in a language I can understand.’
Which at least is an original way to be annoyed, to snarl, ‘I don’t mind falling in a puddle, as long as it’s with the right mix of vowels and consonants, but when it’s with three or even FOUR Zs it’s time we took a stand.’
There have been mini-riots in protest at the Poles, and one area of the town, called Fenside, elected a British National Party councillor. The vicar of the Stump, as he was showing me round the tiny walkway at the summit of his church, told me with splendid liberal vicarness, ‘If only they could see that the wealth that created this city, and indeed funded this very Stump, was provided by gentlemen of the Hanseatic League, made up of thirteenth-century traders from the very Eastern European countries they’re now blaming for taking our wealth.’
But the hostility may not be as overwhelming as it can appear. The Polish bars where you sit round chunky wooden tables drinking chunky bottles of beer called something like Gryzdnyzck are packed with a mix of Polish and Lincolnshire-raised teenagers. And on the farms, the experience of spending twelve hours a day picking Brussels sprouts together is bound to create a certain camaraderie, no matter what language someone walks in a group of four with.
I spent a morning picking these sprouts, and what I learned above all was that there are bloody millions of sprouts. Normally with manual work, you can see your progress. You look round after an hour and think, ‘I’ve moved that amount, and there’s that much left to do. I’m getting there.’ But on a sprout farm you pick all the sprouts off about fifty plants, look around to survey your achievement, and beyond the pathetic insignificant patch you’ve picked are Brussels sprouts in all directions for miles and miles and millions of miles, way beyond the horizon stretching into infinite space, so you feel as if you’re in a story from ancient Greece about a man who defied the gods and was condemned to pick Brussels sprouts for all eternity, like Sisyphus who was ordered to spend forever pushing a boulder up a hill and watching it roll back down again, except at least he had the variety of seeing a hill, the jammy bastard.
The picking session was broken up a bit by a conversation I’ll recount word for word, between the farm owner and one picker:
‘Hello, Ted. Are you all right? Haven’t seen you for a while.’
‘No. I had a heart attack.’
‘Oo er. So, are you all right now?’
‘No. The doctor said I had to cut down on my fry-ups.’
‘And have you stopped smoking as well?’
‘Well, I did, but now the bloomin’ doctor’s said I’ve got to stop again.’
In the packing plant I met Sandhra, whose job is to weigh the sprouts so that the same amount goes into each box. She’s so skilled in this art that she could probably use it to get to the semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent. ‘I’ve been working here twelve years,’ she told me, ‘and I love sprouts. I write poems about them. Would you like to hear one?’
She agreed to come to the radio recording the following evening and read out a sprout poem. Then she introduced me to Alex, a Pole in his twenties who worked alongside her, and he agreed to come to the show and say a bit about being Polish in Boston.
During the recording I introduced Sandhra the sprout bard, and she waved her arms manically like a contestant trying to appear wild and crazy on a game show, and yelled, ‘HERE I AM!’ Then, holding a brown envelope on which she’d written her poem, she clambered onto the stage, yelled, ‘I LOVE SPROUTS!’ fell over while grabbing the microphone, causing a screeching moment of feedback followed by an alarming dull clump, and said, ‘I’ve had a bit to drink.’
For the next five minutes I tried coaxing her back to her seat, with the inadequacy of someone who’s had no training trying to persuade a paranoid schizophrenic to put down an axe, and the audience wept with unsympathetic laughter as she made a series of attempts to recite her poem. The only time any sounds emerged that could realistically be categorised as words was when she said, ‘Sprouts make you poo.’
So I introduced Alex, with a ‘Follow that.’ And Alex stared back at me. I tried to introduce him again, more slowly, aware that he may have been overawed or be having trouble with the language. Then he stood up and screamed, ‘I am from POLAND!’, and it became clear he’d achieved the impressive feat of being even more drunk than Sandhra.
‘What do you like most about Boston?’ I asked, pathetically.
‘I love SANDHRA!’ he yelled. ‘I LOVE her!’
‘He don’t mean like that. I’m married,’ said Sandhra, rediscovering her ability to speak.
In a way it was a beautiful example of friendship across the cultures, of potentially diverse ethnic groups finding more to unite them than divide them, and as such should be celebrated as a homage to the Hanseatic League.
As well as its economic importance in the fourteenth century, Boston became one of the world’s most important towns in the seventeenth century, as a centre of the rise of Puritanism. The radicalism of the Puritans was their insistence that rather than inhabit the earth in a hierarchy ordained by God, all men were equal before Him. This idea found an audience amongst the poor of Boston.
A local aristocratic family, the Penns, complained that ‘no gentlemen, none but mean persons’ were Purita
ns. A landowner agreed that most poachers were Puritans, because ‘it’s as if they wish no King to command them’.
The Church needed preachers, and the most enthusiastic people applying for the job were sympathetic to the Puritans. In 1612 the new vicar appointed to Boston was the Puritan John Cotton.
Cotton was called before the Church courts for preaching ‘non-conformist’ ideas, but he was so popular they didn’t dare sack him, and hundreds of Puritans came to Boston, attracted by him. The King and the heads of the Church must have been furious. The man preaching every day in the biggest church in Britain was someone opposed to their very existence, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. It must have been as if the government today suddenly realised that the BBC weather reports were being read every night by George Galloway, who stood there going, ‘Now, let me be abundantly clear. The ongoing precipitation and relentless cascading of fluids from the heavens remains as inevitable as the obsequious lickspittle bleatings of Mr Cameron before the forces of murderous, rapacious imperialism. Now here’s Alison with tomorrow’s forecast.’
Eventually the royal family and the Church suspended anti-establishment preachers, and Cotton was sacked, ‘upon special complaint to the King’, for not kneeling during communion. It was around this time some Puritans decided on a change of tactics, which was to set up a new country in America. Between 1620 and 1640 about a fifth of Boston’s population, including John Cotton, sailed to Massachusetts Bay, where they set up a new community which they called, imaginatively, Boston. One of the first batch to arrive was John Winthrop, who announced, ‘We have been divinely ordained to build in New England a city upon a hill.’
Maybe all they really wanted was to live somewhere with a bit of a slope, where they could have their own driving lessons.