by Mark Steel
And the spot where Tomas lay slain
They still call today
The Tomas O’Hara car accessory shop.
But since the ceasefire the festival has become an event involving glossy pamphlets and literary figures, tickets booked through agencies and chicken tikka wraps in the dressing room. To emphasise the point, the patron of the festival is Danny Morrison, a leading member of Sinn Féin, believed by many to have once held a senior position in the IRA. At one level you have to assume this means he gets his way, and that if there’s an argument on the committee it ends with Danny lowering his voice and saying quietly, ‘I say we put on The Taming of the Shrew,’ and the decision is agreed.
I stayed with a Protestant friend in East Belfast, someone with no allegiance to Unionism, who told me she’d never been to Andersonstown, and wasn’t sure of the way, pointing vaguely and saying, ‘I think it’s over there somewhere,’ as if she was guessing the direction to Libya.
So I booked a taxi, and the driver said, ‘Are you sure you want Andersonstown?’ with such astonishment I wondered if I’d said ‘Atlantis’ by mistake.
The Andersonstown Sports Centre, it turned out, hadn’t been designed with comedy shows in mind. It’s one of the most unsuitable venues possible, slightly worse than a bottling plant, and a long way behind a hospital’s stroke unit. The sound bounces and echoes across the volleyball courts like Tannoy announcements in a supermarket, and there was a constant chatter of people squeezing past tables to queue at the makeshift bar. On this night the queue for drinks consistently hovered at around a hundred people, and groups sat around tables getting drunker and louder as a variety of problems meant that the time I was due on got later and later. Eventually the room was awash with a tsunami of chatter that was so slurred, by the time most words had ended their beginnings had already bounced back off the wall to where they started.
As the compère began to introduce me, three hours after most people had arrived, around two hundred people sat in the middle of the room, looking as if they were waiting for me to start, while the other eight hundred shouted, ‘Hey, Kieran, they’ve run out o’ fucken’ Grolsch’ across the tables, threw peanuts at each other, and shrieked with laughter as they fell over, as if they were in a Hollywood depiction of eighteenth-century sailors on a night in a tavern.
I went on stage and surveyed this splendid testimony to disorder, aware that I might as well try to do a show to a flock of geese. A few of them shouted, ‘Fuck off you fucking Brit.’ I battled, pointlessly, for maybe three or four interminable minutes, while a small core of supporters yelled at the rest to keep quiet, and the rest made it clear that they wouldn’t and probably couldn’t. Maybe, I pondered, the two groups would start fighting, it would spill out onto the street, the troops would be called back, and this comedy show would result in the breakdown of the ceasefire. For the next hundred years rival factions would fire at each other and paint murals of me sloping off the stage. Then historians of the future would debate why it was that the Northern Ireland peace process appeared to break down at a comedy night in Andersonstown.
Although some of the Protestants of the town might have advised me otherwise, I surrendered. I sloped away, and went backstage to collect my things. As I left the dressing room I was greeted by someone I vaguely recognised. ‘Mark,’ he said with a ripe Belfast baritone, ‘I’m Danny Morrison, trustee of the festival, and I can’t apologise enough for what went on tonight.’
‘It’s fine, Danny,’ I said.
‘It’s not fine,’ he argued, adding, ‘Mark, I’d like to speak to you about what happened there. Will you come into this room with me for just five minutes.’
It was hard not to smile at the thought that some people in the past might have been nervous if Danny had made a similar request.
We went in the room, and Danny said he was disgusted by the behaviour of the audience, who had no discipline and were ‘racist, there’s no other word for it – racist against you for being British’.
‘Maybe a few of them were,’ I said, ‘but I think mostly they were just drunk.’ But secretly I thought, ‘Of all the people asked to follow Danny Morrison into a room, I bet this is the only time the reason’s been to receive an apology for the Irish being anti-British.’
Politely, with great charm, Danny offered to organise a taxi to take me back, and to stay with me in the car park until it came, so I didn’t face any more revelry from the crowd, who were now stumbling outside.
‘Where are you going?’ said the taxi driver, incredulous that anyone from Andersonstown could possibly suggest the journey to Protestant East Belfast. He puffed and said ‘Jesus’ a few times, and tried to figure out which way was east.
But eventually I got back, and relayed the events of the night to my host, who just said, ‘Oh dear, that’s a bad night, when the safest option is to stand alone in a car park with a murderer.’*
Colchester
Surely the most gloriously undervalued resident in most towns is the local historian. There can’t be a task in the community that brings less of a boost to the ego than compiling books with titles such as Tring Between the Wars or When Andover had Three Fishmongers. Most authors can at least dream that their book will become a national success, but you’d have to be very optimistic to ring up the Newcastle branch of Waterstone’s and ask how many copies they’d sold of Guildford: The Harold Macmillan Years.
Now most towns have a historical society that puts articles on a website. Of these my favourite so far is the one for Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, which has a series of links for each century. I clicked on the first, for the sixteenth century, and it said, ‘Nothing of note happened in Wellingborough in the sixteenth century.’
The care and detail displayed in history society pamphlets is dazzling. They list everyone in the town who fought in the war, or every film shown at the old Empire Cinema. If you wanted to play a cruel trick you could send a local historian a letter claiming it was Ted Billinghurst and not his brother Arthur who fought at El Alamein, as stated in Chapter 9, and he’d spend the rest of his life in the town hall’s basement checking every record in the filing cabinets until he was satisfied he was right.
Where this thoroughness becomes a problem is when it’s applied to local events that were shaped by great historical issues. On such occasions the big picture can be lost in the swamp of fine detail. For example, ‘The Battle of Evesham’ covers events in the thirteenth century, when Henry III decided to reverse the principle of the Magna Carta, which established the right of barons to prevent the monarch ruling entirely as he pleased. The nobles formed an army and captured the King, and the Battle of Evesham was the royal court’s attempt to rescue him.
But the account is so clogged up in detail that it ignores how amazing it is that the King was taken hostage, and instead concentrates on the debate about the route taken by each army. So we’re given the splendid sentence, ‘I accept Carpenter’s theory, that the Royalist army marched along the line of the current B4084.’ This is followed with, ‘After the fork at Fladbury, Edward’s troops may have quit the line of the B4084 and marched north to cut the Alcester Road just short of Norton.’
Maybe when the armies arrived the commanders met before the battle and went, ‘Next time try coming off the B4084 to Littleworth, cut through Drakes Broughton and take the bypass at Besford Bridge, which will cut out the bottleneck at Pershore.’ Then whoever survived the battle could take the A3657689B through Diddlebury, which is slightly longer but scenic, and they could stop off at the Little Chef.
What the local details often show is that it’s rare for one area to buck a national trend in history. So most accounts of British towns over the last 2,000 years tell a broadly similar story, with the same critical turning points. The Romans came, built stuff and left; the Normans swiped the land; Henry VIII sold off the monasteries; the town was besieged in the Civil War; around 1800 it became industrial; it was bombed in the Blitz; and the Arndale Centre was opened
in 1979.
Among the most important towns in the history of Britain is Colchester. In fact, it claims to be the first town in the history of Britain, as the Romans established a headquarters there in the first century AD, with a grid of streets, a city council and a temple. It had a population of 2,000, and they called the place Camulodunum. Most impressively, the Romans brought what everyone in the town insists were the first elephants to visit Britain.
The Celtic tribe that ruled the area before was the Iceni. The Romans used them to police the area, which meant the Iceni were well armed. But when Nero became Roman Emperor in AD 54 he changed policy, decided the Iceni were now the enemy (does any of this sound familiar?) and had their land confiscated, their leader Boudica whipped, and her daughters raped. At which point she raised an army of 120,000, took them to Camulodunum and burned the place to the ground. But the main point is she took her chariot up the A12 as far as Kelvedon, and joined up with the A120 at Marks Tey to avoid the roadworks on the B1256 from Braintree.
These days, the town seems unsure how to treat Boudica. On the one hand she’s a celebrity, so at every parade there’s someone dressed as her, and the council vans have a picture of her on the side, which must make Colchester the only town whose council’s symbol is someone who burned the place to a cinder. But she isn’t seen universally as a heroine. When a newborn baby was on the front page of the Colchester Gazette for being named Boudica, a series of angry letters was sent in, such as one that went: ‘I am disgusted a baby has been named after a criminal who murdered people. A pox on her memory.’ This suggests that there may still be a Roman contingent in the town, that never quite left, and dreams of taking over again one day.
You sense the difficulty of coming to terms with such an ancient past in the book Colchester: A History, which ends its Roman section with: ‘After Claudius and Boudica, Colchester would never be so important again.’ It must be awkward to accept that your finest moment was 2,000 years ago, and that now you’re just a place on the way to Ipswich. Maybe it’s like being a former child star who now works in a pet shop, and occasionally someone says, ‘Didn’t you used to be that bloke on Opportunity Knocks?’
But Colchester was to be an important town again, only 1,600 years later. As the cloth trade grew in the area, it became the home of hundreds of self-employed craftsmen and merchants, exactly the types who followed the radical Protestant ideas current at the time. In the Civil War a Royalist army captured the town, and Cromwell’s men surrounded them in a siege that became a major episode in the late stage of the war. The Royalists had a huge round cannon at the top of a wall by St Mary’s church, which was blown up by Cromwell’s troops, who made a rhyme about the direct hit. They named the cannon Humpty Dumpty, and referred to its fall from a wall.
That’s the bit of history that everyone in the town knows. Such is the obsession with celebrity being attached to your town, the fact that’s most remembered about the Civil War in Colchester is that it connected them with a celebrity nursery-rhyme character. But the town also has a claim on ‘Old King Cole’, who was a King of Colchester in the third century, and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, which was written in a chapel there in the 1800s. It’s as if the place is like a record label churning out hits, but in the difficult and competitive area of nursery rhymes.
Today Colchester is a classic spot for television crews to film drunk teenagers at the weekend. It may have given a false impression, but it’s the only place I’ve ever seen a couple jacking up heroin in the High Street, which I suppose is a junky version of a romantic morning in bed with coffee and croissants.
Colchester seemed to struggle with its 2,000-year slide from fame. For example, there’s an account of how elections were conducted in 1892 in the book Colchester Voices. Apparently, ‘At election time the Liberal supporters would congregate down the bottom of the High Street, and the Conservatives at the top of North Hill. Then someone would blow a whistle and they’d start to march towards each other. I used to be there and got involved all right, pushing and kicking. They were the good old days. All the roughs of the town who wanted a fight joined in, about fifty on each side and the police didn’t mind as long as there was no damage to property.’ Immediately afterwards there was probably an excited reporter from Sky yelling, ‘Our polls show the Conservatives won the fight, breaking sixteen ribs to the Liberals’ nine. Let’s see if we can hear what Mr Gladstone has to say about that.’
But at the heart of the town there’s a sense that something of note must have happened here before. The town centre is yet another town centre, but the dual carriageway along the side passes an old stone wall, the sort that would cause my mum to say, ‘Oo, that place has got a lot of history.’ There’s a huge water tower and odd bits of stone emerging from multi-storey car parks, giving rise to an expectation that everyone from Colchester must be brought up with some sense of their town’s distinct place in history.
So when I performed at the theatre there, I wondered if there should be a more historical angle to the show than usual. And it might have gone that way, except that I mentioned the zoo, in which, it’s claimed, there’s a creature that’s a cross between a zebra and a donkey, called a zedonk. I said that this seemed a handy myth with which to attract people to the zoo. I’d have got away lighter if I’d told them I spat on their gods and their mothers were whores.
The whole audience seemed to shout back, ‘It’s TROOOOO!’ so I asked if anyone had seen this thing. ‘YEEEEEEEES!’ they all screamed. I felt as if I’d been sent to investigate reports from some remote part of the world about a man-eating yeti. ‘When you saw this stripy donkey, or “zedonk”,’ I said, ‘did the stripes tend to wash off in the rain? Did anyone notice used felt-tip pins lying nearby?’
The howls that this was an authentic zedonk became shrieks, and the audience seemed to elect someone to tell me calmly that this beast exists and is in their zoo. Although he was measured in his description I did feel he was about to finish, ‘So ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY ZEDONK!’ and everyone in the room would lie on the floor crying ‘Ee-aw!’
For a moment I couldn’t make up my mind. They’d seemed a rational bunch, but so do people who tell you they’ve been taken for a ride in a flying saucer, up to the point they tell you they’ve been taken for a ride in a flying saucer. I agreed to keep an open mind, but every couple of minutes from then on someone would lose control and shout, ‘There IS a zedonk!’ and someone else would give their account of meeting the bloody thing.
Every time I found myself becoming convinced, something would cast doubt. One person might announce that it died last year, then another would say it was still alive, and I’d wonder if someone was about to say, ‘Oh, and something else – it flies and it holds up the sun.’ While all the talk of Romans and Cromwell, of Boudica and weavers and sieges had largely slipped by, this issue seemed to cause uproar.
When I got home I discovered that Colchester Zoo has been noted, by various reputable institutions, for its work in breeding zebra/donkey hybrids. Darwin himself commented at length on the issue of zebras mating with donkeys, so I had to accept I’d been wrong, and be thankful Darwin hadn’t been in the audience, or I’d have had him screaming at me as well.
There’s a limit to how much impact all this history can have on a place which still exists as a town of 100,000 people. You can’t expect that every time your neighbour sees you they’ll say, ‘Well, to think this was where Boudica took her revenge on the Romans all those years ago. Anyway, could you feed my fish while I’m away at the weekend?’ Or that every time someone buys a lightbulb they say, ‘Boudica never had one of these.’
I expect that in Carthage there are people who say the town is of great importance, because it’s the only place for miles where you can get a decent set of trainers, and on Krakatoa people say, ‘We’ve had all sorts happen here. One year the vicar ran off with a choirboy.’
I wonder what Boudica would have thought, as she looked across at her legions, prepared to di
e for the right to live and worship in liberty as they destroyed the symbols of the occupying Roman forces, if she’d known that one day, whatever the outcome, the people of this land would be united in heartfelt passion at the questioning of a fucking zedonk.
Exeter
If ever you fancy an in-depth account of the history of Exeter, I recommend the book I used for this study, A Child’s History of Exeter. Because it was from this book I learned that in the tenth century Exeter was invaded three times by the Danes, and apparently the third time this happened, ‘The people of Exeter said, “Oh no, not the Danes again, surely!”’
It’s possible they went even further and added, ‘Can’t we be raped and pillaged by someone different?’ But that’s just guesswork, so it wouldn’t be right to include it in a historical document.
Historians of the future might conclude that in the twentieth century Exeter was lucky to be invaded in a different way. Because a study found it was more overrun by chain stores than any other, making it the ‘clone-town capital’ of Britain. It was given this title by the committee that analyses Britain’s towns, judging their cloneness by how many of the shops in their centres are chain stores.
At first this seems unexpected, because with the prejudice that comes from living in a big city, you can’t help imagining that in the centre of a rural town in Devon the Asda is just the farmer’s son selling onions out the back of his truck. I’m often caught out this way. I was in Shrewsbury one evening, wandering in a park by the banks of the River Severn near the Charles Darwin Shopping Centre, contemplating the ducks and pondering how peaceful Shropshire is compared to South London, when a teenage couple, sixteen at the oldest, emerged from under a bush beside me. The lad made a groan as if he was off his head on birdseed and Benylin, and the girl yelled in a perfect rural accent, ‘How d’you expect me to say I love you when you fuckin’ look like that, you fuckin’ dick?’ And she stomped off over the quaint footbridge as geese gently flapped in formation above her.