Adventures on the High Teas Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1 The Heart of the Matter

  CHAPTER 2 Bathe of Glory

  CHAPTER 3 Green Ink and Pleasant Land

  CHAPTER 4 Let Them Eat Twizzlers

  CHAPTER 5 The Land Without Music

  CHAPTER 6 Ex Libris

  CHAPTER 7 Beyond a Joke

  CHAPTER 8 Brief Encounters, Missed Connections

  CHAPTER 9 In Darkest England

  CHAPTER 10 Myth UK

  About the Author

  Cider with Roadies

  Pies and Prejudice

  Adventures

  on the

  High Teas

  For The English Roses

  STUART

  MACONIE

  Adventures

  on the

  High Teas

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  Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

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  Copyright © Stuart Maconie 2009

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  Epigraph from Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, published by Jonathan Cape.

  Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  The Art of Donald McGill (1941), Decline of the English Murder (1946), The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell), Reproduced by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

  ‘Meditation on the A30’, from Collected Poems and extract from Summoned by Bells by John Betjeman © The Estate of John Betjeman

  ‘Night Mail’ from Collected Poems by WH Auden reproduced with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Extract from The Pyrates reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © George MacDonald Fraser, 1983

  ‘When I Came Last To Ludlow’ from Shropshire Lad by AE Housman, reproduced with permission from Dover Publications Inc.

  ‘Slow Train’ reproduced by permission of the Estates of Michael Flanders & Donald Swann 2009. Any use of Flanders & Swann material, large or small, should be referred to the Estates at [email protected]

  Extracts from Margaret Thatcher reprinted by permission of Jonathan Cape, © John Campbell 2001

  ‘Fruit Tree’ written by Nick Drake © Published by Warlock Music Ltd/ Rykomusic Ltd / Evergreen Copyright Acquisitions, LLC. Administered by Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd ‘The Grantham Anthem’, words and music © Peter Brewis. www.peterbrewis.co.uk

  The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

  Julian Barnes

  CHAPTER 1

  The Heart of the Matter

  Imagine that you are a very particular kind of Englishman or woman. One burdened by strange and terrible fears. You are terrified of the sea, suspicious of the Scots and consumed by a loathing of France and all things French. Your notion of hell involves not fire and brimstone but bladderwrack, bagpipes and brie. And so profound and dreadful runs this fear that it drives you as far into your beloved realm as you can go: deep into the bosom of your native land, putting as much space as you can between you and your Gallic, Celtic and aquatic demons.

  Well, this is where you would come. Meriden, Warwickshire. Population 2,734. Grid Ref SP240824, 93 miles equally from the Irish Sea, the Wash and the North Sea. Now I like the Scots and I like the sea. I really, really like Debussy and Roquefort. But I have come here too, on A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Well, A Journey to the Centre of England, at least. I was not trying to get to the bottom of things, but to the middle.

  It’s an ash-grey Sunday at the fag end of an unremarkable year early in the twenty-first century and I am standing in the dead centre of England. Appropriately enough, it’s a village green. A village green of sorts, anyway, in that Meriden isn’t really a village and this isn’t really a green; more a functional lozenge of clipped municipal grass. (Nicely kept, mind you, and plenty of benches.) But no other phrase will quite do here. If Meriden is the centre of England – and its residents will tell you proudly and without much provocation that it is – then it is fitting that the very middle of the very middle of Middle England should be a sort of village green, albeit one with a charity shop, a Lloyds pharmacy and a branch of Spar where the stocks and the maypole and the blacksmiths should be.

  Middle England. Depending on how you say it, it can mean entirely different things. Said with a snort and a roll of the eyes – maybe in a private members’ club frequented by media types in Soho – it means stifling conservatism, the Daily Mail and bringing back the birch. Said with a swell of pride and a raised glass of warm flat beer in a saloon bar in the Shires, though, it means tradition, dependability, decency, the pleasing swish not of birch on buttock but of willow on leather. All this and, of course, a notorious gang of British bikers, those famous spinsters cycling to evensong.

  The cycling spinsters attained the status of modern retro-myth in 1993 when John Major mentioned them in his speech to the Conservative Party conference, the infamous ‘Back To Basics’ address. They were one of a litany of icons of Englishness he cited, some lifted from George Orwell’s introduction to The Lion and the Unicorn. Orwell’s essay was a socialist call to arms, its original context suggesting either that a) John Major was a skilled and witty ironist or b) he hadn’t read it. Major talked of ‘old maids cycling to Holy Communion, long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Orwell actually had his maids ‘hiking’, which sounds oddly transatlantic; Major’s misquotation is the one that has passed into legend. Orwell, though, and this is telling, also wrote in his piece of ‘the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs’. None of which, perhaps understandably, Major thought would get the blue-rinses and retired colonels moist-eyed and palpitating. In some ways Major – Pooterish, decent, normal, went to a cricket match on the afternoon he stood down as PM – embodied Middle England; well, as much as the Brixtonian son of a trapeze artist who had a passionate illicit romance with Edwina
Currie can be said to be in any way normal. That’s the thing with Middle England, you see. Hidden depths.

  Orwell himself loved and loathed Middle England in a way that I can easily understand. He disliked the Establishment even though he was a lapsed former member of it, having been to Eton and served as a colonial policeman in Burma. He called England ‘a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly’. But he was fiercely patriotic for all that, not for queen and country and fox-hunting but for pubs and architecture and people. In that same wonderful essay (I would vote for any political party that had The Lion and the Unicorn as its manifesto) he says of England: ‘It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.’

  The French have a word for their mythic geographical soul: La France Profonde. Deepest France. In the USA, they call it Middle America; culturally and geographically the nation’s heartland. Middle America is actually and physically central – the flyover states, as NY and LA cosmopolites call them – but it’s also a synonym for the real America, more truly American than Hollywood or Manhattan, Miami Beach or Cape Cod.

  Back in Blighty, others apart from Orwell and Major have come up with their own pen portraits and icon litanies. With a mischievous smirk, George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, characterised ‘Merrie England’, a bawdy, busty, tankard-clinking predecessor of Middle England, as ‘the old and golden days of England … when all the hedgerows were green and the roads dusty, when hawthorn and wild roses bloomed, when big-bellied landlords brewed rich October ale at a penny a pint … when squires ate roast beef … while their faithful hounds slumbered on the rushes by the hearth, when summers were long and warm and drowsy, with honeysuckle and hollyhocks by cottage walls’. When the Department of Media, Culture and Sport, in its relentlessly upbeat, trendy sandal-wearing teacher way, asked Britain to name its ‘icons of Britishness’, the first twelve ‘we’ came up with were Stonehenge, Punch and Judy, SS Empire Windrush, Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII, a cup of tea, the FA Cup, Alice in Wonderland, the Routemaster bus, the King James Bible, the Angel of the North, the Spitfire and Jerusalem (the song not the place).

  Journeying through the Shires for this book, though, from service station to farmers’ market, along branch lines and country lanes, through countless gift shops, gastropubs and hotel receptions, I came to see that there is a new iconography of Middle England beyond spinsters and cycle clips. If I were compiling the new I-Spy Book of Middle England, you would score points not just for spinsters but for Ginsters, not just for evensong but for loft conversions, CCTV cameras, adverts for firms doing patio improvements on people’s drives, white-towelling-clad hen parties in health spas, trampolines in suburban gardens, those yellow ‘Cleaning In Progress’ signs in the shape of jaunty commissionaires, yummy mummies in black Suzuki jeeps, Top Gear DVDs, phone-in speak (‘long-time listener, first-time caller’, ‘As I told your researcher…’), Polish chambermaids, Diana Princess of Wales, cheery little knots of smokers round patio heaters in beer gardens and sad little bouquets of flowers taped to pelican crossings.

  Middle England. It’s not really a place. It’s more a certain kind of Englishness, one distilled to its very essence like sloe gin, dark and potent. Granted it’s not the only kind of Englishness. There’s the raw, bold, virile, doomed northern variety, composed of jutting crags, sleet, Joy Division, Ted Hughes, roaring winds and silent foundries. There’s the rich, strange otherness of the deep south with its shanties, tin mines, smugglers, witches, Poldark and pasties. But Middle England is different. Comfortable, maybe … if you call flooded cathedral towns and post-Apocalypse Slough comfortable. Straightlaced, yes; if your definition includes Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Cosy, perhaps, in the way that the gruesome, feral ritual of mayhem and bloodletting that goes on every Sunday night in the county of Midsomer is cosy.

  It is not just the literal middle of England, not just its ample, well-fed midriff rising and falling in a post-Sunday-lunch snooze across the Chilterns, the Cotswolds, the Mendips and the Peak District. It is a state of mind. I would use the word Psycho-Geography but they don’t talk like that here. They call a spade a spade. Unless of course they mean the edging iron or the Dutch hoe.

  That said, and this is real geography, I am still standing in the very middle of England. Meriden, Warwickshire. Not much is happening, I have to say, on this slate-coloured Sunday. A fifty-something lady in fleecy pink jogging bottoms with a perky spaniel surreptitiously watches me whilst pretending to have seen something utterly compelling in the window of the charity shop. A passing teenager, with studied insouciance, flips his skateboard up with a foot and into his grasp and dodges triumphantly into the Spar. Somewhere, faintly, a radio is playing ‘Hey Jude’. It is Sunday. Middle England is napping or hoeing or, more likely, getting two litres of Autumn Cornflower mixed at B&Q. Meriden is no exception. In fact, it’s the rule.

  Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, had those cycling spinsters fancied upgrading to something a little sportier, they would have soon known the name of Meriden. Then the village was synonymous with British motorcycling and had been since 1942 when Triumph motorcycles had moved to a new plant here after the bombing of Coventry. The company became world famous when Marlon Brando rode one of their bikes in The Wild One. Triumph, BSA, Norton, Villiers … names to make a Hells Angel cry into his cider. And he would have shed tears aplenty in 1983 when the last Triumph Bonneville rolled off the production line. With help from that kindly uncle of international socialism Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he then was, a workers’ cooperative had run the Meriden plant since 1973 when Norton Villiers Triumph pulled out.

  Now the village, and in particular the green, is a place of pilgrimage for devotees of a, well, ‘greener’ form of biking. Dominating one end of the green is a big, quite forbidding stone cone. It’s the kind of architecture they favoured for police stations in 1970s Romania. In fact, it was erected by cyclists in 1921 as a memorial to their fellows killed in the Great War. It is, in fact, I realise as I stand before it, chewing thoughtfully on a Werther’s butter candy, a massive, quite imposing sort of mini-cenotaph.

  But why Meriden? The lady in the pink jogging bottoms didn’t know. She was really nice, though, once she’d seen my notebook and packet of Werther’s and established that, though I was clearly some kind of nut to be wandering around Meriden jotting furtive notes on a dull, chilly Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t a dangerous one. It turns out that the cyclists put the memorial here for no other reason than Meriden is in the centre of England and therefore equally accessible to all. Some 200,000 turned up for its official unveiling. The logic of its location is unassailable, but why then isn’t Meriden festooned, crammed, overrun with such monuments erected by the British Association of Plumbers, or Cheesemongers, Netball Players and Vintage Traction Engine Enthusiasts? Obviously cyclists think a little differently. Well done, cyclists. But please stay off the pavement, or you’ll be needing another monument to fallen comrades soon.

  Every year, there’s a memorial service and celebration here on the green which attracts cyclists from all over Britain. As I write, it’s just happened. In the afternoon there was a pace-judging competition starting at the village hall. Competitors cycle a 9km route twice, once in each direction. The winner is the one whose times match most closely. Presumably you could do this incredibly slowly if you liked, whilst wobbling in the saddle, as long as you did the same speed twice. In its gentle, formal absurdity, this sounds such a wonderfully Middle English kind of race.

  There’s another bit of bicycle-related commemorative statuary at the other end of the green, a handsome seat ‘To the memory of Wayfarer (WM Robinson) who died on 17 Sept 1956. His devotion to the pastime of cycling inspired many to enjoy’. Wayfarer was the pen name of Walter MacGregor Robinson, pioneer of modern cycling. Someone’s been enjoying themselves on Wayfarer’s seat pretty recently j
udging by the bottle of Lucozade and the half-eaten tray of chips and congealed gravy underneath it. Nearby stands a flagpole sans flag.

  At this end of the green, though, much smaller than the cyclists’ obelisk, is a more significantly ‘Meriden’ artefact. This is a grade-II ancient monument, a 500-year-old sandstone pillar bearing testimony to the fact that this is the traditional, mythic middle of England. The people of Meriden like their monuments. Apart from this, there’s the village’s war memorial, a crucifix, just across from the duck pond. In the courtyard of the Bull’s Head pub, a sign indicates that it was open for travellers needing rest and stabling for their horses as far back as 1603, and a fingerpost tells you the distance to various major cities, letting you know that, yes indeed, this is the ‘Centre of England’.

  The Centre of Englandness is affirmed even more proudly by the half-a-millennium-old landmark on the green. It has seen better days. The head seems to be missing for one thing. When the writer Caroline Hillier came here in 1976, the Spar was a village shop and the girl in it said that the cross had been ‘like that for as long as I remember and I’ve been here sixteen years’. Maybe it got knocked about a bit when it was lent to the Festival of Britain in 1951, given pride of place in the model village.

  There is something very Middle English about how Meriden markets its geographical claim to fame. I once spent a week in a town called Fairmont, Indiana, whose USP, to coin a phrase, is that it’s the birthplace of James Dean. From the colossal 1950s rock and roll and vintage motorbike festival to the rock-lassoing competition (Dean performed this odd trick in Giant) to the diners stuffed with cheesy, evocative memorabilia, Fairmont had no qualms about trading on their dead son. Their only real reservation was about his rumoured homosexuality – lots of burly men told me that ‘there was no way old Jimmy Dean was that way inclined, son’ – and the fact that he took attention away from other luminaries of the town they were equally proud of, other such famous sons as Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, and a chap who had once been head of the National Hurricane Centre. I found this fierce small-town pride utterly charming, and still do.