Читать книгу Bang in the Middle - Robert Shore - Страница 9

‘Shut yer clack, Denis!’

Mum’s in a grump. Dad and I are waiting for her in the car but she’s resisting all our attempts to hurry her along. In fact, she’s now decided that she doesn’t want to come to Leicestershire with us at all as she’d rather go into Mansfield with her friend Joan, or ‘Scooter Girl’ as my father calls her. (Joan is a seasoned member of the Mansfield mobility scooter club.)

After much persuasion the Joan project is dropped – her friend threads her scooter in and out of pedestrian traffic with such dizzying virtuosity that she leaves her shopping companions in a spin, so it’s a relief not to have to go with her, my mother eventually decides – and we are able to set off. In the car, my parents are up front bickering merrily, while I’m strapped in behind them feeling vaguely nauseous in the back: it’s just like being a boy again.

We had been tempted to begin our tour of Leicestershire by heading south-west to the extravagantly named Ashby-de-la-Zouch, with its castle ruins and celebrated four-storey Hastings Tower. Afterwards we might have gone on to nearby Breedon-on-the-Hill, with its remarkable views and church, St Mary and St Hardulph. The latter is built on the site of an Iron Age hillfort and contains some splendid (and historically highly enigmatic) Anglo-Saxon carvings. The fact that the friezes look Byzantine in character has given rise to all sorts of academic speculation: did the Emperor Justinian really go on a mini-break to the East Midlands in the year 535 to avoid having potentially fractious talks with the Ostrogoth king Theodahad? I was looking forward to giving that question a bit more consideration but my mother insists that we head south-east to Melton Mowbray instead as she’d like to bring one of the famous local pork pies back for her brother Jimmy.

In addition to Mum, I’ve brought along another sceptical travelling companion, the Rough Guide. Now I know that quality is more important than quantity, but you can tell something about this particular publication’s general perspective on England’s cultural highlights by the fact that it devotes 368 pages to the South, 231 pages to the North and just 108 to the whole of the Midlands. Leicestershire it dismisses as an ‘apparently haphazard mix of the industrial and rural’, which I find rather puzzling. After all, what part of the developed world isn’t a bit haphazard in appearance? And why ‘apparently’? Do the authors think there’s some secret power at work in the Leicestershire hierarchy conspiring to make it look haphazard, while the effect is actually quite deliberate? If so, we need to be told.

Fortunately Leicestershire itself betrays no such doubts about its purpose or make-up. As you drive out of Nottinghamshire along the A606, the landscape begins to roll sumptuously and a sign at the county border confidently announces that you are entering ‘The Heart of Rural England’. Seeing this puts me in mind of my friend Jerry, who grew up in nearby West Bridgford (which is on the Notts side of the border) and who’s always talked enthusiastically about the natural beauty of this part of the Midlands, which he calls ‘the Shires’, a term you rarely hear these days. A glance is enough to confirm that the local landscape has little in common with the ‘Industrial, built-up, heavily populated, busy, no countryside’ East Midland stereotype reported in that tourist-board survey.

I ask my parents about ‘the Shires’, but they laugh so hard at the mere mention of Jerry and West Bridgford, whose affluent inhabitants were apparently a source of much mirth (and envy) when they were growing up, that they forget to answer.

‘Bread-and-Lard Island, we used to call West Bridgford,’ my dad says. ‘A place of unimaginable, mythic luxury to a simple Sutton lad like me.’

‘The houses there all had net curtains and a phone in the window,’ says my mother, ever the suspicious Blidworth girl. ‘The phones weren’t actually connected, mind. It was all for show.’

Our route skirts the Vale of Belvoir, which fully merits its name (Belvoir means ‘beautiful view’), before finally leading us into Melton Mowbray, the self-styled ‘Rural Capital of Food’, home to both the classic English pork pie and Stilton cheese. The latter may take its name from a village in Cambridgeshire, eighty miles north of London, where it was marketed as a local speciality to travellers on the Great North Road, but it has never actually been produced there: Stilton is a strictly Midland phenomenon, and there’s a Certification Trade Mark to prove it, so don’t you try making your own at home and passing it off as authentic Stilton. It’s just a shame that the name doesn’t underline its geographical rootedness: Yorkshire pudding says so much about the values of the North; a rebranded Stilton could do the same for the Midlands. As for pork pie, the distinctive Melton Mowbray variety was accorded Protected Geographical Indication status by the European Union in 2008. It turns out the EU is good for something after all.

* * *

I don’t know which is more terrifying: my mother in her default nothing-impresses-me mode, or (much less common) in her making-an-effort, now-isn’t-that-fascinating? guise. After we park up in Melton, she suddenly switches to the latter (is it the sight of a startlingly large portrait of grinning, perma-tanned Tory MP Alan Duncan in the window of the Rutland and Melton Conservative Association that’s effected this change of mood?) and stops short as we round a corner into the pedestrianised market area.

‘What’s this?’ she asks, looking up and preparing to be dazzled.

‘It’s a Lloyds TSB, Mum.’

‘Well, it looks really nice, I must say.’

‘Put your specs on, Kath, for god’s sake,’ my father says, before adding darkly: ‘Remember what happened last time.’

You don’t have to pretend to be impressed by Melton Mowbray – it is impressive. In the first place, it’s handsome. There’s a lovely 1930s polychrome Art Deco cinema, the Regal, and a magnificent parish church, St Mary’s, whose scrubbed limestone tower dominates the surrounding landscape. And though the streets are largely peopled by senior citizens on the day I visit – I’ve brought two of my own along just in case more are needed to make up the numbers – this is a town with a strong pulse. Melton appears to be defying the high-street meltdown that’s affecting the rest of the country. Its markets are legion: beyond the gleefully spreading street market that dominates the town centre, there are cattle, farmers’, antique, and fur and feather markets too. And that’s just Tuesdays.

‘Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe’ is obviously a major attraction – signposts insistently direct you towards it – but there’s a lot more to the culinary charms of Melton than a bit of pig wrapped in crust and jelly. Why, there’s such an abundance of butchers, cheese shops and fishmongers, all seemingly thriving in the deep shadow of the huge Morrisons that lurks at the bottom of Sherrard Street, this could almost be France. Though the tempo of life is unhurried and there’s a definite accent on the more traditional aspects of life, there are signs of contemporaneity too: a speciality Polish food store suggests that immigration is making its mark, while boutiques offering beauty treatments and spray tans (much frequented by Alan Duncan, judging by his skin tone in that huge portrait) point to a more youthful town presence.

We wander out towards the edge of town, past the British Legion and Conservative Club to the Melton Carnegie Museum. This contains tidy, informative displays about various aspects of local life, not least Melton’s status as the ‘Rural Capital of Food’: heritage and food and ‘country living’ events draw over a million tourists to the area annually. But the most revealing display relates to the long history of fox hunting in the region. It turns out it’s no coincidence that those ‘Heart of Rural England’ signs that greet you at the county border bear images of foxes. The earliest known fox hunt using hounds may have taken place in Norfolk, and Wikipedia might tell you that the oldest formal hunt is probably the Bilsdale – which is in Yorkshire, naturally – but fox hunting in the form we know it today really developed in fashionable Leicestershire in the eighteenth century. Hugo Meynell, the father of the modern sport, lived locally. As master of the Quorn, he developed the idea of ‘hunting to a system’ and helped to breed a new species of hound, which could chase harder and smell more keenly, encouraging the use of thoroughbred stallions that could charge faster and jump the hedges of the newly enclosed fields more reliably. As a result of these revolutionary innovations, hunts began to gather later in the day – previously they had been obliged to go out early, when foxes would still be digesting their food, to have half a chance of actually catching one – and so started to develop much greater social allure.

Melton was the new leisure activity’s most fashionable centre. As John Otho Paget wrote in his Memories of the Shires at the beginning of the last century: ‘Melton is the fox-hunter’s Mecca, and he should make his pilgrimage there before he dies. Other parts of England have their bits of good country, but nowhere else is there a centre surrounded by glorious hunting ground.’ Writing at about the same time, T.F. Dale noted: ‘A man who has money and some well-mannered horses can, even if he is not an enthusiast about hunting, have a capital time at Melton. He ought never to be bored; he ought to eat well and sleep well and to be sufficiently amused … [Mr Cecil Forester helped make it] the chief hunting centre of England; and from that day to this there has been a steady flow of fashion and wealth to it.’ By the early 1800s, the town had stabling for five hundred horses and was the meeting point for several of the biggest hunts, including the Quorn, Belvoir and Cottesmore. Even the fox-hunter’s distinctive scarlet evening coat was popularised here. Like me, you don’t have to have a love of fox hunting and its lore to appreciate the implications of this snippet of history. Like the signs say, this – Leicestershire and the Midland Shires, not the Home Counties, not the North Country – really is the Heart of Rural England. Creeping industrialisation may have obscured its centrality in the twentieth century (‘It has been said that the day of Melton is passing, that the town has been invaded by manufactories,’ Dale warned in 1903) but in the post-industrial age the glory of the East Midland landscape is beginning to reassert itself. You don’t have to ride a horse or want to hunt foxes to appreciate it. Come and see for yourself.

While I’m looking at the museum displays, my mother does her usual thing of befriending loitering teens. She wanders over to the internet access points, where a couple of adolescents – one male, one female – are merrily Facebooking. The girl is happy to chat to her and boasts that she has 343 online Friends, but the furtive-looking boy stays schtum and hastily closes a window on his computer screen. While this scene unfolds, I approach the lady at reception – whom my mother has proudly told that her son is writing a book about the Midlands – to ask her about the origins of the phrase ‘painting the town red’. It’s regularly ascribed to an incident that took place in Melton on 6 April 1837, when the Marquess of Waterford and his hunting pals – no doubt high on pork pie, a favourite foodstuff with the horse-and-hound fraternity – went on a ‘spree’, daubing the buildings on the high street with red paint. The ‘Mad Marquess’ was a former Oxford undergrad; it sounds as though he may have been a Bullingdon man too. On this occasion he got comeuppance of a sort: he and his fellow rioters were all fined £100 at Derby Assizes.

Not that such demonstrations of animal spirits were unusual in Melton at the time, a fact that Paget puts down to the absence of women:

At the beginning of the [nineteenth] century Melton was rapidly becoming a fashionable hunting centre, and the men who assembled there were the cream of hard riders from other counties, but for several years previous to that date a few sportsmen had made the town their headquarters. In these early days, and for some years later, only bachelors visited Melton, and the married man left his wife at home. This will account for the mad pranks which history tells us were frequently played after dinner by the hunting men, such as painting signs, wrenching knockers and other wild freaks.

I ask the lady in the museum whether any of Waterford’s daubs are still visible and she says that red traces were allegedly found when the sign on the White Swan was taken down for cleaning in the 1980s. They’ve all gone now unfortunately. Still, the Marquess’s paint job appears to have survived for a century and a half before finally being scrubbed away – not bad for an ad hoc afternoon’s work.

The Carnegie Melton is an evocative little museum with the ability to do that splendid thing – transform the way you perceive your surroundings. After spending a happy half-hour or so under its roof, rather than pensioners sniffing out a bargain, you re-emerge to be met with the spectacle of Napoleonic War-era dukes, financiers and industrialists cantering through the Melton streets on their mounts, and the sound of Waterford and his pals carousing at a local pub and planning another spree. I do anyhow, but perhaps I’m just funny that way.

We head back into town via St Mary’s, an architectural gem whose splendid tower, described by one early hunt commentator as ‘a grateful sight to a returning sportsman on a beaten horse’, probably served as a finishing post in the early steeplechases that ‘thrusters’ attracted by the local hunting rode in here. (The name ‘steeplechase’ is derived from the fact that a church steeple or tower usually served as the finishing line.) One of the great heroes of English classical music, Sir Malcolm Sargent, began his career at St Mary’s as choirmaster and organist in the period around World War I. His celebrated productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas regularly attracted the Prince of Wales as a spectator during the latter’s hunting trips to the county. In keeping with its location in the ‘Rural Capital of Food’, the church now hosts the annual British Pie Festival – it’s not just pork pies that are accepted for consideration either, but any pie answering to the broader definition of ‘a filling totally encased in pastry’ – as well as a Christmas Tree Festival, when the nave suddenly becomes a dense forest of trees, creatively decorated to reflect themes from recycling (made of carrier bags) to cleaning supplies (hung with hygiene hair nets rather than tinsel and baubles).

We finally surrender to the inevitable and pay a visit to Dickinson & Morris’s Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe on Nottingham Street. After all the fanfare and build-up, I’m slightly disappointed by what we find. Not because I’m one of the ‘many’ who, according to my truculent friend the Rough Guide, ‘find the pie’s appeal unaccountable’. Quite the opposite. But I had begun to imagine the pork-pie equivalent of London toy emporium Hamleys – five floors rammed with every possible variety of pie: flying ones, Playmobil and Scalextric ones, online multiplayer video-gaming ones – when in fact YOPPS only offers a modest selection, sanely counterbalanced by a range of sausages, breads and Hunt Cake (a rich cake spiced with Jamaican rum, also favoured by hunters). Perhaps my hopes were unreasonable: even Meltonians can’t be expected to live by pork pie alone. And enthusiasts will find some compensation in the fact that you can book a Pork Pie Demonstration or arrange to attend a Make & Bake Experience, and there’s a sign on the wall revealing the secrets behind a great pork pie: the meat should be fresh and not cured, and chopped rather than minced or pureed; preservatives are strictly verboten, only natural bone stock jelly will do and seasoning with salt and white pepper is highly recommended; and the baking should be carried out without the use of a supporting hoop or tin so as to produce the classic rounded, gently bow-sided Melton Mowbray pie shape. So now you know.

* * *

I’m sitting in the front of the car now. Mum much prefers the angle of attack offered by the back seat and has positioned herself behind my father, ready for her next assault.

‘I think your hair’s returning on the top of your head, Robbie,’ she says, still unable to accept the fact that her little boy has gone bald.

We take the A607 and proceed pleasantly through Frisby-on-the-Wreake and Queniborough but the landscape is gradually turning more suburban. ‘Anybody who can do anything in Leicester but make a jumper has got to be a genius,’ Brian Clough once said by way of tribute to former Forest player Martin O’Neill, who as a manager brought unwonted success to Leicester City FC in the late Nineties. Well, my father’s pretty smart but basically what he used to do in Leicester was make jumpers. The purpose of our trip to the city today is to revisit some of the sites where he worked.

Finding them isn’t proving easy, however. We pick up signs for the National Space Centre, a brilliant, heavily interactive museum which happens to contain the only Soyuz spacecraft in Western Europe, and then for the Golden Mile, one of the most vibrant Indian shopping districts in the country, which offers a dynamic mixture of restaurants, jewellers and clothing stores. Some say, rather prosaically, that this stretch of the Belgrave Road got its nickname because it used to have more than its fair share of amber traffic lights, but the spectacular annual Diwali, or Hindu Festival of Light, celebrations probably offer a more satisfactory explanation. (Over 25 per cent of the city’s population is Indian in origin.)

‘I don’t recognise a bloody thing,’ Dad says encouragingly.

‘They used to call Leicester the wealthiest city in Europe,’ says Mum, ignoring Dad.

‘The wealthiest in Britain,’ corrects Dad, simultaneously executing an obviously wrong turn away from the city centre.

Mum’s having none of it. ‘Europe. We always said Nottingham was a big town whereas Leicester was a city. In Nottingham we’d got the Lace Market and a good red-light district,’ my mother chuckles (I think for a moment that she’s going to roll out her favourite ‘Thor but thatithfied’ joke – but no, we’re spared this time), ‘but Leicester had the De Montfort Hall. It was better for entertainment. It had bigger factories and bigger concert halls.’

We drive past a huge John Lewis, and my father briefly thinks he knows where we are. ‘There used to be the most fantastic factories around here. A lot of these were knitting units. They all look like they’ve been converted into flats now.’

He’s right. As recently as the mid-1990s, when my father retired, proud, red-brick Leicester was still dominated by the hosiery and textile industries. As J.B. Priestley wrote in the early 1930s in his bestselling travelogue An English Journey: ‘Leicester has been a hosiery town these last three hundred years. Since the Industrial Revolution, it has specialised in worsted hosiery, for which the Leicestershire long wools are very suitable.’ In order to capture the spirit of the city, the most appropriate thing Priestley could think of doing was to visit three Wolsey knitwear factories – after all, Wolsey ‘has factories all over the town’. No longer. After two centuries’ dominance of the global market (including supplying underwear to Scott of the Antarctic), Wolsey has recently been relaunched as a much-scaled-down ‘luxury British heritage brand’, while the historic Wolsey Building – bearing a mosaic of the English cardinal who gave his name to the company – has just been turned into care flats. Other former Wolsey production units lie in a state of mournful dereliction.

If the pipe-sucking Priestley, a proud Yorkshireman who is – surprise, surprise – generally briskly dismissive of the Midlands in his book,¹ were to return to the city today, what he’d surely notice first is the student presence. Instead of three Wolsey factories, he might now spend an afternoon casting his Northern-patrician eye over three world-renowned institutes of higher education: the University of Leicester, the De Montfort University and (a dozen miles down the road) the University of Loughborough. There’s a high density of hard-working grey matter in this part of Leicestershire; the student presence also ensures that there’s a lively nightlife too.

‘I haven’t got a bloody clue where we are again,’ Dad sighs. Ring roads, pedestrianisation and one-way systems have contrived to render a driver’s basic directional sense almost useless; a disadvantage almost. You may know for sure that what you’re looking for is off to your left – you can actually see it! – but these days you probably need to steer a hard right to get there.

‘I never liked Leicester people,’ my mother pipes up gaily from the back of the car. ‘They were avaricious to an extraordinary degree. The hosiery industry made them rich and horrible. When we lived in Godalming in Surrey briefly in the 1960s, there was a young man there who had worked in Leicester but he’d come home because he found the people so unfriendly. He said he could earn three times as much in Leicester as he could in the South, but it wasn’t worth it. You had to belong to get on in Leicester.’

My father concurs: ‘They were cliquey.’ (He pronounces it ‘clicky’.)

‘Yes,’ agrees my mother, ‘very cliquey.’ (She pronounces it ‘clicky’ too.)

At this moment of unwonted harmony between my parents, I notice that we are driving past Leicester train station.

‘Stop!’ I shout, and my father executes an impressive emergency stop, endangering the lives of literally dozens of other drivers and pedestrians in the process.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ he half-screams.

‘Oh, I just wanted to take a look at the statue of Thomas Cook,’ I say. ‘It’s outside the station here.’

‘You …’ he begins, wagging a fatherly finger in my direction, but I’ve jumped out of the car before he can complete his phrase.

Cook is one of Leicester’s most famous sons. Midlanders have always been great innovators in matters of travel – perhaps it’s because people always seem to want to pass through the region as quickly as possible that we’ve specialised in developing new, ever faster methods of locomotion to help them achieve their goal. Cook’s career as a pioneer of modern tourism began at the railway station here, though it wasn’t exactly leisure that was on the then-cabinetmaker’s mind when he arranged for some 540 temperance activists to be carried by train to a rally in nearby Loughborough. Raised a Baptist, Cook was a fervent campaigner against the evils of alcohol and, as he walked by the newly opened station in the summer of 1841, ‘the thought suddenly flashed across my mind as to the practicability of employing the great powers of railways and locomotion for the furtherance of this social reform’. The canny Cook was quick to see the wider commercial opportunities offered by the newfangled train network, however, and struck a deal with the Midland Counties Railways, which had just come into existence to carry coal and other necessaries to the rapidly industrialising region. As he later noted, ‘thus was struck the keynote of my excursions, and the social idea grew upon me’. By the 1850s Cook’s travel agency was transporting visitors in their thousands across the Channel to gawp at the wonders on display in the Paris Exhibition. Shortly afterwards it had expanded its activities as far as the Holy Land, and by the 1880s it had its own fleet of steamers on the Nile.

The statue of Thomas Cook was unveiled in 1991, to mark the 150th anniversary of that first historic Leicester-to-Loughborough anti-booze cruise, and shows the great pioneer of modern tourism appropriately laden with luggage. The sculptor, James Butler, is responsible for several other statues of iconic Leicester figures. First, there’s The Seamstress, located outside the City Rooms, which pays tribute to the historic centrality of the hosiery industry to Leicester life. Then, in Castle Gardens, there’s a bronze likeness of Richard III, who spent his last night on earth in the city in 1485 before being killed nearby at the Battle of Bosworth. His body was then brought back to Leicester to be laid to rest – where exactly no one was sure until a skeleton was recently recovered from underneath a city-centre car park. Subsequent DNA tests identifying the remains as those of King Richard sparked a controversy with strong echoes of the kerfuffle over Robin Hood’s mythical bones. A group identifying itself as the Richard III Foundation called for the remains of ‘Richard, our hero and martyr, to be brought home to the city that he loved [York], and where he is still loved to this day’. ‘York was Richard’s city,’ declared Andy Smith on behalf of the foundation. ‘It is where he belongs, and it is only right that this great Lord of the North should return home to Yorkshire after more than five hundred years’ enforced absence.’ The Guardian was quick to report the story ‘of the growing enthusiasm for the “vilified Yorkshireman” to return home’ – no doubt Richard, as a true son of ‘God’s own county’, insisted on eating his dinner at midday, even if, as one linguistic expert amusingly pointed out, the available evidence suggests that he probably spoke with a Brummie accent.

Actually Leicester is an ideal final resting place for Richard, the great outsider king of English history. Under pressure from his Southern Tudor paymasters, Shakespeare portrayed the last Plantagenet as a physically deformed monster with a hunchback, an out-and-out villain who had his princely nephews done in and generally rejoiced in the misfortune of others. But other historical sources suggest that Richard wasn’t like that at all. Butler’s statue in Leicester attempts to set the record straight by picturing Richard as a youthful, attractive, reforming king who was keen to do the ordinary folk a bit of good – very Robin Hood, in fact, far removed in spirit from the ‘Yorkshireman’s Creed’. Rest assured: Richard’s bones are perfectly at home in the Midlands.