Categories
council

Cutting the Brie the Wrong Way

Frosty fen.
Cambridge, c.1998.

I haven’t written about my time at Cambridge for various reasons, including a sense that my experience 20 years ago probably isn’t relevant today – that the weird world of public school rituals, boating clubs and silly gowns was fading then and so must surely have completely disappeared by 2017.

Only, it turns out, it hasn’t, so here’s how it went for me.

I grew up working class, mostly on a council estate in Somerset, and went to a comprehensive that was very near the top of the Ofsted Hard as Nails League Table. From there, I was one of a handful of kids who went on to do A levels at the local sixth-form college. There, rather to my surprise, I continued to do well academically and was identified as Oxbridge material by an ambitious college administration. They put all of us swots into special coaching sessions run by an inspirational lecturer, the son of a Nottinghamshire miner who went to Oxford in the 1970s and kept a bust of Lenin on the desk in his classroom. When he told us that, yes, Oxbridge was full of weird posh people but, no, that didn’t mean we should avoid it, it carried weight. We had as much right to be there as anyone else; we shouldn’t let them keep the best stuff to themselves out of fear or misplaced humility.

It all felt as if it happened by accident, to be frank – just a matter of taking what was for me the easiest path, filling in the forms that were put in front of me, tackling one hurdle at a time. I got an interview which took place on a frosty winter day and gave me my first taste of the problems I would have later. I was told to wear a suit, which meant finding the money to buy one; and we couldn’t afford a hotel, even if had been the kind of people who even thought to stay in them. (A reminder: the bar for ‘expensive’ is low when you have bugger all.) So Dad drove through the night and I arrived angry and exhausted at breakfast-time.

The other interview applicants were somewhat reassuring. There were a couple of northerners with proper accents who seemed as anxious as me, and several people who, although clearly Home Counties middle class, had a relatably similar comprehensive-n-college background to mine. The interviews, which seemed almost designed to sabotage people like me, went well, partly thanks to the preparation I’d had at sixth-form, and partly through adrenalin. I remember arguing slightly too vigorously with a pair of terrifying college fellows that Eastenders was as interesting as Wordsworth and that the half-rhymes were the most interesting thing in Wilfred Owen’s poems. It turns out they like this kind of thing – ‘independent thought’ – and so that was that, I was in.

* * *

What people sometimes fail to understand about growing up working class – or at least as I experienced it in the 1980s and 90s – is how scared and innocent it can leave you in some important ways, even if you seem bullish and practical in others. Public transport is expensive so you don’t take it, which is how I got to the age of 18 being unsure how to use trains or buses. I could count the number of times I’d eaten in restaurants on one hand, and had never eaten Chinese food or take-away curry. I’d never seen an olive, or houmous. I’d only been abroad once, on a three-day educational trip to Brussels sponsored by the EU. I didn’t know what ‘smart casual’ meant, or that Earl Grey tea is supposed to taste like Fairy Liquid. I didn’t realise that it was frightfully vulgar to discuss money or politics, or how to make polite small talk over glasses of wine. By contrast, all the upper- and middle-class kids I met in my first week seemed like globetrotting sophisticates: they’d had gap years, spoke multiple languages, and seemed to have been trained in cocktail chat and advanced canapé consumption techniques.

Things only got worse when I realised that there was a tier above this – the blazer-wearing rugby and rowing sorts who were so posh they didn’t even have to pretend to be pleasant or polite, and could behave more or less however they liked. I spent several years just flat out avoiding them, scurrying round the edges of the College, hoping I wouldn’t encounter a drunk member of the pride enraged by, say, a complicated door mechanism, or the complexities of operating a kettle.

Money was a persistent problem, even in those tail-end days of grants. I tried to live off a pound a day, not wanting to tell my parents I needed more cash because they didn’t have it, and having been told by the College not to do any part-time work under any circumstances. So in my first term I lost about two stone and was constantly hungry. (This seems insane now I see it in black-and-white but it’s true.) I eventually cracked and told my tutor that I was getting a job and they could stick it if they didn’t like it, which magically unlocked a bursary fund, after a brief round of mildly humiliating means testing which required my parents to provide copies of their bank statements. Even that only covered living, with nothing left over for having fun. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the rich kids hadn’t been having lots of very loud, visible fun all around me – weekends away, parties, restaurant dinners, fancy clothes, and skiing holidays paid for with their loans ‘because my Dad says I might as well take it, given the low rate of interest’.

(Some of this is probably on me — I am capable of having absolutely no fun under almost any circumstances.)

But the hardest thing was that oppressive sense of cultural alienation. I had a meltdown about this at one point and, in desperation, unloaded in near hysterics during what was meant to be an academic supervision. I chose the right teacher to talk to – someone who had come to Cambridge from Africa and had an experience far more stressful and bewildering than mine. “The whole place is designed to make you feel like an outsider,” he said, with uncharacteristic feeling. “Everything they do, all the rituals and manners, even the way the buildings are designed, is intended to exclude people like us. Do not let them achieve what they want.”

I never stopped feeling like an oik – someone once loudly mocked me for cutting a slice of brie the wrong way, which is the elevator pitch version of my time at Cambridge – but I did eventually stop thinking it was my fault.

I learned to spend as much time as possible away from the College, wandering around reassuringly normal housing estates outside Cambridge, or sitting on benches at the Grafton Centre, which felt a bit like being in my home town. This wasn’t homesickness — it was pining for the real world, and a reminder that it was that lot inside the College walls who were the freaks, not me. I found friends who didn’t make me feel like shit because I didn’t know which way to pass the port, and who liked sitting around drinking tea while we listened to records — something I could afford.

I left with a good degree (having no fun meant I had time to read all the books and revise),  a certain confidence in the quality of my intellect, and several important relationships that are still going strong today.

Other than that, I don’t feel like a ‘Cambridge man’, or have lingering affection for my College. I don’t have any ties or scarves, have dodged every reunion to date, and when the College kept bothering me for money I asked them firmly to stop phoning, emailing and writing. Our business with each other, as far as I’m concerned, concluded the day I walked away with my degree. Cambridge is an ex I dumped after a long, dysfunctional relationship.

So, when young people from similar backgrounds to mine ask if they should go to Cambridge, I find it hard to give a straight answer. One the one hand, not going is a kind of surrender – letting them have it all to themselves – and if it’s not quite world-as-oyster dream I was sold I guess my degree did get me as far as interview stage for my first couple of jobs after university. At the same time, I feel duty bound to be honest with them about my experience, so at least they’ll know what they’re getting into.

Cambridge is what Cambridge is.

Categories
Somerset

The Old Country

A mill against hills, watched by a horse.

I’m Northern like Tony Soprano was Italian.

My Mum is from Lancashire but moved to Somerset when she was a child. She came with an accent (mostly intact 50 years on) and a fully formed Northern identity. I grew up surrounded by Lancastrians who talked constantly and longingly about the North, in Northern accents, sometimes while eating plates of tripe and onions. (That’s not a glib joke.) I heard all about Uncle John and his bus route in the Ribble Valley, endless jokes about the horrors of Yorkshire, and tales of a bastard ancestor whose personal motto was: ‘I’m Joshua Sykes of Stockport and I give a bugger for no man.’

Mum, pining for the Old Country more than my un-sentimental uncle, was the most prone to wallow in her lost Northerness. Even now after a glass of whisky she’ll recite her favourite dialect poem which (as my memory has it) begins: “As I were walking oer Thraitle Bridge I met me owd pal Mickey Plum and what dost tha think he says?” (There are numerous variations.) She calls buses ‘buzzes’ and – a sign that her Lancastrian accent operates at a fundamental level and not as a nostalgic pretence – cannot say Google; instead, it is ‘Goodle’.

My Grandpa looked a bit like Stan Laurel (another member of the Northern diaspora, who ended up further afield) and, apparently left with a damaged internal thermostat by his time as a prisoner of war in eastern Europe, hated any kind of draught. That’s why I remember him best in a kind of sound-and-motion second-long mental snapshot, shouting wearily “Door, door, door, door, DOOR!” whenever I left it open. He chewed the vowels and swallowed the R so that the word was more like dour, or dawer, or maybe dore. I wish I had the technical language to describe his accent. It definitely wasn’t a ‘daw’ at any rate, and he was definitely from Ozzlewtwizzle, not ‘Oswald Twist-el’.

Map of the North West at Manchester Victoria Station.

Oh, yes – Oswaldtwistle, Darwen, Bacup, Rawtenstall… I know the names of all these exotic places and how to pronounce them. ‘Bury’ is almost impossible to say correctly if you haven’t heard it said time and again by native speakers, using secret vowels not in general circulation. When I hear a Southerner say Berry, Dar-wenn, Backup or Raaaaaw-ten-stawl I think they sound bloody daft even though, remember, I’m not Northern, don’t sound Northern, and have never been to any of these places. Watching Juliet Bravo on TV as a child Mum would say to me, ‘They film this in Bacup you know’ and in anger and shame would snap at me in shops when I touched the goods: ‘Put that down! Are you from Bacup? That’s a Bacup look!’ (What a strange slur against one particular Lancashire town – that its natives can’t look at an object without manhandling it.)

I say I don’t sound Northern but there are lots of Northern words and phrases in my vocabulary. Nan was often ‘out of flunter’ and I started using that ironically as a teenager, like Billy Liar teasing Councillor Duxbury. Now, I just find it useful – the perfect word to describe a state somewhere between depression and exhaustion. And decades of hearing Mum call Uncle Norman ‘kid’ or ‘our kid’, and vice versa, has left me prone to referring to my own brother the same way quite instinctively, despite the Gallagher brothers’ brief ownership of this curtly affectionate term in the national consciousness.

A few months ago I was in a crowded pub and need to ask Mum across the room if she wanted a drink. Some previously unused software kicked into life and I mee-mawed, just as I’d seen her and Nan do so many times. She understood and mee-mawed back so that we were able to establish that, yes, she did want a drink, just a half, and, no, not lager — bitter this time, Doom Bar rather than Bass. It was all so fast and instinctive that it took me a moment to realise what had happened at which point I felt quite overcome at so effortlessly using a skill my grandmother had learned in cotton mills in the Rossendale Valley 80-odd years ago and that I had somehow inherited.

The first time I went to the North as a child felt important. It was for a great uncle’s funeral in Bury but we found time to explore. Mum had talked about the market for years with the sadness of an exiled Russian princess recalling the Winter Palace so we had to go there. I remember eating meat and potato pies (still an obsession) and being almost offended when someone told me my mild West Country accent sounded like Ian Botham’s.

In the years that followed we frequently went on holiday to Blackpool, Cleveleys and Fleetwood, popping into Manchester or Bury to visit relatives or shop. I loved it but didn’t feel at home the way Mum did. Of course. Because I wasn’t.

Years later I worked in various places across the North, alongside Northern colleagues, and it didn’t take me long to work out that whatever connection I might feel with the North Country, they saw me as hopelessly Southern. I didn’t understand the geography (true), the tensions, the dialects, or the culture. My belief that I had any claim on Northerneness when really all I had was a secondhand understanding of a particular version of a part of Lancashire of the 1950s was a handicap, not an asset.

Which brings me back to Tony Soprano. There’s an episode in the first season of The Sopranos where Tony and his cronies go back to the Old Country on business only to realise just how little they have in common with their supposed kin. The Italians find them vulgar, crude, stupid; and the Americans find the Italians irritating. An optimistic reading is that this leads them to appreciate their identity as Americans but there’s a sadness in it, too, as a key foundation of their identity is knocked out from under them.

In a small, muddy, mediocre way, my ancestors were migrants too, roaming all over the country in the 19th century chasing agricultural jobs, then industrial work, or service, so that I can claim connections all over England but no deep roots in any one part. Which is true of most non-aristocratic English people, I suspect.

These days, I am trying to be from Somerset, which is where I was born and mostly grew up. I say ‘trying’ because, despite it all, I’m more confident about how to pronounce Crawshawbooth than Muchelney.

Categories
crime

True Crime

Policeman.
A mural in South London.

There are lots of problems with ‘true crime’ writing.

First, so much of it feels as if it’s been written by a sweaty Dennis Franz-alike wearing a dirty vest in a seedy hotel. As if the writers would actually like to be doing the kinds of things they’re writing about, and are writing for people who feel the same. Pornography for repressed psychos, basically, or at least the chronically morbid.

Then there’s the stuff that goes out of its way not to wallow in the gore and physical horror but instead attempts to ‘tell the stories’ of those murdered and of those left behind. Sometimes it has a noble purpose — to ensure that the true weight of the crime is underscored as justice is administered; to keep the story in the news so that the case won’t be closed; or simply re-balancing attention from killer to victim. Too often, though, this also feels like pornography, albeit of a more subtle kind: ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like…’ (But with a shudder that sits somewhere between fear and thrill.)

Still other examples turn the police into unblemished heroes (The Badge);  massage them into archetypes (crusading, compassionate) for the sake of a neat narrative. It is about strong men struggling with demons, refusing to give up. This is another kind of fantasy, albeit often a reassuring one.

I’m thinking about all this because I’ll admit I used to be one of those weirdos who is somewhat interested in the Jack the Ripper case. It was something I came to as a teenager via Sherlock Holmes, and I guess Hammer Horror — not the best route, I now realise. At first, I was more interested in Victorian London, and books about Jack the Ripper were merely a useful, easily available vehicle for accounts of, for example, Jewish social clubs in Whitechapel in the 1880s, or the lives of those who slept hanging in rows on ropes for want of a bed.

Later, I began to feel a nagging irritation at the fact the case offered no closure. How could someone kill six women (the number is debated) and get away with it? Surely some papers would turn up, or a DNA test, wouldn’t they? (There is a whole industry devoted to ‘startling new evidence’.) My theory — because one had to have a theory — was that ‘Jack’ would prove to be the most boring, anonymous 20 to 35-year-old living on or near Flower & Dean Street, and definitely not a mad doctor or prince or whatever else.

I can pinpoint the moment when I realised this was not a healthy thing to be interested in — to have as something even vaguely resembling a ‘hobby’, for goodness sake. It was when a friend booked places on a Jack the Ripper tour of the East End one autumn evening during which the guide, with, I thought, evident glee, declared: ‘…and cut her open from vagina to breastbone’. He made the motion with his hand as he said it. The Americans on the tour giggled but I thought, very Englishly, ‘Steady on.’ He was quite the showman, he had a living to make, I understand all that, but it wasn’t right, and it cast the whole business into sharp relief.

I still have a couple of books about the case on my shelf (both long discredited, I gather) which I catch myself dipping into from time to time, but I haven’t bought any more since. I have also read other bits of true crime writing such as David Simon’s Homicide and the Library of America anthology. I listened to the first series of Serial like everyone else on the planet. The fact that true crime podcasts so often include long-winded justifications for their own existence betrays that their creators doubt their own motives: corpses + grief = subscribers.

Some of the true crime writing I’ve encountered, I enjoyed, if that’s the right word, but some gave me that sick feeling. So much of it concentrates on the killing of women, accurately reflecting the sad ways of the world, no doubt, but leaving me queasily asking… Why am I reading this? And why did they write it?

In recent years, driven primarily by determined female historians, thinking around the Ripper case in particular has moved on. It won’t be solved and in talking endlessly about the murderer, and especially in depicting him as a semi-mythical satanic figure akin to Spring-Heeled Jack rather than a sad arsehole, we do the victims a disservice. So, the new thinking goes, let’s look at and talk about them as whole people, who lived long, full lives before they became merely ‘victims’, if we absolutely must continue to dwell on this horrible case. To which end, Hallie Rubenhold is working on a book about the victims of Jack the Ripper due out next year; and Dr Fern Riddell’s Tweet thread on the same subject, from 2013, is here.

If Jack the Ripper destroyed Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Kelly, and got away with it, the best justice we can now hope for is to put them back together with greater completeness and reverence than their humble lives might otherwise have prompted.

Categories
buildings concrete history Somerset

War Still Echoes

Inside a shelter.
The Spitfire base at Perranporth, Cornwall.

The recent surge in the visibility of fascism and fascist imagery is depressing. It’s become a cliche to say it but here goes: we had a war and settled this a while back, didn’t we?

What I’ve been thinking about lately, in particular, is how that ‘while back’ doesn’t even feel all that far back.

Yes, that feeling is partly a result of my being a relic of the 1970s but, really, you don’t have to look far, even in the leafy suburbs, small towns and countryside of Britain, to see great concrete chunks of World War II just lying around, like tombstones.

I went for a run up and around Purdown in Bristol the other day. My aim was to get to the base of the telecoms tower I’ve been able to see on the horizon for the last few weeks. Once I’d got past that, however, I was amazed to find myself picking a path through what were obviously the overgrown remains of gun emplacements.

Officially known as the Purdown Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery this site was first militarised in 1939 and the concrete structures were erected in 1940. Locally it was the source of the legend of ‘Purdown Percy‘, a supposedly secret, supposedly massive gun that could be heard across the city.

Fantastic as I found this survival I wasn’t surprised by its existence because, honestly, it sometimes feels like a challenge to go for a walk or ramble without stumbling across something like this.

Spitfire base, Perranporth.

On the Cornish coast in April my other half and I found ourselves diverted through the remains of a Spitfire base at Perranporth — overgrown, yes, but so complete that a Battle of Britain fighter squadron could probably operate out of it by this time next week if need be.

In my home town of Bridgwater pill boxes surround the railway station and line the canal all the way Taunton — brutal brick and concrete structures designed for no purpose other than war and preserved at first, I’ve always assumed, because no-one quite believed the peace would hold with Russia rampant; and then just forgotten about.

Even in London, built on and overbuilt and developed to a high shine, you can still see painted signs on Smith Square pointing to air raid shelters, and the remains of shelters themselves in parks and on side streets. Just look at the Citadel in St James’s Park, as I used to do on the way into work most mornings for about a decade — a bunker so bullying and intrusive, like a beached warship, that it has almost become invisible.

The war is still with us, even as those who remember it firsthand slip away from us.

The war is still The War.

The warning still rings.

Categories
council

Hungry for Culture on a Council Estate

BOOKS: Quiet Flows the Don, The Rattle Bag, Jeeves and Wooster

It’s been interesting to see conversation in the past week about working class access to culture prompted by Jeremy Corbyn’s appearance at Glastonbury.

Personally, though I get where they’re coming from, I’d like commentators to think twice before implying that to be working class is to be essentially lumpen, leaden, tasteless and disengaged.

I grew up in a working class family, mostly on a council estate in Somerset, and mostly skint, but there was culture everywhere, assuming you don’t define culture only as Shakespeare and Beethoven.

There were libraries, both in town and at school, where idealistic librarians delighted in the slightest sign of enthusiasm on the part of kids like me. They went out of their way to push cool books and to acquire books by authors in whom I showed any particular interest. By the age of 16 I’d read, for example, Joseph Conrad, James Ellroy, William Gibson, Ernest Hemingway and Philip K. Dick. (All a bit male, I realise, but I’m working on that now.)

I had teachers who refused to talk down, either in terms of age or social class, and lent or gave me copies of books by C.S. Lewis, Raymond Chandler, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mikhail Sholokhov. (Actually, I never got round to reading that last one…)

And, though I didn’t realise it at the time, the bearded socialist in the Lenin cap who ran the secondhand book stall in my home town was carrying out practical redistribution when he tipped me off to an unadvertised five-Penguin-paperbacks for a pound offer. I built a library that way, stacking my rickety shelves with everything from George Orwell to P.G. Wodehouse, via Len Deighton and Dashiell Hammett. Libraries are great but owning a book — scribbling in the margins, bending the corners, dipping in and out over the course of years — is different.

Then there was Auntie, and her extended family. When I started to develop a serious interest in films as a young teenager I didn’t need an art-house cinema because I had the BBC and its lingering Reithian desire to improve and educate. There was Moviedrome, for example, which saw Alex Cox beaming the cultest of cult films into the corner of my bedroom. (I inherited my Nan’s nicotine-stained punch-button TV and VHS recorder when she upgraded. Something something flat screen TVs something something benefits.) And I remember being floored by a season of film noir in about 1993 where I saw things likeThe Big Combo and Double Indemnity for the first time, book-ended with serious-minded discussion and accompanying documentaries. Meanwhile, Channel 4 gave us the Banned season which my friends and I stayed up to watch hoping for titillation but came away from having seen The Life of Brian, fully contextualised as part of a serious debate about censorship. I started listening to Radio 4 at about the same time — hours a week of quality drama (Clive Merrison is the best Sherlock Holmes) and discussion of varying degrees of intellectual rigour running as background noise, drip-feeding my brain.

My parents not only encouraged my consumption of culture but also set a good example. My Dad has been a serious, obsessive fan of blues music since he was a teenager on his own Somerset council estate. Though he’s not a great reader in general he will read about music and so our house was always full of heavyweight volumes by American musicologists, either borrowed from the library or (the secret weapon in many working class bookcases) cancelled and sold off by the library service for 10 or 20p. He also introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock, spaghetti westerns and Hammer horror; to the Kinks, the Bluesbreakers, and the Pretty Things. All, with hindsight, pretty hipster cool for a small-town lathe-operator.

Mum is and always has been a reader — one or two books on the go at any time, speeding through the pages, always keen to explain why she likes or dislikes any particular book. She expected me to read and to enjoy reading and — not in a pushy parent way, but quite naturally — and it worked; I did, and I do. On a couple of occasions she even tried to write novels — Mills & Boon romances, I think — on a typewriter in the dining room. She didn’t get far but that sent a powerful message, too: just because we’ve got fuck-all, and live somewhere like this, doesn’t mean we have to be passive — we’re allowed to create! I started writing myself on the typewriter she abandoned. (Or did I just steal it from her?) I suppose Dad’s various bands over the years, and his dabbling in songwriting, underlined that point.

When I went to university I was sure I would be at a disadvantage and, sure, I sometimes felt a bit lost when people started to compare experience of going to the theatre — to date, I’ve seen, I think, four plays, ever — that is a world from which I feel cut off. In many ways, though, I felt more rounded in my education than some of my peers, and more confident in my own sense of what was good and bad, and what was worth studying in the first place.

I worry sometimes that the infrastructure I enjoyed has been eroded. Libraries have closed or become less ambitious, and TV seems less willing to lecture or challenge in case it gets accused of being patronising or pretentious. But then I hear a story about a refugee in the Lebanon learning to play the violin largely from YouTube videos, and remember the existence of, say, Project Gutenberg, or Archive.org, and I think, no, there’s reason to be optimistic. There’s more culture to enjoy, and more cheap or free ways to enjoy it, than ever before.

And if there’s one thing we council types are good at it’s stretching scraps and mince out to a full meal.

Categories
council weather

King of the Streets

A man with an umbrella.

I like rain and always have, as far as I can remember.

I started thinking about this late last night as I drowsily browsed Alexandra Harris’s 2015 book Weatherland. In her survey of how English writers and artists have looked at the weather she says this of Dorothy and William Wordsworth:

Cumbria is now officially the rainiest county in England, dripping with twice as much rain as some other parts of the country. This didn’t bother the Wordsworths. They were both phenomenally tough, able to walk for hours in steady rain, their woollen coats heavy with the wet, and still consider the experience pleasant.

When I was a kid growing up on a council estate in Somerset I would feel absolute elation if I woke up to low contrast grey light and the tip-tap of rain outside. Not only did I find the cool, subtle atmosphere pleasing in its own right but I also knew that, for a few hours at least, the streets were mine.

Three tourists in the rain.

I wasn’t a tough kid but wandering the avenues, alleyways and closes during a downpour I felt harder than all those wimps cowering indoors.

I could walk from one end of the estate to the other — further than I usually roamed — without seeing anyone, except the occasional face behind a fogged car windscreen.

The shortcuts I usually avoided because they were the territory of rough kids — like mad-eyed Chantel who would have given the Pope a Chinese burn if he’d been reckless enough to wander into her park — were suddenly open. Even if I did bump into someone scary they wouldn’t be inclined to bother me, not with the rain soaking into their trainers.

An anorak-wearing walker on the prom.

When I was small I liked to pretend I was a soldier enduring harsh conditions on patrol. In adolescence the daydream changed. First, I was a private eye going down these mean streets, neither tarnished nor afraid, imagining my very unsexy anorak a trench-coat. Then, becoming a serious student, I did indeed start to think of myself as a Coleredgeian Romantic, reading poetry under trees, partly sincerely, but also because I hoped a girl might see me and be impressed. (Girls, I for some reason imagined, craved damp boys reading wet paperbacks next to the dogshit bins in Cranleigh Gardens.)

I’m still thrilled by the rain, even as I’ve learned to appreciate sunshine too, and I still scoff inwardly when I see people running for cover: ‘It’s only a bit of rain! Doesn’t bother me. I am English, after all.’ Yes, apparently in my more pompous moments I imagine enduring wet trousers to be an English national superpower.

The only problem is that, entering middle-age, I find myself wearing glasses, and speckled, misty spectacles are no fun at all. Perhaps my days as king of the rain-slicked streets are over.

Categories
council

The Likes of Us

council_houses

‘University? Don’t go. It’s not for the likes of us.’

I sometimes wonder if I might have been the last person in Britain to be on the receiving end of that phrase.

When my grandmother spoke those words to me over a cup of tea at her council flat in the mid-1990s it was already an anachronism — a cliché, or joke. But she really meant it.

I only got to know this grandmother well after she was widowed. As long as there was a rum-soaked bully with Navy tattoos in the corner we children weren’t made to feel welcome beyond a tense and gloomy visit a week or so before Christmas each year. Once he’d gone the house seemed brighter and she became lighter on her feet. For the first time I heard stories about her father and grandfather, East End hard men and bastards to varying degrees, and realised that she smiled so much because, however hard her adult life had been at times, it was infinitely better than where she had come from.

She worked until the day she died, cleaning the house of a wealthy local family who I gather thought they were doing her a favour by letting her scrub their floors despite her bad heart and busted knees. She never complained about them and always called them Mr and Mrs even as I sat on the chintzy sofa steaming with indignation on her behalf.

When I told her I’d been offered a place at a good university I thought she’d be pleased. I was used to adults being impressed by my achievements. In fact, that sweet hit of approval was what drove me through school and exams. — I was addicted to being told I was a clever boy, like a laboratory hamster conditioned with a controlled feed of sugar water.

But Nan… Nan looked horrified, as if she’d had a vision of the disastrous fate that awaited me. She did, after all, read tea leaves and regarded herself as having The Gift. It was a reaction and perhaps the most emotional I ever saw her.

I was upset and angry, not so much at her as at whatever accident of programming had made her think that way. What did she think was going to happen? That I’d be laughed at or bullied? I brushed it off and I never got to find out exactly what she meant because she died not long after.

I’ve quite often thought about her advice over the years. At various times I’ve suspected she was broadly right — it wasn’t for the likes of me and I didn’t have a huge amount of fun. When the university kept phoning and writing asking for donations after I’d left, as if we’d been great pals, I told them to stop.

Now I wonder if the bit she got wrong was specifically, ‘Don’t go.’ We have to keep going, even as more obstacles are placed in the way, and even if it’s a difficult experience. Otherwise the breach in the wall will get sealed up and we’ll back where we started.

Categories
concrete council Somerset Uncategorized

Smiling Somerset

Grey concrete in black-and-white.
The sea wall at Burnham.

When I tell people I’m from Somerset they usually say, ‘Oh, lovely!’ recalling holidays they’ve had. But my home town, Bridgwater, isn’t lovely. I mean, I love it, but it’s a working town, with barely a touch of twee about it.

When I bumped into one of my former A level tutors in a pub in London years after leaving home he described Bridgwater as being ‘Like Barnsley or Bolton dropped into the middle of the rural West Country.’ Someone else once summed it up as ‘a small town with inner-city problems’. And a graffito left in the town centre, on display for many years, was pithier: ‘All this town cares about is fucking carnival.’

I should explain Carnival. It takes place every November and is the town’s pulse — an obsession for many and something of which the town is rightly proud. To understand the scale and drama of the event you can do worse than listen to this excellent episode of The Untold narrated by Grace Dent and produced by Polly Weston which goes behind the scenes of  a friendship rent asunder by competing carnival club loyalties.

One of my favourite things is to make habitually unimpressed sophisticates watch videos of Carnival on YouTube; imagining bumpkins prancing about on the back of flat-bed lorries, their jaws drop when they see the fully illuminated mechanically animated behemoths thundering along in clouds of noise and steam. It is amazing. Barmy, brash, camp, yes, but truly amazing.

Then there are the holiday resorts of Burnham and Weston where the sea is merely a concept, once popular with working class Brummies and northerners who would pass us on the motorway as we headed towards Fleetwood and Blackpool. Again, there was no twee in Burnham, just full-throated fun when there was sufficient booze and sun, or oppressive uniform greyness when there wasn’t.

Wintry scene with morning colours of pale purple and orange.
Frozen nettles on the Somerset levels.

When I started to take myself for long walks as a teenager, it was along the banks of drainage ditches, in the orbit of the sinister Royal Ordnance Factory. However far I walked, I could always hear the sore throat of the motorway and occasionally military aircraft would thunder low overhead. There were pillboxes everywhere, unremarked upon, brutalist cubes in the middle of otherwise pretty fields.

As a young man my council estate conditioning and a comprehensive school cringe made even the most ordinarily pleasant town or village feel intimidatingly posh so that for many years the prettier side of Somerset felt all but inaccessible. It didn’t matter, though, because I liked the flat, grim, gritty, gleefully tacky version that I understood. I never called it a ‘shithole’ like some of the other aloof university-bound kids. I never really wanted to leave.

More recently, fuelled by homesick reading, and with the chip on my shoulder finally beginning to disintegrate as I enter middle age, I’ve begun to explore — to appreciate the nature, architecture and deep history of a place I thought I knew. I’ve realised it’s not all institutional severity — there are orchards, forests, cliffsides, ancient churches and a thousand other delights. And I like that version of Somerset too, even if I still feel like a tourist there.

Categories
buildings history

It’s In Swindon

Edwardian photograph: a grocer's shop.

I have a skill that I have yet to work out a way to monetise: finding places on Google Street View based on a single photograph and limited data.

You know when some account or other Tweets a black-and-white photo with some variant on, ‘Any idea where this is, Twitter peeps?’ Once I’ve finished vomiting over the use of ‘Twitter peeps’, I’m the bloke that spends an hour switching between Street View, census records, online photo archives and about 60 other sources to work it out.

It reminds of a jigsaw puzzle based on an M.C. Escher drawing I once helped the other half with. All the pieces looked the same, it seemed utterly impossible, but slowly we learned to distinguish between mostly black, cross-hatched black, sideways hatched dark grey, stippled dark grey, and so on. With an old photo, the more you stare, the more details pop out — a church spire in the background, a number on a nearby shop, the name of a brand of horse food, a faded sign…

Only this morning I cracked a puzzle set by the ever-fascinating @ghostsigns by spotting a war memorial in the bottom right corner; searching the Imperial War Museum’s war memorial database for NEWCASTLE UNDER LYME OBELISK and then exploring the area around Chesterton Park (where I’ve never been in real life) on Street View.

It’s satisfying on several levels. First, it’s pleasing to help someone else. Secondly, as someone who often wants help from others solving pub-related mysteries, I hope it earns me some Karma or something. Then there’s the pleasure of the hunt — I didn’t know anything about Newcastle-under-Lyme when I got up this morning, but now I feel as if I’ve lived there. Finally, there’s the reason most people do puzzles: the sense of elation that comes with a deferred resolution. I may have punched the air discreetly over my porridge.

My greatest triumph came closer to home a couple of years ago. The photo at the top of this post is of my partner’s great grandfather. We knew he ran a grocer’s shop in East London between the wars on a particular street (Orford Road, Walthamstow) but couldn’t work out where it was exactly. I stared at that picture, at Street View, back at the picture, back at Street View, until hours later I declared, ‘It’s in Swindon. Here, look.’

See, Orford road doesn’t slope, I eventually remembered, which broke that hang up. Then, free to think beyond what I’d assumed was an established fact, I started to look more widely, starting by Googling ROLLESTON which, among other things, is a street in Swindon. That rang a bell — wasn’t that where the other half’s great-grandmother was born? I trolled up and down Rolleston Street for a bit but couldn’t find the shop. Then I zeroed in on this distinctive feature:

Window bracket

I’d seen this, here. But the window arrangement wasn’t quite right, and none of the other buildings nearby had the same arrangement. Then, the final move: I looked at the building from a different angle and found a shot from an older Street View survey: BINGO, THERE IT IS.

That’s clearly a converted shop premises, on a slope, with the right arrangement of windows and brackets. (I didn’t know then about the back-and-forward date slider in Street View, or maybe it hadn’t appeared at that point.)

I know, I know — this is incredibly bloody boring. That’s who I am. Deal with it. And if you get stuck with something like this, do drop me a line. I might be able to help and even if I can’t I’ll have fun trying.

Categories
food

Working Class Discernment and the Humble Avocado

An avacado viewed from above.

There’s a version of what being ‘working class’ means (usually championed by those who aren’t) that suggests a kind of pig-like, unquestioning gluttony — which implies that thinking about what you eat and drink, and expressing a preference, is bourgeois pretentiousness. Real first-against-the-wall stuff.

I’ve always found this weird because the working class family I grew up in talked about food and drink all the time. I’ve written about this before, albeit in a subscriber-only newsletter hardly anyone reads, so I’ll quote myself:

During meals, we invariably talked about what we were eating, how it could be improved, and how it compared to previous experiences of the same dish. Even if it was just egg and chips — ‘If you get a good heat on it, the bottom frills up and goes crispy, which is how it should be.’

It was partly because we were determined to squeeze as much pleasure out of life as funds would allow: wasting money on a bad dinner is annoying when you’re wealthy, but heartbreaking when you’re not.

We had a favourite chip shop, which changed frequently as we monitored the quality of the food with successive changes of management: their chips are over-cooked, the fish batter is greasy, they’re cooking it all in the same oil which isn’t at the right temperature for either. We turned our noses up at most bought-in pies but loved Holland’s Potato & Meat. (I still do — that buttery crust, the creamy quality of the potato… Oh, yes.) We debated who made the best roast potatoes — Mum, Nan or Aunty D? (It was, and still is, Aunty D — sorry, Mum.) Was a brand-name brown sauce worth the extra money over the supermarket’s own version? (Yes — less sugary.) We talked about cheese at Christmas when there was more than one to compare. When she had time, Mum made bread, and we all knew it was better than the supermarket stuff — crustier, more flavoursome, with a crumb that fought back.

I also remember Dad and his friends debating the quality of local ciders (Rich’s had the right balance of price and quality), beer (homebrew especially) and whisky.

And a bit more that’s just come to me: my late uncle, a former tank driver, latterly a mechanic, used to take account of particularly good meals he’d eaten to tell me about when he saw me. Sometimes, he’d keep back a slice of especially good bacon or a slice of particularly impressive boiled ham for me to try, serving it up with oil-blackened fingers. Food is love and all that.

I was thinking about this today because I’ve just eaten a particularly fantastic avocado. (95p from Lidl, avo fans — bigger, better, cheaper and more reliable than those from any other shop in town, for reasons unknown.) Stop, don’t hate me!

See, avocado defeated my family the first time we tried it in about 1984, when we were temporarily between homes (because, money) and living with Nan and Gramps. Mum had read about them in a magazine and, as we all liked to try new things, got one at the supermarket. The problem is, it was marketed as an ‘avocado pear’, which set up quite the wrong expectations. Then, on top of that, we had no idea what a ripe avocado felt like so this specimen had the texture of a cricket ball. I can still remember the sensation of eating it — the kind of tannic bitterness you feel on the skin of your teeth. We all tried a bite and grimaced before it went in the bin.

So for years I didn’t think I liked avocado until a holiday in Spain in my twenties where a woman running a market stall asked my partner and I if we wanted one ‘¿Para comer?’ That is, to eat now. She grabbed at them, prodding with her fingers until she found one that was just right — not in a twee lifestyle aspirations way but like a production line operator weeding out dented cans. The one she selected and hurled into a paper bag tasted like vegetable velvet and I felt (as I too often do) a surge of annoyance: why had I been letting middle class people keep good stuff like this to themselves? Good cheap stuff, too — denied to me through lack of experience rather than shortness of funds.

So, I like avocados now. Not because I’m a traitor to my people, or because I’m trying to impress anyone, but because they taste good.

Unless… Well.. You don’t think the act of writing this might betray a lingering anxiety, do you?