by Tim Moore
Cold night air is well known for its sobering properties, and I went through a couple of thousand lungfuls while getting hopelessly lost in the coal-smoked, terraced back streets of Gateshead. Finding my guest house had proved remarkably straightforward, but swaying gently beneath its porch-mounted baskets of plastic flora I’d checked my watch and noted it wasn’t quite ten: way too early to have got into this state, let alone to consider going to bed now that I was. I found myself seized by an urge to round the night off with a visit to the Pear Tree Inn, a Gateshead pub that irresistibly counted a horse amongst its regulars. (‘I called in to attend a bank holiday karaoke,’ ran one online memory, ‘and there he was at the bar, drinking beer out of a bucket.’)
A vague idea that the Pear Tree lay somewhere close at hand was hardened into a cidery, cast-iron conviction that it was precisely here, just up this empty, dark street of identical little Victorian houses, and left at the end. OK, maybe it was right. Oh, I get it: I’m remembering the map upside down. It’s back across here and down this empty, dark street of … hang on.
After a lot more of this, I discovered I was not after all alone in Gateshead. A group of old men were gathered under a streetlight, and I all but grabbed the nearest by the collar. Perhaps it was the befuddling revelation that this collar, and all the others, was attached to a long black frock coat, and set off with a Homburg and a full grey beard. Perhaps it was no more than the amnesia of the drunk and weary. For whatever reason, I now found myself badgering a huddle of elderly orthodox Jews for directions to a pub whose name I no longer remembered.
‘Excuse me,’ I began, filling their worried faces with Red Aftershock. ‘I’m looking for the, ah, that, you know, that pub with the horse.’
In silence I watched fear evolve into something else. There were mutters and scowls, and suddenly I knew what it was: disgust. I rewound my question and came to a horrid conclusion. Turning around and going away would have been a good choice at this point, but Mr Cider would have none of it. ‘No – not the whores, the horse! Hor-sssss: neigh, neigh! Like a big pony. They put down a bucket by the bar and the whores – the horse! – comes in and drinks out of it.’
Every face but one was now pointed at the pavement. It belonged to the youngster, whose beard still bore the odd fleck of black. ‘I cannot help you,’ he said, faltering and guttural. ‘Down there is nice restaurant. Maybe you ask.’
How extraordinary to discover, as I did the next morning, that Gateshead is revered by Jews around the world as one of their faith’s most feted centres of learning. Its trio of Talmudic colleges draw students and religious educators from across the globe, and are accepted as the most important outside the US and Israel. The first Jewish refugees arrived in Gateshead from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, and the local ultra-orthodox population has since swelled to 1,500: many decamped from Newcastle and Hartlepool, disillusioned with the religious laxity of their local congregations. Gateshead was, and for most still is, a town where young Jewish men and women do their shopping at different times of the day, to forestall unsupervised mingling of the sexes.
And yet this ultra-orthodox community co-exists in harmony with a healthy local Muslim population, to the extent of advising drunken out-of-towners to seek directions from a kebab shop, as I presently discovered the nice restaurant to be.
‘Is pub of young generation?’ All things considered I doubted it – a horse is no youthful plaything – and told the kebab man as much. ‘OK,’ he said, wiping his hands on his apron as a prelude to much pointing. I set off fairly certain that his gesticulations would not lead me to the Pear Tree Inn. Sure enough, a while later I heaved open a door handle girdled in tinsel, and found myself inside the Nursery House Working Men’s Club.
I strove to exude a sense of entitlement as I approached the bar, a gait and bearing that said: here is a man, a man who works. With every sticky step across the beer-steeped carpet swirls I expected conversation to stop dead and dominoes to clatter to the table, the oily palm placed firmly against my chest, the grubby thumb jabbed wordlessly at a notice over the bar: MEMBERS ONLY. ALSO, NO PONCES. But the half-dozen drinkers, mostly retirees with big moustaches, just mumbled on good-naturedly to each other. One or two even acknowledged me with tiny nods. All the same, I heard myself order a pint of lager from the young barman in a pathetic murmur stripped of geographical giveaways. After a moment’s reflection he placed before me a large bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale and a very little glass. I had a stab at a grateful smile and passed him a fiver.
At a small table in the corner I sipped bitter-sweet amber and slid gently into a matching reverie. My gaze drifted from the wall-mounted telly broadcasting silent coverage of a Spanish league match and up to the low-slung ceiling, its polystyrene tiles spattered with the ghostly stains of past exuberance. Around me, my fellow drinkers idly discussed motor caravans and the perfect Sunday dinner, punctuating every contribution with languid nods and deep, approving murmurs of ‘aye’. I sat there and savoured the low-key masculinity of it all, just happy to be accepted for what I was – a drunkard who didn’t want any trouble. How uniquely soothing was the sound of old men agreeing with each other. Or rather, how affectingly, unbearably poignant. That’s alcohol for you.
In 1976 there were over four thousand working men’s clubs in Britain. Now there are half that, with two closing down every week. The Nursery House and the way of life that went with it were clearly not long for this world: my arrival lowered the occupants’ average age by some margin. On a wall outside the Gents, a massed group photo of a 1960s club coach outing told of a thriving past, as did the yawning battery of urinals within. Until 2004, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union operated its own Tyneside brewery, an arrangement that allowed members to imbibe at heavily subsidised prices. That year the CIU sold up to a duke who made his fortune filling in decommissioned mine shafts with a patent hard-bonding slurry of kidnapped racing pigeons and bits of Hartlepool, and the plant now manufactures solid-gold top hats. In fact, it produces brown ale on behalf of Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, but the point stands. I’d no doubt be appalled if I had any idea what my bottle would have cost in 2003, or indeed any memory of what I paid for it in 2009.
I certainly don’t remember much about the reasoning process that now persuaded me to finish off my stay at the Nursery House with a large glass of ruby port, and a good old chinwag at the bar with the young man who doubtfully placed it before me.
‘Quiet tonight,’ I began. ‘Had thirty urinals to myself.’
For whatever reason this failed to break the ice, as did further attempts to kick-start chats about his town centre’s stupendous ugliness, and the coal mine in my guest house. Losing patience with the barman’s tiny nods and his sudden interest in Athletico Madrid v Espanyol, I elected to redress the conversational imbalance in the only obvious manner.
‘I’m in seals, me,’ I announced, wiping a rivulet of fortified wine from my chin. ‘Footwear. On the rude, like.’ I was speaking Geordie, and if the dominant part of my mind was to be believed, doing so with fluent ease.
For some time, I fear, I held forth upon the canniness of wor life as a travelling shoe and boot salesman, gannin up and doon the A1, a hinny in every Dolcis. Then, quite suddenly, I succumbed to a terrible leaden fatigue and in a triumph of determination over coordination made my way across the bar. At the threshold I wheeled round to hoist a farewell hand at my fellow working men. ‘Howay the shoes!’ I cried, before noisily and repeatedly attempting to exit through a locked door.
Chapter Seven
IT WAS A busy night at the guest house. At some point someone stealthily entered my room, threw clothes all over the floor, and left both taps in the sink running. Towards dawn they busied themselves tuning everyone else’s television to GMTV at maximum volume, before creeping back into my room and redecorating it in a particularly effusive shade of brilliant white. Still their work was not done: the elderly couple who shared my table at breakfast couldn
’t speak highly enough of their full English, but mine had quite obviously been fried in cod liver oil.
A turn of Craig’s key let forth a Satanic roar, and a far more terrible noise: the bleated, helium-huffing croak of a man pretending to be a plastic green duck. The reflex convulsion thus unleashed introduced my knee to the MP3 stalk, briefly separating it from the power supply in a manner that caused the track to recommence from its awful beginning. My groan tasted of old beer and young eggs. ‘Orville’s Song’, perhaps my deepest excursion yet into the darkest heart of Maestro Man crap culture, an age when a middle-aged, mullet-permed ventriloquist called Keith could bag his own primetime show, and front it for eight straight years. To get an idea of just how far Britain had sunk by this time, one need only note that Keith Harris recorded ‘Orville’s Song’ at Abbey Road studios, and that it sold 750,000 copies – one each for every Maestro owner, with enough left over to build a monumental vinyl statue of John Bull and Britannia kneeling down with their heads in an oven.
With Orville turned down to a sickly whisper I drove away very slowly through a gathering drizzle, back towards the town centre. It was plain from a distance that a good night’s sleep and a shower hadn’t done much for Trinity Square’s looks. Every metaphor of structural ugliness tolled through my dull mind as its bullying bulk rose up: the Tony Montana of scars on the horizon, the Rorschach of blots on the landscape, the Cyclops and lemon juice of eyesores. Matron – the screens!
An entire town dominated by a car park? How very stupid we all were in the Sixties and Seventies. I supposed this was our final temple to transport, just as Paragon station in Hull had been one of our first. An appropriately hideous mausoleum for the childish fixation that compelled us to design whole cities around the motor vehicle, elevating a rather handy means of getting about into the very basis of society.
Demolition work finally began eight months after I passed through. Trinity Square is now no more, though it’s hard to call an ending happy when it involves a 100,000-square-foot Tesco. Don’t get me wrong: I like big Tescos. I’d grown to like them especially over recent days, with their cheap petrol and free toilets, and their unrivalled range of stupid Christmas crap for hungover absent fathers to cram tearfully into their car boots. But seductive as the rationale most surely is, the simple fact that I happen to really like something isn’t always enough to justify its endless proliferation. I nobly accept, for instance, that some street corners might not benefit from a Mustard World superstore, and that paisley button-down shirts aren’t for everyone. I’m not saying Trinity Square should be mourned, or – before anyone in Gateshead starts loading up the trucks – re-erected in my back garden. But as wrongheaded and hideous as the place most assuredly was, at least it had character and a kind of integrity, the product of public-spirited artists who confidently and genuinely believed they were creating something beautiful and good. Flimsy, faceless, off-the-shelf, conceived and designed by Excel spreadsheet: this is your basic massive Tesco. It’s ruthlessly cynical, but worse than that, it’s just so brain-drainingly dull. Tedium is insidious. People, almost by definition, just put up with it. The provocative ghastliness of Trinity Square stoked the fire in Gateshead bellies, forced the locals to come together and take a stand. Hatred is so much more energising, so much more fun. These days every new building in Britain, every new anything, is run through an endless blandification mill of public inquiries, community consultations and focus groups. Edges are knocked off, controversies neutered, any flavour but vanilla spat out. The result is an inexorable convergence towards the middle ground. These days you don’t get ugly, offensive, ridiculous cars, or towns, or even music. Everything looks the same, sounds the same. Everything’s boringly competent. Everything’s one big massive Tesco. I glanced at the doomed Trinity Square in Craig’s rear-view mirror, and felt a pang of melancholy for what it represented: a fallen dynasty of magnificent wrongness, our golden age of crap. Then I hit play, discharging an unsteady wail of late-era Billy Idol, and the moment passed.
I motored inland, north-west up a dual carriageway lined with some desperately dour moorland. It was as flat and featureless as Lincolnshire but very much yellower, all sickly and peat-poisoned, with the discouraging, boggy look of a land where it never stopped raining. All morning a sky the colour of last night’s mushroom soup wrung itself out in Craig’s face. After passing through so many man-made black spots whose ugliness had been thrust upon them, here at last was an area of outstanding natural disfigurement.
Hell’s jukebox chipped in with a work by metal-mouthed, python-owning skinhead Goldie, quite certainly recorded, released and marketed by people who were simply too scared to call any of its manifold deficiencies to his attention. The track began and ended with the kind of breathy, synthesised noodlings that might play under documentary footage of a coral reef, interrupted by a bewildering burst of manic, staccato drum ’n’ bass thrumps and furious shouting. It was like being yanked out of a coma with a massive espresso shot injected straight into your heart, and then dying. This experience went under the name of ‘Mother’, and endured for sixty-one minutes.
I pulled over just outside Wall, a village named in honour of the ancient imperial Pict-thwarter that passes by it. Courtesy of Craig’s cardboard floorpan my feet were sodden even before I got out to follow a heavily reconstructed stub of it up a very wet hill. All around was lumpy mud and leaf mulch, not much fun in damp shoes but a lot less in imperial-issue sandals. Hadrian’s Wall was the Roman Empire’s grimmest outpost, so dependably inhospitable that its guardians were the first legionaries permitted to wear socks. Over 15,000 soldiers came up here to build it, and almost as many were required to patrol the 84-mile fortifications: it’s estimated that one in six imperial legionaries would have done a tour of duty on the wall. Every one of them would eagerly have nominated it for demolition, then thrown up their cold blue hands in despair when Londinium-based Get Caesar fans launched a campaign to save it.
England mustered itself to a last surge of undulating greenery and village churchyards, then a light sleet speckled Craig’s glazing and everything went bleak and bald and windswept. I was welcomed into Scotland by low hills and lower clouds, and a large red van which pulled straight out in front of me from a lay-by and then proceeded in a manner consistent with the transport of plutonium in open vats. I was still crawling along behind it when we wound into Hawick, famed for knitted socks, being pronounced hoick and ‘really spoiling the Borders’.
Hawick’s impressive rap sheet was gleaned from an article in the Scotsman and plentiful online discussions headed things like ‘Worst shithole in Scotland?’, all of them keenly debated by natives with something close to pride. The town’s Borders-spoiling assets ranged from ‘truly horrible pubs’ to ‘the unfriend-liest rugby club in Scotland’, with special mention for a survey in which the Hawick ward of Burnfoot and Mansfield pipped many more notorious national rivals as the very worst place in Scotland to rear children.
If the pubs had been open and I’d found the rugby club it might have been different. As it was Hawick seemed blameless, though I did see two old men emerge from a metal shed advertising ‘horse carrots’, chewing hard. A legacy of the days when the sock was king, the gracious sandstone banks and public buildings on Hawick High Street were holding their heads up despite the parade of to-let signs and charity shops that faced them. If the people hurrying past looked a little grumpier than I’d become accustomed to, that was surely just down to the sluicing, relentless rain, and being Scottish. It’s also an enduring truth that any small town with a big river running straight through it – particularly a half-tamed, semi-Alpine tumbler such as the Teviot showed itself to be – can never attain true ignominy.
In the spirit of dedicated enquiry I tracked down Burnfoot and Mansfield, in fact no more than a handful of streets bordered by overgrown wasteland that I guessed had once been home to riverside textile mills. Hawick clearly wasn’t an ideal place to grow up: the council-sponsored downtown ‘
youth café’ betrayed a plaintive quest to find wholesome remedies for juvenile boredom. Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect in Burnfoot and Mansfield’s finely demarcated concentration of wayward husbandry: shoeless bairns bobbing for horse carrots in an open trough of Irn Bru, perhaps, or duelling with Hartlepool maces on the roof of a burnt-out ice-cream van. Instead, I piloted Craig down quiet and well-kept rows of semi-detached pebble-dash and Victorian granite. There was a cluster of starkly horrible three-floor 1960s tenement blocks that no one would want to call home, but then no one now did: all were boarded up and primed for demolition. I figured Burnfoot and Mansfield was a statistical victim of its own tininess: the entire survey sample could have been corrupted by a single hungover Burnfoot Begbie telling a doorstep researcher to stick his clipboard up his bahookie.
It was a long haul across soggy, open heather to Forth, a town of three thousand just a few miles south of Scotland’s dominant conurbations yet which somehow didn’t get electricity until the mid 1930s, and still hasn’t got gas. Stuck on a barren South Lanarkshire hill and forgotten about, Forth had by all accounts gone a bit funny. Beyond the predictable online comments about inbreeding and tumbleweed, a constant theme emerged amongst those haunted by the place, sometimes after no more than a single drive-through encounter many years previously. ‘There’s something eerie about it’; ‘an odd town’; ‘it’s just not quite right’. Forth was Bad: ‘I used to take deliveries up there every night, and the amount of fights I saw was surreal. They’re all fucking nuts.’ And Forth was Mad: ‘We fancied a pint after a local league match at Forth and someone directed us to the British Legion – found the place and it had closed down years before. Ended up in the Masonic Lodge, watching Gretna v Dundee on the telly.’ The windswept streets of Scotland’s strangest place were naturally enough roamed by a race of giants: George Gracie, one of many Forthians to have topped out above 7 foot, was for a while Britain’s tallest man. No extruded, glandular beanpole he – at 32 stone, Gracie was just a properly enormous bloke. His party piece at fairgrounds in the late Fifties and Sixties was to hoist a massive leg up on the roof of a Mini, like a mighty child trying to squeeze into an infant’s pedal car. Photographers captured this pose with care: Gracie always wore a kilt.
