Steve Gibson is perhaps the only football chairman in England to have his name chanted by the fans in genuine acclaim rather than before the words 'OUT OUT OUT'. They call him the King of Teesside. A local self-made millionaire through his Bulkhaul transport company, he is a genuine fan rather than an avaricious hobbyist. He saved the club from liquidation, built them a new stadium and has bankrolled the purchase of players like Juninho, lured from the beaches of Rio and the cafes of Europe to the muddy banks of the oily Tees. He has been given the freedom of the town and a statue is surely at the planning stage. Unlike most football chairmen, you can actually listen to his opinions for minutes on end without your cerebral cortex liquefying. 'I was reading in The Times' he once said in a Times column by Martin Samuel, 'that most people these days regard themselves as middle-class. Not in Middlesbrough they don't. Ask that question up here and ninety per cent of them would say they were working-class... If you look at Middlesbrough and the area around the town, it has one of the worst infant mortality rates in the country, one of the worst percentages of cardio-vascular disease, one of the highest rates of cancer. Then you list the local Members of Parliament: Tony Blair, William Hague, Alan Milburn, Peter Mandelson. There used to be Mo Mowlam too. And while these career politicians are doing their stuff, advancing up the ladder, their constituents are dying young. So do we see ourselves as the flagship for the town? Of course we do.' Can you imagine Robert Maxwell or Malcolm Glaser ever saying that?
Gibson is right too when he says that the townsfolk are 'loyal, hard-working and innately pessimistic'. Middlesbrough has always had it tough. It has the dubious honour of being the first major British town to be bombed by the Luftwaffe. On 25 May 1940, a Heinkel bombed Dickie Walkington's house on Aire Street. In 1942 a Dornier 217 weaved through the barrage balloon defences and blew up the railway station. According to local legend, several of the town's fish and chip shops were destroyed in these raids. If Stan Boardman had come from Boro, he really could have claimed the Fokkers had bombed his chippy.
Durham was luckier. It should have been hit during the Luftwaffe's infamous Baedeker Raids on cathedral cities and places of historic and cultural worth. Durham was scheduled for attack right after Exeter, Bath and York. The Durham Advertiser reported in 1945: 'Tensions were high and fears grew as moonlight illuminated the cathedral perched high above the streets on its rock pedestal. And then the sirens screamed their alarm from the battlemented walls of the castle, just as other alarms had been sounded from there to sleeping citizens so many centuries ago. The greatly augmented Fire Service stood by, ready to fill the maze of pipes running by kerbsides to Cathedral Green with water. The hour was at hand.
'Suddenly a warden dashed into his post and cried, "A miracle! Look at the cathedral!" Everyone rushed out and saw with great amazement that the city, which had been brightly moonlit a moment before, now lay under a pall of white mist, completely blanketing the cathedral and the valleys. Soon after, the bombers arrived overhead and the sky throbbed as they droned about looking for the landmarks that would give the city away... The planes droned all over the sky, puzzled by the disappearance of this bomb-aimer's dream target, and at length they flew away without releasing their deadly load.' Well, not over Durham anyway. They bombed little villages of the Derwent Valley instead, killing thirty-six people, many women and children.
'Why did no one tell me about Durham?' wrote Bill Bryson after his first visit, astonished that his fellow Americans weren't beating a path to the north-east, instead of Stratford and the Tower of London and Blenheim Palace. Just like the Luftwaffe, lots of foreign visitors miss out on it completely and go somewhere else.
The truth is, and really, Bill, this is not just a chippy northerner grumbling, if Durham were in Kent or Sussex, we would never hear the last of it. Every foreign visitor to these shores would salivate over its dreaming spires and punts and misericords and blue-stockinged girls on bicycles. 'Dur-Ham' would be said like 'Boiled Ham' by men in shorts from Boise, Idaho. It would have its own boat race and folk festival and its own TV show where an irascible, beer-swilling, opera-loving detective finds corpses in every cloister and bookshop. But Durham is a long way away from London. Way up that long, long Al and awkwardly situated, horribly undaytrippable, from the Ramada Heathrow. Far enough north for even this Lancastrian to have never visited before and to ask, baffled, 'Why did no one tell me about Durham?'
But it doesn't feel like the north. Durham has always stood apart. After William the Conqueror had relinquished it, the city and the fractious surrounding county were ruled for centuries as an independent fiefdom or palatinate by some chaps called the Prince Bishops; a powerful line of priest/politicians with their own mint, army and legal system. After the reformation their powers naturally waned but they held out until 1836 before finally ceding control to Westminster and the Crown and joining the rest of us subjects. They abandoned Durham Castle, relocating to a palace in Bishop Auckland, and their old home became the seat of the fledgling Durham University. The effect of all this is to leave a literal and metaphorical peninsula of ancient wealth and grandeur in the centre of what is actually a working-class coal town, one that still has a Miners' Gala though the pits have long gone. It is as if Doncaster's sink estates and flyovers suddenly gave way to reveal a Doges Palace, a Notre Dame or a Sorbonne.
Exquisite and genteel, it's much more redolent of Oxford or Cambridge than a northern city. C. S. Lewis preferred Durham to both Oxford and Cambridge but there is a kinship. Also, like Oxford and Cambridge, the antique glories of its ancient heart often obscure the fact that it has pockets of real deprivation as grim as anywhere in inner-city Liverpool or Manchester. This fact can rankle with Geordies, who resent its ever-so-slightly superior mien, its picture-postcard prettiness, its prim bookish air concealing slovenly habits.
Fair enough. But it is gorgeous. Like Newcastle it's best seen first from the train and, naturally, like Newcastle, I arrived by car. Even if you park in the horribly generic Milburngate shopping mall, it's only a stride or two before things improve. You emerge on a balcony above the river where right on cue, a coxless four glide by disturbing a cormorant or grebe posing madly on a rippling weir. Suddenly a song comes back to mind for the first time in thirty years, forgotten since last you heard Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart play it on Junior Choice. That song, yes, is Roger Whittaker's drearily mournful 'Durham Town' which, before anyone writes in, I know is actually called 'Durham Town (The Leavin')'. In it, in the midst of a gloomy catalogue of personal disasters only rivalled in seventies balladry by Gilbert O'Sullivan's 'Alone Again Naturally', Roger sings, 'When I was a boy, I spent my time/Sitting on the banks of the River Tyne.' And perhaps he did. But not in Durham. It's on the Wear. Clean those specs, Rog.
Crossing the Wear from the shops you begin to see the real Durham, which is possibly the fake Durham depending on your perspective. If the students are in town, the riverside pizzerias and pubs will be jumping and it won't be long before the gradients let you know that you are climbing to the city's crown jewels, in both the aesthetic and the Sid James sense.
You see, if you look at a map of Durham and you're of a faintly puerile cast of mind, you will be reminded of the diagrams of the male generative organs – at rest, I should point out – that you would find in biology text books. Well, it reminded me, anyway. On this modest lambent willy of a peninsula is all the stuff that gets people excited about Durham: the castle, the cathedral and Palace Green. If you want a slightly more high-minded comparison, try Pevsner: 'Durham is one of the great experiences of Europe to those who understand architecture. The group of cathedral, castle and monastery on the rock can only be compared to Avignon or Prague.'
Climbing from the wooded cliff sides and onto Palace Green is like stepping out of the north of chips, pies and draught bitter and into an episode of Brother Cadfael. There should be vans selling mead. It's a lovely spot but, boy, is it ever popular? I was there at Easter and you could barely hear the evensong over the Minolta
powerwinders. My ecclesiastical architecture prose critiques leave quite a bit to be desired so let me instead quote you an expert in the field, Alec Clifton-Taylor, who said: 'With the cathedral at Durham, we reach the incomparable masterpiece of Romanesque architecture not only in England but anywhere. The moment for entering provides for an architectural experience never to be forgotten, one of the greatest England has to offer.'
Well, I'd go along with all of that, squire, with the slight proviso that when you've seen one really big cathedral, you've seen them all, unless you can tell a bema from an ambulatory at fifty paces. That said, it is truly stunning. I thought as I always do when entering one of these places of how powerful, how terrifying even, the presence of God must have been in the lives of rich and poor alike to make them build these edifices – not just build them, but so skilfully and impressively, that just entering makes you feel oddly godly. The sheer authority of the place almost forces you to your knees, like a giant hand on your shoulder. Durham Cathedral is religious certainty written in unyielding stone and stained glass; a vast, daunting embodiment of an unprovable, abstract idea, I mused in its vaulted silence. For about ten minutes. Then I went off to find the cafe.
I had a scone and watched a lovely little vignette at the next table. A delicate, mousy girl in a sweatshirt and round glasses was chatting to a chubby, gentle-faced young man with an untidy beard and a rucksack full of theology books and a different livery of sweatshirt. They were both what I would call 'churchy' and clearly at the very earliest stages of mild courtship. He would say something, possibly a joke about the Venerable Bede, who's buried next door, and she would laugh until her teacup shook and her long, pale face coloured slightly. It was quite the sweetest thing I have ever seen. I do hope they're together now, if that's what they wanted. Or at least I hope they had a really good time finding out that it wasn't quite what they wanted. I finished my scone, bought some pamphlets and left Durham to them and the tourists and the last, liquid honey of the afternoon sun.
If you're hereabouts, drop in at Hexham but try not to approach from the west, where the grim vista of the Waste Transfer Plant and a sprawling industrial estate will make you doubt the guidebook stuff about 'handsome market town'. Hexham is undeniably northern in latitude but Latin in attitude in that it seemed to be having a siesta when I arrived.
I arrived at the Wentworth Cafe just as they were swinging round the 'Closed' signs and was told there was no food with a look that suggested only a pervert ate between noon and six. I asked the nice lady at the tourist information shop where I could get a bite and she told me to try 'Phat Katz Café'. I liked the way that she spelt it out with a shudder of contempt so went off up the hill to give it a go. Britain's cafes have come a long way in the last twenty years. But at Phat Katz I encountered the classic British look of the dismayed and panicked waitress who fears that the unwanted arrival of customers will throw the whole system into disarray. Nervously, I ask for a toasted teacake. She shakes her head.
'All the machines are switched off; it would take a few minutes.' I wonder whether to tell her about the great advances that have been made in toaster technology since the last war but think better of it. In the end I sip my tea and try to puzzle out any kind of theme in the curious bric-a-brac decor. There's a dulcimer, a skeleton, a trombone, an American pedestrian crossing sign and a Sopwith Camel. Perhaps it's based on a particularly freaky acid trip the owner once had in Kathmandu. That would account for his atrocious spelling as well.
Having seen it on a leaflet in a cathedral cafe, I drove across country to the Beamish Museum of Northern Life, a replication of the shops, streets, schools, mines and railway stations of bygone generations, a celebration of local life in the centuries past. Most of it was shut, though, still gearing itself up for the tourist season. No matter. The name was revealing enough. Not North-Eastern Life, Northern Life. That feeling again that we Mancs, Scousers and tykes are somehow deluding ourselves if we think that we're northern. No, son, this is the north, it seems to say.
In fact, this is the ending of the north, a notion I was acutely aware of as we toured these last outposts, not just of the north but of England, back and forth along Hadrian's Wall in that lonely, lovely last corridor of England that lies roughly alongside the A69 from Carlisle to Newcastle. The actual wall though stretches from one coast to the other, from Bowness on Solway in the west to Wallsend in the east. It is the most remarkable Roman monument in the country and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else in the former Roman Empire.
We dropped in at Greenhead, where they offer a virtual tour of the wall for £7.50 although the actual wall (free) would seem much better value. Like Wallsend, Walltown may not be imaginatively named but at least you know exactly where it is. Here I went all gooey over a red squirrel. Well-meaning but misinformed Gunrdinista mates have tried to convince me that my dislike of the grey squirrel and zeal for its extermination is somehow analogous to Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing policy but I'm just not having it. Red squirrels are shy and lovely and they are ours. If we could have both, I'd be happy (though I'd prefer reds), but you can't. Thanks to human stupidity and a disease called Parapox, there won't be a red squirrel left in England in twenty years and another little bit of joy will have passed from the world. Any day you see one is a real red-letter day.
I saw it on Walltown Crags and almost as striking was another sighting there of a gentleman in khaki combat hat of what looked like the Latvian Home Guard. With him was a teenage girl dressed in pink picking her way gingerly in unsuitable footwear through mud. She would glance occasionally and nervously at her dad's headgear and I recognised the look on her face. It was terror that a school friend might see her.
If anyone knows the information centre here and its toilet block, I'd be grateful if they could explain the curious logo, a relief mural which seemed to show a naked man boxing with a pterodactyl watched by a troll in a bobble hat.
From the turrets of Walltown, you can view the vast empty expanse of Northumbria. Empty undulating ridges and dead straight Roman roads built by men from the Mediterranean who must have shivered in their beds and wondered what kind of godforsaken posting this was. Once the wall was garrisoned by thousands of troops who watched over the northern horizon from turrets and milecastles placed at regular intervals. Due north were the savage hordes and ungovernable expanses of Scotland. Haltwhistle, just down the road, is the centre of Britain. Not England, which is Meriden in the Midlands, but Britain, which should remind the Anglocentrics among us just how big Scotland is.
When not nervously walking along the wall looking for mad jocks bent on slaughter, the legionnaires lived in a series of substantial forts placed at strategic locations. The big daddy of these is Housesteads, where I stump up my quid for parking plus three pound odd for admission. The site is massive and the actual fort is a good fifteen minutes' schlep from the car park. The sky glowered, black clouds and slanting rain interrupted by sudden brilliant sun and gusts of icy wind. Even encased in Gore-Tex it was icy. What must it have been like to kids from the sunny Adriatic dreaming of those 'beakers of the warm south' and dusky maidens? Absolute hell, I would have thought.
There are natives of the north who see it like that as well too. Given the choice they'd rather be dancing to cheesy house music in a sweaty club in Ayia Napa while necking an Aftershock. Each to their own. I like it up here. Bleak, challenging, a little raw but wildly romantic. Northern, I'd like to think.
East of here, the A689 is a trunk road that runs between Alston, a fine, isolated moorland village with a desperate shortage of women, it's said, and Penrith, a cracking market town on the border with the Lake District. In 2001, the AA decided that that very A689 is one of the ten best driving roads in the world. Cross it when the clag and murk are down to the valley floor, when the rain comes in stinging sheets that the wipers can't clear, when the hail pings off the bonnet or the snow blows in off the tops, and you will wonder which AA made this decidedly drunken decision
. You'll never forget it, though.
And come in the warm, malt whisky light of a late summer evening or a buttered crumpet of a crisp winter morning or in spring when the sky is alive with larks and there is nowhere better in England. A glorious feeling of well-being will suffuse you, especially as you reach the very top of the pass and find a large squat building that just happens to be the best transport cafe in the world.
Elton can keep the Ivy; Tony can have his Granita. I'd swap every coulis, roulade and jus in NWI for dinner (at dinnertime) at the Hartside Cafe. For years, it was a secret known only to bikers, lorry drivers and walkers with a real sense of adventure. Fog and ice and snow means it can only open half the year or so. But when it does, the smell of the grilling bacon evidently carries across the north and everyone from Barrow to Jarrow heads up here. I'm worried that even writing these words might make it harder to get my steak pie and chips on a Bank Holiday Monday.
Pies and Prejudice Page 34
