Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  Gerry’s own memories of the Quality Hotel were typical of his generation. What he remembered were the 1960s, the time when the hotel first passed out of family hands, when it was acquired by the famous Mr Brittle, who’d bought it from the McCreas, the descendants of Nora and John, who had tired of the hotel’s fading glamour, and the spiralling costs of repairs and maintenance. This was the era of the ice cream parlour and the coffee bar in the lobby, where live bands – skiffle, mostly, and nascent rock‘n’roll performed by the likes of Barry Devlin and the Tigers* – could be heard between 6 and 9 only on Wednesday and Friday nights, while residents attempted to eat their warm roast dinners and their pies in the dining room, which had once been the library, surrounded by shelves long since denuded of books, and replaced with swaths of treen and silver-plated silverware.

  It was when Mr Brittle sold up and bought some land on the coast of southern Spain – clearly foreseeing the future – that the hotel’s final phase of decline began, the era that most of us still remember.

  The new owners, the people who bought the hotel from Mr Brittle, were a consortium headed by the shadowy Mr Miller, a man, people said, ‘with city money behind him’. They were responsible for the addition of the concrete back-bar and disco extension. The Italianate gardens were used as a dumping ground and the vast windows leading out were removed and bricked up. Another bar appeared in the entrance hall, in order to attract passing trade. In these final refurbishments every penny had been spared and every last improvement carried out in Formica, plywood, and unplaned 2″ x 4″. The Quality Hotel had finally achieved its apogee.

  In these last years only the disco, which at first was ‘Jumping Jack’s’, then ‘Scruples’, then ‘Club 2000’, could boast a profit: there were restrictions on numbers, but some nights during the summer, when people would travel in from the city and the country, there were as many as 2000 dancing like John Travolta, and then like Jennifer Warnes and Madonna, and then body-popping, and then round their handbags, and throwing shapes. The disco manager, Cliff – known as ‘The Libyan’ on account of his dark good looks and the fact that his father came from somewhere far away – doled out a grand in the hand, cash, no questions asked, to big-name DJs from local radio and television who travelled out to play a set, and then travelled back up the new motorway as fast as they could, after a rousing finale of ‘Heigh Ho Silver Lining’ or ‘Lady in Red’.

  The hotel, at this point, was to all intents and purposes finished. The consortium of owners took no interest and one day the whole place was simply closed, no fanfare and no announcement. One Friday night there was a disco and the next night, when people arrived wearing their casual trainers and with condoms in their pockets, the doors were closed, locked and bolted, and everyone had to make do with early chips and home.

  The place has since been completely stripped, at first by Mr Miller and his backers, who managed to auction off the larger parts of kitchen equipment, and the beds and the sofas. Elderly Mrs Malone, although she didn’t know it, sat on a part of the Quality Hotel when she was in the day room in the Gables, developing sores, vacantly watching morning television, and every Thursday she ate a chunky vegetable soup which had been served with a ladle from a kitchen that had once been the boast of the county and had seen the back of velouté aux fleurs de courgette. A small revolving leather chair which now sat in the Gables’s duty manager’s office had once, it was rumoured, seen the behind of More O’Ferral himself.

  After the first stripping came the scavengers. In one memorable night someone managed to pick off about 2000 Bangor Blue roof slates, plus several hundred yards of copper piping, some lead flashing, the remaining art deco-style door handles and about a mile and a half of architraves and skirting. After that the real looting began and before long there wasn’t much left for the rest of us. Parquet floors were burned for bonfires. Banisters were snapped. Terrazzo floors hacked up and used for missiles. The stud walls were punched and kicked through, and set light to, opening up the hotel’s original and vast womblike spaces, and for a while More O’Ferral’s monument to his wife was revealed once again in all its original glory. People said even the guard dogs were spooked by the place and would howl at the ghosts who inhabited the halls and corridors, but pretty soon the contract to patrol the building expired, the dogs departed and the hotel was left to rot in peace.

  But still it has its residents, of course, rats mostly – the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the original rats who inhabited the ash pile which stood hidden behind the summer house in the Italianate garden – and pigeons, and the occasional alcoholic like Jerry, who sleeps in his clothes on the bandstand in the old Turkish Baths, a position which gives him a commanding view should anyone attempt to come at him unawares. Drug takers had at one time colonised the old library, but a steel door now kept them out.

  To be honest, it’s hard to feel much nostalgia for the building these days and the Quality Hotel’s current owner, Frank Gilbey, was not a man who could feel nostalgia at the best of times. Like Stalin, Frank believed – as he often told Mrs Gilbey and anyone else who would listen – that you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (Although as far as Mrs Gilbey was aware, Frank had never actually made an omelette. He had boiled her an egg once, for breakfast, when she’d been ill after the Scotsman had left Lorraine, and she thought she couldn’t find the will or the energy to get up and do things, but the egg had been boiled hard enough to bounce and by lunchtime she was back on her feet. Men, Mrs Gilbey was forced to recognise once again, are useless in a crisis, and not that much good the rest of the time either.)

  Frank believed that progress was inevitable and that quality had to be reinvented, time and again. Frank believed that plastic was a natural improvement upon wood and to be preferred in most instances; he believed that uPVC windows were better than sash; that Frank Sinatra on CD was better than Frank on vinyl; and that aerosol cream in a can with a half-life of a hundred years was preferable to the perishable stuff from cows. Frank believed in progress.

  Nonetheless, even though he never liked to look back and he always preferred the future, Frank couldn’t deny that he’d had his good times at the Quality Hotel in the old days. He’d saved up and taken his parents there once for their wedding anniversary, years ago, the first time they’d ever eaten out. Back then, the Quality Hotel was the only place you could eat out in our town – this was way before Wong’s and Scarpetti’s. Frank had insisted that his father order the beef Wellington, the most expensive item on the menu. His mother had the scampi. It was the first time that Frank had really realised what money could buy you: attention, power, respect, people taking orders from you at the click of a finger. It was a revelation. Because he could still remember as a child, when his family didn’t have two pennies to rub together and he’d been sent to the hotel with his brothers to beg for scraps round by the kitchen door, queuing with their pillowcases like the other children from the tight end of town, waiting to receive any crusts and knobs of bread that the cooks saw fit to throw away, or even the occasional pig’s cheek for a Sunday dinner. People would hardly believe it today, but this was within living memory, his own memory. His lifetime. And frankly, after that, no one had the right to deny him anything; after that sort of a start in life Frank Gilbey was entitled. Jerry, who is one of our most notable town tramps, who has a magnificent yellowy beard, actually worked in the kitchens in the Quality Hotel years ago and he had always had a kind word for children like Frank when they came round looking for scraps, and if Jerry was ever out begging Frank always made sure he gave him at least a pound.

  Times have changed, for all of us.

  Frank could remember taking his little girl Lorraine to eat out at the Quality Hotel, and Lorraine, of course, is no longer his little girl. She’s over thirty now and divorced. Frank preferred not to think about that.

  And then there were the dances. It was the dances that everyone remembered, even Frank. He’d been pretty fast in those d
ays, quite a racy kind of a fella, and he’d often take girls out into the Italianate gardens, to see what might develop, and things frequently did develop, and as a thank-you he sometimes gave them a photograph of himself at Blackpool, wearing a Kiss Me Quick hat, as kind of a memento.

  But that was all a very long time ago, and the past, as Frank always liked to remind Mrs Gilbey, is history.

  * I am indebted here and in what follows to Ross Liddell’s invaluable three-volume biography, More O’Ferral: The Early Years (1967), More More O’Ferral: The Years of Fame (1973) and No More O’Ferral: The Final Years (1980), published by the Fireside Gleanings Press in association with the Architectural Heritage Society.

  * According to a recent article in the Impartial Recorder, the library, which was opened in 1910 with a £1,000 grant from Carnegie, may in fact soon be facing the threat of closure, unless the council grant a request for £25,000 to provide for new mandatory disabled access and to comply with recent changes in Health and Safety legislation. Unfortunately, as the council finance director, Hugh Harkin, points out in the article, the library’s borrowing figures have been decreasing over the long-term, with this year’s figures already being down substantially on last year, although this may be because the library is now open for only four days a week, and all its specialist journals, periodicals and pamphlets have been sold or dumped, the reference room has been turned into what is called the Poetry Café and over a quarter of the lending section’s shelf space has been removed in order to accommodate twelve on-line computers. Philomena, Maureen and Anne are all looking for work elsewhere. In the article Arlene Kirkpatrick, the divisional librarian, who has been responsible for what she calls the ‘Big Make-over’ and for ‘updating Andrew Carnegie’, denies rumours that she will soon be leaving to take up a post in sales with Donovan’s, the pub and club management company. (As of writing, Arlene Kirkpatrick has recently resigned from her position as divisional librarian to take up a position in sales with Donovan’s, the pub and club management company.) Contact library for opening times.

  * There’s a saying you still hear around town, not often, but it doesn’t mean it no longer holds true: ‘Too much pudding will choke the dog’. The Quality Hotel did not choke the dog, but it did kill a horse. This is a true story. Right up until the early 1970s the hotel was a popular morning meeting place for the farmers and the market gardeners and the butchers who used to arrive early for Wednesday and Saturday market, before the market became the multi-storey car park. You could get a good cup of coffee and a hot buttered roll for sixpence in the hotel’s dining room, or from Norton Brogue, who’d set up a coffee stall in competition outside the hotel, offering ‘A Matutinal Beverage as an End to a Night’s Dissipation’. Saveloys were Norton’s unique selling point and innovation, and the sale of coffee and saveloys kept him in business for nearly thirty years, before he left for Australia with his daughter on an assisted passage in the 1950s, where he finally abandoned saveloys, took a job in a bicycle repair shop and became a barbecue aficionado. Tommy Corrigan, who worked at the Sunrise Dairy, was standing outside the hotel at Norton’s stall one fine morning in June 1928, drinking his morning cup of coffee and eating his saveloy, chewing the fat with Norton, having been up since 4 a.m. scrubbing out the kegs and measures ready for the day’s deliveries, when one of the cast-iron balconies on the front of the hotel fell down and killed his horse, Flinty, who was tethered outside the hotel, drinking from the stone water trough. These days, Tommy would probably have sued the hotel and been able to retire on the proceeds from his dead horse and his own trauma, but back then he just had to get on and pull his own float for six months before he could afford to buy another horse.

  * See note, p. 149.

  12

  Unisex

  Francie McGinn gets his hair cut and surveys the wondrous cross

  It was a good day to get your hair cut: wet and cold, but with a definite hint of sun high in the sky, an unmistakable gesture of hope in autumn, the kind of day when your body reminds you that despite what you think actually you’re not dead yet, and that it might be possible to change your life and turn things around, shake things out and spice things up a bit, with the addition of just a few subtle tints and the trimming of a few split-ends, or maybe even a hair extension or a soft perm. A grey day, but just bright enough to suggest silver linings, a day to run a comb through your hair and to delouse your dog, to wriggle out of your foul-weather gear and slip into something more comfortable.

  Francie was missing Cherith, and he was missing her in a way he hadn’t expected. (Members of the congregation may wish to turn the page at this point.) He was missing her in bed. Before the split, Francie and Cherith had been married for long enough for there to be no sense of adventure or mystery when they slipped into bed together, synchronised, like two trained circus puppies, at the end of each day. When Francie and Cherith hopped into bed, Francie in blue flannelette to the right and Cherith in pink to the left of him, they usually dropped straight off to sleep, give or take five or ten minutes of reading the Old Testament, which they both found more effective than either a hot milky drink or a modern novel. It may be, in fact, that God designed the names of the descendants of the tribes of Israel as a kind of resting place for a Christian’s cares, a calming velvet hand, a charm and spell for tired and troubled souls. The Bible, one might even argue, is a kind of ark, somewhere to sleep while visiting this planet, an accouchement, a deathbed and an arbour all in one, the ultimate bed-and-breakfast.

  But now with Bobbie Dylan, Francie remembered what it was like, being in a bed with a woman who was not a wife of long standing. Being in bed with Bobbie Dylan required much pillow talk and adjusting of the coverlets. It required a retraining. It was not an easy lay.

  As a minister, Francie had to perform all day, every day. The performance was not his only, of course – he was sustained and supported in his work by the grace of God. When he visited people, when he spoke, he was often conscious of being used by the Holy Spirit. But when he was in bed at night with Bobbie, the Holy Spirit seemed to desert him and he was all alone, with a beautiful woman, and, he had to admit it, he was terrified.

  This had, of course, led to all sorts of problems, problems which Bobbie had been more than prepared to help Francie overcome. Francie had had no idea that these sorts of things could be managed and handled; with Cherith, relations had always taken their own natural course, one way or another, and that had been enough for both of them. Now here he was, a full-grown man in his own bed, feeling like a little boy.

  Bobbie was equally shocked and surprised: it felt to her like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. She’d never lived with another Christian before, and certainly not a Christian minister. So she was surprised to find that Francie was less than fastidious when it came to certain practical Christian household chores and in matters of personal hygiene. In her book, and probably in the Good Book too, according to Bobbie, the use of products from the Body Shop was virtually a commandment. In this life, frankly, about the closest we’re ever going to come to God is the sound of Enya and a running bath, the sight of a set of nice shining taps, and the smell of ylang-ylang and sandalwood aromatherapy oils.

  Francie, it must be admitted, did not always pick up his own clothes at night and he had continued to resist Bobbie’s attempts to smarten him up. She’d tried to get him out of his sta-prests and his lumberjack shirt, at least to get him into something from Marks, but – and Francie didn’t tell Bobbie this – when he was slipping into and out of the clothes in the changing rooms, staring in the full-length mirror at his cheesy white buttocks and his flanks flecked with spots, his wasted upper arms and his protuberant belly, he was terrified at the prospect of further self-transformation. He didn’t think he could take any more: on top of everything else, he didn’t think he could cope with the sight of himself in chinos.

  But he’d agreed to get his hair cut.

  For as long as he could remember, probably his whole life si
nce he was about five years old, Francie had gone to get his hair cut every two or three months by Tommy Morris up at the top of Kilmore Avenue. There was never really much of a queue: Tommy had you in and out before you could say straight or tapered, and anyway, whatever you said, it was all basically a variation on a Number 2 on the back and sides and a Number 3 on top. Tommy never spoke to you, he smoked the whole time he was cutting, and he’d lived happily with his companion, Andy, for twenty-five years without anyone seeing fit to question it, mention it, or even consider the possibility that Tommy was not as other men are. After work Tommy drank his Guinness in the Rose and Crown, bet on the horses, and he and Andy were never seen out in public after dark. They were regarded as upstanding citizens and most men in our town wouldn’t even consider going anywhere else for a haircut.

  So Francie, of course, had never before been into Central Cutz. When he stepped inside it felt like treason. It was a humbling experience.

  Central Cutz is named not for its close approximation to some Platonic ideal – a golden mean – of hair cutting, but rather for its convenient town centre location. It’s on Central Avenue, of course, a few boarded-up shops down from Inspirationz, which offers quality cards and giftware from around the world, and opposite Sew-Biz, where Mrs Nelson, whose son has married a Romanian, does garment alterations and listens to Classic FM. Central Avenue also boasts a health food shop, Full of Beans, which is full of beans, although Mandy Gamble, the owner, is not: weighing in at around sixteen stone and with some serious personal hygiene problems and prone to depression, Mandy is not a great advert for vegetarianism or Culpeper herbalism. But Central Avenue remains probably the closest thing we have here to a Latin Quarter. On a Saturday night, midsummer, if you were very, very drunk, it might almost seem like the barrio.*