Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  So I also like how Meriden shows a quiet, unshowy but very English self-confidence. ‘Welcome to Meriden, please drive carefully’ asks the first sign on the outskirts, meekly. But the next proclaims with a little more swagger, ‘Welcome to Meriden, centre of England’. All else is largely undemonstrative, save for the balloons and bunting tied to the gates of a very nice property where someone is having a party.

  Meriden Fish and Chips resists the temptation to offer anything as crass as ‘the most centrally positioned cod and chips in England’ but the Centre of England Florists has no such qualms. A passer-by in his thirties offers to take my picture outside it. Neither of us has a camera but it seems churlish to point this out. ‘Thought you wanted a souvenir. Most of them do.’ Checking in the local paper later, I find that this is true. The shop owner, one Tracy Gardiner, told their reporter: ‘Tourists and media always use my shop as a backdrop for photos and things like that … I have actually had an order placed from the United States by a man who saw a picture of the shop.’ Today, though, I have this photo opportunity to myself. My friend without a camera, by the way, and here you will have to believe me, was a tall, slim Rastafarian in full dreads dressed in a red replica England shirt with ‘Gerrard’ emblazoned on the back.

  I wander along the small row of businesses overlooking the green to the charity shop. ‘Please do not leave any items outside this shop while it is closed,’ it warns. Other notices are more tantalising, offering a glimpse of a different, racier Meriden. ‘Inspired by “Strictly”? Want to dance? Ballroom at Heart of England Leisure centre.’ ‘Strictly’, I should point out in case this reference means nothing by the time these words are printed, is/was the official popular designation of Strictly Come Dancing, the BBC’s astonishingly successful TV show hosted by octogenarian Light Entertainment titan Bruce Forsyth and itself a contemporary bulwark of Middle English taste.

  They clearly like to cut a rug hereabouts, as another photocopied flyer offers ‘Dancing to the Fabulous Ambassadors at the RSPCA Xmas Party’. If you want to sit this one out, there’s ‘Wind of Change, a Pentecostal musical by Phillip Shapiro’. In the gathering Warwickshire dusk I peer beyond the signs into the interior of the closed shop and the sundry items for sale. There is a quite horrible ceramic owl ‘sold to John’, some curious balls, a child’s car seat, several Dick Francis paperbacks and a large wooden contraption whose sign reads ‘Good when new, all in working order, lovly [sic] sound, 75 pounds with stool’. I have no idea what it is but assume from this that it’s some kind of musical instrument. Appearances suggest a harpsichord that you could milk a cow with and possibly travel the countryside selling pegs from. A postcard in the Post Office window reads, simply and intriguingly, ‘Stay At Home Mums Wanted’.

  At the end of the row is the village shop, now a branch of Spar as noted. National Lottery ads jostle with lined postcards offering ‘Hay and Straw’ and the services of odd-job men: new and old Middle England in a single window. In another small but significant change, the shop is open, brightly lit and crackling with the sounds of a radio on a late Sunday afternoon. Stepping inside, the most significant change in the face – literally – of Middle England becomes apparent.

  The shop is run by a Sikh family. Dad, seventy-ish, is gently rearranging some cauliflowers in the green plastic vegetable rack. Son sports a snazzy bandana-style headdress rather than the more traditional turban and is sifting through the tidal detritus of the day’s papers, the Observers, Telegraphs and Sunday Mercuries, sold or returned. Suddenly hungry, I turn left along the food racks: vegetable pakora, corned beef and Branston pickle baguettes, Eccles cakes. Tottenham are at home to Blackburn on Radio 5 Live and Father and Son are chatting animatedly about the game, switching between English, Punjabi and a dazzling, colourful hybrid of the two. I decide on pakora, subconsciously hoping perhaps that this will be taken as credentials of my faultless cosmopolitan liberalism, before noticing that both Father and Son are dipping regularly and enthusiastically into bags of Monster Munch. This, along with the Eccles cakes, the quickfire Punjabi, the Rastas, chips and gravy, cycling memorials, Strictly Come Dancing, pakoras and Steven Gerrard, makes this late Sunday in Meriden a nicely bamboozling hors d’oeuvre for the hearty repast that is Middle England.

  Meriden is Middle England but doesn’t quite sound it. Chipping Norton does, though: it sounds of high-torque wheels crunching on gravel, fishing lure falling on stream water, clotted cream spreading on scone. Whenever I heard it mentioned as a child, along with its cosy companions Sodbury, Camden and Ongar, I assumed it was made up. I thought it was a suburb of Camberwick Green or possibly a dormitory town for Chigley. A place where, after Mr Cresswell the biscuit-factory manager had headed off in the Audi for a hard day with the Hobnobs, Mrs Cresswell might carry on a steamy illicit affair with Harry Farthing from the Pottery. Yes, these were all residents of Chigley. Just because in our celebrity-obsessed culture Windy Miller and Mrs Honeyman are never out of Heat magazine, you forget the little people, don’t you? But they also serve who only stand and pot.

  Incidentally, when he was interviewed on Radio 4 in 1995, the creator of Trumptonshire Gordon Murray was asked where exactly he thought Trumptonshire was. Kent? Sussex? Apparently not. ‘There are mountains in the background so I would think it’s probably in the middle of the country somewhere. Because the mountains look rather nice in the background.’

  The Cotswolds, then, I’d say, and this thought occurs en route to CN (as I’m sure no one calls it), driving through Banbury in the warm ripe light of a late Friday afternoon in September. It’s more built up and urban than its nursery rhyme name suggests. There’s a hulking 24-hour Tesco on the fringes of town and some grimly utilitarian commercial developments. But they are having a canal day, which is reassuring, and Ralph McTell is playing at the extremely pretty St Mary’s church in Banbury and, best of all, I pass a fancy obelisk decorated with cock horses; obviously the site of the famous Banbury Cross. Up the road is Bloxham, a posh independent school for boys and girls. The villages have thatched roofs but there are still signs for the National Lottery in the Post Office window. A phalanx of kids of all shapes and ages in black blazers is strolling down the hill from evensong. The boys look like Prince William and the girls like Kate Middleton, each bright with the carefree self-possession of their golden youth and boundless promise. Even the most hardened class warrior would find it rather sweet.

  Through a very windy village called Fenbury and things start to get nicely rolling and hilly, the way I like it. We climb upwards gently into ‘Chippy’, as the locals call it, or ‘Gateway to the Cotswolds’ as the brochures proclaim. For all its self-evident gentility and charm– the Georgian townhouses, the shy, pretty mews, the tree-lined streets – ‘Chippy’ is still a real town, not a tourist trap like Bourton-on-the-Water or Broadway. The locals will tell you that it has the last fish and chip shop for thirty miles in the Cheltenham direction. Chipping Norton stands alone from the surrounding Shires geographically (high on the North Oxfordshire ridge), and culturally, being handsome rather than twee, having some of the few Labour councillors around here and a thriving co-op presence with sizeable investments and property holdings in the town. They’ve always made real things here: wool and tweed at the nearby Bliss Mill rather than cream teas and souvenir doilies.

  The Crown and Cushion Hotel was once owned by Keith Moon, the ‘hilarious’ wild man drummer of The Who, much given to dressing as a Nazi and driving cars into swimming pools. Moon’s influence, it is fair to say, does not pervade the old coaching inn today. The boy who greets us is painfully shy and diffident, blond and softly spoken, like the slow, childlike boy in a Frankenstein movie’s alpine village who saves everyone from the terrible fire at the end. The restaurant is almost deserted, apart from three generations of the women of a rather posh family, dressed in silk and organic cottons all, languidly mulling over dessert. The waitresses are Polish, naturally.

  In the two years after EU regulations were rela
xed, half a million young Polish people came to Britain in search of work and many of them came right to the heart of Middle England: to the Wolds and the Shires, to wait on our tables, build our conservatories and fold down the top sheet on our hotel beds. Polite, hardworking and frequently possessed of fabulous cheekbones, they were no problem for me. For others they were. Even that paragon of liberalism Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee claimed that supporting economic migration was an act of treachery to the indigenous British working class. Having seen The Jeremy Kyle Show, I was less convinced that Jacek and Ludmila were putting Jason and Kylie out of work.

  Then the Bulgarians and Latvians and Romanians started to come too, and the papers frothed, the government got twitchy and as of 2008 the numbers are well down. But if you stay in any hotel in Britain, you will still meet young Eastern Europeans gamely and sweetly struggling with the oddities of British idioms. My waitress came over during my meal (ribeye steak with oven-baked aubergine followed by Grand Marnier parfait, since you ask) and asked, charmingly, ‘How is your very good meal?’

  ‘Very good,’ I replied.

  In truth, the food is OK but not helped by the atmosphere of the deserted dining room. Weird martial music is piped across the unoccupied tables, lit by sad dim candelabras. It feels like a scene from a Thomas Mann novel, with me cast as the doomed consumptive academic working on his magnum opus in a failing sanatorium. To dispel this mood, it seems a tour of Friday-night Chipping Norton is in order.

  In many an English market town of a weekend, you will be ‘treated’, if that is the word, to a display of cornering, gear-crunching and acceleration by a succession of acned youth in souped-up Vauxhall Novas. Penrith is a great place for students of this faintly tragic sub-culture. Chipping Norton has its own version in the shape of one solitary youth on a trials bike buzzing around the town like a vexed but languid hornet for about four hours every weekend evening. I assume it’s a youth anyway. Hard to tell with the leathers and full-face helmet. It speaks volumes for the tolerance and patience of Chipping Norton folk that they haven’t murdered him yet in some grisly fashion, since he must be known to everyone in the town. Unless, of course, like a superhero in reverse, his identity is unknown and he changes from mild-mannered chorister into his Irritating Bikeboy garb in a phone box.

  Aside from this, the streets are quiet though the pubs look busy and welcoming. On this mild evening, the recently introduced Smoking Ban on enclosed spaces seems indubitably A Good Thing. Not, I should add, for any puritanical reason but because it’s the end of September and, against their will or not, groups of people are chatting and drinking on patios and under awnings and it all feels deliciously warm and lively and al fresco and continental. Maybe it will look less inviting come the first stinging sleet of January.

  Though the town feels vaguely genteel, there are hints of a darker modernity. In one window, a scrolling red LED advert offers ‘No Mercy’ tattoos. Through another, in what looked like a DSS hostel, a scrawny kid is sprawled on a moth-eaten sofa looking blankly at a TV set. On arriving in the town and popping into the chemists, I had seen a sad, sweating man conducting a furtive transaction that looked to me like the weekly methadone pick-up.

  Elsewhere, there are bookshops, health food shops and a cute Greco-Roman town hall. It’s hosting a craft fair tomorrow and I make a note to be there. A poster in a shop window advertises the Chipping Norton News whose recent headlines include ‘Chip Shop Goes Green’ and ‘Police Apologise’. There are several antique shops and outside one, standing in a pool of light on the pavement, two elderly gentlemen are gazing lustfully at some crockery in the window as if it were a particularly fleshy FHM supplement.

  The combination of antiques and lusty, eye-rolling middle-aged men reminds me instantly of Chipping Norton’s most famous ex-resident. When Ronnie Barker, the larger of Middle England’s adored double act The Two Ronnies, retired in 1987 and whilst still hugely popular, his announcement that he intended to run an antique shop in Chipping Norton was taken as a joke. But he meant to do just that, and for most of the next couple of decades could be found with wife Joy among the walking sticks, knickknacks and wind-up gramophones of the Emporium. The town was quietly proud of him though he never became a local celebrity. He wasn’t often glimpsed in the pubs or restaurants. If you spotted him about town in one of his ‘Stick of Rock’ sports coats, he would politely turn down your request for a photo or autograph. Unlike his famous creation Arkwright in Open All Hours, he was no lurid, leering presence behind the counter. But he did contribute much to the town’s successful bid to bring live professional theatre to Chippy at the converted Salvation Army citadel. And in his shop you could buy some of the duplicates from his 40,000-strong collection of that uniquely British celebration of innocent smut, the saucy seaside postcard. They’re worth another look, along with some other things that make Middle England laugh, a little later in our journey.

  By the time I get back to the hotel bar, there’s been a transformation: from gloomy alpine sanatorium to hearty hub of the community. Many of you will remember the scene in Jon Landis’s film American Werewolf in London where the travellers arrive at that daunting wayside inn, the Slaughtered Lamb. The clientele of slack-jawed yokels all fall silent as the newcomers enter and much unpleasantness ensues. This sadly has become a lazy shorthand gag for metropolitan types horrified to find that country pubs don’t do frappuccino or have a crèche with wi-fi.

  There was nothing of the Slaughtered Lamb about the Crown and Cushion this autumn Friday evening. Everyone seemed to know each other, yes, but there was a definite lack of goitres, eye patches and slack jaws, and I was made implicitly welcome without recourse to slapped backs or clanking tankards. Three smart middle-aged women, clearly enjoying a regular rendezvous, were playing cards and gently gossiping. A woman with a ledger under her arm, high-ranking WI I reckoned, plonked herself at the bar and without a word a tall, misted G&T arrived. There were dogs and body-warmers and dimple glasses and soft accents and it was a warm, welcoming place to sit and sip whisky and write up my notes under the guise of completing the Times crossword.

  Breakfast was a buffet, an increasingly ubiquitous but problematic start to the day for the English traveller. If you’re pennywise or greedy or maybe both it has its advantages in that you can pile your plate high with sausage, egg, hash browns, mushrooms, bacon, beans and fried bread and then brazenly go back for several more artery-hardening platefuls. However, no anguished curling bacon, no flaccid sausage congealing under a high-wattage lamp, no tomato-half slowly cooling like a dying planet can ever match the sheer heartiness of a plate brought to your table with a kindly, ‘Now these plates are very hot so be careful. Toast? White or brown?’ by a bun-haired septuagenarian or white-pinnied young waitress. Standing in that peculiar limbo that is the space before the breakfast tureens, gingerly trying to scrape solidified beans off a ladle, the man in the neat pullover at my side says cheerily, ‘This is a bit like being in prison, isn’t it? … Not that I’d know, of course!’

  Breakfast consumed, I had a date with a craft fair. Inside the rather nice town hall, designed in 1842 by G.S. Repton and, according to the town’s website, ‘Neo-classical with a pedimented Tuscan portico placed strangely to one side and not facing the Market Square as might be expected’, under the gilded portraits of various well-upholstered aldermen like Albert Brassey and J.H. Langston, I was treated to the full, baffling panoply of bewildering produce that is a typical English craft fair. A delightful, giggly Filipino lady is selling the chunky, quirky jewellery that she and her sister produce. ‘You like it! It’s very pretty! Your lady will love it!’ She giggles again as I hand over the cash. On other stalls, there were more traditional craft fair staples too. And I use ‘traditional’ here in the sense of ‘crap’: coasters with poorly mounted pictures of Golden Labradors, tiny turquoise soaps that smell of Toilet Duck, twenty quid for a wicker basket stuffed randomly with cloth and serving no discernible purpose. If these were on a trestl
e table at a church hall ‘bring and buy’ sale, they’d be charming. But touted as the small, aggressive flagships of prospective craft empires, encouraged perhaps by a million avaricious daytime bargain shows, they are taking the piss. I wouldn’t have told Mrs Labrador Coasters this though, as she looked a bit like Patricia Routledge’s cruel ex-Gestapo half-sister.

  Chippy’s high-street department store is called Westgate and though at first it strikes one as grimly, depressingly 1950s with its acidic strip-lighting and forlorn displays, it soon reveals its shy, old-world charms. One gets the sense, negotiating its little aisles and racks, that for generations this has been where Chipping Nortonians have come to get everything from a roasting tin to a corset to a dog lead to a family pack of mothballs. What they didn’t seem to have, though, was men’s socks, precisely the items I needed, having packed both in haste and with a hangover. ‘Try Burtons,’ they said. I did. They didn’t have any either – no, really – although they did have a large selection of washable polyester bow-ties. What does this say about the menfolk of Chipping Norton, I wonder. That they are barefooted free spirits who nevertheless often have to attend messy formal functions? I went back to Westgate and the girl expressed shock and outrage that Burtons menswear didn’t have any men’s socks. ‘You don’t either,’ I pointed out. She paused, smiled coyly and said, ‘Oh, come on … these are really you,’ producing a pair of pink ankle socks encrusted with little stars.

  The little Museum of Chipping Norton is closed – it is Saturday, after all – so I sit on a bench in the mild sunshine with a copy of that supposed bible of Middle England, the Daily Mail. For weeks it has been full of high dudgeon over a supposed moral holocaust at the BBC wherein some admitted errors of judgement on a few radio shows and some cheeky editing of a documentary trailer featuring the Queen have been presented as evidence that the corporation is a vile, satanic monolith where cackling lizard men disguised in rubber humanoid masks eat live hamsters and plot world domination via Radio 2’s Friday Night is Music Night.