Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  In the Buxton museum, there are curious things called Devensian Bone holes and tableaux showing how European reindeer hunters followed the migrant herds over here across ice and snow and fetched up in caves in the Peak District – pretty remarkable when you think about it. The exhibit marked ‘The Wonder of the Peak’ seemed to feature a disconcerting sound montage of someone having a massive, distressing bilious attack but actually turned out to be a recording of a bear.

  The staff were lovely. Bright, personable, chatty ladies with specs on chains and ash-blonde hair and silk blouses. They told me genuinely interesting stuff about local fauna, geology and scandal, all of us trying to ignore the fact that a man in a cagoule and a neckerchief was looking at a representation of a boar hunt in the High Peak muttering ‘But why? But why?’ in a tone of anguished curiosity. Like libraries, museums in the daytime are still a great place to spot that dying English species, the unfathomable, inexplicable solo eccentric whom Larkin celebrated/bemoaned in ‘Toads Revisited’.

  I cross the road onto a large, raised mound that looks back over the snoozing town. This is called the Slopes and is really rather marvellous. There’s a big Georgian civic building here all pumped up with Buxtonian pride, basking in autumn sun and looking out across to blue Peak District hills. The Opera House and Pavilion are down to my right but I decide to head the other way first, towards the market, here on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Pleasingly, it’s a Tuesday.

  By the time I emerge onto the big square behind the King’s Head pub, where one imagines crowds of drinkers spill out on fine summer Saturdays, the market is quietening down with the distinct feel of a party that is breaking up in a desultory flurry of coats and taxis and Portishead album tracks. It’s a nice day, though, and to console myself I decide to have a hotdog. Whilst fully cognisant of the health risks and the fact that hot dog sausages are made from toxic waste and eyeballs and fibreglass, I find them hard to resist, especially from a van on a market square. It’s the cheap, buttery, irresistible aroma of the frying onions, I guess. I have vegetarian friends who, wandering the streets after chucking-out time, will have just these succulent, mouthwatering, fatty onions on a bap with a jolt of ketchup, a kind of Hot Dog Manqué of Drunken Solidarity. The lady in Buxton who ladles on my onions hands the finished product to me and says, ‘Now you enjoy that and you be a good lad.’ Then she pauses and adds, ‘No, don’t. It’s boring.’

  It’s delicious of course. But in the manner of these things it is also gone in a gobbled, messy instant and if it hadn’t been that I thought someone was watching, I’d have tried the ‘businessman’s lunch deal’ at the Big Panda Chinese restaurant. I liked the name a lot and I was keen to find out whether I’d chance upon Bill Gates, Alan Sugar and Richard Branson having spare ribs and pork balls in Buxton on a Tuesday afternoon.

  Down the hill I find what I think qualifies as a ‘little gem’, one of those hidden delights in a town that make you wish you lived here and could kill an hour or two here when the daily round got too dull or stressful. It is Scrivener’s Bookshop and Bookbinders, five rambling, creaky floors of volumes on every subject from sexual health to Sanskrit texts, children’s collectables to military history.

  I wandered around it in a kind of daze. There is, winningly, a ‘self-service coffee area’ consisting of a kettle, mugs, teapot, catering tins of Nescafé and Yorkshire Tea, mismatched spoons and a bowl of sugar. Around a corner awaits a harmonium with sheet music scattered about and bearing the invitation to ‘competent players’ to have a go, suggesting that the midday reverie is sometimes shattered by semi or possibly utterly incompetent harmoniumists rending the air with tortured wheezings.

  No matter how bad your harmonium playing was, I imagine you’d be chastised rather gently and sweetly by the two ladies running the shop this Tuesday. One is owlishly, funkily hippy with greying hair and round glasses, while her younger colleague is chestnut-haired, white lab-coated and sits picking at her Tupperware box of hummus and salad. From the ink and glue stains on the white coat, I guess this must be ‘Holly Serjeant, Bookbinder’ as advertised in the literature. Both are quite charming. I wander into the tail end of the conversation they are having, full of dramatic shivers and whispered confessions about certain rooms in the shop they do not like to enter alone, particularly in a later afternoon dusk in November. They spot my interest immediately and tell me that several customers have reported a spectral man flitting between the shelves on the higher floors. I’m heading that way myself and they ask me, only half joking I note worriedly, to let them know if I see anything.

  I did. I saw a man on the stairs. He blocked my way rather ominously, chuckling quietly to himself. He was quite real, though, if rather queer and disconcerting too, with his ragged yellow pullover and snickering little laugh, another of those unfathomable people you meet in the middle of the day whose back stories and hinterland you will never know. I push past him and onto the Just William first editions, all out of my price range. I content myself with a small, lovely edition of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad.

  By the time I get back downstairs, another man has appeared, a much more personable one, though, and he is regaling Holly and friend and a little gaggle of customers with a spooky tale about the house he is in the process of moving out of. It seems to be called Flash and all the locals know it. He’s leaving because his wife can’t stand the unexplained, distressing cries and whimpers.

  ‘It used to be a children’s home, you know,’ says an old lady standing by the religious section. Apparently no one did. At least I’m guessing that from the quiet that fell in the little room at the foot of the shop, a silence broken by the tinkling of the bell as I leave. When you’re next in Buxton, do pop into Scrivener’s, whether you want a Richmal Crompton first edition, a book bound or just a scary little interlude.

  I walked out into that lovely curious netherworld that is the middle of the day in residential England: the children at school, Mum and Dad at work, Granny snoozing in front of daytime TV or Radio 4’s afternoon play, Granddad doing the odd spot of weeding and, even though you’re a stranger, giving you a cheery wave from his domain across the privets and azaleas. The houses in this part of town are lovely and the occasional one is a B&B in a quiet nook. I walk in brilliant sunshine down deserted avenues that are almost completely silent, save for a stray voice or laugh from an opened window and the faintly eerie sound, getting louder, of a school on its lunch break, I imagine.

  To my left, somewhere up a sweeping bank of russet trees and the rolling hilly countryside at the back of town, lies Poole’s Cavern, once visited by Mary Queen of Scots. The Poole in question was a fifteenth-century thief who was said to have used the caves as hideout and store for his stash. According to a leaflet acquired from the nice ladies at the museum, the cavern’s usage by locals dates back far beyond Poole, however: ‘Artefacts have been found from the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Roman period. The caverns boast exceptional formations, including colourful blue and orange stalactites created by minerals leaching from the limestone roof of the caves.’

  I wouldn’t know. I never got there. I feel distinctly sheepish about this. Real travel writers, the ones with scars, big shorts, bandanas, trunks with exotic stickers, pith helmets, that kind of thing, would not get lost finding one of Buxton’s most famous local landmarks and attractions. They can find a way through treacherous swamps, shark-infested waters, minefields, snipers’ alleys and ruined cities using only the Great Bear and a needle in a glass of water. Ray Mears and Ranulph Fiennes can make a serviceable house – with patio, barbecue area and maybe double garage – out of some wool. They can live on birch sap and rancid yak milk for weeks.

  With hindsight, I reckon I went wrong at the bottom of Bridge Street. The sign was a bit misleading and I think I had the leaflet the wrong way up. And I definitely followed the direction of that little silhouette walking man on the Public Footpath sign. Whatever, I realised after twenty minutes or so that I was wandering in a desultory sort of w
ay around a big grassy area that turned out to be the playing field of Buxton Community School. Strange men wandering around school playing fields has probably never been a heartwarming image, certainly not compared to, say, a tin of shortbread, some milkmaids, or a kitten in a beer mug. But over recent years, any lone man spotted pretty much anywhere where children may have once been in the last calendar year now hints at unspeakable wickedness. Whilst the statistics all agree that kids generally come to harm through the cruelty, neglect and/or idiocy of their own parents or politicians, the notion of the shadowy child-molester at the school gates has got Middle (and certainly lower) England twitchy as hell and led to a severe shortage of amateur referees and scout masters. As someone who detested every one of the eighty or so minutes I was a scout, this doesn’t unduly bother me. But it did occur to me that, on this mild autumn day in Buxton, I ought to get back onto the street before a sniper picked me off from the art room window or parents with pitchforks ran me out of town.

  Waving a hastily constructed placard that read ‘I’m Not A Pervert, Honest’ I made my way as best I could back to the residential street where I had gone wrong. This took me right across the athletics track and right back to 1975. Suddenly I was a small boy again, adrift in a vast, largely hostile Catholic boys grammar school run by virginal sadists in frocks. The lanes of the running track, the discus circle, the long-jump pit, the rugby posts, the stinging hail on red exposed thighs, the bad haircuts, the mock exams, Nationwide with Michael Barrett, the gentle thought of suicide, it all came back to me as a Proustian saver single to the innermost circle of hell. This playing field, I have to say, nestling at the foot of a wooded hill, was much nicer a setting than most of the places where I spent my bleak midwinter Tuesday afternoons. If you are going to be bullied into running 800 metres in a hailstorm, what a nice setting. Now, let’s get out of here.

  Back in Buxton proper, the Sahara kebab house is closed down and so its whitewashed window has become a kind of parish pump cum Reuters Agency for the town’s youth. Various attention-grabbing headlines and op-ed pieces have been smeared and daubed in and of the oily white stuff. ‘Nicole Ray is fit’ reads one. Similarly, ‘Emily Crowther is fit’ according to another correspondent. Less generously, though, someone asserts that ‘Aby is a mong’.

  I pass a violin shop called, with admirable lack of palaver, Buxton’s Violin Shop. I suppose there is not much need to call it Lord of the Strings or Premier Violins since, and I could be wrong here but feel sure I am not, competition in its chosen field must be scant, if not non-existent, even in as nice a place as Buxton. How has it managed to stay in business, eschewing, one assumes from its name, even the cello and viola? I don’t know but I’m very glad that it has, one of those rare and cheering examples of how quirkiness and independence and specialism can still exist in the era of one-stop shops that sell you nothing. I think of all this whilst standing on the pavement trying to resist the lure of both the Coach House Chippy and Thompson’s Fish and Chip Shop. Both look saltily inviting but as it is only a couple of hours since that hastily consumed ‘research’ hot dog, I pass by with a sigh.

  Returning to the town centre via the market, I see that it is still sleepy, with the mid-morning rush long behind it now. There are cheap fleeces and even cheaper air-conditioning units. A white-haired man in a fisherman’s jersey sits gently dozing on a lawn chair in the back of his blue van clearly not selling many of his rugs and pot plants. And you will think I have made this up but behind him, visible in a single quick glance, is the richness and absurdity of English life: a man selling pigs’ ears from a bucket in front of two internet cafés.

  Not put off even by the proximity of porcine offcuts, I decide to have that cherishable Middle English interlude, ‘a nice cup of tea and a sit down’. Beltane, the café I’d seen advertised in the gallery, looks rather sweet – the sort of place where the proprietor will be reading Harry Potter and wishing someone would write it here. ‘Sorry. No food today,’ reads a hastily posted sign. ‘The chef is having a day off.’ I can’t make up my mind whether this is quintessentially Middle English in its half-bakedness or almost Latin American in its winning mañana lackadaisicalness.

  I don’t mind. I only want that nice cup of tea and a sit down. Or a frothy latte as it turns out, as inside Beltane is all scrubbed pine, Zero 7 album, scattered copies of the Independent, nice young men with manbags and bottled Staropramen. I feel very sure there will be live jazz at some point soon. If this sounds like I’m sneering, then be assured that I enjoyed my latte in these convivial surroundings. Next door is a shop called Columbine, who must hate the new and grisly associations of their name but can console themselves that they sit on Town Bank, which is described on an information placard nearby as ‘an elegant rise of Georgian town houses’.

  At the bottom of this rise and down from the Slope sits the famous Pavilion Gardens, with broad grassy lawns, gentle fountains, shady arbours and cute little bandstands. Like the market, the gardens are decidedly somnolent on this autumn Tuesday, making me wonder whether Buxton is now a commuter town for nearby Manchester and Sheffield. Whatever the reason, I very nearly have the place to myself and there is a pronounced lack of those public park staples, Goths and tramps. I feel rather sad about this. I can’t claim to find odorous men swearing and throwing punches at imaginary foes whilst drinking Special Brew appealing, but I have always had a soft spot for Goths, a sympathy hugely increased by the horrific case of the murder in a Bacup park of a young Goth girl, brutally beaten to death by a pack of thugs simply for looking different. At the time, this was passed over by most of the media who were looking the other way at the sweet, sad features of a little blonde girl called Madeleine McCann. In their own way Goths are just as gentle and vulnerable, for all their forbidding appearance and predilection for black eyeliner and Hammer Horror chic. By the way, if you still aren’t sure what a Goth is, the best description I can offer was coined by the journalist Mark Ellen. Drive north on the M6 and just north of Silverdale or Grange-over-Sands, somewhere around junction 35, turn off. Head for the nearest large-ish market town and time your arrival for about dusk. Once in the town centre or market square, look for the war memorial and there you will find three or four young people dressed in black drinking cider from a bottle. These are Goths.

  Back in the Pavilion Gardens, a lovely realisation dawns. Brilliantly, a river runs through it. A real one, the river Wye gurgling and frothing through the park in a series of meanders and frothing waterfalls, rendered a little brown and sluggish by fallen leaves. Though nearly deserted, there are pockets of activity here and there among the gazebos and fountains and bandstands that give the place the feel of Chigley.

  A man is taking a picture of some ladies at the worst conceivable angle, with him in a dip and them partially obscured by said bandstand. Is this incompetence or art? Who can say? The smallest baby I have ever seen is being introduced to the delights of the swings and his or her expression itself swings between abject terror and joy, sheer bliss and delirium. A lovely couple are eating an ice cream on a bench by the pool. ‘We’re playing hookie from the office. I expect you think we should be doing something more exciting.’ Not at all. It’s life’s little stolen pleasures that are often the most profound. A white-haired gentleman is standing by what seems to be – oh joy, it is! – the platform of a miniature railway. I’ve never had a train set and I carry no torch for miniature railways either, to be honest. But just knowing they are still there, between Ravenglass and Eskdale or here in a Buxton Pavilion Gardens, makes me feel warm and reassured, like knowing that the ravens still inhabit the tower and the church clock stands at ten to three and there’s honey still for tea. I ask the white-haired gentleman is there a train due, but he just laughs and walks off chuckling and tapping the ground with his brolly. Clearly he knows something I don’t. Minutes pass without a hoot, a whoosh or a cloud of steam. Perhaps there’s a Miniature National Rail strike or the line fell victim to Beeching’s axe. In any event,
after a while I walk off too.

  The old spa is part of the Pavilion. Once so crucial to Buxton’s prosperity, it now seems to be a swimming baths, judging by the steamed-up windows and the kids with rubber rings. Within the elegant glass façade, the Pavilion houses several eateries. The simpler offers a pensioners’ special lamb curry, whilst in the more chichi restaurant ladies and gentlemen of a certain age are enjoying what seems to be, viewed sheepishly from the doorway, a fine late lunch. They’re taking bookings for Xmas, offering, for starters, a thought-provoking spin on a traditional gambit in ‘pearls of melon with a Thai infusion’. Then comes ‘Pan-fried canon [sic] of turkey wrapped in bacon with traditional trimmings of honey-roasted parsnips and Brussels sprouts’, then Christmas pud, which I’ve never understood the appeal of. Maybe they’d let me have cheesecake. Thirteen pounds fifty a person anyway, which seems the most astonishing bargain to me, a man who is regularly reduced to mute astonishment by the price of a mango smoothie. I stroll to the attractions board to see what I have missed this week: a lunchtime dance with Peter Rogers. A record fair. There’s a farmers’ market next Thursday. I might pop back then and pick up an ostrich burger. They’re bound to be selling them.

  The Opera House adjoins the Pavilion and is a noted jewel, designed by Frank Matcham, one of Britain’s most celebrated theatre architects and the man responsible for the London Palladium. It opened, with great civic fanfare, on 1 June 1903, when the audience were treated to Mrs Willoughby’s Kiss and My Milliner’s Bill. For the next three decades the Opera House played host to touring Shakespeare companies, West End successes, ballets, concerts and musical comedy and whodunits. In 1925 the great Anna Pavlova, later to be immortalised as a strawberry tart, performed the ‘Dance of the Dying Swan’ here. When movies arrived, the Opera House simply adapted and turned itself into a cinema too. But the great Lilian Baylis of London’s Old Vic continued to present live theatre and summer festivals in Buxton. If Beltane had been going back in the 1930s, you might have found yourself slurping a mochaccino next to Dame Sybil Thorndike, Robert Donat, Anthony Quayle, Robert Morley or Alec Guinness.