Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, though, audiences declined and its future looked doubtful. It closed for a while during the mid-1970s but in the late 1990s was the subject of a massive renewal programme with both public and private money and the full support of the town. It came back grander than ever in the new millennium and luminaries as diverse as Elvis Costello, Steven Berkoff, Peter Kay, Prunella Scales, Bill Wyman, Ken Dodd and Jo Brand have trod the boards in recent years. The Knutsford Guardian has eulogised it thus: ‘Frank Matcham’s glorious Opera House at Buxton, with its warm and intimate design, always guarantees a night to remember for theatregoers,’ whilst the Manchester Evening News (‘a friend dropping in’ according to the TV ads of my youth) says, ‘There is no better place for a panto than this gilded fairy palace, especially filled with hundreds of clap-happy, singalong children.’ It is the hub of the Buxton Festival Fringe, a sort of mini-Edinburgh festival with less mime and shortbread.

  Did I mention that it looks gorgeous, even from the outside? Sort of fanciful in a nice way, a bit like an elaborate and undeniably toothsome gateau: twin cupolas, gilt lettering, rampant Edwardiana and a balcony from which Marie Lloyd might have waved. The coming and present attractions give you an instant flavour of the tastes of every generation of Middle Englander. Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World and a stage production of The Darling Buds of May, a selection of Radio 4 stalwarts such as Marcus Brigstocke and Paul Merton, an audience with Peter Sallis (‘thirteen and fifteen pounds’) and Rick Wakeman’s Grumpy Old Picture Show (‘consistent star of TV’s Grumpy Old Men and the creative genius of Yes wallowing in musical nostalgia. Let your essential grumpiness go free!!’). And then into the bar for a sweet sherry or pint of bitter or chardonnay or Bacardi Breezer of whatever your Middle England tipple of choice may be.

  You leave Buxton with a mildly contented air, rather like the one the town itself has. Even with the lorries on the A5 rumbling to Leek and Congleton and Macclesfield, it feels peaceful and happy with its lot. Passing the Buxton campus of the University of Derby, which boasts amongst various achievements ‘the largest unsupported dome in Britain’, I think: what a great place to be a student. Nice pubs and caffs, a market, some great chippies, the fleshpots of Manchester only fifty minutes away, lots of outdoorsy stuff like walking and rock climbing in the surrounding hills of the Peak District and the largest unsupported dome in Europe? You’d be living the dream for three years.

  Though it seems almost too perfect, on the road back to the station I find a proper old-fashioned sweet shop, with jars in the window and an array of pleasures from another age, the age of Marie Lloyd and Frank Matcham: bullseyes, Everton mints, liquorice laces, cough candy, cola cubes, rhubarb and custard, sherbet, and that stuff we used to call ‘kayli’ that made your head explode when eaten with dampened finger. The idyll is only spoiled by the world-weariness of the proprietor, who mildly mocks my enthusiasm for his wares.

  ‘What do they come in?’ I ask. ‘Quarters?’

  ‘One hundred and fourteen grams,’ he replies.

  ‘What’s a 114 grams?’ I ask innocently.

  ‘A quarter,’ he says morosely. Perhaps he longs for another life, far from the cheap childish allure of the Black Jacks and Refreshers. A cocktail bar in New York perhaps?

  Back at the station and sucking thoughtfully on a gobstopper the size of my head which fully lives up to its name, I notice that the Huge Fan Window is a bit cracked. Buxton has its vandals, then, like everywhere. Shame. As I get on the train I spy a little window into the room where the train guys hang out, their green room or backstage, as it were. There’s a Thermos in the window and a Tupperware box of butties and a line of Clive Cusslers and Sven Hassels and Stephen Kings that must have sustained through many a shift. Sweet, I think, as I rattle off back to Manchester with Ivor the Engine in my ears. It was good to have soaped up on niceness in the spas. Because the next safari in my hunt for Middle England promised to be disgusting.

  CHAPTER 3

  Green Ink and Pleasant Land

  Royal Tunbridge Wells is unique. It is, as far as I can see, the only town in the world that is associated with an emotion. We know Blackpool for its tower, Eccles for its cakes and Ascot for its races. We know Chesterfield for its crooked spire and Stilton for its smelly cheese. But the only place that is famous, infamous even, for the supposed character of its natives is Tunbridge Wells.

  And maybe they wouldn’t mind so much if they were known for their generosity or licentiousness, their wit, bravery or their gregariousness. They probably wouldn’t even mind if they were legendary for being generally scared, baffled or absent-minded. But no. The people of Tunbridge Wells have become a byword for small-minded provincial insularity, for hidebound conservatism, for dullness and bigotry and the eagerness to take offence. ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ is as much a national emblem as John Bull or Boudicca, the spluttering, aggrieved counterpart to the happy few and happy breed that Shakespeare and Noël Coward extolled. Is this fair? Is this right? And if it is, is the world becoming more like Tunbridge Wells?

  In 1993, the Australian cultural commentator Robert Hughes published his Culture of Complaint, a book which nailed pretty impressively a nasty contemporary malaise: the desire to blame someone else for everything. He based his theories on America but the phenomenon is a global one, and some people would diagnose it as a very British, even Middle English, disease. For though Hughes’s book is in some ways an attack on political correctness, in which it might seem a rallying cry for disgruntled colonels, it is also a tirade against whingers. And where once stoicism and ‘mustn’t grumble’ were the watchwords of Middle England, it now seems that whatever upsets us, even inconveniences us – from the weather to cold-callers to radio programmes we don’t like – someone must be to blame. Teachers, the government, pop groups, footballers; someone somewhere should pay for the fact that the world is not just how we like it. Once we’d have done something about it. Maybe switched channels, maybe thought hard about stuff, maybe exercised a little patience or equanimity. Now we want someone else to do something about it and fast. Someone should be sacked, someone should be carpeted, someone should apologise. An apology we won’t accept, of course, our arms folded, our ears closed.

  If we call it grumpiness, we defuse it, render it harmless, even funny. Given the name of one of the seven dwarves, it sounds cuddly. It conjures up Rick Wakeman or Arthur Smith complaining about mobile phone ringtones or call centres, rather than reactionary cant about gay people or workers’ rights or art we don’t like or understand. We used to be the people who said, after the Luftwaffe had razed our street, after we’d lost a leg or a cup final and treated those impostors just the same, ‘Mustn’t grumble.’ Now our motto is, ‘Always grumble.’ They should put it on the coins.

  The soundtrack to our lives is becoming an unmusical chorus of whining, a babyish low-level whimper of disapproval dressed up as common sense. Like babies, too, we have become monstrously self-regarding. As Hughes puts it: ‘The self is now the sacred cow … self-esteem is sacrosanct.’

  Is this Tunbridge Wells’ gift to the world then? Surely not. I went to find out whether these people were really as disgusted as we all believe them to be. You’d have to say, at first sight anyway, they aren’t. The girl sitting on the steps of the posh clothes shop didn’t seem that disgusted. Pausing mid-smoothie, she smiled and merely said, ‘Doesn’t it mean that we’re all old fuddy-duddies?’ Something she signally was not in her ‘bling’ shades and diamante-encrusted jeans, sipping her exotic mango and lychee drink. Whenever I could, on my weekend in Royal Tunbridge Wells, population 56,000, twinned with Wiesbaden and sitting prettily on the north of the sandstone of the Kent Weald, I asked people whether they were in fact disgusted about anything at all. And, with a couple of spectacular exceptions, they seemed about as relaxed and contented and, well, whatever the opposite of disgusted is, as a townspeople can be. Though I have to say I didn’t ask all 56,000.

 
; According to Bamber Gascoigne’s Encyclopaedia of Britain, ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ is the ‘hypothetical signature for any indignant anonymous letter to a newspaper, suggesting blimpish outrage. It is not known when or where the joke began, but it is not popular in Tunbridge Wells.’ I like Bamber Gascoigne. University Challenge was a lot more intellectually rigorous under his benign, ginger tutelage. For me, Jeremy Paxman’s abrasive and hectoring style is curiously at odds with the downright easy-peasiness of the questions these days. But here, I think, Bamber may be wrong. The Tunbridge Wellers – affluent, chilled, well turned out – didn’t seem much to care about their appellation. Also, theories proliferate as to how it all began, this mass generalisation of 56,000 people, this ethnic besmirching of a whole, really rather nice town.

  According to a website bearing the very name Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, it was ‘the nom de plume of a prolific writer of letters to the Thunderer – the London Times – during the first half of the 20th century. His alias became almost as widely known as the title of the Fleet Street newspaper itself, and was synonymous with diatribe. He delivered scathing attacks on organisations and individuals that came to his ultracritical attention…He was self-opinionated and convinced of his own infallibility. He was the quintessential Englishman. But what marks him out in particular is that, despite being regularly published, he was never identified, and his real name remains a mystery to this day. He was simply “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”.’

  Like most of the opinions expressed in the website – a tiresome, splenetic and occasionally nasty mish-mash of bigotry and wrong-headedness – this is the veriest bollocks. It seems that the designation ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ used for a mean-spirited, harrumphing bore gained popularity in the 1950s. Historian and former newspaper editor Frank Chapman attributes it to the staff of the former Tunbridge Wells Advertiser. The paper’s then editor, alarmed at a lack of correspondence from readers to fill his letters page, forced his staff to pen a few fictitious ones, a merry practice that I and my colleagues happily indulged in at the New Musical Express some four decades later. One of the staff at the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser signed his simply ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’, and a cultural touchstone was born.

  It seems, though, that long before the 1950s, Tunbridge Wells had enjoyed, if that’s the word, a reputation for stuffiness and stultification. In E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, written in 1908, Miss Bartlett opines, ‘I am used to Tunbridge Wells, where we are all hopelessly behind the times.’ In The County Books – Kent in 1948, Richard Church wrote that ‘many people sneer at Tunbridge Wells, calling it a stuffy Victorian relic, full of retired snobs and ex-professional people whose only amusement is to meet for morning coffee on Mount Pleasant and to be most unpleasant in their querulous frettings over their rheumatism and the disgusting habits of the younger generation … Nevertheless, I love it.’

  There are apparently references to the town in works as diverse as the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Valley of Fear and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Thomas Pynchon’s bamboozling post-modernist tour de force Gravity’s Rainbow and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. In British cinema, it is mentioned with sly humour in David Lean’s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, when the titular character concludes that ‘on the whole, I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells’, and in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service when the soon-to-be-bumped-off Mrs Bond says she looks forward to living as Mr and Mrs Bond in that most idyllically uneventful of addresses: Acacia Avenue, Tunbridge Wells.

  Former Tory leader, beer monster and baseball-cap devotee William Hague chose Tunbridge Wells to launch his local election campaign in the late 1990s. Reporting at the time, the BBC said the place was redolent of ‘Doilies, Women’s Institute, semidetached, cricket on the green, retired colonels, bone china, bridge evening … a by-word for traditional, conservative England’. It is conservative with both small and large Cs, remaining resolutely and defiantly Tory even during the Labour landslide of 1997 and beyond, although the late Robin Cook did choose the town’s register office to tie the knot with his second wife. Two bastions of Middle English sport have lived here: cricketing golden boy David Gower, and Virginia Wade, the last Briton to win a Wimbledon singles title. Ringletted shouter of The Who Roger Daltrey has a trout farm nearby – what is it with rock stars and trout? – and the town’s marketing strapline promises ‘Georgian elegance, natural beauty’. All of which meant it came as quite a surprise when some of the first things I encountered here were robbery, foul language and angry rows motivated by sexual jealousy. All in good time.

  I had really wanted to stay at the Tunbridge Wells branch of the chichi chain Hotel Du Vin, not so much because Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom have stayed there but because it was home for the last seven years of his life to the notorious ‘hellraiser’ (showbiz for ‘drunkard’) Richard Harris. Shortly before he died, he was taken out of the hotel by stretcher to a waiting ambulance and he remarked to some American tourists, ‘It was the food that did for me.’

  Well, anyway, it was fully booked. So I stayed instead in Pembury, a village on the outskirts of the town. Just past the Tesco. You can’t miss it. It has a mini village green, a Chinese takeaway, a chemist and several pubs, one of which shares its name with a fashionable and edgy district of North London. You would hardly call its position rural, sitting alongside a busy arterial road, but it was sort of traditional and welcoming, all candles and stripped pine, and smiling and helpful staff.

  I arrive late-ish and decide to put off exploring Tunbridge Wells itself till the next day and amble down to the bar for something to eat. There is a blackboard offering an overwhelmingly diverse choice of dishes. As I don’t particularly like fish, I now acknowledge that my choice of fish soup as a starter was a strange one. When it arrives it is brown and mysterious and way, way fishier than I am prepared for. After a few mouthfuls it is pushed aside in preparation for my main course. Steak pudding is one of the great northern dishes, best consumed, I always found, in a white foam tray with chips and curry sauce in a bus shelter at half past ten. It helps if you’re sixteen and slightly drunk too. I order it here on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells out of a certain amused and cussed northern-ness, feeling that steak pudding is surely the least Tunbridge Wells main course imaginable. In this, though, I accept I could be wrong, as it was after all a favourite dish of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey and possibly a staple at Eton and Harrow. Anyway, it was very, very good.

  The people at the next table didn’t seem very Tunbridge Wells either. By my reckoning, it was forty-something Mum and Dad with son and girlfriend, and what surprised me was that they were very much a cut below. Dad lolled in his chair looking faintly pissed and the young blonde girlfriend, pretty in an obvious sort of way, started casually effing and blinding like a Clydeside docker, a practice then echoed by everyone around the table, including Mum, who wore an M&S cardie and sipped chenin blanc. They swore not in rage or excitement but calmly and prosaically, as if they were reading out a recipe or a crossword clue. I almost choked on my suet. I wondered if anyone else was shocked. At the table beyond was a scrawny fellow in a turquoise T-shirt. I glanced at him to see if he felt any kindred nonplussedness but he looked vaguely distracted, was shuffling agitatedly and muttering into his mobile phone.

  I read a little about the hotel. It is two hundred years old and is available for funeral wakes, again something I associate with the west coast of Ireland rather than suburban Kent. According to one bit of blurb, it sits ‘majestically’ at the north side of the village, which seemed to be laying it on rather thick, but no matter, the steak pudding had made me feel very well disposed to the village and the pub. At another table, two middle-aged women sit chatting about work. One has just got back from a trip to Amsterdam. They laugh brightly and overloudly about something and she catches my eye, a little embarrassed. She turns to get something from the back of her chair and her demeanour changes, from girlish s
ociability to consternation and then clearly distress.

  The scrawny man in the blue T-shirt has gone. So has her handbag. The two events are not unconnected. Me and the sweary family all begin to offer condolences and vague, probably useless titbits of help, me in regular conversational English, theirs peppered, landmined even, with choice four-letter words.

  ‘Fack me, you don’t expect to get your facking bag nicked here. London, yes, maybe the West End, but not here. Facking cheeky bastard. I thought he looked shifty.’ I can’t help thinking that a bright turquoise T-shirt is not ideal sneak-thief garb. Unless, of course, it’s some kind of genius double bluff. Whatever, it seems to have worked. I feel sorry for the woman who now faces the grim, joyless task of changing her locks and stopping all her credit cards via a series of Kafka-esque late-night phone calls to Bombay. I go to sleep that night thinking that, on first experience, Tunbridge Wells is not so much home of the quintessential bourgeois dullard as a nest of foulmouthed thieves.

  Breakfast has a vaguely, charmingly, provincial French feel. There are baguettes, brie, croissants, some cold ham and a fantastically idiosyncratic way of getting your boiled eggs. A large electrical tureen of boiling water sits gently steaming on a table. Nearby is a basket of eggs. You select your egg and then place it in a small numbered egg-sized basket attached to a long hook. You hook your basket over the edge of the tureen with it dangling in the boiling water. Then you take a little digital timer back to your table where you gut and fillet the Sunday Times and by the time you have got rid of the Travel, Business, Motoring, Lifestyle, Education, Health and Parenting sections, you note that your egg is ready and you go to retrieve it, sharing a joke with the other people at the tureen, all a little childishly giddy about the way boiling an egg here has been turned into a diverting little game. I was almost beside myself with glee when I saw there was a baguette guillotine. How much more jolly was all this than ladling some congealing beans kept warm under a 1000-watt bulb onto your plate?