Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  There are any number of both pen portraits and elephantine biographies of Austen around so I shan’t add another. Let’s just say that she was an interesting woman: the daughter of a clergyman, something of a tomboy, with little in the way of romantic incident in her own life (we think), who died barely into her forties leaving behind six novels. These were largely ignored in her own lifetime, then taken up by academics and intellectuals, and finally in the twentieth century embraced by both the mass reading public and the literary establishment. There are Janeites everywhere now, behind the podiums of our universities and the checkouts of our supermarkets.

  But it has only been in the last decade or so that Austen has not merely been revived but seemingly revealed as the high priestess of Middle English chick-lit. In an age where Francis Fukuyama declared that history had ended, where we are apparently post-feminism and where war, poverty and disease are far less prevalent or frightening than bad hair days, counting calories or ticking biological clocks, Austen has become more relevant than Marx or Mailer, a mania amongst modern women, and even a few men.

  For a well-brought-up middle-class girl, Jane causes more than a little contention. Her devotees love her for her light wit, shrewd social observation and, of course, for the sheer romance of her novels. Long before Bridget Jones’s Diary, Austen was amusing and delighting the reading public of the day with her tales of personable young women, flighty and grave and lovelorn, their desires and their quest for happiness and security. For some, though, this is not enough.

  Celia Brayfield, lecturer at Brunel University and a fine writer herself, has criticised Austen for her lack of any real social engagement or insight. ‘I think she betrays her time and I’m always gobsmacked by what she ignored … She focused on such a narrow strain of human reality. Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the Napoleonic War going on at the time when she was writing; she doesn’t mention it … There is no poverty in her novels, no corruption, ambition, wickedness or war. Yes her wit is enchanting and her human observations enduringly accurate, but the world she writes about is so tiny. I find it claustrophobic.’

  Similarly, the columnist Zoe Williams, by no means a humourless stick, scorns Austen’s essential frivolity. ‘It’s all too graceful and lacks guts … I’m not crazy for Austen. The Brontës’ novels are so overheated, so female, you have to look them in the eye when you read them … Austen’s popular because everyone likes a good costume drama and with Austen you know what you’re getting. You’re guaranteed a manor house, daughters, dresses and weddings. You’re not with authors like Gaskell and Dickens, their stories are not so pretty.’

  It’s a girl thing. That’s the theory anyway. The young and cute Brit actor James McAvoy made modern bosoms heave as the romantic interest in the recent Austen biopic Becoming Jane. But he made blood boil too when he declared to one interviewer that Austen’s Northanger Abbey was ‘one of the worst books I’ve ever read in my life, full of badly written giggly girls’.

  Here he is in good, venerable and blokeish company. In his travel diary Following the Equator, Mark Twain described the library on his ship thus: ‘Jane Austen’s books … are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.’ More pithily, if less wittily, Joseph Conrad asked in a letter to H.G. Wells in 1901, ‘What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her? What is it all about?’

  Her supporters amongst the literary elite, though, from famed don F.R. Leavis to contemporary Oxford professor Richard Jenkyns, point to the fact that her novels are as much about class, commerce, convention and social status as they are about romance; as much about hard cash as heaving bosoms. Jenkyns insists that ‘people who want Regency-type escapism can get it elsewhere … I think [Austen’s] appeal is that she was the first modern novelist and it is her recognition of human life and the strength of the plots [that people enjoy]. The plots are fairly timeless stories about human interaction which are familiar to us.’

  She was no naïf. She was conversant with the ways of the boardroom if not the bedroom. ‘A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of,’ she writes in Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice begins with a famous and waspish social aperçu: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’

  But Jane condemns herself to slightness when she writes, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort and to have done with all the rest.’ Guilt and misery may be inconvenient but they are part of our human lot too. They can make for a rattling good yarn or movie or song.

  I like to think of myself as one of the girls; or as much of one as a hairy straight man from Lancashire can be. I like Abba. I like clothes. I like dancing. I like gossip. I don’t like cars or golf or shouting in pubs or rugby union. I moisturise. I’ve been known to exfoliate. But I still don’t really get Jane Austen. Like P.G. Wodehouse, she seems to me an acute social satirist, but like Wodehouse mildly superficial, a minor if undoubted talent. But I could be wrong of course. And I’m increasingly aware that we may be living in a Jane Austen universe, one where gossip and chatter are the prevalent discourse of modern life, conducted against a backdrop of remote foreign wars, economic uncertainty and an obsession with doing the right thing, property prices and the lives of a pampered elite.

  Jane Austen lived in Bath for five years. She came here after her family left the rural Hampshire parsonage where she grew up till the age of eight, and set two of her novels here. During her time in this charmed and charming city she may have owned a kaleidoscope and possibly even a miner’s safety lamp, but she definitely didn’t have an iPod. I do, and as I wander the lovely, lambent streets of Jane’s old stamping ground, I am listening to a podcast entitled ‘Jane Austen’s Bath’, another striking, crazy example of how she endures.

  This is the ancient shrine of Sulis, county borough of Somerset, World Heritage site and a very, very easy city to fall in love with, as I am finding out. Before you even arrive, you’re a bit smitten. As you drive in on the A6, she reclines below you, like a Regency beauty on a chaise longue, demure and gorgeous. You get a little closer, thinking she won’t be as pretty as this up close. But when your sat nav’s abrupt teutonic voice instructs you to turn right onto Great Pulteney Street, you will give a low murmur of appreciation at her easy elegance and style, especially if you’re a boy from the cramped streets of Lancashire. And you will think, wow, she’s probably out of my league. But what the hell?

  That was last night: a Friday in early summer, the sunset filling the broad street with caramel light and long shadows, the town sighing and chattering as the working week falls from its well-dressed shoulders. There was just time to throw the bags into the hotel room before the curry. Bath, as you’d imagine, has no shortage of chic eateries where the balsamic vinegar flows and the polenta is always drizzled. But a) I really fancied a curry and b) I’d heard good things about one on Bridge Street. Checking out its website I’d been intrigued by its litany of celebrity endorsements, which were nothing if not eclectic. Some were straightforward (‘The best’ – Rolf Harris, ‘Terrific’ – David Essex, ‘Thank you for the good food’ – Keith Floyd). Some were conventionally and believably cheesy (‘Great hot stuff!!’ – Lionel Blair, ‘The band are good but the meal was great!!’ – Des O’Connor). Some were portentous (‘I will return’ – Ken Livingstone, MP). Others reveal a bizarre and eclectic range of diners (‘Lamb tikka amazing’ – Peter Gabriel, ‘Yum!!’ – Brooke Shields, ‘Excellent as ever’ – Roland Orzabal, and ‘Five Star’ – Ravi Shankar). And some were simply baffling (‘Now I know what Joana of Avenger felt like’ – Gareth Hunt).

  Appetite and curiosity naturally whetted, I booked a table. While I yield to no man in my admiration for Roland Orzabal and Gareth Hunt, I have to say that it was just OK.
Perhaps it’s a result of spending a lot of time in the West Midlands over the last decade or so but when you have gorged on the pillowy naans, fiery jalfrezis, sweet, creamy pasandas and piquant pathias of Ladywood and Smethwick, learned to distinguish the Kashmiri from the Goan, the Hyderabadi from the Bengali, you can become spoiled, blasé and immensely fat if you don’t watch it. Interesting again though how the cuisine of the subcontinent has become a staple of Middle England. The average bank manager probably knows what a dupiaza is but not a posset or syllabub. When J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard Harry Potter reacts thus to a magical banquet, ‘He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs’, it rings entirely false and of pure nostalgia for Jennings and Just William books. British children today salivate over bolognese, sweet and sour and tikka masala, not chops and suet.

  The Cobra was good, though, and after a couple of pints of it, a nocturnal tour of the town seemed appropriate. To those who sit cowering behind bolted doors gleaning their view of the world from the Daily Express and 24-hour news, Middle England is a jungle by night, where drunken youths pause in their fornication and vomiting only long enough to stab each other, lit by the searchlights of the police helicopter whirring above. It’s nothing of the sort, of course. Bath was lively in an attractive way, its pavements crowded with young folk showing off for each other in much the same way they’ve been doing since the dawn of time. The girls have got a little shriller and louder maybe, even here, but then so has everyone and everything. I peer over the parapet of Great Pulteney Bridge and down at the great semi-circular weir and the fast-flowing river and watch the equally fast-flowing tide of humanity alongside it. A boy is stretched out comatose on a bench, his girlfriend kneeling alongside him trying to rouse him. Even at this distance I gather that he is called Jimmy. Every now and then he groans and rolls over and flaps his arms as if swatting imaginary flies. She gently persists in her ministrations and smoothes his fringe out of his eyes. It is quite a touching tableau really. And if you are going to drink yourself into a deathly stupor, what nicer place to do it than under the three great arches of a handsome bridge by the swift and murmuring Avon on a mild June night?

  Pulteney Bridge is thronged by a different crowd the next day. There are smiling Japanese girls looking at maps. There are Sikh families taking pictures of each other. A big beaming American man with an unruly ginger beard is fussing over his West Highland terrier, which is called Peanut. The Japanese girls, giggling and putting their hands over their mouths excitably, are very taken with Peanut. It would be hard not to be.

  Pulteney Bridge, built in the Palladian style by Robert Adam for local bigwig Frances Pulteney, was a brand new and striking addition to the Bath cityscape when Jane Austen was around. It is one of only three bridges in the world to be lined with shops. You come across this fact everywhere, but it’s harder to find out what the other two are. (One’s the Ponte Vecchio in Florence actually.) The shops are a bit of a mixed bag in truth. There’s a clothes shop with a huge picture of Judi Dench in the window which positively screams, albeit in a smooth well-modulated scream, ‘Middle England’. There are some tacky and incongruous souvenir shops selling teddy bears and postcards of punks with green Mohicans. There is a coin shop and an antique map shop, the first antique map shop I have ever seen that hasn’t closed down.

  Over the bridge and you are in Bath proper. The gorgeousness just keeps on coming. Everywhere you turn there’s some crenulated doo-dah or tiny delightful wotsit or balcony thingy to die for. Then there’s the abbey where fans of ecclesiastical architecture coo and swoon and sketch and where I had an ice cream, which is often my considered response to an overpowering amount of lovely stuff in the same afternoon. I’m not sure whether I’d put Lawrence Tinnal’s millennium sculpture in that particular category. His risen Christ seems to be swathed in bandages and newspaper and experimenting with Michael Heseltine’s haircut. But it is certainly different. Standing just by it, a lisping podgy young man is pouring his heart out to a pale, worried-looking girl: ‘I simply wouldn’t make a good finance director any more than you would make a good history teacher, Susan.’

  All of this is but a preamble to Bath’s main attraction, its raison d’être. It isn’t called Market or Bridge after all, charming though those features are. It’s named after its big draw, the reason that the Romans came and stayed, not for its wealth or strategic power, not to make a road or a garrison, but purely for hot, steamy fun.

  The story goes that a millennium or so before Christ, there was a Prince called (unattractively, I think) Bladud, the son of Lud Hudibras, King of the Britons. Young Bladud liked to travel but unfortunately somewhere in foreign parts contracted leprosy. His tribe banished him and he was reduced to working as a casual swineherd in the Avon valley. Then his pigs became infected and diseased and it looked like he and they might starve. A kindly farmer advised him – from a distance, one imagines – to look for acorns on the far side of the river around Stainswick. He did just that whilst his pigs wallowed in the hot mud of the swamp, as pigs are wont to do. When his porcine pals emerged, he scraped them clean and found their skin was cleansed and cured. So he jumped in too and, you’ve guessed it, emerged to find his skin clear and his disease healed. Bladud returned to the tribe where he later became King. (I’d have been tempted to burn their huts down, shouting, ‘Who’s a leper now, you heartless bastards!’) In due course, he sent his servants to Bath to establish a settlement, building a temple by the hot springs. Bladud became the ninth king of the Britons and supposed father of King Lear.

  All of which sounds pretty far-fetched to me but what is indisputable is that Bath has a thermal spring – the only one in Britain – and the Celts knew and loved it. They believed that deities and ancestors could be contacted via the conduits of hot springs (which makes as much sense as tea leaves, I suppose) and worshipped the goddess Sul as the guardian to this gateway. When the Romans got here in AD43 they developed it as, essentially, a resort: a place devoted to fun, frolics and relaxation. They built a bath complex called Aquae Sulis, and soon it was attracting visitors from across Europe in search of all three. A little of this air of genteel licentiousness clings to Bath to this day.

  The bath complex was a remarkable feat of engineering and a superb example of Roman art and architecture. It housed healing hot baths, swimming pools, cold rooms and sweat rooms heated by an ingenious plumbing system. Sadly, the temple was eventually flooded by the rising water levels of the river Avon and fell into disuse after the Romans left, becoming a civic dump and then a Saxon burial ground. General stuff accrued on the site and the Roman baths were forgotten about until rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century; Jane Austen would have known nothing about them.

  She’d have known about the spa waters, though. They made Bath popular throughout the Georgian era, which saw the building of the Pump Room and the Royal Mineral Water Hospital under the auspices of William Oliver, a Cornish physician and inventor of the famous and tasteless Bath Oliver biscuit.

  At the turn of the century the Roman baths were uncovered again and in the early 1900s the spa water was bottled and sold as Sulis Water, promising relief from rheumatism, gout, lumbago, sciatica and neuritis. Following the First World War wounded soldiers recuperated here, and after the setting up of the NHS, the health authorities of Bath provided water-cure treatments on prescription. Then in 1978 a girl swimming in the restored Roman bath swallowed some of the source water, and died five days later from a rare form of amoebic meningitis. Tests showed that the Naegleria fowlerii bug was in the water and the pool was closed for public use.

  However, there was a groundswell of support for the notion of redeveloping the Roman baths as a tourist attraction. National Lottery funding was acquired but the project was dogged by problems. The paint peeled off the new pool as soon as it went on. Then the pool started leak
ing. The architect blamed the contractor, who in turn blamed the council for ordering cheap materials. All 274 windows had to be replaced. So did the water-filtering system. When the baths did eventually reopen, it was years late and £30 million over budget.

  And it was worth every day and every penny. Let pettifoggers cavil and harrumph. The Roman Baths at Bath may be the best tourist attraction of its kind in Britain. Other councils and historic sites take note: this is how to do it. Crucially there is none of the silly and faintly desperate dressing up and trivialising of the past that ruins nearly every other museum and exhibition these days. Kids get their own tour and their own little headset thingies. Adults get an intelligent, insightful and well-written tour presented by Stephen Fry and Tamsin Greig, two paragons of Middle English wit and erudition. Plus there’s a sort of additional commentary with a personal flavour by Bill Bryson.

  What all this means is that the past is conjured up with genuine flair and mystery rather than buried beneath a landslide of pointless blather, boring games, the trying on of tunics and such. The large central pool with its terrace of statues is lined with forty-five sheets of lead and filled with hot spa water and once stood in an imposing hall over a hundred feet high but now stands open to the sky. For many Roman visitors, it may have been the biggest building they had ever entered in their life. The commentary reveals it as a place of daily activity: in one corner off-duty soldiers play dice, on a bench two business men make a deal as they might on a modern golf course and, in the shadow of the colonnades, a couple conduct an illicit flirtation.