Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  I like this. Not only does it make the place ‘come alive’ in a way that some cash-strapped actors in a toga could never do, but it strengthens our Austen connection and shows that Bath was a city rich in social manoeuvrings and elaborate choreographed dances of status and hierarchy over half a millennium before Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Bath feels even now like a town where gossip, flirtation and intrigue can flourish. Of course, there may be a downside to this. My friend Lucy was a student here; she said it could be snobbish and small-minded and I have no reason to doubt her. Jane Austen seems to have felt the same. But if you have to come up against snobbery and small-mindedness, rather here amongst colonnades and courtyards than behind the net curtains and pampas grass of suburbia.

  Bill Bryson explains that the Gorgon’s Head – found lying about by workmen in 1982 – is a stunning combination of Celtic and classical deities, a real religious hybrid, and has a strangely and touchingly human look about it. At the heart of the complex is the Sacred Spring where hot water at a temperature of 460°C rises at the rate of 1.17 million litres a day. This was a holy spot and, peeking into its shadowy, sulphurous, subterranean depths, you get a distinct shiver of the otherworldly. The natural phenomenon of the spa, the hot water bubbling up through a crack in the earth, having gained pressure and heat on its journey from the rainy Mendip hills, was beyond the Romans’ comprehension and they believed it to be the work of the gods. It looks like magic to me too.

  I spent a good hour and a half in the baths and could easily have spent more. It really is fabulous. As I leave I overhear a snatch of conversation between two young women guides, clearly very posh local students doing some part-time work. ‘It wasn’t even a borderline first. It was a proper first,’ one is saying while the other looks on enviously. At the side of the baths is the Pump Room, a watering hole of renown in Austen’s day thanks to the tireless promotion of our old friend Richard ‘Beau’ Nash. Fifty pence will still buy you a cup of the hot waters which Charles Dickens famously described as tasting of ‘warmed flat irons’.

  But we should say a cautionary word about our other literary friend here. Whisper it to the Janeites who come in hordes and charabancs from all over the world, but Jane Austen didn’t actually like Bath that much. Some say she hated it and used to cry in the carriage when she had to come here, others that she merely didn’t much like it as a place to live, which is not quite the same. She once wrote that she found the ‘hot white glare’ of the city stifling. She did have Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey proclaim, ‘Oh, who can ever be tired of Bath?’ But in the same book Henry Tilney ripostes, ‘For six weeks it is pleasant enough but beyond that it is the most tiresome place in the world.’

  What a berk Henry must have been, I think as I stroll along the shady Gravel Walk as featured in a romantic episode in Northanger Abbey – much nicer than its name, maybe gravel was a cool new thing in Jane Austen’s day – and up to the sloping green lawn that leads down from the Royal Crescent to the ha ha. There cannot be a better address or a des-er res in the whole of England, a great sweeping curve of a Georgian terrace comprising thirty or so houses and possibly the great ‘ta dah’ moment of world housing. Nowadays it’s hotels and flats so even we mere mortals can stay there. The lawn is full today with picnickers and Frisbee throwers, and I take my place among them, lying back on the grass. Sitting near me on a tartan rug, a young American girl explains her internship and independent study course loudly to her two British companions – ‘You don’t have to go like every day and you have mini lessons and they give you a bunch of stuff’ – before launching into an even louder denunciation of hip-hop culture and the concept of ‘bling’. ‘They say they’re from the ghetto but don’t they know that those diamonds they wear have been mined by slave kids in Africa?’ She is undoubtedly right but the strained smiles on the faces of her friends say, quite clearly, that they want to stab her through the heart with a fork.

  I roll over and look up again at the Royal Crescent. It does make you wonder about the strategic nous of the Luftwaffe that they would flatten Coventry – possibly thinking it was Stratford – but ignore Bath, at least initially. Whatever Henry Thingy thought about the place, the blow to local and national morale of seeing the Royal Crescent in flames would surely have been devastating. The admiralty’s entire warship design operation was based here; another fact the Nazis seem to have overlooked. When it did get the odd bomb, they had generally been aiming for Bristol. Up until April 1942, that is, when as an act of revenge for the Allied bombing of Lübeck, they bombed Bath for two nights and killed four hundred people.

  You would never know. Bath quietly and skilfully rebuilt itself and now the only eyesore is the horrible City of Bath College and the nearby excavation of yet more Roman remains. A passing street cleaner did tell me what this was all about but I confess to not really taking it in. I was just delighted to find a road sweeper with an interest in Roman archaeology and with an accent as rich and gooey as a Somerset cream tea.

  I didn’t manage one of those but that night I climbed the steep hill to the Olive Tree restaurant and ate a piece of fillet beef that I can still remember. The staff were discreet and stylish and knowledgeable and one of them pointed me in the direction of a couple of dessert wines that almost reduced me to silent tears of joy. I pulled myself together, though, and I silently toasted Jane Austen, the lady who had brought me here, and I made myself two promises: one, to come back to Bath and, two, to have another go at Northanger Abbey.

  People who don’t like Jane Austen will often quite like Mrs Gaskell. Don’t be put off by the name. It makes her sound dreadfully severe and fusty and schoolmarmish. In fact, by all accounts Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was witty, principled and something of a rebel, although in the one picture I have seen of her she really ought to have done something different with her hair.

  She lived into the age of photography – just – and in books such as Mary Barton and North and South she displays something Jane Austen barely touches upon, an awareness of the economic structures around her and political issues of the day. Mary Barton has been compared to the work of Engels in its unflinching critique of the conditions endured by Manchester’s Victorian working class, and North and South views the industrial conflicts of the north-west through the eyes of a sensitive woman from the south. The latter was originally serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words. She must often have been late with her copy as Chas once said of her in exasperation, ‘Oh Mrs Gaskell. If I were Mr G, O how I would beat her.’

  In between these two social tracts is a very different book, a sweet almost Austenish thing about the genteel if disadvantaged folk of Middle England. It was too sweet for Virginia Woolf: ‘too great a refinement gives Cranford that prettiness which is the weakest thing about it, making it, superficially at least, the favourite copy for gentle writers who have hired rooms over the village post-office’. Not everyone was as sniffy; Cranford is many people’s favourite of all Mrs G’s oeuvre. Just as in North and South Milton stands for Manchester, so Mrs G modelled her Cranford on a real Cheshire town, one waiting sleepily and nervously and a little snobbishly for the coming of the railways. Nowadays you’re more likely to come across a premiership footballer in designer sunglasses here than Judi Dench in a bonnet. But Knutsford is still genteel. Hardly disadvantaged, though, unless you count not changing the Lamborghini this year as an index of poverty.

  Around the north-west, Knutsford has always been thought of as a cut above, not least by Knutsford itself. It lies contented and secure, at least pre-credit crunch, in the rich fat Shires of Cheshire stockbroker land now colonised by a different kind of highflier, the Dimitars, Cristianos and, er, Waynes who comprise football’s global elite. They play half an hour up the road – less, if you’re driving a Lamborghini – at Old Trafford. In less privileged parts of the north-west – you’ll know this if, like me, you grew up there – Knutsford has always been spoken of as having a certain sophistication and class. Movi
ng there was a sign of rocketing social mobility. Not that anyone I knew ever did. A ‘comedy’ punk band called The Macc Lads have a song called ‘Knutsford Scabby Women’ sung lewdly to the tune of ‘Nutbush City Limits’ but this is clearly just the raging inferiority complex inherent in coming from nearby Macclesfield.

  For Elizabeth Gaskell, Knutsford was ‘the little, straggling town close to the entrance lodge of a great park’. She grew up here at Heathwaite House, situated on what is now Gaskell Avenue, married here and liked it enough to set her sunniest novel Cranford here. As the late Miles Kington pointed out: ‘She came up with a damned good name for a fictional town. “Cranford.” It sounds just right. It sounds real. It sounds a lot more real than real-life Knutsford. “Knutsford” sounds like an uneasy mixture of Danish (Cnuts) and Saxon (ford).’ Which is precisely what it is, the place where King Cnut forded the river, possibly as training for not holding back the waves.

  Writing of Cranford, Mrs G talked of its ‘elegant economy!’ How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford! There, economy was always ‘elegant’, and money-spending always ‘vulgar and ostentatious’. Things have changed a little. The oldest of the old money here may think it vulgar but Knutsford quietly flaunts its healthy bank balance. Walking down from the railway station past the civic centre (‘Coming soon! Rory Bremner! Elaine Delmar! A Laughology workshop!’), I notice that even the chip shop is the most gleaming, spotless, high-tech one of its kind I have ever seen, comprised of sleek, steel cylinders rather than the normal glass counters where you can watch pies congeal and burn your forehead on the red-hot metal strip.

  Turn into one of Knutsford’s innumerable and cute little alleyways and the sense of quiet opulence becomes even headier. There are Zapatos designer shoes; the Via Via deli where finely dressed, slightly severe ladies of a certain age are indicating with impeccably manicured hands the cuts of serrano ham and the varieties of marinated olives they would like to take home. In the Loch Fyne oyster bar, a man in Armani taps listlessly at his Blackberry. In Est Est Est, smiling families tear at their Tuscan bread topped with vine tomatoes and garlic.

  It gets prettier as you turn into one of the two parallel curving main streets. Knutsford’s streets are narrow and crammed with cars and Cheshire’s distinctive black and white timbered buildings. Completely belying its name, King Street seems to have been invented for women and clearly they have become more trend-conscious than in the days of Mrs Gaskell, who wrote, ‘[The Cranford ladies’] dress is very independent of fashion’. I mean, how many bespoke contemporary jewellers can one small Cheshire town need? Black Rose, Aphrodite, Innovation; as I note down these alluring names, I see the owner of the sandwich bar, a sandy-haired lady of about forty, smiling at me from the doorway. ‘Pricing a special present?’ she asks, wiping baguette crumbs from her apron, which features a stylised cartoon of a rabbit holding a bouquet of flowers. ‘I’ve often thought about taking out a mortgage on one of those drop earrings myself … if trade picks up I’ll go back for the other one.’ I don’t know if it’s the Gaskell influence but even the sandwich-shop owners of Knutsford are adroit satirists.

  People in Knutsford and beyond are talking about Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford again because of a recent, sumptuous and much-acclaimed BBC adaptation of it. It has been an Emmy-nominated hit in America, thanks to PBS Masterpiece theatre. In interviews there, its star, the emblematic Dame Judi Dench, has perceptively outlined part of the story’s appeal. ‘We have lost that feeling of a community all being together, and of course irritatingly wanting to know what everyone else’s business is.’ So Cranford is big at the Heritage Tapestry Centre Knutsford, DVDs and illustrated editions to the fore in its windows. Actually, not quite as to the fore as the wooden sculpture in the yard outside, a terrifying sort of tree wraith or pagan Pan figure, his arms made of ribbons and his jagged beard made of splinters. More genial is the flutter of bunting and Union Jacks and Cranford DVDs. There is a Spanish class in progress and in between little flurries of tinkling laughter I hear Mediterranean verbs being declined in accents of Cheshire crystal. In Knutsford, I assume, a smattering of conversational Spanish will come in handy when ordering your serrano ham and Rioja.

  Maybe it was the Union Jacks but there was a vaguely patriotic feel to this corner of the affluent north-west. The Zizzi chain may serve Italian food but its doorway is flanked by one of Giles Gilbert Scott’s old red phone boxes and a GPO red pillar box, as if to say this place may sizzle with extra virgin and reek of basil and garlic, but you are in the heart of Middle England. Next to the restaurant is a wonderfully pretty little pink and white alley called Marble Arch, which is much much smaller and much much nicer than the one in London.

  At the top of Tatton Street, there is an unassuming way in to the famous Tatton Park, the ‘great lodge’ Mrs Gaskell mentions and a much-loved local beauty spot. When I was a child I’d come here with my family on bank holiday trips, though I’d have preferred to go on the slot machines on Blackpool Pier. For old times’ sake, I did spend an hour or two strolling its handsome and refined gardens and great tracts of parkland but have little to report except that as I was leaving and brushing a little pathside dirt from my shoes, I heard a teasing woman’s voice behind me ask, ‘Who’s going straight into a lovely hot bath as soon as I get him home?’ Turning round, I was actually a little disappointed to see that she was addressing her Jack Russell.

  Just alongside the park, though, stands a slightly bizarre but not unattractive Italianate hotch-potch of a building called the Ruskin Rooms. There’s a Laura Ashley shop nearby, a gorgeous little terrace called Hillside and, apart from a distracted old man who nearly reverses over me in his mobility scooter, a general lack of incident. But it has not always been this way. Sixty odd years ago, this corner of Knutsford may have heard the kind of language you won’t find in Cranford, language so ripe and lewd and filthy that even Hollywood had to tone it down when they put the words into George C. Scott’s mouth and won him an Oscar.

  We don’t know for certain that the famous speech that General George Patton gave to members of the Third Army on 5 June 1944 was delivered in Knutsford, but it may well have been, since hereabouts was where the infamous Blood and Guts general had his operational base at the end of the Second World War. Patton himself stayed at the Ruskin Rooms and he frequented local pubs in Peover and nearby Mobberley. But if he did give the speech in these parts, a bowdlerised version of which opens the 1970 movie Patton, then there’s a lovely irony in this charming and prosperous Cheshire town ringing with phrases like:

  This individual heroic stuff is a lot of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real fighting, under fire, than they do about fucking.

  And:

  Don’t forget, you don’t know I’m here. No word of the fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell became of me. I’m not supposed to be commanding this Army. I’m not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. Someday I want them to raise up on their hind legs and howl, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again.’

  Patton was indeed not supposed to be in Knutsford, although word soon got around, which, of course, was just what such a theatrical man wanted. Some say he was sent here because the top brass thought him an attention-seeking, foulmouthed nuisance. Even in sleepy Cheshire he managed to get himself into hot water and nearly ruin his career. The so-called Knutsford Incident was a speech in which he appeared to ignore the Russian contribution to the war effort. Most witnesses say he actually did mention them but it was misreported, perhaps deliberately. Patton’s promotion to the permanent rank of general was placed on hold and Eisenhower scolded him in a fiery letter: ‘I am thoroughly weary of your failure to control your tongue and have begun to doubt your all-round judgment, so essential in high military position.’ Nevertheless, old Blood and Guts
lived to fight another day and Knutsford gained another little bit of history.

  I wander down George Street where several windows sport posters for Wanted One Body!, a new production at the Little Theatre on the corner of the street. Lavish big-budget productions like the BBC’s Cranford have their smaller brethren in the amateur dramatics productions that play in church halls, little theatres and schools all across Middle England. In fact, they may have something of the soul of Middle England about them, all those productions of Hobson’s Choice and The Importance of Being Earnest and Grease and Sleuth played by bank managers and dentists, bakers and florists and retired policemen.

  I happily confess to a fondness for the world of Am Dram. I used to do a bit of it myself, although back in Skelmersdale we were a bunch of scallies and dole-ites and lecturers and such. Still, I like to think they still talk with awe of my Macbeth in parts of Lancashire, an ambitious modern-dress production in which I played the titular despot as Derek Hatton. If nothing else, Am Dram provided me with a fund of funny stories, of which one shall suffice here since it seems to have something sweetly Middle England about it. We were playing a benefit for the Walsall branch of Amnesty International and, at the fall of the curtain, a nice bank-manager type came on, said some complimentary things about the production and made a serious announcement. ‘As you know,’ he began gravely, ‘every branch of Amnesty International has its own prisoner who we campaign for, write to and support. Well, unfortunately …’ and here his pause quietened the room – ‘ours has been released.’

  Saying the right thing and a desperate, nervous, slightly absurd obsession with propriety and appearance is at the heart of Mrs Gaskell’s observations of Knutsford, as transmogrified into demure and dithery Cranford. Then they were worried about the coming of the railway and what these grimy behemoths would bring to their genteel lives. Who knows what they are anxious about today. The credit crunch? Negative equity? Polish plumbers? Whatever, Mrs Gaskell would probably still smile at the ambience of the town, even if she never bought a pair of designer sunglasses.