Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Appropriately, while Knutsford is aware and alert to its Gaskell associations, it could hardly be said to be ruthlessly exploiting them. That would be rather vulgar and – Hollyoaks and Wilmslow WAGS notwithstanding – not very Cheshire really. The literary heritage industry that has turned Haworth into a museum exhibit and Stratford into a theme park has not quite taken root here. There is a leaflet promising ‘A Cranford Walk Around Knutsford’ produced by the Gaskell Society and sold for 80p, which hardly seems slaveringly mercenary. There are a few books and some civic nods: Gaskell and Cranford Avenues, Elizabeth Gaskell Court, the Gaskell Memorial Tower. The Cranford and Matty pharmacies and the Cranford Cake Shop have gone. But, happily for a thirsty and footsore me, there is a Cranford Sandwich Bar.

  As I sit there sipping my latte, I wonder about a few matters. I wonder what the sandwich bar was called a year ago and what it will be called a year hence. I wonder who will win the nearby Crewe and Nantwich by-election, emblazoned in the window of the local Tory party offices though less loudly than the Knutsford Amateur Operatics Society new production of No, No, Nanette. The society, by the way, rejoices in the acronym KAOS, the very same name as the legendary Los Angeles hardcore punk band. I wonder if they ever get confusion over tickets. And I wonder if two hundred and fifty years ago, Knutsford/Cranford was even then a nice place for gently idle young blonde women to loll in cafés in that delicious, noman’s-land between teenage dreams and the responsibilities of adulthood and wonder what cake to try. The ones at the next table to me in the spring of 2008 plumped for the carrot and walnut. It was, they told me, to die for.

  Rather like the chips at Fryways, Nuneaton. Although I imagine the clientele here don’t much use that particular expression. In much the same way that this particular chip shop, unlike the Cranford Sandwich Bar, isn’t trading on its local literary lady icon and hasn’t called itself the Mill on the Cod or the Battered Sausage on the Floss.

  I don’t know if anyone eating here today has read any George Eliot. There are a few people engrossed in literature as they eat but it’s the Sun rather than Silas Marner or Middlemarch. No matter. The chips are fabulous and the girl behind the counter every bit as magnetic as Dorothea Brooke and much less likely to saddle herself with a dry old vicar like Edward Casaubon. The girl in Fryways was a Middle English rose, I guess. Just not the typical sort. She wore an Umbro top, whose replica I couldn’t discern, but she gave me a cone of sweet golden chips for a pound and in an accent that I guess Shakespeare and George Eliot spoke in said words just as sweet as I lingered in the doorway. ‘Come in quick, it was raining right hard before and it might do it again. One cone of chips? That’s just a pound, sweetheart, salt and vinegar and all your sauces there.’ After the niceties of Knutsford and Bath this may seem poor fare. But I was hungry and it was miserable and Nuneaton and the world seemed under a cloud. Drizzle fell on the window, steam rose from the fat fryer, but the chips were good and the welcome was warm.

  My arrival in the town had been less than auspicious. I’d seen a man with the most grotesquely tattooed face imaginable, like a Maori warrior after a messy nervous breakdown, clutching a Special Brew as he sat with a terrifyingly ugly dog at a table outside a pub. The pub was promising, at eight thirty, ‘Krazy Legz’, whatever that may be. Across the road was some grim unfathomable traffic system and a bus station, the first thing you see when you leave the railway station. Whatever the practicalities, towns that do this are committing aesthetic suicide. The first thing you see when you leave Liverpool’s Lime Street station is the staggering neo-classical splendour of St George’s Hall. It’s no accident but an act of quite deliberate civic swagger. Leaving Nuneaton station you see a bus station and an amusement arcade. And the most terrifying dog-man combo in Warwickshire, though that, I appreciate, is not a permanent fixture. Crossing the road (sharpish, obviously), I’d almost been run over by a bus. The bus bore the legend ‘The George Eliot Shuttle Bus’, which was appropriate enough since I had indeed come in search of Georgie Girl.

  George was really Mary. Mary Ann Evans, a local farmer’s daughter of lively mind and penetrating intelligence, a religious radical in a scandalous open marriage, who became one of the most important novelists in the language, not under her own name but the assumed name of a man. The irony here is that after George Eliot, no other woman writer would need to bother with such clumsy subterfuge.

  She was no looker, at least according to her supposed chum Henry James, who wrote of her somewhat ungallantly in a letter to his dad: ‘She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth … She is magnificently ugly – deliciously hideous … in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her.’ So it turns into a compliment eventually. And she has had no shortage of them from illustrious peers and successors. Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch ‘the first novel for grown-up people’, and D.H. Lawrence said of her psychological insights: ‘You see, it was really George Eliot who started it all…It was she who started putting all the action inside.’

  I stole Middlemarch from a store cupboard at my grammar school when I was twelve, partly because I knew I ought to be getting to grips with this stuff, and partly because the tiny, yellow compact edition, chunky as a Bible, was a thing of beauty in itself. I still have it. It is years since I read it and if anything the bonnets and bosoms adaptations, splendid as they are, may have turned me against it. I must revisit it. It is a great novel but it is not a romantic one in the conventional sense. It is not about boy meets girl. It’s about Woman meets World. And is really disappointed by it.

  For idealistic and essentially nuts reasons, the bright and inquisitive Dorothea Brooke marries Edward Casaubon, a boring scholar engaged on a huge and wrong-headed work of religious scholarship. This and several contrapuntal plots are played out in the provincial Midlands in the years leading up to the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which tried to wrest political power out of the hands of wealthy landowners in the teeth of opposition from the Tories. It’s a big book about a great many subjects – politics, marriage, education, women, honour – but at its heart is poor Dorothea’s dutiful, doomed and bloodless marriage.

  In the end it is not because the Rev. Casaubon is plain or fusty or crap in bed that renders him inadequate. It’s a lack of virility of the mind. He is dull, pompous, plodding. But the sex is bad too, it seems. Eliot hints at this rather than illustrates it – it was 1870 after all – but the hints are sometimes unsubtle, as in when Dorothea is found ‘sobbing bitterly’ on honeymoon and when even Casaubon bemoans that what he thought would be ‘the stream of feeling’ turns out to be ‘an exceedingly shallow rill’.

  Nuneaton has other famous sons and daughters as well as George Eliot. An interesting bunch too, from camp comic Larry Grayson to left-wing film director Ken Loach and censorious housewife Mary Whitehouse. But none have got their own hospital or shuttle bus or indeed immortalised the town in the way George – or rather Mary – did, as Milby in Scenes of Clerical Life (nearby neighbour Coventry is the model for Middlemarch itself).

  There’s a ‘Nuneaton George Eliot’ walk on the web, which is actually just a handful of itinerary points, such as the hospital, so I end up wandering around in an aimless way through the pedestrianised streets that clasp the town centre like a friendly octopus. In this way I find the world’s tiniest Debenhams and next to it the Barracuda Bar, closed down. In its shabby, litter-strewn doorway, a woman of about seventy in gold strappy shoes is having a crafty fag. In the town square, a lady of about the same age in a vibrant pink jacket stops and asks me the time. In these days of information overload I would generally think this a preamble to being mugged. But not by this nice lady in pink, I fancy. They seem a law-abiding folk. Every litter bin has a tiny cairn of cigarette butts atop it. And their accent is curious and homely: ‘It dunt luk very nahce, dus it?’ says a lady aloud, watching the
weather forecast on a silent TV in the electrical shop window.

  Excitingly, in the George Eliot Memorial Garden there is an assignation. It is not the kind, though, that happens in Adam Bede or Scenes of Clerical Life. A leather-jacketed boy is trying to put his hands inside his girlfriend’s T-shirt. I assume it’s his girlfriend anyway. Perhaps they have just met, which would explain her reluctance to let him continue his explorations. Anyway, she seems to be taking it in good part, judging by her high-pitched squealing and convulsive laughter and occasional outraged shout of ‘Darren!!!!’

  Through the garden winds the river Anker (a name that must provide some mirth for the Darrens of Nuneaton). It is slow and sluggish and the colour of an old snooker table. A few desultory ducks waddle about on the bank. Suddenly a man in – of course – a high-visibility tabard appears from nowhere waving his arms and scares them, flapping and squawking, back into the water. Can this be his job, I wonder?

  Jubilee Bridge over the fast-flowing weir is ‘part funded by the EU’. Across it you come into town by the back way, past the smartest loo ever and by the loading bay of Marks and Spencer. They have turned the jail into a bistro, which seems astonishingly enterprising. I see a keystone by the very handsome town hall proclaiming ‘Prêt D’Accomplir’. My poor French initially reads this as ‘We’ve already done it’, which I think is the most brilliant motto ever, as casually boastfully dismissive as, ‘Nuneaton: Yeah, Right, Whatever …’ Disappointingly, it actually means Ready To Achieve.

  The Ropewalk shopping centre is as grisly and soulless as these things always are in every little town. Strip-lit and echoing with tinny muzak, filled with expressionless shoppers, it’s like something from a George A. Romero movie. So you escape to the market square with relief, into its trees and little florist stalls and a branch of Thornton’s where the staff were as sweet as the chocolates and lure the unsuspecting traveller with pralines and alpinis and noisettes.

  I emerged from their clutches eventually and chanced upon a statue of what seemed to be a giant sprouting fungus or a bouquet made of hastily and roughly severed ears. I check the date. It is of course 2000, confirming that the millennium surely inspired more bad public art than any other event. But a hundred yards or so away was a much more edifying piece of statuary, George herself.

  She’s sitting on a kind of tree stump thing but it looks awkward. She seems slumped. Perhaps she’s knackered from a hard day of penetrating psychological insights. Anyway it’s very nice, sculpted by John Letts in 1986 on commission from the George Eliot Fellowship. And the square is filled with toddlers and mums, lounging students and pensioners chatting. All human life is here, still gossiping and hoping and regretting, just as they did when the lady cast in bronze amidst them noted their foibles and failings a century and a half ago.

  A.S. Byatt said of Middlemarch that the name roots it in ‘the central English provincial counties in which it takes place [but] It is a microcosm, local but also universal, containing bodies and minds, individuals, families and groups, birth and death, tragedy and comedy, Rome and Europe as well as middle England in Middle Earth.’

  A.S. Byatt is a very clever woman, cleverer than me, which is perhaps why I don’t quite understand that last allusion. But it suits me perfectly, since one of my undernourished but pet theories is that perhaps the most quintessentially Middle English writer is neither Jane nor Mrs G nor George, nor is it Jilly Cooper or J.K. Rowling or Anita Brookner. No, it’s a pipe-smoking Brummie bloke who took the quiet virtues of stolid, beer-drinking Middle England, made them a little more furry and took them to hell and back.

  The journey to Mordor began in Edgbaston. The Fellowship of the Ring was forged by a millpond off the A4040 in the Birmingham suburb of Hall Green. Middle England’s most enduring and popular cultural export is almost entirely suburban Midlands in origin. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa but raised by his widowed mother in the village of Sarehole on the fringes of Birmingham in the last few years of the nineteenth century. He loved it ‘with an intensity of love that was a kind of nostalgia reversed … I was brought up in considerable poverty but I was happy running about in that country. I took the idea of the hobbits from the village people and children. They rather despised me because my mother liked me to be pretty. I went about with long hair and a Little Lord Fauntleroy costume … The hobbits are just what I should like to have been but never was – an entirely unmilitary people who always came up to scratch in a clinch.’

  This seems to me to be an almost perfect summation of the virtues of Middle England in trouble. It’s there in Dad’s Army and in phrases like ‘You can only push us so far’. They (We?) will never look for trouble but if it comes looking for us or bullying some of our weaker neighbours, then look out, chum, whether you’re a nasty Austrian housepainter with ideas above his station or the wraithlike Sauron in his black tower of fire. Artistically, Sarehole was a touchstone for Tolkien, a reservoir of memory that he drew on for his later creations. In fact you could say it was hobbit-forming. Sorry.

  Tolkien remembered it fondly in later life. ‘It was a kind of lost paradise. There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did.’

  Well, sorry to gainsay the great man. But it didn’t. I’m looking at it now and, if anything, it’s in better nick than it was when trespassing Tolkien and his brother were chased away by the miller’s white-haired son George Andrew, who they nicknamed the White Ogre as he was often covered in bone dust. Some think he may have found his way into the character of Saruman, or perhaps Gandalf. Just before his death in 1959, he told a neighbour ‘the pair of them were perishing little nuisances’.

  Birmingham once had fifty working water mills; Sarehole is one of only two that remain. It languished as a tip in Tolkien’s old age. In 1968, Birmingham writer Keith Brace wrote that if you ignored the rusty buckets and mouldering tyres dumped in the river you could see ‘a faded manuscript’ of Tolkien’s Shire. Soon after, though, and following years of neglect and vandalism, the city council restored it in the late 1960s. Tolkien gave it his blessing but was too infirm to attend any ceremonies. It is now fully restored as a beauty spot and museum and attracts thousands of visitors a year. Its website claims that it is ‘famously mentioned in The Lord of the Rings’, which is rubbish, of course, but let’s not carp.

  They’ve done a great job of restoring Sarehole, in the lovely little wooded valley of the river Cole. When I arrive, I see that they are to host a Tolkien Day in a month’s time, and that hungry visitors can get a bacon butty at the Hobbit Café just across the roundabout. The nearby Moseley Bog, the model for the Old Forest, has been drained and improved but retains a penumbral, swampy, creepy air. The scent of wild garlic is heavy in the undergrowth. A sign reads: ‘Danger! Invasive weeds in this area.’

  I am shown around by a fantastically energetic and friendly young guide called Tim who apologises that he is ‘no Tolkien expert’ and then proceeds to be just that and in a casual and relaxed manner, as well as pretty hot on the history of water-milling. He gives me a good potted biography of the man, telling me that after Sarehole he moved to another suburb of Brum, Moseley, but ‘didn’t like it there. Too many students maybe’, a wry reference to Birmingham’s student bedsit, wifi café and import-record-shop capital. I ask him if this is his full-time job and with a smile he informs me that he is in the process of reapplying for his job, the official title of which is Seasonal Part-Time Temporary Visitor Assistant. Cancel your next fact-finding junket to Barcelona, councillor, and give this young man a proper wage. He earns it.

  Head back into Birmingham city centre from Sarehole, and down the Hagley Road, and just after at the second stop after Five Ways traffic island and the Plough and Harrow, turn into Waterworks Road and there, towering above the newsagents, you will see Mina
s Morgul, the Dark Tower, lair of the Witch King Sauron. I wonder if he ever gives the people at number 62 any bother.

  Perrott’s Folly is Birmingham’s oddest architectural feature. It rises a hundred feet above the residential streets of Ladywood, though they were fields and meadows when it was built in 1758 by John Perrott. Perrott’s idea was to build a tower so that he could see the grave of his wife buried ten miles away. Unfortunately the intervening Clent Hills got in the way and his tower did not afford the expected view, thus earning it the epithet ‘Folly’.

  Perrott’s Folly has just opened tentatively to the public. They are coming in their droves. You can gingerly ascend the cold, whitewashed stone, spiral staircase, peeking into the half dozen or so little rooms that lead off. You’ll need these if someone’s coming the other way. You can’t go right to the top. Well, OK, you can if you’re lucky enough to be making a TV documentary about it, as I was in 2007. It’s a bracing, brilliant experience, like being atop the ramparts of a medieval castle in the middle of a residential neighbourhood in a major city. From here you can see those Clent Hills, and beyond those of Malvern and Clun, and, just down the road, you can see Orthanc, the second of the Two Towers.

  The man from the Tolkien Society pointed it out to me. He was shouting up from below, though, as he said he had a bad leg. The reason, you see, that the visitors come is because after leaving the rural quiet of Sarehole, Tolkien’s family came here to Sterling Road. Every day walking to school or looking from his bedroom window, Tolkien would have seen these two brooding, lowering Victorian edifices and the seed of the two towers of Middle Earth were sewn in his imagination. By the way, there are a lot of towers in The Lord of the Rings but Tolkien himself seems to have intended the ‘two’ to be Minas Morgul and Orthanc, not Minas Tirith. This may well mean nothing to you and I apologise but I am just attempting to pre-empt the inevitable deluge of mail. Tolkien does bring out the fanatic in people, as well as the daffily enthusiastic. One website features a group of people in full Elvish and Hobbit garb fannying about at Sarehole Mill without a whiff of embarrassment and its directions to Perrott’s Folly read: ‘I have always found the natives friendly here, but it pays to be cautious, young Hobbit, as this is now a run-down area attempting to regenerate itself, and as with many such areas, crime has been a problem. Walk with fellow travellers, if you can, and be cautious – you never know when an Orc might appear …’ Which is really silly but rather sweet.