Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  The next day doesn’t begin well. I try to get a reviving something or other on Gloucester Green and stray into an awful coffee shop. The only other customer is an Italian man with a terrible glossy wet-look perm and nasty, clearly expensive leather slip-ons, who is shouting loudly into his mobile phone. On the wall are pictures of Dylan and Sinatra and Green Day, and random quotes from each that are completely meaningless, bearing no relation to coffee or Oxford or indeed anything. It’s just another example of that mind-numbing identikit tat that some blue-sky thinker in marketing thinks will say ‘contemporary’ and ‘now’ rather than ‘cheap’ and ‘desperate’. Morse would have hated it. I hated it. And the staff were rude so in the end I leave my greasy latte undrunk and head for the more congenial and upscale ambience of the Ashmolean.

  The Ashmolean museum was built in 1667 (opening in 1683) to house the treasures given by one Elias Ashmole to the University of Oxford. They used to have a stuffed dodo here and there’s a persistent rumour that Christopher Wren did the original design, though it can’t be proven. What is true beyond a doubt is that it contains one of the great Middle English treasures, the Alfred Jewel: a gorgeously decorated ornament carrying a portrait of Christ and discovered in 1693 near Athelney where Alfred the Great, the first man to style himself King of England, founded a monastery. It was certainly commissioned by Alfred. The inscription reads ‘Alfred ordered me to be made’, and it may even have been worn by him. It too finds its way into a Morse story, rechristened the Wilvercote Tongue and the source of many misadventures, not least for the dead lady in Room 310 of the Randolph across the road.

  There’s a lot else in here too, particularly if you’re a fan of amulets and embalmed viscera in jars. But the sun is up and the day is hot and I decide to explore Oxford on foot. Strolling along, Morse tour printout to hand, negotiating Oxford’s semi-permanent log jam of visitors from around the world, I find myself outside another Morse haunt, the Eagle and Child pub, also famous as the boozer where the Inklings met, that beery, blokey gang of middle-aged writer dons that included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. I’m every bit as keen on beer and the like as they or Morse. But it’s a beautiful day and the sun’s barely over the yardarm so I pop into the café next door for an ice cream. There, the same charming, perplexing shambles that permeated last night’s restaurant holds sway. For a start, they are playing ‘Fitter Happier’ by Radiohead, the one about ‘a pig in a cage on antibiotics’, delivered in a scary Stephen Hawking robot voice and the most gloomy and disturbing thing they have ever done. Nice bit of local pride but surely not even Thom Yorke wants this with his 99.

  They don’t do 99s though. They do seem to do Fairtrade ice cream but the genial, horribly pierced girl serving can’t get the scoop into the cryogenically hardened ice cream. She shouts for ‘muscles’ and a scrawny blond kid comes out from the back room. He suggests soaking the scoop in lukewarm water. In the end I do it myself. Outside I realise that they, or rather I, have given me the wrong flavour. It’s clearly catching.

  By a nice coincidence it is actually ‘Gaudy Night’ tonight, this the title of maybe Dorothy L. Sayers’ best Lord Peter Wimsey story. In it, his squeeze Harriet Vane goes back to her old college and gets mixed up in all kinds of proto-feminist skulduggery. Gaudy is short for ‘gaudium’ and is basically a reunion for students back at the old alma mater. It’s Wadham’s tonight and the old boys and girls, a little more lined and less lean than once perhaps but still bright-eyed and expectant, are bundling out of their Audis and Rovers with long velvet dresses and dinner suits on hangars. Perhaps there will be a murder, though of course no one would wish for that. The romantic in me does hope, though, that a little late-flowering passion might bloom again under the moonlight in the quad, some sweet unfinished business from 1973.

  As I stroll through the quad of the Bodleian Library, where a brisk woman in a turban is waving her arms and declaiming at some delighted chaps from the Orient, I ponder on the uniform of the Middle English academic class. Not the cap and gown of the students or dons, but the crumpled cream jacket and Panama hat that, seemingly by law, every man over thirty in Oxford must wear during the summer months. Smarter perhaps than hoodies and tracksuits and baseball caps, but just as unthinkingly de rigueur.

  I spot at least seven Panama hats atop seven greying handsome heads in the compact, crowded beer garden (beer forecourt may be closer to the truth) outside the Turf Tavern. No pub in Oxford is harder to find; common sense will tell you that you’ve gone wrong when you find yourself at the seeming dead end at the foot of Bath Place. But persevere. Have faith. And you’ll be rewarded with the best pub in Oxford and one hard to beat across the whole of Middle England.

  Don’t blame me if you can’t get a seat. ‘They’re like gold dust … hurry,’ said the nice woman in the shawl who beckoned me over to take her place as she finished her white wine and collected her shopping. Though unseen from any road and tricky to find, the Turf will be thronged day and night with happy people in the know. It’s a gem that’s been loved by successive generations of dreamers amongst these famous spires. Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure called it ‘an obscure and low-beamed tavern up a court’, which is completely accurate if a little prosaic. ‘The Turf in Hell Passage knew us well,’ hiccup Charles and Sebastian in that other hymn to Oxford student life, Brideshead Revisited.

  Bill Clinton used to booze here in his Rhodes Scholarship days in Oxford. Some say it is the place where he smoked but did not inhale. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton knocked back a few whiskies here when they were sojourning in the town. And it is Inspector Morse’s favourite boozer, though he calls it the Lamb and Flag, possibly so that he and Lewis can put people off the scent and be certain of a seat. It is snug, cramped some would say, a warren of little rooms and stairways and the low ceilings threaten concussion if not decapitation. But it’s worth it. It was much too warm for mulled wine on the day I was there but I can see why, muffled and scarved, you would hurry down that tiny passage on a December day to sit by the fire with a steaming glass and a copy of something poetic. Particularly at three pound thirty. When you learn that in the winter, huge charcoal braziers are lit to keep the beer garden warm and that kids are invited to toast marshmallows over them, you start to wonder whether, like George Orwell’s Moon Under Water, the place might not be too good to be true.

  Out again, reluctantly, and by a different way, into tiny St Helen’s passage and onto Broad Street and here’s another Oxfordian gem. Its real name is Hertford Bridge since it links together the old and new quadrangles of Hertford College, Evelyn Waugh’s alma mater and the model for the college in Brideshead. Either for this wistful, nostalgic reason or more likely for its resemblance to the one in Venice, this small perfect arch with its leaded windows is known as the Bridge of Sighs. You will look up and sigh, and so will your neighbours from Seoul and Seville and St Petersburg because wherever you stand and however polite you are you will all end up in each other’s pictures, the back of your heads obscuring this architectural delight.

  I find myself lingering here, loath to move on, in a kind of wistful reverie. All things Brideshead, in fact all things redolent of ‘the groves of academe’, do this to me. They bring on a kind of romantic, aching sense of loss and attachment that some would say makes no sense for a boy who grew up on a council estate in a grimy Lancashire cotton town. Or does it make perfect sense? I am pining for a past I never had, a dream as sad and unfulfilled I guess as Jude the Obscure. When I was a bright kid doing A levels, I had all kinds of moral and political objections to ‘Oxbridge’, all of them I now see pretty half-arsed and self-serving. I’d have loved it here I think. Or at least I’d have hated it in some spectacular, glorious Malcolm McDowell in If way. Perhaps I’d have been ‘put down’ or ‘rubbed down’ or ‘sent down’ or whatever it is they do with miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. Watching the young men and women cycling down these lovely streets, arms linked, laughing gaily as they stroll, book-burdened, beneath the i
vy and the deep green shadows of the tiny, serene quadrangle at Lincoln’s, I feel a palpable twinge. It may all be guff. But it’s still palpable.

  But I am jerked from my reverie by the sight of a man carrying a really old plough in a Marks and Spencer plastic bag. Let’s face it, it’s hard not to be. He is sweating and swearing a little. The day is hot, the streets are crowded and the bag has been designed for baguettes and fruit, not antiquarian agricultural implements. I watch where he goes keenly. And I am amply rewarded.

  Oh joy of joys! The Antiques Roadshow! Here is a programme that rivals both Morse and Midsomer as the ultimate TV emblem of Middle England from the cod Handel starchiness of its theme tune to its Sunday teatime slot with its echoes of apple pie and custard, tinned salmon and snoozing granddads. Since 1977 when Arthur Negus was its benign public face, this staple of the TV schedules has presented both the best of the English character – enthusiasm, hobbyism, a desire to preserve the best of the past – with hints of something darker, namely the avarice, greed and lust that flickers behind the eyes of even the cuddliest nan in Oxfordshire. Oh, they may pretend that all they want is a little information about how this trinket found its way into Aunt Dorothy’s bottom drawer, but what they really, really want to be told by a teasing, smiling Eric or Geoffrey or Bunny is that they should insure it for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

  And it’s here today, in Waugh’s old quad at Hertford. Not so much Brideshead Revisited as Bedstead Revisited, a stroke of absolute luck for the traveller from the far north come in search of Middle England. There are vans and cameras and coils of cabling and cheery chippies and sparks and who knows maybe even Fiona Bruce, feline temptress of the newsroom and surely a secret passion of every one of these Panamahatted gentlemen of Oxford.

  There are Panama hats galore in the little quad. And there is much much worse. Dotted here and there amidst the little umbrella-ed tables, the little sections marked ‘Militaria’, ‘Paintings’, ‘Clocks and Watches’ and the like, are many terrifying examples of how badly the posh Englishman will dress if you let him. One of the antique experts struts around in Ray-Bans, a mauve-striped blazer, revealingly tight cream slacks and a pair of tasselled loafers. Individually, these may not sound too bad. But it’s the way they are worn, each item shouting at another like in a pub argument, the effect designed for maximum standoutishness.

  Some people, the organisers I imagine, are sporting bright vermillion silk sashes and thus look like the Graham Norton wing of the Ulster Defence Association. There are also two policewomen in body armour lurking by the ceramics. What can they be expecting? A spray of gunfire from behind the porcelain stall? A score-settling shoot-out between two rival gangs of ruthless period-furniture salesmen from Banbury? Everywhere I look there is something so delightfully daft and English that it gladdens the heart. A clutch of white-haired septuagenarian ladies giggle as they watch a ponytailed cameraman of about twenty take a long, astonishingly boring close-up of a candelabra.

  I overhear a smart, exasperated women hissing into her mobile phone, ‘Of course, he’s brought his camera obscura and I’m sitting here like a lemon,’ a line straight from the pen of Alan Bennett or Victoria Wood. I see the man with the plough again wandering by bemused like the lost and inexplicable recurring penguin in Gregory’s Girl. I could have stayed there all day but Fiona was yet to be lured from her trailer and it was almost time for me to leave Oxford.

  The Turl is a quaint street round the back of Brasenose, which served as the fictitious Lonsdale College in Morse. A little further up is Exeter College where Tolkien got his first in medieval history in 1915. A small group of men in gowns on a street corner are discussing 1970s British TV of the Are You Being Served? ilk before coming up to date. ‘I love BBC1, I love Traffic Cops. Course, you being Swiss wouldn’t know.’ University Clothing on Turl must be where the poshos get their dreadful clothes: an unseemly eyewatering riot of turquoise ties and lime-green and salmon-pink striped shirts.

  On route for the checkout at the Randolph, I pass through the famous covered market, which is quite staggeringly brilliant and therefore, obviously, endangered, from the evidence of the ‘Save the Covered Market’ posters. Here I found a butcher’s that could furnish with me seven types of veggie sausage, such as sweet potato and chestnut, stilton and walnut, Glamorgan. The man in the cheese shop asks ‘Would you like me to suggest something yummy?’ of some delighted American tourists, and gives me and them a taste of mountain gorgonzola. It was so buttery and ripe it took my breath away. Under one roof you can get Manolo Blahnik shoes, a tan Italian briefcase, Hungarian gyulai sausage, fresh skate wings and North American pesto. The pasta shop sold me the best filled pasta I have ever tasted, though I wasn’t to know this until a day or so later when I sat at home relishing it with my mountain gorgonzola and North American pesto and remembering how lovely Oxford was.

  It almost made me forget about the place I’d gone to next: 22 Cromwell Street. Almost, but not quite. If you are going to delve into the dark side of Middle England, you cannot pretend it is all sleuthing spinsters and lovelorn bachelor policemen sipping real ale and solving crosswords to the sound of Wagner. There is a real darkness too, an almost unspeakable, near unnameable wickedness that doesn’t just hide up on some rainy, blasted northern moor or in the glass-strewn stairwells of sink estates. Beowulf lives. And it can live quietly and horribly behind net curtains in nondescript Middle English residential streets in towns like Gloucester.

  It was the second time I’d been here. I’d come a few years back making, of all things, a somewhat intellectual TV show about the portrayal of apes in Hollywood movies and the symbolism therein, filmed at a lovely old independent cinema in the city. The show was fun but I’d taken away a queer, unpleasant feeling about the place, which was probably unfair and really based on one incident. One lunchtime, the crew and I were having our tea and bacon sandwiches in the picture house’s bar area along with the cinema staff. I’d taken a real dislike to one of them, a surly moustachioed maintenance bloke who cracked bad, crude jokes and made the girls ill at ease and clearly wanted it to be known that us fancy telly folk were pampered ponces who were no better than him. I happen to think he was wrong. But that’s by the bye.

  Over lunch, with a leer, he asked us, mouthful of sarnie, ‘Who d’you think did some of the plastering and stuff in this place then?’ Clearly, we didn’t know. Or rather we guessed too late: Gloucester has only one famous builder. ‘That’s right,’ he said with malevolent relish, ‘Fred West.’ Sharp breaths were drawn; an uncomfortable silence fell. He was enjoying it. ‘Oh,’ he huffed with exaggerated impatience at our soft liberal media sensibilities. ‘He was all right, old Fred.’

  ‘Yes, except he wasn’t, was he?’ I replied without hesitation. ‘He wasn’t all right at all.’ Leaving behind an awkward silence, I quickly went out for some fresh air and thought about just how not all right old Fred was, what with the sadism and murder and child abuse and torture. Sorry, Gloucester, but that’s the memory I took away with me.

  And that’s why I’m back, that and some much nicer reasons. But before I can come on to them I had to go to Cromwell Street, where Fred West, a slow-witted son of farming stock, had, along with his wife Rose, tortured, raped and eventually killed at least twelve young women in horrific circumstances over a period of years from 1973 onwards. And all the while the cars had passed and the kids had played and the milkmen had whistled.

  I’d decided that I should go to Cromwell Street as it stands as probably the darkest corner of Middle England in living memory. But I didn’t relish it. Driving through the anonymous, surrounding streets, I felt that even the sat-nav woman was admonishing me as she instructed me to take the second exit on the left and keep right up ahead. I knew that local people resented the ghoulish interest that West’s old home continued to generate. In an interview in 2004 with the BBC, the receptionist at the nearby surgery said, ‘Somebody called in here once from abroad and asked me where it was a
nd I thought, what in God’s name do you want to be looking at that for?’ But then added, ‘West himself was actually very pleasant.’ Well, yes, but – sorry to labour the point and everything – he wasn’t, was he?

  The Wellington Stores offers phone cards and Afro-Caribbean food. I think about going in and making casual enquiries. Then I think better of it. It is probably a trick of the mind, one brought on by associations and the oddly narrow, oppressive little street. But even on a day of bright sunlight, we seem to have fallen into shadow. And I am being watched, of that there’s no doubt. I’m being watched by the haggard little woman on the corner. I’m being checked out by the shirtless toothless tattooed youth with a snooker cue. An old Jamaican man stops as he trims his privet hedge and stares at me. I turn away, awkward and ashamed, to the opposite side of the street where there’s a curious gap in the middle of the row of houses.

  After Fred West’s arrest, trial and conviction, and after his subsequent suicide by hanging in Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, the council demolished 25 Cromwell Street. They even demolished the house next door just for good measure. In fact, once demolished, they powdered and incinerated every brick and piece of timber just to thwart any blackhearted potential souvenir hunter. There’s a gap now, a passageway that we’d call a ginnel up north, blocked with bollards to deter cyclists and skateboarders and worse.