Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Many of Cromwell Street’s residents were not here in the 1990s; many are asylum seekers who do not, or at least did not, know about their new street’s grim history. Quite a few, though, were here while West was, and so you can sense and understand a weird, illogical but pervasive sense of guilt by association. Middle England, so it’s said, likes to keep itself to itself. But here is one instance where a little more busybodied nosiness, a bit more prurient curtain-twitching would not have gone amiss.

  That’s about as much as I am willing to theorise about Cromwell Street. I just wanted to be away from there as quickly as I could. I knew that the cathedral was a stunner and I wanted to be somewhere vast and airy and noble as quickly as I could. The sat nav mocked me a little, took me down some shabby, quiet streets round the back of the Africa Café and Racial Equality Centre, where I spotted my sinister, scrawny, topless snooker-player friend again (I mean, that’s why he had the cue, right?). But eventually I was away from this little maze of streets and with a real sense of relief.

  I could have done without the John Hooper monument then. It stands in front of the cathedral and, before you can get inside and feel too lyrical, humbled and awe-inspired, reminds you of just what a nasty business religion is. Hooper was Bishop of Gloucester, a diehard Protestant, whose refusal to recant during the torrid religious climate of the Catholic or Counter Reformation led to his execution. It happened here, on the spot where I’m looking up at the fine vaulted statuary in his honour, and a terrible, gruesome botched job of a slaying it was.

  Hooper was taken to the stake leaning on a staff, thanks to the painful sciatica brought on by prison life. Three times they tried to light the damp, green wood at his feet. It wouldn’t take light properly though, only succeeding in subjecting him to intense, excruciating heat. He kissed two faggots, stuffed them under each arm and showed the executioners how to set the remaining ones around him so that he might burn quicker. Unfortunately, it was a breezy day and the burning faggots ended up in his hair, blistering and swelling the skin of his head. ‘For God’s love, let me have more fire,’ he cried. More faggots were added, and then some gunpowder. This only succeeded in blowing the fire apart and some of Hooper with it.

  Eventually, his tongue so swollen he could not even cry out any more, with the fat, water and blood dripping from his fingertips, he banged at his own chest with his arms till they dropped off. Forty-five minutes later, when his bowels fell out of the burning lower half of his body, he died ‘as quietly as a child in his bed’.

  There was a good turnout for all this splendid entertainment. Around seven thousand, they reckon. So next time some lazy, professionally scandalised demagogue of the press or TV is scaring you into believing that Middle England is going to hell in a handcart, remember how John Hooper died, his last pitiful agonies cheered and crowed over by a capacity crowd of decent, law-abiding, God-fearing folk in a busy Midlands market square.

  Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Zoroastrian, Scientologist, Taoist, Shinto, Norse or Jedi: for me, every religion contains a kernel of life-denying madness and intolerance that will, left to its own devices, end up with blokes getting burned alive and young girls getting stoned to death. Sorry. But that’s my faith and I ask you to respect it. I do, however, appreciate old hymn tunes, coffee mornings, bring and buy sales and a good cathedral. Gloucester is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a bloody good cathedral.

  It’s almost hidden away, surrounded on three sides by unprepossessing semis and a prosaic estate. But there is nothing unprepossessing or prosaic about the cathedral itself. It is huge, and so filled with detail and interest and different rooms, chapels and structural splendours that you could lose yourself for a day in it. Church architecture on this scale is not a matter of practicality; it is about might and effect. It is designed to reduce you, or rather you as you might have been nine hundred years ago, to mute obeisance to God and all his works. These arches and aisles and vast, vaulted ceilings are as much about ‘shock and awe’ as the US bombing raids and aerial bombardments of Baghdad in the first Gulf War. Interestingly, then, one of the connections that brings American visitors to this glory of European architecture is that one John Stafford Smith is buried here, the man who wrote the tune to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.

  It has other draws and attractions for the modern secular tourist too. Gloucester Cathedral stars as Hogwarts School in several films of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. The ranks of posh-boy wizards fannying about on broomsticks may be pure CGI but the cathedral itself is as you see it. It doesn’t need much in the way of computer assistance. The Potter connection is thought to bring in hundreds of visitors a year now. Good for the rattle of coin in collection box but not without resentment and hostility from some.

  The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral turned down a ‘generous’ offer from the movie company because he was concerned at the ‘Pagan imagery’ of the stories. The Very Reverend Nicholas Bury, Dean of Gloucester, was more amenable, saying, ‘Gloucester is one of the most beautiful cathedrals, and its friendliness and human scale have often been remarked upon. It is an atmospheric place and good for a story about a boy making friends in his first year at school.’ In the teeth of frothing opposition from fundamentalists, he went on to say of the Potter books: ‘They emphasise that truth is better than lies, good overcomes evil, and the use of gifts should be responsible. They are extraordinarily wholesome books, and children should be encouraged to read them.’

  I couldn’t make any kind of headway with Harry Potter but he and J.K. seemed to be getting along without me just dandy. She strikes me as pleasant and principled and the words of the Very Reverend Nick seem to have the bracing and attractive whiff of common sense to me, as opposed to the overpowering aura of bull emanating from the Christian right and, indeed, religious fanatics of any hue. If the Potter money has helped the upkeep and preservation of this stunning building, then good. They certainly aren’t milking it; a small, unofficial Harry Potter companion in the bookshop is the only hint of Harrymania.

  Even an agnostic like me feels holy and humbled in the presence of the Gloucester cloisters where Daniel Radcliffe occasionally roams. They are amazing, disorientating almost, womblike, pulsing abstract cocoons of light and colour. Quiet intensity and emotional power are everywhere here: in the serene quad, the silent chapter house and the amazing chantry. The overall effect is mesmerising, as indeed must have been the sound made here in 1910 when one of the most powerful pieces of English music was premiered in the otherworldly acoustics of this extraordinary space.

  The Tallis Fantasia, premiered in Gloucester Cathedral at the Three Choirs festival of 1910, was a product of Vaughan Williams’ three months’ study with Ravel in Paris where he acquired ‘a little French polish’. Technically, it is an astonishing piece, composed for a strange and demanding orchestral arrangement: a large string orchestra, a chamber-sized string orchestra and a string quartet. And it was composed with the immense acoustics of this cavernous interior space in mind. It must have been an astonishing evening, that first experience of a piece that is almost a cathedral of sound in itself, overarching, massive, powerful and yet at the same time full of contemplative corners, whispered secrets, quiet reverie. I leave Gloucester Cathedral with it ringing in my ears, though the cathedral is silent.

  Like his other emblematic work, The Lark Ascending, the Tallis Fantasia is English myth in sound. Middle England is as much myth as it is reality, as much about shared mystery as explicit fact. But myth is not just about historical ambiguity and enigma; it’s not just about King Arthur and Robin Hood and some other blokes who may or may not have existed. In fact, the two defining Middle English mythic icons of our time are two women who most definitely did.

  CHAPTER 10

  Myth UK

  In the sullen, workaday light of a damp East Midlands afternoon, it’s a dismal spot. The ruthlessly efficient Bavarian sat nav couldn’t find it at all, taking me aimlessly up the Barrowby Road, even past a pub c
alled the Middle of Nowhere. On foot it became no clearer; the street badly signed and the trip entailing several deflating wrong turns and a plod around the back of a faceless, sprawling retail park. Whatever your feelings about ‘her’, whatever your take on ‘that woman’, whatever your politics, you would expect a more imposing or memorable site than this, a cramped, nondescript crossroads where that Barrowby Road meets the old A1 to Newark and Great Gonerby, a tarmac ribbon clogged with delivery vans and school-run mums and shiny-suited salesmen, all tetchy, all tired, all eager to be somewhere else.

  Crossing is awkward and will earn you a grimace or two through the wipered fanlights of the misted windscreens, a jab of the horn or a sock-ful of filthy rainwater from a speeding tyre. When I do get across, I’m harassed and stressed, like the grainy, tired woman who passes me with her shopping in cheap, overfilled plastic bags and a fractious, grizzling toddler in a buggy. Harassed and, in truth, a bit disappointed.

  The plaque is plain and vaguely home-made and fixed high on the drab brick wall, perhaps so it can’t be accessed easily with chisel or spray paint or even bouquets. It sits glumly alongside what might have been her bedroom window and beneath a smaller, higher one, perhaps the room where she was born on 13 October 1925, daughter of Alf Roberts, the second most famous grocer ever of that name. The one played for decades by Bryan Mosley in Coronation Street may be better known but is rather less significant in the history of these islands.

  Imagine again, as I asked you several hundred pages and miles earlier, that you are a very particular kind of Englishman or woman. Again, one burdened by strange and terrible fears. Maybe you’re still terrified of the sea, still suspicious of the Scots and consumed by a loathing of France and all things French. Or maybe you’ve got an axe to grind about the Falklands War or the destruction of the British coalfields or the privatisation of the railways. Well, again, maybe this is where you would come. Number 2, North Parade, Grantham, Lincolnshire, just opposite the Catholic Church of Mary the Immaculate and the Abacus day-care centre (‘government-funded’, it says, ironically).

  These days, number 2 is a chiropractic and holistic therapy retreat called the Living Well Centre. Its window is bedecked with rainbows, silver stars, mandalas and pastel exhortations to ‘unwind’, ‘rebalance’, ‘pamper’, and so on. I bet you can get your chakra realigned here and at a competitive price. If the practice had more of a sense of humour they’d have that quote from St Francis of Assisi somewhere: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.’

  It would be an appropriate enough slogan for a holistic therapist’s and moreover a clever little nod to its former resident, the most controversial and divisive political figure of modern times. Depending on your point of view, either the true and truly unpalatable, mean, small-minded face of Middle England, or its most shining avatar and exemplar of hard work, backbone and decency. Such things are debatable. What is not is that, as the plaque says, this is ‘birthplace of the Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher MP, first woman prime minister of Gt Britain and Northern Ireland’.

  Maybe I came on the wrong day. Maybe on St George’s Day or a decently warm August bank holiday it is thronged and buzzing and you can’t move for coach parties, school trips, performance artists and megaphoned speakers from competing ideologies. But I found it a strangely muted little place and Grantham more than a little apologetic. The town’s websites and literature mention the fact that Margaret Thatcher, longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century, was born here, but could hardly be said to shout it from the rooftops. They make much more of another local lad, Isaac Newton, in that there’s a big, ugly shopping centre bearing his name and a statue in the town square. Maybe this is understandable, as even the most passionate and confirmed Thatcherite would concede that the three laws of thermodynamics and the discovery of gravity is a bit more important than the setting up of Thames Water.

  Although it’s more northerly and easterly than anywhere else in this book, I knew from the start that I’d be coming to Grantham. It booked itself, you could say. Apparently Lord Salisbury first used the term ‘Middle England’ in 1882 but it did not really become a popular term in public discourse until Thatcher, and because of her. She herself branded it into our consciousness in the same way that Nixon had talked warmly of ‘Middle America’. That’s why I came to Grantham, because it is so central to the Thatcher myth, which in itself is a part of the modern notion of Middle England, a part that I find hugely problematic and contradictory.

  However strong the association, and however much the marketing men and tourist boards and development agencies talk that association up, pretty much every one of our major cultural figures outgrows and transcends their origins. The brown signs on the M5 may call it Shakespeare’s Stratford and understandably so. But has anyone ever thought of him as Stratford’s Shakespeare? Has anyone ever watched Lear’s impotent madness or Othello’s terrible hurt and jealousy, Hamlet’s existential doubt or Lady Macbeth’s deranged remorse and said, knowingly, ‘Ah, you see, you can take the boy out of Stratford but you can’t take Stratford out of the boy. Only a chap from that small yet prosperous Warwickshire market town with its roots in the woollen trade can fully comprehend these myriad mysteries of the human condition.’ I don’t think so.

  But Grantham’s Thatcher? According to many, not least Margaret herself: yes. Grantham made her. This market town and its presumed values loom large in her created mythos. And it was a quite deliberate act of reinvention. When she emerged onto the political scene as MP for Finchley in 1959, she carefully cultivated an image as a posh Tory lady from the Shires, knowing that this was the only way to succeed within the entrenched snobbery and sexist milieu of Conservative politics at the time. But as time went on and her zeal and ambition as a conviction politician and ideologue grew until eventually she challenged for the leadership of the party in 1979, she effected a transformation. According to biographer John Campbell: ‘In place of the Home Counties Tory lady in a stripy hat, married to a rich husband, whose children had attended the most expensive private schools, she forced the media to redefine her as a battling meritocrat who had raised herself by hard work from a humble provincial background.’ Sincerely or cynically, she turned her provincial roots into a mother lode, and the grocer’s daughter from Grantham was born. Again.

  The truth of the exhaust-fumey, clamorous T-junction in this peripheral, overlooked part of town is unprepossessing. But, as Campbell astutely points out: ‘The iconography of Grantham is almost as familiar as the manger in Bethlehem: Alfred Roberts’ famous corner shop, with the Great North Road thundering past the window; the sides of bacon hanging in the back, the smell of baking bread, young Margaret weighing out the sugar; the saintly father, the homely mother, Victorian values – thrift, temperance, good housekeeping, patriotism and duty.’

  The satirical puppet show Spitting Image turned this homespun Messianic mythology rather neatly into a song in the late 1980s, a piece of overheated schlock sung by their infamous Thatcher puppet.

  The bottles of bleach cost thirty pence each

  and Duraglit is forty-six pee

  And family-size individual fruit pies

  are a bargain at one twenty-three …

  I will sing the Grantham Anthem

  that I learned at my father’s knee

  As I helped him in his corner shop

  in Nazareth Galilee

  For all this, as I said, and unlike Bath or Stratford or Liverpool and their attitude to their most celebrated offspring – unlike even the villages of Midsomer – there is no tour, no trail, no leaflet from the tourist office. It seems that this has been a long-standing reluctance, dating back from Margaret’s pomp when the town was perhaps mindful of Maggie’s powerful, polarising effect on people. A New York Times article from 1989 reports on how some locals were irked by this lack of civic pride: ‘The Premier Restau
rant, which occupies the old grocery store above which she was born, announced that it would serve a five-course meal featuring Chicken Margaret [but] The lack of enthusiasm being displayed for the hometown girl who made good was enough to make Joe Flatters take matters into his own hands … “I just felt that we were underplaying things too much, which is a tendency that is part of Grantham’s character…So I did something about it myself. I think she’s the greatest thing that’s happened to this country since the war. She has given some pride to this little town, which was once accused by a radio station of being the most boring town in England.”’

  What Flatters did was to put up signs on the roads leading into Grantham reading, ‘Congratulations, Margaret Thatcher. Ten Years as Prime Minister’. The council made him take them down. By then, many had already been ripped down or defaced. Undaunted, the splendidly Dickensian-sounding Mr Flatters planned to erect signs around town that said: ‘Grantham, Birthplace of Margaret Thatcher.’ He applied for permission this time. But didn’t get it, it appears. Or gave up. Or got bored. Or had a Damascene conversion to Labour.

  The Premier Restaurant, by the way, occupying Maggie’s dad’s old shop and now, as reported, a holistic therapist’s, found that many of the town’s residents boycotted the place. It was spattered with eggs so often that the owner ruefully considered hanging a sign that said, ‘Omelettes Our Speciality’. By the way, in case you’re curious about Chicken Margaret: ‘We thought of sweet and sour sauce but decided against it… Then we thought of Chicken Margaret. It’s soft on the outside and has hazelnuts on the inside to give it hardness. Apples give it a bit of sweetness and lemon sauce gives it zest.’ Personally, the thought of biting into something as soft and succulent as fried chicken and coming up hard against a hazelnut sounds more distressing than appetising. Perhaps that why the Premier Restaurant isn’t there any more.