Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  I embarked on a train of thought that this was a product of Birmingham’s history: all that growth, all that openness, all that coming and going. The place was not rooted anywhere. Not in Warwickshire, not in England, barely even on Earth. ‘All right, mate,’ the man said sweetly to his infant. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  He got off with his girl and his can of lager shortly afterwards, but there was no baby. Or if there was, they had left it behind. The fat girls went too, to be succeeded by two pre-pubescent boys in tracksuits and hoodies who lit a roll-up. Or maybe a joint; it was hard to tell above the smell of onion. I decided that, despite the forthcoming excitement of passing Winson Green prison, perhaps I would go back the way I came. The kebab was still above the stairs, turning septic. The 11C was much quieter, presumably attracting a far higher class of clientele, people who are clockwise rather than anti.

  Next morning I did go to Winson Green, taking a ride on Birmingham’s single lonely tram line and then walking past the terraces of evocatively named Nineveh Road. Every house in the street bar one had the floral-patterned net curtains that in Britain have become a reliable indicator of Asianness: families as discreet and house-proud as the British of two generations ago. One home had a little sign in the window, ‘2 ROOM TO LET INDIAN FAMILY’, perhaps just ambiguous enough to avoid prosecution, but still a throwback to the days when white families had these houses and placed adverts with NC in the corner: No Coloureds. The little front gardens, however, were all neglected.

  Nineveh Road reaches Soho Road, where every business appears to be Asian-run, except the betting shops. The dominant feature is the Sikh temple, proudly advertising its new free schools, primary and secondary. And at the corner of Hamstead Road, where Handsworth turns into Lozells, the Asian Resource Centre offered ‘FREE COFFEE MORNINGS, ALL NATIONS WELCOME’. It listed some examples: Pakistani, Indian, Afro-Caribbean, Bengali, Chinese, Vietnamese. Some might think there is an ethnic group missing. But actually it is not really an ethnic group represented in Lozells.

  The vicar of Lozells, the Rev. Jemima Prasadam, ‘Auntie Jemima’, built a considerable reputation for her dedication and fortitude on the streets when the area was convulsed by rioting in 2005. Finding her was not easy. There was a crowd of men outside the impressive New Testament Church of God, but when I asked where the Church of England was, they were as bewildered as if I had asked about the Kirk of the Wee Frees or the Masorti Synagogue. I found it eventually: an obscure modern single-storey building, St Paul & St Silas, successor to two large Victorian churches, St Paul, now a nursery, and St Silas, so grand it has its own square, but now given over to the Pentecostalists.

  The church was locked, and it was some weeks before I could track her down and months before I could come back to meet her. Famously, she is everywhere in Lozells all week; the only way was to return on a Sunday morning. Before doing that, I popped into the New Testament Church of God – just one of a stack of revivalist churches on and around Lozells Road. It offered five big screens, theatrical lights, five singers on stage, a band and a warm welcome to a crowd of about 150. Elderly black ladies in black hats swayed and clapped to a succession of rather samey gospel songs. We prayed for Mrs Olive Thomas, who had suffered the loss of an aunt, and for the rich, who didn’t understand. And we praised God and said Hallelujah a great deal.

  Attendance at the harvest festival service down the road at St Paul & St Silas was bumped up above a couple of dozen by the presence of a fraternal delegation from suburban Sutton Coldfield. Auntie Jemima turned out to be even tinier than her congregation and looked like a little Indian bird. But she did her utmost to offer a touch of hot-gospel vibrancy, which is not easy in a near-empty room. Over tea afterwards, I raised the question of numbers.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘a hundred years ago we would have had 120. Now we have twenty. But this is God’s territory and we take the challenge. You know, other churches have more and they take care of their people. But the good old Anglicans. We go Out There.’

  She may be on to something. The Sikh free school up the road will be well funded and probably a huge success. But it will be full of Sikhs, strengthening the mutual incomprehension between Birmingham’s communities for generations to come. Lozells needs Jemima to be Out There.

  It is only a short walk, if not a pleasant one, to the last resting place of the man who was once Birmingham’s most famous son: Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914), father of the now more famous Neville.

  He remains the best-known resident of Key Hill Cemetery, challenged only by Alfred Bird, inventor of Bird’s Custard. But it took me a full hour and a half to find the Chamberlain family tomb, which can only be reached by trampling over assorted Caddicks, Rylands and Harrolds. It is marked by a stake, which is not much use if you don’t know what the stake signifies.

  As mayor, Joe Chamberlain transformed this city in a manner more associated with an American mayor than a British one, clearing slums, cleaning the water supply, creating public amenities. Then he went to Westminster and – without ever becoming prime minister – became the most gifted, potent, admired and reviled politician in the country.

  In Portrait of Birmingham Vivian Bird (no known connection with custard) wrote how the city ‘went en fête for Joseph’s seventieth birthday, with a civic banquet, mass rallies in six parks, and bunting across every street’. The obscurity of his grave is a symbol of the fate of British local democracy.

  Bird – writing in 1970 – tried to say the right thing about the mass immigration that was under way but could not help mentioning that his middle-class suburb was just over the River Cole from increasingly Asian Sparkhill: ‘I am not the only Hall Green resident who watches for signs of encroachment on “our side of the river”.’

  Back in Lozells, I went into a Sudanese internet café and got talking to a young man. ‘You look at Soho Road,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look like the UK. It makes me angry. It is a bit extreme.’

  His name was Beruke. From Ethiopia.

  April/October 2012

  In 2014 Warwickshire County Cricket Club rebranded their team, for the purpose of Twenty20 matches only, as the Birmingham Bears, causing great irritation to their supporters in Coventry, Nuneaton and Leamington etc., and also to the writer of this book.

  13. The sound of the froghorn

  SUFFOLK

  We were walking – my friend Simon Barnes and I – by the reed beds that lead down to the sea at Minsmere, perhaps the holiest shrine of the British conservation movement. He was engaged in giving me a full-scale lecture on the purpose of the reserve. But a practised birdwatcher is like a secret agent. He never once took his eyes off everything around him. The difference is that Simon, without missing a beat, kept telling me what he saw.

  ‘The whole point,’ he was saying, ‘is that a reed bed wants to become an oak forest. Shoveller. Left to themselves, the reeds would slowly deposit humus and dry up and eventually the scrubby stuff would reed warbler, no, sedge warbler take over. Brambles and so on. Then would come the pioneer trees, largely pair of lapwings birch or alders, continuing the process until, eventually, the climax vegetation arrives, and over the course of a millennium the canopy would close.

  ‘The whole point of management is to prevent that happening. An allotment is trying to become an oakwood. So is a flower bed. Or a farmer’s field. The reed bed is being farmed for bitterns by being cut gadwall on a rotational basis so the reeds come back new and young and fresh, which is just the habitat that bitterns like. Swift! First of the season!’

  But we did not see a bittern, even though the whole place was being designed for their benefit. Hardly anyone ever sees a bittern. It is a sort of heron but an extremely shy one: its reedy world meets all its needs. In any case, only a few dozen breed in Britain each year, all in East Anglia and one small reserve in Lancashire. Under the circumstances, it needs to advertise its presence to avoid complete extinction. Loudly. The boom of the bittern is a characteristic sound of the Suffolk countryside.
But by now the grey morning had turned to drizzle and, despite their penchant for damp surroundings, bitterns find rain very unerotic and keep quiet.

  We did see the avocets, the monarchs of Minsmere, who made this whole place possible. In the early days of the Second World War, with invasion a serious threat, it was decided that this lonely, low-lying stretch of coastline was indefensible. The army built a line of concrete posts to deter the tanks and then allowed the sea to come through the gaps, so that the carefully drained coastal farmland became a mere again. Suddenly, up popped the avocets, who had not bred in Britain for a hundred years. At the time the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had fewer than 10,000 members. Now it has over a million, with the avocet as its symbol.

  What a perfect symbol it is too: a lovely, sinuous creature, from its slender legs to its curly beak, far too exotic-looking for these drab climes. Ruthless, though: it goes head-down every few seconds, like a metronome or a nodding donkey, to slash the nearest aquatic insect with that luscious beak. No birder I, but this was riveting.

  We wandered off eventually and walked along the beach. But by now the drizzle had turned to rain and the rain had turned to downpour. I had on some gear I had worn on a trip to the South Pole, but it was no protection against Suffolk in April. We found another hide, full of birders in dripping-wet anoraks, all groaning about the weather. Simon, being a successful author of wildlife books and local with it, counts as a personality in these parts. And suddenly he was spotted, as though he were a shoveller or a gadwall.

  ‘You tell people when to come to Minsmere,’ a woman was saying to her friend, ‘and you say late April or early May. But now look at it. Simon Barnes.’

  She came over to say hello, and Simon introduced his friend Matthew. And she held out her hand and said: ‘Whetton Coles.’ We talked about the weather for a bit while I considered the etiquette of asking why Mr and Mrs Coles might have called their baby girl Whetton. The moment passed, which was lucky, as it was some hours later when I realised that, far from performing the un-English act of introducing herself, she had in fact uttered the most English phrase of them all: ‘Wet and cold.’

  Simon and I had a nice lunch in the Eels Foot Inn (a local joke) in East-bridge. The rain had stopped now, and we went for a post-prandial wander and found ourselves by the Minsmere River, which runs along the southern edge of the reserve. Suddenly, Simon held up his hand and shushed.

  It was not a boom: there was no B. And it was not that loud, though audible enough across the coastal marshes. ‘Oom … oom … oom.’ A couple making love in the next hotel room? A frog with mild constipation? That other characteristic sound of the east coast, a foghorn? Some combination of the above – an amorous froghorn, perhaps?

  Whatever, I could hold my head high from the Stour to the Waveney. I had heard the bittern.

  As a child, I had regular nightmares about inundation. Still do sometimes. Long before the terrible Indian and Pacific Ocean tsunamis of the early twenty-first century, I spent holidays on Bournemouth beach nervously conning the horizon just in case one turned up. My horror was and is mixed with fascination. I love to watch stormy seas pounding the walls or raging rivers bursting into water meadows.

  Suffolk taunts me. Normally, the land is there and the sea is there, and that’s that. Here you never quite know. How many outsiders think of Ipswich as a port? On a map Woodbridge looks miles inland. But if you pass through by train, there is a boatyard that stretches alongside the line for what seems like a mile or more. There are no north–south roads anywhere near the coast (‘too crumbly, squishy and volatile,’ says Simon). In some places there is no route seaward of the A12, about eight miles from the notional edge of England. Beyond that, there is terra-not-all-that-firma, estuaries, rivers, meres and marsh and the very Suffolk habitat known as sandling heath, merging and unmerging with the tides, the seasons, the years and the eons while the opportunist North Sea lies in wait like a wolf at the door. It is the mud from all the estuaries, I was told, that makes the Suffolk sea so peculiarly brown, even on bright days.

  This is a very mysterious place to an inlander. The coastline is dominated by the dome of the Sizewell B power station. Even at Minsmere, it pokes up behind the reed beds, looking like a rising full moon. Not ugly, just unearthly. Alongside that seems to go the unworldly. Edward FitzGerald translated the Rubáiyát here; W. G. Sebald walked this coast for his idiosyncratic meditation on world history, The Rings of Saturn, which included, in a very Sebaldian way, the story of Major Le Strange of Henstead, who died in 1992, leaving his entire estate to his housekeeper, who had dined with him every day for more than thirty years, having adhered to his original condition that she should do so in total silence. Was this real? The cutting looked authentic. But the combination of Sebald and Suffolk is most unsettling.

  In 2009 I found, tucked away and unsignposted in the little town of Leiston, Summerhill School, whose very existence had beguiled us as children. The school where lessons are optional! The school where kids make the rules! It was founded by A. S. Neill in 1921 and was still run by his daughter, Zoë Readhead, and still wholly true to itself, if somewhat out of fashion. I was welcomed warmly and allowed in to The Meeting, the thrice-weekly gathering that makes the rules: one person, one vote, be they principal or infant. The upshot is that Summerhill has what must be the thickest rule book of any school in England, possibly thicker than the book governing VAT regulations, a testament to children’s innate love of order and fairness, as long as the rules are theirs. When Zoë Readhead talked about children being ‘successful’, she made quotation-mark signs with her fingers.

  The Suffolk accent is also mysterious. Anyone with half an ear and a reasonable knowledge of Britain can make a reasonable stab at identifying and perhaps amateurishly imitating maybe a dozen of the best-known accents. But even good actors usually turn Norfolk and Suffolk into a bastardised Mummerset.

  Rivalry between Norfolk and Suffolk has for years manifested itself mainly at football, where Norwich City and Ipswich Town have long performed better than is expected from teams beyond the big conurbations. The differences between the counties are subtle: Suffolk these days is a bit richer, partly from being closer to London; the Norfolkologist Keith Skipper thinks it’s less deferential. He is also kind about its accent: ‘Suffolk is Norfolk dialect set to music.’ Simon Barnes thinks rivalry with Norfolk is not the urgent one: ‘It’s more important now to make it clear that Suffolk is not Essex than to say it’s not Norfolk.’

  Suffolk’s image is indisputably rural. Ipswich Town are known as ‘Tractor Boys’ in the papers and ‘sheepshaggers’ on the terraces. Yet the town now sprawls for miles until it almost merges with Woodbridge. And this is nowhere near the outer limits of London commuterdom.

  Forced to break off this chapter to spend a day in London, I arrived at Saxmundham Station at 6 a.m., just nicking the last parking place, to the disgust of one regular on the 6.14 to Ipswich, whom I heard chuntering about the iniquity of such a thing all the way to Wickham Market. It was another cold, bleak morning and, outside major disaster zones, I have never seen a crowd quite as grim-faced as that gathered on Platform 2 to get on the connecting 7.09 to Liverpool Street.

  In Suffolk, though, this seems out of character. Most people have no wish to travel anywhere else, which is lucky, because the A12 going north quickly turns into a cart track. In the unlikely event of the road ahead not being occupied by a juggernaut or a tractor or an unjustified 30 mph limit, there will appear in front of you an elderly couple in a red Nissan Micra, travelling at a speed low enough to be incredibly irritating but high enough to be impassable. I suspect they are paid by the council to deter any purposeful movement whatever.

  The most striking thing about the county, though, is the extent to which it is so palpably show-offy. All those pink-cheeked houses! You wouldn’t get away with them in Yorkshire, not even in Hebden Bridge. They would be an aberration in Cornwall. ‘Am I not incredibly beautiful?’ the very stones
are saying. ‘Is not my pargeting extremely fine?’ ‘Is my thatch not immaculate?’

  This is most obvious in west Suffolk, where the old wool-based opulence has been fortified by the wagonloads of Waitrosey weekenders. Take Long Melford, with a parish church that can only be described as arrogant. Long? The village/town/megalopolis stretches downhill (and then a little way up again) for two miles, slowly becoming less prosperous the further you get from God’s Very Large House. Or Lavenham, where the much-loved half-timbered houses have been twisted into bizarre shapes, one is tempted to imagine, not by the ravages of time but in a self-conscious effort to look quainter than their neighbours.

  And then there is Newmarket, so close to Suffolk’s western border that the Cesarewitch, one of the most famous of all its races, actually starts in Cambridgeshire. On a fresh, dewy, spring morning, there are few more beautiful spots to be than the foot of Warren Hill, or on the edge of the Heath with the first lot of horses glistening from their morning workout and Ely Cathedral shimmering in the distance. It’s pointless to consider Newmarket in terms of the county as a whole: it is perhaps the least diversified town left in the kingdom, and the most introverted, and the most distinctive – ‘a one-horse-town with 3,000 horses’. Like horse racing in general, Newmarket is based on a strange alliance of toffs and oiks, with the bourgeoisie almost wholly absent. ‘Which is why,’ explained one resident, ‘the best restaurant in town is Pizza Express.’

  However, the essence of Suffolk, which is on the whole relentlessly bourgeois, is to be found near the water. Take four coastal towns with totally different stories, two of them disastrous, two of them successful – or, as Zoë Readhead of Summerhill would say – ‘successful’. All of them illustrating Suffolk’s contradictions.