Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  We also hit (literally) a shop in the covered market (‘Mark! Mark! Market!’), and marched through Monsoon and the kitchens of Wagamama before finishing at Lincoln College. There the stone is by a back door to Brasenose, known as the needle’s eye, so narrow that Bob had to proceed on his own to mark Stone 29, while the rest of us were led into the refectory for light luncheon and ivy beer, to be followed by three more cheers and undergraduates throwing hot pennies to schoolboys by Jeremy Taylor’s staircase. By now we were so drenched in Oxonian arcana that at any moment one felt Great Tom would chime 101 times and the fellows of All Souls might start doing unspeakable things to a mallard.

  Having avoided being struck with a stick throughout, two things did strike me. The first was that only in Oxford could seventy-odd people carrying a cross, staffs and canes process through the middle of Marks & Spencer without anyone batting an eyelid. The second was how the ceremony showed off the glorious medieval hugger-mugger of the place. In Oxford, far more than in Cambridge, everything nestles tightly against everything else: town and gown; high and low; vaulted halls and grubby basements; churches, colleges and commerce; Carfax and cars; God, quad and Bod.

  I was so enchanted by the whole occasion that when later I strolled down to Magdalen Bridge, now free of drunks and security men, I almost jumped off it, for sheer joy.

  When we were in Wagamama’s kitchens I caught a sign that read: ‘PPE. Don’t risk it.’ Those initials could be the shibboleth that distinguishes the two Oxfords. What do they stand for? Politics, philosophy and economics? Not much use when rushing out an order for chicken and prawn teppanyaki. Personal protection equipment.

  Another question. Name the biggest university in Oxford? The 2012–13 figures, the latest available, suggest the right answer is the obvious one, but in terms of full-time undergraduates it’s almost a dead heat between the University of Oxford and the Other One: based way out east, in unremarkable buildings, long past Magdalen Bridge and the roundabout where the tour buses give up and turn round, and not requiring a galaxy of A* A-levels to gain admission. This is Oxford Brookes University, the old polytechnic, elevated in status in 1992, along with the other downbeat polys, in a fit of governmental egalitarianism. Actually, it had the reverse effect: making the old class-ridden stratification of tertiary education something even more prescriptive and almost Hindu in its fine gradations and complexity.

  Brookes turned into a success story. From its inception, it was rather good, and innovative, allowing students to put together unusual modules: accounting and history of art, for example, which is a sound basis on which to run an art gallery. Some say it has become less innovative, since almost every university does that kind of stuff now. But it still has pockets of excellence: architecture and nutrition among them.

  It had three permanent advantages, though: location, location, location. Local rumour is that the obscure name was chosen (Brookes was a former principal) so it would be high in the alphabetical list of universities. But what mattered was the O not the B. Immediately, students poured in from overseas, confident that no one back home would grasp the difference between studying at Oxford and in Oxford. But it worked for home-based kids too, especially posher ones who had the balls to go to job interviews and say they went to ‘Oxford slight cough University’. And, in the meantime, it’s a much nicer place to be a student than Wolverhampton.

  There is, however, a third class of young person in Oxford: the locals. In the old days the college menials – the cooks and the porters and the scouts – lived in rented homes nearby. Now the city has turned into Paris: the centre is full of smart arondissements, while the workers have been shoved off towards and beyond the périphérique. If your first thought on hearing PPE is the Wagamama meaning, out you go to Barton or Blackbird Leys. ‘It’s a circular gentrification project that operates like a blast radius,’ says the Oxford-based film-maker Jon Spira.

  Spira’s debut film, Anyone Can Play Guitar, highly regarded if little shown, was a celebration of the Oxford music scene, which, he says, is unique: ‘You look at any of the cities with music scenes that everyone talks about, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield … they were based on a single sound and a handful of bands all doing the same thing, which was always short-lived. Oxford has been a boot camp for bands and movements – Radiohead, Supergrass, Riot Grrrl, twee music, shoegaze, math rock.’ He could be making this stuff up, but most of it is on Wikipedia. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, goes the thesis.

  Does this have anything to do with university? Nothing to do with the students. ‘But my theory is this,’ says Jon. ‘It’s a very inspirational place to grow up. The most amazing people in the world come through Oxford. I think there’s something in the air here.’ Not all of it is agreeable. ‘You feel an outcast. The university has all these beautiful buildings which you never get to go in. The students come here for three years and they get all that. You’re an exile in your own city.’

  I got an inkling of what he meant when I went to Oxford Cathedral to light my candle. It’s actually part of Christ Church, Oxford’s snootiest college, and getting there requires walking across the vast acreage of Tom Quad; it is not at all obvious that one is welcome. I paused momentarily before following my normal rule in moments of uncertainty – keep walking briskly until someone points a gun – and marched past the bowler-hatted flunkeys. It was worth the small risk that they had shoot-to-kill instructions. The cathedral is beautiful, intimate in a chapel-y kind of way, and someone kindly scurried off to find a candle for me because there were none in the shrine. But an Oxford ragamuffin might not feel exactly welcome.

  Still, Jon Spira is right about the inspiration. In 1991 the Blackbird Leys estate, the epitome of the Oxford banlieues, became briefly notorious when riots started following a crackdown on joyriding. The joyriding involved not just nicking the cars but using them for show-off stunt drives. It was a kind of performance art.

  Oxford is a first-class city at the heart of a two-two sort of county. Yet it no longer stands unchallenged as Oxfordshire’s chief tourist attraction. Forget Blenheim Palace, forget Churchill’s grave. This new phenomenon is Bicester Village, an outlet centre on the outskirts of the once-obscure town of Bicester, which is now better known in China, Brazil and Russia than any of the dreaming spires: 130 shops, nearly all of them belonging to chains even I had heard of; three million visitors a year, many of them arriving by air from Beijing and Shanghai via bus from London.

  When I arrived, on a dank Friday afternoon, it was busy – if not quite weekend-frantic – and at a guess nearly half the shoppers were Asian. The shops are all wood-clad: impermanent-looking but gaily painted. My first thoughts were that I had been transported to the village in The Prisoner or to some New England movie-set town where something terrible was about to happen to the inhabitants.

  Nothing in the windows looked cheap to me. And I was beginning to feel the whole thing was ludicrous when I was suddenly spotted by my photographer mate Rick and his girlfriend, Leanne, who is in the fashion trade and understands these places. She explained that although not necessarily cheap, Bicester was cheaper. ‘If you crave a £1,000 bag and it’s worth £250 and you see it for £350, it’s a bargain.’ So we sat down, had tea and a laugh, and I felt better and went and had another stroll round.

  Look, I only bought two shirts, a tie and two pairs of shoes, which I really needed, and honest they were bargains so just shut up, will you? I came to scoff and I stayed to pay.

  The original point of Oxfordshire was its positioning: the crossroads of the Wessex–Mercia trade routes. Hence too the positioning of Bicester: an hour from London, just far enough to make visitors feel they have been out in the country. And geography still governs the whole nature of the county. It attracts both weekenders and commuters, a deadly combination.

  Take Kingham: ‘England’s Favourite Village’, according to a panel put together by Country Life in 2004. Of all the surveys of this kind, this one has had a
unique resonance, so much so that Kingham-England’s-favourite-village has almost become its official title, like Henley-on-Thames or Stow-on-the-Wold. Absurd, of course – no human can have visited every village. Kingham ticks plenty of boxes (looks, pubs, school, cricket team …) but the crucial part is that it has a railway station: eighty-six minutes from London. Not fast but doable.

  Which of course bumps up the property prices and attracts a particular sort of wannabe villager. The station, like many of those built by the Great Western Railway, is a long way from the village itself, past the cordon sanitaire that divides the old now-posh bit from the new unposh bit and then a fair distance again: hardly walkable on a wet or frosty morning. The station car park looked like an Audi showroom.

  Oxfordshire’s weekenders became notorious after the 2010 election because of what is now known as the Chipping Norton set, various dubious media-trash figures who socialised with each other and with the new prime minister, David Cameron, whose presence could be explained away by his being the local MP. For the others, the attraction was simply proximity to London, which tends to produce undesirable neighbours with the least commitment. Chipping Norton itself is a solid, workaday kind of town, even though its chief landmark, the tweed mill, has long since been turned into ‘apartments’. Its inhabitants responded to the publicity by voting for a Labour councillor in 2012.

  Most Oxfordshire towns are far more preening: Woodstock; Burford; red-brick, riverside Goring; Henley, for heaven’s sake … all of them places just a little bit too good to be true to themselves. I was far more taken with Bampton, which used to be known (and, self-deprecatingly, sometimes still is known) as Bampton-in-the-Bush, because the communications were so terrible. It is still out of the way, unless you arrive by RAF jet to Brize Norton, yet it is as handsome as any town in the Cotswolds.

  Then I drove east, through Berkshire and the Goring Gap, on a whim and a mission. I had a sudden notion to return to the White House at Ipsden, the pub we used to visit illicitly near my old school. Ipsden is very different from Cotswold Oxfordshire. This is high country: hedgeless fields of maize and rape with views clear across to the Didcot power station. The White House closed in 1995, I discovered, and had become a soft furnishings shop. Soft furnishings or gastro? Which outcome would the old landlord ‘Father’ (I don’t think he had any other name) have hated most? He had very few furnishings, none of them soft. And the only food I remember was pickled eggs.

  The village shop in dinky little North Stoke had gone too. And so, as I well knew, had the school. Carmel College – known in its day as ‘the Jewish Eton’ – went under in murky circumstances in 1997, and the handsome site by the Thames had still found no proper use fifteen years later. The gates were festooned with ‘Keep Out’ signs, which I decided to ignore. Bloody funny, I thought: after all those years when they were so determined to keep me in and stop me going to the White House.

  The place was derelict. It looked somewhere between a Detroit slum and the room laid for Miss Havisham’s wedding breakfast. I stood on the pretty little bridge over the cut into the river. This one, I am sure, I did jump off once. No. I’m a scaredy-cat; I was probably pushed.

  May 2012

  15. And no knickers

  CHESHIRE

  On the first day of the May meeting at Chester, where racing dates back at least to the early sixteenth century, the horse that attracted most attention was an unraced two-year-old colt in the opening race, the Lily Agnes Stakes.

  This was mainly because of the identity of his owners. This was the first-ever runner in the pink-and-white colours of Mr and Mrs W. Rooney, Mr Rooney being Wayne Rooney, a Manchester United and England footballer who had become rather famous.

  The second point of discussion was the horse’s name, Pippy, for reasons expressed rather elegantly in the following day’s Racing Post: ‘Racecourse rumour was rife … not so much with reports of sparkling workouts as with the information that the origins of the horse’s name were rooted in, shall we say, the gynaecological.’

  Whatever, Pippy came stone last. But the name of the winner was also intriguing: All Fur Coat. Now, I had always understood that the horse-racing authorities maintained a team of young men with filthy minds whose job was to sniff out hidden meanings in horse names submitted for registration by owners whose wealth may have arrived faster than their discretion (as in the case of Rooney, whose weekly wage had just been reported at £250,000).

  They are meant to maintain the sport’s dignity by catching such suggestions as Wear the Fox Hat or Superbum (its rudeness depends on the stress) or, indeed, Pippy (a vagina – urbandictionary.com). And they must have had a collective off day, because All Fur Coat might be considered at least a marginal case. It is the first half of an old northern saying whose second half forms the title of this chapter.

  I have always understood it to mean a state of dress where outward show disguised hidden poverty, like the well-turned-out woman in Gloucestershire whose body was found amid squalor. But there is a collateral meaning, implying a certain over-readiness in the pippy area.

  Ach, what the hell? My own selection, Tharawal Lady (Tharawal – an Aboriginal tribe of New South Wales, no offence seemingly intended), came fourth, which set the tone for a disastrous meeting betting-wise. But I adore racing at Chester, anyway. It is a unique racecourse, on the Roodee, a small patch of green below the city walls with a tight track full of turns, more suited to greyhounds than thoroughbreds, and full of singular problems to solve for horses, jockeys and punters.

  There is a singular problem for the racecourse management too, since the best view is obtained not from the expensive stands, which are invariably jammed solid, but free of charge from the ramparts above. I suspect many regular racegoers, as the great baseball player and Malapropist Yogi Berra said of a popular restaurant, might say of Chester: ‘Nobody goes there. It’s too crowded.’

  On the other hand, the atmosphere is unique. The course is so close to the centre of a city that is traffic-clogged even in a normal week that arrival by car is insane bordering on impossible. So the crowd progresses from the station through the city and, by the time they have reached the Eastgate clock and the surprisingly named Watergate begins, the racegoers far outnumber the shoppers and the whole place feels as it might have done a century or two ago. It would be no surprise if the ticket touts and hustlers waiting for custom in the Rows were joined by circus freaks or pea-and-thimble men.

  The free view is not a significant problem because, frankly, hardly anyone comes to watch the racing. This year I went on the Thursday, Ladies Day, a northern hommage to, and pastiche of, the equivalent day at Royal Ascot. And the horses were the least of the attractions. Wearing saddles and number cloths, they were more demurely clad than half the humans.

  On the train, I found myself sitting opposite a woman whose dangly earrings were involved in a photo-finish with her hemline. And the pageant to the station was full of dress-alikes. The style was quasi-regal, that is to say a mix of Gypsy queen and drag queen. Coral was supposed to be flavour of the season, but it just looked pink to me. The prevailing colour scheme was the Rooney racing silks, but without the white: pink mini-dresses and pink shoes, mainly on heels so high that no Chinese peasant with her feet bound could have suffered such discomfort. The substantial portion of skin on display was pink with a tendency towards mottling, and there was the odd outbreak of pink hair too. Some of the women were pretty. But only some. The overall effect as they tittuped and clattered past the Rows was rather alarming: Chester may not have experienced an invasion quite so overwhelming since Augustus’s 20th Legion marched in.

  The young men were in suits and ties, which is the dress code for the County Enclosure. They mostly wore the ties disrespectfully, loosening them even before arrival at the course. Something similar happens at Australia’s great race day, the Melbourne Cup, where the women also dress as they might for clubbing, and the men wear suits, but they don’t loosen their ties until much later, con
scious as they are that the day is an obeisance to the nearest thing Australia has to a national religion.

  In Melbourne the women’s fashions are usually more appropriate to the weather. In Chester it had been raining on more than off for weeks, with further downpours forecast. That clearly was going to make no difference whatever to the wearers (‘I don’t care if it does bloody rain. I’ve chosen my bloody outfit and that’s bloody final’), certain – and correctly so – that they were the centre of attention, and not necessarily clear that there was any alternative entertainment. (‘’Orses? What piggin’ ’orses? Nobody said anything about piggin’ ’orses!’)

  There were no religious undertones, though one did sense that Ladies Day at Chester could stand as the national day of an independent Cheshire, to be presided over by the local spiritual leaders, Mr and Mrs W. Rooney.

  The boundaries of Cheshire were much fiddled with in the 1974 reorganisation. Nonetheless Cheshire’s image has sharpened in the four subsequent decades. Just like Essex, and for much the same reason. In the North-West, Cheshire fulfils the function of both Essex and Surrey, or, as someone once said of white-ruled Rhodesia, Surrey with the lunatic fringe on top.

  Only one major aspect of modern English post-industrial life is centred on the North-West and that’s football, so inevitably its young mega-millionaires set the tone of the area where most of them live. However, I believe there was always a touch of loucheness about Cheshire. Between the wars its great houses were far enough from London, yet easy enough to reach, and so became convenient venues for goings-on.

  Cheshire was then, and to some extent still is, a major centre of industry: chemicals, soap, shipbuilding, oil refineries and cars – Vauxhall in Ellesmere Port and Bentley in Crewe. Tucked away just below Winsford, there are still huge heaps of surprisingly sandy-looking stuff: actually the rock salt which there is never enough of to pour on the roads in cold winters. I like the idea of all those imported East European football stars ending up so close to the salt mines.