Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Oh, it would be easy enough to shift from Surrey to the more genteel suburbs of Newcastle, or to the camomile-tea towns of Alnwick and Hexham. Lots of like-minded souls. There is a Shakespeare group in distant Allendale. And the Coquet Valley has its adherents. But beyond that, well, it’s remote. There are issues of transport as well as culture. The East Coast Main Line bombs up the coast, and a glorious stretch of rail it is. But the trains often forget to stop on the 125 miles between Newcastle and Edinburgh. The only other line worth mentioning is the one following Hadrian from Newcastle to Carlisle. But, in the sad absence of the Border Counties line, there is a vast empty trainless quarter between the two.

  And the roads! North of Morpeth the A1 – the A1! – suddenly goes down to single carriageway for the first time since Hampstead Garden Suburb, and stays like that most of the way to Berwick. This event is marked by signs reading ‘DON’T SPEED’. Fat chance of that when you’re in a line of lorries behind a tractor and a muck spreader.

  The babbling North Tyne gets 700,000 young salmon every year from the hatchery at Kielder. But it’s no use for navigation, never mind commuting. This was Reiver Country and the history lurks close to the surface. The Robsons, Charltons and Milburns were famous for plunder long before they became famous for football. And many of their heirs remain. ‘The North Tyne had such a reputation for violence and theft that even in Victorian times the Newcastle shipyards wouldn’t take apprentices from there,’ according to the Hexham-based writer Harry Pearson. ‘Into the 1980s the men from Wark used to head to Haltwhistle for a massive traditional fight on Bank Holiday Mondays. This was something that dated right back to the reivers.’

  I stopped in Bellingham, which looked just the sort of little English town where people often say good morning in the street. I tried. But as the old ladies scowled by, the words died in my throat. Bellingham is pronounced ‘Bellin-jam’. They probably sensed I was the sort of the person to get it wrong. This is just one of a whole pile of Northumberland shibboleths designed to entrap an outsider. Wark is prounced ‘Waark’. Alnwick is ‘Anick’; the village actually spelt Anick is ‘Eh-Nick’; Alnmouth is ‘Alan-mouth’ … And of course Newcastle is ‘Newcassel’.

  Over the years, Newcastle has probably been the least-worst run of any British big city. It has had its moments, especially in the era when the corrupt T. Dan Smith led the council in the early 1960s. But Smith did not quite achieve his ambition of turning the city into a chilly Brasilia. Its heart still derives from the architecture of the early nineteenth century, mainly by the architect John Dobson and the spec builder Richard Grainger, thrillingly topped off by Robert Stephenson’s High Level Bridge. ‘The only major city in England with a planned centre,’ enthused Pevsner, ‘classical, competent and resourceful’.

  I was lucky to have a living, breathing guidebook with me as well: the playwright Michael Chaplin, who was able to point out not just, for example, the Corinthian portico of the Theatre Royal but the site of its former neighbour, the public lavatories on Shakespeare Street, known to the locals as Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Mike gave me a tour of Newcastle’s own Athenaeum, the Lit and Phil, and then led me to Grey Street, ‘one of the best streets in England’, according to Pevsner, a judgement that seems to me unduly cautious. Sinuous and sloping from the Grey Monument down towards the Quayside, it was also, when Pevsner wrote in 1957, soot-blackened and ripe to be stuffed up by mindless modernisation. But the actual centre was remarkably unruined in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps because, like Liverpool, the city was too mired in industrial decay: the great empire built by the Victorian arms tycoon and shipbuilder William Armstrong was fading away.

  But somewhere along the line, Newcastle was revitalised. It is hard to pin down when and how it happened. Part of it was benign neglect: the redundant docks were not turned into some grandiose Canary Wharf but allowed to redevelop organically. Part of it was forethought: in the 1980s, when Thatcherism was raging through the North-East, a load of redundant old railways were patched together into a Metro system, second in Britain only to the London Underground. (It is fair to say that this happened by seeing the two sides of the Tyne – Northumberland and County Durham – holistically not historically.)

  And then Newcastle became trendy. In the 1980s it was the setting for the very un-Thatcherite Channel 4 rock programme The Tube, which started to make the place seem cool. Like Manchester and Leeds, the city reaped the benefit of being a magnet for regional offices. It was a big winner from the universities boom, not just in numbers but because it was seen as a lively, party kind of city, so it attracted sub-Oxbridge students from the southern middle class who headed to Newcassel to learn Geordie as a foreign language. It benefited from the great football revival: Newcastle United hardly ever won anything, but they were always major players in the sport’s grand soap opera. And Michael Caine’s 1971 gangster film Get Carter was set on Tyneside. A flop on its release, it slowly acquired cult status, which was either one cause of the city’s growing status or an effect.

  The invasion of students certainly added a new dimension to a city where working-class males had always been heavily alcohol-fuelled. And so two boozy cultures collided. Here began the meteorologically insane habit of young people going out pubbing and clubbing wearing bugger all, dressed not so much to kill as to catch their death. I took a Friday night wander down Grey Street to observe this old-hat but ongoing phenomenon. There was so much bass-thumping coming out of the basements that at any moment it felt as though Dobson and Grainger’s well-constructed buildings might all tumble down the hill into the Tyne.

  And yet the cultural collision was not violent. The Friday night atmosphere seemed very amiable. Even so, I took refuge from the noise and goose-pimpled flesh in the Crown Posada, by the Quayside, a joyous wood-panelled pub where the music came from 1950s LPs on a 1950s Dynatron record player. Fairly quickly, a drunken granny from Blyth started snogging me, until her husband led her gently away. At some point during the second pint, discussing Muddy Waters (I think it was) with some bloke at the bar, I realised there was no city in England where one was more likely to strike up a bar-room conversation with a stranger and none where one was less likely to understand what the hell they were on about.

  Northumberland is a big county (no. 5 in area, smaller than only Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Devon and Norfolk). Newcastle is emphatically not the geographic centre of it and has been separately administered throughout modern times. But the whole county looks to Newcastle and almost unanimously supports/endures the football team: it has nowhere else to go.

  The city in return regards the county as a kind of country estate, much as Sheffield regards the Peak. Any Tyneside childhood is suffused by memories of days in the small, mostly down-at-heel resorts up the coast which can be a match for the Mediterranean or Caribbean on at least, ooh, four or five days in an average summer. And the rest of Northumberland – that vast Saudi-style Empty Quarter – is seen as theirs too, but something more distant, more haunting. Out There.

  In July 2010 Raoul Moat, thirty-seven, a small-time hoodlum with anger management problems, came out of prison and shot three people with a sawn-off shotgun. He wounded his ex-girlfriend, killed her new lover and blinded a policeman, before apparently conducting an armed robbery in a chip shop at Seaton Delaval. His car was found near the small town (or village, as the locals call it) of Rothbury, in the Coquet Valley, and a manhunt began which for a week transfixed the nation.

  The Financial Times sent me up to Rothbury to report this. I arrived to find a huge cast of police (including one-tenth of Britain’s firearms officers) and media doing their best to rub along with a small population that was at once bemused, irritated, fearful and, without ever quite admitting it, relishing the extra business and excitement. Initially, the locals would point towards the Simonside Hills – Out There – and say he could be anywhere.

  For this was a very Northumberland manhunt: Out There was miles and miles of nothing. And there was an inclination to
treat Moat in what may have been his own grandiose self-image: as a man against the world but resourceful enough to live alone indefinitely amid the crags and summer-high bracken. In a country as settled and CCTV-ed as this one, there was something exhilaratingly American about the very idea.

  As the days passed, evidence started to point in a different direction. A reporter saw a beefy and suspicious late-night man in a baseball cap on the street. Local resident Rob Herdman saw a figure moving near his greenhouse and reported the mysterious disappearance of his salad crops. An abandoned camp was discovered nearby.

  Early on Friday evening, six days after the initial shootings, Moat was cornered on the edge of town. He had been living almost within earshot of the speculation, in a storm drain by the river, from which – had he lasted long enough – he would have been literally flushed out. A tense night followed, in which the marksmen pointed their guns at Moat and he pointed his gun at himself. It was a weird night too: among the arrivals was the troubled ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne, armed with a chicken and some cans of lager for his mate ‘Moaty’; in the Queen’s Head, the media, trying to make sense of what was happening behind the police cordon, were joined by a group of wedding guests, barred from reaching the reception at a hotel the other side of the river. So they had their own breakaway, bride-and-groomless, party instead.

  Just after 1 a.m. the police decided to use an experimental Taser on Moat to stop him killing himself. It had the reverse effect: it never became wholly clear whether his death was reflexive, brought on by the jolt, or a considered decision. The inquest jury decided on suicide. In early 2012 the blinded policeman, David Rathband, also killed himself, perhaps the saddest aspect of a sad, sad story.

  And on a Saturday morning a year later I drove into Rothbury and wandered down the High Street. All the police and journalists had gone; everything else seemed as it was and should be, although the Big Issue seller outside the Co-op was an improbable touch. The sign on Bill Kirkup’s toyshop said ‘Closed’ but no one was taking any notice, including Bill, who was in his normal place behind the counter, dealing with a stream of kids brought in for a little Saturday morning treat. (There is nothing more fascinating to a child than a small-town toyshop.) I had met Bill first time round and he remembered me instantly, and not unkindly; his accountant had brought him the FT cutting and he had approved.

  Rothbury had a new preoccupation: the road was closed by Cragside, William Armstrong’s old country home, just as it was on the night of Moat’s last stand – this time because of a landslide. There was talk of it being closed until Christmas, with unfortunate effects on the summer tourist trade.

  ‘After the Moat business, the village was quiet,’ said Bill. ‘But we had a lot of eerie visitors who used to ask for the site where he was shot. One family wanted to take a picture of their child posing in the drain. How bizarre is that? And bikers would arrive with a few cans and sit there, you know. The family came up to spread his ashes on the river and they used to put flowers down there. The locals would kick them in the water. We didn’t want to make a shrine of it. We just wanted to make it go away.’

  But he had kept the cuttings. And, as he admitted, it was part of Rothbury’s history. The biggest thing that had happened there since 1878, when Cragside became (probably) the first house in the world to be lit by electric light.

  Back on the border, in Berwick, I met Simon Duke, a reporter on the Berwickshire News, who also had to contribute to its sister paper, the Berwick Advertiser. The News circulates mainly in the Scottish county of Berwickshire, which starts across the line at Marshall Meadows; the Advertiser in and around the English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Both papers report on the generally subdued doings of Berwick Rangers, the English football team who play in the Scottish League. All clear?

  ‘People in Berwick definitely see themselves as English,’ Simon said. ‘But I wouldn’t say they were particularly proud. They’re not that bothered. There isn’t much fuss if there’s a football match or something. Whereas the other side of the border is very Scottish.’

  Reporters here have to wrap their heads round two very different legal systems since they may have to cover both Scottish and English courts, never mind such complications as the River Till. For Simon Duke, the main difference between the papers was not English/Scottish but urban/rural. The townie Advertiser gets a response if it tries to involve readers via social media; the rustic News doesn’t. The Advertiser is obsessed with parking (Berwick wants more) and the seagull menace (Berwick wants fewer). The News focuses mainly on agriculture.

  Not the week I was there, though. ‘HUMAN REMAINS UNDER INVESTIGATION’, yelled the front page of the Berwickshire News. The man who wrote the splash was delighted: ‘It was a dream story for us,’ said Simon.

  Mike Chaplin was a trainee reporter on the Newcastle Journal forty years ago. Early on, his news editor beckoned him over and said portentously, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ He handed Mike the tide tables for Holy Island and told him to write the paragraph showing that day’s times. He would have caught the aggrieved look at once. ‘It’s the most important job on the paper,’ the news editor hissed. ‘Get it wrong, someone will die.’

  The tides at Northumberland’s oldest tourist site have been a matter of life and death since at least the seventh century AD, when St Aidan arrived to found the monastery at Lindisfarne. The essence of the problem has not changed. You can drive to the island by the causeway just over half the time; the recommended times on foot across the sand are more conservative. But, essentially, two or three hours either side of high tide the waters close in. The News, the Advertiser and the Journal all still list the safe crossing times. On the day I crossed, the deadline was 13.35.

  The tide did now its flood-mark gain,

  And girdled in the saint’s domain;

  For, with the flow and ebb, its style

  Varies from continent to isle;

  Dry-shod, o’er sands, twice every day,

  The pilgrims to the shrine find way;

  Twice every day, the waves efface

  Of staves and sandalled feet the trace.

  ‘The Holy Island’, Sir Walter Scott

  This struck at one of my deepest obsessions. I mentioned my childhood fascination-cum-psychosis about floods, storms, tsunamis and inundations back in Dunwich (Chapter 13). I felt drawn to Holy Island, but also terrified. That was before I had lingered too long in Berwick and then got lost in the outskirts. It was 11.30 when I finally crossed and even then the water was lapping the tarmac in places.

  In theory, nothing ought to go wrong, even if you don’t buy the papers. There are electronic signs at the start of the causeway, flashing the magic figures, 13.35; notices all over the island; and blood-curdling pictures of drowning cars. The first person I met was the postman, who comes from Berwick to deliver to the few dozen homes and businesses. ‘Some days I have to get on and off, whoosh.’ Today he was relaxed. I wasn’t.

  Normal people come to Lindisfarne to seek spiritual renewal in the spirit of St Aidan, St Cuthbert, St Eadberht and St Eadfrith, or to twitch rare birds or drink the monkish mead or explore the castle, refurbished by Lutyens with a garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll, or buy tat in the souvenir shops. Not me. The castle? Oh no, no time.

  It was a classic Northumbrian morning: bright but cold-breezy, with clouds forming and re-forming. Everyone seemed to me to have a sense of urgency: the tourists, a gang of builders dismantling some scaffolding; even the birds sounded as though they were singing with one eye on the clock. I opted for an early lunch in the Ship but confined myself to a sandwich, being further discombobulated by a poem on the wall in praise of lifeboat men, with the rubric ‘LET NOT THE DEEP SWALLOW ME UP’.

  By 12.45 the High Street was eerily deserted; by 1.15 the car park had virtually emptied. The ice cream man was reassuring. ‘I’ll leave at 1.45,’ he mused. ‘Let the tourists get off first.’ The issue was a classic one for a reporter. What does ‘a deadline’ mean exactly?
There are little white lies involved. ‘We must have your copy by 6 at all costs’ means ‘We will be mildly inconvenienced if it’s later than 6.30.’ Do the Holy Island safe crossing times work the same way? Logic and the ice cream man suggested yes. But was I sure?

  I pressed the panic button at 1.20. The lapping water hadn’t moved in nearly two hours. I stopped on the bank on the other side and waited. I reckon I would have had time to walk to the castle, inspect Gertrude Jekyll’s garden, have sticky toffee pudding, coffee and brandy in the Ship and a nap in the car, and still get off safely. More sensibly, I might have spent a night, a week or a lifetime, allowed myself to be girdled in the saintly domain to contemplate the infinite mysteries, like tides. However, I was off to see something traditionally unavailable on Holy Island: a naked woman.

  Northumberlandia is the county’s newest tourist attraction, billed as the ‘world’s largest landform sculpture’. It was commissioned by Viscount Ridley, owner of Blagdon Hall, an eighteenth-century pile which, as its downbeat name somehow suggests, has managed to maintain its amenities through the proximate, but not too proximate, presence of large quantities of coal.

  The title lightly disguises one Matt Ridley, a journalist known for his heterodox views about climate change (he thinks it exists but may be a good thing, which is certainly true for tourist projects in Northumberland). He was also formerly chairman of Northern Rock, a building society-turned-bank which went spectacularly belly-up on his watch in 2007, thus helping precipitate the financial crisis, an event which might mitigate anyone’s enthusiasm for the ideas of Viscount Ridley.

  The plan was conceived to enable the Blagdon Estate to overcome objections to a new open-cast coal mine, and involved shifting a million and a half tons of waste, which were then lightly grassed over to create a simulacrum of an extremely large woman, designed by the American ‘architectural theorist’ Charles Jencks. She is known to some as ‘Fat Slag’.