Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  From a helicopter she might indeed look fairly convincing. But the Blagdon Estate does not provide helicopters or, at the time of my visit, toilets or a cup of tea; and the explanatory leaflet was only proffered from someone’s pocket as I was leaving. Happily, there was no admission charge.

  One has acquired over the years a certain superficial familiarity with the female body. But it would not have been one’s first guess at Northum-berlandia. It felt to me like a particularly hilly and difficult golf course. I know she had a face because there was a sign saying ‘PLEASE KEEP OFF THE FACE’. I think I found a hip because someone said it was a hip. And I feel pretty sure I stood on one of her windblown bosoms, but she did appear to have four of them, two of them very strangely positioned.

  Atop the bosom there was a fine view of the open-cast mine and of a classic Northumberland cloudscape, full of wonderful and definable shapes. One definitely looked like a dragon. Another like a flying pig.

  From early April until mid-September the Hirst Northern Homing Society normally gathers at Friday teatime in a back room at the Northern Social Club in Ashington: a handful of humans and several hundred of their best friends, crated and ready to be freighted.

  The humans were nearly all male and mostly grey; the birds were sleek, well fed. These are the rich cousins of the urban pigeon, anxious not to get begging letters from their ne’er-do-well relatives. If they were human, they would probably get out of Ashington and head south for good. Instead, every weekend they are driven south – further and further as the season progresses, concluding in Bourges, in central France – and every weekend they fly home at the first opportunity. There is an attrition rate which John Snowdon, the society chairman, thinks might average out at 10 to 15 per cent a year, usually caused by bad weather or the pigeons’ multiplying enemy, sparrowhawks. But week after week, most get home, at an A1 dual-carriageway-ish average speed of 60 mph if the winds are favourable, and a single-lane-ish 40 mph if not.

  None of the old pit communities is as imbued with north-eastern culture as Ashington. It is a town ‘rich in associational life’, in the words of Bill Lancaster. This was the town that produced perhaps Northumberland’s three greatest footballers: the Newcastle 1950s hero Jackie Milburn and the Charlton brothers, Jack and Sir Bobby. It was a centre of leek growing and whippet racing as well as pigeons. It was also the home of the Pitmen Painters. And its accent remains distinctive, even in this region of elongated vowels. (Northumberland joke: Ashington woman goes into the hairdresser, says, ‘Can I have a perm?’ and gets the reply, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’)

  There is an explanation for all this, says Lancaster. The Ashington Coal Company was a Quaker-run consortium which took a broader view of its responsibilities than most pit owners. The firm thought long term, concentrating on high-quality coal which had a high reputation – it was even exported to Germany in the 1930s – and it was inclined to a kindly, paternalistic view of its employees. Hence decent wages, and the strong sport and social side – which all led to a stable workforce and thus to a particularly introverted accent.

  But I still didn’t understand what made the pigeons keep coming back. ‘What is it,’ I asked the folk at the social club, ‘apart from your cooking and care, of course?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ said George Drury, who was helping with the checking process.

  ‘And sex,’ said John Snowdon. ‘Remember when you were young and you’d go any distance for sex?’

  George nodded: ‘It’ll do anything for sex, a pigeon.’

  I was just musing on how I might compare in that matter to a youthful pigeon when in came Bob Bell, seventy-eight, a Renaissance man worthy of study at the Newcastle Lit and Phil and a legend in his own home town: former face-worker, former professional footballer, former world champion leek grower and pigeon man par excellence.

  I can well understand the appeal of pigeon racing – its intricacies, its strategies and the notion of airborne freedom to men confined underground. But why leeks? Nasty vegetable: Shakespeare had it right – Fluellen would have brought the Globe down with knowing laughter when he forced Pistol to eat a whole one in Henry V.

  ‘Why didn’t you compete with cucumbers or carrots?’

  ‘We did,’ said Bob (or, this being Ashington, ‘Burb’). ‘But the money was in the leek shows. And the radiograms. And the televisions. And the washing machines. And the fridge-freezers.’

  But it’s gone now. Bob said there used to be fifty-two leek shows in Ashington, offering prizes that in the 1950s and 1960s could transform a pit family’s life. There was one for every social club – and there are still dozens of those. ‘They don’t want to know these days. They just sit at home with their computer games.’

  ‘Whippets?’

  ‘Why-aye. Never see a whippet race now.’

  ‘What about the pigeons?’

  ‘Dying the death.’

  It didn’t look that way at the back of the Northern Social, as nearly 300 birds were brought in and filled the small room with their soft cooing. But John said they loaded up to 800 here in the old days. And, whatever drives the pigeons home, this hobby can be a bit of a passion-killer for the humans.

  It is not a sport that lends itself to holidays, or to weekend togetherness. The lorry arrived only a fraction after the scheduled hour of 6 to get the birds to the starting point in Peterborough. And once they are released, it is reasonably easy to calculate when they might return. But that release can be delayed and delayed if the weather isn’t right. In the North-East, most pigeon men have their lofts on their allotments. And there can be a lot of £1-a-time calls to the ‘Liberation Line’ and long, long waits with the Thermos. But what joy when a champion bird comes home preening, and looking for his tea and his oats.

  Whippet racing may have gone towards extinction even more surely than the Northumbrian burr, though there is some suggestion of a revival in leek growing: younger gardeners are said to be enthused by the traditions of skulduggery and the notion of fertilising the trenches with dead cats and dogs. And the Ashington accent is still famous in the North-East. The very funny magazine Newcastle Stuff included, as well as a column called Tyne & Weird, an Ashington Dictionary:

  Stern: A small piece of rock

  Sure: Light downpour of rain

  Talkies: Large hen-like creatures eaten at Christmas.

  The last pit closed in 1988 and the town seemed rather sad. I stood outside the Nisa Extra store and every shopping bag clanked. Reopening the railway station would really help, even if it did dilute the accent.

  Before returning south, I took the advice Bill Kirkup gave me in Rothbury: drive to Corby Craggs on the B road to Alnwick, sit on the bench and admire the view. That view is north-westwards stretching towards the distant, snow-capped Cheviots across a vast country where Raoul Moat might be lurking yet had he put his mind to it. Every bird in creation seemed to be singing, with the possible exception of the racing pigeon. The sun was shining but still the Northumberland sky was filled with its signature large, fluffy clouds. Methinks I saw one shaped like a naked woman.

  April 2013

  27. Land of the rising sap

  DORSET

  It was just before 7 and coming up to Moira reading the Radio 2 News. Melvin the cheesemaker and his assistant Phil were already there: in white uniforms and wellies and black gloves. They were deep into their work, fooling their boss, who thought he would show me the start of the process.

  This is the cheesemaking plant at Woodbridge Farm in King’s Stag – the domain of Michael Davies, the man who brought back Britain’s most mysterious cheese from the edge of oblivion. This is the home of Dorset Blue Vinny.

  The cheese (and cricket, and wine) connoisseur John Arlott wrote about Blue Vinny in 1958 and, even then, he said, ‘Of all the cheeses still made, it is the hardest to find.’ But he declared, ‘It is worth the search. It is amazing that a skimmed milk cheese should be so noble and round and rich, without a trace of the pungency we fi
nd in so much of the Continental blues.’ That was shortly after de Gaulle had declared that only fear could unite the French because you couldn’t bring together ‘un pays qui compte 265 spécialités de fromage’.

  He said that at a time when most British consumers thought cheese meant Cheddar or Dairylea. Now there are more than 700 named varieties made in Britain, though it hasn’t made us less biddable. I do wish we possessed a fraction of France’s localised bloody-mindedness.

  Michael Davies was bloody-minded all right. In the 1950s, said Arlott, the cheese came only from a Mr Vincent of Sherborne. By 1982 it had disappeared completely. Someone was selling something called Blue Vinny to the grockles: it turned out to be second-grade Stilton. That was when Michael first began experimenting in the garage, ripening the cheese in his wife Christine’s pantry. (Declaration of slight interest: Christine is my wife’s first cousin.) ‘The first time I opened up a cheese it was solid blue,’ he recalled. ‘I think it had a shelf life of twenty minutes.’

  Everything else turned blue, including the corn flakes, and he was ejected from the pantry. It took him seven years to get it right. The blue was always the problem. There were certain traditional Dorset ways of getting the mould that would produce the blue veining into the cheese – muddy horse-harnesses, old boots, damp hay – but these would nowadays raise eyebrows at the Food Standards Agency. The modern answer turned out to be one known to the Romans: the fungus Penicillium roqueforti. The tricky bit was getting the quantity right – less than a teaspoonful for a vat full of unpasteurised Friesian milk.

  On Day 1 had come the starter mixture – a sort of sour milk – plus the mysterious blue and the rennet. At Woodbridge this is veggie-friendly plant rennet and not the traditional rennet that comes from the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf (or maybe the blood of a Dorset virgin, I hardly know what to believe). Then it turns custardy and becomes curds and whey, last heard of being eaten by Miss Muffet.

  By the time I got there next morning and Moira read the news, the whey had drained away and the curds were in the cooler, exhibiting the consistency of scrambled egg and a taste something like cheese, though of a bland and mass-produced kind, which is not the nature of the finished product. By lunchtime on Day 2 it will have hardened enough to be put into moulds to stand in the first of my sort-of cousin Michael’s three storage rooms, each cooler than the last, to be given the most mystical ingredient of all: time.

  At first it looks, frankly, like an industrial-sized roll of toilet paper. But then the tinges of blue appear. Within twelve weeks Michael will have tested the cheese and pronounced it good, or not. Arlott called the taste ‘subtle yet round’, and that’s right. It’s not an in-your-face blue cheese like Stilton or Roquefort itself. It has taste, but above all aftertaste. Blessed are the cheesemakers.

  Blue Vinny has to be a rarity. Almost nothing in this process is mechanised; it cannot be mass-produced. Dorset was never Somerset, which unleashed its cheese on the world; a few dozen American Cheddar-eaters could eat up Woodbridge Farm’s entire output. The Blackmore Vale traditionally made its living from dairying, selling its cream to London and, when the railways arrived, the milk as well. The cheese was always an afterthought. Much of Dorset did not even make cheese, since it is on chalk, where dairying is unpromising. Hence, so the locals insist, ‘chalk and cheese’. Reference books deny it.

  Dorset’s most conspicuous resident is pure chalk and not cheesy at all. Beefcake, more like. Everybody knows the giant of Cerne Abbas, trilled Arthur Mee in his 1939 guide to Dorset: ‘He equals thirty tall men standing one on the other, each of his fingers measures seven feet, and the club in his hand is forty feet long.’

  All of which may be true, but it is not his fingers or his club that anyone notices. In Sussex, not an especially demure county, the hillside chalk figure of the Long Man of Wilmington is almost well enough clad to pass at a garden party arranged by the Hove Conservative Association. His Dorset rival would be wholly unacceptable even on Brighton’s nudist beach. The Cerne Abbas giant is in possession of Britain’s biggest, most famous and longest-lasting erection. Estimates of its size range from twenty feet, which looks like an underestimate, to forty. But perhaps it is so realistic it varies according to the quality of the company.

  Estimates of his age vary too. Scholars argue whether he might be Celtic or Saxon; yet no evidence of his existence has emerged before 1694, which adds credence to the notion that he might be a landowner’s parody of Cromwell. It is hard enough to believe he could have survived the Victorians, let alone generations of pre-Reformation Cerne Abbas abbots; the Bishop of Salisbury was trying to organise a cover-up as late as the 1930s.

  The National Trust has now fenced the giant in, allegedly to preserve the downland rather than to prevent him escaping and terrorising the neighbourhood. In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The best views come either from the air or from a lay-by on the main road, where on a May morning he could be seen in his full glory, just above a field of, um, rape.

  But it is an easy walk up the hill, and though he is largely invisible behind the fence, his thighs lie close to early purple orchids, themselves a symbol of fertility, like the giant himself. The fence is not impregnable and it would be nice to think that worried village maidens might, as of old, steal up there, lie close to his mighty organ and dream of babies; and that, perhaps on Midsummer’s Eve, couples might also sneak through the fence, maybe thinking of babies, maybe having taken precautions.

  All around everything seemed to be growing, almost visibly, the sap rising and rising as if the whole landscape were an extension of the giant’s dick. Everyone seemed to be at it: the swannery at Abbotsbury was full of new-hatched cygnets and the flutter of tiny, fluffy wings. Over most of England, the default weather is usually an uncontroversial, unmemorable mid-autumn grey. But this place is different. Springtime feels the natural time of year. It’s an illusion of course. And this illusion is entirely the creation of Dorset’s best-known former resident.

  ‘Dorset,’ the signs say, ‘Home of the Jurassic Coast’. This slogan is regarded with contempt by all the local intellectuals I met, partly because it’s such an obvious attempt to cash in on the film Jurassic Park, which had nothing to do with Dorset. It would be just as accurate to call it the Triassic or Cretaceous Coast, which doesn’t quite do the business marketing-wise.

  It is also misleading. As surely as the image of Devon and Cornwall was created by the Great Western Railway, which was only a minor presence in Dorset, this county was fixed in the public mind by the novels of Thomas Hardy. It used to be marketed as Hardy’s County, and it is hard to think of it any other way. In the novels, of course, he avoided the word Dorset, renamed the towns and reinvented a Wessex that sprawled across six counties. It is a wonder he was never appointed to a committee to reform local government.

  This fictionalisation bought him freedom to exercise literary imagination beyond the reach of both geographical pedants and paranoid neighbours. But South Wessex, aka Dorset, is at the heart of his work. And he is at the heart of Dorset. Many other writers have been drawn to the county, including Jane Austen, John Fowles, Ian McEwan, P. D. James and J. Meade Falkner, author of Moonfleet. The difference is that in Hardy’s work, Dorset is more than a setting. It is, in effect, one of the lead characters, a player.

  You can still stand on High West Street in the thoroughly satisfying town of Dorchester and, if you ignore the traffic and the vulgar canopy over the entrance to Ladbrokes, imagine yourself back in the 1880s. But Hardy’s countryside has largely vanished.

  The most powerful of his landscapes, ‘Egdon Heath’, was based on the vast tract of open land that once stretched nearly all the way from his birthplace at Upper Bockhampton into Hampshire. No more does twilight fall on Egdon, as it does in The Return of the Native, ‘to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity’. It’s now slightly scabby woodland and scrub, which various bodies a
re trying to restore to something like its old self by reversing the whole drift of millennia of agricultural history and taking nutrients out of the soil.

  But it still feels like the real Dorset, which the coast does not. For Dorset is not a coastal county, not in the way that Devon and Cornwall are. It is an instinctively inland place that happens to have a coastline.

  Yes, the fossils are amazing and the story of Mary Anning, the Lyme Regis carpenter’s daughter and pioneer of palaeontology, is inspirational. And Poole Harbour is enormous: sixty miles of coastline, if you allow for all the little inlets and headlands, with five large islands. Sailors can be as lonely as Noah, notwithstanding a couple of hundred thousand people living on the east side of the bay. But, frankly, the coastline is either hard to get at or too damn easy. There are not that many sandy beaches, except in woebegone Weymouth. And, as soon as a yachtsman gets out of Poole Harbour, the prospect, if the weather is even slightly iffy, is not a pretty one.

  ‘When you get past Swanage,’ explains one local sailor, David Burnett, ‘this is a ferocious coast. At St Aldhelm’s Head there’s a tidal race, which is nasty at the best of times. There’s nowhere to take shelter until you get to Weymouth and there you have to get right inside the marina. There’s another race off Portland. You have to get right round Portland Bill and then you’re in Lyme Bay, where there’s nothing at all. Lyme Regis has only got the Cobb. There’s no proper protection until you get to Exmouth. It’s a brute of a coast.’

  Even walkers on the coastal path have to plan carefully because of the risk of being shot at by the army. And serious fossil hunters, whose perfect moments come after winter storms, are thus inherently at risk from rock-falls. Mary Anning had one very narrow escape; her dog did not survive.