Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  In some places it felt almost Jurassic: standing on Sidbury Hill with a helicopter hovering over the valley, I fancied it was a pterodactyl in flight. And yet it was all very English: the background music in my head was ‘The Lark Ascending’, punctuated by occasional bursts of gunfire. And the extinct birds are not entirely imaginary: behind a high and rather militaristic fence, we caught a glimpse of a pair of the great bustards – the world’s heaviest flying birds and extinct in Britain since the 1840s – being reared for release. With luck, they will one day outnumber the helicopters.

  In the meantime the landowner has to balance military needs – which in themselves often conflict with each other – with ecological needs, archaeological needs, leisure needs and local needs. ‘It keeps me in a job,’ says Linge. He has to worry about badgers, rabbits and off-road racers. It all seems to work remarkably well: there is access to almost all the plain some of the time – even Imber Church, though officially redundant, is opened up for carols and a St Giles’ Day service. Keeping the locals happy is not that big a problem because, more than any other county, Wiltshire just loves the army.

  Wootton Bassett is a market town near Swindon which used to be famous for the St Ivel yoghurt factory and as a major junction on the Great Western Railway. Mostly, the inhabitants just call it Bassett, though these days they like to practise its new, sonorous full title: Royal Wootton Bassett. For four years the town became famous – a regular on the evening news – because of its impromptu repatriation ceremonies when dead soldiers were brought home from the wars in Iraq and, particularly, Afghanistan.

  I was in the High Street near the war memorial when I became aware of an old man tending the flowers and talking to a couple of obvious tourists. They were asking him how the Wootton Bassett phenomenon started. ‘I started it,’ he said simply. His name turned out to be Ken Scott. He was ninety-eight and spent three years with the Eighth Army in North Africa, before taking part in D-Day. The bald statement might have been a slight oversimplification. But he is certainly the embodiment of an extraordinary story and an exceptional town.

  In the spring of 2007, said Scott, he was standing on the High Street with a couple of his pals from the British Legion Club when they saw a hearse come by carrying a coffin draped with the Union Jack. They thought it might have been one of their members whose funerals, in the nature of things, happened pretty frequently. They made enquiries and discovered that the High Street was on the route between RAF Lyneham, where the bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan were being brought in, and the mortuary in Oxford. They got the mayor – one of their members – to have a word with Lyneham, so that next time the Legion would know in advance and could pay their respects. So a group turned up – in their blazers, grey trousers and regimental hats (no medals) – and waited to bow their heads.

  As the mad Iraq war faded into the background, thousands of squaddies would be dispatched to what became the even madder war in Afghanistan, excited by the chance of real soldiering instead of yomping round the moors, even as their mothers became tearful and fearful as they flew out. Dozens – a small percentage, but too many for anyone’s comfort – would fall victim: sometimes to something resembling conventional action; more often to roadside bombs, rogue local allies or the other cockups of a more than normally cocked-up war.

  And so Wootton Bassett entered the vocabulary of the time, along with Helmand and Camp Bastion and the like. Passers-by started joining in; then the shopkeepers began to close their doors and come outside; then nearby villagers would come in specially; then they came from further afield; and, with them, the TV crews. Once the tenor bell of the church was tolling, by chance, because the ringers were practising. And that seemed a nice touch, so it became part of the ritual. Word came that the families were appreciative and the town grew in confidence.

  News coverage of this war was scanter than of any since before the Crimea, and tightly controlled. But Bassett was not subject to military censorship and PR. And even as the politicians lavished praise on the town, one sensed their discomfort. They wanted a narrative of inexorable progress towards victory. But this was a war that had gone on longer than the two world wars put together and hardly anyone could remember what the hell the British Army was doing there. And all the public were seeing were the hearses down Wootton Bassett High Street.

  Lyneham was due for closure anyway, as its fleet of Hercules transporters grew ever older, so the full conspiracy theory cannot be valid. But as Linda Frost, who became mayor in 2013, put it, ‘I don’t think the government liked the publicity we attracted. It really brought the war home. On the occasions when there were two, three, four soldiers, it was totally heart-wrenching. It didn’t matter what age you were, the minute the hearse came through, it was so powerful.’

  The last Hercules were moved to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire in 2011. The geography there was different and it was possible to keep the hearses out of any town centres that might have wished to take on Bassett’s role. In compensation David Cameron organised the Royal prefix. It is impossible to avoid the thought that he did so with the same kind of relief with which he might hand over a peerage to an irritating colleague he wanted out of his hair.

  But the story didn’t end for Ken Scott. He kept finding flowers on the war memorial, so he would get a vase to make them last longer. There would be cards too, getting drenched and windblown. So he began to collect them and they are now in a memorial book in the council offices. One reads, ‘My darling son: I’m sure that somewhere you are leading men again.’ Another says, ‘All the funny times we had together. Sleep tight, Bob.’

  I asked Ken Scott if he regretted the end of the repatriations. At ninety-eight, his wits were clearer than those of the three prime ministers who had created the tragedies. ‘What I regret is that they happened. One army can’t go into another country and try to change their culture. The Nazis tried that. I think Tony Blair’s a war criminal. Those young boys. Handsome young boys. It’s very sad.’

  And yet for Wootton Bassett there was a war dividend. Lyneham did not offer much employment, so it was not a major loss. In a country full of high streets dominated by charity shops and pawnbrokers, this one exudes an air of unusual perkiness and prosperity. And Linda Frost says that it has given the town a lingering unity: even routine local events are better supported than they were before. There is nothing like a sense of purpose to keep an old town vigorous.

  An old bloke too. Look at Ken Scott, as the flowers and cards kept appearing for him to nurture and cherish.

  Wootton Bassett is the only Wiltshire town I saw that could match the county’s poster boy, Marlborough, where the economy is buoyed up by the presence of a major public school. Marlborough also has what is said to be the second-widest high street in Britain, beaten only by Stockton-on-Tees. An information board says the town had had ‘a quiet history since the Civil War’. This ignores the fact that the High Street carried the traffic from London to Bath well into the twentieth century. And the story of the punch-up between two old ladies trying to get into a single parking place.

  The council meet in Trowbridge; the police are in Devizes; Salisbury has nothing to say to Swindon, a town whose exponential growth has not erased its old baleful reputation. Victorian travellers knew it as Swindleham, because it had a monopoly on the Great Western Railway’s catering in the days before buffet cars, and took full advantage. It is now best known as the home of the Magic Roundabout, a vile set-up near the football ground involving five mini-roundabouts round ‘a contra-rotational hub’. The locals have got used to it, are even perversely proud – the jokey nickname has become official – but, like everything else in the town, it repels visitors.

  Even its rival Salisbury seems to be feeling the twenty-first-century pinch a little. It’s a wonderful town – like Oxford without all those cleverclogs kids – but the traffic is ghastly and, even here, I saw a street with four charity shops in a row of five. The cathedral is fabulous of course, especially the needle-like spire: t
all and grey and old and lovely. But it is best seen nowadays from the hill fort of Old Sarum, which like sunken Dunwich used to return two MPs before 1832 despite having no voters, an arrangement that at least had the virtue of being relaxing for the politicians.

  I think that Wiltshire’s glories are in the villages: not the obvious chocolate-boxers, like Castle Combe – which even in midweek had the bee-buzz of noise from its motor-racing circuit – or the tourist honeypot Lacock, but the workaday places, all of which seem to have a ration of gorgeous thatch looking more natural and homely than in any other county. I took a particular shine to Bishops Cannings, an architectural mishmash but tucked away all snug and secret beneath the stirring downs north of Devizes. This is one of the villages associated with Wiltshire’s favourite legend, the moonrakers: the locals who, one moonlit night, were retrieving a barrel of smuggled French brandy (or similar) which they had hidden in the pond, when the excise man rode by. They told him they were collecting cheese – the moon’s reflection. The exciseman thought they were idiots and rode off.

  Not daft, these people. But it is a county where one can start to believe the impossible …

  I met my old friend Bryan McAllister, the reformed Guardian cartoonist, in the Barge Inn at Honeystreet. Or as the sign in the bar has it, ‘Honeystreet twinned with Roswell, New Mexico’, global centre of ufology, and maybe home town of the floppy-hat woman at Avebury. The Barge is the global centre of crop circles.

  Another sign offers a prize of 100,000 pints of the pub’s own brew, Croppie Ale, to ‘any genuine alien in possession of a valid passport from another world’ who could reproduce the most famous of all crop circles, the Galaxy Formation, which appeared at Milk Hill in 2001. The Barge has achieved something almost as hard as finding a winner of its competition: a USP to sustain the profits of a country pub.

  The crop circle phenomenon appeared to be fading, having lost its last vestiges of mystique. Too many jokers created too much elaboration, snapping the last skeins of doubt that there were any kind of natural forces at work. And yet. The first report of something resembling a crop circle dates from 1678, in a Hertfordshire oat field. The researcher Terence Meaden found an account in an 1880 edition of Nature magazine, submitted by a well-known amateur scientist in Surrey. The first Wiltshire account, from Tilshead, goes back to about 1904. ‘All the complex circles are man-made,’ said Meaden. ‘But some of the single circles would have been made by some kind of whirlwind or vortex.’

  There was a more compelling puzzle centred on the Barge: what happened, under a previous regime, to more than £400,000 in Lottery funds supposed to be used for refurbishment of the pub and other community projects. But in Wiltshire there is always that sense of mystery. At Avebury I met a bloke who swore convincingly that his grandfather had seen crop circles. And at the Barge the kitchen staff had apparently been captured by aliens and were unable, even after half an hour, to offer a menu.

  Having spent the previous night sleepless and wretched at Stonehenge, I made my excuses to Bryan and left early. But I made a final detour down Stonehenge’s dying highway, the A344, and stopped by the perimeter fence. About a dozen other people had done the same. Now there were no clouds, the moon was full and the circle was deserted except for a couple of security men. The thousands of lager cans had been cleared away. Stonehenge looked real again: broody, impressive, genuinely mysterious. The real meaning of solstice to an Englishman struck me forcefully: it means that henceforth the days start getting shorter. Bloody winter can’t be far away.

  June 2013

  Ken Scott returned to Normandy for the D-Day commemoration in 2014. He told journalists of the horror of wading past the dying: ‘They had met the machine guns and you couldn’t help them. They were crying out, “Give us a hand, buddy.” Some of them were calling for their mothers. We just had to keep going – we pushed them to one side, we just couldn’t help them.’

  The 2014 sunrise at Stonehenge was magnificent, apparently.

  30. Let’s party like it’s AD 43

  SOMERSET

  ‘Good evening,’ I said to Allen Powell, landlord of the Crown at Pilton.

  ‘That would be an exaggeration,’ he replied.

  It was Thursday. All week cars had been going through, past and round Pilton. Some of them had stopped at the pub. The occupants asked the landlord whether a rival pub, the Apple Tree, was open; whether they could recharge their phone; use the toilets; have a glass of water; buy a ticket for the event down the road; and, on rare occasions, whether they might buy a drink or some food. He was remarkably affable, really.

  The village already looked like a place under occupation: stewards in hi-vis jackets, the storm troopers of the leisure age, patrolled and controlled the streets. In the valley, there was already a vast tented encampment. In the English countryside any unfamiliar sight towards the horizon usually turns out to be a new type of polytunnel. But this was the size of a Middle Eastern refugee camp. Friday, Saturday and Sunday the pub would be closing. These marked the three business days at the camp, officially known as the 2013 Glastonbury Festival.

  An immeasurable part of the success of this almost-annual ritual is its name. Michael Eavis, the founder, did not, after the first year, call his little shindig at Worthy Farm the Pilton Festival. He did not name it after the nearest town, Shepton Mallet. Instead he gave it the name of the most mystical town in Britain, which was not obvious geographically. Now there is a most astonishing invasion: 180,000 people, two Cup Final crowds, descend, except in the occasional fallow years, on what they might think is Glastonbury but isn’t, among villages that have no infrastructure whatever.

  It was a masterful piece of branding, as clever as naming a piece of technology after something yummy: Apple, Orange, BlackBerry. The second part of the trick was being in the most mellifluous of all the counties. Somerset is named after Somerton, the original (until 1366) county town. Somer may or may not mean summer, but it sounds as though it does. Somerset was a summer county perforce, because in winter vast areas of it were under water (often in summer too, as any festival regular would attest). But to our ears there is another implication. Where better to be at the end of June, when the countryside is at its most ravishing, than the county whose name trips so sweetly off the tongue? Somer-set.

  Another aspect of Eavis’s skill has been his ability to keep his most important neighbours happy. Everyone in Pilton gets a free ticket. The surrounding farmers get in the loop by renting their fields out. There is work for local contractors and for the kids, not least as stewards. Villagers get the milk franchise. For the three-day weekend itself this is a frontier village, and so there is also scope for smuggling rackets: in this case people-smuggling of the kind that used to go on at the Berlin Wall. Only this racket is designed to get people in rather than out.

  Until 2000 gatecrashing the festival was a rite of passage: if you didn’t get in you were a wimp or a non-trier. Now there is a security fence and the trade is far more clandestine. The ticket-holders, meanwhile, just drive through Somerset as if through a cordon sanitaire. Once in the site, they stay in, and so – perhaps uniquely for an event of this magnitude – there is very little spin-off for local traders not directly involved.

  The Crown shuts mainly because there is no point opening. Surrounding B&Bs have ‘Vacancies’ signs, which they would not expect on any other midsummer weekend. Glastonbury, nearly seven miles away, gets a little pre-festival business from passers-through panic-buying sleeping bags and wellies. Thereafter it is deserted and the owners of the funky shops have time to moan to passing writers.

  ‘It’s terrible for business,’ said Caroline Harris of Natural Earth. ‘Nobody comes here.’

  ‘It’s like a ghost town,’ said the Hundred Monkeys café.

  ‘Even the locals are at the festival,’ reported Conscious Clothing.

  ‘The old ones?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  In the early days the very words ‘Glastonbury Festival’ use
d to terrify one’s mother. Now you take both Mum and Gran. That’s the history of modern popular music.

  Allen Powell said he was going to go out for the three days, go to things the way publicans never do.

  ‘There’s something on in the village, isn’t there? A garden fete or something?’

  He put on his weary face. ‘Yes, something like that.’

  Somerset is The Hedonistic County, the County of Self-Indulgence. They can put that on their leaflets and road signs, and credit me. It was a conclusion I reached while wearing my floral-pattern bathing cozzie, lying back nonchalantly in a bathtub-warm rooftop pool and staring dreamily towards Bathwick Hill over the best cityscape in the kingdom. All I needed for total nirvana was one of the bikini-clad fellow bathers to lean over and peel me a grape.

  Bath is surely the only inland city in Britain constructed essentially for pleasure (Bradford? Wolverhampton? Maybe not). The Romans settled there not because it was a defensible position, offered mineral wealth or had fast trains to London. They chose the site because it offered one of the delights of home, thanks to the only really hot springs on a chilly island. And as Tacitus said, taking the waters is ‘one of those luxuries that stimulate vice’. It sounds like advertising copy, though he was actually being censorious; on this subject it comes to the same thing.

  Bath has played the same role intermittently throughout the two intervening millennia, most famously in the eighteenth century, when the real-life counterparts of Jane Austen’s characters used the waters as the backdrop to their mating rituals. The springs continued to be central to the city until the late 1970s: kids used to have toga parties in the Roman bath. Then years of neglect and the death of a child from meningitis led to closure for nearly three decades. Restoration came in the years of fin-de-siècle plenty thanks to a millennium grant plus the discovery that the health issues could be resolved by tapping much, much deeper into the spring, down to water that is said to have fallen as rain before the Romans ever got here.