Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  The project was much delayed and became a byword for official hopelessness. But in 2006 the locals got their bathright back. And the council and the operators are very keen that it should be seen as a public bath, not a private one. They like to tempt workers away from the rush hour with their twilight package. It seems to me rather a triumphant comeback, making the waters once again the centrepiece of a city that, for all its traffic and pretensions, retains its infinite charm.

  I went into the pool with a pain in my right shoulder blade, my right kneecap, my left collarbone and my left quadratus lumborum. Afterwards, some of the pains had definitely shifted around, if nothing else. But my brain felt startlingly refreshed. Anyway, how can you not love a place where even the post office looks like a temple of Athene?

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree.

  That was written in Somerset – until Coleridge was interrupted by a man from Porlock, the late-eighteenth-century equivalent of a courtesy call from BT. Bath is on the eastern edge of a county that stretches a long way west and has a strong literary tradition. James Crowden’s Literary Somerset lists 300 writers of various kinds from Adelard of Bath to Thomas Young. What it lacks is a single, overwhelming Hardyesque author who embodies the county. Even the Brontës can be said to represent a certain grim overarching Yorkieness. But Somerset is too heterogeneous. It’s hard to imagine what Austen’s characters might say to those of R. D. Blackmore, the thick end of three hours’ drive away even now. But let’s try:

  CATHERINE MORLAND: I hope I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again soon. Shall you be at the cotillion ball tomorrow?

  CARVER DOONE: I will fling thee senseless into the river if I ever catch thy girl-face there again.

  The pleasure principle is surprisingly widespread. Exmoor, aside from blood feuds, was a place for stag-hunting. Then take Bridgwater, a town once known for the Bridgwater Smell (it came from a cellophane factory), but now that’s gone it can enjoy its carnival. This is the centrepiece of a series of autumnal bacchanals that are widespread in Somerset, in a manner analogous to the Lewes-centred Guy Fawkes Nights of East Sussex. Bridgwater notionally raises money for the event and also makes charity donations, averaging around £20,000 a year. Twenty thousand? From a whopping great carnival? They could probably raise more from a few wellrun coffee mornings or beetle drives.

  No one much cares for the Somerset coast from Weston-super-Mud to Butlins, Minehead, though it perks up when it meets Exmoor a few miles from the Devon border. Otherwise it is not very beautiful and the Bristol Channel’s massive tidal range ensures that the sea is often invisible. But I can commend the retro-funfair, complete with 1950s penny slot machines and Victorian sideshows, that camps at Weston for high season. Somerset’s most famous school is Millfield, best known for its sport. Even the holy little city of Wells has a street, hard by the cathedral, that used to be known (a sign dutifully records) as Grope Lane. Above all, what is Somerset’s best-known – almost its only – industry? Cider, the drink of choice for the revellers at Worthy Farm (they are always called revellers in the media), because I suppose they think it’s what they ought to drink, and also because it’s cheaper and stronger than the beer.

  The local heroes are all bringers of joy, like Eavis himself. (‘You see him in Wells,’ said one sceptic. ‘He has an aura about him. And he jolly knows it.’) And Julian Temperley, maker of cider brandy. And the smokery people from Hambridge. Somerset’s cricketers have always made the game, above all, fun.

  Cider aside, Somerset never did make much. There was a small coalfield centred on Radstock; Clarks made shoes at Street, until they didn’t; Morlands sheepskins still come from Glastonbury, just about; there were gloves and, even now, helicopters round Yeovil. It is too easy to categorise the locals as mañana-ish; they do that better themselves: ‘Sometimes oy just sits and thinks. But when that gets too stressful oy just sits.’ But there is a strange undertow of masterly small-scale engineering and construction. ‘If I was stranded in the desert,’ said the sculptor Gordon Young, who came down from Carlisle thirty-four years ago, ‘I’d want a Somerset bloke to bodge me out.’ He introduced me to his very-Somerset neighbour, Brian Hill, who was – among many other projects – restoring a Paxman agricultural steam engine, the last of its kind. He was creating a lot of new thingummies to replace the old wotsits and it was absolutely marvellous, even though I understood almost nothing of what he was doing.

  ‘Brian, do you think this is a particularly Somerset thing to do?’

  ‘Yes, I do. There’s loads of clubs for restoring old engines.’

  Gordon Young, from cold old Cumberland, thinks they’re all a bit soft. ‘You’d be hard-pushed to starve in Somerset. Everything bloody grows. It’s so fertile. The season’s so long, they think they’re in clover. They are in clover. It’s the land of lush. Somerset’s never produced an England footballer, you know. I know they aren’t all softies: the Somerset Light Infantry had a great record. But they’re spoiled rotten.’

  There is a much rougher working-class culture too. I sometimes caught glimpses of it decades ago when Ian Botham was in his rampaging pomp in the backstreet pubs of Taunton. Botham’s home town, Yeovil, is considered the HQ of this. Yobville, as it is sometimes known. Or Yeovile. Or, as it was sometimes spelt in Old English, Evil.

  But everything is relative. Somerset is not that rough. What it does have is a delicious weirdness, just below the surface. ‘MAN BEATS LEWD MASCOT’ said a poster for the Central Somerset Gazette. In Long Sutton I saw a sign saying ‘BEWARE. POLICE OPERATE IN THIS AREA’. Usually, such signs say ‘THIEVES’. Maybe it was placed there by the National Union of Marijuana Farmers. And Glastonbury has an estate agent called the Real Ralph Bending, who has modelled his adverts on those of Roy Brooks, who half a century ago was the last man to try to bring humour to this grim trade.

  WESTBURY-SUB-MENDIP: One-bed ground-floor apartment out in the sticks. Suit someone whose brother is also their uncle.

  GLASTONBURY: Two-bedroom retirement home. Suit someone on their last legs.

  I have had to clean up Mr Bending’s spelling, which suggests he should be careful making fun of rural ignorance. But I applaud his efforts.

  The notion of Somerset as ground zero for two-headed bumpkins is deeply ingrained in the wider culture. When a friend’s wife began teaching in a Devon comprehensive, a kid asked where she came from. ‘Somerset,’ she replied. ‘Ooh, aaarrr. Ooh, aaarr,’ the class went in mocking unison. Counties without big cities have that effect on their neighbours.

  But it is a substantial agricultural area and unusually varied: a bit of everything. However, the hierarchy of farming is not quite the usual counter-intuitive arrangement with the low ground at the top. In complete contrast to Dorset, there are few big landowners and some of the farms are exceptionally small. The big cheeses make the big cheeses. But everyone looks down, literally and metaphorically, on the Somerset Levels. Or, as they are usually called, the moors. These are not, though, anything like the upland moors of Exmoor, Dartmoor or the North.

  Anyone driving down the M5 will get a sense of the Levels as they drive across Sedgemoor, a journey otherwise notable only for the vast Morrisons depot at Bridgwater and some particularly repulsive service areas. It is like a miniature East Anglia: flat fields fringed by willow and reeds rather than hedgerows, and broken up by the artificial drainage ditches known as rhynes or rhines (usually pronounced reens).

  As I wandered the fields near Muchelney, just outside Langport, on a July morning, the rhynes were unpleasantly stagnant and covered in duckweed. A year earlier, it would have been a very different story.

  The Levels were drained, but not as quickly or determinedly as the Fens: when James I’s chief fen-reclaimer, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, arrived to have a go at Somerset, the rustics, with their eternal suspicion of busybodies sent from London, saw him off. And the Levels never did get the big arable fields that made East Anglia rich.

&
nbsp; So the area has remained relatively poor – ‘bogtrotters’, I heard one incomer call his neighbours. Certainly the -ey suffix indicates that Muchelney was an island, and to this day Muchelney Abbey and its adjoining church have always remained above the waterline. ‘The monks knew what they were doing,’ said one villager ruefully. Locally, the village has long had a certain celebrity as the home of the Lowland Games, a jokey celebration of what might be called bogtrotter culture.

  Most winters there is some flooding on the moors, which is not a problem as long as the stock is removed in time and the roads stay dry. Even then, canny villagers normally park elsewhere and hitch rides out by tractor. In November 2012 this was impossible: the only exit was by boat. Several of the outlying homesteads, not necessarily new, were inundated. At least in hindsight and/or in public, villagers like to play up the joy of these occasions. ‘It is lovely, the peace,’ said one woman. ‘We have flood parties in the church and we bring what we’ve got a lot of. “Have you got potatoes? I’ve got carrots.”’

  But in 2012 that wasn’t the half of it. The moors flooded in summer as well, for weeks on end, creating a vast and foul insect-ridden swamp. ‘I never had bites in thirty years in Somerset,’ said Gordon Young, way above the waterline in High Ham. ‘Now I’ve got bites that still haven’t healed.’

  ‘Is Somerset malarial, do you think?’ I asked lightly.

  ‘I did wonder. I asked the doctor.’

  In Muchelney itself, one could sense the unease, even in a summer that was tending towards drought. Anecdotal evidence suggests several incomers have been trying to find a permanent way out. Graham Walker of School Farm has a popular farm shop, selling stuff from his polytunnels. Which is lucky. The grass on about half his moorland fields had not recovered a year later. He had no doubt who was to blame: ‘Too many people sitting on their backsides refusing to do any work.’

  This was a not very veiled reference to the Environment Agency, which for years had refused to dredge the rivers, mainly to save money but rationalised by all kinds of theories that appear to have collapsed under the weight of water. ‘The swampists are in headlong retreat,’ concluded Anthony Gibson, the former regional director of the NFU.

  And so rural England’s battle to keep its head above water takes on an extra urgency in the Levels. One local branch of agriculture, peat-cutting, is withering away because it is palpably unsustainable. But the place does need to stay reasonably dry if it is to retain its local culture and cuisine: jugged hare, smoked eels, the occasional badger steak and, behind locked doors, so I heard in whispers, a very occasional, illegal, roast swan.

  People in Somerset do seem curiously self-deprecating about their county. Several I met referred to it as ‘a drive-through county’ and it is true that it is not, for the most part, a destination in the way of Devon, Cornwall and Dorset. Partly that’s due to the dreariness of the coastline and the gentleness of the hills. There is also an absence of great houses, with the single major exception of Montacute, ancestral home of the Phelips family; even the Duke of Somerset’s place, Bradley House, is in Wiltshire.

  And yet the place is quite stunning architecturally. Pevsner, who normally worked on the historic boundaries, found he had to split this volume, and merge North Somerset with Bristol. Far bigger and more obvious counties were not so honoured.

  In part, this seems to be because Somerset had a late surge of church building in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the county had a quarter of the English wool trade and a good deal of money. Parishes competed with each other to build the biggest towers (Somerset never went in for spires much). It was also a beauty contest: these towers were not just fat and solid, as in Norfolk; they were dolled up. In the words of Julian Orbach, who has been writing the new edition of Pevsner: ‘the stone was so good you could play games with it’.

  There was an extraordinary variety of such stone too. Somerset straddles several of England’s great geological belts. So it goes from Bath stone, through the blue lias limestone-and-shale that makes the ancient county town of Somerton look so calm and self-possessed, to hamstone (‘the loveliest building material in England’ – Simon Jenkins), which gives so many Somerset villages the colour of different types of marmalade, sometimes orange, sometimes lemon.

  In places, this becomes decidedly over the top, as at Barrington (‘startlingly beautiful’ – Candida Lycett Green) or Hinton St George, described by Alan Bennett as ‘absurdly picturesque’, the emphasis for me being on the absurd. One survey suggested this was the place with the longest life expectancy in the country: long enough for the populace to get crabby and install bins for doggie-doos, as if this were Hampstead, and signs like ‘Private Drive. Church Property’.

  For me, the glory of Somerset does not come from the stone or the gastropubs. It comes in the places that live quietly and unshowily with their own integrity. Throughout this book, I have been searching for the perfect small town. I had hopes of Wells, before discovering that just about every shop on the High Street was a chain, from Country Casuals to Waterstones. Some Somerset towns, notably Frome and Bruton, have already started to feel the influence of displaced Londoners. Yet it is still possible to find somewhere like Ilminster, as self-contained and unself-conscious as a small town in Gascony. It seems to have survived even Tesco.

  Anyone might be thankful to be in a Somerset village. And it was Arthur Mee, children’s encyclopedist and begetter of the sentimental 1930s county guides, The King’s England, who is credited with the phrase ‘thankful villages’ to cover the tiny number of places that sent their young men off to war in 1914 and got them all back again.

  There are thought to be fifty-one of them (excluding various doubts and complications, all explained on the website hellfirecorner.co.uk). And, of these, nine are in Somerset, a remarkable number; Yorkshire is second with five. There was a later, inevitably much smaller, list: the villages that repeated the trick in the Second World War as well. There are said to be fourteen ‘doubly thankful’ villages, two of them in Somerset: Stocklinch and Woolley.

  I came upon Stocklinch, not far from Ilminster, early on a summer’s evening. Inside the little church was a brass plaque ‘in gratitude for peace and victory’ listing the nineteen men who took part in the Great War. Below it is a framed parchment listing seven who served and came back from 1939 to 1945. By the village hall there is a commemorative stone bench. There is of course no war memorial.

  The bugles called from sad shires with such regularity that one middle-sized county’s over-representation in this list seemed as though it must have an explanation. Norfolk did not have a single thankful village, nor Devon, nor Surrey. Small villages obviously stood a better chance, but that does not appear to be a particular Somerset phenomenon. Did the agricultural exemptions in the conscription system work more kindly here? Did Somerset lads’ mechanical skills get them safer jobs behind the lines? Father Geoff Wade, the vicar of Stocklinch, rejected these explanations, and Rod Morris, one of the researchers behind the Hellfire Corner project, was just as definite: ‘The Somerset Light Infantry took heavy losses on the western front. You’ll get a fairly starchy response if it’s suggested Somerset did not play its full part.’

  Morris lives in another thankful village, Rodney Stoke, which sent twenty-one men out in the First World War and got them all back. Its neighbour Draycott, so close that the boundary is indistinct, lost eleven. His collaborator Norman Thorpe concluded, ‘We have tried many times to find any reason for the completely erratic distribution of thankful villages, and each time we have concluded that it seems to be pure chance.’ The vicar, being both C of E and an ex-naval officer, did not attempt to tell me that thankfulness was a sign of God’s special benison. It was blind chance, he thought. Which is lucky, because God’s benison can be mighty capricious. Flixborough in Lincolnshire was one of the original thankful villages; in 1974 it was the site of one of Britain’s worst modern industrial disasters when a chemical works blew up, killing twenty-eight.r />
  There is one last very Somersetty explanation. Rod Morris mentioned a theory that all the Somerset thankful villages lie on the St Michael ley line, devised/invented by the late John Michell. This is the great western line – more direct than Brunel’s – which links Glastonbury Tor with St Michael’s Mount to the west and with Avebury and Bury St Edmunds to the east. If there are any answers, they have to come at Glastonbury.

  A month later Glastonbury was back to what passes for normal there. The characteristic shops of a small English market town were all thriving again: the witchcraft supply store, the non-toxic hairdresser’s, the Sufi charity shop, the Ethical Elegance beauty salon and so on. Ralph Bending, the subversive estate agent, was still in fine form:

  WEST PENNARD: Two-bedroom cottage. No heating and plenty of fresh air await a tenant with the constitution of an ox.

  Glastonbury now had an event of its own, indeed one that can hardly be imagined anywhere else: the 18th Goddess Conference, ‘a unique transformative, spiritual, emotional, psychological and physical experience’, which in 2013 was devoted to celebrating ‘Eartha, our Great Earth Mother’. We were enjoined to honour her by wearing autumnal colours, which I did: a khaki shirt spattered with a shade of plum, an overripe one which had squirted over my shirt.

  This looked a feeble effort beside the flowing orange and russets that otherwise filled the hall. About 100 women, mainly of the Earth Mother type themselves, and a handful of men, had gathered in the town hall under banners depicting goddess icons from round the world – Grandmother Spider Woman, the Cumaean Crone, the Luristan Birthing Goddess – some of which looked like stylised depictions of page 3 of the Sun.