Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  There is another, far more secret transport route: what the humorist and singer Sid Kipper (‘Like a Rhinestone Ploughboy’) calls the Trans-Norfolk Highway, which the Department for Transport hides under a bland nom de route as the B1145. But it really does cross the county: from Mundesley on the coast to King’s Lynn in the west, disappearing momentarily a couple of times, then magically reappearing. All the way the signs, like Sirens, beckon the motorist to deviate from the straight-ish and narrow to see Norfolk’s most tantalisingly named villages: Whissonsett, Weasenham St Peter, Weasenham All Saints, Tittleshall, Wending, Booton (actually very bootiful, I thought), Themelthorpe, Drabblegate, Fiddler’s Green, Stratton Strawless, Trunch.

  But the road itself is bewitching enough. Except for a northward turn near the coast it runs roughly level with the bottom of the Wash, about three-quarters of the way up the county. The highway aside, communications are almost non-existent. This really is deepest Norfolk, where the Black Shuck might appear on a winter’s night, floating in canine form on a bed of mist. But it was a lovely drive, beneath magical cloudscapes. Not flat.

  D. J. Taylor had lent me the CD of a terrific radio documentary he did about the Singing Postman a few years back, so I listened to that. Rather less appropriately, I then put on Leonard Cohen. I got to his great revolutionary anthem:

  First we take Manhattan

  Then we take Berlin.

  But it seemed a bit odd in this setting. It seemed time to rewrite it:

  First we take Hunstanton

  Then we take King’s Lynn.

  I commend my version to the Norfolk independence movement. It doesn’t scan if you call it Hunston.

  Norwich Cathedral is more than normally lovable: it has an unusual architectural integrity; it is very welcoming; and the set-up feels as though it is part of the life of the modern city rather than a demanding old nuisance. On a mild autumn morning, the walk down to the river through the Close, intermittently alive with the dawdling pupils of the 900-year-old school, is an unusually cheering and timeless urban experience. The cathedral itself has a spire second in height to Salisbury, but it is low down and does not show off.

  But then Norfolk is so full of show-pony churches that the cathedral is not that special. It is unusual in having a spire: the characteristic sight of the Norfolk countryside is of a medieval tower poking above the treeline. But, the spire aside, no other expense was spared on these churches. The county was rich from wool in the Middle Ages, and religion was how it flaunted its wealth. I went into some churches that had fonts almost as large as a Welsh chapel.

  There is generally a steady traffic of Pevsner-wielding travellers pootling from parish to parish swapping favourites. ‘I think one is either a Salle or a Cawston man,’ Betjeman said somewhere, as though the relative merits of Sts Peter and Paul, Salle, and St Agnes, Cawston, were one of the major issues dividing the nation: United or City; Tory or Labour; Salle or Cawston.

  I’m a Salle man myself. Cawston church is stark and uncompromising, and the massive tower looks military rather than ecclesiastical. Salle (‘Saul’ in Norfolk-speak) is more homely, as well it might be, since it hardly has a parish to go with it. This enables it to have a more enchanting setting, just opposite a cricket ground. A Cawston man urged me to forget Salle (‘one man’s vanity project’) and concentrate on the great wool churches: Aylsham, Reepham (‘Reefum’) and Worstead.

  To be honest, the best thing about Norfolk churches is not the architecture but the vicars. I stopped off at Weston Longville, living of the eighteenth-century diarist and gourmand Parson Woodforde (‘… soals boiled and fryed, couple of boiled chicken and tongue, beans and bacon, stewed beef and an haunch of vension …’ And that was just for starters.). They probably did not, in his day, have ‘Messy Church’ at 4 p.m. in the hall, every second Sunday.

  There are, however, few things messier in the history of the Church of England than the life – and especially death – of the famous Rector of Stiffkey (‘Stookey’ or maybe not), Rev. Harold Davidson, ‘the prostitutes’ padre’. He died in 1937, but his story is one of those ancient newspaper sensations that still exerts a fascinating power. With good reason.

  Davidson was not your average country clergyman. He had been on the stage before being ordained and never quite lost his taste for theatricality of all kinds. When he came back from the war to discover his wife had become mysteriously pregnant, he began spending his weekdays in London ministering to fallen women, a category that did seem to include not just prostitutes but the waitresses in Lyons Corner Houses and other teashops.

  The inference might have seemed obvious, but the evidence of his wrongdoing was curiously elusive, as shown when an ecclesiastical court finally convened and heard evidence against him that was both circumstantial and thin. Nonetheless, the court had him ‘removed, deposed and degraded’ from the priesthood, of which he had become the best-known member, far surpassing the archbishop of Canterbury.

  Broke and indignant, he campaigned for reinstatement while preaching from a barrel at Blackpool before escaping what he called ‘the blatant vulgarities’ of the place to go upmarket and play Daniel, delivering sermons from a lion’s den in Skegness. And it was there, one summer’s evening, that a lion called Freddie, who had perhaps omitted to take his medication, grew weary of the sermonising, picked up the rector in his mouth and mauled him to death. The version of the story on the church noticeboard says that much of the audience thought this was part of the act and laughed uproariously.

  Though he had his enemies all right, most of the villagers wanted the rector buried among them. Thousands attended the funeral, not all of them journalists. And there he lies, in a corner of Stiffkey churchyard, not hidden away but in a grave that might be described as uncharacteristically discreet. Perhaps the mourners repaired, as I did, to the pub named, of all things, the Red Lion. They probably discussed the question, which remains unresolved, of where the rector stood on the spectrum between holy innocent and dirty old man. Or argued about whether to call the place Stiffkey or Stookey.

  There was an even more famous religious figure in Norfolk: Richeldis de Faverches, a Saxon noblewoman who in 1061 had a vision of the Virgin Mary in Walsingham. The site became an Augustinian priory and one of the world’s great centres of pilgrimage. A succession of kings came to the shrine, including the young Henry VIII, who walked the last couple of miles from East Barsham barefoot. The older Henry VIII had the place destroyed with more than normal thoroughness, complete with several exemplary executions.

  And then for more than three and a half centuries Walsingham mouldered, a forgotten symbol of the Catholicism England had rejected. But the medieval Slipper Chapel, outside the village, had survived the carnage. This was where less energetic pilgrims than Henry would remove their shoes for the final push. It had eked out the succeeding centuries in such lowly incarnations as a poorhouse and a cow barn. But in 1895 it was bought by a Catholic family; in 1938 it was reconsecrated.

  By that time the Church of England had begun to take an interest, or at least a segment of it had, and the Vicar of Walsingham created his own shrine in the village with its own Marian statue. Eventually, the Orthodox Church built their version in the old railway station, and pretty much everyone was in on the act except the atheists and the Jedi Knights. Walsingham began marketing itself as ‘England’s Nazareth’. It was a rebirth, not least of the village’s ancient marketing skills, for as one resident put it, ‘There’s no one who can turn a penny into a pound like those Augustinian canons.’

  It may indeed be England’s Nazareth in the sense of it being a possible flashpoint for holy war. What one senses in Walsingham is not so much an aura of sanctity but of the kind of quietly simmering resentments that led to the Reformation in the first place. The Slipper Chapel is a sombre and appropriately brooding place, but the Anglican shrine is bizarre: ponging of what might have been either incense or industrial floor polish and with enough gold on the altar for Walsingham to stage
the next Olympics. ‘My dear,’ said one local Catholic. ‘They’re much Higher Church than we are.’ Hard to believe all this was being built while Harold Davidson was enduring life with the lions. Extremists from the puritan wing of the Church of England have been known to picket the annual Walsingham procession.

  Walsingham is a pretty village of darling little cottages, whose interiors often reveal medieval wall paintings when the builders move in. It has only a handful of shops, but two of them specialise in religious knick-knacks. It is a sort of Lourdes for the carriage classes. But there is a fourth place of pilgrimage: the ruins of the original priory, at the back of the old courthouse, in the garden belonging to the Gurney family.

  The main relic comprises the leftovers of the ruined priory, most obviously the remnant of the east wall, which stands in the middle of the lawn looking like either a folly or a giant croquet hoop. Other remains are scattered about and integrated into the garden; the west tower looks like a little garden well, set about with rose bushes. On a kindly afternoon, the breeze rustled the beech trees and the first leaves were starting to drop on to the lawn. It really did seem as though God might be hereabouts, and possibly the Virgin Mary too.

  In haste, I rushed past Roys of Wroxham, ‘the world’s largest village store’; languorously, I crossed the River Yare on the chain ferry at Reedham. I took a peek at Great Witchingham Hall, a mix of Tudor and Victorian with a few echoes of onion-dome Muscovy. It looks like a country house hotel. It is actually the HQ of Bernard Matthews. It was here in the 1950s, when great mansions cost buttons, that he shelled out £3,000, kept two rooms to live in and filled the other thirty-three with turkeys: they were, the Independent reported, ‘hatched in the dining-room, reared in the Jacobean bedrooms and slaughtered in the kitchens’. The turkeys now live and die up the road and round the back, protected by security.

  I enjoyed cosy Reepham and genteel Holt, marvelled at spacious Swaffham, surely the only town in England that has both a market cross with Tuscan columns and a Russian restaurant. I went through Fakenham, which has a Museum of Gas and Local History, and also a tattoo shop adjacent to the Tudor Tea Rooms, a conjunction that sets the mind racing: ‘Excuse me, Muriel. You just finish your teacake while I nip next door and get a tramp stamp on my buttocks.’

  I began to understand the logic of the classic Norfolk town: by the river a small industrial estate where the station used to be; the market square on what counts in Norfolk as a hill; and somewhere round the back the supermarket, usually the same one – Fakenham, Stalham, Aylsham, Downham Market … Tesco towns all.

  And now there is another: Sheringham, the little seaside resort that had spent the past seventeen years – seventeen! – trying to keep Tesco out. It was perhaps the most epic battle in the history of British retailing – Sheringham as Stalingrad – and on more than one occasion it appeared that the antis had won. But they were up against an implacable opponent who hurled unimaginable resources against the district council in pursuit of victory.

  I first went to Sheringham to report the story in 2009. When I mentioned the town in a phone call to a Tesco press officer there was an audible gulp. The company was not that keen on the world being aware of its existence.

  Throughout, Tesco’s opponents have been fond of wartime metaphors, but this was not a case of a united band of brothers defying the wicked invasion force. The town was split down the middle. ‘You’ve heard of Ambridge, an everyday story of country folk?’ said the owner of my hotel when I arrived. ‘Well, welcome to Umbrage, an everyday story of seaside folk.’

  A lot of the residents were fixated by the allure of having a real supermarket just like a grown-up town, instead of having to drive for a full ten minutes to get to Morrisons in Cromer. And there was a reasonable case for wanting shops that would stay open as advertised instead of shoving off of an afternoon because it was raining and quiet. However, these did tend to be the people whose roots in the town were shallowest, especially the young, who were mostly going to shove off anyway. The pro-Tesco Face-book page was run by a student from Holt.

  Sheringham does not have the best beach in the kingdom – it only gets sandy at low tide; it is north-facing; it is buffeted by winds. The town’s USP was that it was a theme park of nostalgic shopping: three greengrocers; three fishmongers; two butchers, one of them called Icarus Hinds; a bookseller called Bertram A. Watts; a wool shop with such a variety of different coloured threads that it was almost as lip-smacking as the retro sweetie shop; and one of the nation’s great ironmongers, Blyth & Wright. Everything that Tesco has a history of killing off.

  Tesco had long since taken Hunstanton and King’s Lynn and it was utterly determined to get Sheringham. Its costs must have been staggering. North Norfolk District Council was, narrowly but consistently, keen to oppose the project but was constrained by a strange secret agreement signed by two former council officers years earlier. In 2010 it caved in.

  Three years later I came back to discover that the new store was just a week away from opening. That very morning the Eastern Daily Press had splashed on the news that Sheringham’s traders were summoning a ‘1940s spirit’, which was a very Sheringham thing to do. The town had just had a wartime-nostalgia weekend and the windows of the Lobster, one of the pubs by the seafront, were covered by pictures of Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson. And indeed a 1940s spirit was what I found. Some were phlegmatic: ‘If my son was coming into the business I’d be scared to bits,’ said Peter Scotter the fishmonger. Some were defiant. ‘I’ve had eighteen good years here,’ said Steve Fulcher the greengrocer, ‘and I plan to be here for a few years yet.’

  And the Tesco that was preparing to open was not as hubristic as the one that had won the battle. The company had just announced a 25 per cent fall in profits and had been forced into humiliating retreat in both the US and China. Perhaps in Sheringham it will try to make nicey-nicey with the new neighbours, at least in the short term.

  The week before, Sheringham had suffered some damage in the storm that almost took Bryony’s bungalow in Happisburgh: water seeped under the sea wall. But, like most of Norfolk, it is not in imminent danger of being swallowed by the sea. The threat is to landward: the danger that the county’s distinctive charm will be wrecked by an onslaught of homogeneity.

  October 2013

  Less than two months later, in early December, a tidal surge hit Happisburgh and Bryony Nierop-Reading’s bathroom caved in. The house was then demolished. She was unhurt, having removed herself and her belongings in time. The council declined to offer her any compensation, claiming that she should have moved earlier. She said she was better off than those next door in Walcott, who were taken by surprise. ‘I’ve seen floods,’ said resident Jane Knapp. ‘But this was so quiet. The water crept up; it was like bath water overflowing.’

  In 2014 the British Museum announced that a year earlier scientists had found the oldest human footprints ever seen outside Africa – 800,000 years old – in the mud on Happisburgh beach. And six months after Tesco arrived in Sheringham Steve Fulcher said business was way down, but was unsure whether that was due to Tesco or the wet winter: ‘People say if you can survive the first twelve to eighteen months, trade does come back, so fingers crossed.’

  34. Not not proud

  STAFFORDSHIRE

  We walked up the stone steps leading to the main entrance of the ancestral home of the earls of Shrewsbury – passing by the Talbot hounds, the family symbols flanking the door, and under the family crest. We went through the armoury, past the statuary and into the Octagon, the centrepiece of this extraordinary house.

  ‘Fantastical,’ Pevsner called it. Indeed, the whole experience was dream-like. The long corridors were dark and grew ever more mysterious as we approached the Octagon. There we were shown a film depicting the 15th earl being cursed by an old crone who had been spattered with mud by his rushing carriage. The earl was described as ‘cruel’ and ‘arrogant’, which was the best indication yet that the current earl,
no. 22, was not actually at home.

  Then we were led into another chamber, where we were invited to take a seat. We began swaying up and down. Then the walls began moving until we seemed to be doing a full 360-degree turn. And then … no, I didn’t wake up. We were all ushered outside into the light, where it became clear that we had been not in one of the rooms of the stately home but in a green prefab within the shell of the original house, which is known as Alton Towers.

  Ah, the A-phrase, never to be spoken by fastidious parents in front of children for fear they will have to go. As alarming in its way as the D-word, Disney, the only company which outstrips Alton Towers’ owners, Merlin Entertainments, in ‘location-based, branded family entertainment’. The Earl of Shrewsbury and his family, the Talbots, are indeed not at home, and have not been since 1924. The witch’s curse has had some effect.

  The ride inside the Towers, ‘Hex’, is a gentle middle-aged kind of jaunt. On the far side of the house, however, is Merlin’s new pride and joy, the Smiler, opened early in 2013: the world’s first fourteen-loop roller coaster. The queues for the Smiler have lasted all summer long, peaking at three hours. Three hours’ wait for a thrill you can’t help anticipating but which lasts just two minutes forty-five seconds? Sounds like dating.

  And indeed the Smiler is aimed squarely at the post-pubescent market. Even now, in late October, with the season nearly over, the wait was over an hour. God bless the smartphone! Indeed, the imminent autumn half-term has now become the park’s busiest time of year, branded as Scarefest, and featuring Franklyn’s Freaky Fun Zone, Skelvin’s Spooky Storytime and Phil’s Petrifying Penalty Shot.

  I was there as a guest of the management, and my guide, Liz Greenwood, was much nicer than her bleak title of ‘corporate communications manager’ suggested. Nonetheless, at this point we had a disagreement. One of us thought it would do no harm for a single time-pressed VIP to be given preferential treatment and allowed to queue-jump to experience the park’s star attraction. The other refused to contemplate such an injustice to the patient paying customers. You will of course have gathered that it was me doing the refusing. Actually, I was even more frightened by the thought of having to endure the adjoining ride, Oblivion, which concluded with a sheer drop, as down a lift shaft.