Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  And one firm turned into a star of stage and screen. I knew Barry would wince when I mentioned it. In 2005 Kinky Boots became the most successful film ever made about Northampton (possibly the only one), then a Broadway musical (definitely the only one). It told the story of a young man who inherited his father’s shoe business and discovered it was going bust. He then met a drag artist who solved the problem by persuading him to make feminine footwear strong enough to fit masculine feet. And, after many travails, everyone lived happily ever after. Which was all sort-of true except the last bit: Steve Pateman, the young boss of W. J. Brookes of Earls Barton, did diversify into ‘Divine Footwear’ and all was well for a while. Then the cheap knock-offs arrived from abroad. The factory is now a housing estate.

  Filming was done, inside and out, at Tricker’s. What the film could not convey was the smell and feel of the leather. The shoemaker’s art is concentrated in the clicking room, where the clicker has to choose the best leather for the front of the shoes and the second-rank stuff for the back. I was invited to stroke the best. It was beautiful: smooth, sensual and, given enough time, quite probably arousing. Very kinky indeed. All the while Barry was explaining precisely where the leather came from. Eventually understanding dawned.

  ‘You mean to say I’m stroking a cow’s arse?’

  ‘We prefer to call it the butt.’

  Even on modern maps Northamptonshire looks a long thin county. Historic Northamptonshire is even longer, a county and a half since the Soke of Peterborough had a separate county council and ancient liberties that, for instance, allowed the magistrates to try murder cases. This right continued until 1971, on the promise that they would never invoke it.

  The county was defined by the transport links between Northampton and Peterborough: the River Nene (pronounced Nen in Northampton and Neen up there), and the Trans-Northants Express (my little joke), which ambled between the two until the day it didn’t. I took the line from Castle Station in Northampton just before it closed, alone, as twelve-year-olds were allowed to do in the 1960s, went into a café in Peterborough, played Del Shannon on the jukebox and then took the train back again. Just after that, Peterborough was removed from Northamptonshire and placed in Huntingdonshire, an arrangement that lasted less than a decade before all that was subsumed into Cambridgeshire.

  Thus Peterborough appears to be moving eastward, a process which, if it continues, should soon lead to its meeting the onrushing North Sea as that batters its way westward. Then it’ll be soked all right. Football fans in Northampton used to hate Peterborough and their fancy nickname ‘Posh’. ‘Death to Posh,’ said the graffiti. This has been replaced by Northampton’s psychopathic obsession with Milton Keynes, which has almost nothing to do with football. And Peterborough can wander off to Norfolk or wherever, though it would be helpful if it dismantled its cathedral first and moved it to Northampton, which needs a little something.

  For the whole county, including the Soke, location has been crucial to its modern existence and fate. This is now the logistics centre of Britain: basically, it’s one big warehouse. It borders nine of the other thirty-eight counties, more than anywhere else. There are several points on country lanes west of Northampton where it’s possible to cross in quick succession the Romans’ Watling Street (now the A5), the Grand Union Canal, the West Coast Main Line and the M1: the entire history of English transport in a few hundred yards. It is extremely difficult to get from London to the North without passing through Northamptonshire.

  This is also just beyond what used to be considered the edge of commutability. In other words, it was right in the target area. In the 1960s almost all the major towns – Northampton, Peterborough, Corby and Wellingborough – were earmarked for massive expansion, a process that looks likely to go on until the last meadow is converted to grow a crop of motorway cones. Nowhere have the Nimbys been more comprehensively routed.

  Among the casualties is believed to be the battlefield at Naseby, the decisive encounter of the Civil War: Britain’s Gettysburg. In 1989 it was decided to drive the new A14 through this neglected site, against the anguished screams of historians crying ‘desecration’. The problem, a planning official told me later, was that while all the historians consulted were certain where the battle was fought, each one’s certainty was different from the others. So Whitehall shrugged its shoulders and pushed on with the route it wanted.

  Anyway, my school history book claimed Naseby was in Leicestershire. Outsiders always belittled Northamptonshire. No one even knew where to place it. Was it North, as the word implied? Or South? It’s sort of in the East Midlands but not quite. Sometimes people called it South Midlands or South-East, or even Home Counties, which is definitely wrong. The TV programmes come from Norwich, which is insane. I once overheard someone utter the phrase Very Northamptonshire!’ But Northamptonshire is the county that was never seen as very anything. Except maybe very nondescript. A folk music researcher once triumphantly discovered two songs that came from the county – then found out they really came from Lincolnshire. The Northamptonshire Regiment sometimes marched into battle to the tune of ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’. This was a county that timidly wanted to fit in.

  It was on a characteristically bland new housing estate on the edge of Corby that I met Chris Eilbeck and John Tye, two incomers actually, both from London. But they helped change my increasingly despairing perspective of my own home county. They are both members of the Northampton Ramblers, which has a long-established route called the Northamptonshire Round, though it actually takes the form of a ring round the county town and is thus is in danger of being tarmacked itself.

  So the two devised their own route round the edge of the (Sokeless) county. Clockwise from King’s Sutton in the south to Easton-on-the-Hill in the north and then back down the east side. Fourteen days; 204 miles. You could take a fortnight’s holiday and do the whole thing, as with the Coast-to-coast walk across the Pennines, though funnily enough no one ever has; there might be an issue camping in some of the publess villages. Only eight people have done it at all, even in stages.

  The route leaves the county just twice: once because the path goes the wrong side of a hedge; and once to take in a pub in Leicestershire. ‘All the locals belittle the county and say there’s nothing here,’ said Chris. ‘They’re not getting out and about. They just see the towns and the charity shops and think that’s it.’

  ‘There’s noise in places, obviously,’ said John. ‘But a lot of the time you could be the only people in the county.’

  ‘My favourite place is the stone bridge at Cosgrove,’ said Chris. It is rather lovely: shaped like the top of an ace of spades. Then they started batting the highlights about.

  ‘The view of King’s Cliffe.’

  ‘The windmill at Hellidon.’

  ‘And there’s Blatherwycke.’

  ‘And nobody knows.’

  ‘You don’t have to fight the crowds when you get there.’

  ‘That’s the whole point, isn’t it?’

  I left inspired. I had forgotten how fond I was of the old place, how strong my memories were: the Blisworth Arm of the canal; the Royal Scot thundering through; fields full of lapwings; the walk on a summer’s night from Newnham to Badby; haunted Fotheringhay, where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned, tried and beheaded; watching Northampton Town beating Leeds and Villa in their one and only season in the top division; nineteen-stone Colin Milburn smashing sixes. And how much I always planned, living in London, to come back home again for good.

  Suddenly I was seeing it with freshened eyes. The sun had come out, in this rainiest of winters, which helped. I had forgotten the beauty of the building stone: grey at the top end, then turning to a wonderfully varied brown. Honey-coloured, it’s often called, but it varies from mousy to marmalade. And at its absolute best – Rothwell Church, maybe – like a brown-haired girl just emerging from a salon with blonde highlights.

  I had lunch in Oundle, the smartest of Northamptonshire towns
(‘so snooty you can get arrested for watching ITV’) and went to see the whitewashed cottage at Helpston where the peasant poet John Clare was born in 1793. It is now owned by a trust and open to the public. It’s a very nice set-up but, in tough times, in this most untouristed area, a bit of a struggle. Clare himself called Helpston ‘a gloomy village in Northamptonshire, on the brink of the Lincolnshire Fens.’

  At first sight he might seem a rather soppy nature-lover, celebrating a timeless prelapsarian countryside. In fact he was beset by change and what he perceived as decay, most particularly by the enclosure of the surrounding fields, which transformed the ancient rhythms of the village and curtailed his productive wanderings.

  Autumn met plains that stretched them far away

  In unchecked shadows of green, brown, and grey.

  Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene;

  No fence of ownership crept in between

  To hide the prospect from the gazing eye;

  Its only bondage was the circling sky.

  But then:

  Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours,

  Free as spring clouds and wild as forest flowers,

  Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,

  And hath been once as it no more shall be.

  Change disorientated Clare, especially after he achieved brief celebrity but, of course, bugger all money. He became depressed and had what we would now call a breakdown. This worsened after he moved to nearby Northborough to live with his large but sickly family. Eventually, he was confined to the asylum in Northampton and the poetry dried up. Twenty-seven years later, he finally returned to Helpston on the new railway, in his coffin.

  I chose to study Clare at A level because, if I’m honest, he was a famous writer from Northamptonshire, which is what I aspired to become. But Helpston is only a few miles from Peterborough and so has now been plonked in a different county entirely. As Byron Rogers wrote in the Guardian: ‘For 150 years he was “the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”; this is chiselled into his grave and memorial … Now he is Cambridgeshire’s Peasant Poet. The skewer has been removed and the man, for whom a move of three miles brought on the anxiety which became madness, is spiralling through eternity in no man’s land.’

  The Northamptonshire accent is a very distinct one – I still reckon I can spot it anywhere – but it is hard to imitate and impossible to define. Even David Wilson finds it a struggle and he is probably the foremost expert on the subject: a Higham Ferrers boy who studied dialectology in the great specialist unit at Leeds, taught English and produced That’ll Lern Yer, a Dictionary of Northamptonshire Dialect.

  The accent might be a cross between Cockney and Brummie, which is geographically as it should be, but it bears no obvious resemblance to either. Nor is it northern: it’s long grarss not short gráss. But in Corby, where thousands of Scots poured in to work in the now demolished steelworks, it has spawned a weird mutation, a sort of twangy Glaswegian.

  The great exponent of the language was an artist called Reg Norman, who reputedly got his inspiration from hearing the women queuing at Saxby’s pie shop in Rushden and turned them into a pocket cartoon that appeared in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, ‘Air Ada’ (Our Ada), who was always talking to her friend ‘Mawd’. This was not very funny, nor intended to be; it was, however, very precise and popular.

  Wilson had his favourite overhear on a bus back to Higham Ferrers: ‘Is them seats took?’, which goes along with another bus-chestnut, ‘Ent much room, wuz they?’ Lynda Needle, who has translated Bible stories into dialect to read on Radio Northampton, is fond of the ultimate expression of apathetic obstinacy: ‘Ah enna gunna do it.’

  The accent is always said to be strongest in the inward-looking little shoe towns like Rushden. I am not best placed to judge whether women still address each other, as Ada and Mawd did, as ‘gal’. But even in Raunds, supposedly the strongest-accented town of the lot, no one used the gender-neutral m’duck on me. It is not a usage unique to Northamptonshire; in this matter, the county was at one with the rest of the East Midlands.

  ‘When were you last called m’duck?’ I asked Brian Binley MP. ‘All the time. In my surgery.’

  Probably it gets used by wheezy pensioners in doctors’ surgeries too, but not among the puking youth of the Northampton nightclubs. And maybe there are still mullocking (awkward) people who scrat about (rush around) pointlessly. But I fear the worst. Binley, from Finedon in the A6 belt, does pass the acid test of Northamptonianism. He refers to the town as N’thampton. No need to stress the first syllable. No one round here is ever likely to get it mixed up with far-off Southampton.

  When the call of home was loudest, I always imagined I would settle for ever in south-west Northamptonshire. Here the countryside not just rolls but even pitches a little. Some of the villages are Cotswold-scrumptious but the stone is more handsome, the houses and horses less expensive, and the incomers less snotty.

  I became particularly fixated on the village of Eydon (pronounced Eden): lots of nice stone, a splendid old pub, the Royal Oak, and a farm called East of Eydon, which suggested that at least some of the inhabitants had a pleasing sense of humour. Driving by in the 1990s, I stopped at the post office to be greeted by a sign on the door, ‘No Directions Given’, which suggested that some of the inhabitants might also be miserable sods. I gave up on moving to Eydon. This time, I paid another trip to see if the sign was still there. Naturally the post office had closed down years ago.

  The post office had also gone in the village I grew up in, Milton, as it used to be known, now poshified back into its medieval name of Milton Malsor while at the same time being almost engulfed by surging Northampton. Though the main A43 now bypasses the village, the place seems noisier. The shop that went with the post office hangs on, though perhaps not for long; Tesco, the killer of commerce, is dangerously close. The smaller, more villagey of the two pubs, the Compass – once famous for its skittles team – seems equally on the brink. Yet the village is much cherished: the Historical Society has a wonderful website.

  I went to see our old friends Monty and Pat Kutas, still newcomers when my parents chose to move back into town after sixteen years, traumatising their youngest son, who could remember nowhere else. Now they have been there almost half a century, a tribute to Milton’s healthy air: Monty, well past ninety, was debating whether or not he was up to another summer’s golf. But the place has changed, a magnet for people whose main aim is a home handy for the motorway. ‘We don’t get together the way we used to,’ sighed Pat.

  The church was locked, a sure sign of encroaching urbanism. In the graveyard I saw the old village names of a generation I can just remember – Tack, Mackintosh, Judge, Mallard, Pell, Yates. If memory serves, they all called me m’duck.

  February 2014

  39. The Great Wen-will-it-implode?

  LONDON

  The morning I was going up Britain’s tallest building dawned improbably clear: cloudless and un-Londonish. Naturally, by the appointed time, the sky was starting to grey up, though it was still possible to see the distant outlines of the Chilterns, far away to the north-west. As if they mattered. The Chilterns are not the point. The stars of the show are in the foreground.

  It takes two separate lifts to get to the viewing platform 800 feet up on the seventy-second floor; and there, around and beneath you, is the rest of London’s galaxy of new skyscrapers. Huddled together just north of the river is the dominant constellation, a cluster of lustre: huge twenty-first-century buildings with homely names – the Gherkin, the Cheese-Grater, the Walkie-Talkie, the Helter-Skelter. These overpower the faded veterans of the last century, the NatWest Tower (aka Tower 42) and Lloyd’s of London, which caused shock in the innocent 1980s when it displayed all its undies as outer garments.

  To the east, Canary Wharf; to the south, the Strata, whose USP was three wind turbines (which are rarely switched on); to the north-west, almost forgotten now, the Post Office or BT Tower, and much-
loathed Centre Point; to the north-east, looking rather like a gasometer, the Olympic Stadium. And way down, down, down, barely visible, are the buildings that once defined London: St Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace. Even the Tower of London, just along the opposite bank, looks merely like an elaborate doll’s house. All that’s missing is the biggest building of all, the Shard, because we’re in it.

  Not on top of it. There are another fifteen levels, and steps leading up to a small glass room accessible only to Important Persons with more Vs in front than I can muster. I had managed to blag my way round the £24.95 admission fee (£29.95 on the day) but it’s tough getting to the top. In any case, altitude does not define the quality of a view: you often get an impressive view of London flying into Heathrow along the Thames, but the townscape looks too Dinky Toy-ish to offer any sense of reality. In the Shard, you can get a very decent view for the price of a cup from the thirty-second floor coffee shop. At a similar height, the London Eye has been a huge success. The connoisseur of the capital Simon Jenkins swears by the view from the Monument, a mere 200 feet up.

  The Shard is not just London’s tallest building but the tallest in Western Europe: 1,017 feet. Or 1,016. Or 1,012. Or 1,004. It depends how you do your calculations. However, this is merely like being European baseball champions: it’s not our thing. On the global list, the Shard is only sixty-third. Or thirty-ninth. Or sixty-first. Or seventy-fifth. This is a surprisingly inexact science. By the time you read this, London’s finest may have fallen near the relegation zone. If even some of the planned stratosphere-scrapers, mostly in Chinese cities, actually get built, this will be regarded as non-league architecture.