The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play
Page 1
CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY STUART MACONIE
TITLE PAGE
PROLOGUE
CLOCKING OFF
CHAPTER ONE
PLAYING AT WORK
CHAPTER TWO
LIVING THE SPORTING LIFE
CHAPTER THREE
HAVING A FLUTTER
CHAPTER FOUR
GETTING A BIT OF CULTURE
CHAPTER FIVE
HAVING A GOOD FEED
CHAPTER SIX
MAKING A DAY OF IT
CHAPTER SEVEN
KICKING A BALL ABOUT
CHAPTER EIGHT
GETTING A BIT OF FRESH AIR
CHAPTER NINE
STRIKING UP THE BAND
CHAPTER TEN
TRYING SOMETHING A BIT DIFFERENT
EPILOGUE
DRINKING UP
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE BOOK
Factory, mine and mill. Industry, toil and grime. Its manufacturing roots mean we still see the North of England as a hardworking place. But, more than possibly anywhere else, the North has always known how to get dressed up, take itself out on the town and have a good time. After all, working and playing hard is its specialty, and Stuart Maconie is in search of what, exactly, this entails what it tells us about the North today.
Following tip offs and rumour, Stuart takes trip to forgotten corners and locals’ haunts. From the tapas bars of Halifax to the caravan parks of Berwick Upon Tweed, from a Westhoughton bowling green to Manchester’s curry mile, via dog tracks and art galleries, dance floors and high fells, Stuart compares the new and old North, with some surprising results.
The Pie at Night could be seen as a companion to the bestselling Pies and Prejudice, but it is not a sequel. After all, this is a new decade and the North is changing faster than ever. This is a revealing and digressive journey and a State of the North address, delivered from barstool, terrace, dress circle and hillside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stuart Maconie is a writer, broadcaster and journalist familiar to millions from his work in print, on radio and on TV. His previous bestsellers have included Cider with Roadies, Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas, and he currently hosts the afternoon show on BBC 6music with Mark Radcliffe as well as weekly show The Freak Zone. Based in the cities of Birmingham and Manchester, he can also often be spotted on top of a mountain in the Lake District with a Thermos flask and individual pork pie.
Also by Stuart Maconie
Cider with Roadies
Pies and Prejudice
Adventures on the High Teas
Hope and Glory
The People’s Songs
PROLOGUE
CLOCKING OFF
The train now leaving Stalybridge station is for the north …
They call it Stalyvegas. A good place to start I think. A town that just wants to have fun.
But where to start with Stalybridge itself? With its long, dark, wild hills and its long, dark, wild history? It has plenty of that. Luddites, those mocked and misunderstood symbols of industrial muscle, once raged through its streets, smashing looms, burning mills, generally earning themselves centuries of undeserved bad press. Chartists made it a stronghold, collected signatures, stoked the people’s ire; strikers and plug rioters stalked the town, anger spread like a bloodstain across Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire. Friedrich Engels came and found a town in disarray and a people in despair, despite some really rather lovely countryside.
Stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ravine … and both sides of this ravine are occupied by an irregular group of cottages, houses and mills. On entering, the very first cottages are narrow, smoke-begrimed, old and ruinous; and as the first houses, so the whole town. A few streets lie in the narrow valley bottom, most of them run criss-cross, pell-mell, up hill and down, and in nearly all the houses, by reason of this sloping situation, the ground-floor is half-buried in the earth; and what multitudes of courts, back lanes and remote nooks arise out of this confused way of building may be seen from the hills, whence one has the town, here and there, in a bird’s-eye view almost at one’s feet. Add to this the shocking filth, and the repulsive effect of Stalybridge … may be readily imagined.
Understandably, the tourist board doesn’t go big on the above in the promotional literature.
Or shall we begin with a chorus of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, written, it’s said, in an hour for a bet one boozy night in 1912 in Stalybridge’s Newmarket Tavern by local lad Jack Judge? Then there’s another claim to fame, the fact that the last surviving tripe shop in Britain is still about its rubbery, vinegary business on Stalybridge’s Main Street. It is still a place of local pilgrimage, if only selling around a quarter of the mind-boggling, jaw-dropping, some would say stomach-turning 100lbs-a-day of the stuff they would sell 20 years ago.
Or shall we begin with that nickname; ‘Stalyvegas’, the city of lights in the wilderness, first used jokingly when the council went overboard on traffic lights and then used more abstractly and affectionately of a crazy, fun town in the middle of nowhere. An isolated town cradled by soft hills, turning rural again, feral even, as industry’s tide recedes and the tripe trade slackens to be replaced by other passions; cocktail bars and bookies, tanning salons, Wetherspoons and pound shops.
But no. Let us begin on platform one of Stalybridge station where the trains clank and whizz and rumble their way between Lancashire and Yorkshire, and where stands what just might be the best pub in the north of England.
You’ll need a drink after your journey. The northern rail train will be cramped and fetid, because it always is, packed sardine tight with the workers of Liverpool and Manchester and Bolton heading home to the hills; smart office girls in charcoal suits with pink paperbacks, hipster web designers with iPods and waxed ’tashes, exhausted labourers in blue serge overalls flecked with plaster nodding off against the rainy window, through which the landscape is gradually greening.
You won’t get a seat, rest assured, so as the decrepit seventies ‘Sprinter’ train sighs into Stalybridge you will fall gratefully out of the grimy concertina doors and onto platform 1, where the much more welcoming door of the Stalybridge Buffet Bar will be open, and the little lights will be twinkling and your stool or your table and your pint and the night await you.
The evening has begun.
A long, long time ago, an unimaginably long time actually – somewhere between half a million and two million years – our distant ancestor Homo erectus made the most important discovery of his or her short, action-packed life.
No one can be sure when or how it happened. A stray, fugitive spark from the sharpening of a flint axe head perhaps; or a lightning strike in a primeval forest bringing a crackle of sudden heat and light and a plume of smoke in the depths of a stormy Pleistocene night. But whatever it took, whatever happened, at some unknowable but undeniable point in the earth’s history, human beings discovered fire and how to control it.
We’ll never know when that was; certainly before 230,000 BC when we have evidence of hearths in Terra Amata, southern France. But whenever it occurred, this step, according to many modern anthropologists, marked the real beginnings of our culture. Firstly, of course, it meant a giant culinary leap for mankind. But it gets more interesting than that. Raw food is harder to digest and far less calorific than cooked; gorillas and other big primates have to spend eight hours a day eating to get enough calories to feed their small brains. When we invented cooking, we beefed up our brain
s far more speedily and easily than before, without having to spend the day sitting around gormlessly munching and masticating. Cooking made us smarter.
So we became cleverer. But what to do with this new brain power and the capacity to embrace abstract thought? Mastery of fire brought a new social dimension to our existence, too. The glow and warmth of the campfire extended the short, harsh day beyond sunset. It brought us together in light and safety when the daily business of survival was over. It gave us entertainment, art, nightlife; all that good stuff. When humans mastered fire, they invented leisure.
A couple of million years later – in AD 1983 to be precise – the singer Cyndi Lauper put it rather well: ‘When the working day is done, oh girls, they want to have fun’. Boys too of course. For as long as we have worked, we have played. We have played in different ways, at different times, for different reasons, and with different levels of engagement. Homo erectus gave way to brainier, brighter Homo sapiens but we have always still wanted to have fun down the long centuries, however constrained our time, however limited our choices. How one set of people have spent and still spend their free time – the working people of northern industrial Britain – is the subject of this book.
As soon as you enter the Buffet Bar on platform 1 of Stalybridge station, you know immediately that that grim trip was worth it. This is a place that feels both a little too good to be true and inescapably, quintessentially northern. Cosy lighting in the bar parlour, antique and mysterious railway bric-a-brac and memorabilia to lose oneself in, conspiratorial corners for secret assignations, a walnut bar to perch at with your novel or the crossword, at the end of which, under glass, glisten home-made hot pork pies, Eccles cakes and Victoria sponges. There are several real ales with enticing names, reeking of industry and Norse myth, a row of bottles of Vimto, and a tureen full of steaming broth ‘freshly made’. The kindly, elderly lady ahead of you at the bar is greeted by name and with her usual, a hot elderflower cordial, at which point you will think that this is definitely too good to be true, or that I am a fantasist, or both. But no.
The lady served, her cordial carried away in a china mug, the barman turns to you to speak but pauses, noticing that the young serving girl has left the kitchen radio on and Heart FM is leaking through into the bar. ‘Let me turn this rubbish off sir …’ he begins, giving you a quick, appraising glance as he does so, at your book, your man bag, your smartphone ‘… and now can I say that, as you don’t seem to be here for the steamy movies or the knitting circle, are you a card carrying member of CAMRA?’
You are none of these but you are intrigued, and the barman can tell. ‘Let me explain. First, a drink? A pint of Boltmakers? Named after our head brewers’ local, the Boltmakers Arms in Keighley. “I’ll tell you now and I’ll tell you briefly, I don’t never want to go to Keighley”,’ he drawls in Salfordian, quoting the great John Cooper Clarke. ‘Nice little pub. Oasis sponsored the pub football team for a while I believe. Now, let me tell you what’s going on here tonight.’
Steamy movies is the humorous name given to the weekly showings of old black-and-white steam train footage in the back bar. He indicates a group of men of a certain age in caps and anoraks, some with pipes, which makes me think of David Hockney’s sage observation that no pipe smoker would ever have road rage. One raises a cap in salute, increasing the sensation that I am in some kind of Lancashire Twin Peaks. ‘The knitters are through there,’ and he points to a clutch of women of varying ages taking needles and multicoloured yarns out of carpet bags and with a variety of drinks in front of them; spritzers, tea, halves of mild. Other regular attractions advertised on the pub’s crowded wall include Laurel and Hardy Night, a poetry reading and several quizzes.
Next to them is a menu upon which my eye falls hungrily. ‘Now then, sir,’ the barman begins apologetically, ‘if you’ve come for our infamous black peas’ – this a northern delicacy, often enjoyed around Bonfire Night and delicious in a Dickensian sort of way – ‘then I have to tell you that they haven’t really been soaking for long enough yet. It wouldn’t be right to serve them for you. I can offer you a delicious hot pork pie from Saddleworth and mushy peas though, and after that perhaps a home-made pudding.’
‘Yes, that would be marvellous,’ I answer weakly, the evening beginning to take on the quality of a dream. On the wall a sign reads that this is has been voted CAMRA’s pub of the year. I’m just surprised it isn’t every year.
In a daze of pleasure, I find a corner table. I have come here to start a new book and to re-read the end of an old one. That was called Pies and Prejudice and I turn, somewhat sheepishly in case I’m spotted, to the end of the book which found me in another wonderful northern watering hole; the transport café on Hartside Pass in the Pennines. It was late spring, and it felt more like early summer. April 2007; the sky thick with larks, the dusk gentle and lambent. I was in a romantic, reflective mood. A year or two of research for Pies and Prejudice was ending, researches and travels that had taken me all over northern England and had rekindled my complicated love affair with the north, its landscape, its people and its hard, wild, gorgeous history. I wrote then about the view from that spot, the top of Hartside Pass and was forgivably lyrical I hope about ‘the gathering blue dusk’ and ‘that silvery stream of twinkling light along the mighty tributary of the M6’. Kindled for that first book which came out in 2008, love raged on, as complex and intoxicating as ever, as difficult and as wonderful.
‘Write about what you know’ is the timeworn, oft-repeated advice given to budding authors. There’s some truth in this, although it would leave the sci-fi and fantasy shelves of your local bookshop looking pretty threadbare. (That’s even if you have a local bookshop.) ‘Write about what you care about’ strikes me as better advice. In 2007–8, I wrote that book about the north of England because I knew a fair bit about it and I cared a good deal too. I didn’t know or care as much as I thought I did, though, which was why the book, and what TV talent shows and celebrity baking programmes call ‘the journey’, became so important and enjoyable to me.
I fancy making those kinds of journey again. To the heart and the hubbub of working Britain to see what folks are up to. I am in search of what a long-running BBC radio show called ‘workers’ playtime’. It ran for 24 years, between 1921 and 1964, and came three times a week from a different factory, bringing music and comedy to the shop floor from top entertainers of the day. With its venues chosen by the Ministry of Labour, exhortations to increased production and its regular catch phrase of ‘Good luck, all workers!’, it sounds positively North Korean now, or at least rather quaint and paternalistic. A little patronising, yes, but in the age of Benefit Street and Jeremy Kyle, when working-class people and their lives are routinely offered up contemptuously as a freak show, Workers’ Playtime now seems rather sweet and warm. In fact, Workers’ Playtime might have been an alternative title for this book had The Pie at Night not suggested itself first, as a nod to its predecessor and to the notion of clocking off and enjoying leisure. Not all the activities here are actually exclusively nocturnal, but whether the play is at night or day, this is a book about love and work and the debatable land between.
‘Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness’ said Sigmund Freud, a truth that Johnny Marr of The Smiths once quoted to me during an interview. While I’ve long been a fan of Johnny’s, I’ve never been the most ardent disciple of Sigmund, especially not of his cockeyed (literally) dream theories. I’ve always believed that sometimes when you dream about a snake, it may be that snakes are on your mind for some reason best known to yourself. You may have been watching re-runs of Animal Magic or Snakes on a Plane or The Jungle Book. You may work in the reptile house of Chester Zoo. Similarly, I’ve always held that our dreams are merely a random nocturnal whizz through the mental Rolodex of the day’s events.
(Hence, in one of my more vivid and memorable recent dreams, I went to see the American alt rock band The National at a village hall in Yorkshire. I alighte
d at a station called (implausibly) Catterick Hat Shop. A local family took me back to their house for tea, which consisted of a vast oleaginous fry-up. When I got to the gig, I was by now, and for reasons unclear, carrying a large roll of stair carpet which the band kindly let me leave backstage. I then watched the show on the shoulders of the radio broadcaster Marc Riley, who subsequently dropped me on the pool table.)
But this axiom of Freud’s from Johnny struck me as an insight of an entirely different order; more than that, a kind of mantra or philosophy that offered truth, inspiration, consolation even. Love and work are the pillars and the poles of life that we navigate between. To be human is to love and work, and what we cannot get from one, we can hopefully find in the other. The Beatles had it slightly wrong. Love and work are all you need.
Love gets the better press. There are no pop songs called everlasting work, whole lotta work, are you ready for work, work is a many splendored thing or I’ve got my work to keep me warm. Not even work train, I’m not in work or the work of the common people (although there should be). Similarly, there are no songs extolling the virtues of loving in a coalmine, which I think is a real pity. It sounds intriguing.
But there are songs and plenty of them that either imply or come straight out and say that, hey man, work is a drain and a drudge, a shackle and a sentence, something that gets in the way of the proper stuff of life, which generally in the popular song is love.
There is a marked and telling difference between us and the Americans here. From Springsteen to Jimmy Webb, American songwriters have regularly and passionately lionised the working man/ woman and the blue-collar life. In Britain, from the Kinks to The Jam to Cat Stevens’ ‘Matthew & Son’, our pop musicians have tended to sneer at the supposed banality of the average working life. There are a few honourable exceptions to this. In fact, Johnny’s old band mate Morrissey wrote about the friction between freedom, boredom, unemployment and work as well and wittily and mordantly as anyone. His early lyrics are full of ambivalence towards what Phillip Larkin called ‘the toad work’. In ‘Still Ill’, he’s never had a job because he’s ‘too shy’ and he’s ‘never wanted one’ and if you must go to work tomorrow, well, if he were you, he wouldn’t bother.