The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  I end up repairing to the pub with some of the staff and volunteers involved in the walk and the Art House. Internecine politics rears its head sporadically over the pints. One bloke is getting quite voluble about some of the organisers of the Artwalk and how they have ‘hijacked’ the creative spirit of the town. It’s a story I’ve heard before in many a northern boozer; I grew up with it. I know the type because, hey, once maybe I was it. The angry free-spirited small town maverick, always working on that experimental novel/political poetry/radical theatre group who refuses to ‘sell out’. That is, refuses to do any real work, get anything finished or risk the curt rejections of the cruel, real world. We can’t all be real geniuses, but we can all be the kind of helpful person who puts themselves on a rota and offers to wash up. Community art probably needs these people more than it needs geniuses, and certainly more than it needs free spirits or mavericks who can often be real pains in the arse to be around, and usually forget to bring their tea and biscuit money.

  By chance, the resident artist whose installation of tacks I admired at Fell House, Jaimini, pops in. I buy her a drink and tell her how much I liked the piece. She tells me about the long, awkward days of kneeling, squatting and sitting on the cold concrete floor involved in setting the work up (there’s a video of the process at the Art House website). Wryly, she tells me how she lost a couple of days’ work when she realised that she was going to ‘paint’ herself into a corner and hem herself in with a floor of tacks that stopped her getting to the door. One of the most useful tools she had was a long stick for turning the lights on and off from a distance. We coyly dance around the matter of what the piece was ‘about’ and I start to see that we don’t have the same opinions. ‘Well, you’re the artist, so you’re obviously right,’ I concede smiling. ‘Hmm, I don’t know about that,’ she replies, and I realise she is quite serious.

  Later, I find my hotel, ordered online, and check in. ‘Ah, the nicest room in the whole hotel,’ says the darkly handsome Middle European owner. ‘What a waste that you are on your own … maybe not next time …’ he says meaningfully, and I half think he will tap his nose or nudge me like a Romanian Eric Idle. A little nervously I take the lift up to the second floor and then to perhaps the strangest hotel room I have ever encountered. It is the size of a basketball court and nearly as empty, stripped to the irreducible; a bed, a lamp and, oddly, a leather chesterfield couch. It is also clearly in the process of being re-decorated; a process that looks and smells as if it was paused about five minutes before I put my key in the door. The tang of fresh paint in a hotel room is simultaneously the most reassuring and upsetting of all the odours you can come across; it shows they’re making an effort to keep things spruce, but it guarantees that you’ll spend the night alternately weeping and coughing. I hatch a plan.

  Back out onto the rainy high street and, from the all-night curry and kebab house, I buy a lamb dupiaza for £4.50, because a) I am hungry and still regretting not finding a window in my evening for the Bollywood Lounge and b) I want something as smelly as possible to take the overpowering aroma of Cornflower Blue away. In what I think is an excellent deal, it comes with three chapattis and a carton of raita, but no fork, an omission I don’t spot until I’m back on the second floor of my hotel. I sit for a while in my gigantic, partly painted room, me and the three pieces of furniture, wondering whether I could eat my curry with my toothbrush or maybe a coathanger, until I end up trying to eat it with the plastic lid of the raita carton sitting in the windowsill with dark, glistening Wakefield stretched out below me. Perhaps this is how Modigliani dined in his Montmartre garret; eating snails out of the shell with a golf tee. Repast over, I fall asleep after my night of art in a very fitting state, in a room flecked with fresh paint, reeking of turps and emulsion, and randomly smeared with turmeric.

  A postscript. Not long after Artwalk, I came back to Wakefield as performer at the literary festival. ‘Lit Fests’ are things I associate more with the gentle south than the workers’ north. Pluck a letter from the A–Z list at literaryfestivals.co.uk, ‘B’ in my case, and you’ll still find many more Baths, Banburys, Brightons, Bournemouths, Burnham Markets and Budleigh Saltertons than you will Bradfords and Berwicks. But this is changing, as all things are. Over the last year or two, I’ve circuited the Lit Fests of the north, sometimes just looking, sometimes performing. In Hexham, I was the support act to Germaine Greer, where a man in the pub later told me I ‘blew her off’ which was flattering if a little disturbing to hear. This year I’m going to Derby’s first one. So I came back a few weeks after the Artwalk to play a show at the lovely Victorian Theatre Royal as part of Wakefield’s literary festival, delighted that Wakey’s getting arty again. A tweet I receive blusters ‘A Lit Fest in Wakefield is a contradiction in terms’, which gets my back right up until I realise the tweeter is from Leeds and thus horribly partisan of course.

  After the show, which is great fun, the excellent curator Robert Powell asks if I need to be looked after and fed and watered, but I say (and this is genuine) that after the show you quite often just want to do your own thing and be your own boss without having to be social. I ask him if this sounds miserable of me and he tells me Will Self said exactly the same thing. I am reminded of Alan Bennett’s explanation as to why he gave up on readings and festival appearances. He said he had enough of feeling awkward eating Chinese banquets in the back streets of unfamiliar towns at midnight with complete strangers.

  Robert understands all this and tells me the room booked for me should be fine he hopes, at least the aforementioned Will Self and Roger McGough said it was when they stayed in it recently (and separately I should add). I set off armed with the address and, yes, it is exactly the same room in the same hotel as before and I get exactly the same response from exactly the same gentleman on reception. ‘You’re alone … what a shame … it’s a very nice room … we’ve just had it decorated …’

  So, something of an old hand at this routine now, off out I go to grab a late meal. Down darkened streets I head purposefully with but one destination in mind, and arrive at the Bollywood Lounge just too late for their 10.30 last dinner order. A real shame as I liked their advertising billboard in the doorway. It featured recent celebrity diners such as Cliff Richard who apparently came in with mates Freda Payne, Lamont Dozier, Jaki Graham and (the late) Percy Sledge and the MPs Frank Dobson and ‘Eric Prickles’ (sic). They all look contented and well fed (especially ‘Prickles’, obviously), unlike I who trudge back to the very same kebab emporium that catered to me the last time I was here. Determined to carry back all the requisite cutlery and appurtenances this time, I produce a small fabric bag I have with me that I picked up in the Paris book shop Shakespeare & Co. On it is a large reproduction of the iconic picture of the immortal bard himself.

  ‘Nice bag,’ says the Indian proprietor, as he places my pakora and doner with salad and extra chili in it.

  ‘Is that Hitler?’ he asks cheerily.

  What can he possibly have thought? I wonder, as I eat by the open window – the room still stinks like a Dulux factory – listening to the deafeningly loud thumping music from a club that seems empty, but has three girls outside smoking with the bouncers in the misty rain that is rolling in over West Yorkshire. I eat my kebab with ‘Hitler/ Shakespeare’ on my lap as a napkin, looking longingly out across the rooftops of Wakefield at the laughing, sated revellers leaving the Bollywood Lounge and the pizza parlour. Do the smoking girls and the laughing burly bouncers ever take the Wakefield Artwalk? Do the drinkers in the Brown Bear and The Pilot Inn in Berwick ever tear themselves away from the giant television screens and wander the headland in the footsteps of Lowry? Maybe. Maybe not. But that is to miss the point. Both are there for them should they wish and these encouragements to culture make these towns richer and more full, confounding those who might see working class leisure as a matter of frenzied hedonism, of drinking and eating to roaring excess.

  But that said, this too has its place in the
downtime and free time of the north. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom and I was happy to be led there by my stomach.

  CHAPTER 5

  HAVING A GOOD FEED

  Chips and tapas in Tod and Halifax, Michelin stars in Lancashire

  I dined out most evenings as a teenager, and somewhere different every night. My fellow gourmets and I were adventurous, curious and willing to travel but like all connoisseurs, we had our favoured haunts. There was Bentham’s by Alexandra Park in Newton, conservative in scope but always tremendously good; classically prepared traditional cuisine, served by excellent and knowledgeable staff under the stewardship of a first rate lady maître d’, who would however insist on shouting, ‘Do you want a Jubbly lolly with that love?’ rather too loudly when the establishment was crowded. If we happened to have business uptown, there was Jimmy’s on Wigan Lane. This was always busy with discerning regulars, but they would normally fit us in. Renowned for its gravy and pies, latterly they did venture into a sort of oriental fusion cuisine which was popular with younger diners – chop suey rolls, spare ribs, etc. – but wisely maintained signature dishes for the longstanding clientele.

  In the centre of Wigan was The Millgate, something of an oldschool downtown institution à la the Gay Hussar or the Ivy. Its cachet rested on an intimate back room with very few covers but exceptionally good food, freshly cooked (hence some waiting at busy periods), a cellar of chilled Vimto and always bread and butter. If we were nearer our own patch but craving variety or we were particularly ‘clemt’, there was always Greasy Lil’s on Warrington Road, Pemberton. Here the resident chefs would often experiment with the menu and, to be candid, not always entirely successfully; saveloys, faggots and the like are not regional staples of the north and here they could be woefully hit and miss. But the steak puddings were always superb and the curry, gravy and ‘pea wet’ were clearly the work of a skilled saucier.

  Chippies apart, and we shall return to them, or the dining room at various Butlins, I didn’t ‘eat out’ in the accepted sense until I was in my twenties. In my town back then, one just didn’t do it unless your folks were wildly aspirational – the type who had ‘carports’ and Mateus Rosé in the drinks cupboard – or it was a very special occasion. I can vividly recall my first instance of ‘going out for a meal’. Terry Stokes, brother of the aforementioned food critic Jeff, and myself had given up a week of our summer holidays demolishing an old garage used by his caterer dad to store pop and crisps. It was filthy, backbreaking work and our reward at the end of the week was a ‘meal out’ at a pub; a nice pub, mind you, with decent food. Not a spit and sawdust boozer, the kind where the dining options were either a gelatinous pie or a packet of Big D peanuts taken from many on a card hanging behind the bar, removal of which would reveal progressively more of an unclad young woman’s alluring frame.

  No, the Cross Keys in Wigan’s fashionably chi-chi Standishgate district was an epicure’s playground by comparison. There were various cooked animals on offer, probably even an omelette for Wigan’s very few and presumably emaciated vegetarians of the day. But like suburban swingers making small talk over the Matchmakers, we all knew what we were here for. Steak.

  Steak in my house was just steak; a once a week treat and always reliably tasty, as procedurally it came with onions and gravy and had been in ‘the slow cooker’ all day while we were all out in school and factory. But here, in this faux-rustic ‘olde worlde’ dining room with dimple mugs and horse brasses, steak could be ribeye or T-Bone, porterhouse or tenderloin, rump or minute or chuck or fillet. Not only that, but (for a small supplementary charge) you could have it with a little ramekin of sauce, mustard or Provençal or blue cheese. Blue cheese sauce! Mental! Almost as mental as the onion rings which claimed to be ‘beer battered’. Would life ever be the same again? What was it the old song said? ‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm now that they’ve seen Paris?’ Having eaten a beer battered onion ring AND a grilled half tomato cut in a special jagged way, would I ever be content with rehydrating a Pot Noodle again?

  In my lack of dining experience, I was not unique or enormously disadvantaged. I was fairly typical of my kind. Until relatively recently, working-class people would no more have gone out of the house to sit in a formal setting just to eat than they would have to have gone someplace special to iron their clothes. Food was fuel, elevated to a domestic treat on Sunday dinners or Christmas day, but otherwise not to be made an activity of, least of all a palaver, unlike going out to drink or dance or be entertained, none of which could be easily done in your own front room.

  Chips were different though. A source of comfort and joy for decades and, we contend, another brilliant northern innovation such as the computer, female suffrage and nuclear fission. Fried fish was introduced to Britain by Jewish refugees from the continent. It was initially sold by street sellers from a tray around their neck, ‘ice cream at the pictures’ style, or from a ‘fried fish warehouse’ as mentioned by Dickens in Oliver Twist. But it was a northern entrepreneur called John Lees who in 1863 began selling fried fish with chipped potatoes out of a wooden hut at Mossley market in the heart of industrial Lancashire. Like Lennon meeting McCartney at Woolton fete, Rolls having lunch with Royce at the Midland Hotel, Manchester, or Burton and Taylor’s eyes meeting for the first time in Rome on the set of Antony and Cleopatra, this was surely one of history’s most significant bunk-ups.

  At a time when tripe was regarded as exotic fare, and ordinary diets were bland, grim and unvaried, this new pairing was a sensation. Orwell thought that fish and chips ‘averted revolution’ in Britain, and in his academic tome Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, Professor John Walton argues that fish and chips helped win the Great War. He told the BBC, ‘The cabinet knew it was vital to keep families on the home front in good heart … unlike the German regime that failed to keep its people well fed and that was one reason why they were defeated.’ We longer think of Fish and Chips as a healthy diet of course, but we had more pressing concerns then than saturated fats. Fish and chips were packed with calories, filled our bellies and lifted our spirits, and this kind of reading was firing my imagination, making my mind race and stomach rumble as I made my way through a drenching East Lancashire fog to Grandma Pollards.

  I’d been doing my homework, asked around, made some enquiries down at the counters, drooled over the keyboard as I scanned forums dedicated to the subject, and had finally found a handful of names that were by common consent the best chippies in the north. But I was in for a shock when I looked at the posh media. The Times restaurant critic boasted that ‘all the best chip shops are in London’, a statement as dense as it is inflammatory. In their 2013 ‘Best Traditional Chippies in Britain’ feature, Esquire chose just one northern chip shop and concentrated on London and Suffolk. Feigned or not, this was the kind of madness that got my considerable dander up. There is more to a ‘chippie’ than its fresh locally sourced fish, you foodies. It is a rare and mysterious ambient blend of location, vibe, trappings, mushy peas, lighting, curry sauce, forks, staff, smell. Each has its own stamp, its own sizzling music, its own terroir. The place I wanted, said the word on the streets, was Grandma Pollards.

  Crawling through Milnrow in the late rush hour on a freezing night of murk and sleet, I pitied those who make this commute daily. (I once made a TV film round these parts in which we set a keen runner against a motorist on a notorious four-mile stretch. The runner won.) I pass the dark watery bowl of Hollingworth Lake and see that the famous old Italian restaurant Del Lago has closed and become a bar called Marina. Sad. Del Lago was properly, wonderfully old school; Chianti bottles in wicker holders, gigantic phallic pepper pots, trolleys of extravagant gateaux stacked and layered like Venetian palazzi. All around the walls were signed photos of celebrity diners, mainly male TV hosts, comedians and kids’ presenters of the seventies. Maybe that’s why it’s closed down. Maybe all their regular clientele are in prison.

  As I pass through Littleboroug
h at the back of a line of cars moving slowly enough to make out the famous, enigmatic graffiti on the station wall – ‘Mark Owen 93’ – the night is getting worse, becoming a thick drenching clag as I reach the darkened hills of Todmorden and eventually the little ‘Tod’ suburb of Walsden. In a blaze of light and people in an otherwise dark and deserted street, Grandma Pollards looks fabulously welcoming. ‘You Can Park Here’ says a sign by a big yellow Simpson’s style school bus with a weird dummy in the driver’s seat. Even on such a foul night, Grandma P’s is doing a brisk trade. In the takeaway section, there’s a queue and, here in the café area, many of the tables are occupied. I am instantly confronted with what some theorists – not usually with regard to chip shops it has to be said – call the ‘tyranny of choice’. There is every kind of fish in every kind of format. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see mini barracuda and chips or battered ichthyosaurus on the menu. There’s a flummoxing offer of specials and deals. Under a glass counter lounges a glistening, calorific selection of home-made sweet pies – bilberry, apple, raspberry – sugary tarts and vanilla slices, the most sybaritic and irresistible of all the cheap cake treats. With all this choice I feel a bit bad for Emma behind the counter for ordering ‘off the menu’, but she seems sweetly unphased by my request for steak pudding, chips and curry sauce. This Lancashire classic was, according to Victoria Wood, the only meal she still missed as a vegetarian and it had been my default chippy order since my teenage years, when it was mainly eaten in bus shelters with a can of Vimto and, if lucky, Anne Thomas.

  Grandma Pollards, ‘arguably the best chippie in the world’ as their lively website will tell you, has been here since 1957 when the titular baking matriarch branched out into fish and chips. Youngest son Tony is still in charge here, five days a week. ‘But don’t forget we are closed Saturday & Sunday. Tony’s little legs need a rest.’ Tony is here tonight, not doing much in the way of cooking, but generally ‘being around’ chatting, joking with customers, teasing the staff. I have no problem with this maître d’ concept. One of the reasons I liked and miss the above mentioned Del Lago was that it met in every regard my requirements of the perfect traditional Italian restaurant. For me, they must have a) zucchini fritti, b) ‘semplice’ tomato and red onion salad and c) a silver-haired gentleman of obscure role in a smart suit fiddling with his expensive watch, who you know could have someone quietly and expertly drowned for you in a nearby reservoir.