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

by Stuart Maconie

  For working people, precious days of paid holiday were rare, hard won and to be celebrated fiercely and without restraint. Leisure in the pre-industrial world is sometimes rather rosily seen as an idyllic sunlit parade of maypole dancing, cider quaffing, Morris dancing and cricket on the village green in a Merrie England theme park, a Pop Larkin vision of rural life as full of plump, buxom and bucolic pleasure. Then along comes the Industrial Revolution with its dark satanic mills and we’re all condemned to be sooty-faced factory fodder. In fact, for most people, the myth of the pre-industrial golden age was just that – a myth, and one sadly encouraged by well-meaning types like folk music collector Cecil Sharp and a casual acquaintance with Cider with Rosie. Rural life, for those not lucky enough to belong to the landed gentry, was fairly grim and circumscribed. Holidays and free time were strictly rationed. Apart from the odd hiring fair or rare afternoon spent rush-bearing, cheese-rolling, well-dressing or the like, life for the agricultural worker was more Tess of the D’Urbervilles than Darling Buds of May.

  The Factory Act of 1833 prohibited the employment of children under nine in cotton mills and restricted the hours that older children could work. It also prohibited night work for youngsters and made educational provisions. Further acts improved the lot of children and women and eventually in 1847 the full Ten-Hour Act, as it was known, became law for workers of both sexes and all ages. It was patchy in its coverage and far from exhaustive or ideal in its provisions but it was the beginning of a turning of the tide toward workers’ rights and employers’ responsibility, of a recognition that welfare and safety as well as profit and productivity needed to be borne in mind (a trend in working conditions that seemed irreversible until the 1980s). For many ordinary British people, it offered a new, richer life in which education, self-improvement, sport and pastimes became not just the preserve of the rich. Workers’ playtime had begun, at least for men. For as Dennis Brailsford puts it in his book Sport Time and Society, ‘working class women, though they might nominally have the same free time as their menfolk, had the harder bargain. The meals still had to be on the table even on holidays.’

  From there on, the rest of the nineteenth century brought forth what’s been described as a ‘leisure revolution’. As people crowded together in the big, bustling new Victorian towns and cities, as their jobs become more intense and their hours more regular, so the appetite for recreation – often noisy, wild, hedonistic recreation as release from their arduous, private, silent work – grew. A French politician called Léon Faucher who came to northern England at the time claimed in his Studies Of The English that the urban working class ‘cannot partake of anything in moderation’. In the north we like to say, ‘all things in moderation … including moderation’.

  Zero-hours contracts, erosion of union power and more fluid and flexible working hours have meant that the formal paid holiday is not quite the social institution it once was, when the whole of Britain would seemingly down tools and put on a knotted handkerchief. But you only have to drive on an English motorway on Easter Sunday or hear the sorrow and regret in the weather forecaster’s voice on August Bank Holiday Monday or try to buy a drink in Ireland on Good Friday to see that, in these islands, the bank holiday is still a cherished national institution.

  As a youth, as I kicked a football about with Brownie, Nidge and Mike Tyrer, or went to Knowsley Safari Park and watched monkeys pull my dad’s windscreen wipers off (off his Ford Capri. He didn’t have windscreen wipers) or eat a 99 on Ainsdale Beach, I could see just why Good Friday was good to me, but less so Jesus. But then Easter was a funny business all round. The logic by which the gruesome and brutal execution of mankind’s saviour should be commemorated by eating chocolate eggs filled with Smarties eluded me, but I wasn’t complaining.

  I wasn’t complaining either as I made my way in 2014, along with a goodly proportion of Cumbria, on the most glorious Good Friday in years, to the north-west coast of England. All morning, weather presenters had beamed and made elaborate sweeping hand gestures in front of maps covered in egg-yolk suns and beetling isobars. It was going to be a beautiful day and while some in this part of England were heading for the high cloudless fells, a great mass of humanity had packed its bucket and spade and Factor 50 and was heading for Silloth.

  Like some people, Silloth was built for fun really. The pretty town, nestling on the wide Solway Firth, eight miles across the water from Scotland at a terminus of the railway from Carlisle, grew quickly as a place of recreation for the factory workers of the great Border city and its workers. Famed for its shrimps and sunsets, its long sandy beaches, mild winters, hot summers and pleasant airy streets, it is one of the very finest examples of a Victorian seaside town in England. Its heyday may have been a century or so ago, but even now in this age of budget air travel and stag weekends in Riga, a hot bank holiday will find its streets and beaches crowded with the workers of Cumbria, and its population of 3,000 more than doubles in the summer months. Golf courses and caravan parks abound.

  The glittering blue Solway, which can make the promenade as cold and inhospitable as a Baltic naval base in winter, is a powerful draw on a day like this, when Dumfries and its parent mountain Criffel look just a stone skim away across the glinting water. I have heard Silloth sneered at by clots who’ve never been but assume it will be some decrepit resort that time forgot, when it fact it is just shy, easy to miss and very easy in its own skin; sweet and likeable but without the brashness or the air of seediness that can hang around parts of Blackpool or Morecambe.

  That said, it’s good I didn’t come yesterday as all roads into town were closed because of an armed robbery at the bank. And, true, if you arrive like I do from the north via Skinburness, you can glimpse a sad side of the town. This lonely hamlet is a haven for birdwatchers and the raised shingle spur of Grune Point is a fabulous spot. It’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest with the Solway on one side and the bleak, alluring saltmarshes on the other, rich in sandwort, sea holly and sand couch-grass, haunted by fast-rising tides than can snare the unwary. But the Skinburness hotel looks forlorn; shuttered and creepy like somewhere that Scooby-Doo and the gang might investigate to discover that Old Man Rogers was deliberately scaring customers away from so that he could build a new supermarket there and, yes, he would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids. ‘Gas Off’ says a chalked sign hanging limply in the doorway, the 3 RAC and AA Rosettes now covered in dust and mildew.

  Spirits improve though as you stroll into town along the cobbled main drag. This is called Criffel Street, named after the bold, shapely mountain that faces you across the water. The day is heating up and there’s lively trade and some deft aerobatics at the Silloth Town Council BMX Track, tucked in a wood overlooking the sea. Down the road at the RAFA club, there’s ‘Live Big Screen Sky Sports’ and a sign exhorting you to ‘Be Part Of Something Special Every Day’, although it would have to be monumentally special to keep me in a sepulchral interior on a day like today. To get you in the mood for relaxed fun, there’s a large pictorial chart in the doorway, explaining the specifications of various fighter aircraft; the thrust of the AV-8 Harrier, the wingspan and machine gun capabilities of the Eurofighter Typhoon. All the fun stuff.

  Silloth is justly proud of its green. It has its own website, its own Facebook page and its own Twitter feed. Here you will learn that it is ‘one of the largest and longest village Greens in England and forms a grassy link between the Silloth townscape and the sea front promenade, complementing the grand regency style buildings on Criffel Street, which runs along the opposite side of the broad cobbled road.’ Today it’s overflowing with lads and dads playing football, toddlers toddling, dogs chasing drifting Frisbees and young women in sunglasses stretching out in the sun. Squat and proud in the midst of all this is a cute feature; a clay millennium disc with various elements of the town illustrated – the convalescent home, the aerodrome and the tennis club – like something from a giant’s plasticine playb
ox.

  Further down Criffel Street, the Queen’s Hotel looks smart in biscuit and white and, next to it, I am drawn to investigate the sprawling warren of the Queen’s Court Charity Shop. Despite, or maybe because of the sun outside, scores of bargain hunters are leafing absently through old bri-nylon shirts, seventies board games and laminate place mats featuring hunting scenes. A large pleading sign in the doorway says ‘No More Videos Please’. The last word in desirable tech chic in my youth is now a sorry bit of aged tat. There is a cassette section, too, featuring a breathtaking range of artists: Bruckner, Suzanne Vega, Harry Secombe, The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Slayer. In the CD section are six different Billie Piper albums. Someone has clearly gone off Billie very suddenly and irrevocably, ditching the lot in one fell swoop in one of those moves that must have a story behind it – a divorce, a move, perhaps just a tale of growing up and moving on, to Slayer maybe. Wondrous items abound; literally hundreds of jigsaws, each with a tale to tell of rainy static caravan holidays in North Wales. There’s a pristine copy of the MB games classic Frustration ‘with the Pop-o-matic dice’, a child’s glow-in-the-dark skeleton suit and a knitted toilet-roll cosy in the shape of an Edwardian lady. No wonder both Paul McCartney and Tom Waits have written superbly sad and creepy songs (‘Junk’ and ‘Soldier’s Things’) that are essentially simply inventories of the items you find in these places.

  The toy soldier museum is just about to open but a glance at the leaflet makes me wonder how many rows of small lead figures I could want to look at before I think myself sated. Four perhaps. I put the leaflet back in the arms of the giant guardsman outside – not real – and head over to another part of the green and that most oddly English and variable of things, the craft fair. By the wildly inconsistent standards of the enterprise, this is quite a good one. There are some actually half decent carved wooden sculptures, a perfectly edible Guinness chutney and some coasters of owls that are only mildly disturbing. There is certainly nothing here as poor as the crude plywood cat’s face with googly eyes and legend ‘You’re No-One Till You’ve Been Ignored By A CAT!!!’ that adorns my fridge, bought from a craft fair in the north Lakes in a moment of irony. But the best thing about the fair is the strange and particular ambience in the tent. The air is beginning to gently congeal, the white canvas walls throb with light, and from underfoot comes that sweet, musty aroma of grass gently cooking under sunlit tarpaulin that may be the signature scent of an English summer.

  Outside at the end of the green an enormous queue snakes its sunburned way out of the chip shop, scarlet of arm and mustard of shorts. The obscure and confusing ‘two door’ queuing system is causing some confusion and not a little simmering tension in this hungry high noon. The accents are mainly Cumbrian but the specifically local lady ahead of me is starting to get a tad vexed at our ineptitude with the procedures. I give her a sheepish smile and she softens and her son tells me that he’s a local musician and plays on ‘Frank’s new album’. In this part of the county, Frank is not Sinatra, but Dunnery, the prodigiously gifted guitar prodigy who with his band It Bites, had a hit that readers of an eighties vintage will remember with ‘Calling All The Heroes’.

  Once the queuing has been mastered, there is to come the complexities of the menu and noticeboard. The choice, as it was in Grandma Pollards, is enormous and bewildering. Skate, rollmops, black pudding, haggis, ‘shrek kebab one pound’, turkey sticks, scallops, breakfast baps. Pinned behind the counter are several cuttings and pictures. A page from a newspaper shows a young girl offering some chips to the camera and the caption, ‘The girl who can finally eat fish and chips’, a nice human interest tale from the local paper one assumes. By this is a blurred photocopied picture of two burly shirtless men with shaven heads. Before them another man in a white shirt is crouching in what seems to be supplication. From the bunting and vague crowds in the background of the shot, they seem to be at some kind of fete. Below it, there’s a caption which may explain things. It says, in thick marker pen, ‘Soup and a roll one pound’.

  Armed with the banker choice of chips and curry sauce and an icy perspiring cream soda straight from the fridge, I head for the fairground. As I near it, I can hear that over the crackling boomy tannoy, they’re playing pre-Beatle rock and roll standards: Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’, Johnny Tillotson’s ‘Poetry In Motion’. These are perfectly acceptable fairground soundtrack selections I’d say. I would also allow glam pop, disco and ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ by Thin Lizzy. Nothing hip or clever or too modern. No one wants to hear some sensitive young man blubbing a ballad when you’re trying to snog or fight on the waltzer, be it Nick Drake or Ed Sheeran.

  I lurk by the dodgems. The dodgems fascinate me. Long before an electric car was something that Guardianistas approved of, it meant slow mo gladiatorial combat in these little vehicles showering sparks. What is the etiquette here? Can you go after a stranger without motive or mercy, like the truck did in Steven Spielberg’s early classic Duel? Who can you not ram? Breastfeeding women? OAPs, people carrying fragile crystal ornaments? I think there should be signs that explain the etiquette, like the ones forbidding bombing and petting in swimming pools.

  Dark and whirling against the azure sky, the Ferris wheel is going round at a hell of a lick it seems to me and with some distinctly queasy looking customers. As a precaution, I move a little away from any possible trajectory. A woman tries to enjoin me to ‘hook a duck, love’ and adds something I think might be mildly suggestive from her ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’ delivery but I can’t make it out as a large metal box on stilts next to her suddenly lurches into noisy life, like a cannibalised transit van or a monstrous Transformers’ version of a chest freezer.

  When a small and distinctly unimpressed looking young girl emerges from it, I realise that I have been in one myself. They’re a sort of computer animated fairground ride that work on the principles of big screen visuals and vibrations. They have state of the art ones at the Futuroscope multimedia theme park near Poitiers, France. From my (admittedly limited) experience of the ones at British funfairs, though, most smartphone games have better graphics and most minicab rides fling you about more. But that is to miss the point. A shabby cajoling cheerfulness – and an undercurrent of crime, lasciviousness and food poisoning – is what makes our funfairs so much more, well, fun, than Walt Disney’s raspberry Reich.

  Beyond the mild clamour of the rides, past the gently revolving outsized teacups with their serene cargo of toddlers, a sleek wooden walkway curves out to a platform looking out over the dunes of West Beach and the town’s little dock. Johnny Kidd and Connie Francis are still faintly audible on the breeze as the shrimp boats come and go between the harbour and the Solway. At a pub quiz in Wigan once, we were asked, ‘What’s grey and got 40,000 muscles?’ My mate Tim piped up instantly ‘The Solway Firth’. The answer was actually ‘an elephant’s trunk’ but Tim’s answer was bloody quick, bloody funny and probably an underestimate. Most days, the Solway is a leaden, churning sheet of salt water. Today it’s huge, blue and invigorating. The compass on the platform reels off directions and distances: ‘Isle of Man 55, Skiddaw 19, Carlisle 19, Dumfries 16’. Silloth is a very English seaside resort in a county that is proudly so. The nearest major town though, as the crow flies, is a Scottish one. But the crow flies over some deep, cold, lonely water. You’d struggle to get your big shop home without wet feet.

  I come back to town via the newly refurbished Victorian pagoda, an airy belvedere overlooking the Solway where a small child sits between her numbed, drawn parents, alternately screaming and listlessly licking an ice cream. I can still hear her as I slip inside the welcoming darkness and clatter of the amusement arcade.

  Again, I’m something of a sucker for these places. That vestigial big kid still finds a nugget of a thrill in the lights and noise, the metallic clunk and gush of the all too rare pay-outs, the tinny rock and roll of the pinball machine, rather than see it for what it probably is, cheap and a little seedy. Such places are ess
entially unchanged since I was a child, the passage of time marked only in the nods to transient movies and pop stars in the games and slot machines. Most are as timeless as the sphinx.

  There’s the coin waterfall where banks of two pence pieces rise up in great frozen waves, defying gravity and obscurely but surely rigged. Incredibly, this was turned into a TV show a couple of years back, suggesting that Pro Celebrity Shove Ha’Penny might get commissioned soon. There’s the shotgun ranges, now updated to feature laser cannons and lurching mutants. By the Whittakers Ascot Gold Cup horse racing game a young mum in a fringed leather jacket stands fixed in steely concentration next to a sign saying ‘Gambling Should Be Fun, Gamble Responsibly’. This warning is, I guess, for those who were hell-bent on losing their houses 2p at a time.

  As the bank holiday enters its mature last phase and the sun drops blazing toward the firth and the horizon, I make my way along with a stream of traffic south along the coast road, along miles of dunes and bleaching light. The next village south is Blitterlees, which like Skinburness sounds like a painful and ugly epidermal disease (‘I’m afraid it’s Blitterlees, Mrs Warburton’). Allonby, with its one string of pastel buildings facing the wave-tossed sea and little else, reminded me of those Cornish villages like Rock. Except Allonby has fewer rangy gorgeous floppy-fringed youths lolling in salmon pink rugby shirts with the collars turned up. It does have a clutch of intriguing buildings though: a reading room, a seawater baths, the Baywatch Hotel, Jack’s Surf Bar and a chippy called The Codfather, who have pinched the famous marionette-on-strings logo from the movie. Except here a juicy plaice is dangling from it.