The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

  Eerily so, when, at one point when the tram reaches the halt at The Town, a small group of men in khaki meet us as we disembark. They chat, they show the kids their rifles and bullet belts, and they gently cajole and sport with the male passengers. At the time I visited, scenes like this were being enacted all over Britain, as the nation remembered the outbreak of the First World War on its hundredth anniversary. We did this nationally in a variety of ways, from the sublime to the less so, from Paul Cummins and Tom Piper’s blood-red tide of a million poppies at the Tower Of London to a Sainsbury’s ad that somehow strove to equate the horrors of the Somme and the Christmas truce of 1914 to BOGOF Baked Beans and Taste The Difference Streaky Bacon.

  Once regarded as the ultimate folly and the last word in futile carnage, newer perspectives on the Great War are starting to see that as a primarily English view, encouraged by our First World War poets. Certainly, their influence has been pervasive – when the Beamish chaps in their puttees and neat trimmed ’tashes lean on their rifles in the main street and tell us of the Bosche and our brave boys at Mons and Ypres, the echoes are all of Owen and Sassoon, of bugles calling from sad shadows, and at each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.

  The main street is where the commercial bustle at the heart of the town lies, a fug, reeking of horses and coal smoke, echoing to the clattering trams and hooves and wheels on cobbles. When I first saw the documentary films of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, made at the turn of the twentieth century and rescued from a Blackburn shop basement after a hundred years to be shown on BBC TV as the Lost World Of Mitchell & Kenyon, one of the many things than stunned and delighted me was how crowded and alive the town streets of England of the 1900s were. Even at their busiest now, on maybe a hot summer Saturday or the last working day before Christmas, the Lancashire towns they filmed in like Wigan, Blackburn are Preston are like ghost towns compared to what you see here. Mitchell and Kenyon’s streets are thronged with folk, horses, barrows, traders, vendors, kids, dogs, trams and trolleybuses. It’s an invigorating mayhem. Life was not the privatised and domestic affair it is today, conducted under fluorescent lights in offices and cubicles, on out of town estates and shopping centres. It was lived communally and al fresco and must have been maddening and thrilling at the same time. Beamish’s Town, thanks to its stream of visitors and parade of actors, has some of that same vibrant feel.

  Watching the Briton of today in the urban townscape of a century ago prompts a few thoughts from your ever vigilant observer; chiefly that eating or at least snacking seems to have become our national sport. Scores of kids are milling around, all are eating constantly in that remorseless, slightly hypnotic way that sheep on the high fells do. I watch a tiny girl on a bench in Redman Park wrestling with a family size bag of Pickled Onion Monster Munch as big as herself. Everywhere you look small children are brandishing and cradling pasties, toffees, Pringles, Mars bars and the occasional banana. To be fair to them, this is not of their own volition. Legions of fussing parents are watching them like hawks, except no hawk was ever so worried about his or her fledgling’s food intake. It’s like the movie Speed, if it were called Nosh. At no point must your calorie intake fall before 50 kilojoules a minute or you will die a hideous death from starvation.

  Also, here’s a serious question. When did we become so hung up on flipping hydration? I never heard the word till I was about 20. Now you hear old ladies in the hairdressers under those big hairdryers saying, ‘Are you keeping yourself hydrated, Doreen?’ and blokes down the bowling green carrying plastic sacks with tubes bottles designed for endurance runners. If you’re crossing the Serengeti on foot in the dry season or smelting in a foundry, I can see the need for having a small bottle of water to hand. But everyone here at Beamish – toddlers, football dads, young mums, gormless youths, elderly ladies – are laden with gallon bottles of Highland Spring that they suck from constantly like Joe Frazier during the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’.

  Funny how our attitude to water has changed. Now it’s seen as a sophisticated lifestyle accoutrement, like a smartphone or an avocado. It used to be something boring that came out of the tap. When I was a kid, dashing in from a ten-hour, forty-a-side football game during the summer holidays, desperate for a glug of Barr’s Cream Soda or Corona Limeade, I was told dispiritingly to drink ‘corporation pop’ or ‘Adam’s Ale’. Or even tea, which was supposed to be most thirst quenching of all. A huge money-saving fib, and I knew it then as I know now, because I have never seen anyone with a teapot running alongside Paula Radcliffe at the London Marathon.

  Speaking of gormless youths, which I think you’ll find I was, I bump into a particularly fine example on my way across the square. His faded jeans are cut off at the bony knees and he wears a presumably ironic Rolling Stones T-shirt and has Kurt Cobain’s Vileda supermop hair. There is none of the doomed Nirvana singer’s nihilistic intensity here, though, as he chews vacantly on something unidentified and smirks at his mate. Both have spots and languid Home Counties’ drawls, and I fight hard against ingrained prejudice. Let us be generous and say that he may well be stumbling down the dark and enclosing tunnel of adolescence, soon to emerge a model citizen and go off to work with Médecins Sans Frontières in Eritrea.

  The residential street at Beamish’s Town is called Ravensworth Terrace, saved from demolition in the 1970s and rebuilt brick by brick here from its original site in Gateshead. The houses have been beautifully recreated as various dwellings. Number 2 represents the home of music teacher Miss Florence Smith. There is manuscript paper on the stand and a love token of a glass rolling pin on the dresser. The Budget Kurt Cobain follows me in with his mum in tow. She looks at the neat back room with its blackened range and charming wallpaper, a small, neat much loved domicile, and pronounces it ‘creepy’ before going out for a fag.

  I can’t agree with her there. But young and old, gormless and smart, we all get the creeps at Nos 3 and 4 Ravensworth Terrace. This belongs to J Jones, a dentist in Edwardian Hartlepool, and whose chilling surgery is now also relocated to Beamish. Free dentistry didn’t arrive till the coming of the NHS. Before that you would have your teeth pulled at travelling fairs, markets or, if you were lucky enough to live in a town, at grisly establishments like J Jones. Preventative dentistry was largely unknown – you went to the dentist when you were in pain – although it was not uncommon for young women to get a set of false teeth for their twenty-first birthday and for them to have teeth pulled needlessly to save future husbands the expense of buying dentures later on. Apparently this was standard in County Durham till the mid-fifties. Dentistry even in my seventies’ youth was primitive too, as I found to my cost when, not that long ago, I had to have work done on mine that could have bought me a BMW and was in no way commensurate with the pleasure I got from my childhood diet of Tooty Frooties. My friend’s dad actually did his own dentistry, removing a loose and painful tooth by facing himself in the mirror with pliers poised, gripping said tooth and then ‘waiting until I least expected it’ before yanking it out.

  As you head upstairs at Number 3 Ravensworth Terrace, with shrinking trepidation, upsetting childhood memories fill one’s head along with the Proustian scent of the chloroform and the Nitrous Oxide or ‘laughing gas’. A dentist once told me that, at dental school parties, they would sometimes let a little ‘nitrous’ leak gently into the room to improve the mood. They could certainly do with some in here. The room is crammed and bristling with various nightmarish instruments, leather pipes and tubes, vicious looking clamps and I remember that reclining green leather chair from my school dentist and from many subsequent bad dreams. In here, the dentist and his nurse are showing a traumatised little girl the large pincers used for tugging out teeth. ‘Then I’ll put a cotton wool ball in to soak up the blood and help it clot,’ he says gently and terrifyingly. He asks her how often she brushes her teeth. ‘Twice a day,’ she answers weakly. ‘Oh no! Once a week is more than enough,’ he replies.

  After all this I am glad to be ou
t on the street with my new friends The Purples. I have christened them thus because dad and son are both resplendent in eye-watering violet football tops and matching quiffs. Maybe it’s the new Newcastle United away strip, though not the quiffs, obviously. Anyway, they are loud and jovial and after some initial reservations – they really are loud – I decide I like them, not least for the fact that they’ve chosen to spend their precious leisure hours immersing themselves in their own history and culture rather than sit watching some berk in a spotted bowtie pricing up Delft china.

  We walk past the Town Stables and the big yard reeking of lanolin and leather. There are several horses in there and The Purples (and me too, to be honest) are unsure whether they are real or not. They seem very still but their eyes occasionally flicker. ‘Are they robots?’ Purple senior asks me thoughtfully. He may well be right but I wonder where one would buy a robot horse. If they were readily available, Kanye West would surely have one. Eventually we decide they are sleeping. A career in equestrian journalism does not beckon for me or him, I fancy.

  At the end of Ravensworth Terrace are the shops and institutions of the town. There’s a sweet shop called Jubilee Confectioners which is doing a predictably brisk trade in pineapple chunks, black bullets and Tyne mints, for which they are queuing out of the door. Next door is the newspaper office and upstairs is a print shop. In it, the printer is explaining, with great patience and pride, the technicalities of his craft and the workings of the Jack Ascough’s Printing Press of Barnard Castle. He is setting the type for a brass band concert poster and trying to get all the alignments, font sizes and justifications exactly right. ‘One band is playing twice, which makes it a little awkward,’ he says tinkering with bits of iron and pots of ink. A family watches him, crunching humbugs with the mechanised precision and regularity of a robot horse.

  The bank, moved here from Gateshead too like the houses, is an imposing edifice in Swedish Imperial granite; its dignity, stolidity even, designed to give confidence to its customers. I wonder how many working folk from the pit villages or farms of County Durham and Northumberland have stood within these walls, awkward and apprehensive, twisting their caps in their hands, waiting for a mortgage, a loan or withdrawing savings for some red letter day. A young teller in glasses and wing collar is putting up a poster from the period explaining why nationalisation of the banks is absolutely necessary. Plus ça change, I think.

  There is also a Co-op at Beamish, transplanted from Annfield Plain, a nearby ex-mining village. It is wonderful. The Co-op began in Rochdale, in 1844. Twenty-eight textile weavers from the town, poor and desperate and blacklisted for striking for better conditions, pooled £140 to buy a small dry goods store stocked with oatmeal, sugar, butter, flour and a handful of candles. Ten years later, with a fine reputation for quality, the British co-operative movement had grown to nearly 1,000 co-operatives. That first little shop at 31 Toad Lane, Rochdale, is now a museum, but in its heyday it would have looked a lot like the one I mooch about now.

  Two older ladies are reminiscing about their ‘divi’ numbers – the Co-op’s very own pioneering dividend loyalty card system – and I admire the marble slabs for keeping the cheeses cool and fresh, the wooden butter pats, the hams and pipes and snuff, and the Dainty Dinah Toffee tins. I marvel at the elaborate nature of the Lamson-Paragon cash carrying system, which whizzed payments and change inside hollow wooden balls along overhead tracks. It is delightful and more than a little nuts. I chuckle at the ad for ‘Mekumfat’, a feed guaranteed to give you ‘plump poultry’ and showing a rubicund, breathless farmhand chasing some huge, crazed chickens around a barn. I ask the nice assistant in the pinafore dress where the bacon slicer is and she tells me gently but firmly that, ‘They weren’t invented till 1920 and in this shop it’s 1913.’ This reminds me of the time at a similar attraction, Dudley’s Black Country Living Museum, when a customer in the pub asked for a Diet Coke and some prawn cocktail crisps only to be told sharply ‘It’s 1932 in here chum. You can have a Sarsaparilla and a cheese and onion bap.’

  There is so much of Beamish that to cover it all would take the rest of this book; farms, churches, a fairground and railway, the entire Georgian village of Pockerley. So let me take you to a couple more places nearer our own time. The trolleybus up the hill to Home Farm and Orchard Cottage is driven by a young Asian man who is openly covetous of the disabled ramp/lift of a fellow driver. ‘I’m hoping to get one in the New Year,’ he says, wistfully, as if it were a Maserati. Thus conveyed, I arrive at the cottage with The Purples whom I am starting to like more and more.

  ‘Aunty Jen’s house was like this, she had her cooker there,’ says Ma Purple, as the householder played by an actor sits silently, playing solitaire ludo (somehow) and listening to ITMA on the wireless. A newspaper lying nearby tells us that we are in Warship Week. It is now 1940. Orchard Cottage is intended to represent the home of a family of evacuees escaping urban bombing raids. There’s anti-blast tapes on the windows and an Anderson shelter in the garden. But inside, it is small and neat and homely; pastel blues and warm creams, utilitarian but cosy. It reminds me of my Irish grandmother ‘Granma Coney’s’ little house in Haydock near Wigan.

  It also reminds me of a conversation I once had with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the design expert. Sometimes dismissed as an arch televisual fop, I found him engaging, intelligent company. The Second World War and the supercharged vibrancy, danger and urgency it gave to daily life fascinate him as they do me. For Bowen, it was a sexy time, a time of glamour in the face of darkness. ‘When you know that every night, the Luftwaffe might blow up your house and kill you in your bed, you get on with today.’ I grew up adoring Richmal Crompton’s Just William books and would lie in bed at night on a seventies’ council estate absorbed in the doings of a fictional 12-year-old from the Home Counties, his ration books, gas mask and dealings with the ARP warden. This, and Dad’s Army, made kids like me and Laurence pine to have lived in these fabulous times. That may have been trivial but, for me, it’s deepened into real respect for the generation of Britons who found and forged a national voice and character back then; who, whether fighting in the skies or sitting stoically with ludo and ITMA at kitchen tables, defied a ravenous, spreading evil and then built a better fairer Britain from the wreckage and ruins.

  I also really like the clothes. How cool did Land Girls look? Those tank tops and hair piled up in scarves, the rolled-up sleeves, the jumpers and plaid shirts. My Auntie Mag never married and stayed at home to look after Granma Coney. In the war, though, she’d been a teenage Land Girl and you knew from the way she talked about it – the camaraderie, the work, the sense of youthful vigour and purpose – that it was the greatest time of her life. I’ll bet. Who wouldn’t want to spend summer in Devon or Kent mucking about in haycarts and barns with all your mates, a gang of hardworking, fun-loving young women, and give international Fascism a bloody nose at the same time?

  I have my lunch in the British Kitchen. It’s ‘Allotment Soup’, a hearty stew ‘made from everything in the allotment except the greenhouse’ and served to me by a smiling woman in full Land Girl gear. The next lady in the queue just wants a paper bag and asks how much. Slightly baffled, the man behind the counter says, ‘You can have a paper bag for nothing, missus, we’re not the National Trust.’

  The British Kitchen is an example of a British Restaurant, institutions set up in 1940 to provide cheap, wholesome fare for people bombed out of their homes or otherwise in need. At the height of the war, there were several thousand of them serving over half a million cheap and much needed meals a day. They were originally called Community Feeding Centres, but Churchill disliked the drab, functional, faintly socialistic sound of that so re-named them British Restaurants. There was undoubtedly a political element to them. Labour liked their egalitarian impulse and when they came to power post-war thought they might become a permanent feature of life, guaranteeing a nourishing diet for the poor. However, they were disbanded in 1947.

  I
meet the man from the British Restaurant outside as he’s coming out after his shift behind the counter. He points me in the direction of Home Farm, once part of Sir Anthony Eden’s family estate and full of the high-tech gear and innovations that would never have been lavished on the estate’s ordinary tenant farmers. ‘Look at that water boiler,’ he says, indicating what looks like a small U Boat in a nearby field. ‘That was the boiler for the steam engine. Can you imagine getting all that water to boil? And of course it was deadly. Loads of people were killed and maimed by the bloody things. But of course, they were only farm workers so it didn’t matter …’

  At the farm itself, I am greeted by a compelling sight. The biggest pig I have ever seen. I’m no huge pig enthusiast so I realise this statement lacks real authority, but boy, was it ever gigantic, and standing on its hind legs leaning over a stone wall seemingly addressing a small crowd of people. It’s all a bit Animal Farm and, to tell you the truth, it freaked me out. As I get closer I see that the pig is, in fact, leaning over to eat a proffered bit of sausage roll (which seems in poor taste to me though not, I have to say, to the pig) and, obligingly, to have his picture taken. Or her. I was in no hurry to find out.

  At the centre of the knot of onlookers are, predictably, The Purples. Pa Purple and youngest daughter – and writing this has instantly made me think of Ask the Family. Ask your dad – are having an earnest and thoughtful discussion about how effective a pig would be in the disposal of a body.

  Pa Purple: ‘The thing about a pig, y’naa, is it will eat any part of a human except the bones.’

  Daughter Purple: ‘What about teeth?’