A man comes in and tells Twix Boy (who is quite posh and I guess a student supplementing his non-existent grant) a very long and involved anecdote about how he once appeared fondling some root vegetables in a Sainsbury’s advert. The boy, I have to say, does an admirable job of feigning rapt absorption in the tale. I wonder what Larkin, an old school trad jazz buff with conservative tastes, would have made of the wildly eclectic selection of music: Arcade Fire, Chuck Berry, old Motown, Roxy Music and Barbra Streisand. Two couples come in muffled against the cold. ‘We don’t want a drink,’ they say apologetically. ‘We’re just old students reminiscing.’ I picture them 40 years before, shaggy haired and cheese-clothed, smoking roll-ups, and putting Zep and Carole King on the jukebox.
On my travels, I visit a few more significant Larkin spots such as the branch of M&S, a slick modern wonder in the early sixties, that inspired his poem ‘The Large Cool Store’. A plaque by the lifts near the lingerie features the text. As the afternoon turns towards dusk, and the lights come on at four, and the streets ebb and flow with shoppers and workers, I conclude that I like Hull a lot. It’s bold and characterful with that air of self-sufficiency and rakishness that ports often have. Alexei Sayle once said of it ‘it doesn’t feel like an English city, or like anywhere else, at all. It feels like an enclave of itself … It’s a fascinating city, on the road to nowhere and at the end of the line – it’s isolated and self-contained without being insular or unwelcoming.’ I know exactly what he means. Like Liverpool, with which it has much in common, it doesn’t seek to blend in. It’s very much its own place.
I liked the Land of Green Ginger and Pearson Park. I liked the pubs and the cranes and the boats. I liked the landscape. If you follow the longer version of the Larkin Trail, you’ll end up in the more isolated landscape to the west, where Larkin enjoyed cycling around the scattered villages along the Humber estuary, such as Broomfleet.
In the end, you’ll come to the ‘unfenced existence’ of Holderness plain and the striking, desolate peninsula of Spurn Point, where Larkin would sometimes come to look back at the town and find the words to sing its praises in that Eeyorish voice. In 1399, the usurping Henry IV landed here from France en route to dethrone Richard II, who he later imprisoned and starved to death. There’s nothing to mark this historic event since the entire port of Ravenspurn has disappeared, claimed by the North Sea. But Larkin has fared better.
Leaving Hull by train, you pass a statue of him on the concourse, looking like a cross between Jean-Paul Sartre and Eric Morecambe, comic and melancholic in his owlish glasses and drab raincoat. On the train I chat to a nice chap called John whose hands, marked with various little nicks and wounds, suggest that he’s a carpenter which, pleasingly for my detective skills, he turns out to be (OK, a picture framer and wood turner, close enough). But his passion is board games and he enthuses to me about one he’s invented. It’s called Iceflow, it won best British board game five years ago and he’s now trying to sell around the world. ‘The French loved it. They talked of its mouvement perpétuelle. They loved it at the Essen games show. But we’ve had some setbacks. We lost a container full of them en route from Chicago. There’s 150,000 blue plastic icebergs somewhere on the seven seas. Tiny ones obviously.’
He’s now working on a game about money and dynasties in the Middle Ages. ‘There was no credit creation then, so there was a finite amount of money in the world. And it’ll play out just like the real history did. Every five years something will happen so you have to plan for that. You know, Jerusalem will fall so if you’re king of Jerusalem you have to plan for it. You know the Mongols will sack Baghdad. You’re just going to have to deal with it.’
We look out across the flat Eastern plain and Larkin’s ‘shining gull-marked mud’ to the Humber estuary and inland to Beverley and Goole. Larkin loved its flatness because he loved to cycle its deserted lanes. ‘Hull is so flat,’ says John, ‘that they say the only exercise the Codheads get is visiting their elderly relatives on the ninth floor of the Royal Infirmary where they put the oldies.’ He says that, though the town was once rich, money is ebbing away from the centre out to the suburbs and that there are only ten higher rate tax players within the city boundaries. ‘Hull’s an island … and sometimes being an island is good for you, and sometimes it’s not.’
Encouraging people to come and visit post-industrial northern towns, and alerting townspeople to the cultural heritage on their doorstep, is what initiatives like the Larkin Trail is all about. The Pennine village of Haworth boasts several Brontë trails, of course, and for 3,000 bucks or so, one American firm will even take you on a Brontë tour of England. Walkabout Leeds shows off the city’s superb civic architecture.
You could have made an educated guess that the Larkin Trail would be in the poet’s adopted Yorkshire home. But you’d probably not put the L S Lowry Trail in Northumberland’s Berwick-upon-Tweed, he being the visual laureate of the streets and people of industrial Lancashire. But Berwick is where The Lowry Trail is and, not least because I never got quite this far north in Pies and Prejudice, I set forth for this town on the Tweed.
Berwick has had divided loyalties and ownership for centuries, its place on the border between England and Scotland has meant that its history has been complex, shifting and extremely bloody. It has changed hands between England and Scotland 13 times, sometimes peacefully (as in when Richard III sold it to fund the Crusades) but usually with a great deal of associated violence. According to legend, it was the devil’s own holiday bolthole. When he was tempting Christ by showing him all the treasures of the earth that could be his if he’d just lighten up a little, ‘he kept Berwick hidden beneath his thumb, wishing to reserve it as his own little nook.’
I could see at once why the old rascal might want to keep it to himself. One’s feelings for a place are often coloured by how one arrives. People tell me that Worksop is a nice town but when I was a kid we once drove into town behind a stinking dustcart and then had a grim sandwich in an awful backstreet boozer. So I’ve never been back. (Happy to rectify this, Worksop Tourist Board!) Arriving in Berwick in the crimson of a winter dusk, the silver moon large and low over the majestic ink-black Tweed, which swirls and eddies under ancient bridges, I am instantly enchanted and a little spooked.
The town feels sweet, somnolent and slightly weird. Gulls cry and church bells peal, and interiors are being lit against the coming dark. I spot a shadowy figure in the lamp-lit back alcove of a bookshop and a tired looking waitress blowing out the last of the candles in a tea shop. The pubs of the town are all very different. The Brown Bear has several tellies, bawling kids standing on chairs and shaven-headed men smoking sourly in the little alley by the side. It doesn’t exactly exude a hearty welcome. The Barrels is funkier and more genteel. The pine is scrubbed, the fire is lit and couples in Gore-Tex cradle real ales and Soaves as they pore over OS maps in the window seat. Someone – a friend of the owner surely at this hour – is getting her hair cut in the Saddlery while two young lads on bikes practise wheelies by a tugboat. Some of the streets are as ghostly as the grave but a couple of cafés are still selling hot crab sandwiches and soup. It reminds me of the seaside town in Robert Aickman’s unsettling short story ‘Ringing the Changes’ which I urge you to read (after you’ve finished this book, of course), and for that and other reasons I decide I’m going to like it.
Two of our great cultural touchstones, The Beatles and Charles Dickens, have both stayed here in Berwick, according to the plaques on my hotel wall on Hide Hill. ‘Dickens gave a reading out there apparently,’ says the rather sleepy lad from Newcastle pointing into a small tidy garden. How long has this place been here? ‘Hundreds of years. Me? Three months.’ Are you going to stay? ‘I don’t know. It’s very quiet after Newcastle …’ and he drifts into a reverie, perhaps of giddy nights in the Bigg Market and crates of ‘Newkie Brown’.
Many people have a special place that lures them back year after year, their own kind of magical anchor in the tur
ning year. For some it’s an event like Glastonbury, the Hay literary festival or the TT Races, or it may be a haunt from your childhood still beloved – a favourite Cumbrian lake or Cotswold village. Writer Caitlin Moran goes to Aberystwyth for a week every summer and stays in the same place and eats in the same cafés on the same days. For the great English painter L S Lowry, it was Berwick.
The fact that, like Larkin, Lowry had a day job and rooted his art in working communities led the salon mandarins of the art world to dismiss him as an unschooled amateur. This irritated him. ‘If people call me a Sunday painter I’m a Sunday painter who paints every day of the week!’ Much of the hostility to his work came and still comes from his subject matter; the grimy streets and hovels of urban Lancashire were not thought of as worthy of artistic repesentation by some critics, especially not in such a seemingly spare and untutored way …
Others were more far-sighted. Art critic Herbert Read said, ‘No one else to my knowledge has been so sensitively aware of the poetry of the English industrial landscape.’ Once a year though Lowry would leave those bleak, urban wastelands, those cramped and cobbled streets and looming factories that he immortalised, and take himself even further north. Every summer, from early 1932 till he died in 1976, he would pack his easel and oils and come for his week in Berwick. Lowry loved the sea and found this little historic town charming. He stayed at the Castle Hotel by the railway station and produced about 30 paintings and drawings of Berwick during his visits. Now there is a Lowry Trail, which takes in the scenes from most of these, marked by interpretive boards. Armed with my Lowry Trail leaflet, I seek out a café to plot my route.
Thistle Do Nicely! How horribly twee I thought your name was when I came across it on Trip Advisor, and how blinkered and wrong I was. I love your haggis and cheese toastie, your delicious apple crumble and your even more delicious staff, whose accents, pitched between gentle lowland Scots and rough, warm Geordie, are as welcoming as the food. A young mum is feeding a massive BLT to her little girl, who in turn feeds bits to her tiny stuffed animal. John, dapper in his cap and cardie, says he’s chipped his tooth and he’ll have his scone ‘here today rather than to take out’, and is given it with solicitous, loving care from beneath the Perspex cake cover. Two prim but elegant Scots ladies have asked for apple crumble. ‘Large or small?’ the owner asks. ‘Small … but not too small,’ comes the reply. When one nips to the loo, the other puts on some lippy beneath a poster with Berwick Rangers fixtures. They are known as the ‘Wee Gers’, in unnecessary deference to the louder Glaswegian namesakes whom they famously beat in the Scottish Cup of 1967 (remembered still in The Barrels and The Black Bull I bet). And as every pub quiz veteran knows, the Wee Gers are unique, the only English team to play in the Scottish League.
Lowry, it seems, loved, drew or painted every aspect of the town, from bustling street and yard scenes to eerie seascapes, from austere architectural compositions to busy evocations of fun on the beaches. His first painting of the town was the High Street in 1935, and was included in his first London exhibition. Even by then, his standing was such that it was priced at 30 guineas, about £1,000 today. The painting is reproduced on a board up on the city walls overlooking Marygate. The scene has hardly changed in the last century or so, although in this and other pictures he made of the scene, Lowry distorts reality and exaggerates dimensions slightly but unnervingly. The Spire with its clock like a Cyclops eye is higher than in reality, and the famous stick figures seem to be lured irresistibly towards it for some obscure purpose.
In Lowry’s paintings, there are often monoliths, towers, lampposts and other solitary symbols, which naturally commentators claim reflect his own isolated existence. Lowry was a strange man all right. Withdrawn and blunt to the point of rudeness, he nonetheless loathed snobbery (‘All my life I have felt most strongly against social distinction of any kind,’ he wrote to Harold Wilson, turning down his offer of a knighthood). He was cagey, capricious, flirtatious even, which in turn brings up the murky matter of sex. Lowry is assumed to have died virgo intacta and once said, ‘I have never know passion.’ But his close Lewis Carroll-ish friendships with teenage girls and the paintings of doll-like women in restrictive and fetishistic clothing that came to light after his death, suppressed like Goya’s Black Paintings, throw up unanswered questions, some of a disquieting nature.
A walk along the ramparts to the sea is the perfect way to clear the head of all this. As well as L S Lowry, and its tiny dual-citizenship football club and the fact that technically it’s still at war with Russia over the Crimea (Berwick was accidently left off the peace treaty, as one might leave Marmite off a shopping list), Berwick has another claim to fame. Six hundred years ago, Berwick was the most fortified town in Europe, thanks to the series of bastions and ramparts built by the Virgin Queen. Now a playground for tourists and walkers, then these were the most sophisticated defence technology in the world, costing more than every other civil project of Elizabeth I’s reign altogether. Walking these ramparts and moats, you achieve a sense of how Lowry saw the town in his day with the views across the roofs and spires and cloistered squares, down Castlegate and Marygate, into the picture postcard town centre. But also how the soldiers of the sixteenth century and beyond would have seen it as they crisscrossed the walls in gales and rain, manning the gun emplacements, peering into the North Sea murk for successive enemies, the French, the Scots, the Jacobites.
Nowadays it’s much quieter. I find a couple of beer cans and Alcopops bottles which suggest that it’s a nocturnal hang out for what gets awkwardly referred to as ‘the youth’ on phone-ins. Here, where they may once have poured boiling oil on French corsairs or Scottish raiders, a woman with a buggy is chatting to her neighbour in the street below, near the Co-op. I drop down to where they are and turn up by the sign that says ‘To The Cliffs’ just by the shop selling Edinburgh Rock, Irn-Bru and ‘See You Jimmy!’ hats which seems both ludicrously dated and pretty courageous this close to the border. I walk up past the Women’s Institute whose array of coming attractions dazzles – a Pie and Peas supper, ‘Relax and Unwind With Aromatherapy’, ‘Scott Weightman talks about his Russian travels’, ‘Cheese making workshop’, ‘Argentinean tango and Alzheimer’s café’. The WI have shed some of their genteel image since they mildly savaged a hapless Tony Blair a few years back. I gave a talk to the Eden Valley WI last year and had a lot of fun, although oddly I can’t remember now a word of what I said. This may have been because of the anxiety brought on when I realised that, in order not to offend, I would have to sample each of the 30 or so buffet items hand cooked by the ladies. It was hell.
Across Golden Square and up Walkergate onto Wallace Green. This seems to be the ecclesiastical centre of town with churches to suit all tastes; a tiny, unpretentious Methodist one, a big Church of Scotland, a Catholic and even a Cromwellian Church, which bills itself ‘the most northerly Church Of England’ and ‘one of the first and only English churches in the unadorned Presbyterian style’. I expect if I looked hard enough I’d find a ziggurat and a Shinto temple.
In her excellent biography of Lowry, Shelley Rohde suggests that his affection for Berwick was not just artistic. He claimed to have ‘got to know some people’ here, which hints to me at a romantic infatuation, and thought about moving here permanently. But Rohde also thinks he’d also just had his fill of cobbles and chimneys, and had seen a nice house he liked by the sea he was fascinated with. I’m standing in front of it now. It’s called The Lions and while I can see that the views across beach and ramparts and waves must have been stunning, especially at sunrise and sunset, the house itself is more than a little creepy – a melancholic, isolated structure on the Elizabethan wall that had fallen derelict in the last years of Lowry’s life. In fact, it came to resemble one of my favourite of Lowry’s paintings, ‘The Empty House’, a work so pregnant with gloom and regret that you wonder if critics of the Brian Sewell school who snigger at Lowry’s ‘ineptness’ and ‘tedium’ can have ever seen
it, or indeed any of his paintings.
Lowry said of his own work, I think with a hint of Morrissey’s self-mythologising irony, ‘Poverty and gloom. Never a joyous picture of mine … I never do a jolly picture.’ But the beach scenes he painted at Berwick seem full of simple delight. ‘Spittal Sands’ is thronged with brightly clothed children having fun, errant dogs and sandcastles. But look a little closer, and the washed out figures look spectral, like wraiths, and walk a little further, drawn by the sea as Lowry was, and the mood alters. At the end of the long, unadorned, stone pier is a lighthouse which becomes in Lowry’s composition no longer the maritime decoration you see in the prints on Cornish pub walls but a lonely and inscrutable sentinel. Beyond that is the sea itself.
‘Once you have seen a Lowry painting of the sea, you will then never see the sea again in the same way,’ said Ian McKellen in 2004. He’s right, and you will also never see Lowry in the same way. Vast, haunting and somehow monumental, they have something of an obsession about them, as if the artist were compelled to paint these scenes almost beyond his own understanding. He said it was simply boredom but he is being mischievous again. Friends testify to his habit of sitting for hours staring out to sea.
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