Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  So the sign at the railway station is in English and Punjabi, and the pub outside the station is boarded up but is covered in pictures of followers of Krishna, alongside poems written on cardboard imploring humankind to show mercy to their fellow creatures. I presume this is because it’s been used by Krishna followers, and not that it’s an attempt to set up a chain of Krishna theme pubs, with a slightly limited jukebox, and on your first visit you keep thinking, ‘Surely it can’t be last orders already,’ every time someone bangs a gong.

  Next is Britain’s largest Sikh temple, emitting a constant smell of dhal as they provide a continuous supply of free food for anyone – that’s anyone at all – who feels in need of food. It’s a sign of how the human spirit isn’t as selfish as is sometimes suggested that the place isn’t regularly packed with groups arriving and saying, ‘Our usual table for six please.’ All of this is within twenty yards of the station, and even to walk past is thrilling because it’s so buoyantly different.

  The main street, known as the Broadway, could be the most unique road in Britain. Every angle is like a giant spot-the-difference puzzle. The chicken nuggets shop has a sign above the door that says ‘Home of the Halal Peri-Peri Chicken’. The betting shops display odds for cricket matches rather than football matches. Several music shops still sell cassettes. Cassettes? Cassettes aren’t like vinyl. No one plays cassettes. That’s being deliberately obtuse, like trying to sell Gary Glitter annuals or sheets of asbestos.

  The cafés all have about a dozen mesmerising curries in those canteen-style metal containers, so it’s tempting to say, ‘Can I have all of them please?’, and they have a screen to one side showing either an Asian music channel or Star Gold, which when I was last there was showing a film in which a reckless lorry driver ran over and killed a pedestrian. But as he sped off a hero somersaulted onto the lorry’s roof, dragged him from the speeding vehicle and punched him about sixty times, each thump making a sound like a tap cymbal. Then about a hundred people arrived and everyone celebrated because it had clearly been a wonderful ten minutes, if you leave aside the pedestrian lying dead in the road. If I spoke Punjabi I’d probably be aware that amongst the cheering crowd was the pedestrian’s brother, singing, ‘My sibling’s been crushed by a lorry but hoorah hoorah what a somersault.’

  At various points you’ll be handed a leaflet, and the one I took implored me: ‘Know your future and adjust way of your life. We provide you protection for house, business and personal matters, removal all types of black magisc and evil things by performing Devi Upasana, Laxmi pooja shanthi Pooja Mandala pooja (prayers) and also protection from eneminies and jealousy. 100% guarantee result.’ I can only guess how often someone rings to demand their money back, complaining, ‘It’s been three weeks now and I’ve still got several evil things you haven’t removed, including a demon you said you’d take on Thursday but I waited in all day and you never showed up and now he keeps grabbing my soul, I can barely sleep.’

  Traders look you in the eye and ask you to please buy their mangoes, which seems such a reasonable thing to ask, but it may be there’s an opportunity for a cultural exchange here, in which a bloke from Croydon ends up asking people to please buy his orange, while an old man from Jaipur holds up a mango and shouts, ‘Fifty fifty fifty fifty fifty fifty fifty!’

  Amongst this mêlée, between the Bollywood DVD shops and the sari stalls, is a Greggs the bakers, jostling along merrily and refusing to feel out of place, like one of these eighty-year-olds who go to a drum ’n’ bass night.

  And throughout is a constant beat of Indian dance and bhangra, which sounded especially welcome one Christmas Day when, for a complex batch of reasons, I found myself on my own. So I cycled to Southall, wondering if it might be the one place in London where life carried on as normal amidst the eerie still emptiness that encircles you on Christmas Day if you dare take a peek outside.

  As I turned into the Broadway the street was booming and crackling, the leaflets and curries flowing and the beats pumping out of the shops with no suggestion there’d be a chorus in which jolly was rhymed with holly, or if it did at least it would be in a language I don’t understand. Friends called across the street to each other, shopkeepers displayed a relaxed and helpful demeanour that’s only possible when you haven’t been ordered to wear fun reindeer antlers, and everybody seemed full of good will and joy. Anyone arriving from another world would have assumed they’d landed in the middle of an annual festival, while the poor sods in the rest of the country were undergoing some enforced sacrifice.

  The alien might also be confused by another aspect of Southall. Because the Broadway was the scene of one of the most violent nights in British post-war history, when in 1979 the National Front organised a meeting in the centre, and the protesters were attacked by a unit of the police called the Special Patrol Group, which led to the death of teacher Blair Peach.

  But in the long term the protesters won, because not only has the Indian community stayed, it remains both distinctly Indian and firmly integrated into London.

  Southall is London. Croydon is London. The adverts at the airports and on the tourist brochures should boast of these areas, because most people in London don’t live in Regent’s Park or on the London Eye. Big Ben is imposing enough and the West End theatres emit a certain buzz, but they aren’t where people live and argue, create and joke and struggle and transform their environment, to make pulsating tales of life that overcome the office blocks and the dual carriageways and the gas towers that land and grow and rip apart whole chunks of land like the more charmless members of the Godzilla family, with no more compassion than the less subtle types whose tool is the more direct petrol bomb, but somehow never seem to overwhelm the people who live beneath them.

  Hereford

  People of Hereford aren’t quite sure where the town is, although they know where it’s not. It’s not in the Cotswolds and it’s not in the West Country, and it’s definitely not in Wales. In fact there’s a fascination with the aftermath of the Battle of Hereford in 760, when the castle was built to keep the Welsh out, as apparently it’s still legal to fire a crossbow at a Welshman in the courtyard of the cathedral. I suspect this isn’t as true as they seem to believe, as it’s hard to see how it sneaked past the European Court of Human Rights, unless there’s someone in Strasbourg going, ‘Oh, it’s only the Welsh.’

  Hereford has to be admired for its imaginatively diverse array of industry. Most towns with more than one industry have trades that complement each other, like steel and coal, or fishing and being a port. But Hereford has cider, cows and the headquarters of the SAS. Careers advisors must hope that everyone who comes to see them will fit easily into one of those jobs, by saying something like, ‘I’m scared of cows, allergic to apples, and my hobby is swinging through windows with a hand grenade and shooting people through the smoke. Do you have anything suitable?’

  Mostly, though, the town is defined by its cows. It even has a breed of cow named after it, and every road seems to lead to the cattle market, a huge square behind the sort of brick wall you only usually see between rows of back-to-back houses in footage of scrawny kids in 1960s Manchester. Covering this wall are posters with information about cow diseases and cow auctions and the latest cow regulations. The cattle market backs onto the football ground, as if to allow farmers to keep an eye on their stock while watching the game.

  So before I went I pledged not to take the obvious line of supposing that everything was cattle-related. I asked on Twitter for local people to tell me about the town, and the first three replies each said, ‘Before every Hereford home game we parade a cow round the pitch.’

  The town is equally proud of its cider industry. According to the official Hereford Cider website, ‘It’s often said it takes four men to drink a pint of Herefordshire cider: two to hold the man down, and one to pour it down his throat.’ Then it informs you, ‘In the King Offa distillery, the tradition of making cider brandy has been revived. Once known as the Win
e of England, this mind-blowing substance can be obtained at the museum shop!’

  So whereas your normal museum shops boast a variety of gifts, rubbers and bookmarks, in Hereford you can commemorate your visit by blowing your fucking mind.

  And there’s that cheery little exclamation mark, the sort you put after ‘The tulips were delightful!’ Maybe there’s another section that goes, ‘For a change from cider brandy, why not pop down to a back road behind our council estates to sample some of our full-strength home-grown Hereford crack!’

  And yet, from the city centre you would never imagine that the cattle market and the cider distilleries were just around the corner, as the whole area is a desert of inevitable shops and wide concrete walkways, banks and chain pubs, that stretches and bends and goes on a bit more and never seems to end, and that on a Sunday is so deserted you wonder if a nuclear apocalypse took place while you were parking in the multi-storey. Even on a perfectly still day, with no breeze and the flags lying limp, you’d still hear wind whistling around the big green bins behind Iceland.

  At every point around the edge of this pedestrian zone you can suddenly emerge into a town with roads and people and voices, but if you step back onto the concrete there’s only an eerie whistle again.

  Just as unexpectedly, I was once greeted by the Hereford Anarchist Association, which produces a magazine called the Hereford Heckler, incorporating the Hereford Insurgent, and which campaigned against a new Tesco and against job losses at Bulmer’s Cider.

  They took me to their favourite cider pub, where the landlord was sympathetic, they said, and had allowed them to use the back room for an anarchist film night until the police put pressure on him to ban their documentary on the arms trade. I wish I had footage of the meeting at which the police discussed this strategy, then congratulated themselves on preventing the spread of anarchism in Hereford.

  The fascination of the town is that it has all these disparate elements that shouldn’t go together, like a kid’s picture where they’ve drawn their house but put a dinosaur in a spaceship in the garden.

  The next time I visited I didn’t find the anarchists, so I presumed they’d either gone to the right or been executed following a word from the Hereford police to the SAS. I wandered through the Sunday-evening pedestrian eeriness, in which you feel less desire to be a pedestrian than you would in the racetrack during the Monaco Grand Prix, trying to find a pub that was still serving. Seeing myself reflected in the windows of New Look and Gap, and aware of the clip of each footstep, I found myself wondering whether my presence would wake a mutant hiding in the overflowing bottle bank by the Burger King, and stepped into the outer live ring of the town. I heard a lonely jukebox, I thought, and turned the corner to find a pub.

  The barman looked at his watch as he served me, grudgingly pressing a button to squirt out a Kronenbourg, while six teenagers sat at a table pouting and staring into the middle distance with expressions that told you none of them had spoken for an hour. Suddenly one of the boys stood up, and with a teenage stroll that said, ‘Why is walking so BORING?’ he meandered to the karaoke machine, calling out, ‘Shut up Jamie, you arse!’ managing to elicit boredom and aggression from a Hereford accent, and then put a coin in the machine. Then he snapped his fingers and sang ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ in a silky baritone with perfect jazz syncopation, rolling the last but one ‘I love you’ to a ‘Yoooooo-oo-ow-ow-ow’, with perfect pitch and in a throaty but creamy crooner’s lilt, all the while staring straight ahead looking utterly bored while his mates sipped pink drinks through straws and the barman collected glasses with a scowl.

  He sauntered back to the table, even slower than he’d gone, then one of the girls shrugged her shoulders, looked around and stumbled to the machine. On came the backing for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’. The girl poured out every sinew and vulnerable creak of the original. It would surely have reduced everyone in earshot to tears, except that she performed the whole song while chewing gum and staring in the vague direction of the air vent.

  One by one they all took turns to look clinically bored while belting out breathtaking versions of classic ballads, as the barman emptied the till and went round the tables spraying Pledge.

  The explanation for all these weird goings-on, if there is one, evades me. But maybe they’re connected to Miles Smith, the Hereford canon who translated parts of the King James Version of the Bible in the early seventeenth century. That’s an investigation that should be undertaken by Dan Brown, especially as I seem to recall one verse in the book of Exodus which goes, ‘And Moses did question GOD as to how he would lead his cows through the market. And GOD did say, “Take thy rod and cast it into the ground,” whereupon the rod did turn into a special paratrooper fully prepared for combat operations. And Moses did lay his drink upon the ground and say, “Never again, this stuff’s mind-blowing.”’

  Norwich

  The accents of East Anglia are possibly the most expressive in Britain. They destroy self-importance: it’s impossible to be pompous in reply to an East Anglian accent.

  When an actor is throwing a backstage tantrum, screaming, ‘How can I possibly work in these conditions?’ there should be an East Anglian nearby to say, ‘Calm you down. You can’t carry on playen’ Widow Twankey if you’s all het up and carryen’ awn.’

  When a contestant on The Apprentice says, ‘I can taste success in my spit,’ the Norfolk woman should be on hand to reply, ‘That’s a rum ol’ do. Yew wan’ see doctor ’bout that, yew do.’ And Bono should be made to live there, so every time he announced he’d taken another huge step towards solving the problem of the world’s food supply there was a gap of fifteen seconds while people around gently supped their pints, then someone said, ‘You had a good year on the allotment, have you?’

  When I asked on Twitter if anyone had a comment to make about Norwich, someone sent me the message, ‘I heard a woman in the market with an umbrella with a push-button thing say, “Do it do that? It do.”’

  The first time I witnessed this demeanour was in a house in Lowestoft, with a friend and his uncle, who had a degree in English literature as well as a full-bodied stammer. The uncle set off for the shops, then came back two minutes later and picked up the keys he’d left on the table. As he put them in his pocket he said with a gently lyrical Lowestoft lilt, ‘I I I I’d f-f-f-f-f-f-f-forget my balls if they weren’t in a b-b-bag,’ and set off again.

  The accent has an added impact in Norwich, as it fools you into thinking the town is a rural lolloping plain, but Norwich defies its image on every front. It’s got hills, an identikit pedestrianised area, clubs that advertise MC battles, and two central multi-storey car parks, both called Castle Mall car park, so you park there, and on your way back through town you see a sign saying ‘Castle Mall car park’, and then wander round and round and up and along and past every single space four times until a local comes over and says, ‘I ’spect you’s in a wrong Castle Mall car park is it?’ Presumably when they named the second one, rather than opt for one of the infinite arrangements of letters that are different to ‘Castle Mall’ to distinguish it from the first one, they decided, ‘Castle Mall’s worked well enough for first, so’s no need to pick nuffin’ different for second.’

  Norwich seems to appreciate its distance from London. Whenever there’s a suggestion that the A11, the main road south, should be widened from its one lane in each direction, there’s an uneasy disquiet, as if the town thinks, ‘If buggers are goan come up here we can at least make ’em suffer a bit on way.’ This is understandable, given the attitude of some who buy second homes round there. The town of Burnham Market is known as Chelsea-on-Sea, and in May 2010 the new residents endeared themselves to the older community by taking legal action against the owners of some cockerels that were crowing too early. It’s easy to imagine them over their sautéd noisette of sea lion boasting, ‘It’s so exquisitely delightful to enjoy this retreat of rural splendour, but I just wish they’d widen that ghastly road so the g
hastly yokels wouldn’t hold us up all day.’

  So the true adventurer to East Anglia goes to Norwich, which is one of the few places where the main central shopping mall has one unit that gives away the identity of the town it’s in. Because opposite H&M and behind Waterstone’s is the Colman’s Mustard Shop.

  Apparently the Norwich mustard industry was started by Jeremiah Colman at a water mill in the village of Bawburgh. The Mustard Shop is magnificently dedicated to mustard, with normal jars of Colman’s mustard, jars of powder for you to make your own mustard, mustard pots, mustard recipe books and industrial-sized tubs of mustard that could only be used to terrify inmates at Guantánamo Bay, or for strongman events that come on Sky Sports 3 in the middle of the night.

  It was outside this mustard shop that I heard a woman of about fifty, from somewhere south, say to her friend as they gazed in the door at 103 mustard-related objects for sale, ‘I wonder if this is the mustard shop.’

  Altogether, the rural image of Norwich must have made it the only town with a university, a ring road, a series of industries, shopping malls and multi-storey car parks, whose football supporters still get taunted for behaving in an illegal manner with sheep.

  This might be particularly galling if you were three hundred years old, as you’d recall when Norwich was England’s second city. Having access to water that led out to the East made it a major trading centre from the twelfth century until the Industrial Revolution.

  The accounts of the town from this time are unusually complimentary, although George Borrow, in his translation of a German version of the Faust legend, adapted a passage about hell to read: ‘They found the people of the place modelled after so unsightly a pattern, with such ugly figures and flat features that the devil had never seen them equalled, except by the inhabitants of an English town called Norwich, when dressed in their Sunday best.’