Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  Because you forget that towns in the middle of large rural areas aren’t rural, they’re towns. And it may be that outside Exeter is a series of fields, and lanes that come to crossroads with no signposts, leaving you to guess which road winds on to Longdown and which goes three miles to a dead end by a vandalised barn so you have to reverse all the way back again. But inside Exeter is Zizzi’s and Debenhams and H. Samuel, a university, an airport, and a record-breaking level of chain stores.

  A wander around the title-winning city centre, though, suggests that it may have won the accolade unfairly, because between the ubiquitous shops and restaurants is a vast, majestic golden cathedral in the middle of the pedestrianised area that gives it a hint of distinction. And there are dinky alleys between the window displays, including Gandy Street, where a local artist has covered the walls in paintings of Elizabethan figures from the town.

  The only thing is, John Lewis had some of them destroyed. According to South-West Business magazine: ‘A spokesperson for DTZ Investment Management, the discretionary property fund manager of the John Lewis Pensions Fund, said, “The building is held as an investment, as part of a property portfolio, on behalf of the pension fund. The current occupier has advised us they intend to vacate the property when their lease expires. We are therefore looking to refurbish and improve the building in order to increase its appeal to potential occupiers.”’

  It would be almost impossible to compile a list of words more chillingly indifferent to anything beyond the demands of a property portfolio than those. Dickens would have struggled. He might have come up with a Mr Grabwall, who says every morning while shaving, ‘Purchase my property, offer me stock, but paint on my wall, you can suck my cock.’ But that would still seem Bohemian and riddled with hippyness compared to the prose of the good people at DTZ.

  In a corner of one alley is a theatre with displays of local photos, and there are medieval passages under the High Street you can visit, stooping and squeezing through, so you feel part of an underground movement in hiding, waiting to run the town one day. And there’s a prominent painting at the main station, in which an entire wall including the timetables is submerged behind two backpackers and two finely toned young men, one in shorts, gazing with intent at one another while striking poses of a Roman sculpture in what is known as the local homoerotic mural.

  The cloneness of a town probably can’t be measured simply by the number of shops selling the same autumn tops as their branch in Dundee. It may be more a case of how far its sense of identity is submerged.

  And Exeter certainly has a unique past, that it likes to share with its children. Which must be why A Child’s History of Exeter informs young historians that when the Romans were in charge of the town, a Roman teacher might tell his pupils, ‘Leave your clothes over there and come and join me for some exercise. Let’s start with some leapfrogs. We can ask a slave to clean our bodies. He’ll cover them with oil and scrape it off with a metal hook. Don’t worry.’ This suggests that Exeter’s social services department in Roman times wasn’t as thorough as it should have been.

  More widely known across the town is the wonderfully obscure hero figure of Bishop Leofric, who earned his place in history by compiling a book containing the first ever riddles. Like an idiot, I started reading them, thinking they’d be riddles as we understand them, with answers like ‘A box of dates.’ Or at least questions like, ‘With my axe and my dagger I’ll make you quite poorly, When I invade, folk say, “Not them again, surely.” Who am I?’

  Instead the Bishop’s riddles are along the lines of asking what makes men incapable of performing any task but still attracts them. The answer is wine. They’ve been passed through folklore and were written in Saxon, so most of them would confuse people today if they popped up in a Christmas cracker, but they’re a source of pride in the town, the originals protected by all manner of chunky glass and electric beams somewhere in the cathedral.

  And they have a football club in Exeter, which has dropped out of the Football League and come back again, but which creates a sense of pride partly because it drags every other team in whichever league they’re in hundreds of miles further than anyone else. Like all football teams it’s had its moment of glory: for Exeter it was the period from 2002 to 2003, when Uri Geller became the co-chairman.

  I find it impossible to hear this without imagining him being interviewed in front of logos for Lucozade Sport and Barclays, making comments such as, ‘I think our problem today was when our midfield got the ball, they should have laid on the ground and breathed in the spirit of the universe to push away the demons that were allowing Dagenham and Redbridge to hit us on the break.’

  Even more spectacular – and everyone I spoke to in the town mentioned this as a day Exeter would remember forever, for reasons entirely comical – was the day Uri brought his mate Michael Jackson to a match. Maybe he’d read about the games the Romans played, and decided it was a place Michael might identify with. But it’s hard enough taking your football team seriously at the best of times, so who knows what that did to the psyche of the average Exeter fan.

  Whatever impact it had, Michael did the town a favour, giving it something else that was defiantly, uniquely Exeter, and I suspect preventing it from deserving the title of Britain’s clone-town league champion.

  Portland

  One of the eeriest places in Britain must be the Isle of Portland in Dorset. You get there via a sort of sea-level bridge, stretching over a vast field of pebbles across the water from Weymouth like a finger straining to reach a key that’s fallen down the back of a fridge, or a passage into another world on a computer game. The road that crosses the island passes a hotel converted from a Ministry of Defence naval headquarters, cliffs covered in knee-length grass that should never ever be cut, several quarries where piles of pure white stones the size of sideboards have been randomly discarded like shopping trolleys by a canal, two lighthouses and a prison.

  There’s a website on which you can ask people on the island about the place. One person has asked if there’s a shop that sells CDs. The first answer is, ‘There are people on this island who’ve never seen a CD.’ The second is, ‘What’s a CD? In fact what’s a shop?’ If you look up ‘cinemas’, it says, ‘We’ve all got satellite TVs, so what’s the point?’

  I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a place that feels more like an island. The inhabitants even have a word, ‘kimberlin’, for people who come from off the island. This shows an admirable logic, to have a special word for that branch of the human race that doesn’t come from the Isle of Portland. You could be from Paris, Ecuador or Weymouth, and you’re a kimberlin. Whether you’ve been to the Chelsea Flower Show or to the depths of the Congo to live amongst the people and learn their customs, you’ve been mixing with kimberlins.

  This might be a result of centuries of isolation before the road across the pebbles was built.

  One historian of the area, J.W. Garren, wrote: ‘At one time 90 per cent of the population of Portland had the surnames of Pearce, Stone, Comben, Attwooll, Flew or White.’ So nearly everyone had one of six names. The calling of the register at school must have gone: ‘Attwooll’ – ‘Here’; ‘Attwooll’ – ‘Here’; ‘Attwool’ – ‘Here’; ‘Attwoll’ – ‘Here’; ‘Attwoll – where’s Attwoll?’ – ‘He’s absent, sir.’

  As a result, everyone became known by their nicknames. For example, a man called Fido Lunettes wrote in 1825 about a conversation he’d heard about: ‘A gentleman made repeated enquiries after one James Miller, but his enquiries were fruitless. Meeting a man on the island he asked where Miller lived. “I don’t know,” was the immediate reply. “There’s no such man on Portland, sir.”

  ‘The gentleman added, “He’s also commonly known as Wapsy.”

  ‘“Oh, Wapsy,” replied the Portlander, “That’s my father.”’

  Yet Portland has been at the heart of some of the most innovative international modern city life, because the island is made of Portland stone.
This is a result of how the land mass of Britain was apparently formed in two chunks. If you draw a diagonal line from Torquay in Devon to Hartlepool on Teesside, most of the country north of that line is made of rock that’s over 300 million years old, which might have become coal or slate. But south of that line is younger, Jurassic, rock, only 140 million years old, a lot of which is chalk. And then there’s limestone, made by the broken-down bones of fish and amphibians. In certain areas, especially Portland, the carbonate of lime has built up around the broken shells in tiny egg shapes, at which point it’s called ‘oolitic’. All this makes Portland’s stone stick together in huge hard blocks, perfect for building. It also doesn’t fade from that grand white imperial look that’s perfect for huge columns and buildings that say, ‘Take a good look at me when you walk past, won’t you? Nelson attended a banquet behind these columns, you know, so don’t you dare lean against me, you grubby peasant. I, if you didn’t know, am oolitic.’

  The Romans used stone from Portland, the Saxons used it, and in the seventeenth century six million tons of the stuff was blasted out from the quarries. Christopher Wren came to Portland to choose the stone he wanted to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral. Whitehall, the Cenotaph and the grandest buildings in New York were built from it. As you wander across this small island, past quarry after quarry, you start to imagine the prestigious buildings that were once embedded in the land before you. Surely there must be nothing left. Getting any more out must be like playing a giant version of that Jenga game, where you have to keep picking out blocks without everything collapsing. One day a crane driver will whisper, ‘Right, we’re going for this stone here – careful, careful, caaaareful, woooooah, oh shit, the Co-Op’s collapsed.’

  Everywhere you look in Portland there are stone houses, stone walls and obelisks commemorating no one in particular that were presumably built to use up some spare stone. So if your ambition is to have a statue made of yourself, it’s advisable to move to Portland, do something like run two hundred yards in under three minutes or learn to say the alphabet backwards, and that should do it.

  Walking through a quarry is one of the most masculine activities you can imagine. They’re by necessity arenas of vast craggy ugliness, the odd digger clumping across their bases like a bored bear making its way across its pen. It would be impossible to do anything dainty in a quarry, like waltz or play table tennis. A quarryman showed me this giant hammer they use for cracking the stone out of the cliff, and there was a pneumatic drill that bores through huge rocks and cracks them in half. In effect, it enables you to beat a rock in a fight.

  And that’s before they use dynamite. I don’t know if it’s genetic or social, but no male can hear someone say ‘Then we use the dynamite’ without going, ‘I want a go, I want a go.’

  Then, as if designed according to local authority regulations which insist that all that aggression must be balanced with something tranquil, around the corner is a bird observatory. It’s like a miniature lighthouse, and people climb up to a tiny platform where they can spend the night, ready to observe whatever flaps past at daybreak. The manager of the bird observatory had offered to take me on a tour of the tiny platform, but when I got there he was sat in a deckchair reading the local paper. ‘Hello, I think we had a visit arranged,’ I said, but he carried on reading his paper in that deliberate ‘I’m reading the paper and not answering you’ way that means someone isn’t reading the paper at all but thinking, ‘I bet this is annoying you – I’m reading the paper.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said again. ‘I’m Mark Steel …’ He looked up from his paper and said, ‘I know who you are, I looked you up on the internet. I don’t think you’re suitable for this bird observatory.’ He then announced that he was therefore refusing to show me round. I don’t know if something led him to believe I was from al Qaeda’s ornithology department, or if he’d mixed me up with someone on YouTube breaking a world record for stamping on puffins, but getting barred from a bird observatory is possibly my proudest moment as a rebel. Stick that, Che Guevara. He might have ponced around with guns and attacks on Havana, but I bet he never got barred from a bird observatory.

  Half a mile further south is the end of the island, stoically marked by the main lighthouse, beautifully chunky, industrial and determined, standing on a cliff where the wind must cause havoc for the people who compile the Shipping Forecast by blowing in every direction at once. This lighthouse isn’t there to look pretty and stripy: ships depend on the thing, and it looks as if it has bacon, egg, sausage, chips, beans and two slices every morning before blowing its first fog warning, and if it has fingers they’re yellow from thirty years of roll-ups. As you stand beneath it defying the swirling uppercuts of wind, you will never have felt so awake. They should take people who’ve been in a coma for years to the Portland lighthouse. Three minutes on that clifftop and they’ll be shrieking, ‘Jesus what the fuck!’ and unhooking their drip.

  It all felt glorious and slightly dangerous, and I had started to lose myself in thoughts of schooners and shipwrecks when a man licking a Cornetto said to his wife in a London accent with amber-alert aggression, ‘That fucking foghorn’s doing my head in.’

  The collection of unusual buildings continues with the hotel, converted from the Ministry of Defence building. Sitting at the top of a sinister hill, it is still surrounded by unscaleable fences and checkpoints where you imagine the odd double-crossing Bulgarian was discreetly shot through the head with a bullet from a long, silent pistol during the Cold War. Maybe the council insist on retaining the original features or something, or there’s a preservation order on the barbed wire, but the result is that you expect that at any moment a soldier will point a gun at you and yell, ‘Put the complimentary biscuits down NOW!’

  The ground floor is a series of enormous oblong rooms all connected by a concrete path, giving it the ambience and in places the smell of a hospital. The place is managed by a young Czech who somehow is always right behind you. Three times, at diverse points in the hotel, I said out loud, ‘Where am I?’ to myself, and each time the smiling Czech suddenly appeared and said, ‘Can I help, sir?’ From my room to the restaurant was a ten-minute walk, along corridors leading to corridors and more corridors, like at Heathrow when you’re walking to the place where you collect your bag after landing. I decided to run along one corridor, off which there must have been fifty doors, all painted the identical blue of the blue of the carpet and the blue of the walls, so that as I ran I wasn’t even sure I was going forward – it was like a depiction of an acid trip in a film from the sixties. At the end was an enormous door, the sort that might be the entrance to the head office of a major bank. I went through it and found myself outside, on a patch of grass leading to a cliff with the sea air pinching me beneath the right angles of this military structure. To my right appeared the Czech, who said, ‘Are you lost, sir?’ adding, ‘I saw you were running.’ At that point it seemed almost certain that the next person I’d see would be Jack Nicholson with an axe.

  There are separate villages within Portland, but Portland is the area that people there identify with. A sentence from an islander will often start with ‘The Portland people …’ and go on to describe some trait such as ‘are proud of their wind’, or ‘don’t like to be rushed in the morning’. Weymouth is a foreign power, distrusted as if it was stealing Portland’s stone, with blatant disregard for UN resolutions. In the official history of Portland by Stuart Morris, there’s often a diversion such as: ‘The Dorset County Chronicle remarked of a parade in Weymouth in 1863, “Portland men were all half a head taller than Weymouthians. They are a fine, strong, healthy race, greatly superior in stature, both in person and intelligence.”’ See. That proves it.

  There is one issue, though, that all visiting kimberlins should be aware of before they arrive. On Portland no one’s allowed to say the word ‘rabbit’. For example, when the Wallace and Gromit film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit came out, a special poster had to be devised for Portland, which renamed
it The Curse of the Were-Bunny. This must, you think at first, be a joke played on tourists. But then someone will tell you about ‘underground mutton’ or, as in Stuart Morris’s book, say, ‘Monks introduced a furry little creature with long ears in the twelfth century.’ The first time a Portlander tells you how blasphemous it is to say the word, on account of the awful luck it will surely bring, you joke along with them, and then realise they’ve maintained an earnest expression, the same one they’d use if they were warning you not to go past the deserted house on the hill, as the ground turns into quicksand.

  Then comes that awkward moment when someone you’ve been chatting amiably to for a while calmly and suddenly reveals themselves as mad. You’re forced to try to maintain your demeanour, and maybe even to appear genuinely keen to hear more about what you’ve just been told, in the way you might say, ‘Oh that must be a useful talent. How often do you use this ability to turn someone into a snake?’

  Nobody is sure why the custom arose, but it may have originated with quarrymen, as it’s possible that the sight of rabbits scurrying was a sign of the impending collapse of some ground. Even so, I’d have thought that in those circumstances it would be unlucky not to say ‘rabbit’, as you’d be screaming at your colleagues, ‘Get away quick, I’ve seen what-nots, you know, no not Hell’s Angels, warren-dwelling mammals renowned for their sexual proclivities, oh too late everyone’s buried under a heap of rubble.’

  But if anywhere can get away with upholding a superstition that would seem irrational to your average medieval leper, it’s Portland. The whole place is bracingly disjointed. Its beaches aren’t sandy and inviting, but stony and hidden between cliff faces; not for the all-day bather, but for the smug bastard who goes swimming there for one minute at six in the morning so he can feel he’s achieved something with his life.*