Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  The one I ended up seeing was a huge construction, maybe four storeys high. The field it was in was so packed I thought I couldn’t see a single space where anyone else could fit, at which point a couple of hundred more squeezed in, each holding a can of beer as the flames danced in the wind, sometimes suddenly turning and bolting our way like an actor in one of those plays where they run into the audience. Everyone would cheer and laugh, which is healthy, because it is quite funny to feel that one unexpected gust in the wrong direction could kill four hundred people in an instant.

  In fact the whole thing seems to be designed as a deliberate affront to the world of health and safety. You wonder if there’s one society that says, ‘To add to the gaiety we set a rhino loose amongst the crowd.’

  The most astonishing challenge to modern precautions comes with the arrival of the Cardinals. Each society selects three people each year to dress as Cardinals for bonfire night. Your prize, should you be lucky enough to be chosen, is to stand on a platform for ten minutes while fireworks are aimed at you. Apparently it’s a huge honour to be picked, and the candidates sit at the planning meetings thinking, ‘I want to be deafened, I want explosions all round me with a 70 per cent chance of being maimed for life, pick me me me.’ The lucky winners prepare for their big moment like girls in an American beauty pageant, probably with members of their family sewing patterns on their cassocks and saying, ‘I don’t want the doctors who attend to your burns to think you’ve got a scruffy outfit.’

  About fifty yards to the right of the bonfire was a scaffold, and that year’s three Cardinals made their way up to the platform to a mighty wave of derision. They waved defiantly, the crowd booed more violently, and then the fireworks started. The whole scene had seemed surreal enough when I’d first heard about it. But whatever your expectation, the reality is more dramatic. The boos rise in a crescendo, winding up for action like a jet engine, then a flurry of assorted fireworks are hurled, the bap-bap-bap of countless bangers merely a drumbeat for the melody of rockets, fizzing fountains and blazing objects that rain down on the three proud Cardinals from all directions. Every few moments one of the Cardinals has his mitre knocked from his head by a flying hissing sparkling thing, that probably has huge letters on its side warning you to light it carefully and then retreat fifty yards, and on no account ever to let anyone pass near it again for two years. The crowd cheers the direct hit, and the Cardinal politely bends down to retrieve his headwear.

  For around fifteen minutes this spectacle goes on, and every time the torrent subsides to a flurry and you assume the ammunition is running out, a renewed surge takes place and the Cardinals disappear once more inside a pall of gunpowder. I can honestly say it’s one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I kept thinking there must be a trick, that with cameras and computer graphics they can do all sorts of stuff these days, but no, the truth was that three men dressed as cardinals were being bombarded with lit fireworks.

  When the process finally winds down and you’re giving thanks to the town for such a display, the Pope is wheeled out, a thirty-foot-high hunched-up pontiff who crackles and pops in the flames until they reach the fireworks embedded in him and he splats and fizzes to wild cheering before eventually exploding in all directions.

  As I turned to go back to the centre of town I saw something behind the hedges that I chose to disbelieve. By now it felt like being in Alice in Wonderland, in that as soon as one adventure with something impossible was over, something just as baffling would replace it, so if we’d all been handed a potion that made us shrink it would have seemed reasonable. But at one side of the field there appeared to be another effigy, that looked like Barack Obama. It must be a trick of the light from the flames, I decided. Either that, or the evening had played games with my mind, and now I could see the shadow of a hot-dog stall and imagine it was an effigy of a black man. Someone might hand me a Twix and I’d chuck it in the road expecting it to explode.

  Or it was someone else, and I’d looked at it wrong. Perhaps it was supposed to be Chris Moyles, and only looked like Obama from a strange angle. But as I walked along the path next to the bonfire, the height of which was now reduced to two storeys, a giant kneeling Barack Obama was pulled towards the crowd and set ablaze. It was a sight to get the section of America who scream at rallies that Obama is a crazed communist un-American African with a terrorist middle name waving their bourbons in the air and yee-haaing across Kentucky.

  The decision of who to burn each year is taken in the summer, as it takes three months to build the giant models, and in the summer of 2010 Obama had been seen by some as an enemy of Britain for his criticisms of BP when its oil was leaking across the Gulf of Mexico. I presumed that was the reasoning behind setting him alight, but this vision would have been cheered most enthusiastically by Sarah Palin and her colleagues, should they keep a close eye on the Lewes annual bonfire night.

  That’s the contradiction of the festivities: they’re a giant and blazing snub at authority, but that doesn’t mean they’re driven by liberal values. In Victorian times the night used to celebrate the victories of the British Army throughout the Empire, and according to one local book, ‘When Brighton councillor W. Evans tried to hold a socialist debate at the top of School Hill he was greeted by a crowd who taunted him with shouts of “Bum him.”’

  I’ve spent a while wondering about this quote, and reckon it’s a misprint, and they were shouting ‘Burn him,’ which might not be as interesting, but makes it even less likely that they meant it in a friendly way.

  Conversely, in the 1850s some bonfire society members went to America to work on the railways, and were so appalled at the way the Native Americans were treated that when they came back they set up the Commercial Square Bonfire Society, one of the rules of which is that everyone has to go to the bonfire dressed as a Native American.

  Recent effigies have been of Blair and Bush, following the invasion of Iraq, and, with a slightly less liberal tone, a family of gypsies in a caravan. And while there’s an argument to be made for burning Popes in a town where Protestants were executed, I can see why you might feel slightly uneasy about cheering along if you were a Catholic.

  Insisting you won’t be druv can be a gesture of solidarity against the powerful, but it can also express a refusal to be part of a wider community. What is exhilarating about the Lewes bonfire celebration is that it’s planned, arranged and executed by the people who take part in it. Whether you agree or not with some of the choices they make, they have at least been made entirely by those participating.

  Even if you arrive from out of town, when you follow the parades you feel you’re taking part rather than merely watching. You become part of the procession, part of the chaos, which is one of the reasons the event is vastly popular, with two-hour queues for the trains that leave the town after midnight.

  So the stand taken by the martyrs meant that in the town where they perished there remains, 450 years later, a commitment to an evening not decided by sponsors or councils, or the demands of celebrities or their agents, but remaining the product of immense imagination and organisation, of a culture formed from the bottom up. It may not be quite what Deryck Carver was hoping for as he clutched his Bible amidst the flames, but his line about the pudding suggests that he was capable of thinking outside the box.

  In 2008, in an act of wonderfully confident stroppiness, Lewes issued its own currency. Only a few years after much of the rest of Europe had merged its currencies, Lewes came up with one that isn’t even accepted up the road in Haywards Heath. Maybe the hope was that eventually the financial reports at the end of the television news would go: ‘The dollar was up three cents against the pound this morning, and the yen up by 2 per cent, but again the strongest rally is from the Lewes pound, which rose against all major currencies following excellent quarterly figures from Percy’s fishing-tackle shop and Bill’s the organic grocers.’

  On one side of the Lewes currency is the face of Tom Paine, with his line
‘We have the power to build the world anew.’ It’s as if they love trouble. I bet the whole town gets called in to see the government every few weeks, to be told, ‘Always the same faces, isn’t it, Lewes?’

  ‘Yer.’

  ‘WHAT?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now what have you done?’

  ‘Made own pound, sir.’

  ‘Why can’t you be like Eastbourne, eh? THEY don’t make their own pound. Nor does Seaford, or Hurstpierpoint.’

  ‘What about Hastings, sir?’

  ‘You know full well, Lewes, that Hastings was expelled long ago.’

  By seeing the world from the bottom up, the town has quite an impact on it, to the extent that Barack Obama concluded his inauguration speech in 2009 with the words: ‘With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that we did not turn back nor did we falter as we carried forward that gift of freedom and delivered it for future generations.’ This was a quote from Tom Paine, written shortly after he arrived in Boston from Lewes.

  In any normal place they’d emblazon the tourist brochures and the council’s headed paper with the fact that the new US President came into office quoting lines by a man from their town. Only in Lewes would they build a model of him, and blow the fucker up.

  Gateshead

  Sometimes, when I visit a new town for the radio show, I’m given a tour by someone from the museum, or who runs the local historical society, who’s about sixty-eight and has written a book about a steamroller that was often seen in the area until 1965. And I feel woefully guilty, because they’ve spent four days putting together an itinerary including the collection of pepper pots at the old vicarage and a VIP visit to the basement of the town hall to see plans of the original plumbing. Then they show me the corner of a church that, if you look closely, you can see was rebuilt after the great gale of 1685, before asking me if I’d like to see the guttering, which is similar to the type we saw at the disused abattoir, and I risk breaking their heart by confessing I probably won’t have time to fit all this into the show, although I will make room for the story in the local paper of a tramp who walked into a pet shop and was sick on a goldfish.

  But in Gateshead things weren’t like that. It was unlikely that they would be, as Gateshead is renowned for being the smaller, less notable, almost insignificant forgettable other side of the river from Newcastle. Its image worked in its favour only once, as it made it the perfect setting for the 1970s film Get Carter, in which Michael Caine trudges through two hours of relentless grime and misery, and when they finished filming the producer probably said to the mayor, ‘Thanks so much for making the place absolutely perfect for our requirements. It must have taken a huge effort making everything so shit. I hope it doesn’t take you too long to get the place back habitable for your citizens.’

  I was met by Mark, whose dad had worked in a local pit. Mark was employed by the council to promote the area, which he did with disturbing enthusiasm. ‘I can’t wait to show you how Gateshead’s changing,’ he said, and recited quotes from European committees about the efficiency of the transport system while cantering to the Baltic Art Gallery, a recently converted flour mill on the bank of the River Tyne. We passed through the vast glass doors and into the vast glass lift to whirr past the empty shiny wooden floors. He didn’t seem entirely at home as he made comments such as, ‘They’ve got all sorts of like, art and that, in here like.’ Strangely, there was a chemist’s on one floor, and I made a vague mental note that there wouldn’t normally be a chemist’s in an art gallery. Then I thought, ‘Hang on, that isn’t a work of art, is it?’ And there was indeed a little board saying ‘Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy’. We went inside and it was just like a chemist’s, with hundreds of glass cabinets containing jars and plasters and tubes of cream, and Mark kept changing his expression as he tried to think of something positive and chemist-related to say, and I felt he was going to blurt out, ‘According to the Lancet we have more Nurofens per head in Gateshead than anywhere else in western Europe.’

  I looked around for something about this chemist’s that might make it at least as interesting as a normal chemist’s, and said to Mark, ‘If these jars here were swapped with the ones on this shelf below, would Damien Hirst see it and scream, “Noooo the whole effect is ruined”?’

  As I did this I lightly touched the glass cabinet, and within a second a huge security guard had taken three strides across the pharmacy floor and put his nose right up to mine, like a sergeant major about to bark at a private. In perfect Geordie he growled, ‘DON’T you touch that. This art’s worth TEN MILLION POUNDS.’

  This was so ridiculous it somehow wasn’t intimidating, so I said, ‘It’s not any more. Now I’ve touched the glass it’s only worth nine million.’

  ‘Oh, you think you’re very fucking funny you, don’t you?’ he said.

  Mark looked at the floor, but he shouldn’t have worried, because all I could think was what a magnificent effort the area puts into living up to its stereotype, when even the pretentious art galleries are hard. One wrong word in an exhibition and you’ll get a security guard yelling, ‘Ay, come here and slag off Botticelli’s perspective to ma face, ya prick,’ while his girlfriend implores him, ‘Leave it, Darren, it’s not worth it. It’s from his later orange period.’

  Like most regeneration schemes, the one in Gateshead has created a series of buildings alongside water that have won architectural prizes and have open-plan cafés where you can buy mushroom soup for eight quid a bowl. For example the Sage Centre, the new waterside venue for theatre and concerts, is shaped like the back of a snail.

  But a minute’s walk from there towards the centre of Gateshead is the start of the unregenerated tower blocks, boarded-up pubs and very old women struggling with bags full of shopping past places with ‘We change your cheques’ above the door and off licences in which the staff sit behind reinforced glass as if they’re awaiting a nuclear attack. Some pubs are still open, including the Metropole, though to get in I had to clamber across two men slumped in the doorway, each holding one crutch, as if Gateshead runs a crutch-pooling system so the disabled of the town don’t waste energy. Or maybe one of them wasn’t drinking, as he was the designated crutch-bearer.

  Inside there were four people in the far corner, including a man in a scarf and gloves who kept yelling, ‘And that was only the fucking parrot!’ then cackling, not unlike a parrot in fact, so this was presumably the punchline to a joke. The others stared straight ahead, so unmoved I felt like someone who can see people no one else is aware of, like the boy in the film Sixth Sense. A few seconds would pass, long enough for general laughter to die down if there had been any, then he’d yell, ‘And that was only the fucking parrot!’ again, and cackle again.

  Eventually one of his audience, a short man in a red jumper, left the parrot man and came to stand next to me instead. He asked if I liked jazz. I told him I loved jazz, and he said, ‘I love jazz, me,’ and asked who I liked in particular. I told him I always enjoyed hearing Dexter Gordon in Paris, but he hadn’t heard of him, so I tried Miles Davis, and he didn’t know him either. I asked who he did like, and he said, ‘I don’t know any of the names but I love the jazz.’

  Then he told me something very personal about himself. ‘What I do,’ he said, applying himself carefully as if it was essential I got all the details, as I’d need them on a mission once I was behind enemy lines, ‘is I drink a pint of Scottish & Newcastle. But then, for my next pint, I like change, to a different ale, could be anything, but not Scottish & Newcastle. Then I go back to Scottish & Newcastle, and then – after that, after the second Scottish & Newcastle, then I have a different ale. It might be the same ale as after the first Scottish & Newcastle, or it might be a different one again, a third one like, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not Scottish & Newcastle. Then I go back to Scottish & Newcastle, and then, after that, I have a different ale, could be anything
, one I’ve had before or maybe not, and keep swapping about like, all night, a different ale and then Scottish & Newcastle. And that way I don’t get bored.’

  He sat back down with his friends, the jokester having given up with his parrot line, and for a few minutes there was only the sound of five people supping. Then, at about twenty past ten the landlord suddenly stopped washing up glasses to yell in the direction of the four people opposite, ‘Right – that’s it! Now FUCK OFF you Irish CUNT!’ And the four of them got up and left, as if accepting that they did indeed between them comprise an Irish cunt, although there were four of them and they all seemed to be from Gateshead.

  The pubs of the High Street are considered tourist attractions. The council website boasts: ‘It is often claimed it’s not possible to walk the length of the High Street drinking half a pint in each pub.’ This is followed by: ‘Well excuse me but there are 32 pubs so that’s only 16 pints!’

  Moving further away from the River Tyne, the next landmark after the Metropole is the Dunston Rocket, a thirty-floor block of flats shaped like a rocket and hailed for its innovative design. For example, the book Gateshead Architecture describes it as ‘supported by large concrete fin-like flying buttresses, a design unique in Britain’. All of which is accurate, but avoids the detail that it was condemned in 2005 as uninhabitable, and is now surrounded by wire and covered in hardboard.

  Apparently there’s a name for this sort of architecture, which is ‘brutalist’. Which is to say it’s brutal on purpose. So at some point in the construction maybe it was marginally more appealing, and the architects grimaced and said, ‘Hmm, not quite brutal enough.’ Maybe the original plans pushed the boundaries of brutalism by including concrete windows and spikes that sprung from the living-room walls at random intervals, until these were rejected by some bureaucrat at the Housing Department who pointed out that it contravened EU regulations to kill all the tenants.