Engel's England Read online

  Except that they hadn’t really. Because no one knew where anywhere was any more. Is Sunderland now in County Durham, where it spent a good eight centuries? In the county of Tyne and Wear (which lasted only slightly longer than Winchcombeshire), as Wikipedia still insists? Is it Sunderland, Sundld, which is what my AA atlas calls it? Or, as most search engines imply, does it exist only as a football team? The AA (‘Britain’s Clearest Mapping’), trying desperately to follow the endless shifts in council boundaries, also awards county status to such confections as Halton, Kirklees, Knowsley, Sandwell and Trafford, remote centres of power even to locals, meaningless to outsiders. Other atlases and websites use different formulae. My special favourite is ‘Wigan, Wigan’, which makes it on to the BBC Weather website. So good they named it twice!

  Contrast this with America. Everyone knows it’s Boston, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, and Memphis, Tennessee: (‘Long-distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee!’). An American president can nuke Moscow in an instant, but cannot possibly interfere with the domestic arrangements of Memphis City Council. The current British government is far more subtle than Mrs Thatcher. It preaches ‘localism’ while at the same time whittling away at the two major areas of authority left with councils: education and planning.

  The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has expressed support for traditional counties and abandoned a rule barring the erection of signs denoting their historic boundaries. But councils don’t have enough money to mend the roads, never mind anything else. And a sign is meaningless when Royal Mail is agitating to get county names off envelopes entirely. No traditions attach themselves to a postcode.

  Even modern birthing practices conspire against local loyalties. Maternity hospitals are increasingly centralised, so whole swathes of the country will be filled with children born in another county, or even across national borders. And the populace are themselves guilty. If, by some strange fluke, a decision is taken locally and does not come down from Brussels, Westminster, Whitehall or the distant HQ of an avaricious multinational, the cry goes up, ‘Unfair! Postcode lottery!’

  This absence of local pride and engagement was noted by Raymond Seitz, the US Ambassador to Britain in the early 1990s. Seitz was a notable Anglophile, but he regretted, for instance, the dreary car number plates that resulted from Britain’s inability to permit diversity. ‘Its licence plates are unimaginative and uninformative. There is no “Kent: The Garden County” or “Cumbria: Land o’ Lakes”. I wonder what games British children play on long trips.’

  To me, the destruction of local pride in general, and the counties in particular, is a tragedy. Not a thousand-dead tragedy, but a slow-burn, almost unnoticed disaster leading to an irrevocable loss of self-respect. Not a deliberate act, but a case of criminal negligence. A crime against history, a crime against geography. Of course, mobility and mass media and globalisation make some degree of homogenisation inevitable. But that means it is even more urgent to cherish the things that make our own small patch of the planet special.

  It is not just the US where they do things differently. In France and Germany and Belgium, no one needs a government to preach localism: the strength of the commune or the pull of Heimat is very strong. In Scotland and Wales the nations themselves have awoken from slumber. In England people know less and less what they are and where they are. You can see the consequences in sad, once self-governing northern county boroughs like Dewsbury, their town halls echoing and empty. And you can see it on the Berkshire Downs, where the White Horse of Uffington has probably been a symbol of local pride for a couple of thousand years, and specifically Berkshire pride for eleven hundred. It was then moved to Oxfordshire. Decisions like this instantly rendered inoperative such adornments of the nation’s cultural heritage as the Victoria County History series and Pevsner’s Buildings of England. The benefit was negligible, the loss incalculable.

  Though much is taken, much abides. And although this book is something of an elegy, it is also a celebration of the remarkable and continuing distinctiveness of every part of England. It is the product of a three-year journey – to be more exact, a series of journeys, since real life did not cease – through thirty-nine counties and one capital: an average of just over one a month.

  To others, my wanderings appeared unexotic. Once I sent a friend an email saying ‘Am in Grimsby.’ ‘Bloody hell,’ he replied. ‘You’re like some third-rate Henry Kissinger – couldn’t you have said you were in Rio?’ Another time I really was going abroad, to Crete with the family. But obviously part of my brain refused to believe it. So somehow I managed to start a message to a colleague with the words ‘Just off for a week in Crewe’.

  As the project continued, people would ask me if I had a favourite county. But I soon ceased to answer. Since no one else seemed to cherish the counties, I found myself acquiring a mother’s fierce protectiveness. These were my forty children. Some had become gratifyingly more famous of late, like pushy Essex and tarty Cheshire, even though certain aspects of their celebrity might cause a little maternal concern; some found it ever harder to assert themselves and make their way in the world, so they needed my care even more; some were frankly exasperating. But I never had a dull day. And I never met a county I didn’t love.

  Despite all the pressures towards uniformity, each one is still individual, unique. My tone of voice may occasionally be sharp, as a mother’s should be, and some readers may say I have been unkind to their county or home town. But I do hope my underlying affection shines through.

  The notion that there are forty counties is an old one. Thomas Moule stated it as a fact in The English Counties Delineated (1839). Charlotte M. Mason used the title The Forty Shires for a book in 1881, implying it was a well-known phrase. She begins: ‘The writer ventures to hope the following pages may help to acquaint English children with their native land in the only way in which England can be practically known – county by county.’ And I applaud the sentiment.

  My forty chapters are not quite hers, though. Mason, like Moule, included Monmouthshire as part of England, which was technically correct from 1542 to 1974. And though the 1974 changes were almost all terrible, this one tidied up an obvious piece of nonsense. It is not entirely clear why the 1542 Laws in Wales Act should have omitted Monmouthshire: I thought at first it was either some Machiavellian Tudor manoeuvre or a straightforward cock-up. Monmouthshire was then far more Welsh than it is now, and for many purposes in those intervening 432 years the standard formulation was ‘Wales and Monmouthshire’. It was never truly an English county. Rhodri Morgan, the erudite former First Minister of Wales, thinks this anomaly arose from an earlier act which rejigged the judicial circuits – then vital cogs in the governmental machine. This took Monmouth out of the Welsh circuit and on to the Oxford circuit, apparently to even up the populations. In other words, it was an example of precisely the kind of insensitive tinkering that was repeated over and over again at the very time this ancient mistake was finally being corrected.

  On the other hand, Mason did not count London. Her book was published seven years before the formation of the London County Council, when the city was simply the City and the rest was in one of the Home Counties. It seems to me ludicrous to suggest that Westminster Bridge still links Middlesex and Surrey, and I don’t.

  London had to be included as a separate chapter for what might be called technical reasons: the publisher, Andrew Franklin, said a lot of books can be sold in London and I’d better include it or else. It was only much later that I realised that he was also right on a higher plane. All the counties exist in apposition to London, their nature determined by the extent to which Londonishness pervades them. In a sense, the entire book is about London.

  And there is no longer any clear definition of a county. The recent history is so shambolic I’ve just had to decide that I know a county when I see one. As a rough guide, I have used the 1955 AA Handbook because (a) it pre-dates the twists and turns of the past half-century and makes sense; (
b) I possess a copy; and (c) it is a glorious evocation of bygone England. Opening the book at random, I was able to discover, on a single spread, hotels called the King’s Arms in Berkhamsted, Herts (**), Berwick-upon-Tweed, Nthmb (***) and Bicester, Oxon (**, telephone Bicester 15), all offering B&B for twenty shillings or less, with dinner for as little as five and sixpence; dogs in Berkhamsted at manager’s discretion only. And when I wrote each chapter, I added another piece to my ‘Victory Plywood Jig Saw Puzzle’, showing all the counties (but ducking the London conundrum), which must be of similar vintage.

  The order of my chapters may not look immediately logical. I considered proceeding in alphabetical order, which sounded boring, or grouping them by regions, which sounded very boring. So I went as the spirit moved me. There were things I wanted to do at a particular time of year, and I wanted variety: big and small; coastal and inland; urban and rural. I also wanted to finish with the three places where I have lived almost all my life: Northamptonshire, where I grew up; London, where I grew a little wiser; and Herefordshire, where I settled. Sometimes I went back to a county to tie up a loose end, but they appear in chronological order of my main visit, and are written as I found them, without hindsight.

  I went to the northernmost, southernmost, westernmost and easternmost bits of England (two of these are the same place; one of the others is a dump); the wettest, the driest, the lowest, the highest (though only one of these is unarguable). The seasons changed around me, and I have tried not to condemn a place just because the weather was shitty. But there were places within counties that I liked and those I didn’t. The opinions I formed were often far removed from those I expected to form. Not everyone will agree, but they are honest opinions and my own. If you find a factual mistake (and there are bound to be quite a few in such a book), please let me know ([email protected]) to allow for possible corrections, but do so gently and politely, because it will have been an honest mistake.

  When required, updates appear in italics after each chapter.

  My website, matthewengel.co.uk, will have further updates and talking points and quirky footnote-y material that failed to make the book for fear of denuding all the forests of Scandinavia.

  By way of subtext, I visited all forty-one (Anglican) cathedrals and lit a candle to my late son in each. This meant going to a lot of Choral Evensong, partly for pleasure and partly to avoid paying the admission charges; principle not meanness, you understand.

  And everywhere I met wonderful people, many of whom are thanked by name at the back of the book. They helped me not only out of the goodness of their hearts, though that was plentiful, but also because in most cases, I believe, they got pleasure from talking about their village, their town and, sometimes above all, their county. The question I kept asking was, ‘How do I find the essence of this county?’ The answers often led me to fascinating discoveries.

  It is easy to get depressed about England, so confused, so ill-used, so wet and so grey. But there was something I believed when I set out that I believe even more strongly now I have finished: that this is the most beautiful and fascinating country on earth.

  Matthew Engel

  Herefordshire, September 2014

  1. I’ll be with you in plum blossom time

  WORCESTERSHIRE

  The ‘Springtime in the Vale’ coach trip left the country park outside Evesham just after 10 a.m. This was the outing formerly known as the Blossom Trail tour. But blossom and bus timetables are uneasy bedfellows. ‘It’s a bit of a revamped blossom tour,’ explained our guide, Angela from Wychavon District Council. ‘Either the blossom was too early, or we were too late, or vice versa, so we’ve rebranded it.’

  There was another uneasy party to this arrangement. I’m a train man: I don’t like buses. And simply being here spoke to one of my deepest fears. Everyone has their own particular alarm about old age: pain, infirmity, mental decay. My own holy terror is of being so bored and lonely that I succumb to booking seven-day coach tours to ‘Glorious Devon’ or ‘Loch Lomond and the Trossachs’. As it was, I found myself – as happens less and less often – some way below the average age of the thirty-strong company, although Fred the driver had trouble believing my protest that I was not entitled to the £1 pensioner discount.

  But it had seemed churlish to spurn the bus trip. Angela and Fred knew where Worcestershire’s best blossom might be; I didn’t. And for once everything was in sync. An infamously savage December had been succeeded by a bland January and February, and a kindly March. The upshot was that on this Wednesday, 6 April, the plum trees were in full cry. These are the traditional harbingers of the brief and glorious Midland spring; they are followed by riots of pear, cherry and apple blossom before the orchards calm down, stop showing off and get on with the serious business of producing fruit.

  Furthermore, this was no ordinary 6 April. It was a fabulous 6 April: the sky deep blue, the sun blazing down, the air midsummer-warm.

  The tour had definitely been given more of a revamp than a rebrand. Once we got going, we saw heaps of plum blossom, but only in the distance. Angela had other priorities. Within minutes, we stopped at a farm shop for plum-jam nibbles washed down with thimbles of local apple juice. That lasted half an hour. We went on to Croome Park, designed by Capability Brown, mucked up by the RAF and then by the M5, now being restored by the National Trust, which has had difficulty replanting some of the trees in their old places, since they are ill-suited to the southbound fast lane.

  At Croome Park we were encouraged to visit the toilets, the coffee shop and the redundant Georgian church of Croome D’Abitot, once the quasi-private chapel of the Earls of Coventry. This was an hour-long stop, which was a bit leisurely for the toilet but not quite long enough to visit Croome Court, the Coventrys’ ancestral home which fell on confused times after the tenth earl was killed during the Dunkirk retreat, and the estate was sold off. The house then had spells as a Catholic boys’ school, a country house hotel, a base for the Hare Krishna movement, the home of a property developer or two, the offices of an insurance company and a police training centre. The motorway came through in the 1960s, perhaps the only decade in the past 250 years when such a thing would have been possible without either the Coventrys or public opinion screaming blue murder.

  Which is, I think, all very interesting, but nothing to do with plum blossom. And then, when we reboarded Fred’s coach, we were taken straight to the centre of Evesham and decanted for a two-hour stop, this time to have lunch. By now, I was hearing mutinous murmurs from the rows behind me. ‘I came to see the countryside, not the town,’ moaned a woman from Worcester.

  Some of the party probably lived in Evesham and might have walked home for lunch. Evesham is a pretty town, especially on a day like this, though it is of an unfortunate size (pop.: 22,000) which means it has a good many chain stores of a not especially useful kind (Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Body Shop, Burton) but no Marks & Spencer. It does have a particularly hideous 24-hour Tesco on the edge of town. My friend Jane Mason, who was to give me board and lodging that evening, once complained to the manager: ‘Can’t you turn the sign off at night? This is a rural area and you can see it from everywhere, even the riverbank.’ ‘That’s the point,’ he replied.

  Before the supermarket came, the last major event in Evesham was a kerfuffle in 1265 when rebel soldiers led by Simon de Montfort were trapped by the bend in the River Avon. With no Tesco sign to suggest a line of retreat, they had the river on three sides and forces loyal to Henry III on the fourth; they were duly massacred. De Montfort was slain and cut in pieces, with body parts being awarded, in the manner of the corrida, to various loyalist generals. Roger, the first Baron Mortimer, was given the head and sent it home to his wife, as one of the most original and thoughtful of all love tokens. Perhaps it was stamped A SOUVENIR OF EVESHAM, or MY HUSBAND WENT TO EVESHAM AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY HEAD.

  I would have retrieved my car and gone off on my own but for an assurance from Angela that we really wer
e going to see blossom in the hour that would remain between us regrouping at 3 p.m. and saying goodbye at 4. The destination was The Lenches, a group of five villages and hamlets, Rous Lench, Church Lench, Ab Lench, Atch Lench and Sheriff’s Lench, famous for their mistletoe-covered old orchards. I just wanted to lie on the warming ground and stare through the flowers at the perfect sky.

  So, after 3, Angela pointed out the homes of a few minor celebrities and I sat back contentedly, savouring the prospect ahead and that lovely phrase: plum blossom. Perhaps only cherry blossom can match it for euphony, I was thinking, though that has become tainted by association with boot polish. The coach jogged gently along the lanes. The sun streamed through the window. I must have closed my eyes. And the next thing I knew we were back in the car park, being ushered off.

  Very cross, I drove straight back to Atch Lench, where there is a large community orchard, saved from the bulldozers in 1999 by a consortium of concerned villagers. The gate was open and it was at last possible to bond with the springtime. England stretched down the hill and far beyond; a soft spring breeze ruffled the grass; the trees were stark white against the sky. Plum blossom is not just a pretty phrase. It is more beautiful in reality than its rivals, purer in its whiteness, more delicate, more vulnerable. It symbolises all the hope of the year. But the breeze was driving the first blooms to the ground: April not a week old – day one of the financial year – and already the first hint of melancholy. It felt like a scene that had been enacted in the Lenches for thousands of springtimes.

  Actually not. The Vale of Evesham was originally famous for vegetables (including asparagus), cereals and sheep. Then came the great agrarian depression of the late nineteenth century. According to John Edgeley – the acknowledged local expert – the first big orchards near here were then planted just over the Gloucestershire border by Lord Sudeley. Soon they spread into Worcestershire, and Evesham’s neighbour Pershore became famous for two plums, the Pershore Yellow Egg and the Pershore Purple. Fresh plums, previously an upper-class delicacy, became widely available, and plum jam and tinned plums ubiquitous. However, this heyday lasted barely half a century. By the 1950s cold storage was enabling the nascent supermarkets to bring in fresh plums from more trustworthy climes.