Engel's England Read online

It was stunning. And to think I was setting out to visit all the coloured counties. Maybe the other thirty-eight (plus London) would be as lovely as this one. What joy! What an adventure!

  April 2011

  In 2012 a local company with six employees deflected Coca-Cola’s opposition and began calling its product Holywell Malvern Spring Water – sold only in glass bottles. George Chesterton died, aged ninety, in November 2012.

  Three years on, my eyes still well with tears whenever I think of the inscription on Robert and Lily Lee’s gravestone.

  2. Do you know how the shower works, Jesus?

  BEDFORDSHIRE

  Then, next thing, I was at the gates of Mordor, otherwise known as the Ibis Hotel, Luton Airport: a couple of hours’ flying time from almost anywhere in Europe; an unimaginable distance from Bredon.

  Luton Airport stands as a representation of England as it changed, for better and worse, in the second half of the twentieth century. It developed as a base for charter airlines in the early days of package holidays and acquired a particular place in the cultural history of flight: typifying its transition from being exotic, risky, thrilling and luxurious to commonplace, safe, dull and disgusting. In the late 1970s the young actress Lorraine Chase, looking exquisite, appeared with a white-suited roué in an unforgettable advert set on an elegant terrace outside a Palladian mansion, somewhere near the Mediterranean. ‘Were you truly wafted here from paradise?’ purred the vile smoothie. The goddess replied in pure Eliza Doolittle, pre-Higgins: ‘Naaa, Lu’on Airpor’.’ (The ad was for Campari, though it may not have been very effective. Until I checked, my memory said Wall’s Cornetto.)

  I have myself been wafted to distant places from Luton, though not often. I remember the security hall, filled with offensively bossy notices written in capital letters: it was much how one imagines the induction centre at Guantanamo Bay. I also remember a winter flight back from Zurich. In Switzerland there was a foot and a half of fresh snow; my train across the country was ninety seconds late. In Luton there had been a light dusting; chaos reigned. The plane was delayed five hours because the landing runway was blocked, and we returned to an emergency bus timetable, carefully organised so as to deposit us on the frozen wastes of Luton Airport Parkway Station at 2.10 a.m., thus missing the hourly all-night service to King’s Cross by precisely one minute.

  I took intense satisfaction in the fact that, this time, unlike every other guest at the Ibis Hotel, I did not have to fly anywhere. I was here because Luton Airport was in Bedfordshire, a fact probably unknown to everyone else in the hotel.

  Modern counties, with their public relations officers and marketing departments and tourist boards, like self-promotion. They try to infiltrate themselves into the minds of those passing through with signs and catchy slogans. You would have thought this was particularly relevant for a county with a lot of through traffic (M1, A1, A5, A6 and all three main railway lines to the North). Not in the least. Bedfordshire survived the 1974 reorganisation intact and, up till 2009, its borders had remained unchanged – bar minor tinkering – since Saxon times. Technically, that remains the case. But it is now divided into three ‘unitary areas’ and thus has no county council with any duty of care for the name and its heritage. The Bedfordshire signs were removed and sold on eBay for £6 each (having reportedly cost £2,000 to erect). As they leave, motorists are told where they are going, without knowing where they have just been. The only indication I had – and this was temporary, though not very temporary – was that the M1 went down to 50 mph for the entire length of the county because of roadworks between Junctions 10 and 13.

  It is not as if the county doesn’t lend itself to slogans. During the 1990s craze for ‘Do It’ puns (‘Rugby players do it with oval balls’; ‘Cardiologists do it till your heart stops’ etc.), a competition run by the Daily Mail was won by the suggestion ‘Luton Town Do It in Beds’. Vera Lynn sang

  Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire

  Heading for the land of dreams…

  And Lorraine Chase had come-to-Beds eyes.

  Perhaps, too, no county has more need of marketing. Bedfordshire has no mountains, no coastline, no cathedral. No racecourse, no first-class cricket team and, in 2011, no League football team. It is the most nondescript of counties: Britain’s New Jersey. The state of Idaho, struggling for a catchphrase, used to say on its number plates ‘Famous Potatoes’. What might Bedfordshire say? Its main distinction is its lack of self-respect.

  Even the Victoria County History struggles to get excited: ‘a county of comparatively little interest to the vertebrate palaeontologist … the name of Bedfordshire is not connected to any of the more striking memories of early Church history … few distinctive characteristics … a thoroughfare from one part of the kingdom to another …’ (If not necessarily a quick thoroughfare.) In the early 1980s, when the now-defunct Illustrated London News was doing a series on all the counties, my friend Frank Keating suggested to the editor that I might do the piece on Northamptonshire, my home county. No chance, said the editor. ‘Already arranged.’ Then he perked up. ‘Can he do Bedfordshire? No one else wants it.’

  ‘Is there anything distinctive about the county?’ I asked the local naturalist Conor Jameson. ‘Um, um,’ he replied. ‘It’s probably distinguished by its averageness.’

  That average is brought down not only by Luton Airport but by Luton itself: a middlingly dreary town in terms of looks that has somehow made itself wholly unloved. The English characteristic of good-natured tolerance never took root here. In 1919 the official celebration of the end of the First World War was marked in Luton by rioters burning down the town hall. In the 1970s and 1980s the town was known as a hotbed of pro-IRA sentiment. Since then, the pace of unpleasantness has quickened. There was said to be an Islamist militant cell here even before 2005, when the four London suicide bombers made it their last stop on the way to blowing up themselves and fifty-two strangers on the London transport system. Their visit had not inspired them to choose life and light rather than death and infamy. In 2009 local Muslims infuriated their neighbours by protesting against soldiers returning from Afghanistan (‘Luton twinned with Yemen,’ said the Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn). This in turn gave rise to the white backlash group, the English Defence League, which is thought to have emerged from Luton’s football-hooligan class. It was also here that an entire family of chavs kept a slave, tortured him and then finally, in 2009, hacked him to pieces.

  The only major institution now named after the county is the University of Bedfordshire, which is a mutation and rebranding of the University of Luton, which passed into folk myth (no doubt unfairly) as the ultimate pretend university where they would readily dish out to all-comers first-class honours in basket weaving or strip pontoon. Maybe Luton itself could be rebranded: it really does not help a place to have a name so redolent of the toilet.

  It is possible to avoid Luton and the M1 by taking Watling Street, the A5, through the once-grand staging-post town of Dunstable. In pre-railway days the Old Sugar Loaf Hotel was one of the most famous coaching inns of England. Moll Flanders stopped there, as did Queen Victoria (though not at the same time). It is now a loud, chirpy, bog-standard pub with TV screens all round the bar flashing up messages like TRY OUR TASTY BASKET MEALS! and BUY 5 COFFEES AND RECEIVE YOUR 6TH FREE. That would keep you awake in the traffic jams. It is almost impossible to park nearby even if you wanted and such a struggle to run a business in Dunstable that even the charity shops steer clear. Building after building was empty when I went through.

  And yet you only have to head a couple of miles west and you can see how Bedfordshire maintains its averageness. Suddenly you are on Dunstable Downs, 700 feet up; the air is fresh and, westward, look, the land is bright. At the official viewing spot the scene is somewhat spoiled when you turn round and see the nasty new visitors’ centre. But my weatherman-friend Philip Eden, who lives at Whipsnade, showed me his secret view from a barley field: clear across to Ivinghoe Beacon and way beyond �
�� to the Cotswolds on a clear day. You can also just glimpse the penguin enclosure.

  Whipsnade has something far more surprising than the view and the zoo. For Bedfordshire does, after all, have a cathedral: an imitation more touching than anything made of stone – a tree cathedral, created by a local grandee, Edmund Kell Blyth, to commemorate his First World War comrades. Not a memorial, he said, but a symbol of ‘faith, hope and reconciliation’. It was not immediately successful: as soon as he finished planting it, the next war began. But it has survived all the horrors. It has the shape and scale of the real thing: a porch of oaks; a nave of limes; a chancel of silver birches; transepts of tulip trees and chestnuts. It is a quiet, numinous place. The South-East being gripped by drought that spring, I thought it politic not to light a candle.

  Someone summed up Bedfordshire to me as ‘a county of ugly towns and pretty villages’. And the second half of that is undoubtedly true. There is stunning stone-built Turvey; prosperous Eversholt with its splendid cricket field, its own communal swimming pool and a street called Witts End (which I’m often at); and, above all, there is Old Warden, full of thatch and leaded lights without a rough edge in sight, so pristine one would be frightened to fart in bed for fear of a harsh letter from the parish council. Old Warden was advertising a black-tie summer ball, starting with Pimm’s and canapés, with tickets at £50 a head. Oh, the simple joys of merrie England! Even Toddington, famous for its motorway service station and racked by traffic, has a charming church and village green. It also still had, in 2011, seven pubs, believed to be a record for any English village. Indeed, I don’t know any county with such handsome pubs – top beer, too, now that the south London staple Youngs is brewed in Bedford alongside much-loved Charlie Wells. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is based in a country house set in parkland just outside Sandy. Conor Jameson works there and talked to me eloquently of the joys of the Greensand Ridge, a landmark for migratory birds that crosses the county.

  And Bedford is an unexpectedly pretty town. It went upmarket in the late nineteenth century thanks to the appeal of the good local schools run by the Harpur Trust. It seems settled, content, unexpectedly refined. St Paul’s Church, in the centre of town, was the wartime setting for the BBC’s Daily Service, which would be described as coming from ‘Somewhere in England’.

  Somewhere in England: it’s a good description of Bedfordshire.

  In contrast to Luton, Bedford has a sense of community. This is exemplified by its newspaper, Bedfordshire on Sunday, a freesheet started in 1977 by a rip-roaring local journalist called Frank Branston who got thrown out of the bland and fearful Bedfordshire Times because he kept trying to write stories exposing corruption. ‘It was like a thirty-year revenge mission for Frank,’ said his successor as editor, Steve Lowe.

  An exquisitely successful mission: eventually his baby eclipsed the Times and took over its old office. Branston’s paper was something else: part redtop tabloid, part Private Eye, it avoided village news and cheque presentations and delighted in enraging the bourgeoisie. Branston eventually became Bedford’s first elected mayor and won a second term before he died suddenly, in 2009. His creation – now corporately owned by the Iliffe group – lives on, a little more placidly than before. ‘We miss Frank,’ said Lowe. ‘It was his newspaper, his personality. But Iliffe said they wouldn’t interfere and they haven’t. It’s just that the law makes it harder for us to do what we used to do. We were forever monstering people and we did get sued an awful lot.’ When I went to the office, an old bloke in front of me was complaining: ‘No one’s delivered to Roxton for three weeks.’ Normal freesheets do not draw this kind of response. Its success suggests a place with hidden depths.

  I wandered down to the River Ouse, bordered by gardens full of lilacs and early roses, with school eights gliding by. Pevsner was enchanted by the riverbank: ‘Few English towns can be compared’. He missed the turning to Albany Road, an ordinary-looking street of Edwardian terraces, architecturally undistinguished but potentially the most famous street in the world.

  For this is the home of the Panacea Society, a religious sect founded at the end of the first war under the leadership of Mabel Barltrop (a name that might have been invented by either Agatha Christie or Alan Bennett), who lived at no. 12. The Society gathered enough adherents – who knew Mabel under the more heavenly-sounding name of Octavia – to acquire a large property portfolio and a war chest now thought to exceed £30 million.

  Though almost forgotten beyond Bedford, the Panacea Society is fashionably feminist: its fundamental tenet is that God is fourfold – father and son; mother and daughter. It is also very British, venerating a string of obscure British prophets, the most significant being Joanna Southcott, daughter of an eighteenth-century Devonian farmer, who left some of her writings in a sealed box, now held at an undisclosed location, thought to be 18 Albany Road, three doors down from Mabel’s. This can only be opened, Southcott decreed, ‘in a time of a grave national danger’ on the instructions of twenty-four bishops of the Church of England.

  In the 1920s, when Britain was full of bereaved young women, the society struck a chord and ran a poster campaign that made it famous: CRIME BANDITRY DISTRESS AND PERPLEXITY WILL INCREASE UNTIL THE BISHOPS OPEN JOANNA SOUTHCOTT’S BOX. Anyone who has observed the Church of England will be aware how difficult it is to get twenty-four bishops to agree on anything. And so crime, banditry, distress and perplexity have duly increased.

  Much of this information I found on the society’s website. This did not mention what members once told a TV documentary team: that the society believes Bedford to be the centre of the Garden of Eden. They added that a room (also thought to be in no. 18) had been prepared for Jesus’ return, complete with en suite facilities.

  All religions, including the most successful, require a suspension of everyday rational thought. In the cold light of a Channel 4 documentary, they would all sound ridiculous, especially if they originated not in Jerusalem, but in a terraced house in Bedford. It is socially acceptable to believe in the virgin birth, but not in Joanna Southcott’s Box. So the Panacea Society grew sheepish and suspicious. When I rang the office bell and asked if they had any information, a gruff man told me: ‘We don’t just give out information. You’d need to write in and say why you want to know.’ How was he so sure I wasn’t a bishop?

  There was one group who found worldly salvation in Bedford. I discovered their remnants, most of them by now over eighty, at their Thursday afternoon group in a Methodist church near the centre of town. The main difference between this club and the average British pensioners’ group was the refreshment. No tea urn. At the Club Prima Generazione Italiani, they served tiny cups of strong coffee.

  The Italians came to Bedford in the early 1950s because – with postwar employment booming – the locals no longer wanted or needed to work in the brickworks that then dominated the Bedfordshire landscape. The big firms began to recruit in southern Italy, where the grinding poverty meant there were many takers: strong young men keen to earn money unimaginable in the Mezzogiorno.

  Some of those men were at Park Road church, still powerfully built, no longer young. They thought the streets of Bedford would be paved with gold. They were shocked by what they found. ‘I thought when they said “hostel”, that was the same as a hotel,’ said Piras from Sardinia. They slept six to eight in a room; they hated the food (in 1950s England, pasta meant Heinz spaghetti); and, after they had paid for their accommodation and bus fares, there was little enough to send back.

  To make more money, they had to take the toughest jobs: on piecework and inside the ‘chamber’, the kiln itself, which could get unspeakably hot, especially towards the end of the week. ‘On Monday, after it had been cooled for the weekend, it was not so bad,’ said Domenico from Campobasso. ‘But by Friday if I touched the floor it burned my hand. Every hour I had to change my shirt, it was so wet.’ ‘My husband had gloves made from the tyres of lorries,’ said Lena from Campania. ‘All the s
kin was burned from his legs.’ The worst thing, everyone agreed, was going from the heat of the kiln to the cold outside.

  Because they worked hard, the men were accepted soon enough. At home, it was harder, with the neighbours complaining about the noise and the cooking smells. The womenfolk could be isolated, although many got work in the Meltis factory, making that delight of a 1950s childhood, New Berry Fruits. I suspect things started to get easier in the 1960s, which was when the British discovered Italy (often flying from Luton Airport) and ceased to think of their neighbours as Martians. Most of the migrants went home eventually, but some stayed, although it was noticeable that, even sixty years on, almost everyone at Park Road was far more comfortable speaking Italian. Their children grew up British, with the girls in particular chafing against their mothers’ notions of teenage decorum. And now, as the prima generazione moves on, Bedford’s Italian culture is fading too. ‘Once there was an Italian shop on every street, and sometimes two,’ said Carmela Semeraro, the community historian and organiser of the Thursday group. ‘Now there are only two left in Bedford.’

  The brickworks have gone too. The largest in the world, run by the London Brick Company at Stewartby, was said to produce 650 million bricks a year. And that was just one site: there were 130 chimneys on the road between Bedford and Bletchley alone. Stewartby closed in 2008 and production moved to Peterborough, on the same brick-friendly layer of clay, but with more modern plant. On the otherwise deserted site I discovered a lone watchman supervising the exit of the day’s last lorry carrying away the old spoil. The four Stewartby chimneys – more than 200 feet high – are not being demolished: the heritage people stepped in. Outside a battered sign read: GRADE II LISTED CHIMNEYS AND KILNS FOR SALE OR TO LET. The kilns might make bijou garden flats, I suppose, but it is not obvious what use there might be for the chimneys, which would have drawbacks as family homes, despite the sensational view from the roof terrace.