Engel's England Page 5

  So they will remain, along with the two great airship sheds at Cardington, which have had little use since the R101 left there in 1930 on its doomed journey to France. There it crashed in flames, killing forty-eight passengers and crew and, with them, the dream that airships would be the transport of the future. The sheds stand like beached whales, towering above the poplars – symbols, like the Stewartby chimneys, of a county that desperately needs some kind of symbolism. Otherwise, it will eventually lose what little identity it has and really will be just Somewhere in England.

  Perhaps the RSPB could set up an offshoot, the Royal Society for the Protection of Bedfordshire. Perhaps the Panacea Society could be a little less secretive with the notion of Bedford as the Garden of Eden. But what if Mabel’s heirs were half right, and Jesus actually turned up in a room with en suite at the Ibis Hotel, Luton Airport, instead? That might be a very interesting and profound statement.

  May 2011

  The last resident member of the Panacea Society died in 2012 and it ceased to exist as a religious community. It is now under control of a trust which, grown weary of furtiveness, has a museum, open for a short period every Thursday. It intends to continue to abide by the conditions for opening the box, which is ‘in a safe and secure location’. The profusion of pubs in little Toddington was too good to be true: by the end of 2012 the seven had dwindled to four. Luton Town returned to the Football League in 2014 after five years in exile.

  3. Adventures in the state-your-business belt

  SURREY

  We were standing, Matthew Banner and I, on the western edge of Box Hill. On a ridge to the north-east, looking very out of place, was the show-offy eighteenth-century pile of Norbury Park. But since this was later owned by Leopold Salomons, who gave Box Hill to the nation, it would have been mean to complain.

  That one house aside, nothing. Mile after mile of what looked like virgin forest. We could have been Lewis and Clark on the Rockies, stout Cortez on a peak in Darien. It was a moment for wild surmise. Where on earth were we? ‘That’s Heathrow Airport over there,’ said Matthew. ‘You’d see it very clearly in the winter when there’s no leaf cover.’

  We went back to the most famous part of the hill, the southern slope by the Salomons memorial. On the warm summer’s morning there were women in bikinis, sunbathing. Ahead of them lay this vision: Leith Hill, the highest point in south-east England; a few Italianate lollipop trees atop the foothills; and a seemingly empty plain stretching to Chanctonbury Ring, the South Downs, the horizon and the sea.

  ‘Over there, hidden by the ridge,’ said Matthew, pointing south-east, ‘that’s Gatwick. And there, those are the suburbs of Dorking. You can see the main railway line there, and there’s another below us. That’s the A24 just there …’

  ‘And what are those white things, the ones that look like the sails of a yacht?’

  ‘That’s the sewage works.’

  Surrey truly is a miraculous county, the world’s biggest trompe l’oeil. Somewhere round here, there are millions of people. But they are hidden among the trees: shy woodland creatures, probably nocturnal – trolls or goblins or hobbits. Maybe that’s why the river that flows past Box Hill is called the Mole. Again and again, this place takes one’s breath away: from the top of the stand at Epsom racecourse, all you see, if you gaze beyond the horses, are treetops stretching towards infinity, like the New Guinea rainforest. Surrey is called the most wooded county in England and I believe it. There is an iron law in journalism that it must always be referred to as ‘leafy Surrey’; subeditors probably think that’s the official title, like Royal Berkshire. Technically, it’s only leafy between April and the end of October, when you can’t see Heathrow from Box Hill. So why not twiggy, boughy or trunky? Shouldn’t be there a close season on using the word ‘leafy’, as with grouse shooting?

  In my mind’s eye, Surrey has always been associated with green: Green Line buses, the green station signs of the old Southern Region. And the leafiness means it stays green even after a drought-spring like this one. But there are contrasts too. Looking north from the Hog’s Back, I fancied myself on the Blue Mountains in New South Wales: ‘I see the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended’. Well, as I say, there was a drought. And it had been a pretty brief glimpse. The Hog’s Back is the A31 dual carriageway, not a place to get distracted by visions.

  For it’s all an illusion. You may not be able to see the airports from Box Hill but you can hear the planes right enough: we were only a few miles from Ockham, one of the four stacks which pilots must meander around when awaiting a landing slot at Heathrow. George Meredith, who lived nearby, referred to the valley below Box Hill as ‘a soundless gulf’. He died in 1909, two months before Blériot crossed the Channel and some years before the motorcycling community discovered Ryka’s burger bar at Burford Bridge, began flocking there on summer weekends like starlings, staging ton-up races down the A24 and, sometimes, writing themselves off on the Mickleham bends.

  That’s entirely typical. Surrey is visually exhilarating but aurally vexatious. The racket is constant but no one else appears to notice. In Farnham, pretty and Georgian, the bleepers on the pedestrian crossings were set to ear-splitting levels; maybe it’s the only way they could be heard above the planes. Every road in the county seemed constantly busy, even in the middle of the day. And here was me thinking the entire adult population was whisked to Waterloo sometime around sunrise, leaving Surrey to the young, the old, the feckless and about half a dozen surviving farm workers.

  It’s a bad-tempered county too. On the roads, someone is always in your face or up your arse. There is a myth that drivers in London are mean and aggressive; it’s not true (the cyclists excepted) – the only way to survive on the roads there is by give-and-take. Then these gentle souls get out of town and, whump, all their pent-up motoring misanthropy comes out. No one gives an inch. There is still something of the 1930s about Surrey, when a chap might take his popsy out in the jalopy for a spin round Brooklands, have a few jars at the roadhouse and a canoodle in the dicky seat down Lovers’ Lane. But there are no quiet lanes any more. My constant companion, Kathy, the Irish satnav voice, was spooked by this county and regularly disorientated. Once this forced me to execute a nine-point turn on a sandy track. In the midst of this operation, I was assailed by a herd of cyclists, taking no prisoners.

  The epitome of Surrey is Seven Hills Road in Weybridge: huge houses set among the tall trees and the rhododendrons, nearly all of them with sylvan names: Squirrels Wood, The Beeches, Hill Pines, Fox Oak, The Spinney. The only exception I spotted was Millstones, presumably named by an owner who needed multiple mortgages or hated his children. But I may have missed some: if I had slowed down a fraction to check the names, someone would have nuzzled my rear bumper. These houses must constitute second prize in life’s lottery (we will come to the first prize later). Yet just turning right when they exit their security gates in the morning constitutes a further gamble for these winners. The traffic is always fast and the drivers furious. What are they furious about? Because they don’t live on Seven Hills Road? Or because they do?

  Money and property are the Surrey obsessions. One of the county magazines, So Surrey – witless even by the low standards of this genre – had ‘The New £150,000 Aston Martin’ on its cover. Its rival, Surrey Life, channelled the Sunday Times rich list and revealed that nos. 1, 2 and 3 were all local residents (or homeowners anyway): Lakshmi Mittal of Cranleigh, Alisher Usmanov of Guildford and Roman Abramovich of Stoke D’Abernon. The front few pages of the Surrey Advertiser homes supplement were taken up by places all valued deep into seven-figure territory; eight is not uncommon; nine not unthinkable. On the web there was a mansion in Windlesham for sale at £70 million. Exact size unknown, since different agents counted different numbers of bedrooms, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, somewhere in that region. Not forgetting heated marble driveways, three swimming pools, squash court, bowling alley and a galleried landing that is ‘a replica of V
ersace’s home in Miami’.

  Staring at the colour pictures of sumptuous interiors and neatly mown weedless lawns, one sensed something dismal about these places: they seemed vapid, sterile, loveless. I know people normally tidy up before the estate agent takes photographs, but there is another property-selling theory – that you should casually strew the lawn with children’s bikes and a football, and suffuse the house with the smell of freshly baked apple pie. Hard to imagine these houses had ever heard children’s laughter or smelt an apple pie. This is the heart of what the writer Gordon Burn once called ‘the state-your-business belt’.

  One felt most of the sales marked the end of more than one era and that the marriage was being disposed of too. Further back came the adverts for flats, and every Surrey town I saw was echoing to the construction of new blocks of what are usually now called apartments, boltholes for refugees from relationships that have fractured under the pressure of living in Surrey.

  But the wealth is in part another illusion. Surrey is not homogeneous, even its post-1965 incarnation after its urban north-east was ceded to Greater London in exchange for a chunk of meat carved from the carcass of murdered Middlesex. You can take a tram these days from Croydon to Wimbledon that goes through much of ex-Surrey, most of it a bit grim. Surrey County Hall, weirdly, is still in Kingston, which is no longer part of the territory it administers.

  Some people think of Surrey in quadrants: more urban north of the M25; a bit snootier west of the A3. But overall it is quite obviously wealthy. That, says Wendy Varcoe of the Community Foundation for Surrey, is the trouble: ‘Our challenge is to make people aware that there’s a problem. If you’re wealthy, it’s a lovely place to live. If you’re not, the services aren’t geared to you.’

  I met Wendy at Ockford Ridge, a 1930s ex-council estate above Godalming, regarded with a slight shudder by most of the residents of that most Surreyish of towns as ‘up there’. It does not look deprived, and indeed has been gentrified by young couples fleeing the million-pound houses below. The main complaint I heard was about a woman who always left her overflowing dustbin on the pavement.

  But there’s stuff beneath the surface and always has been. I met a woman who came from Birmingham to work in the nursery school: ‘I was teaching in Handsworth and I thought I’d seen it all. When I first got here the kids said, “We’re not going to do what you tell us.” I was spat on, I was kicked.’

  ‘How old were these kids?’

  ‘Three and four.’

  Terry Broomfield, who grew up on the estate, got into the grammar school in 1947. His parents, humiliatingly, sent him with football boots rather than rugby boots. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t know about such things,’ he was told dismissively on Day 1. ‘You’re from Ockford Ridge.’ In retirement, he still hadn’t budged and was working hard for the community.

  ‘The doctor’s surgery used to be in the High Street. Now it’s out of town and 250 yards from a bus stop. And a lot of people have to take two buses to get there at all. Well, if you’re ill, you might not be able to walk 250 yards. We get forgotten.’ Terry drove me round and pointed out, with some pride, a house where a murder took place. ‘That’s the private estate, Miltons Crescent,’ he explained.

  ‘So that’s not Ockford Ridge?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, talking mock-posh. ‘That’s Miltons Crescent. Phwah!’

  Naturally, the news reports all said it was Ockford Ridge.

  I fall in love with place names and then regret it. Once, I took a bus hundreds of miles because I couldn’t resist the sound of Sweetwater, Texas. It was a dump, of course. I kept rolling the names of Surrey towns round my tongue, but one look in my copy of the Surrey Pevsner stopped me bothering. This was the only volume in the series almost wholly written by that much-missed critic and wanderer Ian Nairn. He was more reliably trenchant than the series’ eponymous master: ABINGER (beloved of E. M. Forster): ‘a little suburbanized’; ASH: ‘sad’; BRAMLEY: ‘nondescript’; BYFLEET: ‘shattered … beneath contempt’; CAPEL: ‘nondescript’ … all the way down to WRECCLESHAM: ‘a few very battered cottages and a bad church’.

  I couldn’t resist Bagshot, purely because of the name, redolent of the days when every lounge bar in England, possibly under a similar regulation to the one governing the use of ‘leafy Surrey’, always had a mustachioed military figure at the bar with a name like that. ‘Mornin’, Major Bagshot. A pint of the usual?’ Long before Pevsner, Daniel Defoe had called Bagshot the town ‘good for nothing’ and he wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t see a pub that would have suited the major. Or me.

  I had to go on to Camberley, not utterly dismissed by Pevsner, but really because of Betjeman:

  By roads ‘not adopted’, by woodlanded ways,

  She drove to the club in the late summer haze,

  Into nine-o’clock Camberley, heavy with bells

  And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

  I parked by Pine Avenue (unadopted) and scrunched my way down the gravel road past houses called Stony Ridge, Stumpers and Squirrels Lea. Some of the houses did have a vaguely Betjemanesque quality but most had been extended, remodelled, infilled. There was an occasional whiff of pine. But I heard no bells: just the jets from Gatwick; the roar of the traffic on the M3; the hammering of builders; the whine of hedge trimmers and the whirr of mowers, controlled by jobbing gardeners who arrive in American-style pickup trucks and are not encouraged to let mushrooms show their faces. In the autumn, they probably use leaf blowers. At moments when everything stopped except the M3, it was possible to detect an understorey of birdsong. That kind of silence does occur in Surrey but, I think, less frequently than in any other county.

  I went to Puttenham under the Hog’s Back, home of the last hop garden in Surrey, and singled out in 2007 by the connoisseur of villages, Clive Aslet, for its peacefulness and for the sign in the charmingly named pub, the Good Intent, welcoming ‘muddy boots, dogs and children’. I sat in the pub garden: a siren was wailing from the main road; next door someone was using a power drill, which might have been annoying had it not been outcompeted by a mega-decibel cooling unit or something at the back of the pub. The beer was OK. Then I spotted the sign. It now read: ‘Please remove or clean properly your shoes or boots to protect the carpet. Thank you.’ The road to the Good Intent is paved with hell.

  I tried heaven instead and went to Guildford Cathedral to light my candle. The building is modern, almost contemporaneous with Coventry, but laid out in the Gothic manner without the curly, twirly bits. It is not much loved. Pevsner-Nairn, however, was kindly, calling it ‘noble and subtle, with a queer power of compelling not reverence but contemplation’. I tried to sit and contemplate but, when I stared skywards, I noticed the ceiling had developed dark blotches, as though it had a fungal disease. Then a thirty-strong conga line passed by, suddenly and bafflingly. They were apparently Dutch choristers, rehearsing for the evening concert. I also needed a pee. None of this was conducive to contemplation. The cathedral is, however, available for ‘drinks receptions and gala dinners’ and I am sure it is conducive to those.

  In any case, I had an invitation – to go back to Seven Hills Road and climb, from the runners-up zone to the podium reserved for life’s real champions: the St George’s Hill estate. This place is famous for two reasons, which happen to be totally contradictory. Surrey may be a county of paradoxes but there is nothing to match this.

  In the 1640s a London cloth merchant called Gerrard Winstanley responded to the collapse of his business by retreating to Surrey to farm. He began hearing voices and seeing visions, as people did in that overwrought decade. In April 1649, three months after Charles I was executed, Winstanley and a small group of settlers put together a few rickety huts and began planting crops on the St George’s Hill common, preaching some kind of combination of love, peace and the abolition of private property. The earth, said Winstanley, should be ‘a common treasury’. They called themselves the Diggers or the True Levellers.

  Respectable
local opinion was outraged and a group of vigilantes wrecked one field by ploughing in the crop; soldiers destroyed another. One officer sent to investigate said ‘the business is not worth the writing’. Another observer called the Diggers ‘a company of crackbrains’. They did not last long, had little impact and were largely forgotten for more than three centuries, until the 1960s, another overwrought decade, when the mood of the times – and the researches of the historian Christopher Hill – helped push them into public consciousness. We have had a play, a film, a song by Leon Rosselson and, in 2009, The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, published by the Oxford University Press, which has no truck with any of that common treasury nonsense, at £189. Plus the fact that in 1999 a new group of Diggers arrived and decided that the time had come again.

  However, by now St George’s Hill had changed a bit. It certainly was not common land. The reverse. Just before the First World War, a builder called George Tarrant had bought the property and built 105 family homes, mostly in the ‘Surrey style’, influenced by Lutyens and the Arts and Crafts movement, each with at least an acre of land, suitable for the plutocrats of the day, with a golf course and tennis club on hand.

  The years passed. St George’s Hill became a byword for luxurious and exclusive living: more private and less nouveau than its rivals like Wentworth and Woldingham. The golf course, set amid the pines with a clubhouse in tartan baronial style, became much admired and enjoyed. It was a gorgeous place for a drink on a hot afternoon. The estate acquired an international reputation, appealing in particular to the new breed of Russian oligarch. Meanwhile, the cult of Winstanley was starting to take shape. And finally, on a springtime Saturday in 1999, the 350th anniversary of the Diggers’ arrival, the worlds collided.