Everyman's England

Victor Canning

EVERYMAN'S ENGLAND

This edition published in 2011 by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
First published by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd in 1936.

Copyright © 2011 Charles Collingwood, the Estate of Victor Canning.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.

The right of Victor Canning to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the Estate of Victor Canning in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

Summersdale Publishers Ltd
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UK

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Printed and bound in Great Britain

eISBN: 9780857654052

Victor Canning
(1911–1986) is best known as a thriller writer, though he also wrote historical romances and books for children. Over a writing career spanning 50 years, he wrote more than 60 books and over 80 short stories. Many of his books have been filmed.

Charles Collingwood
is a British actor renowned for his role as Brian Aldridge in the BBC Radio 4 soap opera
The Archers
. He is the author of
Brian and Me: Life on – and off – The Archers
.

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

About the Author

Introduction

Preface

Chapter 1: NORTHWARD HO!

Chapter 2: CUMBERLAND CONTRASTS

Chapter 3: TOWN OF SURPRISES

Chapter 4: BROAD ACRES

Chapter 5: BETWEEN TWO RIVERS

Chapter 6: THE POTTERIES

Chapter 7: THE SMALLEST OF THE FAMILY

Chapter 8: FENLAND TOWN

Chapter 9: ALL THE WAY, PLEASE

Chapter 10: NORFOLK

Chapter 11: CARAVAN ON THE COTSWOLDS

Chapter 12: NO ORDINARY TOWN

Chapter 13: BATH

Chapter 14: THE OTHER OXFORD

Chapter 15: OFF THE MAIN ROAD

Chapter 16: EXERCISE WITH A MAP

Chapter 17: DORCHESTER

Chapter 18: BIDEFORD

Chapter 19: SOMEWHERE IN CORNWALL

INTRODUCTION

In reading Victor Canning's reflective views as he journeyed from top to toe in England, what struck me was how quickly time has passed and with so much change. It is quite hard to believe he wrote
Everyman's England
within the lifetime of so many of us. The very fact that in chapter one, ‘Northwood Ho!', he travels by overnight sleeper to Berwick-on-Tweed only serves to underline my point.

Throughout the book, he manages to create pictures that are enchanting yet unromantic. His style is never twee but full of surprise. His dry humour is with us all the while and his pithy, slightly leftfield opinions occasionally allow the reader to question his views as the pages fly by.

For me, it is hard not to feel that this book will remind some and inform others of a gentler, slower age while at the same time making it impossible to ignore the poverty and the hardships many had to endure not so long ago, whether within the industrial heartlands or out in the remotest, bleakest parts of our countryside. It shows the speed in which our nation's industrial decline has taken place. How fortunate we are today though that many of yesteryear's physical hardships are behind us.

I knew Victor well. He was, in later life, my father Jack's best friend and fiercest golf opponent. In his sixties, through my parents, he met and married my godmother Adria. Quite simply, for the next ten years, he was the love of her life and when he died most of the joy of life left her too. All that remained were her memories and his wonderful books.

That's what we all have with
Everyman's England
, his memories of England. Slip back a few years and spend some time in the company of a true, English gentleman.

Oh, and finally, Victor was quite insistent that this isn't a guidebook. He's right, but it would still serve as an invaluable companion to one.

 

Charles Collingwood, 1 April 2011

PREFACE

What does the word England mean to you? Do you think, at once, of a small patch of red tucked away at the top right-hand corner of the North Atlantic Ocean on a Mercator's projection, or of Westminster Bridge flattened by the bulk of Big Ben? Or do you think of white figures on a cricket field,
The Times
, a crowd cheering some royal pageant… To all of us England means something different, and yet I think there is for every man and woman some little corner which is more England than anywhere else. I think of a village on the River Tamar, a bridge over a Somerset stream, and the quiet of a small town near the East Coast. You may think of Brighton and the Pilgrims' Way, or the factory-studded splendour of the Great West Road and the White Stone pond on Hampstead Heath of a May morning.

Yet, if we each have our own idea of what England means, we show a lively curiosity in the England of other people, in those towns and counties which differ from our own by the accident of history and industry, and when we have the chance we visit them. Divorced from the parochialisms of familiar surroundings, held by few ties, and governed by our curiosity, we are impressed by a rich sense of our own individuality as we walk in strange places and watch the ways of other men and women. Without these occasional pilgrimages to the other man's England it would be impossible to understand the intricate pattern and appreciate the colour of the great fabric of English life.

With this thought I have written this book of the impressions I have gathered by visiting, and living in, various parts of England, in the hope that on reading these pages you may find old memories awakening in you, or feel the desire to make the same discoveries yourself. They are not all well-known places, for the simple reason that the England we treasure, each in our heart, seldom is famous, and sometimes has no claim to the beauty that guidebooks love to extol in tired adjectives, and in those places which draw thousands of tourists I am afraid I did not always pay my respects to the curiosities which have given them fame. For this unpardonable evasion I offer no excuse other than the reminder that this is not a guidebook.

Crundale

V. C.

CHAPTER 1

I travelled from King's Cross to Berwick-on-Tweed in a sleeper on the night-express for no other reason than that I like to read in bed and, at the same time, feel that I am being rushed forward at a tremendous speed. To have your shoes cleaned and your hair trimmed while you read the paper is, somehow, to have scored off life. Minutes, valuable minutes, have been saved by this multiplicity of attention. Just why you should bother to save minutes hardly affects the joy of saving them. To read or sleep while a train rushes you through the night gives the same joy. To anyone who doubts that man is indeed a noble, capable creature, more than ready to conquer the irritating exigencies of life, and a being far removed from the rest of the animal world, I would recommend a journey in a sleeper.

The compartment itself is a compact of all that man holds most dear. The bed (though it does not provide for those who roll in their sleep) is comfortable, and there is generally a spare blanket on the rack above the bed if you feel you must have four blankets. Into one wall of the compartment is fitted an elaborate chromium-plated device which, after various knobs and levers have been pulled out and cursed, shows itself to be a wash-basin, fitted with hot and cold water taps. If you run too much water into the basin, it gracefully overflows on to your pyjama trousers from the jolting of the train. When you have washed, if you wish to write a letter, the basin will obligingly convert itself into a table without pinching your fingers more than three times. Hung about the compartment are enough hooks and racks to shame the untidiest of men into hanging up his clothes instead of dropping them on to the floor. That the clothes sometimes drop off in the night can be no fault of the hooks, but is due to the movement of the train and the carelessness with which they have been hung, or so I like to think.

But the greatest joy is the array of switches over the head of the bed. A man has an excuse for not sleeping if he is tempted into operating them all. Such is our delight in mechanical contraptions that there are few of us today who can resist the digital appeal of switches. One switch puts on a light over the wash-basin, another brings on a bluish reading light from a bulb over the bed, and yet another operates the general compartment light. When you have finished playing with the lights, you can begin to experiment with the levers which control the heat – three positions – and those which affect the conditioning of the air. When light, heat and air have been arranged to produce a satisfactory effect of comfort and well-being, there is still the little bell-push for the attendant.

You summon him, just to see if the bell does work, and then when he comes you have to order morning tea because you have not enough assurity of manner to say calmly that you were merely experimenting with the bell-push. And you hate tea in bed.

By this time you are wide awake, and you are no longer interested in the book, so you decide to lie awake in the dark, watching the lights from small towns and the windows of country houses as they swirl like meteors across the little heaven of the carriage window. Beneath you the bed sways gently and the wheels beat out a tantalising, never-changing rhythm. You finally go to sleep wishing that you had travelled by day, for then you need not have watched lights stream across the dark rectangle of the window, but could have sat watching ever-changing scenery, or have been diverted by the man opposite who turns out to be a traveller in farm tractors and not, as you had hoped, a vaudeville actor on the way to another date.

My train brought me into Berwick, in the early sunshine of a morning which had somehow strayed from June into March, over the lofty, straddling viaduct designed by Robert Stephenson. There are three bridges over the Tweed at Berwick, dwindling in size like the three bears: the large railway bridge, then the new Border Bridge, its whiteness making the others look rather shabby, and the Tweed Bridge, the smallest of the three, but by far the oldest.

From the carriage window I had a view of the wide, grey-green Tweed rolling in spate to the sea. The right bank of the river was flat and cut into meadows, brightened by the fresh colours of new houses, while the other bank rose sharply to an eminence, darkened upstream by patches of trees and gorse that still showed yellow points of bloom. Downstream, below the bridge, the hill was covered by the houses and streets of Berwick.

Berwick has a medieval air; its red roofs, the thin twists of smoke curling up from hidden chimneys, and the friendly clustering and pushing of the houses up the steep slope reminded me of illustrations of Hans Andersen's fairy stories. I would not swear that the chimneys are crooked or that there are quaint turrets poking through the smoke, though I felt that the chimneys and roofs knew all about Hans Andersen and that it was only a regard for the convenience of the inhabitants which kept them from a crooked way of life.

The town has that somnolent air of a border town whose inhabitants have long forgotten the need for armed vigilance, for the men and women who walk in the streets are the descendants of folk who used to spend the best part of their lives fighting top reserve their independence and livelihoods. For centuries Berwick was an excuse for fighting between the English and the Scots; first one had it and then the other, and between 1147 and 1482 it changed hands as many as thirteen times. It has a record for sieges which almost equals that of Jerusalem, and probably no other town in England has seen as much fighting. But Berwick, especially in the thirteenth century, was worth fighting for; its Customs receipts then were reckoned to account for almost a quarter of the whole sum collected in England. The only tangible trace of its stormy history today rests in the old walls which are in a state of preservation that rivals those of York and Chester. The walls are mostly Elizabethan, though there are the remains of an earlier Edwardian fortification.

This information about Berwick's walls I have, obviously, obtained from a guidebook. Alone, I am quite incapable of differentiating between an Elizabethan, Edwardian, or back wall. Exactly in the reign of which of the Edwards, who preceded Elizabeth, the earlier wall was built, my guidebook (and various others I consulted) did not say, and I am not well enough versed in the Scottish and English pre-Elizabethan Edwards to decide. If the mystery worries any reader I can only refer him to the British Museum.

It is a long time since soldiers manned the bastions and sentinelled the ramparts, and where pikemen thrust down at the invaders, the children of the town now play ball, and the old men walk quietly in the sun exercising their dogs. As I got out of the train and stood on the railway platform it was hard to imagine that where the steel rails now run and porters shout to one another, once stood the great Berwick Castle, and that on one of its towers, in 1306, the Countess of Buchan was shut up in a wooden cage to spend six years exposed to the public gaze to expiate the sin of exercising her prerogative, as a daughter of the house of Fife, of crowning the Scottish kings. She had, with a hastily improvised crown, made Robert Bruce King of Scotland at Scone. Six years in a wooden cage would make a man morose. With a woman it would probably produce a very bad temper, and I can imagine that if there was any shouting of taunts at the good lady she probably gave as good as she got.

When you go to Berwick you must walk down Station Street, close by the station, and look at the house on the right corner at the top of the street. It is a large, square, grey house, and as I came abreast of it a pigeon flew over it with a clapping of wings which made me look up and see what otherwise would have been easy to miss. A stone coping ran along the top of the house and at each corner and, so it seemed to me, wherever there was space for one, stood a bust of a man. For a moment I stared at this decorated roof-top and then through the clear morning air I was aware that the faces which looked down upon me were vaguely familiar. I stared hard and then, despite the weathering they had undergone, I was sure that I was looking at Robbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott and other well-known figures. There they all were perched up on the roof-top. Dickens, Byron, the Duke of Wellington… basking in the sunlight and enjoying the view.

How did they get there, and why? Did the builder of the house have an opportunity to buy a job lot of busts and use them to decorate his house? For a moment I was determined to knock at the house door and discover the reason, and then I hesitated. It was just breakfast time and I knew what kind of a reception I might get from a busy housewife if I interrupted the cooking of porridge and ham and eggs with questions of busts and Robbie Burns. I wish now that I had not faltered for my curiosity is growing every day and sometimes threatens to keep me awake at night. I know that someday I shall be dragged back to Berwick for the single purpose of satisfying my curiosity.

I met an old man lounging over the parapet of Berwick's newest bridge. He was one of those men who look so old that it is difficult to imagine that they were ever boys, and who have, you feel, a grand scorn of anything which is young. His clothes had that drab colour and indeterminate look which indicate, but are no longer affected by, the passage of time, and he was shouting down emphatic but unintelligent remarks to a youth who was painting a rowing boat on a landing stage below the bridge. The youth ignored him completely, not I felt from any disrespect for his age, but because he did not suspect that he was being addressed. A stiff wind was blowing out to sea and shredding the old man's words into silence. Seeing me the old man stopped his shouting and spat into the gutter. I took this as a mark of friendliness and, seeking to raise his civic pride and ingratiate myself in his good favour, I remarked on the beauty of Berwick's bridges.

‘They're troublesome in the summer,' he replied.

‘In the summer?' I wondered what mystery there was about them which made them troublesome in the summer.

‘Not for an old skin like mine,' he went on happily. ‘Midges like young blood.'

‘Bridges,' I boomed, ‘not midges.'

He shook his head and eyed the youth painting the boat. I saw that I was losing his attention, so I asked him loudly whether, despite the official inclusion of Berwick as an English town, he considered himself Scottish or English.

‘Wha's that?' he asked, screwing up one side of his face.

I repeated my question, shouting almost.

He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I'm awfa' dull o' hearin',' he confessed.

So I came closer to him, determined to bring some coherence into the conversation, and bawled my question until I could have been heard at Spittal on the other side of the Tweed. He laughed and scratched the stubble on his chin.

‘We're neither,' he said, ‘we're Berwickers!'

And Berwickers they are; Border people who, until recent years, never knew whether they belonged to England or Scotland, for the town used to change hands with a frequency that, despite its dangers, must have become monotonous for the citizens, and between 1551 and 1885 it was a neutral town belonging to no country – a town, county and country all on its own so that Great Britain was England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Berwick-on-Tweed. Now it is part of Northumberland, but the men and women are ‘Berwickers' still.

With the sunlight on it Berwick is a wealth of red, grey and gold. The red pantiles of the old houses flash in the warm sun, and the grey lengths of the grass-topped ramparts and bastions, relics of its fortified days, which surround the town, take on a dignity and beauty which make one forget their ugly, medieval purpose. Everywhere there is a continual air of friendliness and kind curiosity. In larger towns the stranger passes unnoticed; in Berwick there is time and space to mark him for attention. As I walked down Hatter's Lane, a typical Berwick street of red-roofed houses, holed by dark doorways that lead back to dim courtyards, a man approached a group of shawled women and enquired by name for someone living in the street.

He was accorded no perfunctory directions. The women with common assent formed themselves into a bodyguard and escorted him, volubly, up the street to the house. Here, one obligingly opened the door and called to Mrs So-and-so, meanwhile the others grouped themselves about him, and perhaps fearing that he might want to shirk the interview at the last moment, assured him that this was where Mrs So-and-so lived. It was not until he had made his preliminaries with Mrs So-and-so and had been invited into the front parlour that the other women withdrew, their faces happy at the accomplishment of their obvious duty towards a stranger.

I spent a morning walking about the streets and gradually the placid, contented atmosphere of the town began to steal about me until I felt that there was no world outside of this grey and red town over the river, that all the haste and turmoil of the world, the madness of internecine quarrel and wordy pact-making had no significance, and that the main purpose of mankind was to lean against a shop doorway, uncaring whether customers came, talking to the man across the way and occasionally bidding Mrs Sinclair or Mrs Jarvis good morning, or better still, if one ached for action, to lead a dog along the grass-topped ramparts and feel the sea breeze upon one's face and smell the salt in the air… Even the Great North Road which crosses the new bridge seems to lose its hurry and bustle through the town, as though the drivers sense the gentle spirit of calm that drenches everything and unconsciously slacken their pace below even the statutory thirty miles an hour.