You Are Awful (But I Like You) Page 6
The town’s opening syllable seemed to set out the civic stall, and my sole previous visit had dutifully suggested Grimsby as a place that had seen better days, and would only see worse. Perhaps it hadn’t helped that I’d gone there in a wet gale, and saw little of the town beyond its inevitably discouraging container docks. There are also powerfully negative associations with the manner of my farewell to Grimsby, and the three days that followed – a storm-tossed cargo voyage to Iceland that left me a yellow, wizened husk of a man.
Anyway, it was still a pleasant surprise to find Wellholme Avenue reveal itself as entirely unobjectionable, indeed rather agreeable – a long, straight road of trim, red-brick, late-Victorian terraces, with arched windows, stucco trimmings and a Spar on the corner. Half a dozen boisterous kids in filthy football kit were disgorged from a mum-driven people carrier, a pizza-delivery moped buzzed past and a tubby old man in a flat cap walked by with a tubby old Labrador – just a normal, wholesome Sunday afternoon in a normal, wholesome British street.
My neighbour Chris was born and raised in Grimsby, and while explaining to him some months previously just why I’d acquired the shaming, ridiculous vehicle that now besmirched the street we both called home, I saw his features sag into a kind of defeated wince. ‘All the worst places?’ he said flatly, when I was done. ‘So I take it you’ll be going to Grimsby, then.’ This was before Google Maps finessed my itinerary, so as things then stood, I wasn’t, and told him so. His face lit up and I pictured it now: grateful, reprieved, maybe – like all my neighbours – just a tiny bit in love with me. So though I’d driven into Wellholme Avenue feeling a little guilty, I drove back out of it smiling. I could knock firmly on Chris’s door and treat him to a happy-ending confession.
If I’d then motored out through Grimsby with my eyes shut, everyone but my insurance company would have been happy. As it was, I watched the town go to pieces around me. First the side streets devolved into a hotch-potch of pebble-dash and ramshackle uPVC porches; the dogs grew stockier and scarier, and the men walking them younger, wearing hoods instead of caps. Shops were shuttered up, then bricked up. The traffic melted away as I approached what would have been Grimsby’s bustling port-centred heartland, back when Wellholme Avenue was laid out, and the prosperous streets were a-throng with trawlermen and stevedores. Instead, the townscape fell away, leaving an eerie, brownfield vacuum, with only the odd marooned hulk to betray a once crowded commercial skyline. Worse still, it had evidently been this way for years, long enough for a pre-fab Allied Carpets warehouse to have sprung forth from the stony soil, struggled to establish itself, and failed in turn. It wasn’t alone. I turned off the main road and drove past umpteen retail hangars of recent construction, with weeds sprouting from their chained and empty car parks: the phoenix had risen from the ashes, then starved to death and rotted.
Yet in alarming reality, Grimsby is a regional success story. It’s Britain’s busiest port by tonnage, with a hefty fish and frozen-food processing industry that inspired the local authority to saddle it with the ungainly title of Europe’s Food Town. Round one corner I was presented with a stirring, iconic vision: the bow of a huge grey ship, looming majestically over a Homebase. Give or take the odd step up the production chain, Grimsby is more or less doing what it’s always done, and doing it rather well. It just so happens that these days you don’t need very many people to unload a ship or make crispy pollock fillets: it’s pretty much just Captain Birdseye and a forklift truck. Grimsby was simply built for a larger population than it can now support. I drove away from the town sensing there’d be similar stories in the weeks ahead, but with much sadder endings.
Exhausted by the effort of hauling itself aloft, the countryside soon lay flat down on its back again. The muddy plain separating me from the Humber was briefly but memorably filled by a pair of prodigious oil refineries, throwing up fumes and fire as if in the midst of an endless rolling catastrophe. Then Ozzy’s nasal haranguing bullied me off down a series of soggy, narrow lanes, and presently up to the banks of the Humber, and the town of New Holland. Almost everyone I’d discussed my forthcoming journey with had volunteered their own private hell, and here was Chris’s.
When a town dies, it’s typically a lingering affair. Industries are slowly undermined by changing consumer tastes, superior technology or cheaper foreign labour, and the commercial life-blood ebbs gently away. Not so New Holland, killed stone dead at midday on 24 June 1981.
A town with a simple, solitary function, New Holland was the staging post between Grimsby and Hull, a place where goods and people en route from Lincolnshire to Yorkshire got off a train and got on a trans-Humber ferry. There was a station, a jetty, and – the focus of Chris’s unhappy memories – two big pubs, each named after one of the coal-powered paddle steamers that plied the route. The crossing was a twenty-minute job in theory, but tides and shifting sandbanks played merry hell with the timetable, often marooning Chris and his many brothers in those pubs for long and uncomfortable hours. More than once their big night out in Hull had got no further than New Holland, degenerating into an embattled ordeal in the company of restless and increasingly drunken dockers.
I’d assumed the town had been named in honour of the Dutch engineers who helped reclaim so much of Lincolnshire from its watery encroachments. In fact, rather wonderfully, New Holland is thus called after the Dutch gin that was energetically smuggled through here in that spirit’s Hogarthian heyday. True to this heritage, both pubs were still in business. I was welcomed into New Holland by the Magna Charta, its stout cream-coloured flanks decorated with images of the eponymous paddle steamer that inaugurated the route in 1820, and waved out of it by the Lincoln Castle: not just the last ferry to cross the Humber, but the last paddle steamer to operate a scheduled service in Britain. (That vessel and its last sister ship, the Tattershall Castle, both live on as floating pubs, one on the Thames and the other at Grimsby docks. It’s what the gin-smuggling, boozed-up Chris-taunters would have wanted.)
Linking the two themed inns was a shabby and forlorn quarter-mile ribbon of red-brick terraced cottages, built for the ferry and railway workers, and hence now sparsely occupied. Many were for sale, and most of those that weren’t had an unloved Craig-era Astra or Escort out front. It was 4 p.m., and the only other soul on the streets was a helmetless youth on a trials bike, demonstrating a fitful mastery of the wheelie. I rumbled to a halt on a squalid patch of threadbare cobbles and tarmac, and opened the window. It was all puddles and weeds and a creepy Sunday silence. The petrochemical billowings to the west had coalesced into a dense cloud of butterscotch, being eased towards me on the stiff, cold wind.
What a horrid place, I thought, then said aloud, neatly filling the silence between ‘So Macho’ and ‘Remember You’re A Womble’. Beyond the Lincoln Castle lay a moribund Victorian warehouse, a rusty railway line overseen by a derelict beach hut of a signal box, and the silos and lofty conveyer belts of a bulk-goods terminal. Somewhere behind this lay the Humber, and somewhere up that soared the mighty suspension bridge that had whipped the rug out from under New Holland’s feet. The ferry and the railway station both closed at the precise minute it opened, and that was this place – certainly the dullest, deadest and dankest I had yet visited, the town I was most heartily relieved not to call home – done and dusted.
The fresh-faced two-wheeled lawbreaker buzzed back into view, flicked me a dispassionate V-sign, and buzzed away behind the warehouse. His suggestion appealed instantly. Scrapping my plan to share Chris’s pain with a pint in the Lincoln Castle, I heaved Craig into first, and with Mike Batt urging me to remember-member-member my true heritage, fucked off.
Plans for a suspension bridge over the Humber were first drawn up in the 1930s, at a time when clipping fifty miles off the road-trip between Grimsby and Hull made compelling economic sense. The Humber numbers probably still worked when construction finally began in 1972, though they probably didn’t eight years later, when my Geography teacher Mr Brooks reluct
antly selected the project as an O level case study. Largely involving us watching Mr Brooks connect hexagons on the overhead projector, this sought to demonstrate how the bridge might benefit a fictional bakery on the south side of the Humber, dispatching fictional bread to customers on the north. We were fifteen-year-old London boys who had never been anywhere near Humberside, but we’d heard of the Cod War, and Margaret Thatcher: fisherman and fictional baker alike would soon have nothing to deliver. Like its close contemporary the Austin Maestro, the Humber Bridge was a decent British idea whose time came and went somewhere along the long, long road from drawing board to final completion.
Yet as deluded as those projections of exponential traffic growth and associated regional prosperity so plainly were, no one objected as Mr Brooks mumbled out the data. Largely because we just wanted him to whip through it all and return to what he loved about geography: the mighty peaks, cliffs and chasms of its physical incarnation. This was a love we shared, for Mr Brooks always illustrated the related phenomena with a slideshow of self-timer portraits from his solo field trips – the most compelling body of images, with predictable exceptions, that any of us had yet been exposed to.
Mr Brooks was a painfully retiring fellow, who looked at the floor when he spoke, and tackled classroom disorder by slowly shaking his head. The one suggestion that a very different Mr Brooks might lurk within was his beard, a wild and hefty moustache-less bush that strayed way beyond standard-issue 1970s Geography teacher territory and deep into the realm of the Amish elders. When the lights went out and the projector clicked on, we saw this other Mr Brooks: a man who gestured confidently at drumlins and batholiths, a man whose massive beard framed a brilliant, fulfilled smile. And a man – now I see that head begin to slowly shake – who spent his summers in wellington boots, a lumberjack shirt and a pair of incredibly tight denim shorts.
The maelstrom of face-wetting, wrist-biting, desk-clawing hysteria thus unleashed, and the failure of Mr Brooks’ hands-off, mouth-closed approach to restraining it, should have made that first slideshow the last. Yet so blind was the man’s passion for glacial erosion and longshore drift that it never took much to get him eagerly rooting out the Kodachromes. ‘I think I understand the principle, sir, but what does terminal moraine actually look like?’ Blinds down, lights off, and there it all was again: the beard, the beam, the boots, the shorts.
Anyway, I thought of Mr Brooks as just outside New Holland the top half of the Humber Bridge showed itself, two massive concrete ladders supporting God’s own clothes line. I’ve always had a thing for epic civil engineering, though it proved tricky to settle into a mood of sombre awe with Chas and Dave’s ‘Rabbit’ as a soundtrack. Here was the last hurrah of newsreel-voiced, look-at-us Britain, when the future was always bright, nature was there to be conquered, and speed was the answer to everything.
The 1982 opening was accompanied by a fanfare of gosh-inducing statistics: the world’s longest single-span suspension bridge, with a main cable long enough to stretch twice round the globe, and a toll booth constructed entirely from crushed puffin beaks. But even then the instinctive, hexagon-based misgivings of my youth were hardening into proper, grown-up facts. The simple truth that the Humber was still, in 1981, ferrying passengers in a paddle steamer seems a fairly potent suggestion that economic progress might have stalled round these parts, and sure enough, when those trans-Humberian bakers finally stood up to be counted, there just weren’t enough of them. Traffic has never come close to the predicted levels, not even halfway. Two thousand cars now use the bridge every day, which might not sound too awful until you work out that’s barely one a minute. I’ve lived on busier suburban back roads.
The Humber is now only the fifth longest suspension bridge, its conquerors betraying the shift in the economic balance of power: one each in Denmark and Japan, the most recent two in China. It’s still a record-breaker, though: the longest bridge in the world that one can cross on foot, and thus a powerful magnet for those weary of life. I’d only spent ten minutes in New Holland, but it was still probably for the best that my route drew me away from the bridge, and a handrail that’s now vaulted once a fortnight.
The day was dimming, and I had something to see before it went the way of all days. In a triumph of hope over experience I put my foot down, which had little influence on the speedometer but made it very hard to hear Jonathan King’s ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, especially once I began to bellow out a rather brilliant rework of its chorused title. ‘You’re just a fucking wanker!’ I roared over the clatter of labouring pistons, hands juddering on the wheel, willing Craig to make a blur of Lincolnshire’s wide-open spaces.
We don’t really do big country in England, but this stuff was pretty sizeable. Lincolnshire is our second largest county in size, but just scrapes into the population top twenty. On the bedspread-sized laminated map of Great Britain and Ireland that fills the wall behind my PC monitor, the county is a white void sparsely veined with trunk roads, its far-flung habitations labelled in tiny lower case. On all sides but the big blue one it’s surrounded by regions crazy-paved with major road routes and dense with capital-letter cities. All in all, it was perhaps inevitable that when the Ordnance Survey’s cartographers were asked to nominate the most boring spot in Britain, they found themselves drawn to this county. Though, in fact, they eventually stuck the pin half a mile off its edge, in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
I inched towards grid reference SE830220 in the throes of a sunset that poured gold across the flat fields in a dangerously compelling fashion. It even cast an almost fetching gloss over Britain’s most inexplicable holiday destination, a vast muddy hollow filled with static caravans. The interestometer flickered crazily as we passed into the splendidly named Hatfield Chase, an age-old royal hunting ground that spent much of its time beneath the surface of the many large rivers that ran through it. Until 1626, when Charles I contracted Cornelius Vermuyden, superstar of Holland’s thriving land-reclamation scene. Vermuyden masterminded the extravagant network of dykes and drainage canals that would spare SE830220 and its neighbours from repeated inundation, and swiftly establish Hatfield Chase as one of Britain’s most productive but least fascinating arable regions.
Ousefleet, near the point where the Trent meets the Ouse to form the Humber, was one of the farming villages that emerged from the flood plain. Just outside it I carefully recalibrated the sat-nav, and bumped gingerly down a lumpy track that trailed off into the yawning cultivated prairie. This was it, the proverbial middle of nowhere, the square kilometre selected as the cartographic final answer to a cheerfully pejorative debate amongst Radio 4 listeners. ‘We ran a computer analysis of each of the 204 maps in our widely used Landranger series,’ commented an Ordnance Survey press officer, doubtless in a soporific nasal drone. ‘Of the 320,000 squares, this one contained the least information. No ditches, streams or buildings are shown on this particular scale, though I should add that there is an electrical pylon in one corner, and that people edge away from me at parties.’
Nobody rushed to stand up for SE830220, which given its absence of inhabitants shouldn’t have surprised anyone, but apparently did surprise the media. Ever keen to make mountains out of molehills – not a huge challenge, you’d have thought, in a landscape that’s pretty well done the job already – the press tracked down the landowning farmer and tried to rouse him to a spirited defence of his maligned tract. Yet Tom Ella nobly declined to play ball. ‘Look, it’s just a field,’ he told one reporter. ‘If people want to come and look at it, I don’t mind, but they’re wasting their petrol.’
I got out to see what I’d wasted my petrol for. The darkening sky was unblemished, save a few painterly streaks of grey and orange smudged around the sinking sun, and a distant puff of industrial vapour. Below it: nothing, but in such extraordinary amounts that boredom was comfortably transcended.
The stripe of crispy brown bracken and grass lining the lane gave way to a fat, 360-degree layer of furrowed brown and green, whi
ch would have seeped away for ever had the blue-grey horizon not cut it off. The whole still and silent panorama had a sweeping grandeur to it, rural yet abstract, a Constable by Rothko. I’d imagined that pylon, part of a column marching away to Scunthorpe, as SE830220’s scene-stealing cameo performer; in fact, it seemed a spindly intrusion. Even the odd skeletal tree and the distant huddle of tiles and whitewash that was Ousefleet just got in the way.
It was a beguiling, oddly magnetic scene, somewhere you could hide in plain sight, see everything without being seen. Extrapolating from the clutch of dented old cans I now spotted in the dead bracken, I could imagine SE830220 hosting a bit of lager-with-Rosie action of a summer evening. I suddenly found it easy to imagine all manner of remarkable and contra-tedious chapters in SE830220’s super-aquatic history: the shoot-out between rival gangs of gin smugglers, the dispute over a prize beet that set Ella against Ella, that terrible business with the pylon repairman and the milking machine. And then I looked around again, and noted that the sun had finally called it a day, and that this little square kilometre, with all its epic vistas and made-up mysteries, was now just a cold, dark and very lonely place. Not somewhere you’d want to get stuck for the night, as I had cause to ponder during an ill-judged three-point turn that threatened this very fate upon me. Fifteen hectic and very sweary minutes elapsed before Craig slithered away from SE830220, wheels steaming and flanks splattered in Tom Ella’s brown gold.
The road took me up to the Ouse – a theoretical entity that lurked behind a hefty embankment – and through a series of sleepy, unkempt villages, where no front yard seemed complete without a windowless caravan. The evening river-mist seemed laced with something thicker, and I presently identified the moreish whiff of domestic coal-smoke wafting in through the many gaps in Craig’s bodywork. It was to become a defining odour.