You Are Awful (But I Like You) Page 7

  From Skegness to Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire can blame the Vikings for the unbecoming names that burden its habitations. No such excuse for the nineteenth-century Yorkshiremen who built the Aire and Calder canal, and founded a town called Goole at its confluence with the River Ouse. And if Goole doesn’t sound bad enough in its own right, consider its etymology: the name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘open sewer’.

  This unfortunate history provided irresistible inspiration for the many journalists who came to the town after it was exposed as the home of Britain’s youngest heroin addict, an eight-year-old boy. ‘Goole was named after an open sewer – and now that sewer is metaphorically choked with drug dealers, and no doubt actually choked with their horrible druggy poo.’ That sort of thing. Further research revealed that Goole suffers more fatal heroin overdoses per head than anywhere else in Britain – around seven every year in a population of just eighteen thousand. Also that the town’s pensioners are regularly arrested for intent to supply, and that a regional ‘culture of injecting’ encourages jaded locals to shoot up everything from valium to whisky when their class As run out. Some pictures paint a thousand words, but a photo I came across restricted itself to a pithy seven: a boarded-up Ford garage daubed with the legend, Welcome to Goole – we kill smack dealers.

  As it was, I found myself driving into town past a big dockside shed bearing a less diverting salutation, The UK’s premier inland port, which had an underwhelming, defensive ring to it, as if Goole couldn’t quite make a claim that wasn’t much of a claim in the first place, along the lines of ‘Great Yarmouth’s leading pet crematorium’ or ‘New Holland pub-of-the-year finalist’. In fact, the half-hearted adjectives were misleading – Goole is by any calculation our largest inland port, and despite being 50 miles away from the salty sea, has all the trappings of your actual bona-fide marine port. Three million tons of cargo a year, proper lighthouses all the way along the banks of the Ouse and the Humber, and ready access to uncut, fresh-off-the-boat, overdose-strength skag.

  I actually gasped at the townscape that sprang up the moment Craig crested the box-girder bridge over the Aire and Calder. Squinting at the fuzzy, sodium-lit skyline, all I could see was a scrappy void occasionally punctured by a twisted section of gantry, or a gasholder, or a silo, or a water tower. It was like some tableau crafted from C.S. Lewis’s definition of hell, as a desolate twilight city upon which night is imperceptibly sinking. These weren’t the outskirts: this was downtown Goole, in fact this was the whole of Goole. My mind chose this moment to retrieve an entry I’d come across in a regional internet forum, contributing to a collation of fond local memories. ‘I married a lass from Goole. Sadly, she died in an industrial accident at the luncheon meat factory some years ago.’

  I bumped over a series of level crossings and was offered a glimpse of inert high street, devoid of humanity and lavishly puddled with the morning’s rain. Then it was off down a road of boarded-up, bring-out-your-dead terraces, past disembodied walls bearing ancient hand-painted promotions for drapery stores and distemper treatments. Even the inevitable post-industrial retail invaders – Netto, CarpetRight – looked more like dumpy little prisons, each a windowless, metal-shuttered fortress sitting in its razor-wired, flood-lit tarmac compound.

  It felt like driving through a town-sized advert for the heroin marketing board, yet I came out of Goole with a smile on my face. The world outside might be a dank, foresaken wasteland with a permanent touch of flu, but Craig was a deafening singalong party on wheels. It had started when Timmy Mallett, children’s TV presenter cum living incitement to blunt-force trauma, launched into a cover version that I came to interpret, with alarming gusto, as ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Wart-Encrusted Peenie’. This segued into the opening bars of an album that I shouldn’t really have included in my playlist: it was an American production – so American that it featured the eighteen-year-old Jon Bon Jovi’s recording debut. However, the revelation that the lead vocal artiste was an Englishman by the name of Anthony Daniels gave me the excuse I needed. Because this was the super-bad, over-proof hard stuff – not just a stand-out album in Q’s roll-call of the damned, but a top-ten entry in a Daily Telegraph poll of worst record covers. I’m looking at it now: a kindly old gent with a big white beard and pebble specs sits by a glowing fireplace, surrounded by half-finished toys and a number of – wait for it – androids. Prominent amongst these is Anthony Daniels, imprisoned in the golden carapace that made him famous, though evidently not that rich. Welcome to Christmas in the Stars, a 1980 festive production featuring the ‘original cast of Star Wars’.

  Well, what a tonic the ensuing thirty-three minutes proved to be – just what the methadone clinic doctor ordered. Beneath the goodwill-to-all-droids theme ran a curious sub-plot in which C-3PO laboured to talk-sing his little dustbin chum R2-D2 into whistling a tune, a feat finally accomplished on ‘Sleigh Ride’ (‘Oh, R2, I knew you could do it! Again!’). That hit the spot, and hit it hard. My fascination, dangerously hysterical as it was, only sagged during ‘R2-D2 We Wish You A Merry Christmas’, which didn’t have nearly enough C-3PO, and instead had far too much Jon Bon Jovi, giving it his youthful, huge-haired all above a high-school choir (the album was recorded in the studio where his uncle worked, and where he had a part-time cleaning job). Then we were into the unforgettable highlight, an ensemble number that propelled me shrieking on to the M62: ‘What can you get a Wookiee for Christmas, when he’s already got a comb?’ I was vocally and emotionally drained long before the final track delivered the underwhelming answer to this conundrum (a brush), and almost asleep at the wheel when at around 7 p.m. I passed a huge roadside billboard that read CLOSING DOWN. Thus I found myself welcomed into Kingston upon Hull.

  The grand old man of sad old dumps, the dad of bad, Hull ran away with the top spot in the popular publication Crap Towns, and came a solid second in the more scientific survey commissioned by Location, Sedation, Castration. It’s been dubbed Britain’s obesity capital, and seen both its police force and its education authority rated the worst in the land. A survey of local drinking habits found that 95 per cent of Hullensians under twenty-five drank to harmful excess. I imagined the entire city being sat down and given a talking-to by the college dean from Animal House: ‘Listen, son: fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.’

  Hull is almost synonymous with unloveliness, deprivation and failure – literally so, if you take the city’s winningly outspoken council leader at his word. ‘Until recently it was difficult to find a story that didn’t mention Hull and crap in the same sentence,’ he said in 2008, committing the sin himself. ‘We’ve had the shit kicked out of us for thirty years.’ His next word was naturally a ‘but’, though this sadly presaged the pump-priming, morale-boosting achievements of Hull City Football Club, then enjoying what proved to be a very short-lived stay in the Premier League, and an even briefer period of solvency.

  Ozzy f-f-fucked me off the motorway and into a shadowy zone of wasteland and distribution centres. I spotted my first white telephone box, for as every civic-trivia buff will know, Hull is home to a telecommunications network that uniquely in Britain remained independent of the General Post Office and British Telecom. I was so diverted by this sighting that it took me a while to note that I was in the red-light district. Craig’s evidently unpromising appearance had the lone kerb-dwellers slinking off into the shadows as I approached; I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw them slinking back out, peering at me suspiciously. What sort of man kerb-crawled in an immaculate black Austin Maestro?

  I spotted my destination just before Ozzy crudely informed me of its proximity. The Stop Inn: a hotel masquerading as a mid-rise, mid-Sixties council block, and burdened with a feebly comic name of the type associated with hairdressing salons. ‘Stop Inn? Move on!’ So began a typical review, one of the torrent that described the hotel in the most damning terms. Lice, swearing, gouges, threadbare, damp, peeling, hairs, ‘Sunday towels and a haunting stench’ �
� the complaints went way beyond simple disgruntlement, coming across more like the urgent, rasped words of a man whose dying wish was that others be spared his ordeal. ‘Please, please do not stay here under any circumstances … Avoid – just avoid.’ This man could die happy, for as I gathered from the small heap of mail gathered behind its locked glass doors, and the security-firm logo that implied the premises were patrolled by an armed lion, the Stop Inn had bidden farewell to its last unhappy resident. Across the street, next to a vast cinema-turned-bingo-hall, sat a trim new Ibis, no doubt the straw that broke the Stop Inn’s hairy, damp back. I admit I was briefly tempted: whatever a Sunday towel might be, you surely wouldn’t find one there.

  But surveying that bland, corporate frontage, smug with the promise of a louse-free, odourless overnight experience, I felt my brain stem begin to shrivel. Bumhats to the Ibis, uniform, dependable and deeply, deeply dull, the hotel equivalent of the Kinder Bueno in Angela Merkel’s handbag, a two-year-old Ford Mondeo 1.6i Edge nosing into car park 5B at Bluewater, Tim Henman watching Countdown in his cords. I was on a quest for the local, the unpredictable, the non-globalised and non-homogenous, the thrill of the unknown that had once made travel an adventure, even here in my homeland. The fear and excitement that went with never being quite sure that you’d ever get to where you wanted to go, let alone what you’d find there if you did. The mysteries that once lay in wait behind every hotel-room door, inside every menu, under every bonnet.

  The zeal thus unleashed ebbed away somewhat over the following hour, during which I established that the Stop Inn was merely the freshest corpse in the hotel mass grave that is Hull. After taking Craig on a tour of the city’s many roofless former guest houses, I presented myself at the reception of the Ibis’s only surviving competitor, fewer than 200 yards up the road: the Royal Hotel.

  A period attachment to Hull’s railway station, the Royal was graced with an ominously regal gold-lettered façade, all arches and pilasters and newly scrubbed Victorian limestone sheathed in pigeon-netting. I needn’t have worried. The reception area looked out across a grandly proportioned hall supported by marble columns, but a half-eaten sandwich sat on the nearest Chesterfield, with a half-drunk pint on the discoloured carpet beside it.

  Perhaps she saw my tense features sag in relief as my gaze alighted on this still life; perhaps she’d spotted me parking Craig on her CCTV monitors, and wanted to distract me before I tried to consume it. Either way, the chirpy young receptionist’s words of welcome betrayed a psycho-sociological prescience beyond her years. ‘Good evening,’ she said brightly. ‘Could I interest you in our deal of the day? A single room plus dinner and a half bottle of wine.’ She paused for effect. ‘For £36, including breakfast.’

  As many as ninety seconds later, I’d taken a seat in the expansive dining room. There was plenty of choice – my sole fellow diner was an elderly Japanese man engrossed in a paper-back copy of What in the Holy Name of Fuck Am I Doing Here?. Picking my way past the trio of waistcoated staff trying to thread a string of fairy lights round a squat plastic tree, I’d plumped for a table that looked directly out on to the station concourse.

  It was pleasingly peculiar to be right up by the platform action, to see incoming locomotives loom up towards me over WH Smith’s, to hear the bing-bongs and deafening but entirely unintelligible snatches of Tannoy. How excited we all used to get about the technology of travel! So proud were the Victorians of their rail-based achievements that they could think of nothing better than sitting down with a cup of tea to stare at trains. They grandly dubbed this station Hull Paragon, and endowed the en suite hotel with its regal appellation following Queen Victoria’s sleepover in 1854. It didn’t stop there. In the Twenties, new apartment blocks across the land were tricked up like ocean liners, and in the Thirties every urban dual carriageway was lined with houses, allowing a privileged front-row view of the petrol-powered future. In the Sixties, no airport was complete without a viewing gallery, where families might spend a happy day watching planes take off and land. If we don’t do that kind of thing any more, it’s not because we’re all grown-up and sober and now realise the short-sighted, environmental folly inherent in celebrating such progress. It’s because there is no such progress to celebrate. On cue a feeble little Sprinter-type affair wobbled away from platform 4, farting out a puff of diesel exhaust. I glanced up at the richly decorated, cast-iron arches that vaulted impressively above it, and thought: We’ve literally run out of steam.

  ‘No, Sandra – he’s on the wine!’

  A stout waitress, approaching my table with a menu, turned to look at the receptionist, who’d arrived to assist the tree-dressers and had delivered this arresting announcement.

  ‘Are you, love? Are you on the wine?’

  The waitress’s tone was kindly and confidential, but it was aimed at me from a distance and at stentorian volume. I noted the old man looking up from his book.

  ‘The wine deal?’

  I nodded cravenly.

  ‘Which one, love?’

  ‘The one that makes you and everyone else in here shut up, straight away,’ I should have said. Instead I just looked at her helplessly, like the helpless alcoholic I was.

  ‘See, we’ve different menus for each deal. There’s the half-bottle …’ she began, now standing beside me yet raising her voice to the level of an extremely enthusiastic circus ringmaster. I tried to cut in with a confirmation, but my words were lost in a sudden reverberating blare from without, informing passengers of the neck stain tour egg impolite Fermat’s theorem. Belatedly I understood why the strident bellow had become the default manner of in-restaurant communication.

  ‘… and there’s the unlimited deal – you know, where you drink as much as you want.’

  As I mumblingly put her straight, I saw the old man’s eyes widen in a manner that suggested a deeper familiarity with the language than I’d lazily assumed. Then he shook his head very slowly, and shot me a look laden with foreboding and dismay, a look that said: as much as you want, or slightly more than you can?

  My first course arrived just before the high-noon bedfellow pomade eater, and my pudding just after the departure of the minor drawstring Toulouse Colgate buffs elbow. The meal may well have been rather swish – I recall artful swirls of jus – but both food and wine were dispatched with a shame-fuelled haste that left little imprint. Not since completing further education have I drunk so fast, a performance unlikely to have persuaded my fellow diner to reappraise his opinion. In tandem with the sleep-defying feats of an over-zealous motion-activated security light outside my window – calling all units, pigeon pecking at cold chip in car park! – this half-bottle haste very unfairly landed me an unlimited-sized hangover.

  Chapter Four

  I WAS HEADING ever further north and into the year’s final month: from here on, no walk would be a stroll. The local breakfast TV weatherman predicted a vicious Arctic gale, in a tone better suited to revealing that Hull had just been awarded the 2016 Olympics. Just walking out of the Royal I felt my freeze-dried lips chapping up. On the plus side, the cobwebs of crapulence were blasted clean out of my living soul by the time I turned the first corner.

  The streets around any main-line station are a sure bet for action, even if it’s the sleazy crack-and-kebabs variety. This is emphatically not so in Hull. Right opposite the Paragon’s taxi-drop-off side entrance stood an abandoned hotel I’d somehow missed the night before, a once-noble Victorian edifice with mature shrubs sprouting from the gutters, begging to be put out of its misery. The first pedestrian I encountered, 100 yards up the road, was an old man in carpet slippers, shuffling vacantly out of a hostel of some sort, a filthy plastic bag in one hand and a bloodstained rag in the other.

  Adelaide Street, Canberra Street, Ice House Road: the addresses betrayed a cosmopolitan and bustling mercantile past, but the ice houses and warehouses and whorehouses were long gone. Instead I trudged down a mile-long stretch of Soviet-pattern tenement blocks, fourteen-storey
concrete megaliths laid out in drab grey ranks under a drab grey sky. It was an eerily bleak environment to encounter so close to the centre of a city, and the scale of these estates suggested that some drastic and abrupt calamity had cleared the way for them, rather than any drawn-out commercial decline. In fact it was a bit of both.

  As well as jutting out provocatively towards the Luftwaffe’s airfields, like an overconfident boxer’s chin, Hull had thoughtfully sited itself on an estuary so navigationally conspicuous that a drunk badger could have flown you there. It was Britain’s third busiest port, and its most feebly defended. The city’s principal anti-aircraft measure was a battery of seventy-two barrage balloons strung out across the Humber, which claimed its first victim in March 1941, when a dirigible broke loose and demolished the Guildhall clock tower. Between then and the end of the war, the barrage downed a total of four aircraft. None bore a swastika. Given an almost free rein, Goering’s boys set about literally wiping huge areas of Hull off the map. The city endured Britain’s first daylight bombing raid, and was the target of the Luftwaffe’s final attack. In between, a dumbfounding 95 per cent of Hull’s housing stock was destroyed or damaged, and over half of the 320,000 citizens lost their homes. Twelve hundred lost their lives. A single raid in 1941 destroyed no fewer than six cinemas (the shell of the National Picture Theatre still looks out onto Beverley Road, one of the last surviving Blitz-wrecked buildings in Britain). My wife’s grandfather, an Icelandic trawlerman, was a regular wartime visitor to Hull, and recalled looters doing a busy trade in the dockland shadows, hawking jewellery snatched from the city’s endless mounds of smouldering rubble.

  Everyone knew about the London Blitz, but Hull’s greater traumas were blue-pencilled by the censors. Each pocket apocalypse that flattened another swathe of it was blandly reported as ‘a raid on a northern coastal town’. Peace laid bare the scale of the civic devastation, but also a harsh commercial reality that had been lurking since the 1920s, when three hundred years of uninterrupted growth first faltered.