chapter Seventeen
I FORGOT TO MENTION CURRY HOUSES EARLIER IN MY BRIEF LIST OF
Bradford's glories, which was a terrible oversight. Bradford may have lost a wool trade but it has gained a thousand excellent Indian restaurants, which I personally find a reasonable swap as I have a strictly limited need for bales of fibre but can take about as much Indian food as you care to shovel at me.
The oldest of the Bradford curry houses, I'm told, and certainly one of the best and cheapest, is the Kashmir, just up the road from the Alhambra. There is a proper restaurant upstairs, with white tablecloths, gleaming cutlery and poised, helpful waiters, but aficionados descend to the basement where you sit with strangers at long Formica-topped tables. This place is so hard core that they don't bother with cutlery. You just scoop the food in with hunks of nan bread and messy fingers. For £3 I had a small feast that was rich, delicious and so hot that it made my fillings sizzle.
Afterwards, bloated and sated and with a stomach bubbling away like a heated beaker in a mad-scientist movie, I stepped out into the Bradford evening and wondered what to do with myself. It was just after six o'clock on a Saturday evening, but the place felt dead.
I was acutely and uncomfortably aware that my home and dear family were just over the next range of hills. For some reason I had it in my head that it would be cheating to go home now with the trip half finished, but then I thought: Sod it. I'm cold and lonesome and I'm not about to spend a night in a hotel twenty miles from my own home. So I walked to Forster Square Station, took a rattling, empty train to Skipton and a cab to the little Dales village where I live, and had the driver drop me down the road so that I'could approach the house on foot.
What a joy it is to arrive after dark at a snug-looking house, its windows filled with welcoming light, and know that it is yours and that inside is your family. I walked up the drive and looked through the kitchen window, and there they all were gathered round the kitchen table playing Monopoly, bless their wholesome little hearts. I stared at them for ages, lost in a glow of affection and admiration and feeling like Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life when he gets to spy on his own life. And then I went in.
Now I can't possibly write about this sort of thing without making it sound like an episode from The Waltons, so what I'm going to do is distract your attention for a moment from this animated and heartwarming reunion in a Yorkshire Dales kitchen and tell you a true but irrelevant story.
In the early 1980s, I was freelancing a lot in my spare time, principally for airline magazines. I got the idea to do an article on remarkable coincidences and sent off a query letter to one of these publications, which expressed serious interest and promised payment of $500 if published - a sum of money I could very handily have done with. But when I came to write the article, I realized that, although I had plenty of information about scientific studies into the probabilities of coincidence, I didn't have nearly enough examples of remarkable coincidences themselves to give the article sufficient zip or to fill 1,500 words of space. So I wrote a letter to the magazine saying I wouldn't be able to deliver and left it on the top of my typewriter to post the next day. Then I dressed myself in respectable clothing and drove to work at The Times.
Now in those days, Philip Howard, the kindly literary editor (I would, of course, say that, in view of his position, but in fact it is true: he's a proper gent), used to hold book sales for the staff a couple of times a year when his office became so filled with review copies that he'd lost his desk. These were always exciting occasions because you could acquire stacks of books for practically nothing. He charged something like 25p for hardbacks and lOp for paperbacks, and then passed the proceeds to the Cirrhosis Foundation or some other charity dear to the hearts of journalists. On this particular day, I arrived at work to find a notice by the lifts announcing a book sale at 4 p.m. It was 3.55, so I dumped my coatat my desk and eagerly hastened to his chamber. The place was already full of mingling people. I stepped into the melee and what should be the very first book my eyes fell on but a paperback called Remarkable True Coincidences. How's that for a remarkable true coincidence? But here's the uncanny thing. I opened it up and found that not only did it offer all the material I could possibly need, but the very first coincidence it discussed concerned a man named Bryson.
I've been telling this story for years in pubs and every time I've finished it, the people to whom I've told it have nodded thoughtfully for quite some time, then turned to each other and said: 'You know, it occurs to me there's another way to get to Barnsley without going anywhere near the M62. You know the Happy Eater roundabout at Guiseley? Well, if you take the second turning there. ..'
So anyway, I spent three days at home, immersed in the chaos of domestic life, happy as a puppy - romping with the little ones, bestowing affection indiscriminately, following my wife from room to room, doing widdles on a sheet of newspaper in the kitchen corner. I cleaned out my rucksack, attended to the mail, strode proprietorially around the garden, savoured the bliss of waking up each morning in my own bed.
I couldn't face the prospect of departing again so soon, so I decided to stay on a bit longer and make a couple of day trips. Thus it was that on the third morning I picked up my good friend and neighbour, the kindly and gifted artist David Cook - it is his painting that graces the jacket of this book - and went with him for a day's walk through Saltaire and Bingley, his native turf. It was awfully nice to have some company for a change and interesting to see this little corner of Yorkshire through the eyes of someone who had grown up in it.
I had never properly been to Saltaire before and what a splendid surprise it was to me. Saltaire, in case you don't know about it, is a model factory community built by Titus Salt between 185I and 1876. It is a little difficult to know what to make of old Titus. On the one hand he was one of that unattractive breed of teetotalling, self-righteous, God-fearing industrialists in which the nineteenth century seemed to specialize - a man who didn't want merely to employ his workers but to own them. Workers at his mill were expected to live in his houses, worship in his church, follow his precepts to the letter. He would not allow a pub in the village and so saddled the local park with stern restrictions regarding noise, smoking, the playing of games and other indecorous activities that there was not much fun to be had in it. Workers were allowed to take boats out on the river - but only, for some reason, so long as there were never more than four out at any one time. Whether they Uked it or not, in short, they were compelled to be sober, industrious and quiet.
On the other hand, Salt showed a rare degree of enlightenment in terms of social welfare, and there is no question that his employees enjoyed cleaner, healthier, more comfortable living conditions than almost any other industrial workers in the world at that time.
Though it has since been swallowed up by the great sprawl that is the Leeds-Bradford conurbation, when it was built Saltaire stood in clean, open countryside - a vast change from the unhealthy stew of central Bradford, where in the 1850s there were more brothels than churches and not a single yard of covered sewers. From bleak and grimy back-to-backs, Salt's workers came to airy, spacious cottages, each with a yard, private gas supply and at least two bedrooms. It must have seemed a very Eden.
On a sloping site overlooking the River Aire and Leeds to Liverpool Canal, Salt built a massive mill known as the Palace of Industry - in its day the largest factory in Europe - spreading over nine acres and graced with a striking Italianate campanile modelled on that of Santa Maria Gloriosa in Venice. He additionally built a park, a church, an institute for 'conversation, refreshment and education', a hospital, a school and 850 trim and tidy stone houses on a formal grid of cobbled streets, most of them named for Salt's wife and eleven children. The institute was perhaps the most remarkable of these undertakings. Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had manual workers been given a more lavish opportunity to better themselves, an opportunity that many scores enthusiastically seized. One James Waddington, an untutored woolsorter, became a world authority on linguistics and a leading light of the Phonetic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
Today Saltaire remains miraculously intact, though the factory has long since ceased to manufacture cloth and the houses are now privately owned. One floor of the factory contains a wonderful -and free - permanent exhibition of the works of David Hockney, and the rest is given over to retail space selling the most extraordinary range of designer clothes, posh and stylish housewares, books and arty postcards. It was a kind of miracle to find this place - this yuppie heaven - inhabiting a forgotten corner of metropolitan Bradford. And yet it seemed to be doing very well.
David Cook and I had an unhurried look around the gallery - I had never paid much attention to Hockney, but I'll tell you this: the boy can draw - then wandered through the streets of former workers' cottages, all of them snug and trim and lovingly preserved, before striking off through Roberts Park to Shipley Glen, a steep wooded dell leading to a sweep of open common land of the sort where you can usually find people exercising their dogs. It looks as if it has been wild and untended for ever, but in fact a century ago this was the site of a hugely successful amusement park - one of the world's first.
Among the many attractions were an aerial gondola ride, a big dipper and what was billed as The Largest, Wildest, Steepest Toboggan Slide Ever Erected on Earth'. I've seen pictures of these, filled with ladies with parasols and mustachioed men in stiff collars, and they do actually look pretty exciting, particularly the toboggan ride, which ran for perhaps a quarter of a mile down a formidably steep and perilous hill. One day in 1900, as a earful of smartly dressed tobogganers were being hauled up the hill to be despatched on another hair-raising descent, the winch cable snapped, sending the passengers hurtling out of control to a messy but exciting death at the bottom, and that was pretty much the end of the Shipley Glen Amusement Park. Today all that's left of these original thrills is the poky Glen Tramway, which goes up and down a nearby slope in a discreet and sedate fashion, as it has since 1895, but among the tall grass we did find a remnant of old track from the original toboggan ride, which thrilled us mildly.
The whole of this area is a kind of archaeological site of the not-too-distant past. A mile or so away, up an overgrown track, is the site of Milner Field, an ornate palace of stone built by Titus Salt Junior in 1870 at a time when the Salt family fortunes seemed boundless and perpetually secure. But weren't they in for a surprise? In 1893, the textile trade went into a sudden slump, leaving the Salts dangerously overextended, and the family abruptly lost control of the firm. In consternation and shame, they had to sell the house, mill and associated holdings. Then began a strange and sinister series of events. Without apparent exception all the subsequent owners of Milner Field suffered odd and devastating setbacks. One whacked himself in the foot with a golf club and died when the wound turned gangrenous. Another came home to find his young bride engaged in an unseemly bout of naked bedtop wrestling rwith a business associate. He shot the associate or possibly both of them - accounts vary - but in any case he certainly made a mess of the bedroom and was taken off to have his neck stretched.
Before long the house developed a reputation as a place where you could reliably expect to come a cropper. People moved in and abruptly moved out again, with ashen faces and terrible wounds. By 1930, when the house went on the market one last time, no buyer could be found for it. It stayed empty for twenty years, and finally in 1950 it was pulled down. Now the site is overgrown and weedy, and you could walk past it without ever guessing that one of the finest houses in the North had once stood here. But if you poke about in the tall grass, as we did now, you can find one of the old conservatory floors, made of neatly patterned black and white tiles. It was strangely reminiscent of the Roman mosaic I had seen at Winchcombe, and scarcely less astonishing.
It seemed remarkable to think that a century ago Titus Salt Junior could have stood on this spot, in a splendid house, looking down the Aire Valley to the distant but formidable Salt's Mill, clanging away and filling the air with steamy smoke, and beyond it the sprawl of the richest centre of woollen trade in the world, and that now it could all be gone. What would old Titus Senior think, I wondered, if you brought him back and showed him that the family fortune was spent and his busy factory was now full of stylish chrome housewares and wooftah paintings of naked male swimmers with glistening buttocks?
We stood for a long time on this lonely summit. You can see for miles across Airedale from up there, with its crowded towns and houses climbing up the steep hillsides to the bleak upland fells, and I found myself wondering, as I often do when I stand on a northern hillside, what all those people in all those houses do. There used to be scores of mills all up and down Airedale - ten or more in Bingley alone - and now they are virtually all gone, torn down to make room for supermarkets or converted into heritage centres, blocks of flats or shopping complexes. French's Mill, Bingley's last surviving textile factory, had closed a year or two before and now sat forlorn with broken windows.One of the great surprises to me upon moving North was discovering the extent to which it felt like another country. Partly it was from the look and feel of the North - the high, open moors and big skies, the wandering drystone walls, the grimy mill towns, the snug stone villages of the Dales and Lakes - and partly, of course, it was to do with the accents, the different words, the refreshing if sometimes startling frankness of speech. Partly it was also to do with the way Southerners and Northerners were so extraordinarily, sometimes defiantly, ignorant of the geography of the other end of the country. It used to astonish me, working on newspapers in London, how often you could call out a question like 'Which of the Yorkshires is Halifax in?' and be met with a tableful of blank frowns. And when I moved North and told people that I'd previously lived in Surrey near Windsor, I often got the same look - a kind of nervous uncertainty, as if they were afraid I was going to say, 'Now you show me on the map just where that is.'
Mostly what differentiated the North from the South, however, was the exceptional sense of economic loss, of greatness passed, when you drove through places like Preston or Blackburn or stood on a hillside like this. If you draw an angled line between Bristol and the Wash, you divide the country into two halves with roughly 27 million people on each side. Between 1980 and 1985, in the southern half they lost 103,600 jobs. In the northern half in the same period they lost 1,032,000 jobs, almost exactly ten times as many. And still the factories are shutting. Turn on the local television news any evening and at least half of it will be devoted to factory closures (and the other half will be about a cat stuck up a tree somewhere; there is truly nothing direr than local television aews). So I ask again: what do all those people in all those houses do - and what, more to the point, will their children do?
We walked out of the grounds along another track towards Eldwick, past a large and flamboyant gatehouse, and David made a crestfallen noise. 'I used to have a friend who lived there,' he said. Now it was crumbling, its windows and doorways bricked up, a sad waste of a fine structure. Beside it, an old walled garden was neglected and overgrown.
Across the road, David pointed out the house where Fred Hoyle had grown up. In his autobiography (It'll Start Getting Cold Any Minute Now, Just You See), Hoyle recalls how he used to see servants in white gloves going in and out the gate of Milner Field, but is mysteriously silent on all the scandal and tragedy that was happening beyond the high wall. I had spent £3 on his autobiography in a second-hand bookshop in the certain expectation that the early chapters would be full of accounts of gunfire and midnight screams, so you can imagine my disappointment.
A bit further on, we passed three large blocks of council flats, which were not only ugly and remote but positioned in such an odd and careless way that, although they stood on an open hillside, the tenants didn't actually get a view. They had, David told me, won many architectural awards.
As we ambled into Bingley down a curving slope, David told me about his childhood there in the Forties and Fifties. He painted an attractive picture of happy times spent going to the pictures ('Wednesdays to the Hippodrome, Fridays to the Myrtle'), eating fish and chips out of newspapers, listening to Dick Barton and Top of the Form on the radio - a magic lost world of half-day closings, second posts, people on bicycles, endless summers. The Bingley he described was a confident, prosperous cog at the heart of a proud and mighty empire, with busy factories and a lively centre full of cinemas, tea-rooms and interesting shops, which was strikingly at odds with the dowdy, traffic-frazzled, knocked-about place we were passing into now. The Myrtle and Hippodrome had shut years before. The Hippodrome had been taken over by a Woolworth's, but that, too, was now long gone. Today there isn't a cinema in Bingley or much of anything else to make you want to go there. The centre of the town is towered over by the forbidding presence of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society - not a particularly awful building as these things go, but hopelessly out of scale with the town around it. Between it and a truly squalid 1960s brick shopping precinct, the centre of Bingley has had its character destroyed beyond repair. So it came as a pleasant surprise to find that beyond its central core Bingley remains a delightful spot.
We walked past a school and a golf course to a place called Beckfoot Farm, a pretty stone cottage in a dell beside a burbling beck. The main Bradford road was only a few hundred yards away, but it was another, pre-motorized century back here. We followed a shady riverside path, which was exceedingly fetching in the mild sunshine. There used to be a factory here where they rendered fat, David told me. It had the most awful smell, and the water always had a horrible rusty-creamy colour with a skin of frothy gunge on it. Now the river was sparkling green and healthy-looking and thespot seemed totally untouched by either time or industry. The old factory had been scrubbed up and gutted and turned into a block of stylish flats. We walked up to a place called Five-Rise Locks, where the Leeds-to-Liverpool Canal climbs a hundred feet or so in five quick stages, and had a look at the broken windows beyond the razor-wire perimeter of French's Mill. Then, feeling as if we had exhausted pretty much all that Bingley had to offer, we went to a convivial pub called the Old White Horse and drank a very large amount of beer, which is what we had both had in mind all along.
The next day I went shopping with my wife in Harrogate - or rather I had a look around Harrogate while she went shopping. Shopping is not, in my view, something that men and women should do together since all men want to do is buy something noisy like a drill and get it home so they can play with it, whereas women aren't happy until they've seen more or less everything in town and felt at least 1,500 different textures. Am I alone in being mystified by this strange compulsion on the part of women to finger things in shops? I have many times seen my wife go twenty or thirty yards out of her way to feel something - a mohair jumper or a velveteen bed jacket or something.
'Do you like that?' I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad.
'That? she'll say. 'No, it's hideous.'
Then why on earth,' I always want to say, 'did you walk all the way over there to touch it?' But of course like all long-term husbands I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say - 'I'm hungry', 'I'm bored', 'My feet are tired', 'Yes, that one looks nice on you, too', 'Well, have them both then', 'Oh, for f*ck sake', 'Can't we just go home?', 'Monsoon? Again? Oh, for f*ck sake', 'Where have I been? Where have you been?', 'Then why on earth did you walk all the way over there to touch it?' - it doesn't pay, so I say nothing.
On this day, Mrs B. was in shoe-shopping mode, which means hours and hours of making some poor guy in a cheap suit fetch endless boxes of more or less identical footwear and then deciding not to have anything, so I wisely decided to clear off and have a look at the town. To show her I love her, I took her for coffee and cake at Betty's (and at Betty's prices you need to be pretty damn smitten), where she issued me with her usual precise instructions for a rendezvous. Three o'clock outside Woolworth's. But listen - stop fiddling with that and listen - if Russell & Bromley don't have the shoes I want I'll have to go to Ravel, in which case meet me at 3.15 by the frozen foods in Marks. Otherwise I'll be in Hammick's in the cookery books section or possibly the children's books - unless I'm in Boots feeling toasters. But probably, in fact, I'll be at Russell & Bromley trying on all the same shoes all over again, in which case meet me outside Next no later than 3.27. Have you got that?'
'Yes.' No.
'Don't let me down.'
'Of course not.' In your dreams.
And then with a kiss she was gone. I finished my coffee and savoured the elegant, old-fashioned ambience of this fine institution where the waitresses still wear frilly caps and white aprons over black dresses. There really ought to be more places like this, if you ask me. It may cost an arm and a leg for a cafetiere and a sticky bun, but it is worth every penny and they will let you sit there all day, which I seriously considered doing now as it was so agreeable. But then I thought I really ought to have a look around the town, so I paid the bill and hauled myself off through the shopping precinct to have a look at Harrogate's newest feature, the Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre. The name is a bit rich because they built it on top of Victoria Gardens, so it really ought to be called the Nice Little Gardens Destroyed By This Shopping Centre.
I wouldn't mind this so much, but they also demolished the last great public toilets in Britain - a little subterranean treasure house of polished tiles and gleaming brass in the aforementioned gardens. The Gents was simply wonderful and I've had good reports about the Ladies as well. I might not even mind this so much either but the new shopping centre is just heartbreakingly awful, the worst kind of pastiche architecture - a sort of Bath Crescent meets Crystal Palace with a roof by B&Q. For reasons I couldn't begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest - I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People - but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.
On the Station Parade side of the building, where the pleasant little Victoria Gardens and their pleasant little public toilets formerly existed, there is now a kind of open-air amphitheatre of steps, where I suppose it is intended for people to sit on those two or three days a year when Yorkshire is sunny, and high above theroad there has been built a truly preposterous covered footbridge in the same Georgian/Italianate/F*ck-Knows style connecting the shopping centre to a multi-storey car park across the way.
Now, on the basis of my earlier remarks about Britain's treatment of its architectural heritage, you may foolishly have supposed that I would be something of an enthusiast for this sort of thing. Alas, no. If by pastiche you mean a building that takes some note of its neighbours and perhaps takes some care to match adjoining rooflines and echo the size and position of its neighbours' windows and door openings and that sort of thing, then yes, I am in favour of it. But if by pastiche you mean a kind of Disneyland version of Jolly Olde England like this laughable heap before me, then thank you but no.
You could argue, I suppose - and I dare say Victoria Gardens' architect would - that at least it shows some effort to inject traditional architectural values into the townscape and that it is less jarring to the sensibilities than the nearby glass-and-plastic box in which the Co-op is happy to reside (which is, let me say here, a building of consummate ugliness), but in fact it seems to me that it is just as bad as, and in its way even more uninspired and unimaginative than, the wretched Co-op building. (But let me also say that neither is even remotely as bad as the Maples building, a Sixties block that rises, like some kind of half-witted practical joke, a dozen or so storeys into the air in the middle of a long street of innocuous Victorian structures. Now how did that happen?)
So what are we to do with Britain's poor battered towns if I won't let you have Richard Seifert and I won't let you have Walt Disney? I wish I knew. More than this, I wish the architects knew. Surely there must be some way to create buildings that are stylish and forward-looking without destroying the overall ambience of their setting. Most other European nations manage it (with the notable and curious exception of the French). So why not here?
But enough of this tedious bleating. Harrogate is basically a very fine town, and far less scarred by careless developments than many other communities. It has in the Stray, a 215-acre sweep of parklike common land overlooked by solid, prosperous homes, one of the largest and most agreeable open spaces in the country. It has some nice old hotels, a pleasant shopping area and, withal, a genteel and well-ordered air. It is, in short, as nice a town as you will find anywhere. It reminds me, in a pleasantly English way, a little of Baden-Baden, which is, of course, not surprising since it was likewise a spa town in its day - and a very successful one, too. According to a leaflet I picked up at the Royal Pump Room Museum, as late as 1926 they were still dispensing as many as 26,000 glasses of sulphurous water in a single day. You can still drink the water if you want. According to a notice by the tap, it is reputedly very good for flatulence, which seemed an intriguing promise, and I very nearly drank some until I realized they meant it prevented it. What an odd notion.
I had a look around the museum and walked past the old Swan Hotel, where Agatha Christie went and hid after she found out that her husband was a philanderer, the beastly cad, then wandered up Montpellier Parade, a very pretty street filled with awesomely expensive antique shops. I examined the seventy-five-foot-high War Memorial, and went for a long, pleasantly directionless amble through the Stray, thinking how nice it must be to live in one of the big houses overlooking the park and be able to stroll to the shops.
You would never guess that a place as prosperous and decorous as Harrogate could inhabit the same zone of the country as Bradford or Bolton, but of course that is the other thing about the North - it has these pockets of immense prosperity, like Harrogate and Ilkley, that are even more decorous and flushed with wealth than their counterparts in the South. Makes it a much more interesting place, if you ask me.
Eventually, with the afternoon fading, I took myself back into the heart of the shopping area, where I scratched my head and, with a kind of panicky terror, realized I didn't have the faintest idea where or when I had agreed to meet my dear missis. I was standing there wearing an expression like Stan Laurel when he turns around to find that the piano he was looking after is rolling down a steep hill with Ollie aboard, legs wriggling, when by a kind of miracle my wife walked up.
'Hello, dear!' she said brightly. 'I must say, I never expected to find you here waiting for me.'
'Oh, for goodness' sake, give me a bit of credit, please. I've been here ages.'
And arm in arm we strode off into the wintry sunset.