Robert Shore
BANG in the MIDDLE
A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MIDLANDS – THE MOST UNDERRATED PLACE ON EARTH
Contents
To Mansfield
To Nottingham
To Melton Mowbray
To Grantham
To Northampton
To Stratford-Upon-Avon
To Coventry
To Birmingham
To Lichfield
To Stoke-On-Trent
To Chatsworth
To The Crags
Acknowledgements
Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands
About the Publisher
Queen Victoria’s blinds, John Gielgud’s private parts, and the great Robin Hood feud
So there we were, sprawled across the floor of our living room in South London, happily building a Lego Pharaoh’s Quest Flying Mummy Attack, when Hector dropped The Big Question.
‘Dad?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Where are you from?’
Hector had been asking a lot of questions lately – partly because, at five years of age, he was in the middle of the classic ‘why/where/when’ stage of child development, and partly because his school topic for the term was ‘About Ourselves’.
‘I’m from England,’ I said confidently. ‘Your mother is from France and I am from England.’
‘I think he needs a little more detail than that,’ my wife said, entering the room to deliver her line and then immediately exiting again, like an actor with a walk-on part in a French farce.
‘Okay, if it’s more detail you want,’ I steadied myself, ‘I’m from Mansfield.’
‘Oh,’ mused Hector. ‘Where’s that?’
‘You know, where Grandma and Grandad live. It’s in the Midlands.’
‘Oh,’ he mused again. ‘What’s the Miglands?’
‘Don’t you want to finish the biplane so we can start launching our flying attacks on the mummy?’ I said, trying to change the subject. A father likes to be able to answer his son’s questions with authority, and I wasn’t sure that I had anything very definite to tell him on the subject of my origins.
‘Miss Kate says she wants parents to come in and tell us about where they’re from,’ Hector persisted. ‘Do you want to come to school and tell us about the Miglands?’
I could just imagine the scene: a parade of parents from Bosnia, Bologna and Baghdad, all with amazing tales to tell to boggle the imaginations of a class of wide-eyed five-year-olds, and then me, bringing up the rear of this exotic, multi-lingual procession, turning bright red with embarrassment as I desperately tried to think of something interesting to say on the subject of Mansfield and the Midlands.
My wife is a Parisian, so on his mother’s side Hector’s heritage is rich: berets and haute couture, baguettes and haute cuisine, moody philosophers in black polo necks, and a general all-round je ne sais quoi. As cultural legacies go, you can’t ask for better. My contribution is thinner. Mansfield was named the sixth and ninth worst place to live in Britain, respectively, in the 2005 and 2007 editions of Channel 4’s popular The Best and Worst Places to Live in the UK show.
As for the Midlands – well, as a badge of identity, it’s not like coming from the North, is it? Few people would know where to draw the boundary lines that separate the coastline-free Midlands from the North and South of England, those two monolithic and self-mythologising geographical constructs that sit above and below it on the national map. Just as importantly, whereas most people could attempt at least rudimentary definitions of the North and South as cultural entities – flat caps versus posh accents, or, in the terms of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, ‘Southern fairies’ versus ‘Northern monkeys’ – very few would find much to say about the Midlands’ ‘identity’. And that includes Midlanders.
I grew up in the Midlands, but I can’t remember anyone ever referring to themselves or me as a Midlander – there was a distinct lack of what you might call ‘Midland consciousness’. When I then went south to university, I was perceived as a Northerner, principally because I pronounced the word ‘class’ with a short ‘a’. ‘You’re quite well-spoken,’ I was assured by one of my Home Counties-scented, RP-channelling peers, ‘but you’ve got funny vowels. Might you be from the North, old boy?’ Since I didn’t much fancy spending the next three years propping up the bar with the college’s real Northerners, mithering on about dinner being the meal you eat in t’middle of t’day, lad, and how Southerners couldn’t take their drink, I grew self-conscious about my pronunciation and avoided making any unnecessary references to grass, glass or taking a bath in my conversation.
Even in this great Age of Identity Politics, coming from the Midlands is tantamount to coming from nowhere in particular. You can be a Professional Northerner (it’s a crowded field, but there always seems to be room for fresh recruits), but a Professional Midlander? The very word ‘Midlands’ is rarely employed outside specialised or technical contexts. It occurs most frequently in weather and travel reports (there are a lot of roads in the Midlands). Beyond that, it pops up in the camp idiom of a certain vintage: in his letters, the (London-born) classical actor John Gielgud refers to the zone between his legs and midriff as ‘the Midlands’. We all come from there at a biological level, of course, but in a geographical context there’s little social cachet in announcing yourself as hailing from the nation’s meat-and-two-veg.
* * *
I decided to do what I have done so many times before at moments of crisis in my life. I called my mother.
(Sound of a phone ringing out. The receiver is eventually lifted and a small intense woman, audibly gurning, speaks.)
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Mum. It’s your second-born.’
‘Ey up mi duck.’ My mother is hardly a strong dialect-speaker, but she does enjoy slipping into the local argot from time to time. ‘Can I call you back later? I don’t really have time to talk at the moment.’
‘Then why did you pick up the phone?’
‘In case it was something important.’
I went into my hurt-silence routine, honed over decades.
‘Come on,’ she chivvied me. ‘What can I do you for? Spit it out.’
‘Mum, there’s a question I need to ask you.’
‘I love you and your brother both equally. I’ve told you before.’
‘Not