The nation’s great individualists, Midlanders are above kneejerk class-based political loyalties. The Mansfield-led Nottinghamshire miners were accused of being Thatcherite stooges, but name calling, and actual violence, made no difference to their resistance to Scargillite coercion. Truculent independence of mind is a very Midland attitude: we’re used to our outsider status. Perhaps it’s because of this – and because we’re excluded from the lazy black-and-white cultural distinctions inherent in the idea of the North/South divide – that Midlanders are able to take a more nuanced view of life’s little complexities. It is, if you like, a mark of our civilisation. And that means I’m proud to come from a scab – or, if you wanted to make it sound more romantic, you might instead say an outlaw – town.
A bit of crust and jelly, Thomas Cook and crook-back Dick, and the call of the Shires
‘Shut yer clack, Denis!’
Mum’s in a grump. Dad and I are waiting for her in the car but she’s resisting all our attempts to hurry her along. In fact, she’s now decided that she doesn’t want to come to Leicestershire with us at all as she’d rather go into Mansfield with her friend Joan, or ‘Scooter Girl’ as my father calls her. (Joan is a seasoned member of the Mansfield mobility scooter club.)
After much persuasion the Joan project is dropped – her friend threads her scooter in and out of pedestrian traffic with such dizzying virtuosity that she leaves her shopping companions in a spin, so it’s a relief not to have to go with her, my mother eventually decides – and we are able to set off. In the car, my parents are up front bickering merrily, while I’m strapped in behind them feeling vaguely nauseous in the back: it’s just like being a boy again.
We had been tempted to begin our tour of Leicestershire by heading south-west to the extravagantly named Ashby-de-la-Zouch, with its castle ruins and celebrated four-storey Hastings Tower. Afterwards we might have gone on to nearby Breedon-on-the-Hill, with its remarkable views and church, St Mary and St Hardulph. The latter is built on the site of an Iron Age hillfort and contains some splendid (and historically highly enigmatic) Anglo-Saxon carvings. The fact that the friezes look Byzantine in character has given rise to all sorts of academic speculation: did the Emperor Justinian really go on a mini-break to the East Midlands in the year 535 to avoid having potentially fractious talks with the Ostrogoth king Theodahad? I was looking forward to giving that question a bit more consideration but my mother insists that we head south-east to Melton Mowbray instead as she’d like to bring one of the famous local pork pies back for her brother Jimmy.
In addition to Mum, I’ve brought along another sceptical travelling companion, the Rough Guide. Now I know that quality is more important than quantity, but you can tell something about this particular publication’s general perspective on England’s cultural highlights by the fact that it devotes 368 pages to the South, 231 pages to the North and just 108 to the whole of the Midlands. Leicestershire it dismisses as an ‘apparently haphazard mix of the industrial and rural’, which I find rather puzzling. After all, what part of the developed world isn’t a bit haphazard in appearance? And why ‘apparently’? Do the authors think there’s some secret power at work in the Leicestershire hierarchy conspiring to make it look haphazard, while the effect is actually quite deliberate? If so, we need to be told.
Fortunately Leicestershire itself betrays no such doubts about its purpose or make-up. As you drive out of Nottinghamshire along the A606, the landscape begins to roll sumptuously and a sign at the county border confidently announces that you are entering ‘The Heart of Rural England’. Seeing this puts me in mind of my friend Jerry, who grew up in nearby West Bridgford (which is on the Notts side of the border) and who’s always talked enthusiastically about the natural beauty of this part of the Midlands, which he calls ‘the Shires’, a term you rarely hear these days. A glance is enough to confirm that the local landscape has little in common with the ‘Industrial, built-up, heavily populated, busy, no countryside’ East Midland stereotype reported in that tourist-board survey.
I ask my parents about ‘the Shires’, but they laugh so hard at the mere mention of Jerry and West Bridgford, whose affluent inhabitants were apparently a source of much mirth (and envy) when they were growing up, that they forget to answer.
‘Bread-and-Lard Island, we used to call West Bridgford,’ my dad says. ‘A place of unimaginable, mythic luxury to a simple Sutton lad like me.’
‘The houses there all had net curtains and a phone in the window,’ says my mother, ever the suspicious Blidworth girl. ‘The phones weren’t actually connected, mind. It was all for show.’
Our route skirts the Vale of Belvoir, which fully merits its name (Belvoir means ‘beautiful view’), before finally leading us into Melton Mowbray, the self-styled ‘Rural Capital of Food’, home to both the classic English pork pie and Stilton cheese. The latter may take its name from a village in Cambridgeshire, eighty miles north of London, where it was marketed as a local speciality to travellers on the Great North Road, but it has never actually been produced there: Stilton is a strictly Midland phenomenon, and there’s a Certification Trade Mark to prove it, so don’t you try making your own at home and passing it off as authentic Stilton. It’s just a shame that the name doesn’t underline its geographical rootedness: Yorkshire pudding says so much about the values of the North; a rebranded Stilton could do the same for the Midlands. As for pork pie, the distinctive Melton Mowbray variety was accorded Protected Geographical Indication status by the European Union in 2008. It turns out the EU is good for something after all.
* * *
I don’t know which is more terrifying: my mother in her default nothing-impresses-me mode, or (much less common) in her making-an-effort, now-isn’t-that-fascinating? guise. After we park up in Melton, she suddenly switches to the latter (is it the sight of a startlingly large portrait of grinning, perma-tanned Tory MP Alan Duncan in the window of the Rutland and Melton Conservative Association that’s effected this change of mood?) and stops short as we round a corner into the pedestrianised market area.
‘What’s this?’ she asks, looking up and preparing to be dazzled.
‘It’s a Lloyds TSB, Mum.’
‘Well, it looks really nice, I must say.’
‘Put your specs on, Kath, for god’s sake,’ my father says, before adding darkly: ‘Remember what happened last time.’
You don’t have to pretend to be impressed by Melton Mowbray – it is impressive. In the first place, it’s handsome. There’s a lovely 1930s polychrome Art Deco cinema, the Regal, and a magnificent parish church, St Mary’s, whose scrubbed limestone tower dominates the surrounding landscape. And though the streets are largely peopled by senior citizens on the day I visit – I’ve brought two of my own along just in case more are needed to make up the numbers – this is a town with a strong pulse. Melton appears to be defying the high-street meltdown that’s affecting the rest of the country. Its markets are legion: beyond the gleefully spreading street market that dominates the town centre, there are cattle, farmers’, antique, and fur and feather markets too. And that’s just Tuesdays.
‘Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe’ is obviously a major attraction – signposts insistently direct you towards it – but there’s a lot more to the culinary charms of Melton than a bit of pig wrapped in crust and jelly. Why, there’s such an abundance of butchers, cheese shops and fishmongers, all seemingly thriving in the deep shadow of the huge Morrisons that lurks at the bottom of Sherrard Street,