Midlanders have traditionally been slow to react to such acts of daylight robbery. I once asked Alan Sillitoe about the wavering accents in the film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for which he wrote the screenplay, and he explained that the problem was that they simply hadn’t been able to find ‘a clutch of actors who all came from Nottingham’. As a result, it ended up ‘a kind of mish-mash of South Yorkshire and Scouse and this, that and the other’. Didn’t it worry Sillitoe – the late twentieth-century Bard of Nottingham – that his works could so easily be claimed for the North? ‘That’s other people’s problem. Who cares about the North, or indeed about the South?’ he told me. For him, the Midlands was a place of ‘illimitable frontiers’. Then, after a pause, he added, ‘Bugger the North!’ and excused himself as his tea was waiting for him in the other room. Where uppity Northerners rage and bluster for attention, stoical Midlanders just shrug and concentrate on more important matters – buttered toast, for instance.
The cinema has never been particularly helpful where Midland identity is concerned. Take the more recent example of Shane Meadows’s Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002). With a title like that, you’d think that Meadows’s starrily cast modern spaghetti western would deliver a firmer, more differentiating picture of life as it is lived between North and South. Indeed, with a title like that, you might even think that that was one of its principal raisons d’être – especially as Meadows is himself a Midlander. So it’s curious that there’s no attempt to make the setting of the film identifiably Midland – the locations are all anonymous, unromanticised suburbs of the kind that can be found anywhere in the UK – or even to make the characters sound like Midlanders. Rhys Ifans speaks with a Welsh accent, Ricky Tomlinson – who plays ‘the Midlands cowboy’ – is audibly Scouse, while Kathy Burke, though she does use the very North Notts term of endearment ‘mi duck’ when talking to her brother (a very Scottish-sounding Robert Carlyle), is her usual salt-of-the-earth, Norf Lunnon self. So there you have it: a drama that announces boldly that it’s about the Midlands, but that then goes on to look and sound anything and everything but. Go figure.
* * *
The day after my visit to Goose Fair I’ve arranged to meet a friend for lunch. Elizabeth spent her childhood just up the road from me in Chesterfield, home of the not-much-vaunted Crooked Spire. Like me, she now lives in London but makes regular jaunts to Nottingham to visit family. We’re due to meet outside the Victoria Centre, one of the two big shopping malls that sandwich the city centre. So long as I pay for lunch, she’s agreed to answer my questions about her impressions of the region.
When she arrives, she looks quite flustered. Apparently she’s just had a nasty experience in the Nottingham Poundland (what she was doing there I can’t imagine as she’s only really comfortable antiquing in Notting Hill). I’d been hoping to lure her for a boutique burger around the corner at groovy ‘eatery and funhouse’ Spanky Van Dyke’s, which captures Nottingham’s youthful spirit so well (this is a big student city). But after her budget-store trauma she insists on a cup of Earl Grey and a prawn sandwich in the more reassuring surroundings of John Lewis, which just happens to occupy a large portion of the Vicky Centre.
Elizabeth looks like a classic Twenties flapper and holds down a very serious job. Given her general profile, you might expect her to speak with an RP accent. And for the most part she does – middling aristocracy, I’d say she sounds – until she pronounces one of those great North/South divide words, like ‘laugh’ or ‘bath’, when her vowels suddenly become as flat as those of any no-nonsense muck-and-brass Northern industrialist. This peculiarity in her pronunciation reflects the influence of her father, who grew up in Barnsley and, in the best Yorkshire tradition, ‘is very clear what he thinks about things and very blunt when he speaks about them’ (Elizabeth’s own description).
Duly settled in a corner of JL’s ‘Place to Eat’, I press the button on my recording device and begin my interrogation.
‘Right, Elizabeth. Question one: What’s the best thing ever to come out of the Midlands?’
She raises a hand to stop me.
‘Can I ask a question? Are you counting Staffordshire as being in the Midlands?’
‘Obviously. Because it is.’
‘Good … And how about Birmingham? I hope Lincolnshire isn’t on your list, because I know that isn’t the Midlands …’
I think I’ve already mentioned that a lot of people don’t know where the Midlands begins and ends, including Midlanders. Well, Elizabeth falls into that category.
‘Anyway,’ she goes on, ‘if Staffordshire’s in, lots of brilliant things like trains and bridges were invented there. But I don’t know much about them.’
Oh well, I comfort myself, I can deal with the genius of Staffordshire folk later on in my tour.
‘I’ll tell you one of the worst things to come out of the Midlands,’ she announces with sudden and excessive passion, ‘and that’s a little tea shop I went to last time I was here. What was its name? Anyway it’s over near the Lace Market. I ordered a scone with jam and some special blend of tea they were promoting. And do you know how they served it?’
She stops and looks at me, as if I am actually going to attempt to answer her plainly rhetorical question.
‘No, Elizabeth, I don’t,’ I say after a pause. ‘How did they serve it?’
‘They brought the tea leaves separately, exposed on a saucer! When I asked why they did it that way the girl said: “Customers like to be able to see them.” Apparently in Nottingham people go into tea shops just to stare at the leaves.’
Interesting as this phenomenon is (although I hasten to add that I’ve been unable to find any other references to it – to the best of my knowledge, Elizabeth is the only person to have experienced it), I decide to change the subject by mentioning Jilly Cooper’s injurious declaration that, for the grander sort of people, ‘The Midlands are beyond the pale’. ‘What do you think she meant by that, Elizabeth?’ I ask.
‘Perhaps she’d just been to that tea shop. It is beyond the pale.’
‘No, seriously,’ I encourage her.
After a pause, she shakes her head. ‘I can’t comment on that because, you see, I don’t actually come from the Midlands. Chesterfield is really the North. I think you’d class the Peak District as the North, because there’s an association of the word “Midlands” with the idea of industry, and particularly deprived Victorian-style industry. And although Chesterfield has a bit of that, it’s mostly a Northern market town on the edge of a hilly area.’
I’ve known Elizabeth a long time and have heard her say many extraordinary things over the years (don’t get her started on the Moon landings – faked, obviously), but I’m genuinely taken aback by this. Elizabeth, it turns out, is a Midlands-denier.
‘Okay, your father’s a Yorkshireman, but you were born and bred in Chesterfield. Elizabeth, are you seriously telling me that you’re not a Midlander?’ I fix her with a searching look.
‘That’s right,’ she says, holding my gaze and flattening her vowels with classic Northern vehemence. ‘I’m sorry, Robert, but Chesterfield is in the hills, and hills are Northern.’