Where Did It All Go Right? (6 page)

Like any child, Saturday shopping was a chore leavened only by the possibility of getting a toy or a comic or a sweet. Simon was paid off with a detour to Millets to check out the crampons and jumpers, I was kept quiet with a spin round Universal Stationers to look at pads and paint-by-number sets. This was a trade-off for the times we had to go and try on shoes, or worse, clothes.

Once we had all that we needed from Abington Street, the centre and the market it was back to the Equity & Law and off to Mum’s favoured ‘local’ shops, which were out of town but nowhere near where we lived: Highgrade the greengrocer’s and Masson’s the high street butcher. We stayed in the car while Mum and Dad did this bit. It seems quaint now that Mum used to shop around so much for her food, but that’s progress. The town centre itself has long since been pedestrianised and castrated; they’ve got HMV and Gap and McDonald’s and beggars and everything now. What used to be the Mounts Swimming Baths up by the fire station is now the Mounts Health Suite.

But that’s not my town. My Northampton is Seventies Northampton. You knew where you were then.

* * *

My proud birthplace. A place right out of histor-ee. Best known for being junction 15 off the M1 (and 15a and 16 actually, but I generally come at it from the south), Northampton is every-town and anytown. The sort of place you tear past at high speed. ‘Northampton? Yeah I think I drove through there once,’ say outsiders, as if once was enough, and it is.

There’s no outward mythology to the place. Nothing to remember it by or plan a return visit for. Unless you live somewhere that hasn’t got a Comet and a bowling alley in the same car park. With the notable exception of the graphic novel
Big Numbers
, written by Northamptonian Alan Moore (in which the town is fictionalised as ‘Hampton’
¹
) and Bridget Jones’s parents (who live in rural Northants), books, films and culture pass it by. It’s just one of those towns.

In his 1979 book
A History of Northamptonshire
, local historian R.L. Greenall describes the county as ‘unknown England’ and is perceptive in doing so. In the marvellous old volume
Northamptonshire
(first published in 1945 and part of the King’s England series
²
) Arthur Mee concurs:

This thousand square miles in the middle of England is as completely representative of our green and pleasant land as Shakespeare’s Warwickshire; but it is all too little known.

Never fares well in comparisons, Northampton. It could’ve been oh-so-different if Shakespeare had been born 40 miles to the east but he wasn’t. His granddaughter Elizabeth Nash died in
Northampton
, and that just about sums it up. See Northampton and die. I mean, where is Northamptonshire? Is it in the East Midlands? The South Midlands? The Eastern Counties? It was part of Mercia in Saxon times. Since 1964, it’s been in the ITV region of Anglia. Meanwhile our old pal R.L. Greenall notes that ‘developments in national communications have drawn it inexorably southwards’.

Certainly Northampton’s biggest selling point during the development years of the Seventies and Eighties was that it was ‘60 miles by road or rail’ from London. That was indeed the refrain on a curious little promo single released by the Development Corporation in 1980 – ‘Energy In Northampton’, sung by Linda Jardim and written and arranged by Rod Thompson.
³
The uplifting little number’s lyrical conceit is that aliens in a flying saucer need somewhere to relocate. They choose Northampton, as well they might, with its ample spaceship parking.

The old town was a beneficiary of the pioneering New Towns Act of 1965. By 1968 the ink was dry and its fate was sealed: it would expand to help reduce pressure on the spiralling population of London and the south-east (and outer space, if Rod was to be believed). We let in 70,000 Cockney refugees, basically, except they were prosaically referred to as ‘overspill’. Expansion quickly became Northampton’s middle name. See a field, build a house,
fill
it with spivs. Better yet, in the spirit of suburban sprawl, build a Close or a Drive or a Way. As you know, we lived in one such freshly built Way in Abington Vale,
and
we got in before all those southern chancers with their fancy London ways.

While 19,952 designated acres of green were ploughed up and planted with new houses, my beloved Northampton town centre was also enthusiastically redeveloped. I watched it evolve as I grew up. The twin focal points of the great civic facelift were the Grosvenor Centre and Greyfriars Bus Station – a cathedral-like terminus with the look of two giant upturned skips. The shops and the bus station were joined and served by a brand new multi-storey car park, where we would never need to park, but where I would later work. As a Sainsbury’s Saturday boy I had to brave carbon monoxide poisoning and collect trolleys from all levels of the car park, wearing brown flares and a clip-on brown tie for protection against looking good.

The Great Expansion served up other new landmarks: Barclaycard House, one of the then-largest office blocks to be built outside London (230,000 square feet), the Carlsberg Brewery, which has nestled on the banks of the piddling River Nene since 1974 (imagine having your town characterised by probably the worst lager in the world
⁴
), and a tissue box-shaped hotel called the Saxon Inn, opened in 1973 and since renamed the Moat House.
⁵

The developers of the Seventies left the old cobbled Market Square alone, which was thoughtful of them. As Robert Cook writes in
A Century of Northampton
(I’ve got all the books, you know), the
Development
Corporation ‘uncovered much of antiquity’ when they tore up the town, ‘and unhappily removed much of it’.

* * *

Not that I gave a flying fig about the history of my town then. As long as there were shops I could buy felt-tips from and somewhere to ride my bike, I was the same as any other kid in any other town: no civic pride, no sense of place, and no interest in the decline of the boot and shoe trade.

Northampton used to be emblemised not by lager but leather. Shoe leather. Hence Northampton Town Football Club’s nickname, the Cobblers. It’s a shoemaking thing, like pots in Stoke and fish in Hull.

Here’s a surprise – even the Industrial Revolution saw fit to pass Northamptonshire by. They used to make a bit of cotton and worsted and lace round here, but it was essentially a market, not a manufacturing town – with ample cart parking no doubt. However, the one thing we did make was shoes. Plenty of cows nearby, see – plus, labour was cheaper than in London (Northampton put women and children to work long before it was the done thing). And, just as British Aerospace cry crocodile tears whenever there’s chance of an air war today, so Northampton benefited from the glut of armed and booted conflict in the seventeenth century. Northants stabbed and stitched and cut and tooled most of the French boots in the Franco-Prussian War. Made in Northampton, worn in Sedan (not that it helped).

By 1850, there were reckoned to be about 13,000 shoemakers in the county. Now that really is a load of cobblers. Nowadays, they all work in call centres or River Island.

So the town
is
known for something, albeit something long downsized. And the Cobblers themselves entered the annals of football history in the Sixties by climbing from the fourth division to the first and then dropping right back down to the fourth again in consecutive seasons.
⁶
Joe Mercer, then manager of Manchester
City
, said, ‘The miracle of 1966 was not England winning the World Cup but Northampton reaching Division One.’

Another proud story about my home team: in 1970, having miraculously reached the fifth round of the FA Cup, they let eight goals in against Manchester United, six of them from the boot (not made in Northampton) of George Best.

It would be disingenuous to say I couldn’t wait to leave. After all, I waited 19 years to leave. Most of my sixth-form mates left town a year before I did to go to their exotic universities in Hatfield and the north. To tell you the truth, I had no idea how humdrum and monocultural Northampton was until I got to London in 1984. And even then it took time to sink in – I was dreadfully homesick during my first term at college. I went home at weekends far more than I actually stayed in London.

But was it Northampton that I missed? Or just 19 years of familiarity? Northampton was, after all, the back of my hand. Like Woody Allen’s Manhattan, it was my town … and it always would be.

So how did it shape me? Am I a product of Northampton? A victim of geography? Yes, in the sense that I felt neither northern nor southern when I arrived in the capital; neither posh nor poor. I was always glad not to be hidebound by all that geographical pride shit. I know grown men now who seem to think that coming from either Yorkshire or Lancashire makes a difference. Because I never supported the Cobblers
⁷
I don’t even have that kneejerk, residual local allegiance that ties you to a place each Saturday teatime by the football results. I don’t know what league Northampton are in today.

What are Northamptonians like? What are our civic traits? Are we bluff like Yorkshiremen? Do we have an innate sense of humour like Liverpudlians? Is the man who narrates the tremendous
Bygone Northampton
video right when he states, ‘If there’s one thing that has always united the people of Northamptonshire it is the love of a good parade’? Or is he just reading what’s on the sheet of paper in front of him? I know we pulled together during the war, and
we
’ve always turned out in respectable numbers when royalty have visited (‘Northampton? Yes, I think one was driven through there once’), but again, that’s anytown. There was a carnival every year when I was growing up – a town tradition that dated back to the Thirties – and we always went, to throw pennies from the first-floor window of Pap Reg’s office into the buckets of bank managers dressed as women below. A marvellous evening was guaranteed and we were, I suppose, united in our love. But is that it?

Being from Northampton is good if you want to start a new life. Like so many artificially expanded new towns, it does a nice line in blank canvasses.

The Northampton accent may be regarded as something of a handicap out there in the sophisticated world, but it doesn’t quite carry the stigma of a Birmingham or a West Country. It’s nothing like as recognisable for a start. The Northampton accent is – whaddya know! – a sort of cross between half a dozen others: a heavy dose of West Midlands, a dash of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester, and the cretinous-sounding twang of the country. In 1933, an editorial in the local paper complained, ‘In Northampton we suffer, largely, from a lazy lower jaw which drops in the pronunciation of vowels and does not rise to clear-cut rendering of consonants.’ People in Northampton, especially the older generation, pronounce ‘going down town’ as
gooing dane tane
, and ‘our old car’ would come out as
air uld cah
. I would be referred to by my grandparents as
air
Andrew. Yes is
yis
and yet is
yit
, and ‘this afternoon’ is streamlined to
sartnoon
. They might also call you
m’duck
as a term of endearment. You are their duck.

The first thing I did when I got to London was work on a London accent. I didn’t want to be exclaiming
God blarmey!
all my life.

My wife, who was born in London, calls me northern, but when your home town is only 60 miles by road or rail, it hardly feels like dark, satanic mills and black pudding. As far as I’m concerned, Northampton is up the road. And that simple proximity was, I’m sure, a calming influence on my college years as I adjusted to life away from everything I knew. Like being a student with stabilisers.

There’s something primal and necessary about leaving your home town, even if only for a spell like my mum and dad. Having
said
that, I totally respect Melissa for staying put and sending her boys to the very schools we went to. After years in Colchester and Germany with the forces, Simon and his family were drawn back to Northampton too. There’s something poetic and circle-of-life about that. I have no contempt for people who choose not to leave. Northampton’s development was all about welcoming people in, not driving them back down the M1 to clog the south-east back up again!

Northampton didn’t drive me away: it raised me, it shod me in Doc Martens, it took my virginity, and it prepared me for my own journey into space. That’s why I’m so keen to record my 19-year love affair with the place and ‘put it all in’, as Raymond Carver once wrote. As a home town, it was big enough to get lost in and small enough to have a local rock scene. Urban enough to have jobs and rural enough to have country pubs. Conservative enough to have engendered a modest goth community in the Eighties and tolerant enough to let us occupy the bar of the Berni Inn with our big hair. Even the ugly place names stir my bones: Lumbertubs, Lings, Jimmy’s End, Moulton Park, Billing, Ecton, Harpole, Weedon, Brackmills.
⁸
I still love everything about this place.

This happy childhood I keep fretting about – Northampton did that.

And you are my duck.

1.
Published in serial form in 1990 by Mad Love, a local publisher who acknowledge the assistance of Northampton Borough Council, Northampton Transit and the Northamptonshire Police at the back of issue #1. Although drawn by American artist Bill Sienkeiwicz, he’s clearly worked from photographs of Northampton locations such as the railway station and what could be the Black Lion pub where our band played so often. It’s a stunning piece of work by the way.

2.
Given to my dad as a prize by Northampton Grammar School in 1953.

3.
Given to me in the form of a seven-inch single as a light-hearted gift by Danny Kelly, my former mentor and editor (he frequents car boot sales). From the back sleeve, a eulogy worth printing in full: