England All Over comes out on Hodder &
Stoughton’s Sceptre (Melvyn Bragg’s label) in March 2000. It is intended to
put the middle classes in their place by addressing their decline (swapping
football for opera), and illustrating the earthquake going on in the English
class system. And I don’t even use the word ‘tectonic’. The hero Clive
Pointing is a disgraced ex-Geography teacher. He was called Clive Ponting but my
editor said change it.
1)
Protagonist
Clive has reached his peak of confusion and desire, both for England and Rose,
the woman he works with. At last he gets the better of the language (English):
“I
have a question for you,” she said. Normally this would have been ominous, but
with her he was happy to answer.
“You know you said yesterday ‘This is my
favourite thing, this is my
England’? Well, what else? What else?”
“God, there’s such a lot. Lots of things,
mad things, beautiful things…What is England to me? Roundabouts. Three inch
breakers.” He thought for a moment. “Unsolved cattle maimings. A ten-yard
queue at a free phone box. Catfights at the Harrods sale. Celebrities mentioning
their bowel movements in interviews. Stopped clocks. Car manufacturers’
recalls….”
She smiled.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Rose.” From
his backpack he produced the megaphone. “Hello everybody, hello! Can you hear
me? Oyez, oyez….that’s French by the way…” There was a whistle of
feedback, and his voice had a rough electronic tang to it, and cut across the
landscape.
“Army surplus stores. Fans who turn up to
boo at Luton Airport. Hanging baskets that drip. Tweedy men who work for 1950s
wages. Hand-inked bus passes and home made tax discs. Judges dressed as babies.
Supermarket closings. Wreathes on a grass verge. An ex-con’s paper bag. A 21
year old junior school teacher coming third in Miss Great Britain. Grandparents
handing their grandkids back. Old sweets made for the nostalgia market. A new
Blue Peter presenter. Chilled lagers. Old maids cycling to therapy. Engraved
shotguns. A steaming filly. Petrol station glasses. Riverside pubs. Obsessional
litigants. Unwitting homosexuals. Vote-counters. Foster parents. Wheelchair
heptathletes. Pensioners who shout ‘Stringemup’ at Black Mariahs. Empty
mental homes. Cream eggs. Pubs at 11 am. Grocers apostrophes. Rebel commuters on
the tracks. Rejected astronauts. Nobel Prize winners who still go in to work the
next day. Giant graffiti on motorway bridges. Isle of Man masochists. Soup after
school. Double entendres. Picnics in
lay-byes. That Peel bloke when you least expect him. Wind in the willows.
Outrage at the Olivier. New pop stars. Farm boys on dirt bikes. Indignation. The
longest day. The hottest day. Silent libraries. Cable burning. Have you had
enough?” he asked her, and the world in general.
“No!” she shouted from fifteen yards
away. “Tell me more.”
“Riots. Sue Ryder shops. Agents for this
and that. Moaning. Tower block demolition. Executives with carrier bags.
Criminals in their court suits. Scallies blocking the handicapped ramp. The dead
old lady and the hundred cats. Pubs at 11pm. African night shift cleaners.
Bonfire night. Fat. Light aircraft tragedies. Green flash pumps. Smoking
footballers. Sponge swirl ceilings. Shakespeare outdoors. Vomit in corners.
Three squaddies looking for a country pub. Midges. Temporary frost. Visiting
dignitaries. Swords reversed. Car boot sales. Vacuum tube valves. Paddle boats.
Roman numerals. Monogrammed hankies. Cones. Knot gardens. Troublemakers. Quink.
Asian Babes. Victorian swimming baths. Tartan shopping trolleys. Scabs. Tank
crossings. Frog crossings. Pelican crossings. Pigeon fanciers. Genetic
engineers. Poets. The detention centre at Heathrow. The Burger King at Heathrow.
Social climbers. Rock climbers. Windmills. Toast. Dole offices. Postmen hiding
letters in a hedge. Film critics. Slot machines. Redesigns. Anthrax. Cheese
rolling. Twats in Union Jack suits. Waistcoats. Sellotape culture. Need I go on?
I could go on.”
Rose was laughing throughout. “Save it!
Save it for next time I’m sad.”
2)
A
pub lunch soon sorted them out, during which Clive lectured them on the Lake
poets.
He
took a vote on where they should go next: Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm, or
William Wordsworth’s old house, Dove Cottage at Grasmere. It took a lot of
negative campaigning about the old bag Potter but finally he got the votes to
see the Wordsworths’s museum-home. He was one of the serious poets that
reminded him of his mother and her hobby. Better than going to see a load of
crap about some kid’s book, as he told Barry.
“God
I read enough of those to my Tess to know what a rip-off kids’ books are. Ten
quid for 200 words and some crappy drawings. You know that Postman Pat’s from
round here?”
“Stands
to reason dunnit? Postman Pat and his black and white cat. Twat,” said Barry.
“And them thick cardboard pages. They love to chew em. That’s why I only get
‘em vijoes now. You can’t chew a
video can you? Besides, you can slap it in any old time. Not like reading a
book.”
“Oh,
Barry. You’re such a….fucking…yob,”
said Clive, not without affection. Barry took it well.
“Just
be careful who you say that in front of, that’s all,” said Barry, not
without menace.
Dove
Cottage turned out to be a poky little hole. Nasty cold flagstones. Hard
furniture. A mean little fire. Black wood everywhere so it was too dark to read
by candlelight. It was made of stone and had a slate roof, and the windows were
tiny. Everyone shambled through after the guide like people in the property
market. The guide pointed out that it used to be a pub called the Dove and
Olive. Barry looked around with sudden interest.
“That’s
my dream, that is.”
“What,
to live in a pub?”
“Above
one. Own it. Come down, pour a pint anytime I want. Play some pool. Have me
mates round. Course I’ll never have the money if I keep doing this.” He
looked troubled for a moment. “I need a big score. I need the really big score
if I’m ever going to do it.”
“Like
this lot. Always broke, till it was too late,” said Clive, referring to the
Wordsworths.
They
saw the floor spaces where Coleridge and De Quincey used to crash, and all the
other loafers who couldn’t pay their rent more than two months in a row.
Wordsworth’s babies slept in baskets in the kitchen, and he did his writing
sitting in a weird angular chair with everyone tramping through. His sister
Dorothy did most of the housework, and had her own little cube where she wrote
her arselicking journal. After a bit, William married some local bird called
Mary.
“So,
he’d go off walking with his sister and write her love letters and all that.
D’you fink there was anything, you know, going on there?”
The
guide was speechless and turned bright red.
“No,
definitely not,” said Clive loudly, taking over. He’d read a bit about them
in his anthology. “They were soul mates. Dorothy helped him with his poems,
made fair copies, talked about them. The thing with his poems, and
Coleridge’s, they were meant to be simple, almost innocent. Simple language,
everyday subjects, but with a lot of emotion. No one was doing stuff about farm
girls and cuckoos then, not really. He even sent a copy of his Lyrical Ballads
to a politician with a note saying see, ‘Men who do not wear fine clothes can
feel deeply’. He had a motto – ‘Plain living and high thinking.’”
Rose
tugged at Clive’s sleeve to shut him up. It was an etiquette thing, stealing
another guide’s thunder.
“I’m
just saying,” he protested. The guide hustled everyone to have a look
in the next room. It was where the kids slept when there were too many people
staying. It was the size of a closet, had three external walls and even in
August it felt like a fridge. The walls had recently been papered with yellowed
copies of the Times from Wordsworth’s day, a heritage touch. Barry read out
the numbers for the National Lottery of 1800.
They
skipped the museum and shop and stood outside while Barry smoked.
“Plain
living and high thinking. That’s a nice idea,” said Rose.
“It’s
the opposite of Barry. Hey Barry, how does it feel to have met your antithesis?
Your complete opposite”
“I’d
never dog my sister like him, if that’s what you mean. Sister-in-law,
maybe,” he said with a grin, and
flicked his cigarette butt at Clive, making him leap out of the way. “Where
are we staying tonight anyway?”
3)
Very early in the book, Barry comes home to his first floor flat in a tower block in Stratford, East London, and after seeing out is sister in law who was babysitting, and putting his three girls to bed, he sits down to watch TV, but starts reminiscing about the days when he was a Club 180-30 guide, and fun he had.
He'd
asked Donna to tape his favourite soap, East
Enders, but she cocked it up and got a load of rubbish instead. Flicking
around between the channels he couldn't settle on anything, even satellite was
boring for once. There was a square photo on top of the telly of Barry in his
twenties with Christine. They looked shiny and happy, like they’d had a day on
the beach, and they both had cocktails in front of them. Her bare arm was draped
around his neck. There was another woman’s arm round his neck, coming from the
other side, but whoever it was had been cropped.
For
over ten years, into his mid thirties, Barry had been a Club 18 to 30 guide. He
saw them all. Groups of party-mad teenagers mixed in with blossoming young
adults, geezers with fresh paunches and girls with caesarean scars, shipping 'em
in and out of Gatwick and Luton like mutton to Europe. All sorts, but all
basically the same. Van drivers and pipefitters, bouncers, barrow boys and
bakery girls, production liners and fork lift drivers, service industry foot
soldiers, clerks and temps and typists and “Exec Asses”, cuties who worked
in jeans shops, the girls who served pies at the skating rink, the BT blokes who
fixed your phone, trainee coppers, firemen, nurses - tons of nurses, lovely
nurses out of uniform and wearing just bikinis - dole office people with their
pallid skin and hangdog looks (they took a bit of extra cheering up but he could
do it), the blokes who dug up the roads, already brown and hard and able to live
on ten pints and four hours sleep a night (plus a nap on the beach), thieves and
fences, e-peddlers, Aspirin launderers, barmen, people who worked in record
shops, people who worked in exhaust pipe centres, people who worked nights
putting holes in washers, North Sea trawlermen (he had known it, six
incomprehensible Yorkshire boys who drank until they fell down and had to be
constantly rescued by hotel security), rastas even, aerobics teachers,
dole-ites, dole-ites, thousands of dole-ites with their black market money,
non-specific slappers, blokes who sold cars and vans, blokes who sold insurance,
boxers, lots of boxers for some reason, fake ID council workmen, baggage
handlers, even a bus driver once, from Scunthorpe or Skegness or somewhere
northern like that, on his own and horny as hell, all he wanted to know was
where he could get off his face all the time and where could he get sex local
even if he had to pay for it, mental, never stopped smiling for a week....
Polytechnic students, more and more students in fact, schoolgirls though they
weren't supposed to, launderette girls, supermarket girls, product demonstration
girls who wanted to be models, Irish girls, the odd Asian and his mates, not
very happy about that in the early days but attitudes seemed to change and they
were accepted, Asian babes as they started to get a bit of money and attitude,
waitresses, office managers, salesmen, trainee accountants, muggers, everyone.
Everyone. Even the odd gaggle of public schoolboys looking for an easy ride.
Barry
had been an alpha male among Club 18-30 reps. He shagged his way through half of
England during his halcyon days, when he used to take two loads of punters a
week to Greece. And Greece was the place for him. He'd done a lot of no-name
tours pulled together in shop fronts in east London before he worked his way up
to Club 18-30. He did a dodgy caravan site in the St Tropez for a year, cramming
them in and dragging them out, though he thought the South of France was too
posh and a bit too nudie in a German businessman sort of way. He knew all the
service stations of the Autoroutes and the names of all the cross channel
ferries, he knew what time the airports closed around Europe and how to avoid
the more massive queues. Club 18-30 came after him because their reps had seen
him around in various Mediterranean watering holes, always with a string of
happy punters in tow. He did Ibiza for a while until it went trendy, then the
Costas, which were OK, a bit common but the traffic was there. But Greece,
Greece was the place. The Aegean Sea. Corfu, Kos, Dos, Tos, Rhodes, Faliraki,
and even bits of Turkey, Bodrum and Marmaris. Names that had once seemed strange
and now seemed like home.
Barry
led them everywhere. From departure day, chasing stragglers out of the duty free
shop at Gatwick where they already had the tops off their litres of vodka and
perfume and getting them on to the waiting plane which was already half-full of
moaning Mancs and Brummies...to the last day when he signed off on hungover lads
on crutches with moped road rash or sunburn and watched them wheeled away by
their friends on luggage trolleys. Barry was the man.
He
entertained them on the plane with stories of cheap ouzo, topless swimming
parties and loud clubs, he sorted out the shy ones and made sure they got loaded
or laid at least once by the middle of the week, and he threatened his lads with
jail and the cricket bat when they got too out of order and clashed too
violently with the locals.
But
what Barry was best at was the extras. Charming unexpected tariffs out of the
punters for the things they had seen in the brochure and naively assumed would
be free: parasailing, windsurfing, dune buggies, snorkel gear, ping-pong,
barbecues, wine tasting, donkey up the hill to the monastery...even a Frisbee
was a fiver. Barry taxed with a smile and embezzled with a poker face, and
everybody loved him.
Great
days, those had been great days. The money, the birds, the laughs. Now, as Barry
put it, things were tighter than a gnat's chuff and not half as much fun.
Britannia didn't compare. The unpredictable tourists, the strong pound, the rain
- England wasn't Greece. Barry didn't like that posh twat Alex, and didn't think
the new bloke looked up to much either. He seemed pretty green. Still, it just
meant more extras for him.