Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.’

      ‘All of them? Exclusively?’

      ‘All the proper ones, yes. I’m not including those slopes you go up and down when you’re coming into Nottingham, obviously. Sherwood Rise, ha!’

      ‘I’m sure if you asked anyone on Derbyshire County Council they’d tell you Chesterfield was part of the East Midlands.’

      ‘Oh what do they know, silly people!’ she says, agitatedly putting down her teacup and rooting fruitlessly through her handbag. When she looks up again, her cheeks have turned quite red.

      ‘I know, for instance,’ I go on, wanting to press my point home and show off a little of my research at the same time, ‘that Derbyshire County Council are dependent on the East Midlands Development Agency here in Nottingham for various kinds of funding. Which would appear to confirm that Derbyshire is in the East Midlands.’

      Elizabeth looks briefly crestfallen.

      ‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ she says with a mildly hysterical laugh. ‘I accept, then, if I must, that I am by some definition a Midlander and that Derbyshire is, again by some definition, in the Midlands. But I would say that it is a border area, in the same way that Belarus and the Ukraine are … Is Warwickshire in the Midlands? It’s an interesting thing but I think the general perception is that rural counties aren’t in the Midlands.’

      ‘I’m getting the impression that you wouldn’t want to live in Nottingham, then?’

      ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a city anywhere, if I’m honest, although I have to say I’d rather live in Leeds than Nottingham.’

      ‘Why’s that?’

      ‘Because Leeds has got a fresh Northern feel, whereas Nottingham just feels a bit depressed. It does! It’s like that everywhere in the Midlands. I took a train from Birmingham to Nottingham a few weeks ago and it nearly undermined my will to live. Go to Wilkos here and I challenge you not to be depressed!’

      Poundland, Wilkinsons – it sounds an improbable itinerary for a woman like Elizabeth. But it’s telling that she seems to think her misadventures uniquely expressive of life as it is lived in the Midlands.

      * * *

      Can you locate Nottingham on a map of the UK? Probably not, at least if Private Eye is to be believed. The London-based satirical magazine marked the recent, much-trumpeted opening of a major new art gallery in the city with a Young British Artists comic strip by illustrator Birch.

      ‘It all sounds very exciting!’ says one metropolitan YBA enthusiastically of the inaugural exhibition, which was designed to put Nottingham on the art map.

      ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ replies his pal.

      ‘No, nor would I. Near Liverpool, isn’t it?’ rejoins the first YBA, returning to his senses and moving from the figurative to the straightforwardly geographical.

      ‘Even further, I think,’ concludes his sceptical mate. (Just in case you’re unsure: Nottingham is 120 miles from London, Liverpool is 200.)

      The message being: Nottingham, like the Midlands generally, is even more alien to the Southern media than the North, and nothing the city does СКАЧАТЬ