Postcard from Teeside

I’m visiting places around Stockton on Tees because my girlfriend is from here. Her parents still live in Norton, which is half sleepy Georgian village and half fighty pubs, but we want to see Stockton itself because that’s where she grew up.

They say that you can never go back and it’s true. It’s true because the council have demolished everywhere you used to go since you went away, so even attempting to place the sites you slouched around in your teenage years is impossible. Perhaps Tony Robinson and the Time Team could bring brushes and trowels and unearth the site of my first snog. Or perhaps it’s best left where it belongs, beneath the rubble.

Stockton, I’m reliably informed, has the widest high-street in the country and it’s certainly a big one, so large that you can fit a rather tatty, fly-blown market slap bang in the middle of it and still have room for four lanes of traffic. It looks as though it’s missing an awful lot of trams. There is a shop here named “Animal Addiction”. I see it from a bus so I have no idea what it’s selling: some kind of moggy-methadone for weaning them off the cat-nip?  

I thought Aardman Animations had just made it up, but Wallaces abound in Stockton. On every street corner are buck-toothed men in glasses and bobble hats, laughing with their hands in their trackie bottom pockets. Gromit is probably in rehab.

An Italian restaurant called “Don Andreas” allays fears of foreign exoticism by draping a union flag over the front door. A smaller door leads to its nightclub venue “The Don” which features as its logo a picture of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone. It also has an enormous sign recommending their charity work for “Our Heroes and The Fallen”. So a mash-up of Italian organised crime and the British military, then. I’m not sure that it’s for me. Thanks though.   

Susie and I cross the Millennium Bridge in moderately high winds, the aftermath of Storm Gertrude, which is fine until a portly man with bandaged knees jogs past us and the whole bridge ripples like his back fat. Once again my stomach is in my mouth, which is inconvenient positioning.  

In Stockton a longstanding Beano ambition is finally fulfilled – I have seen a pie with a hole in the top of it, the type that Pie-Face, from Dennis the Menace’s gang was always chucking down his neck (hence the name, one assumes. Otherwise it’s a really odd case of nominative determinism.) 

Northerners are a romantic lot and go misty eyed over the thought of a pie. The pie in question was a variation on a local delicacy: Chicken Parmo. Chicken Parmo is basically breaded chicken in a béchamel sauce. It used to come with grated parmesan (hence the name) but now it is more usually flavoured with cheddar. This pie was a Chicken Parmo pie. That’s breaded chicken under a pie crust! Imagine that collision of textures! I was almost tempted.

(A week later, back home, Susie and I make our own version of Chicken Parmo – I remained mildly nauseous for days. Perhaps we should have breaded the chicken.)   

Susie tells me of a legendary local suicide where a woman locked herself in the garage with the motor running until she was consumed by the fumes. She finishes the story with the line: “In the end she just exhausted herself in a Fiat 500.” I laugh for about ten minutes.

We travel on to leafy Yarm which, despite sounding like the sort of thing a toothless yokel might say on waking from a cider induced reverie, is an absolutely gorgeous Victorian town. This sense is heightened by a sudden snow storm erupting out of a blue sky as soon as we step from the bus. The snow, which comes in like something that would devour a Swiss village, melts away just as quickly and we set out to discover the town. And I really love Yarm. Its blue cobbled streets, its giant viaducts eating into landscape. It’s “Truelovers Walk” down by the riverside, still silted from flooding. We meet an odd free-range rooster poking its head out of a rusting urban barn (I am slightly suspicious that the attractively oxidised corrugated metal was a design choice).    

I’m in the Black Bull pub. I could warm to the Northern people. The men gawp at the TVs in groups while the women cackle and show out and look fierce with their fancy drinks: I start to see everything through a Smiths coloured lens; a Jo Slee sepia.

The men do that thing of leaning as far back in their chairs as possible with their arms folded over their chests and their legs wide apart. It is an inherited Viking posture used for flyting, a ritual, poetic exchange of insults dating from the fifth century and still popular today. The ritual is ended either by a proper actual fight or a hearty slap on the back and the offer of a pint. Southerners do not have this noble tradition and are consequently ill-prepared for this unprompted fire-wall of abuse. Northerners cannot understand what the bloody problem is. It is the single greatest set-back to this island nation’s unity. 

 Yarm is full of nick-nack shops, charity shops and lady’s outfitters. It’s a long way from a stereotypical Northern experience. You could film the “Dickensian” version of Hollyoaks here.   

The next day we’re in Seaton Carew, which sounds like a writer of crime fiction from the thirties, and is one of the bleakest spots I’ve ever been to. Growing up in Portslade on the south coast, I’m very keen on rotting seaside towns. It’s like coming home: the brown tide, the dull grey groynes breaking the water that looks already comprehensively broken.  I remember very little about Portslade in the 70’s. There were a couple of big hills, a tiny prefabricated library on the Old Shoreham Road with hairy blue tickets and a disappointing lack of Asterix books. Around the corner from my house a Salvation Army or possibly Boys Brigade band used to rehearse. There was an ice-cream shop run by a pristine bald man who had a look of Crippen. And then there was the beach. The sea was always bitter brown with a thin soapy head on it, like the scum on boiling potatoes. The shingle and stones were a thick grey band separating water and concrete. There may have been a pub with steps leading down to the beach but there was nothing else. Over towards Hove there would be pitch and putt and then onto Brighton itself which was reported to have a nude beach and was therefore exotic and thrillingly, illicitly foreign. I never went.

Seaton Carew reminds me of Portslade, or Lancing, or Fishers Gate. It has a vast empty beach with marbled sand, a peculiar remnant of the coal industry with black smudges snaking away from the water. Out to sea are the swaying masts of a wind farm and beyond that the belching chimneys of a power station. There is a golf course next to the power station. And some cows and sheep grazing. It’s an unusual combination – Andre Breton would look on approvingly.

We travel down towards “The Clarences” where there is a big blue “transporter bridge”, closed on a Sunday. And it is a Sunday. It’s five and three quarter miles from Seaton Carew to The Clarences and the power station is still there – it’s nearly six miles of uninterrupted, rotting industrial sprawl. I’m still amazed that I’ve managed to live into my frail dotage and I have absolutely no idea what these Brobodingian concrete barns are for. Most of them no longer appear to be in use and are gently decomposing or being engulfed by jealous nature.

I don’t know if every day is like Sunday in Seaton Carew – it is, after all, a Sunday. But the high street, with its amusement arcades (“The Talk of the Town”? Not this century), its giant plastic ice cream cones, its tea-rooms occluded by condensation, its bored seagulls and the sign proudly proclaiming that there is no Life-Guard on duty today, has an incredible beauty for me.

 The shivering girl in the ice cream shop glued to her phone because no one wants ice cream in January, the ghostly faces pressed against shop fronts, the dead tandooris, the grey expanse of the beach fading into the haze of the horizon; the battered shop fronts with outmoded area codes.  It is romantic. It is hard worn and hard won, the faded glamour of amusements that no longer amuse, where that joke isn’t funny anymore. 

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.