I live in Leith, by tradition Edinburgh’s port. Until 1920 it was a town in its own right, and there is still something separate about it. Nowhere else in Edinburgh can you drink a £1,200 bottle of wine in a Michelin-starred restaurant on one side of the street and score heroin on the other. Following my exile from England it took time to settle, but I am now happy here, though I have yet to try the wine or the heroin.
In the summer of 2012 Leith certainly felt independent of my home country. From there, so it appeared on television, the English were lapping up the Queen’s Jubilee. A plague of patriotic spiders had attacked and webbed England’s streets in bunting, and people were even tolerating Nicholas Witchell. In Leith the closest we came was a Union Jack poster in one of our five branches of Greggs. Even the Orange Lodge remained untainted, its unionism outdone by neighbouring Farmfoods’ commitment to the Great British Summer Barbecue. Furthermore, in Leith and across Scotland, independence from England sometimes felt inevitable, not least because the idea of the Jubilee seemed so very alien and, well, English.
When Euro 2012 began, Scotland seemed less anti-England than usual. During previous tournaments, being English here had been difficult. ‘It’s not you we hate,’ they would say to me, ‘It’s John Motson and all those guys mentioning 1966 every other sentence.’ The logic seemed to be that you hated a nation because of its football pundits, which is a bit like hating Mexico because you once went on holiday there and a weather forecaster’s lisp got on your nerves. It helped that those pundits were not so gung-ho this time around; England had a new manager who specialised in playing down expectations, which in themselves were refreshingly low – he basically had the task of convincing the rain it was wet. In addition, heavy patriotism bred apathy among the media and those non-football fans who during major tournaments usually come along for the ride. After a while, any country’s arms ache from waving flags.
As happens every two or four years, I was trying my best to support England. On a Monday evening in June I set out to watch England v. France in Leith. I walk by a number of pubs – Leith’s are split between traditional (eight or nine men stood by the bar drinking Tennents underneath the tenements) and gentrified (eight or nine web architects sat on sofas drinking German wheat beers in a converted something) – until I am tempted in by the music of one. That music is ‘La Marseillaise’, sung with surprising melody by a dozen or so Scottish voices. The bar is firmly in the traditional camp, its spirits section a large bottle of Grant’s vodka, its menu those nuts that when pulled from their display reveal a naked woman (Scampi Fries are off). I take a seat underneath the television, becoming the only non-standing member of the audience. As the French anthem wilts it gives way to cries of ‘Mon the French’, ‘Ya dirty English bastar’’ and a lone ‘Mon the English’. I decipher commentator references to Agincourt and Waterloo, and in a moment comprehend many Scots’ anti-England stance and wonder once again why the English make themselves such a difficult team to support. Having said that, no nation is worse than Scotland for harking back several hundred years – soon here, there will be state-sponsored celebrations of a skirmish 700 years in the background. Meanwhile, the barman starts to sing ‘God Save the Queen’.
It is this song, this soggy, fairy-tale lament for a land of never-never, which helped put me off England. I must have liked the team through childhood and into my early teens. World Cup 1990 was a catalyst that transformed an interest in football into love. In a drawer in my mum’s house, I still have the Umbro shell suit to show for it. I can remember the heartbreak of Euro 92: ‘Bro-leeeen. Dah-leeeen, Bro-leeeen’ and Graham Taylor losing his way. Rarely have I been as upset as I was in 1996, when Gascoigne slid and missed at the far post and Barry Davies wailed ‘Oh no!’ But then, as I grasped at adulthood, there was Glenn Hoddle dropping my first love, Gazza, and invoking karmic principles on the disabled. Further, as I found myself to be what is known in certain circles as a ‘socialist’, I struggled with the notion of patriotism, nationhood and national anthems about a monarchy I opposed created by a god I didn’t believe in. Surely a nation is a random line in the sand, your birth in it a complete accident? As I moved away from my Socialist Worker early twenties and into my disillusioned late ones, to support England seemed like a hypocrisy: how could I will injury on a Chelsea midfielder in club football one week, only to cheer him in an England shirt the next? Now, at thirty, it is the impossibility of relating to England or an England player that perturbs me most. Theirs is not the football of Sheffield then or Chester now. Wembley was not built by a community and given life by those who belong.
Early in its existence, the England team struggled against the strength of these communities. From most supporters’ viewpoint, the club v. country conundrum had an unequivocal answer. England was an extra. It even got in the way, creating dead Saturdays where league fixtures should have been. An advantage England did have was its potential to create national unity between those many communities, yet it squandered this by playing so rarely. There were annual matches with Scotland (from 1872), Wales (1879) and Ireland (1882), but very little else. England did not play a non-British side until 1908 (Austria), nor host one until 1923 (Belgium), meaning there was less to rally around and identify with than there could have been. Neither did football chime with popular cricket imagery of England as a demure, ancient and green land in which hatted couples watched plucky amateurs from behind picnic hampers. Here was an urban, aggressive game that paid its players to entertain and alleviate its industrial working-class viewers.
For many, the World Cup of 1966 (apologies, Scottish family and friends) changed that order, so that England passed from afterthought to jingoistic symbol. Prior to Pickles and Hurst, England were on the wane, their means and methods overtaken across the globe. When in 1953 Hungary won 6-3 at Wembley, the defeat itself was not a shock, merely the extent and nature of it. The two reactions were telling and pertinent: England should acknowledge the growing supremacy of their counterparts and adapt accordingly or, what those other countries had achieved was down to British coaches, and our great nation should steer clear of their filthy foreign ways. In practice, 1966 halted popular support for the former and left us firmly with the latter. A Soccer Star piece published a month after England became world champions set the tone: ‘Whatever the team lacked in skill it more than made up for it with the type of display that owed more to British character than any special football prowess’.
This victory for conservatism brutalised the popular image of the England team, and allowed tabloid newspapers to define its purpose. As Britain’s Empire declined the England team became its Alamo, defending national pride to the last. I well recall the Daily Mirror’s Euro 96 front page message ahead of that Germany game: ‘ACHTUNG! SURRENDER. For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over’.
Euro 2012 has been another tournament preceded by a style crisis, as in 1953. Should we play to our strengths, invoking the Watford archetype, or begin to breed a generation that can keep the ball and tiki-taka with the best and rest of them? Off the field, it often feels as if we have emerged sheepishly – a caveman coming into the light – from our post-Empire crisis, but then our government invades Iraq or threatens Argentina over the Falklands. My thirty years have changed and stayed the same. To an extent, the England team are helpless victims in this, the spoils of off-field politicking. So, discounting the horrible truth that any of England’s midfielders could probably buy Chester FC with a few weeks’ wages, I again try to support them, and quietly cheer to myself when they go one-up against France.
When France equalise, the pub roars to life. I try and remain logical, not to feel like an Englishman in Leith, an alien without a kilt. In my time, I have on a thousand occasions cheered the demise of a disliked team. This question, however, remains unanswered: do the Scots dislike them because they are England, or because they are English?
I walk home and realise that I feel a little hurt. Football or xenophobia, humour or malice, it is still not nice to have those of the place you live in dislike something as fundamental as the football team of the place where you were born. Today I feel more English than I have on any of my trips south. I feel the need to be Sassenach, to go to the very heart of my country, the middle bit I have so far neglected, the midriff area that defies north-south categorisation. So I go to watch England in the middle of England.
When I fly to Birmingham in the middle of June, my intention is to travel to a town called Hinckley and watch England from a barstool there. Hinckley United’s ground is one of the closest to the geographic centre of England, and I like their nickname, the Knitters. They did not exist in 1981-82, so I am thinking of them as my wild card, only a bit tame (perhaps the three of spades). From Birmingham Airport I take the 900 bus and feel the profound sense of pride that goes with catching a bus in an unfamiliar place. As always, this is followed by the profound sense of fear that the bus is going in the wrong direction. We plough along a stretch of motorway, me unfamiliar with these strange conveyor belts of silent solo travel. At the rear of the bus, a man is explaining to someone on the other end of the phone how to watch a DVD on his new television. ‘Get dat big fing, dat’s de scartfing, and stick in de grilly, spiky bit. Ye get me?’ We are close to Shakespeare territory, and perhaps that great chronicler of slang and street talk himself would enjoy these linguistic ticks. The bus turns from the motorway and is quickly trundling along country roads, becoming an island on axles among a sea of oak trees and furrows. ‘Dogging’ says a spray-paint stencil message accompanied by an arrow beneath a road sign. Behind a taxi flying the flag of St George we arrive in ‘Meriden: The Centre of England’, my first calling point of the day.
Meriden, on the road between Birmingham and Coventry, has long been thought of as England’s middle. A weather-beaten monument on its village green marks ‘THE CENTRE OF ENGLAND’, and has done for half a millennium. As I sit on a bench by the maypole and look back on The Centre of England Charity Shop, I feel guilty for thinking this innocent and appealing little place a fraud, and ashamed to question the integrity of the bushy-roofed thatched cottages behind me; the centre of England, geographers recently showed, is a good few miles to the north of here. A wood pigeon looks at me and then has a peck at the old statue. Geographers, visiting writers, birds; everyone seems to have it in for Meriden.
This original centre of England is representative of many other English places, then and now. Behind the green is a neat row of shops – pharmacy, newsagent, butcher, hairdresser, Spar, chip shop. Shiny Union Jack bunting hangs loosely from the guttering of the Barratt Homes opposite, Jubilee remnants in plastic. Salon girls arrive for work, mahogany skins and cheery cherry lips. In drips and drabs, solo men park up to buy a paper, patting strangers’ dogs on leads as they go, and old couples pause to gossip. All converse in the same accent, Received Brummie. The main sounds are hedge trimmers and traffic, the smells cut grass and fried eggs. I enter the cafe that produces the latter. It has low ceilings, groaning floorboards and dark oak beams, and wooden panel walls punctuated by oil paintings of fox hunting. Its typical English caff fare should seem incongruous, but works. It is as if the domestic servants have occupied a stately home and turned it into a workers’ co-operative. Across separate tables, a woman and two men talk about farming subsidies and barn flooring, stopping only to stare at the dozen workmen that float in when the clock strikes ten. I enjoy the precision and habits of what they order. One asks for ‘a veggie breakfast, but with black pudding instead of veggie sausages’, another ‘a full breakfast, but instead of mushroom, a hash brown’ and his mate ‘a brunch, but with the fried egg on top of the chips.’ As another five workmen arrive, the cafe walls contract and squeeze me out.
In the case displaying Meriden’s news and notices, a long list schedules the dates for ‘Hoisting Flags in Meriden’. These begin on 9 January with the Duchess of Cambridge’s birthday and end on 20 November with Her Majesty’s Wedding Day. Flag day highlights along the way include Coronation Day and Birthday of The Prince Harry, when everyone dons a Nazi uniform and shouts ‘ya, totally’ into an iPhone. Meanwhile a ninety-two-year-old lady is looking for a ‘Carer-Companion ... four hours per week. Rates by negotiation.’ You would, let’s face it, have to be a bit of a shit to play hardball on that one. I call my agent immediately. Items for sale include a glass television unit (there is always an advert for a glass television unit, it’s a running joke between English villages), grazing land for two horses, guttering, childcare (‘including twins’) and a Neostar Desiccant Dehumidifier. If you can tell a lot about a place by its noticeboard, then Meriden is a ritually royalist, lonely rural place with over-estimated moisture issues and free-standing televisions.
I board another bus, this time towards Coventry. Brown signs on the city’s forehead mark out the Ricoh Arena and Coventry Cathedral, while another advertises the Godiva Festival. The road into town settles into a rhythm: semi-detached bay-windowed houses followed by parades of shops. The housing far more resembles suburban hideaway homes of the south than accommodation in the north. Along the way Jubilee bunting flickers consistently, silently linking the streets. There tends to be more in apparently affluent areas than in tower block windows. Some of it is sad, such as the tatty leftover Union triangles on a care home wall.
The bus decants me into one of Coventry’s lesser areas, where it seems city planners twisted the knife Hitler left poised. Concrete and dark brown glass smothers sightlines. The AXA Insurance building looks like a copper car battery belonging to Gulliver, while the stilted Britannia Hotel looks like something a hungover Jabba the Hut would emit. J. B. Priestley wrote of the ‘extraordinary ugliness’ of the ‘hobgoblin’ locals in Coventry; he would not have noticed them had he visited after the war. I have an hour between buses, so take a walk around town that confirms the people of Coventry as pretty, ugly and normal in the same proportions as everywhere else.
Then, in a blink, Coventry suddenly becomes beautiful. After a Garden of International Peace the twining lanes and secret spaces of Priory Row, Hill Top and Cuckoo Lane lead to the two cathedrals. One is a bombed-out shell, the other its replacement. In the 1960s, both my parents were brought here on school trips from Yorkshire – the old Coventry Cathedral was there to make them remember the war, the new to showcase Jerusalem, their future, now being built. I brush by dozens of French schoolchildren and climb to the original cathedral. To stand in this epic shell is a devastating, unreal experience. Each giant wall is intact; every stained-glass window is gone. The ancient floor remains, the ancient ceiling blistered and collapsed the day Hitler’s Luftwaffe sprayed Coventry in bombs. There are monuments to peace now, sculptures of friendship between the bereaved of Hiroshima and Coventry. As you enter, in golden letters a choice and ignored quote from the bible makes eye contact: ‘Nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither shall they learn war any more.’ Suddenly, the sky cracks in two and rain pelts the floor. It polishes bright the iron statue of two kneeling and weeping bomb victims, and runs down its dedication plaque, which tells how the sculpture:
... reminds us that, in the face of destructive forces, human dignity and love will triumph over disaster and bring the nation together in respect and peace.
It is to be among the most memorable moments of my English journey. Unexpectedly lifted and moved, I walk back towards the bus station. I feel privileged to be in a country where a few rights and lefts take you to something as special as Coventry Cathedral. The middle of England has glitter in its crow’s feet.
I change buses again in Nuneaton, where two old men in polo neck T-shirts and smart trousers swap score predictions for tonight’s England v. Sweden match. ‘Three-nil, no question George.’ ‘Aye, he’s got them hard to beat, Barry.’ I am staying in a hamlet outside Hinckley, essentially so I can walk to the other middle of England tomorrow morning, and because all the hotels in Hinckley sounded scary. I enter the village pub, whose denizens would twist as one and gawp at me, were any of them in. It takes some time to get served as the lady behind the bar is reporting a ‘car that slowed down and looked right in’ to the police. ‘I mean, this is the middle of nowhere,’ she continues. A regular trots in and she fills him in on the crime spree. ‘Well, they use that Google Earth to steal to order these days,’ he says. They move on to talk of this eventful year of ours. ‘Jubilee. Euros. Olympics. It’s a big year, this one. You should be proud to be British,’ she offers. ‘You should be proud to be British every year,’ her customer replies, and I wonder whether they mean ‘British’ or ‘English’. I tune out and concentrate on my copy of today’s Hinckley Times. There is a competition to ‘Spot the Tin Hat and Win £25’. I later learn that, as well as Knitters, the people of Hinckley are known as ‘Tin Hats’. This moniker comes from a local shepherd who often boasted he could drink a hat of ale. A blacksmith duly made him a tin hat with which to do so, and this now resides in the town museum.
Today’s final bout of public transport takes me to what a welcome sign describes as ‘Hinckley: Home of the Hansom Cab’. I later read that Joseph Aloysius Hansom built the earliest of his vehicles here in 1835, and imagine he still used its first journey to tell passengers: ‘Tell you what, you’ll never guess who I had in ’ere last week.’ The town is most not-famous for its hosiery industry, hence Hinckley United’s nickname. It started knitting stockings as the English Civil War raged, its geography leaving it open to regular raids from both sides. No historian has recorded whether Royalists and Parliamentarians indulged in sock-puppet fights, so this amateur one wishes to assert that they did, just because it is a lovely mental image.
There is a vintage about Hinckley that gives its streets an air of supremacy. In England a place can achieve nothing for two centuries, but if Shakespeare mentioned it (‘Do you mean to stop any of William’s wages, about the sack he lost the other day at Hinckley fair?’ Henry IV, Part 2) then it retains confidence. Some of that constant air comes from a sense of medieval tradition, not to mention the routine of religion. In living memory here there were Sunday School Union Festivals, a Procession of Christian Witness, Self-Denial Week and the Hinckley Carnival with its Queens and Maids. Where in Luton the factory girls wore the sashes, here glamour was ancient and ritualistic. What is missed by the current generation is sometimes unknowingly passed on by osmosis and manifests itself in behaviour – I realise this when, after the England match, men and women spill on to the streets and go on merry parade, an impromptu carnival. Though Bacardi Breezers have replaced prayers as unifiers and enablers, the Midlands, as far as I read it, feels very old and is happy to be stuck in its ways.
I decide to walk the two miles to the Knitters’ top of town home. Hollycroft is as genteel as it sounds, a mild hill with thickset lodges from grander days and a red phone box in somebody’s garden. The police station on Upper Bond Street seems unfeasibly large for a town of this size. Further up is another apparently outsized penal building, the magistrates’ court. This has a hefty glass portcullis topped by a dome the shape of a sailor’s hat, and black cricket-stump pillars. Maybe these places were built with history in mind. Two hundred years ago the Knitters of Hinckley rowdily indulged in some of the first flushes of Luddism. They thwacked hosiery machines with sledgehammers by way of protecting jobs. Many were imprisoned, but across Britain it caught on. Technology won in the end, and this summer evening it shows. Cars whoosh by at speed, a relentless thrashing noise to replace that of disused hosiery factories. On my walk, I see only three people on foot. I am pleased to note that ‘Knitters’ does not merely mark a past pursuit – the art deco premises of the Nylon Hosiery Company appear to be in fine health. Next door is a larger, disused hosiery factory, windows sore from stones hurled through, redbrick fading to black.
The hill steepens and town turns to suburb. A long stretch of hatted semi-detached houses in the Watford mould takes an age to pass through. Looking at each one of them, so prim and wholesome with their gardens and porches, is like being bored to tears by a perfect cousin. The cemetery brings them to a halt, appropriately, though even that is mild – sparse graves, not enough history or misery for my liking. As I progress the houses become more withdrawn from the road and there is even space for ample public lawns in between them. This suburbia is unmistakeably Anywhere England. I am not convinced there will be a football ground at the end of the rainbow. Which is essentially because there won’t be – I have missed my turning.
It takes me twenty minutes to reach Derby Road, each step slightly more flustered than the last. Rows of dainty knitters’ cottages cheer me up, as does the bold Mock Tudory of the Weavers’ Arms. Its white walls and St George flags glow in the sun. The streets narrow into terraces and old factories. Among the two-up two-downs are daunting factory walls, which squash in the houses so that they resemble a skinny kid in a school photo being jostled out of place by two fat ones. No excuses for being late to work here. The biggest old factory still wears its signage: ‘T. Jennings Ltd. For Tights, Stockings and Pop Socks.’ On tree-ruled streets something mind-blowing happens: I see another person. He, a middle-aged gentleman walking the dog, seems to feel as I do and in tandem we try to strike up conversation. ‘No, you go ...’ We talk weather and then the England match (‘They’ll lose, ’cause I’m watching it’) and then move off in opposite directions, which is odd as he was going the same way as me when I overtook him.
Soon after the factories Hinckley once again resembles a rural village. On one side of the road are fields, on the other minor mansions that poke through overgrown conifers like clumsy robot spies. Blossom trees, wheelie bins, greenery, cars: repeat to fade. Again I lose belief that hereabouts rests a football ground. I pass Hansom Road, festooned in ‘20mph Zone’ signs, and soon there are paths only on one side. A while later, a dark green sign, perhaps a mirage, offers: ‘Greene King Stadium. Home of Hinckley United FC’.
It could be delirium after an hour’s walking, but the first stand I see has a roof which seems to jut into the air and resemble a Black Power fisted salute. There is no discernible entrance so I walk by a long hedge, the Berlin Wall keeping me from my destination with a rotting oak tree as its sentry tower. There is at last a cutting and I enter the car park of Hinckley’s home since 2005. The club’s main entrance looks like that of a modern GP surgery. Its windows are apparently based on an upside-down Tetris formation, and straddle a doorway with pagoda pretensions. Whatever the team, no matter the architecture, I find a stone-dead stadium an interesting place. Even in a modern home like this there are echoes in the bricks, broken-heart stains on the pillars. I peer into the ground. Though a touch flat-pack, its terraces are cosy and a fine example of what ‘safe standing’ may look like. The Knitters were formed in 1997, an amalgamation of two local sides, Athletic and Town. There had been football in Hinckley for well over a century, though a life bothering the Leicestershire Senior, Birmingham Combination and Midland Alliance leagues was never going to be glitzy. Athletic were the people’s club; Town more recent upstarts. For many years, Athletic’s 1923 FA Cup Fifth Qualifying Round defeat to Grimsby Town represented the high-water mark of footballing achievement. At its most popular, football in Hinckley could sustain crowds of 2,000, creeping up to 5,000 for derbies with Nuneaton Borough. Hundreds are more likely now; the Knitters were recently relegated from football’s sixth tier. My idea is to watch England play from this stadium in the middle of England. I shall take a table in the adjacent Nobby’s Bar and sup ale, admiring its purple carpets and scattergun furniture policy. Or, as it turns out, I shall find the bar closed and head back into town. This is what happens when I try to be spontaneous.
I rush down Castle Street. Bar Vis-à-Vis is heroically badly named and so I enter. Sticky floors try to steal my shoes and I eventually stand underneath a widescreen TV by the bar, unsure if I will be rooted to this spot for evermore, a decaying statue. There are sixty or seventy people here, most adhering to a dress code of brilliant white and St George red. The din – belly laughs and throaty shouts – gives this the feeling of not just another Friday night out, but an event. The small town of Hinckley has come together in support of the mother ship. As the game kicks off, England can hear them from Kiev. The Three Lions begin in a direct, aggressive manner, pinning Sweden against a wall, casting wide balls and crosses for the giant up front. In the battle for style Watford has emphatically defeated Barcelona. It works.
A cross from the right ascends to the perfect height. The big man hangs in the air like a Sea King helicopter, Swedish defenders stranded below. Iron neck muscles thrust his head to the ball. On impact it seems to distort before cannoning into the net. Bar Vis-à-Vis erupts, arms and legs, hugs and kisses, some that last to the restart. ‘I told you, I told you,’ shouts a beery man into my ear. He didn’t – in fact, all I remember him saying is ‘Is this stool spare, mate?’ – but I don’t argue. For the rest of the half, Sweden fail to irk England, and the half-time whistle is met by another heartfelt cheer. People swarm around me, leaning for attention from the bar staff, slightly wary of the outsider and his notebook. Drinks restocked, we move our eyes back to the screens and the second-half in north Ukraine. Come on, England. The goal hero cheaply concedes a free-kick. When it is taken the ball pings off the defensive wall and into the path of a Sweden player. His effort hits England limbs and the post but trickles in. One-all. A goal mired in such chaos rattles England. Composure evaporates. When the ball comes close to them the players poke at it then retreat, as if at half-time it has been exchanged for a grenade. Their opponents hurl it in the box, England heads duck, and a Swedish forehead glances a goal. One-nil up, two-one down. The people of Hinckley react by screaming, shaking their heads muttering ‘typical’ and ordering more booze. Hands rest on heads. There are even smirks at the familiarity of it all: expectation, anticipation, excitement, let down. Same old England.
Except it is not, and all because of a Roy of the Rovers super-sub. This whippet lashes a curvaceous shot into the net with one of his first touches, then steams through flailing Swedish legs to pull back for a teammate to score. Three-two. ‘We never beat Sweden,’ says the bargirl, ‘I can’t believe it.’ When it matters, everyone is a pundit. The noise is infectious, stirring. The final whistle blows and the Vis-à-Vis stereo cranks up to 11. ‘Three lions on a shirt ...’ sing the men and women of Hinckley. I mouth along, struck by goosebumps built on recollections of being fourteen and heartbroken when that ball flew by Gazza at the far post, and on the sheer collective glee of being part of something as big as England. Watching and finding I care has told me something: my exile and my travels have swelled my Englishness. Each new England feels like something worth hanging on to. The team and the community, the belonging it occasionally breeds is another of those Englands. Tonight, I am an England supporter, and we are a community, even if we have other priorities and our players are overpaid dickheads.
The morning after I have paid a taxi driver £18 to take me the three miles home (‘It’s ’cause I crossed county boundaries, mate.’ ‘Into where, Mexico?’), I set out for the other middle of England. I am pathetically clad and shod for a walk involving the countryside and an Ordnance Survey map, but if I can survive the night train to London I can survive anything. Precision orienteering (using my fingers to translate the scale) suggests my walk should be just under four miles. The thunderstorm starts during the second. From underneath my hood I chart the repetitious country roadside as I go: nettles, ditch, bush, McDonald’s cup, nettles, ditch, bush, McDonald’s cup. When the skies clear I look up to find fields of comfort and barley. They eddy in the gathering wind. I can do this. I shall not rest until I find the middle of England or one of these tractors gores me. I look at some sheep whose returning glances make me realise I am singing from the soundtrack of Stand by Me. I hope there is no dead body at the end of this hike. If there is, it is probably mine.
Each corner brings another long stretch. I do not mind the length; I mind being able to see it. Luckily, there are plenty of stones to dribble and gates to shoot at. When I turn off the road into woods, contentment washes over me like the thick and muddy spray of a truck splashing in a ditch, which shortly afterwards also washes over me. If my map reading is correct, if the path my frozen finger rests on is this one, then I am just about here, a field near Lindley Hall Farm, a field that is geographically the centre of England. As I approach what I take to be the spot, a figure emerges from the farmhouse ahead. It seems to be a lady, and she seems to be asking what I am doing on her land. When I apologise and explain, she replies in a friendly if flustered manner. ‘Oh,’ she begins, ‘we don’t publicise that. It was a shame, a real shame, taking it from Meriden like that. They will always be the centre.’ Ritual over science yet again in this corner of the Midlands, this centre of England? Possibly. Or a farmer’s wife who does not like sodding men in sodden jeans on her driveway. Before her intervention, I did feel something bordering on excitement to be in England’s middle. It may only be an accident of geography, but so too is supporting England, and this morning I feel like that matters.
I walk on towards the spires of Fenny Drayton. It is almost lunchtime, and this English idyll looks like it must house a stonking pub with a roaring fire. I turn another corner in England and find another piece of history. Fenny Drayton is the home of Quakerism, the teetotal home of Quakerism. I do not like all of the corners I turn. The next bus to civilisation and/or Nuneaton is in two hours. Onwards I walk, until I reach the neverland between signs denoting ‘Leicestershire’ and ‘Warwickshire’, which I am close to declaring my own republic if only so I can open a pub to drink in.
The Midlands I have seen are different and separate, neither north nor south. They are traditional, but in traditions they made themselves. There is order, ritual and mythology, a sense of continuation with ye olde, medieval England. This permanence breeds a self-assurance that can come across as unfriendly. They are of an England that is very sure of itself and does not worry about which half it is in or which side it is on, unlike a north in permanent flux and a south turning through trends as a fork churns soil. Such a mood of assurance has enabled me to say that, yes, I am an England fan, only quietly, and possibly not in a pub near my house. Now for the uncertainty of the new football season.