16 A Year in the Pennines



Ten years ago Tony Fanshaw was a living legend in the hothouse world of advertising. His innovative campaigns caught the mood of the nation, the zeitgeist of the times. Schoolchildren parroted his slogans until they stuck indelibly in the memory. ‘Go to work on a bus’: that was probably his most famous line. Yes, Tony was one of the brightest stars in the advertising firmament. However much he was getting paid, it was nowhere near enough.

Running an advertising agency during the 1980s was like a license to print money, but the good times couldn’t last forever. The rot started with an unexpected outbreak of truth in advertising. The tobacco companies admitted that cigarettes weren’t, as they’d been claiming, ‘good for a tickly cough’, but were, in fact, one of the most pernicious and addictive narcotics known to man. When even the tobacco barons were running scared, advertising executives were right to worry. What could we expect next: McDonalds admitting their burgers were ‘crap’? Once hard-headed business people started thinking this way, the whole advertising profession could go down the pan. And then where would we be?

Tony was growing weary of the advertising treadmill. He began to see that making people more unhappy today than they were yesterday isn’t much of a job for a grown man who still has his frontal lobes intact. When he tried to market a 'Penis Reduction Kit' for the over-endowed - a doomed enterprise, if ever there was one - he felt his career had reached rock bottom. He’d made his pile; it seemed like the right time to quit the London rat-race. So, like the Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, he decided to uproot the whole Fanshaw family (that’s his wife, Pristine, and the three kids, Mark, Sophie and Tabatha) and head north to Yorkshire. Tony wanted his children to have all the advantages of a country upbringing. Having subscribed to Country Life, he reckons he knows what they are.

Sickened by the shallowness of the advertising profession, Tony longed for authenticity. Bored with money, meaningless awards and the bogus bonhomie of his peers, he wanted a simpler, more genuine kind of life. He wanted to discover a place where people said what they meant, and meant what they said. And, perhaps just as importantly, a place where a man who had just sold a mews house in London could afford to buy up a whole street. The Yorkshire that Tony sought was the Yorkshire that appears on tea-towels and biscuit tins, and coffee-table books that brag about having 'full colour photographs'. So it was just unfortunate all round that the place he chose turned out to be Milltown.

Buying up a whole street in Milltown would have brought the Fanshaw family into too close a contact with the natives, and rather too quickly. Tony plumped instead for a substantial farmstead with a fine view over the town. He picked up the place at auction; some hill farmer had gone broke, apparently. It’s an ill wind, Tony thought, as the ink dried on his cheque. Here, on a Pennine hillside, the Fanshaw family could bask on the sunlit uplands of their own prosperity and immerse themselves in the northern way of life.

Having spent so many years churning out copy, Tony felt the urge to become a proper writer. He thought, sensibly enough, that a man who could persuade people to drink pints of Tetley’s Creamflow without having a gun pointed at their heads should find no terrors in compiling a few thousand words of over-leavened prose.

Tony’s diary was to have formed the basis of a book. A Year in the Pennines might have done for Yorkshire what Peter Mayle did for Provence. But it wasn’t to be. Though his journal runs to many thousands of words, it remains unpublished. Tony’s original five-year diary, with just a little charring round the edges, turned up recently in a job-lot at a sale of fire-damaged goods. There is room here to offer just a few extracts, beginning with the Fanshaw family’s initial enthusiasm about moving to Milltown.

It is so very beautiful here. Our neighbours are mostly hill farmers. And what a sturdy, hard-working bunch they are - adding a touch of rustic colour to even the barest of Pennine landscapes. Those farmers who are blessed with the power of speech keep us amused with their ugly, guttural dialect and halting attempts at conversation. They work from dawn till dusk, doing whatever it is that farmers do. Performing unspeakable acts on animals, mostly. At least that’s what it sounds like. If you wanted some vile indignity inflicted upon a dumb farmyard beast, then the farmers of Milltown would no doubt be happy to oblige. It seems there's always another way to maltreat semi-domesticated animals for pleasure or profit.

We feel rather sorry for our immediate neighbour (Jake, or Jethro, or Amos, or something) who seems to be struggling to make ends meet. It’s not his fault. How could he possibly have known that turning his livestock from grazing herbivores into carnivorous cannibals would have created so many problems in the food chain? I introduced myself, handed him my card, and suggested - tactfully, of course - that if he ever fancied diversifying into cleaning swimming pools, I could probably offer him a few hours of gainful employment. Minimum wage, granted, but regular work.

From the vantage point of our luxury farmhouse we can look down - in every sense - on the people of Milltown. From such a distance the people in the streets of the town look no bigger than ants. And even from close quarters they retain a certain insect-like quality, as they go about the business of their humdrum little lives. Perhaps it’s true what we’ve heard: people really do grow to look like their pests.

Nevertheless, we have developed a soft spot for Milltown folk. It’s a bit of an affectation, I know. But I can’t help feeling that for all their lack of sophistication (industrial-stength lager... with seafood?) they are indeed the salt of the earth. We wouldn't want to be stuck in a broken-down lift with any of them, of course, but exchanging a few perfunctory pleasantries costs nothing.

We seem to be almost as fascinating to the locals as they are to us. Milltown is so full of unusual families and unconventional lifestyles that the mere sight of a man, his wife and three clean, well-behaved children seems enough to draw gawping crowds. And once Mark, Sophie and Tabatha have been inoculated against typhoid, impetigo and mange, we will have fewer qualms about them mixing with the local children.

The men are polite enough: doffing their hats in mock deference or giving us what locals call ‘the middle digit of friendship’. Some of the local women are quite attractive, in a dowdy kind of way: acceptable for a first marriage at least. Indeed, I have engaged the services of a local girl, for a few hours each week, to help my wife learn the Yorkshire patois. Once Pristine has flattened her vowels, and reduced her vocabulary, she can move on to the verbs. Even if she only masters the imperative tense, that will enable her to communicate with the servants.

Eating out is one of our keenest pleasures, and many an evening during our years in London was enlivened by eating endangered species, sampling truly great wines and enjoying the company of some of our close, personal show-biz friends. Having come north, however, Pristine and I appreciate that our favourite dishes will probably be unknown. Where in Milltown are we going to find a chef who will do justice to a dish such as ‘peccadillo of okapi, sautéd with a mélange of boiled boneless voles, served on a bed of total bollocks’? Where can we find a bottle or two of our favourite tipple: an obscenely expensive liqueur, fermented, as it has been for centuries, by a closed order of alcoholic monks... with each bottled signed, albeit illegibly, by the Ruined Abbot of Langoustine?

Pristine and I harboured no illusions about Yorkshire cuisine. We expected simple, wholesome fare: pikelets, faggots, food shaped like characters from Disney cartoons. But nothing prepared us for a recent debacle in one of Milltown’s premier eateries. The Grievous Bodily Arms, I think it was called: a place that hasn’t always enjoyed such a good reputation for food and, according to the small-print on the extensive menu, ‘an almost vermine-free dining environment'.

The meal started unpromisingly. The soup was so thin, I took it for a finger-bowl. When I asked the waiter if it really was home-made, he just shrugged his shoulders and said that’s what it said on the tin. Things got worse. For the main course I decided to indulge myself. “These pygmy quails”, I said, pointing at the menu, “I'll have three of them.” "I'm very sorry, sir,” the waiter said, “we only have two left." "Well, get some more, man." "These really are the last, sir." "When will you be getting some more?" "Never, sir, this is the last breeding pair in existence." "Well, I'll have them both... sautéd... on toast." You have to put your foot down sometimes.

Pristine had settled for something rather less exotic: stew and dumplings. I took one look at the vile concoction placed before her, before collaring the hapless waiter once again. “What’s that?”, I demanded to know, gesturing to something large and grey. “I think you’ll find that’s a dumpling, sir”, he replied, superciliously. "That's not a dumpling, you imbecile... that's a dump...", I said, making a mental note never to eat at this establishment again. Perhaps the rumours were true, and there really is an Egon Ronay inspector buried under the car-park. My wife, bless her, tapped me on the arm and smiled. “Please don’t make a fuss”, she said, forcing a lump of gristle down: “What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger.” Can Yorkshire cuisine win higher praise than that?

There are some misguided souls in Milltown who accuse us of being insensitive, racist even. And for them we have a ready answer. The truth is that we have had nannies and kitchen staff from many different countries and cultures. We do not discriminate on the basis of colour, race or creed. In return for just 70 or 80 hours work each week, we allow them to share part of our lovely home and we give them pocket money. Insensitive? I really don’t think these allegations can be placed at our door. They say we are supercilious and self-important. What can these cretins mean? Despite giving ourselves unstintingly to life in Milltown and, incidentally, enriching the gene pool (not before time, some may say), we get no credit whatsoever.

We are quickly running out of places in Milltown where we can find a welcome. Our beautiful home seems like a fortress: a fortress besieged by malevolent farmers and beetle-browed yokels. Our London friends warned us we were mad to come and live in Yorkshire, surrounded by sheep and slurry. With a heavy heart I’m coming to the unpalatable conclusion that they were probably right.

We are assured, by those few locals who are still speaking to us, that everyone around here has their house firebombed from time to time. That’s what I tell Pristine and the children, to stop them worrying unnecessarily, but in truth I can’t even convince myself. I don’t want us all to be identified by our dental records, and end us as just another headline in that dreadful newspaper the locals insist on reading. Oh God, what will become of us. The horror... the horror...

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