For What Is Chatteris

 

The other side of the coin from being in the sticks and dreaming of the bright lights, big city or making it on Broadway is being in the fast lane of the city and dreaming of the sticks, or more likely the countryside – finding something like the title of David Ackle’s 1969 song, Subway to the Country. That view from the other end of the telescope, of course, has often been a pretty idealised one of rural life, a picture postcard view of a cottage with roses and ivy looking out across a rolling landscape. The desire to get back to nature and a simpler way of life has been a common theme in literature for the past 200 years or so and something similar happened musically in the late sixties, with a string of artists - Bob Dylan, The Band, Stevie Winwood and Traffic, Jethro Tull - suddenly wanting to get it together in the country with a more pastoral hue to their music. The arrival of pop groups in the countryside to discover themselves was not always welcomed. One former resident of the Berkshire village where Traffic recorded their 1967 Mr Fantasy album recalled: “They were a strange looking lot. We'd never seen anything like it. My dad reckoned they were a sweaty, smelly lot. He warned me to keep away from them because of the sex and drugs and that.".

I am not sure who was first. Cliff Richard and The Shadows could possibly lay claim, with their In the Country hit dating to 1966, though the sound here did conjure up the notion of a Sunday drive in a Ford Cortina to have a picnic of hard boiled eggs and jam sandwiches in a field somewhere more than aduki beans and dope in a rural commune. Whoever it was, it set in train several years of British and American artists finding their historical rural roots. Take the Small Faces, the mid-sixties epitome of urban East End mods whose idea of something rural was the bit of waste ground of Itchycoo Park: by 1974 former member Ronnie Lane could bring out the bucolic The Poacher – “Was fresh and bright and early, I went towards the river, but nothing still has altered just the seasons ring a change”. Some songs went for a mystical, magical approach to the countryside, as in Carolanne Pegg’s Witch's Guide to the Underground; some for the whimsical, as with Stackridge and Pinafore Days; some for the comical, as with the Wurzels and I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester.

Most of these painted, in different ways, a rose-coloured picture, though some did point out that life in the countryside could actually be pretty miserable. Recently, Billy Bragg and the Imagined Village band updated the traditional Hard Times of Old England to incorporate the Countryside Alliance and the impact on rural life of the encroachment of Tesco and the closure of post offices.

Link to Hard Times of Old England Retold

What is striking, however, is that the view was usually of the deep countryside of cottages and farms. The large village/small market town hardly figured as a vision of escape, yet to a resident of London or Manchester these were just as much ‘the countryside’.

The song here from 2005, then, For What Is Chatteris by Birkenhead indie band Half Man Half Biscuit, redresses that with a double-edged commentary, like much of their work over the past 25 years. A seemingly anonymous small market town in the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire is presented with a blend of witty irony and poignancy, not as a dullsville to escape from to the big city but a gentle idyll which has only lost its charms after a girlfriend upped and left. (Note: there is an extensive internet debate on some of the lyrics and whether the words near the end  say ‘prick’ or ‘crick’ barriers at both ends. Either seem plausible!). I must admit that I have only passed through Chatteris once but it was on a cross-country route to visit my father in a very similar place some 70 miles away, North Walsham in Norfolk. Like Chatteris ,it is a rural market town with some 10,000 inhabitants where the worries are out- of - town supermarkets closing down the local shops, teenagers pulling up the floral display in the park and the odd ‘drive by shouting’.

I often wondered why my father chose to retire there after 40+ years of working in London and the South Coast, as we never went on holiday there or even passed through Norfolk at all to my knowledge. Many years later I found a black and white photograph of a far distant summer, my father as a teenager but looking grown up as though the world was at his feet, standing with his own father on Cromer beach, the seaside town adjoining North Walsham where one stormy evening once I saw Alan Price play at the end of the pier as the waves buffeted the structure. What had pulled my father back there perhaps was the North Norfolk coast shimmering in a remembered golden summer holiday  of a lifetime ago shortly before his father died and his life changed for ever.

Perhaps too it was the predictable nature of life that was attractive. Over the visits there I sometimes thought about the families in the small park down the road from his house. The children went there to play on the swings and roundabout and eat ice - creams; a few years later they were back with their school or college friends, hanging about the park and War Memorial drinking cider and smoking; a few years after that they were back with their own children playing on the swings, whilst around them the town changed little. I was reminded of the Little Bear books by Else Minarik. Only small things happen in these stories: Little Bear puts a box on his head as a space helmet, climbs up a little mound to pretend he has flown to the moon and eventually jumps off again to have his tea. But young children love them because of the safe reassurance of the stories: like North Walsham and Chatteris, you look to enter a small but complete world protected from change. Life there is not being on Broadway, true, but then Broadway -either in reality or the imagination - hasn’t got three good butchers, two fine chandlers, an indoor pool and a first class cake shop.

Link to song