SO VERY SURREY

series on England with a jaundiced view of the county in which she grew up

IT TOOK a spell of living in California for me to get the point, or the pointlessness, of Surrey, the county where I grew up. Surrey is ersatz, Surrey is fake, Surrey is all about hype. Suddenly, on the burned hills of Los Angeles amid all the little stucco châteaux and cut-price dream palaces 6,000 miles from the London green belt I felt on famil- iar ground, and I knew why. LA is surpris- ingly similar to sprawling suburban Surrey with its pseudo-Tudor estates and its repro- thatch cottages, but on the whole it is more sincere. A nagging worry that Surrey had no soul was put to rest. Surrey had no soul.

From the tiny terraces of Tooting to the barely detached mansions of Milford, from the Thirties till now, its architectural signa- ture is counterfeit but consistent. Surrey is compulsively gabled, just like the scenery on the Disney studios backlot. You expect to go behind the façades and find nothing there — and if you do go behind the façades all too often, there is nothing of substance there. Perhaps it is because Sur- rey has long been a dormitory county that it is pretty well dormant in its waking hours as well.

Since my childhood, things have become a good deal worse. Commuter country has expanded to fill most of a county which skirts the Thames in the north and the downs in the south. Most things between Richmond and Redhill with any roots have been made into a company headquarters or a nursing home. In Surrey, age is a disad- vantage in buildings, but not so in humans, whose infirmity is a major local industry. From Croydon to Cranleigh, a copy of a country house can be worth more than the real thing; Surrey is a convenience county.

Surrey property prices are high because of its proximity to London, not for the 'They can't afford the big-name soloists any more.' most part because of any intrinsic value. The proximity itself has eroded any of that, carving up the royal hunting forests around Richmond and Kingston and the dukedoms to the south into manageable little parcels for proles, and driving roads and railways leading somewhere else through anything meaningfully content with itself. The pro- ductive wilderness has become the con- sumer jungle. Surrey is neither verdant nor vicious, neither rural nor urban, but char- acterised by row upon anodyne row of houses valued for their, well, value. In Sur- rey, proximity is everything. It is approxi- mately many things but nothing in particular. A rustic pub, gabled of course, sells high-priced nouvelle cuisine rather than rude food. An English road- house passes itself off as an Italian trattoria with Mediterranean purple tablecloths clashing with the English country colours outside. There is Japanese karaoke in the public bars on the former coaching routes round Cobham.

The names of the houses show the peo- ple of Surrey have left their hearts else- where or that they aspire to be someone other than themselves. Broadlands, Arling- ton, Tanglewood, Highclere: here are a litany of pretensions to line an estate agent's pocket. Surrey is about references — to other people's lives. It is risibly con- fused about its own identity. Men wearing waxed Barbours with Reeboks roam the pedestrianised shopping precincts, boasting baby-slings like bumpers against the Satur- day crowds and disgorging their Sainsbury trolleys into Japanese jeeps which the Sur- rey classes think are a proof of country liv- ing.

Surrey is a microcosm of everything that has happened to post-war England to give the country its current identity crisis. Its high streets, charmingly half-timbered from the first storey up, are a riot of orienteer- er's orange at shop-level. Their plastic signs trumpet cut-price wine, cut-price food, records, holidays, clothes and the sort of jewellery, vulgar yet inconspicuous, which has no worth the moment it leaves the shop. These are high streets in which no one spends as much as they appear to be spending, because all the money is tied up in the houses.

This, plus the stifling torpor of the place, must be the reason why so many people are dab hands at DIY. Surrey is the home of the dead-end, or, as its genteel inhabitants like to call it, the cul-de-sac. These culmi- nate as often as not in a superstore full of floral garden furniture, which in Surrey, despite the example of the Royal Horticul- tural Society in Wisley, is often a substitute for flowers.

True, there are pockets of serene rurali- ty, or at least there seem to be, but this innocence is fake, not profound. The herds of deer in Richmond Park are overlooked by the skyscrapers of drug-funded Sixties council estates. On the Hog's Back agora- phobic trippers in parked cars take care to inspect the 360-degree view through glass lest they should become too liberated by direct contemplation of it. Plough through the next copse in Woking or Leatherhead, there is inevitably a housing development (or as often as not a crematorium dis- guised as a housing development). Surrey is the home of the show home. It is a spiri- tual hotel chain.

The apotheosis of Surrey living is St George's Hill, Weybridge. This gloomy private estate rising between the pet ceme- tery and the ubiquitous Surrey golfcourse is indistinguishable from the two on account of its sepulchral evergreens and lugubrious lawns. Here, the barbecuing classes floodlight their patios to resemble detention centres, while security gates guard security gates which in turn guard the sort of nouveau acquisitions which would fetch nothing except at a car-boot sale. This is the haunt of pop stars and dentists, where even the houses are named after rock groups, and you expect to see nurses patrolling the verges. In such a clin- ical enclave you know the kitchens are going to be easycare, but so too are the gardens. It can't be long before the Fly- mowed lawns are replaced by artificial grass. The only sign of sentient life is the squirrels. The children are already con- sumer clones. In Weybridge they come and

go in their Day-Glo, practising wheelies on the sleeping policemen with their chopper bikes.

It would be characteristic of Surrey to be offended by these observations, and point in self-defence to its stewardship of the country's great traditions as symbol- ised by the grace-and-favour residences in Richmond, and certain public schools like Charterhouse where the alumni always wish they had been to Eton. This yearning tells you all.

Surrey, middle-class, middle-brow, mid- dle-aged, is desperate to keep up appear- ances. It elevates the bourgeois virtues of family and etiquette to a pedestal which they in no way occupy in truth. Even in my youth, these were represented by nothing more substantial than polite hairdos and floribunda roses and fish-forks, and net curtains designed to make sure reality nei- ther crossed into the house nor could get out.

Surrey's real pride was in its deceptions. It boasted civilisation and security and pretended not to notice the lurking per- vert by the allotments who peed over the poohstick bridge when girls in gymslips passed by. It was a David Lynch movie in which the garden hose turned on the keep- er of its orderliness and strangled him without his ever noticing. It was the origi- nal statue with a worm in its mouth, its eyes willingly bandaged.

Perhaps that is why I always enjoyed it so much when its hypocrisy was exposed. I still experience relief to hear how a Nazi incen- diary bomb blew up Bon Marche in East Sheen High Street, purveyors of pseudo- French underwear in pseudo-silk to the pseudo-gently. The satellite county, flat-. tered to be trapped within the gravitational orbit of the metropolis, yet with no notion of its hard reality, felt the catharsis of a direct hit. In Surrey even today no heads may be seen poking over the garden fence, still less any parapets.

All this pretence, not to mention preten- sion, is exhausting. That is why it is not just the sleeping policemen who are comatose in the road on a Saturday night. So too are the rugby-playing, golfing accountants, mainstay of its clubs and carpools. On Sun- days, civilised by hangovers, they hold their coloured cocktail glasses at 45 degrees in the presence of their long-suffering, tennis- playing wives before thumbing secretly through, according to what the Patels stock in the average Surrey high street these days, the sort of magazines you would be pushed to find in a specialised Soho sex shop.

Surrey people dream of having the guts to move to Essex.