WELCOME TO CHAMELEON COUNTY

Matthew Engel continues our series on

England with an only slightly disenchanted look at Northamptonshire

WHEN YOU come back, having been away a long, long time, you overhear con- versations rather than take part in them. `Ooh,' I heard a woman say to a neighbour at her front door, 'that's very Northamp- tonshire.'

Very Northamptonshire? Very North- amptonshire? I wish I had heard the previ- ous line. The thing about Northamp- tonshire is that the county is not very any- thing. This is the chameleon county, so good-natured that it will change itself into anything you want it to be.

You want Cotswolds? Down in the south-west corner we've got Cotswolds, well, more or less. You want the Fens? We've got places, especially up near Oun- dle, as flat and cold as anywhere (indeed, the midsummer cold on the old Race- course in Northampton, now a public recreation ground, is always explained away on the East Anglian principle that there is nowhere higher between here and the Urals). You want the big city? It gets closer every day.

It is that sense of being an unweekend- cottaged version of the Cotswolds that makes Northamptonshire appealing to . . . people looking for weekend cottages, I suppose. Nowhere has such beautiful stone. The books usually call it honey-coloured, but that isn't right. Pevsner prefers ginger- bread. Marmalade, perhaps, if we're still hungry, or russet or ochre. Anyway, it depends where in the county you are, and where the quarry was.

Northamptonshire architecture is seen at its best round the Spencer estate at Althorp, all leaded lights and mullions, and south of Watling Street. But there are mid- dle managers in the cottages now, and they move on and move up, taking their carriage lamps with them, after a couple of years in charge of the branch covering the South- East Midlands, Mid-Anglia, Home Coun- ties North or whatever obscure name this county gets in their particular company.

At Eydon, perhaps the most handsome and perfect of all the stone villages, there is a sign on the Post Office saying 'No Direc- tions Given'. At 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, the only person I passed failed to say 'Good morning', which would have been unthink- able in any village in the county 20 years ago. It was probably the sub-postmaster. Otherwise, the street was left to the wheel- ie bins guarding each deserted house: Neighbourhood Watch meets the Daleks.

'He's a hopeless case. I'm sorry, but I'm going to turn off his television.' The characteristic winter bird in the ploughed fields nearby was the seagull, as deracinated as everyone else.

The population of most of the major towns has doubled or more in the past quarter of a century, yet the circulation of the evening papers has almost halved. Why should our newcomers care about the area, if they aren't stopping for long?

Most people never stop at all, except at the Watford Gap service area. Every major route to the north came through the coun- ty, including the four railway main lines. There is a stretch between Whilton Locks and Brockhall where it is possible to trace the history of English transport without moving. Within 600 yards of each other are Watling Street, the Grand Union Canal, the London and North Western Railway and the Ml. History teachers could far more profitably conduct a lesson here than in the classroom, were it not impossible to be heard above the motor- way.

But when I was sent to boarding school, nobody there had heard of Northampton- shire, unless they were very keen on crick- et, in which case they were usually

disparaging. Even then they assumed it must be very far up north or got it mixed up with North Hants, which appears a lot in the full-colour estate agents' ads at the front of Country Life.

Such identity as the county has comes from its position halfway between London and Birmingham. That is probably the best way to describe the accent, which can still be heard in the terraced streets of the older parts of Northampton and in the A6 shoe towns. The Evening Telegraph used to have a cartoon called Air Ada, drawn by Reginald Norman of Rushden, who spoke in the broadest possible N'thamptonshire —'Alto, gal, ows things agooin? Ayya bin- non yoldy, m'duck?'

The county's other modern laureate was J.L. Carr of Kettering, who died last Satur- day, as under-appreciated as Northamp- tonshire itself. He once described it as being famous for 'the Saints forwards in the loose, boots, the Battle of Naseby, V.W.C. Jupp, Earls Barton's church tower and Rushden's brass bands'. There are not many people left who remember Jupp, the England all-rounder of the inter-war peri- od. Anyway, he was born in Sussex, just as Carr was born in Yorkshire.

As for the Battle of Naseby, the decisive encounter of the Civil War, the battlefield is marked by an obscure and unfrequented obelisk right by the new Ml-Al link road. If it were anywhere else, there would probably be NasebyWorld and The Nase- by Experience, complete with souvenir shoppe. It being in Northamptonshire, ref- erence books regularly say it is in Leices- tershire, and the historians were so confused about the actual site of the battle that they were routed at the public inquiry as decisively as if the New Model Army itself had outflanked them. Carr's novels, even when they are osten- sibly set elsewhere or nowhere, often seem to have the mist of a Northamptonshire winter rising through them. I regularly decide I would like to live in the county again. Northampton has a good arts centre these days and a decent cinema and the beer's improved and they still have cheese skittles (now that is very Northampton- shire) in some of the village pubs. And what with the motorway and railway and that, it is, after all, a mighty easy place to get out of: you can be in London, Birming- ham or Cambridge in an hour, Bristol or Leeds in two. That's why so many other people moved in, of course. And every time I go back, I am confronted by the reality that there is no there there any more, at least not quite in the way I thought I remembered.

In Orwell's Coming Up for Air, George Bowling decides to go home — 'But where was Lower Binfield? Where was the town I used to know? It might have been any- where. All I knew was that it was buried somewhere in the middle of that sea of bricks.' Last time I tried to visit Milton Malsor, my own Lower Binfield, they had moved all the roads.

Just south of Towcester, in the lovely vil- lage of Litchborough, is a building called The Old Brew House. Anywhere else, that would probably refer to the 18th century. The Litchborough Brewery began in that spot when an old Phipps's Brewery man put his redundo into making small quanti- ties of beer for public consumption, at that time an unheard-of idea. It was 20 years ago; I remember it well. Old Brew House, indeed. Very Northamptonshire.

Matthew Engel is on the staff of the Guardian and editor of Wisden.

`Well, if your handbag isn't safe in the pew, we might as well give up.'