North Berwick is the best place to live in the UK. An extended postcard from my home town.
A minding involving ice cream, crazy golf, and demolished hotels
North Berwick is the best place to live in the UK, according to the Sunday Times. Of course it is. How was this decision reached? What were the criteria? I don’t care. Without checking, I’d imagine it’s a combination of things, to do with property prices, the school, the landscape, the transport links (easy train to Edinburgh), the golf, the raft race, Fringe By The Sea, the excellent coffee available from the Steampunk cafe, the zipwire in the Lodge grounds, the aviary, the Luca’s ice cream van at the corner of the East Bay, the putting, the pipe band, the houses called Nia Roo and Whigmaleerie, the puffin-watching, the trips round the Bass Rock on Sula II, the Bostock bakery and its exquisite bourgeois breakfast treats, the leaky harbour, the cheeky banter you get from behind the counter at the N Berwick Fry. Well, some of those things.
I don’t really care. North Berwick is amazing. It has always been amazing. And one of the most amazing things about it is how it never changes, yet is a completely different place to the town I grew up in.
Let’s start at Steampunk. I love Steampunk. I am a coffee bore, and I couldn’t be happier that there is a place for proper coffee in NB. Of course, for a North Berwick veteran, the Steampunk building is a magical place, because back in the day it used to host a shop called Goods ’n’Garb. Goods ’n’ Garb had a subtle art nouveau sign on the wall outside, but inside it was a Xanadu of priceless jumble. The whole world was in there. Clothes, antiques, crud. I got about a dozen Frank Sinatra LPs for almost nothing, and I treasure the story of how the store was visited by a local Tory dignitary - let’s call him a dignitory - who wanted to donate some of his old pinstripe suits, though they were worn thin and shiny in the arse from luxuriating on the red leather benches of the House of Lords. “Perhaps a working man could wear then under his boiler suit,” he suggested.
Let’s talk summer jobs. I had four. One year, I worked as a gardener/handyman in the Redcroft old people’s home. Redcroft was a handsome building by the railway bridge on the way out of town. I was nobody’s idea of a handyman, so my activities were mostly restricted to gardening, with the occasional walk into town to pick up prescriptions and moonshine for the home’s residents. I was a hopeless gardener too, but I loved the lunch hour, where I would sit quietly with the head gardener, Mr Davies, listening to The World At One. He would quiz me gently about my life ambitions. Mr Davies had been a banker and hated it, hence the gardening. He was the first adult I’d had conversations with who wasn’t my parents and he was patient and surprising. “If my son wants to go to university,” he would say, “he’ll have to tell me why.”
Redcroft isn’t there anymore. It was demolished and the grounds are now occupied by a cluster of oversized executive homes, because North Berwick is very popular with oversized executives. But I recently found a postcard of the building in its heyday. Because what I sort of understood, but never quite knew, was that Redcroft was a hotel before it was an old people’s home. The vast lawn, the edges of which I used to trim, had been tennis courts. (A map of this metaphor will be available in the foyer afterwards.)
Yes, hotels. You won’t see the Station Hotel anymore either. It was, as you’d expect, on the corner by the station, with views over the town. I think that might have been the first place I ever saw the word “brunch”. The Station Hotel was demolished, and turned into flats. I feel a pang whenever I pass that corner on the road into town. Not because of the hotel. My sadistic dentist was on the other side of the road. He ruined my teeth. “It won’t matter,” he told my mum, “he’s a boy.”
Hotels, continued. I had a job at the Marine Hotel. It was a fine establishment which had been finer in the past. When the golfers stayed there, we waited outside and got their autographs. I was impressed by Bernard Gallagher and told my dad he was handsome. What I meant was that he had a deep tan, but my dad was, I think, worried that calling golfers handsome might be a sign of latent homosexuality. (Handsomeness also figured at school. Miss Thorburn, the lovely primary six teacher, asked us to define the word, and laughed when I put up my hand and said “Gregory Peck”. I had no idea who Gregory Peck was, but I had heard his name at my mum’s coffee mornings, and understood that whatever handsomeness was, he had some).
I worked in the kitchen of the Marine as a KP, a kitchen porter. Mostly, this meant washing pots in lukewarm water with no Fairy liquid. And these were big pots. There was a walk-in fridge, and in that fridge there was the mid-section of a shark. That was another thing I had never seen before, except in Jaws.
My dishwashing skills got me a job at Sam’s Ices, a large cafe on Quality Street, halfway between the harbour and the chippie. Sam’s was all right. It had rocket-fuelled espresso. But the finest iteration of that cafe was its previous guise as the Luca’s ice cream parlour. When it was Luca’s, the back wall of the cafe was wallpapered with a photographic mural of the harbour, and it was the place I was sent while my parents played in a putting competition. Me and my brother were given 30p and told to treat ourselves to a Knickerbocker Glory. I still feel a twinge of transgression thinking about it. Not just the knickerbockers, but the glacé cherry on top, the tinned peaches at the bottom of that tall glass, the ice cream, the nuts, and the cream in the middle. It was a treat in a life of Instant Whip, to be supped with a long spoon.
did go to university, of course. That meant leaving town, which was all of my ambitions. The summer before I went, I worked as a shelf-stacker in the Galbraith’s supermarket. This is one of those instances where the size of a memory and the architecture do not tally. Galbraith’s was a huge place. It was the biggest supermarket in town. There was a front shop and a back shop. In the front shop, I kept myself busy, wielding the price gun like The Virginian, stacking the sugar into mountainous heaps, trying to hide whenever a teacher came into the shop. In this, I failed twice. Miss Dodd, my Modern Studies teacher, terrorised me by appearing from nowhere to ask me where I had put the natural yoghurt, a concept which baffled me. I wasn’t from a yoghurt-eating family. We preferred frozen Supermousses, which we ate straight from the ice box, though I can see now that there were probably meant to be thawed first. And my ferocious English teacher, Miss Taylor - who liked nothing more than to dissect the erotic verse of John Donne - pulled me from the deep chest freezer to inform me that my Sixth Year Studies result was a disappointment to her, the school, and the wider poetic universe. Perhaps if I had read the books I was writing about it might have been better, but we’ll never know. I’m left with the guilt, and a certain portion of my brain which continues to worry about whether George Orwell was a revolutionary or a conservative. I could write it now, but nobody’s asking. Even thinking about it brings a chill to my cheeks, along with flashing hallucinations of Marshall’s Chunky Chickens. I saw some frightening things in Galbraiths, but the staff were kind to me in the end. They gifted me a Parker pen, for all of the pointless writing I would be doing.
That was then. And if the Then of childhood hangs heavy over the autumn of adult reminiscence, I am aware that there is a Now too. Galbraith’s is now the Co-op, and it’s a fairly small shop. The big Tesco lurks on the edge of town, selling everything. Much of the stuff of childhood is gone: the crazy golf, the skittles, the trampolines in the Lodge, and - most significantly, the cinema and the open air pool. In my book, Alternatives To Valium, I wrote at length about seeing The Omega Man at the cinema. It was a formative experience from which I have yet to recover. Similarly, I like too amuse my daughter by telling her the story of learning to swim in the pool, and being given a certificate to prove that I had managed four strokes before sinking. (My friend received a “No strokes” certificate, because all must have prizes). This tale is my motivational dad speech, my equivalent of Robert Bruce and the spider, because I persevered. The following year, I was able to swim 10m, and was rewarded with a small purple patch which my mum did not sew on to my trunks.
Imagine if North Berwick still had the cinema and the pool. It would be better than perfect. For the moment, perfect will have to do, though it pains me that other people will hear about it, prompting more outsized executives to aspire to live in a field on the outskirts of town. I couldn’t afford to move back now, so it remains a dream, a kinescope of sunny memories, and occasional lightning flashes of violence. When I do back for a visit, I climb the Law and look down over the ruined lookout, and I see the changes, and the volcanic beauty that remains.
I don’t live there any more. I can never leave.
I
A very emotive piece with just the right touch of wry, sly sarcasm. Would not seem out of place as a newspaper column (except it's not snarky enough for most of those in the UK). Cheers.
What a beautiful love letter.