Thursday, June 30, 2011
WHO CALI-FORNICATED FARNHAM?
'Californication...' sang the busker at the top of gentrified Lion and Lamb Yard, off West Street, in what used to be a very special and largely peaceful little Surrey town. If you're not familiar with the term Californication, it refers to what happens to somewhere beautiful if you allow rampant overdevelopment. 'Don't Californicate Oregon', read the bumper stickers in the golden state's woody neighbour. 'Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye' went The Eagles' lament for bounteous America in the final song on Hotel California - 'The Last Resort'. As Don Henley was reported to have said: "The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence — by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment."
After trying to negotiate Farnham's car-jammed roads and wandering its crowded streets for half an hour, for only the second time in thirty years, I couldn't help thinking the busker was really singing a lament for the town itself as I fled the mayhem for the tranquility of lovely Dockenfield, to the south, in search of an old friend.
I moved to Farnham in 1978 to start work at Hammick's, the bookseller in Downing Street. My first job, on what was even for those far-off days the fairly paltry salary of £2,000 - that's the book trade for you - was actually at the company's warehouse in Alton. Fortunately I was allocated a room in the two-storey staff flat over the shop, accessed through the shop itself. I think the rent was very low, if not rent-free, which was just as well, considering how little we were paid - but then those were the days when people who wanted to get into the book trade were expected to be motivated as much by the love of books as anything so sordid as a living wage or a career!
Such were the times, that the three of us who lived overhead had the free run of what was in effect a personal library and it was a very special experience to wander the shop quietly after hours, browse the bookshelves and borrow anything we fancied to read. I don't think the shop even had an alarm system. It was a charming old building in a row of shops, probably Georgian in origin or even earlier and was the only one to retain its ornate window - possibly Victorian or older. At that time, there were still numerous little alleys and passages in the town, sometimes blocked off by doors or gates, through which mysterious redundant yards could be glimpsed. Lion and Lamb Yard was one such and it was part of Farnham's charm that there were these wasted, gently decaying spaces that whispered eloquently of the hustle and bustle of days gone by. I walked through what had been Hammick's to find the dear old place had been gutted long since and turned into a corporately soulless chain optician - even the staircase had been moved and the large rear extension, which used to house the children's book department, had been made even bigger, taking over nearly the whole of the leafy courtyard where I used to park my motorbike during the day; at night I wheeled it into the shop to keep it safe from pissed-up pub-goers.
Although the town seemed outwardly to be quite comfortable, nay genteel and perhaps even then more than a bit pleased with itself, it had some rough edges. At the bottom of Castle Street was a pub called the Coach and Horses. I hadn't been living in Farnham long before I learned that its nickname was the 'Coke and Hashish' and I'm sure that doesn't require any explanation. Today it's a 'bar-restaurant' called The Coach - one of many that now litter the town. Halfway up Castle Street was The Nelson Arms, where I got a part-time job to supplement my pathetic income. The landlady was a rather fierce woman called Mary - so fierce in fact that she gave rise to a graffito in the gents along the lines of the Smirnoff vodka advertising campaign, which used the strapline 'I thought ..... was a ..... until I discovered Smirnoff vodka'. In this case it was ' I thought a Bloody Mary was a drink until I discovered the Nelson Arms' - marvellously and succinctly eloquent, really. There were others, one or two of which have remained with me: 'Snow White thought Seven Up was a soft drink until she discovered Smirnoff vodka' - that kind of thing. Today all appears to be safely suburban, although doubtless there are pockets of resistance.
Even the fairly sedate Nelson wasn't immune from the sort of high jinks that went on at the Coach and Horses. I was actually drinking in the Nelson one evening - as opposed to working behind the bar. I'd arrived on my motorbike (tame Japanese stuff, not full-on leather Triumph or something), along with my housemate on his machine. We were chatting to a guy with whom I was at school, although he was older than me - in my brother's year. He'd spent some time in the Royal Marines, which wasn't surprising - he'd been in the First XV at school and was a tough cookie. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone pick up my crash helmet from where I'd parked it. I immediately went over to him and asked him what he thought he was doing and told him to give me my helmet back. He said 'Say please', so being the hard-arsed bookseller that I was, I did. He still didn't give the helmet back, so I grabbed it and turned away. As I did so, he punched me on the shoulder. Big mistake. My ex-marine friend saw immediately what was going on and shot out a mighty fist, which sent my tormentor literally flying across the bar - something until then I thought really did only happen in films. There were no further problems, although I gave up drinking at the Nelson, since I couldn't guarantee my saviour would be there in future! And I gave up the bar job when I got promoted. Anyway, we had moved on - to the Hop Blossom, in a little side street just off Castle Street, one of the new wave of real ale pubs with sawdusted floors, pork scratchings, interesting things to drink (I eschewed real ale for real cider) and a very affable landlord called Tony - where is he now?
Another memorable pub was the William Cobbett, also popular with bikers. It even had an oaken plaque hanging up in the bar bearing the inscribed words: 'two wheeled horseless carriages' - possibly the result of some greaser's carpentry homework. It was at the Cobbett where I had my first date with Susan, whom I had espied working in a 'trendy winebar' called Sevens in the Borough. Sevens was probably the forerunner of the rash of similar places that have so suburbanised Farnham today, indeed I think it's now a branch of Prezzo, but at the time it was a one-off and so quite cool. A friend called Mark managed the place and I spotted Susan waitressing there one lunchtime. She was gorgeous and I was smitten. I found out where she lived from Mark, dropped by on my bike and asked her out. Amazingly, she said yes. She smoked Marlboro and I thought it would be churlish of me (and more than a trifle uncool) to refuse when she offered me one, so began an off-on affair with the weed that lasted until I was 32, although I downgraded to wimpier Silk Cut 'gaspers' long before then.
Susan turned out to be a real heartbreaker, but that's another story. After six months in the Alton warehouse I had got a job in the shop itself and by the time I left Farnham in 1981 I had risen to the dizzy heights of Assistant Manager, earning £3,750 a year! That was as far as I could go, since Phoebe the lovely manager was very comfortable in her job and showed no signs of moving on. I had originally got into bookselling on the advice of Nigel Sissons, he of Hamish Hamilton fame, who had been in the Army with my father. I went to see him for advice on how to get into publishing and he recommended spending some time in the trade first. However, by the time I had been in it for a couple of years it was painfully obvious that there was no money to be made in books - at least not at the sharp end and that the footsoldiers of the industry were underpaid worker bees whose love of books was cynically and ruthlessly exploited by - well, everyone, really.
However, if you were tuned in to it, the bookishness of Hammick's and one or two antiquarian booksellers pervaded the town, which still reverberated gently to the ghostly local influences of William Cobbett and his Rural Rides, Gilbert White and his Natural History of Selborne and the gentility of Jane Austen. Cobbett's and White's books were steady sellers at Hammick's and it wasn't difficult to evoke the atmosphere they conveyed directly. Now, that is all lost under the cacophony of regular gridlocks in the town centre's teeming streets.
A year or two after I arrived in Farnham, an old college friend and I got together to share a house - at Shady Nook (yes, it really was called that) at the top of the hill you reached when you left Farnham up Castle Street. A devoutly evangelical Christian fellow-Hammickite and talented mechanic took the third bedroom and not long afterwards my then-unemployed elder brother arrived and took the fourth. I collected him from the station (illegally) on my 200cc motorbike after I took the L-plates off and we weaved our way back up to Shady Nook with him balancing a single suitcase on his lap. He soon got a job in the ironmongers opposite the Cobbett and could be seen in there for a while in the traditional khaki coat, until he moved on to bigger things as a journalist on a medical publication in Guildford.
We had some wild-ish times at Shady Nook - or Shapely Knockers as we re-Christened it - not least because my brother was a fanatical skydiver and an assortment of similarly afflicted people (including my younger brother, for a while) would turn up at weekends and head off to Netheravon to, as my father put it, 'jump out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes' - anathema to an old soldier! When they returned, still high on adrenaline (and one or three beers at the Dog and Gun in 'Nethers', I suspect), the party would get started. One of our number sold BMWs very successfully in the City, so he was always turning up in these incredible cars, while the rest of us drove around in heaps or rode motorbikes. It used to amuse the neighbours no end when he burned rubber in the quiet cul-de-sac as he departed in his latest beast and what with the noise from my very powerful hi-fi as the skydivers 'dirt-dived' in the sitting room to Boston's 'More than a feeling' and OMD's 'Enola Gay', no weekend was complete without a courtesy visit from Surrey's finest.
But I digress.
Like tourist attractions and the most desirable places to live in our increasingly overcrowded world, Farnham seems to have become a victim of its own loveliness, so that it is no longer lovely, or special, but something akin to Richmond or Chiswick or some other sought-after but anonymous and over-developed London suburb. The people who live in Farnham today probably think they've arrived, as they drink and eat in the town's expensive wine bars and restaurants and relax in their staggeringly expensive houses, feeling quite a bit more than a little pleased with themselves. But there is something intangible and fragile missing from the town that can never be replaced - I know, I was there when it still existed.
A lot of it has to do with excessive development - shoehorning in houses where space should have been preserved - and tacking on incongruous commercial development that has distorted the proportions of the place and which sucks in far too much traffic, business and people. I dare say that what has happened to Farnham only reflects what has happened to thousands of other sleepy little market towns the length and breadth of the country, but I don't know about them. Farnham is in Surrey, but in my day seemed to be geographically not of it - it was much more a Hampshire kind of place, perhaps because it was perched right on the county boundary. Now it could be Cobham or Effingham for all the difference and specialness it conveys, as the baleful influence of London creeps ever-further outwards.
When I reached Dockenfield, I called in at the home of my old friend's brother and, remarking on what a hell-hole Farnham had become, asked if he ever goes there these days. He doesn't - and I wish I hadn't.
'Californication...' sang the busker at the top of gentrified Lion and Lamb Yard, off West Street, in what used to be a very special and largely peaceful little Surrey town. If you're not familiar with the term Californication, it refers to what happens to somewhere beautiful if you allow rampant overdevelopment. 'Don't Californicate Oregon', read the bumper stickers in the golden state's woody neighbour. 'Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye' went The Eagles' lament for bounteous America in the final song on Hotel California - 'The Last Resort'. As Don Henley was reported to have said: "The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence — by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment."
After trying to negotiate Farnham's car-jammed roads and wandering its crowded streets for half an hour, for only the second time in thirty years, I couldn't help thinking the busker was really singing a lament for the town itself as I fled the mayhem for the tranquility of lovely Dockenfield, to the south, in search of an old friend.
I moved to Farnham in 1978 to start work at Hammick's, the bookseller in Downing Street. My first job, on what was even for those far-off days the fairly paltry salary of £2,000 - that's the book trade for you - was actually at the company's warehouse in Alton. Fortunately I was allocated a room in the two-storey staff flat over the shop, accessed through the shop itself. I think the rent was very low, if not rent-free, which was just as well, considering how little we were paid - but then those were the days when people who wanted to get into the book trade were expected to be motivated as much by the love of books as anything so sordid as a living wage or a career!
Such were the times, that the three of us who lived overhead had the free run of what was in effect a personal library and it was a very special experience to wander the shop quietly after hours, browse the bookshelves and borrow anything we fancied to read. I don't think the shop even had an alarm system. It was a charming old building in a row of shops, probably Georgian in origin or even earlier and was the only one to retain its ornate window - possibly Victorian or older. At that time, there were still numerous little alleys and passages in the town, sometimes blocked off by doors or gates, through which mysterious redundant yards could be glimpsed. Lion and Lamb Yard was one such and it was part of Farnham's charm that there were these wasted, gently decaying spaces that whispered eloquently of the hustle and bustle of days gone by. I walked through what had been Hammick's to find the dear old place had been gutted long since and turned into a corporately soulless chain optician - even the staircase had been moved and the large rear extension, which used to house the children's book department, had been made even bigger, taking over nearly the whole of the leafy courtyard where I used to park my motorbike during the day; at night I wheeled it into the shop to keep it safe from pissed-up pub-goers.
Although the town seemed outwardly to be quite comfortable, nay genteel and perhaps even then more than a bit pleased with itself, it had some rough edges. At the bottom of Castle Street was a pub called the Coach and Horses. I hadn't been living in Farnham long before I learned that its nickname was the 'Coke and Hashish' and I'm sure that doesn't require any explanation. Today it's a 'bar-restaurant' called The Coach - one of many that now litter the town. Halfway up Castle Street was The Nelson Arms, where I got a part-time job to supplement my pathetic income. The landlady was a rather fierce woman called Mary - so fierce in fact that she gave rise to a graffito in the gents along the lines of the Smirnoff vodka advertising campaign, which used the strapline 'I thought ..... was a ..... until I discovered Smirnoff vodka'. In this case it was ' I thought a Bloody Mary was a drink until I discovered the Nelson Arms' - marvellously and succinctly eloquent, really. There were others, one or two of which have remained with me: 'Snow White thought Seven Up was a soft drink until she discovered Smirnoff vodka' - that kind of thing. Today all appears to be safely suburban, although doubtless there are pockets of resistance.
Even the fairly sedate Nelson wasn't immune from the sort of high jinks that went on at the Coach and Horses. I was actually drinking in the Nelson one evening - as opposed to working behind the bar. I'd arrived on my motorbike (tame Japanese stuff, not full-on leather Triumph or something), along with my housemate on his machine. We were chatting to a guy with whom I was at school, although he was older than me - in my brother's year. He'd spent some time in the Royal Marines, which wasn't surprising - he'd been in the First XV at school and was a tough cookie. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone pick up my crash helmet from where I'd parked it. I immediately went over to him and asked him what he thought he was doing and told him to give me my helmet back. He said 'Say please', so being the hard-arsed bookseller that I was, I did. He still didn't give the helmet back, so I grabbed it and turned away. As I did so, he punched me on the shoulder. Big mistake. My ex-marine friend saw immediately what was going on and shot out a mighty fist, which sent my tormentor literally flying across the bar - something until then I thought really did only happen in films. There were no further problems, although I gave up drinking at the Nelson, since I couldn't guarantee my saviour would be there in future! And I gave up the bar job when I got promoted. Anyway, we had moved on - to the Hop Blossom, in a little side street just off Castle Street, one of the new wave of real ale pubs with sawdusted floors, pork scratchings, interesting things to drink (I eschewed real ale for real cider) and a very affable landlord called Tony - where is he now?
Another memorable pub was the William Cobbett, also popular with bikers. It even had an oaken plaque hanging up in the bar bearing the inscribed words: 'two wheeled horseless carriages' - possibly the result of some greaser's carpentry homework. It was at the Cobbett where I had my first date with Susan, whom I had espied working in a 'trendy winebar' called Sevens in the Borough. Sevens was probably the forerunner of the rash of similar places that have so suburbanised Farnham today, indeed I think it's now a branch of Prezzo, but at the time it was a one-off and so quite cool. A friend called Mark managed the place and I spotted Susan waitressing there one lunchtime. She was gorgeous and I was smitten. I found out where she lived from Mark, dropped by on my bike and asked her out. Amazingly, she said yes. She smoked Marlboro and I thought it would be churlish of me (and more than a trifle uncool) to refuse when she offered me one, so began an off-on affair with the weed that lasted until I was 32, although I downgraded to wimpier Silk Cut 'gaspers' long before then.
Susan turned out to be a real heartbreaker, but that's another story. After six months in the Alton warehouse I had got a job in the shop itself and by the time I left Farnham in 1981 I had risen to the dizzy heights of Assistant Manager, earning £3,750 a year! That was as far as I could go, since Phoebe the lovely manager was very comfortable in her job and showed no signs of moving on. I had originally got into bookselling on the advice of Nigel Sissons, he of Hamish Hamilton fame, who had been in the Army with my father. I went to see him for advice on how to get into publishing and he recommended spending some time in the trade first. However, by the time I had been in it for a couple of years it was painfully obvious that there was no money to be made in books - at least not at the sharp end and that the footsoldiers of the industry were underpaid worker bees whose love of books was cynically and ruthlessly exploited by - well, everyone, really.
However, if you were tuned in to it, the bookishness of Hammick's and one or two antiquarian booksellers pervaded the town, which still reverberated gently to the ghostly local influences of William Cobbett and his Rural Rides, Gilbert White and his Natural History of Selborne and the gentility of Jane Austen. Cobbett's and White's books were steady sellers at Hammick's and it wasn't difficult to evoke the atmosphere they conveyed directly. Now, that is all lost under the cacophony of regular gridlocks in the town centre's teeming streets.
A year or two after I arrived in Farnham, an old college friend and I got together to share a house - at Shady Nook (yes, it really was called that) at the top of the hill you reached when you left Farnham up Castle Street. A devoutly evangelical Christian fellow-Hammickite and talented mechanic took the third bedroom and not long afterwards my then-unemployed elder brother arrived and took the fourth. I collected him from the station (illegally) on my 200cc motorbike after I took the L-plates off and we weaved our way back up to Shady Nook with him balancing a single suitcase on his lap. He soon got a job in the ironmongers opposite the Cobbett and could be seen in there for a while in the traditional khaki coat, until he moved on to bigger things as a journalist on a medical publication in Guildford.
We had some wild-ish times at Shady Nook - or Shapely Knockers as we re-Christened it - not least because my brother was a fanatical skydiver and an assortment of similarly afflicted people (including my younger brother, for a while) would turn up at weekends and head off to Netheravon to, as my father put it, 'jump out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes' - anathema to an old soldier! When they returned, still high on adrenaline (and one or three beers at the Dog and Gun in 'Nethers', I suspect), the party would get started. One of our number sold BMWs very successfully in the City, so he was always turning up in these incredible cars, while the rest of us drove around in heaps or rode motorbikes. It used to amuse the neighbours no end when he burned rubber in the quiet cul-de-sac as he departed in his latest beast and what with the noise from my very powerful hi-fi as the skydivers 'dirt-dived' in the sitting room to Boston's 'More than a feeling' and OMD's 'Enola Gay', no weekend was complete without a courtesy visit from Surrey's finest.
But I digress.
Like tourist attractions and the most desirable places to live in our increasingly overcrowded world, Farnham seems to have become a victim of its own loveliness, so that it is no longer lovely, or special, but something akin to Richmond or Chiswick or some other sought-after but anonymous and over-developed London suburb. The people who live in Farnham today probably think they've arrived, as they drink and eat in the town's expensive wine bars and restaurants and relax in their staggeringly expensive houses, feeling quite a bit more than a little pleased with themselves. But there is something intangible and fragile missing from the town that can never be replaced - I know, I was there when it still existed.
A lot of it has to do with excessive development - shoehorning in houses where space should have been preserved - and tacking on incongruous commercial development that has distorted the proportions of the place and which sucks in far too much traffic, business and people. I dare say that what has happened to Farnham only reflects what has happened to thousands of other sleepy little market towns the length and breadth of the country, but I don't know about them. Farnham is in Surrey, but in my day seemed to be geographically not of it - it was much more a Hampshire kind of place, perhaps because it was perched right on the county boundary. Now it could be Cobham or Effingham for all the difference and specialness it conveys, as the baleful influence of London creeps ever-further outwards.
When I reached Dockenfield, I called in at the home of my old friend's brother and, remarking on what a hell-hole Farnham had become, asked if he ever goes there these days. He doesn't - and I wish I hadn't.
Labels: Coach and Horses, Farnham, Hammick's, William Cobbett
