Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

‘That’s enough,’ the passenger said. ‘Take me back.’

‘I can take you over to the Loose Cannon,’ the boatman said. ‘There’s no more to pay.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ the passenger said, and though they seemed to be facing in the correct direction, the boat swung round in the stream, pulled by one oar, in a full circle, facing in turn the city and the roar of the motorway over the estuary, the remote blue hills where the sun was setting, and then seawards, where everything goes in the end. And on the jetty, the small figure knelt, opening up a black-backed computer, the blue light of the screen illuminating what, after all, was the cropped hair and small face of a pretty girl, intent on her digital task.

Hanmouth, that well-known town on the Hain estuary on the north coast of Devon, formed a stratified appearance whichever way you looked at it. The four streets of the place ran between and parallel to the railway line to the coast and the estuary itself. Less stately thoroughfares—alleyways, gennels, cut-throughs, setback squares of white-painted nineteenth-century almshouses and 1930s suburban ‘closes’ with front gardens made out of a bare foot or two of leftover land—squiggled more liberally across the four vertical and distinguished avenues. The first of those verticals ran seamlessly from Ferry Road in the north to the Strand in the south, knotting around the quay and rising to three historic pubs, a plaque commemorating the birthplace of a centuries-dead attorney general and, at its most expensive, unfettered views of the estuary and the hills beyond, crested with a remote and ducal folly-tower. On this first street lived newsreaders, property magnates, people who had made their money in computers and telecommunications. The first house in Hanmouth to sell for a million pounds was here, and pointed out by the innocent locals; but that had been seven years ago, and the figure was losing its lustre, and had long lost its uniqueness. The pinnacle of envy for miles around, for half a county, the Strand in the south was a series of Dutch-gabled houses, pink, cream, terracotta-red-fronted, and everyone, it was said, lived there, meaning that everyone, of course, did not.

Only an odd few lived in the second avenue, the shopping street; the Brigadier and his wife in a wide, flat, shallow eighteenth-century one-house terrace of brick, facing the wrong direction as if it had turned its back on the commerce. The Fore street was holding up well; the community centre, built in municipal interbellum brick, was celebrating its eightieth birthday next year with a Hanmouth Players production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun , among other things. Outside the community centre was a bronze statue of a boy fishing on his haunches, with an elbow on either knee and an expression of great concentration. The statue had been commissioned for the hall’s fiftieth anniversary, which had coincided with the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977. It had been unveiled at the height of a street party, trestle tables snaking down the whole length of the Fore street, and was instantly and universally known, even in the hand-printed guide to Hanmouth the second-hand bookshop sold, as the Crapping Juvenile. As for the rest of the Fore street: the new Tesco out of town had had no effect on the excellent butcher, the fair-to-middling greengrocer. Had no power, either, over the knick-knack shops, the amateur jewellers making a go of it, or the Oriental emporium run by the two retired sisters, stocked by bi-annual trips to the markets of south India; they returned from Madurai with triumphant rolls of bright silk, hand-made soap, and encrusted, elaborate, tarnished silver trinket boxes to be sold at twelve times the purchase price.

On the other side of the Fore street, as the railway line grew more apparent, the bohemians, the aspiring many who had escaped only so far from Barnstaple, lived in polite and tidy houses, designed for eighteenth-century churchwardens or pre-war shopkeepers. Here, their view was of their neighbours’ windows, principally. In the town, there was one school, supposed to be very good, one fortnightly French-style market, twelve antiques shops and a junk market, a fishmonger with an almost daily van and seven churches, ranging from those that turned to the east during the Creed with hats on, to one that frankly and openly prostrated itself before spiritual emanations, this last in a converted bike shed with a corrugated-iron roof. Miranda Kenyon, who taught at the university and lived in a Dutch house on the Strand, often announced that she had promised herself she would go into that last, mad church one of these Sundays.

That was the part of Hanmouth people thought of when they aspired to live there. It was the part that pronounced their town Hammuth . The bright upward side of leisurely high-fronted Dutch houses, their glass-punctured façades big and shining with the sun setting over the westward hills, its inhabitants pouring a first drink of the evening behind leaded, curving windows, occupying themselves by counting the long-legged wading birds in the shining estuary. They thought of the square Protestant whitewashed houses in the streets behind, or at worst the Edwardian villas further back, towards the railway line. The railway, bearing only the trundling little train to the coastal stretch around Heycombe, was charming in final effect, rather than a noisy interruption of Hanmouth’s postcard qualities. The flowerbeds at the station were well kept, with ‘HANMOUTH’ in topiary, and a level crossing at which widows with woven wicker shopping baskets lined in gingham always seemed to be waiting patiently. A couple of hundred yards down from the station, a white wicket gate and a footpath across the track showed that this was a rare surviving branch line of the sort that was supposed to have been eradicated decades ago. It was quite charming, and harmless.

The people of Hanmouth were conscious of their pleasant, attractive, functioning little town, and they protected it. A police station with a square blue lamp and a miniature fire station added to the miniaturized, clockwork impression. Its one nuisance was represented by the twelve pubs of the town; there was a sport among the students of the university to embark on the Hanmouth Twelve, a mammoth holiday pub-crawl, which sometimes ended with drunken manly widdling off the jetty, as gay Sam put it, late-night vomit on the station platform to greet you with your early-morning train, and once, a smashed window in the florist’s shop at the quay end of the Fore street. These small-town irritations, the responsibility of outsiders, were talked over in the newsagent’s and in the streets. Mr Calvin, to everyone’s approval, took the sort of initiative only newcomers were likely to take, and formed a Neighbourhood Watch. There was some nervous joshing that you’d have to join in a prayer circle before the meetings got going, but in the end they’d been a great success, as everyone agreed. In the last couple of years, security cameras had been put up over the station in both directions, and at the quay where people waited for buses into Barnstaple. Then a little more lobbying secured six more, and as John Calvin said he had explained to Neighbourhood Watch, and Neighbourhood Watch would explain in turn to everyone they knew, now you could walk from one end of the Fore street to the other at any time of the day or night without fear, watched by CCTV. Even quite old ladies knew to say ‘CCTV’ now. ‘You’ve got nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong,’ John Calvin said. ‘Nothing to hide: nothing to fear,’ he added, quoting a government slogan of the day, and in the open-faced and street-fronting houses of Hanmouth, often wanting to boast about the elegant opulence of their private lives, the rich of Hanmouth tended to agree.