Now I only had a few minutes to get to the hall, and I was already in a bad mood.
The hall? I suppose that sounds bit grand. Now you’re thinking that Stones has got off with some rich bird who lives in a bloody great mansion somewhere. What a hypocrite, you think. Well, tough — you’re wrong. Lisa is a tourist guide at Hardwick Hall. That’s Bess of Hardwick’s gaff, right on the border with Derbyshire. You’ll no doubt have noticed its graceful Tudor turrets from the M1 on your way south between junctions 29 and 28? Like hell you will. Like everyone else, all you’ll have noticed is the bumper of the car in front and the signs telling you how far it is to the next service area.
But take my word for it, it’s there. In fact, there are two halls — the Elizabethan mansion built by the Countess of Shrewsbury (that’s Bess’s Sunday name), and next to it the ruins of an earlier effort.
Lisa has the shitty job of shepherding hordes of ignorant visitors about all day, answering bloody stupid questions. You wouldn’t believe some of them. Most of these people don’t know Bess of Hardwick from Tess of the d’Urbervilles. They’ve come because it’s next on the list of places to visit on their tourist board kitchen calendars. Or maybe they got lost on the M1 at Heath and ended up somewhere real, not knowing quite how to handle it. When they arrive at Hardwick, they expect Shakespeare to have written Romeo and Juliet there or something. Lisa has to explain two thousand years of English history in thirty seconds, and do it fifty times a day. But then, she’s good at it. She’s good at a few other things as well, but I’m keeping those to myself for now.
Thoughts like these kept me warm while I drove the Subaru west through Meden Vale, Church Warsop and Warsop Vale to reach Shirebrook, a village that is all back streets, plus a one-way system that directs you away from the shopping centre, which is shut anyway. By the time I got to this gem in Nottinghamshire’s crown I’d already passed four pits — Medensworth, Welbeck, Warsop and Shirebrook itself. But then I began to wind my way through some lanes towards Stony Houghton, and the pits might as well have been in a different country. I started to feel quite cheerful. Hardwick and Lisa were ahead, both of them nestling invitingly in a bit of parkland that was as far from the Forest Estate as you can get and still be within ten miles.
Getting to Hardwick Hall is a bit of a neat trick, though. The hall lies east of the M1, on the Nottinghamshire side. But to get there you have to go past it, cross the motorway at junction 29, then sneak back under again on a little side road. If it weren’t for the little brown tourist signs at the junctions, you’d never find it, even though you can see the towers up there on the hillside.
Like all the big historic gaffs in this part of the world, Hardwick Hall is well within a miner’s spitting distance of slag heaps — in this case, the remains of Teversal Colliery. Of course, this didn’t bother Bess of Hardwick when she built the place (the hall I mean, not the pit). She’d lived in the Old Hall until her husband died. This particular husband — number three — was the Earl of Shrewsbury, and of course he was loaded with dosh. So Bess used his money to build a bigger, grander hall. She was already seventy at the time, and it took seven years to finish the place. But what else would you do with so much money at her age?
It’s been written that Hardwick is ‘a milestone in the history of civilised taste’. Some folk would think it’s more of a millstone. Think of all that money, they say, poured into a bloody enormous house for one batty old woman to live in. Paintings and tapestries and carpets and staircases and wood-panelled corridors. Who needs it?
But not me. I think about the blokes who worked on it. It took them seven years — so they weren’t your average cowboy builders, were they? We’re not talking the old ‘sling up a bit of breeze block and slap some paint on it before the plaster’s dry’ techniques of the late twentieth century. They were craftsmen, these blokes, who put their whole lives into producing places like Hardwick. The Great High Chamber has a coloured plaster frieze a hundred and sixty-six feet long that will knock your eyes out. The Gallery has three bay windows — each of them about the size of a modern council house.
Then you should go and look at the Great Kitchen downstairs. Who do you think slaved away at those sinks and chopping boards? Who lugged crates of wine up from the cellars, and who broke their backs to produce vegetables all the year round from the garden? Not Bess of chuffin’ Hardwick anyway. It may have been her money, or her dead hubby’s. But it was ordinary folk’s sweat that built the hall and kept it running.
While I waited in the car park, I eyed up some of the tourist types drifting in and out of the hall and wandering about the grounds. Most of them looked as though they might just as well have been at Alton Towers or Disney World. Today they’d been for a whiteknuckle culture ride. Really scary stuff. There was a carved ceiling in there that could make you forget which way up you are. And then, of course, there’s the usual souvenir shop, where they turn you upside down until the coins fall out of your pockets. Who needs the Corkscrew Rollercoaster?
I felt sorry for some of the kids being dragged about. It’s supposed to be part of their education. But they just get the impression that in the old days everybody lived in massive houses and had servants. It makes them wonder why their own family lives in a shoebox-sized semi made out of cardboard and have to move their own wheelie bins to keep the binmen happy. Nobody bothers to explain to the poor little sods that if they had lived in Bess’s time, they would have been the servants. No Nintendos or telly, no designer jeans or Big Macs. Not even any school. Or wages. Or shoes. And no Sunday afternoon outings to places like Hardwick either. Yes, you can make them learn from history if you take the trouble. But if you don’t do it properly they grow up feeling all deprived because they haven’t got three maids and a footman.
I was loitering near one of the side entrances, where a sign at the gate says ‘Residents only’. But we’re not talking Bess herself here, or even her impoverished descendants. The residents now are caretakers, National Trust staff — there to see that the hoi polloi don’t get in at night and nick the tapestries. As if we would.
When Lisa came out, she wasn’t alone. From a distance, she always looks small and fragile. She’s fair, and I suppose a bit plain really, if you forced me to it. But her smile and that style she has make up for it. She’d got this way of holding herself as she talks to you that makes you feel you’re the most important person in the world. It’s a kind of a tilt of the head, a look in the eyes, an angling of the shoulders. And then when she smiles at you, you feel as though you’re already in bed together. What a trick. But just at the moment that smile was turned on someone other than me. I’m not a jealous bloke — emotions like that are dangerous in my business — but I like to know who my bird’s being chatted up by, just in case I have to feed him a knuckle sandwich.
This bloke was one I didn’t recognise. He looked like a tourist, but not the ordinary sort. For a start, he was wearing a suit instead of M & S casuals and he wasn’t carrying a Canon autofocus camera. He was much too smart. In fact, he stood out like a working man in a workingmen’s club.
I expected him to go in a moment or two. Probably he was just asking the way to the nearest craft shop. But he kept Lisa talking on the doorstep. She was nodding and chatting back, and she hadn’t even noticed I was there. This wasn’t on. It looked as though I’d have to take action.
I slipped out of the car and checked my jeans were suitably grubby. Levis never look right unless they’re a bit grubby, do they? One of the back pockets was hanging off, and there was a curious stain near my crotch which I couldn’t properly explain. I’d left my leather jacket off, because the weather was quite warm, and my check shirt was rolled up to the elbows and just about clinging together, held at the front by a couple of buttons. I had on my favourite belt with the big brass VW buckle (‘Very Wicked’ — get it?), and my boots were still streaked with mud. Somehow my hands had got covered in black oil at Metal Jacket’s workshop. My hair had been cropped to a number two on top only a couple of days before, but I’d left it long at the back, where it was starting to get in need of a wash. I reckoned I looked about right.