Talking Location With author D J Taylor – NORFOLK

21st March 2022

#TalkingLocationWith... D J Taylor, author of Stewkey Blues – NORFOLK

Even now, in a diverse and polyglot age, where the Norwich backstreets are full of Polish grocers and the Portuguese population of Thetford runs into thousands, being ‘local’ is still highly important in Norfolk. ‘I’m local’ elderly ladies on North Norfolk beaches sometimes counter if you complain about them not clearing up after their dogs – as if this were some kind of queenly perquisite that cancelled out the need for basic good manners.

I lived in Norwich until was 19, came back at 40 with a wife and three children and have stayed here ever since. Does that make me local?’ ‘You don’t sound local’ people sometimes tentatively propose, which stirs memories of my father’s lament about the ‘half-crown voice’ I supposedly brought back from my first term at Oxford. But yes, in any serious argument about Norfolk and its environs my upbringing in a four-bedroomed house a mile from Norwich city centre is a clincher. I’m local. Whereas as my wife, Rachel, brought up in Surrey, is still – to use a withering expression applied to those thought to be slyly colonising the place from origins beyond the county line – a ‘blow-in.

’Why write about Norfolk? Well, first there is the landscape – that monstrous expanse of almost entirely flat countryside that extends all the way from Elm in the remote north-west to Gorleston on the east coast and downward to the debatable lands of the Suffolk border, with nothing to stop the winds tearing in from Jutland to freeze the extremities of the insufficiently clad. Rachel always says that her first act on arriving in Norfolk for good was to send out for a set of winter underwear. As for me, raised in a house with one coalfire and two radiators, I think it’s a temperate kind of climate and simply don’t notice the chill.

Running up alongside the great bare fields and the scrubby hedgerows, the endless beaches and the windmill-strewn desolation of the Acle Strait are the people. What is it about the Norfolk citizenry, of whom, naturally, I am one? Where do they get their self-containment, their resolute refusal to be impressed and, above all, their devastating sense of irony? About forty years ago Punch printed a cartoon in which a tourist, asking two ancients on a village green for directions, remarks that ‘You two gentlemen must have been here a long time.’ ‘Yes indeed, sir’ one of them responds. ‘I’ve been here since afore the railways come. He’s only been here since Beeching took ‘em away.’ Well, there are still people like that here now poking around the Swaffham antique shops or drinking tea in the beach-side cafes, as confident and self-possessed as their Anglo-Saxon ancestors prospecting on the Breckland heaths.

The stories in Stewkey Blues are souvenirs of lockdown. They were all written in a six month stretch from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021 when Rachel and I were spending two afternoons a week delivering food-bank parcels around Norwich and the surrounding area. These excursions found me visiting parts of the area I hadn’t been to for three or four decades. It was not so much a nostalgic experience as an elegiac one, noting the things that had changed and, when it came to some of the council estates I remembered from my childhood, the things that very much hadn’t. Inevitably, some of the pieces have an autobiographical tint. ‘Kid Charlemagne’ is a memento of the bookshop in Norwich where I worked in university vacations. ‘Forty Years’ was inspired by an intensely depressing school old boys’ dinner. ‘Lads from Strat’ –‘Strat’ is Long Stratton out on the road to Diss –evokes the interiors of BBC Radio Norfolk’s HQ in Norwich, where my father had a Sunday afternoon show until his death in 2006.‘C.V.’ borrows its settings from my teenage paper-round. ‘Stewkey Blues’ are oddly-pigmented cockles, by the way, from Stiffkey on the coast. Stewkey is the local pronunciation. Its affectation by outsiders is reckoned presumptuous.

And here we are again, back with local etiquette, the protocols and situational givens that go with living here and which very few blow-ins can ever hope to understand. To me Norfolk is the most mundane place in the world and simultaneously the most extraordinary –weird, luminous and unsettling, and requiring the same sort of fictional treatment as Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories, in which the painfully routine and down-home characters are so cunningly and obliquely brought to life as to make them seem well-nigh extra-terrestrial. I loved writing Stewkey Blues, and pine to continue these explorations. A 700-page twenty-first century Norfolk Middlemarch probably wouldn’t do justice to the plans I have for the place. We shall see. In the meantime, it’s worth remembering –a phrase with which I used to console myself in the bleak years spent elsewhere –‘You can take the boy out of Norfolk, but you can’t take Norfolk out of the boy.’

Photo credit: Felix Taylor

D J TAYLOR

Follow the author on Twitter @djtaylorwriter

Stewkey Blues by DJ Taylor is published by Salt Publishing on 15 March 2022 as a Paperback Original at £9.99

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