The Last Tripe Shop in Lancaster

thick seam, thin seam, honeycomb,
brown tripe, weasand, elder,
cowheel, dripping, neatsfoot oil,
trotters

are what we sold at 25, St Nicholas Street (see Letter 3). The stomachs, udder, oesophagus and feet of cows. Boiled and bleached to an uncanny whiteness, by “tripe dressers”, the seams billowed like formless albino creatures in the vats of water in the yard, slithered on the marble slab in the sun-filled window.
We never ate it – ‘poverty food’, ‘invalid food’, my mother, who managed the shop in return for the accommodation behind and above the shop, called it.
I came upon a small factory processing tripe on my cycle ride across France, just a few miles from where I’d lived forty years before. The daughter had returned to the family farm ‘to devote myself to tripe’. They sell it canned. I wondered if their trotters came from the abattoir I’d worked in. In England tripe means rubbish, in France it means trickery. I decided that Hermes, the god of  travellers and trickery, who was the tutelary god of my journey, must also be the god of tripe-dressers, thought of  25, St Nicholas Street, cycled on.
I’ve eaten it once, brown tripe, peppery and hot, in a thick roll soaked in spicy liquor, in Florence, sheltering from a summer lightning storm, between Dante’s house and Beatrice’s church, touched by the overflow of notes to her, contemplating leaving my own question for her, for him, that tumultuous week. Delicious.
There is an Academmia della Trippa, that reprinted the 1932 recipe book, “Ninety-Nine Homely and Delicious Ways of Serving Tripe and Cowheel”. But apart from a few market stalls in south Lancashire, and in Chinese dim sum, British cows’ stomachs now disappear into pet food.

Tripe was always eaten, recorded from Homer on, mentioned in Shakespeare, enjoyed by Pepys – ‘a most excellent dish’, referenced in Barnaby Rudge. In 1832 an inn in Liverpool advertised, “Beef steaks, Chops, Cutlets and Tripe, served up in the first style at moderate charges.”
But it was in the 19th century, in industrialising south Lancashire, especially in the cotton mill towns, that it became a popular food, and specialist tripe shops opened. It was cheap protein, a quarter the price of beef. And it was ready to eat. Cold – popular in summer, honeycomb, with salad; and as street food – tripe pieces on skewers on a night out. Contrite men who had spent too long, and too much money at lunchtime in the two pubs on our street would buy a quarter of pieces, my mother’s cool civility and the bitterness of the malt vinegar dissolving their alcohol-fuelled cloud of public bar well-being as they ate it out of paper on their mazy way home. And hot – as the protein in a quick meal, tripe and onions a favourite, when many women worked in the mills and had an hour to get home, make a family meal, and get back to work.
In 1906 there were 260 tripe shops in Manchester. In 1924, Burnley had 52. In 1917, The Tripe de Luxe Restaurant was opened in Wigan, complete with palm trees, ladies’ orchestra, and “lavatory accommodation provided on the most scientific lines.” A company in Yorkshire canned tripe and sold it in Harrods.
The Depression, and meat rationing from 1940 to 1954 (tripe was not rationed), kept the trade going. There was often a queue outside our shop waiting for it to open in the late 1940s. But rising affluence, changing tastes, and the falling price of chicken did for it. Our shop closed in 1960 when the site was bulldozed for a shopping arcade, never reopened, the last tripe shop in Lancaster. For a several years there would be a tray of tripe in the corner of butchers’ windows, but they went as the tripe eaters died.

One day I will seek out one of those market tripe stalls, buy a pound of thin seam, cook one of the ninety-nine homely and delicious recipes, and find out what my mother deprived us of – or saved us from.

With thanks to my main source, Tripe: a Most Excellent Dish, by Marjory Houlihan.

Horizon Line Chamber at Sunderland Point.

I cycle downriver. Wind turbines turn in perfect synchrony, like slow cartwheeling acrobats. High wires crackle on pylons striding across the wide estuary from the nuclear power station. The causeway to Sunderland, a village cut off twice a day, is a ribbon of muddy tarmac between flats of salt marsh grass from which convexes of shining mud, their sea-smoothed surfaces impressed already with the cuneiform of bird footprints, curve down to trickling water. A curlew flies by. Its bill curves down; its call curves up: you take your pick. A flotilla of swans, dazzling as yachts, far out. I walk across to the Morecambe Bay side. The high blue nobbled back of the Lake District dragon on the horizon curves down, long neck low, to the head at Barrow, ready to breathe nuclear fire. Offshore from the mouth a haze, like breath, churning, indecipherable until binoculars reveal a vast array of wind turbines, turning slowly.

I’m here to visit a new art work. It is next to Sambo’s grave (more on that in a later letter). Horizon Line Chamber, by land artist Chris Drury, is a drystone, corbelled beehive, beautifully constructed, that looks like a high-spec hermit’s cell from an Irish island, or a reconstruction from Skara Brae. Odd, this heap of stone in a landscape of grass, mud, water, air. And deliberate, the sugarloaf hump that holds the eye that habitually sweeps across, following birds or carried on the prevailing wind. It is designed to stop, to still the restless eye. Perhaps to still the restless spirit. An oratory.

Inside, in the darkness, within the density and thickness of stone, isolation. Except, on the wall, a circular image, dark above light. This cell is a camera obscura. A lens in the west wall draws the image of outside in, inverted (as the eye experiences images, which the brain then inverts – I’m seeing as the eye sees), and projects it on the east wall. Still as a photograph – and then birds fly across, the light changes as a cloud passes. I imagine watching the equinox sun setting. And yet. I feel like Plato’s man, his back to the ‘real’ world, experiencing only flickering shadows cast on a wall. I want to burst out, into our ‘real’ world! And yet. There is in confinement, in concentration, in single-point focus, an intensification of experience. As I leave I wonder if I will come to terms with it. I will return.

The Hogback Stone and Ship at Heysham, a fable.

They were inseparable. From childhood into adolescence they dressed the same, cut their hair the same, such that no stranger could tell who was girl, who was boy. The hogback, convex, massive, stone, covered in images, became their home,
 where they dwelled, safely guarded by the great beasts enclosing the ends. They pored over it in the church with eye and touch – her father was churchwarden, she had the key – sometimes at night, blindly, or in the mystery and clarity of moonlight. They endlessly talked about, made up stories, adventures in which they were the heroes. Entire sagas, if anyone had written them down. And the images on the stone changed as they grew. The man by the tree was Adam in the Garden, naming the animals – until one day she suddenly saw the serpent that had wreathed itself around the stone – where had it come from …? – and he became Sigurd the dragon-slayer. The stag, at first in the wild, with companion birds and beasts – even playfully carrying one on its back! – became the hunted, by wolves and then, worse, by men with dogs. The four men with raised arms were, for cowboy-mad he, in a hold-up, “Reach for the sky!”; as they learned, they became the dwarfs who hold up the sky in Norse legend. They puzzled over the lemur-like creatures with long curling tails – had they escaped long ago from Heysham Head Zoo, found refuge on the stone? The figures and beasts on the stone spoke to them, from a time when there were gods everywhere, and everything had a voice. They sought words to join themselves to the plants and animals, and beyond to the sea and stars. They asked, ‘what does the wave say?’

Then Ship arrived,

beached on the shore, concave, slender, steel, empty. Standing in front of it, gazing through it to the sea and sky, he said, ‘when the modern era began, the exterior world, hitherto teeming with gods, muses, fairies and ghouls, became empty space.’ ‘No!’ she cried. ‘While the interior world became deep and rich beyond measure. Language changed from poetic to descriptive, men and women no longer spoke to the world but about it, replaced connection with control, named all things but did not sing them. It’s called progress.’ ‘NO!’ But she saw that the identical figures on Ship were facing away from each other, to different worlds. She saw that he would go far, naming, and doing great things. While she would stay, come again and again to experience the sea and sky cupped in the steel hull, and listen for what the wave says.

Notes:
1. I have incorporated texts from Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari, and The Broken Notebooks, by John Gilmore.

2. The hogback stone is a 10th century Norse/Saxon memorial to a Viking trader. It is in St Peter’s church on the cliffs at Heysham Head.

3. Ship is a new artwork, by Anna Gillespie, on the shore close to Heysham Harbour and the nuclear power stations.

1. Halcyon moment.

Returning from a hard bike ride I stop on Halton bridge, lounge with my elbow on warm riveted metal, gaze vacantly down on the glittering threads of water below the weir, at the newly-arrived swans with their looping necks feeding assiduously, dabbling ducks tipping up and back, black-headed gulls lifting and landing, when my eye is caught by a quiver, twenty feet from me, eye-level, a flicker of coloured lights. Hovering, twitching, hovering on barely-visible wings, blue green red, a humming bird from Portrait slipped through space-time, except no slip, this is here, real, now: iridescence vibrating green blue, plump rufous body, sharp beak – it drops, like a climber falling, through me, a tiny splash, then it shoulders out of the gluey water, fish in beak, streaks low across the water, up into the trees, gone. The river flows, the birds feed, it happened.
I know it is a kingfisher, that this is its normal behaviour, nothing special, “it dives, either from a perch or while hovering, to catch fish”, says my bird book. And yet. I have seen kingfishers four times, and I remember each time, place, who I was with, mood, circumstance, recall each perfectly, and in each a kingfisher.

Portrait is Tacita Dean’s film of David Warner and hummingbirds, in which both are hypnotic and memorable.

2. Water-skiing through Lancaster.

Bank holiday, high tide, crossing the bridge, coming closer is the whine and roar of a high-revving engine … and from round the bend under Greyhound Bridge bursts a speeding motor boat, followed by a figure on a single ski slaloming back and forth across the wake, whooping, under the bridge below me, and round the bend upstream. I think of the kids in Les Amants du Pont Neuf joyously water-skiing through Paris. Except this skier looks more like a supervillain.  Ten minutes later he reappears, shoots under the bridge, heads downriver towards the mouth of the Lune, still whooping, is gone.

7. Thomas Harrison’s Bridge

There is a purity in Harrison’s early buildings in Lancaster that has run through me like a thread of spring water in a manifold river. I only realised this when I returned, looked afresh, lived next to his bridge, looked into his work.

Harrison was a 38-year-old unknown in 1782 when he won the competition to build a new bridge over the Lune from Skerton to Lancaster. But he had a backstory. Son of a joiner, from aged 25 to 32 he was in Rome, at the expense of Yorkshire’s richest man, Lawrence Dundas. There he studied the architecture, made many drawings, entered competitions (none of which he won). In 1776 he returned through France, studying and drawing. He then spent two years in London, trying to get noticed and taken up as an architect, but it was a bad time for building, he failed, and returned to Richmond.

Skerton bridge is mainly noted for being the first bridge in England with a level deck. It is a fine piece of engineering, so well designed and built that, unaltered, it carries 40-ton trucks. However, in what could easily have been a piece of practical bridge building, Harrison incorporated, hid in plain sight, elements from his years on the Continent. The level deck is taken from Perronet’s Pont de Neuilly bridge in Paris, opened in 1772 by the king to great fanfare. It is the same length, with the same five elliptical arches. Then into Perronet’s plain engineer’s design, Harrison incorporates elements from classical and contemporary architecture. The niches cut through above each pier derive from the Ponte Fabricio in Rome. Each is faced with an aedicule – the pointed house-like structure made to shelter an altar or god. He told the sponsors that they had the practical value of lightening the load on the piers, and relieving flood pressure; I see aesthetic decisions that allow the eye to flow through the bridge, and add a vertical contrast to the bridge’s horizontality. And the piers are rusticated (rough surfaced), in contrast to the ashlar (smooth-faced stone) of the bridge: this conforms to the Palladian epitome, contrasting basement with main building. In a practical bridge in a small Northern town he seamlessly incorporated Parisian bridge building, Roman design, Classical tradition, and Palladian ideal.

There is a final element in this masterwork. The purpose of the level deck was to create a grand entrance into the town. Walk across in the centre of the road – traffic permitting! – and you see this intention. For you are walking towards the ensemble he built at the end of the bridge, built to the Palladian ideal of Classical house with two wings. (Although the fine house would serve simply as a customs house.) Again, this design came from his days in Rome, his competition entry for a grand entrance to the city. A grand avenue was opened from the bridge to the town centre, and the area by the river laid out for fine houses. It never happened. The ‘Green Ayre’ was first a shipyard, and then a railway station. For Lancaster’s port and prosperity were now in decline, the town entering its 70 years of stagnation.
So that when the ‘Little North Western’ railway was built on the Lancaster side of the river, the end of Harrison’s bridge was raised to bridge over it, ruining the connection of buildings and bridge. Subsequent road engineering and signage have further obscured the connection.

I will save my two favourite Harrison structures for another letter.

Note: All the facts above come from: ‘Thomas Harrison, Georgian Architect of Chester and Lancaster, 1744 – 1829’, by John Champness, an exemplary account of Harrison’s training and work.

The source of the Lune

“She just jumped in, disappeared – it’s deep, no one knows how deep, dangerous, that’s why we’ve fenced it off now. Then popped up, her head and face covered in bright green weed, and set off swimming – well, paddling actually – towards Glasson Dock.”

He’s squatting outside his greenhouse, cutting a circle of green plastic an inch bigger than the metal disc lying on it. I’m intrigued, want to see what he’s making. But he’s happy to stop while he talks, resume when I’ve gone. He’s talking about the woman who swam the length of the Lune. “For charity, I suppose. She got a good send-off.”

The Lune’s source (source is French for spring) is a resurgence (another word from the French), a stream that disappears into the limestone rock and emerges elsewhere as a spring. I think of the résurgence at the foot of the Cathar stronghold of Montsegur, where the priestess hid the sacred head from the besieging French army. And of the fathomless Fontaine de Vaucluse, where Petrarch wrote his sonnets to Laura. Springs have mystical and spiritual significance. (In France I used to confuse sourcier, water diviner, with sorcier, magician. Why all this French? I am still finding my bearings, having connected Lune with lune.)

Among pagans, springs were access-points to the other-world – gifts, inscriptions, broken weapons were dropped in as dedications, falling to who knows what depth. For Christians they were places of transformation, healing, purification – each church has a font, which means spring.

This spring became St Helen’s Well, with a chapel, long gone, dedicated to the mother of Constantine, who brought Christianity to the Empire, discovered the True Cross under a temple to Venus she’d demolished, and built there the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The source of the Lune is a source named for the source of Christianity in the West.

There is a stream flowing from the spring, small but well incised. But the heroic woman must have walked a long way before the river was deep enough to swim in.

Far more water feeds the Lune from the streams flowing from the Howgill Fells to the south. And if the longest was included, it would lengthen the river. But this is the true source of the Lune. I make my dedication, and set off, towards Glasson Dock.

Cycling along the canal

From the busy lane I scramble down into the sunlit calm of the canal. Brownian motion of insects in the dazzle. Three glowing galleon swans, imperturbable. A pair of geese graze near a heron that stands still as a carved stick of painted wood. Reeds combed vertical. Far fells lie supine. A duck lands in the water, heavily, as if thrown. A fish touches the surface and successions of rings expand across the curved underside of the stone bridge, fade, are gone. A duck shepherds eight ducklings across the water, away from me, tiny, balls of fluff, so light they seem in their sudden spurts and dashes to run across the surface – so light they don’t break the surface tension? Seven are brown, and disappear in the water-edge foliage; one is bright yellow, and glows. How long will it survive? The swans heave themselves onto the bank, all curves, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, they quarrel briefly with beaks and flurried wings, then settle each into its space. Everywhere there is hawthorn blossom, in Hockneyesque profusion. Drawn by the alluring perfume I stop, look close into the flowers, see excited chattering fairy faces looking up, pull back, cycle on.

The canal turns this way and that, roundabout in its northern direction as it follows, lies upon, the 72 feet contour. It is water serpent, datum line, spirit level. Didn’t the Egyptians flood the land to establish the level for their pyramids? It lies across the landscape, a languid sinuous presence.

A smart motorboat chugs past. The couple, he bulky and white-haired, she bulky and blond, turn extravagantly away, as if on urgent business, to avoid eye contact. As I pass a man fishing by his boat he pulls in a wriggling fish. ‘Roach’, he says when I ask. ‘Is that your dinner?’ ‘I’d need a few of these,’ as he unhooks it, returns it to the water, adds, ‘hope he’ll tell his dad to come.’

Fields cut for silage, some bare, some with ridges of dark green as the machines buzz back and forth. The lanes are busy with tractors and trailers, there is grass in the air.

On Buena Vista a blond young man, lying back, feet over the side, plays Spanish music, light and melodious. On Moonwitch a dark girl, red hair, intense, plucks herbs from her onboard garden. I’m making up stories in my head. It’s time to climb up from the canal, up to the fine balustered bridge where the canal cuts through manicured parkland like a Picturesque set-piece, and return to the lanes and the traffic.

Tenderfoot and Temperance

Tenderfoot was a tv Western series I watched avidly in the late 1950s. Tom Brewster was an innocent abroad in the Wild West of the 1870s, Hollywood’s version of it, the foundation myth established by John Ford. A self-taught law student, he combined ingenuousness and resourcefulness with guileless charm and a principled sense of right and wrong. In thirty minutes he confronted an injustice, righted it, and moved on. I liked Tom Brewster. And I had, I realise now, a schoolboy crush on Will Hutchins, who played him.
He would walk into the town bar, stand between tough drinkers, foot on the rail, hands on the bar, and order, ‘Sarsaparilla – with a dash of cherry.’ The bar would fall silent. I loved that moment. I have always wanted to walk into a bar and order, ‘Sarsaparilla – with a dash of cherry.’ And in Rawtenstall, I do.

Rawtenstall has the last of the many temperance bars that thrived in Lancashire around Tom Brewster’s time. The Temperance movement was launched in Preston in 1833. Members ‘signed the pledge’, were marked as ‘T (for temperance) Total’. Hence ‘Teetotal’. It was a response to the problems of drink, and the success of Methodism in Lancashire.
The Fitzpatricks were herbalists in Ireland who brought over their recipes for cordials, and soon had 24 temperance hotels and bars in Lancashire. They still make cordials, but Rawtenstall has the last bar.

No, says the friendly if bemused girl behind the bar, no one has ever asked for sarsaparilla and cherry. But she’s soon experimenting with mixes from the optics behind the bar, and comes up with a three to one combination.

It’s a lovely place. With its dark wood, row of colourful optics, bottles of cordials, shelves of spices, copper water boiler rescued from the Astoria ballroom, it’s a cross between a bar and an apothecary. It has excellent food – including a ‘high tea’ that would feed an army! – elaborate desserts, and friendly staff. A gem to be treasured.
As I’m eating my delicious hotpot, sipping my drink, I’m coming up with advertising campaigns – “Sarsaparilla, with a dash of cherry – the drink of cowboys!” Tasting evenings of endless mixes of cordials – cordial cocktails! – colour combinations, vast quantities drunk, and everyone drives home safely.
On reflection, delicious as it is, the drink needs less cherry – Tom was right with his ‘a dash’. I’ll be back soon, to try another mix. It may take a few visits, to get it right. Meanwhile, if you’re in East Lancashire, on the edge of the Moors, head for Rawtenstall, and Fitzpatricks. Tell them Tom Brewster sent you.

Letters from Lancaster 3

Vignettes.

1 A flock of seagulls on the fast-flowing river. A hundred yards of gulls bobbing fast downstream in the sun glitter. Except the flock does not move; for when the lead gulls reach a certain point, they lift off on sharp wings, breasts flashing white, arc over the flock and land at the back, floating demure as bath ducks. This keeps happening. So that although each gull is being swept along at three miles an hour, the flock does not move. What is going on? There seems to be no purpose to it. It is hard not to see, in the arcing up and landing, in the churn, in the flurries within the flock, the exuberance and excited repetition of a game, a round, like giddy children on a slide.

2  A bright spring day, my first day following the river from its source. The last of the cherry blossom – in a breath of wind it falls like confetti at a wedding – the first of the hawthorn. There are bluebells and cowslips, primrose and orchids. A heron heaves up from the stream, then a pair of whirring synchronised mallard. A hare! Tall, alert, and then gone. There are sheep and lambs everywhere, heads up, stock still as I pass, lambs’ propeller ears twitching. I am quickly in Pre-Raphaelite allegories. This lamb, in the midst of sheep, commanding beyond its age, is Christ among the Doctors. That one, alone and blindingly white, is an image of the Transfiguration. There are lambs with tiny horns, like the satyrs in Botticelli’s ‘Venus and Mars’. A large brown horse with large shaggy hooves, as if it is wearing lamp shades. Two lapwing fly across, black, white. The path leads into a farmyard. The young farmer is holding the skinned body of a lamb, thin as a rabbit, guts hanging out, as he tussles to wrap the skin around a larger lamb, tying it on. He smears the thin body, blood and guts, onto the tied-on skin. The lamb bounds away. ‘Lost it this morning. Messy job, but it’s got to be done.’ I’ve read about it many times, never seen it. Fell farming. I walk on.

3  A black and white photograph, brown with age, ‘Mum and Dad in our street after Vets meeting 30.3.58’. They are on the tandem. ‘Vets’ is Veterans’ Cycling Club, for over-forties. They have just pulled up outside our shop. They are smiling. The street is empty. It is Sunday. Behind them are the Golden Ball and the Boar’s Head, the step up to the Unitarian Chapel, beyond that a street of shops, indistinct. ‘Our street’ is St Nicholas Street, one of the oldest in Lancaster. Gone now. If I had taken the photo from across the road, in front of Gorrills the drapers, our shop would have been in the picture. There are no photographs of our shop, our house. The only archive photograph is of the hoardings in front of the demolished buildings. The street disappeared under ‘St Nicholas Arcade’. Now, ‘St Nic’s’. I have lived in dozens of houses, with no interest in revisiting or reentering. But this building, 25 St Nicholas Street, I obsessively visualise, see myself walking into the shop, through to our living room, down into the cellar, up to the sitting room, up again to my bedroom, out into the yard, up the back. And having returned here after 56 years, I see myself going into Poundland, saying, ‘don’t mind me’, walking down steps, not into the underground car park but into our house, and finding the street there, all the buildings, and going into the shops and up to the flats and along alleys and into yards, and walking and walking, until …