Royal Tunbridge Wells is home to Beau Nashes’ architecture, the legendary tiles he laid down in the Pantiles and of course Mr.and Mrs.’Disgusted’ who put this affluent town on the map. Not forgetting the creation of Subbutio and Tonbridge Ware, boxes of inlaid wooden marquetry which are displayed in the local library.
We moved 6 miles South of T’Wells 40 years go.
Back then there were real life shops, with real live people selling their stuff. You could buy yourself half a cumquat whilst carrying a bag of beef bones and a couple of buns for the oven.
Bright and breezy, cheeky chappies who thought nothing of giving your kid a bruised apple.
Five hundred tears ago the gentry, all periwigs and bosoms, perambulated through the town, all Regency and rich to take the waters of Chalybeate Spring, it tastes of iron and is foul. They partook of a coffee, independent establishments all, with not a ‘Costa’ in sight.
In 1984 there was a coffee shop that roasted their own beans in the window for all to see. It had shelves of fancy teapots, and fleets of ladeees who lunched.
It’s now a charity shop. We have more charity shops than Mad Mick.
Then the council, in its wisdom, built a Mall.
Keeping up with the Peter Joneses. Trying to match the Malls that were springing up all over the place.
Which, incidentally, are all the bloody same.
Chain stores, a hideous fast food hall and an establishment that closed down when the guppies nibbling on crusty feet were found wanting..
The Mall is now dead, like the Marie Celeste adrift and desolate
Behind the Mall and the new Primark, behind the barber shops and nail bars, there is another Tunbridge Wells. Not huge pavements and trees but the mean streets of people trying to survive. Untermenches who vote Reform, the St George flag flapping on the aerials of their financed cars.
The mean streets of Kent are a far cry from the East End. Where dark alleys lead to more dark alleys.
When my father was eighteen he joined the army. I’ll rephrase that he was called up. A typical East End boy in his white singlet. He was a boxer and a hustler.
He had the look of the Mafioso, slicked back hair and knocked off watches.
When he arrived at his barracks, in the West Country, lost and scared having trudged through cow pats and overgrown brambles, he was broken. He cried in the dark, the kind of dark the like of which he had never seen before. He was used to lampposts, Kosher restaurants, and dance halls where he jitterbugged with the best of them.
Frightened, he tumbled through field after field until he arrived.
He knocked on the barracks door, the Sergeant Major opened it.
World War 11 was raging, Fascists in black shirts and the persecution of Jews.
The sergeant major eyed up my father and said
‘Ah! You’re the Jew we’ve been waiting for.’
Remember my old man came from the mean streets, ducking and diving and brawling.
‘I’ll have you’ he said to a smirking sergeant.
Meaning?
‘I’ll take you on in the boxing ring, and I’ll take your fucking eye out.
And he did.
As he landed punch after punch the other squaddies screamed with delight. Lamping the Sergeant Major was sweet sport.
After twelve rounds the bell rung. My father raised his arm in victory and so begun his career of deceit.
He’d walked the streets with arrogance and aplomb, now he was being told to get up, shine your shoes, shut your mouth and do as you’re told. These young men were being fashioned to fight. To take on Hitler and end the war.
My father, though a practicing bully, had no intention of going onto the battlefield.
So he feigned madness.
In an apple green ward he pretended he was insane, which he found unsurprisingly easy.
Playing insanity was not hard for him, so he notched up the jeapody by smearing his shit all over the walls and dancing around naked, making himself generally unfit for service. He won. He didn’t see one day of action.
We have army cadets in Tunbridge Wells, sometimes there are two coppers on the beat. Since the advent of Thacherism, we have an upwardly mobile population. There are tasteless shops selling plastic dados, and fake flowers, we also have a pound shop. Buskers sing of a weekend outside ‘Waterstones’ book shop, a ray of sunshine in the centre of the precinct.
The class system is skewered; them that never had nothing now have their own red bricks. The middle classes are up in arms at the rise of the nouveau rich taking over Weatherspoons. Whilst the landowning class are selling off their pile to corrupt builders whose shoddy work makes them uninhabitable.
I’m all for equality, but with the education system up its arse. Having money doth not make the man. Unless we teach ‘taste’ in schools, the plastic culture thrives. Teaching manners and refinement, the cry from the ‘Disgusted’, an impossibility since most schools have cut assemblies, music and the art of debate. .
Instead of being ‘United we Stand’ the divided natives don’t give a fuck.
But they have a point if you’re given an opportunity, and all you experience is that Jack’s alright, then you have flocks of confused sheep doing the bidding of arseholes like Farage.
Still I wouldn’t move. There are still craftsmen around and fifteenth century pubs. T’Wells went Lib Dem, the
The Disgusted pair were disgusted. The High Street is bijou, with an up market jardin shop selling soap at Saudi Arabian prices and leather aprons for the gentrified artisans.
The word on the streets, is that the council are about to put money into a scheme to revive the Mall, attempting life without supermarkets. A cinema has been muted, a food hall and social housing.
Yeah, and pigs might fly.
Change takes time and money, which when it’s in the hands of quizzlings, and only a handful of immigrants, could take until 2049. I am disgusted by their behaviour.
See what I did there!