Author Archives: Tim Lenton

I am unlikely to be invited to upmarket functions. But if I were, and if, while minding my own business, I was approached by someone – a lady-in-waiting, say – who inquired about my name, background and family history, I should be delighted. 

The conversation would probably not last long, because none of the information likely to be gleaned would be very interesting. In fact, I might get annoyed at being treated in such a cursory manner and tweet about it afterwards. But probably not.

True, I was born in Earlham Hall, Norwich, but that’s only because it was being used as a maternity home just after the war. The second world war, since you ask. 

The rest of my family history its less impressive. The words “agricultural” and “labourer” appear often, and my paternal grandfather’s line comes down to us from just outside Peterborough – a hamlet called Norman Cross, which was largely swallowed up when the A1 in that area became a motorway.

His mother’s name was Archer, and she came from Harlestone, near Northampton and close to the Spencer pile at Althorp. In fact her parents’ gravestone at Harlestone is suspiciously swish: could there be a connection? You tell me. Please.

My father’s mother, on the other hand, came from Sheffield, which is obviously more exciting. Her name was Booth, and she claimed to be related to the founder of the Salvation Army, which I suppose is possible, though not traceable.

I could go on, but perhaps the lady-in-waiting would be more interested in my recent history. Between the ages of five and 11 I lived in Coventry, but we returned to Norwich after my father died. 

I can remember a great deal about what Norwich was like in those days – the livestock walking down Ber Street to the cattle market just below the Castle; the ships loading and unloading at the mills on King Street, where my brother worked for a while; the railway goods yard off Grove Road; the slums replaced by Rouen Road; and Prospect House, where I would later work on the Eastern Daily Press, now sadly in reduced circumstances.

What is the same? Certainly not St Stephen’s, which was a bustling street full of cars, cycles and pedestrians. But the Market, the Castle, the stunning Cathedral and the relatively new City Hall (where I also worked) look very similar. 

By now the lady-in-waiting is receding into the far reaches of the room, smiling in a distant sort of way.

Part of my childhood – and indeed a good chunk of my adulthood – has been wiped from the map of Norwich. Not, for once, by the council shutting yet another road, but by a simple name change. 

Surrey Chapel, the free church whose most recent location is within a stone’s throw of Anglia Square, has changed its name to CityGates Church, arguing that the old name doesn’t mean much to Norwich citizens nowadays.

Maybe. It means a lot to me, though. I was brought up there, was baptised there, and for a while as a teenager operated the rather stone-age sound system. My parents were married there. With my friend David Green I helped to found the football team which played twice yearly against Park Church and eventually mushroomed into the now vibrant Norwich Christian Football League.

I used to walk home my first girl friend from Surrey Chapel – quite a long walk, but worth it. Sadly she died a couple of weeks ago; she lived in North-East Norfolk, an even longer walk.

Why Surrey Chapel? Largely because it was situated just off Surrey Street near the centre of the city, and was accessible via Chapel Loke, along which it was just possible to drive a car. Maybe it still is. It was eventually crowded out, first by the ugly Norfolk Tower, which might have been built deliberately to obscure it, and then by the construction of the John Lewis car park, which necessitated its demolition.

As a result the church congregation moved to Botolph Street, where I preached on one occasion, just after my mother died. They didn’t ask me back.

Oddly my church is now St Augustine’s, within a couple of hundred yards of the CityGates building.  

Surrey Chapel was founded in 1854 by Robert Govett, an Anglican who had one or two problems with Church of England ideas at the time. He was a prolific evangelical author, as was his successor, D M Panton. Their graves can be found in the Rosary Cemetery off Rosary Road, as can that of their most famous successor, David Middleton, a basically shy man whose preaching from the 1960s onwards was compelling. He introduced me to Lord of the Rings, among other things.

It’s a strange experience to walk through the graves at the top of the Rosary and see that so many of them are former Surrey Chapel members – people I can picture very easily but who slipped away while my attention was distracted.

I guess I can understand the name change. But I wonder what they think.

The clocks are about to go back to where they came from, the nights are drawing well in, and several other similar cliches will be employed over the next few days to convey that summer has well and truly disappeared, and winter is out there, just waiting to pounce, like the coyotes I saw from a kitchen window in Ontario earlier this month.

It is at times like this that public transport, unlike coyotes, should be brought under the microscope. What do we in the UK need from it, and does it work for everyone?

Take buses. This is what we are urged to do, and in the summer months it is often quite pleasant to hang around bus stops in the sun, with nothing much to do, waiting for a bus to turn up. Not so much fun when the temperature drops, and we shiver in the scant protection afford by a pole and (if you’re lucky) a bit of a roof. That’s if your local council hasn’t mislaid the roof.

We usually walk into the city, but sometimes a bus becomes necessary. The other day my wife had a routine appointment at the hospital and, in view of the difficulty of parking a horse and buggy there, decided to take a bus from the station, just  round the corner from where we live.

She waited for a long time – well beyond what was advertised – and in the end, concerned about missing the appointment, went over and took a black cab. This was, as you might imagine, hugely more expensive. 

Someone once said that a bus is something that takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be. In other words you have to walk at each end, and the attraction of that decreases when there is ice on the pavement and rain is sleeting down.

So in those circumstance, as in most others, it’s good if the bus is on time – and if you have an appointment (and who doesn’t?) it’s important that it makes good time too. Last weekend I and two others caught a bus at the university to travel to the centre of Norwich. I wish I’d timed how long it took.

It waited for an eternity at the university while most of the student enrolment climbed on board – many of them not in sight when the bus pulled up. The bus was then extremely late, which meant that at every stop a large congregation of assorted people wanted to get on. It was clearly a kind of Tardis, because everyone did get on, but it took an inordinate time for them to do so. I don’t know, some of them may have been unfamiliar with the payment system…

Many moons later we reached the centre of Norwich. Fortunately, it was a lovely day; so we got off. Immediately behind us, another bus on the same route pulled in.

It reminded me a bit of the last time I got a bus from the university, on a slightly different route. It seemed to find every speed bump and pothole in existence – most of them kindly provided by a deluded council – and I ended up feeling so battered and bruised that I got off at Orford Place instead of going on to the rail station as I had intended. If it had been winter…

I am in my mid-to-late 70s but in reasonably good condition through no fault of my own. I would imagine most people of my age or older (and many much younger) would have been in considerable pain from such an experience. Not much encouragement to travel by bus. And then there’s the coyotes. 

To be fair,  I have been on bus journeys that were fast, comfortable and more or less on time. Computer models predict that this can happen. But do you want to take the chance?

I have a new home. By “home” I don’t mean a house I own or rent, but an area where  I feel at home, I know where I am and am familiar enough with the immediate area to be comfortable.

One of these “homes” of course is my actual home in Norwich, UK, that fine city which traps anyone who studies at the University of East Anglia and doesn’t let them leave. At least, not for long.

That wasn’t how it got me. I was fortunate enough to be born there, in the eminent setting of Earlham Hall. I am not remotely upper class: it was serving as a post-war maternity home at the time. Now it’s part of the aforementioned UEA – the School of Law, in fact. Odd, Holmes.

Norwich is fine. It has a ludicrous council, but what city hasn’t? It survives being dug up and put back together again in a hamfisted way that makes living more difficult. But that’s life. 

My second home was Coventry. I spent five or six years of my childhood there until my father died and we returned to Norwich. My brother Andrew still lives in Coventry; so I visit quite often. My third home was London, bits of which I got to know well: Stamford Hill and Winchmore HIll, for example, and Acton (no hill), where I worked for a while.

My next home was Yelverton, a village just outside Norwich, where I spent 12 years, and where my son grew up. Then it was Norwich again.

These were all “real” homes. But there were also places that I visited often and knew intimately. One was North Walsham, where my wife grew up, and another Blakeney, a favourite holiday haunt. Both are in Norfolk. I know most of Norfolk pretty well, because I worked on the local newspaper, and had to.

Outside Norfolk  there is Buxton in Derbyshire, where we stay once a year, and Corwen in North Wales, where my wife’s cousins live. Many happy times were had in both those beautiful places. 

Ballater, in Aberdeenshire, next to Balmoral and in the middle of some stunning scenery, is irresistible – so irresistible in fact that we have stayed there almost every year for the last 30 years (pandemic permitting). A real home, that one.

Which bring us almost to the point of my opening paragraph. Which is quite soon, for me.

One other place that has become home for me is in Ontario, Canada, a few miles north of Toronto, where we have spent time over the years with old friends. Well, we’re all old now. Canada for me is all space, relaxation and walking. A lot of walking. 

And now… and now… we’re in Canada again, at the home of our son and his wife – who also happens to be the daughter of our old friends. In the space of a few days we have explored the neighbourhood, visited key points – the mall, an excellent restaurant, a fromagerie, farmers’ and antiques markets and Canadian Tire. Just for the smell.

Yes, it’s home. We’ve done the walks. We know where we are. This may be bad news for them if they wanted a quiet life, but it’s good news for us.

Like many people, I stopped watching the news on television. Not because I was getting it off TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but initially because if I saw one more scientist standing at a podium next to the Prime Minister, I was likely to scream and race from the room. And later, because I came to realise that TV news wasn’t news anyway. It was prediction, with a bit of walking about.

This became very evident with the advent of a new Prime Minister. Up to the moment when the results were in, there was a great deal of discussion on the “news” about how many votes she might win by (if she won at all), and what she might then do; there was conjecture about who would be in her Cabinet, what  their jobs might be and what people might think.

What people might think is a big issue, apparently. Every now and then, a TV news reporter will wander off to somewhere remote, like Salford, and find someone who thinks that chaos is looming, either from Tory policies, energy bills, climate change or inflation. They never seem to find anyone who has a life remotely like mine, but I guess that’s my fault.

And it’s not news! We have a largish, overpopulated country. Surely something is happening somewhere that would be of interest. Trends and statistics are not news, because they can be easily twisted. What actually happens is news. 

Eventually Liz Truss reveals who is in her Cabinet: we want to know who they are, and a bit about them. But what we get is acres of meaningless conjecture about how they might work together and what policies they might pursue. Never mind that in a few hours we will be told all that. 

“And now let’s go back to our top story.” Which will be a newsreader standing outside Buckingham Palace, or Downing Street, or somewhere else where they don’t need to be, offering conjecture about what might happen in a few minutes time.

And then there’s the weather forecast. That’s often wrong too.

** It’s ironic that as I finished writing this, the Queen’s death was announced, and real news took over. If I said that it was tremendously sad, and her faith and service would be sorely missed, I would simply be saying what everyone else has said. Nevertheless, I say it. She took the throne when I was seven, and so I remember no other monarch. She was a truly amazing woman. The next few days are going to seem extremely odd.