A Walk in the Footsteps of Shakespeare - Part 1

Last Sunday Hilary and I went for a walk, and not just any old walk, but a trek in Shakespeare’s footsteps to Snitterfield and back.

Less than a hundred yards (sorry, metres) from where I’m writing this is Shakespeare’s Birthplace, which sits like a marooned pantomime stage-set amongst the hustle and bustle of photo snapping tourists. It’s a modest half-timbered building that would have been pulled down long ago had it not been for its connection, and, architecturally, there are many much more attractive buildings in the town.

But Shakespeare was born there in 1564 (although some historians, usually the boring ones, still question it) when the house stood alone in an acre or two of its own land at the edge of the town, with a back door that opened onto the gentle rise of the Welcombe Hills. Walk out of that back door today, hop over the large iron gates and you’ll immediately get knocked down by a stream of cars heading for B & Q and Tesco’s as you try and get across Guild Street. And if you survive that mauling you’ll probably get flattened by a big red tour bus going the other way before you reach Gt William Street on the other side.

But let’s go back 435 years to when Will was 7 years old and there was no Guild Street, just a well worn track where the flocks of fattened geese, or sheep, or pigs, were herded on their way to London 100 miles away. There was no Gt William Street either (I wonder what the young Shakespeare might have thought if he’d known the footpath he took two or three times a week would end up a street named after him), just a rutted pathway that ran as straight as an arrow over the ever steeper undulations as he made his way after school to visit his elderly paternal grandparents in Snitterfield, where he feed their livestock, chopped wood for the fire, and drew water from their well; returning home with apples and pears from their orchards.

The view you get today from the top of the Welcombe Hills still gives a ghostly echo of what Shakespeare would have seen as he no doubt ran the three miles from his back door to his grandparent’s home. Michael Woods describes the view well in his book In Search of Shakespeare…

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Poor old Stratford-upon-Avon has taken a bit of a bashing recently from Germaine Greer and few others who should know better, which is a pity because the town doesn’t really deserve such criticism. And although a good many of those who live here drive me to distraction, I love (even with all its faults) this daft, lovely, enduring old town.

I even enjoy the 3.8 million visitors the town attracts every year, most of whom march backwards and forwards far below the high mullioned windows of Humdrumming Mansions like the clichéd river of humanity they are.

And 3.8 million visitors works out at, er…. well, it’s a lot of people marching backwards and forwards everyday on the increasingly uneven streets and pavements of Stratford, which makes them even more uneven of course - and I spotted the now very matronly Germaine Greer doing just that a few weeks ago, so she didn’t help matters did she. And as this chattering, laughing, arguing, sometimes singing, sometimes drunk (especially in the early hours of a Saturday morning) army, which is bigger than the army of the USSR when there was a USSR, march up and down they drop an estimated ten tons of litter a day, most of which seems to end up against the heavily fortified doors of said Mansions, which is okay because one can often find a nourishing half eaten MacDonalds amidst the discarded cans (some half full), bottles, coins, and discarded tenners, that helps keep this writer and publisher upright and robust.

So, who are these people who complain? Well, they seem to be those, like Greer, who seldom drag themselves away from London, and only then if there’s a free press ticket going at the RST, but who still, in their heart of hearts, consider Stratford to be a theatrical and cultural upstart, and pretty unimportant when compared to the capital. Remember that dreadfully hollow beating of breasts when Adrian Nobel closed the RSC venue in the Barbican? That same snobbish element was there in 1879 when the first Memorial Theatre was built; nothing has changed. But most of those who complain locally are invariably residents who have recently moved into one of the 1,000 plus new houses built in Stratford in the last two years (plus hundreds who left a long time ago for Torquay or Malaga) who want the false idyll of a Warwickshire market town (all very Midsommer Murders), the kudos of the RSC and Shakespeare, but not the dropped litter of 3.8 million visitors. They are also the ones who complain most bitterly about the increases in the council tax to clean up all that tonnage of dropped litter. What they never do is give thanks for being in a position to go and see Dame Judi Dench, or Sir Ian McKellen, at the RST, followed by a meal at one of a pretty good selection of restaurants. In fact, most of them will prefer to stay at home and complain about the poor TV reception.

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I was drinking a cup of barely warm coffee at the RST quite recently when I remembered seeing the Tin Man smoking a cigarette.He’d been arguing with a small officious man in a black RSC t-shirt on the veranda of the Green Room. It wasn’t the famous Tin Man of course ( you know, over the rainbow and all that) but the robot character from the RSC’s production of Beauty and the Beast. There must have been a rehearsal going on and the man in the t-shirt seemed pretty angry about something, and it was obvious the Tin Man was getting pretty angry about something too, with the smouldering, angry cigarette jerking up and down between his angry lips. He reminded me of my grandfather.

My grandfather, Harry, was not an angry man, but he always had a cigarette in his mouth (invariably a Player’s Gold Flake), and it always bobbed up and down between his lips as he talked. He was a baker and the cigarette remained in his mouth even when mixing the dough, with the ash dropping lightly into the mixture, which is probably what gave his bread its locally renowned flavour.

In the summer of 1929 Harry grew momentarily very angry indeed with his boss at the Co-op Bakery in Wellesbourne ( the man had foolishly boasted about the way he’d avoided fighting in the First World War) and knocked the man to the floor with a well placed left hook (which had, like the rest of my grandfather, seen five years of service in the war), caught the next bus to Stratford -upon-Avon and signed-on as a bricklayers labourer with the company building the new theatre.

Harry was assigned to an elderly bricklayer who, as a fourteen year old, had worked on the first Memorial Theatre back in the late 1870s. The old man was a real craftsman, but had a very weak bladder (working out of doors in all weathers, and too much beer on a Friday night had probably caused that) which meant that no sooner had he climbed to the top of the scaffold to start work he had to scurry back down again to take a pee in the Avon. Because the old man couldn’t afford to retire the other brickies covered for him and quickly taught my grandfather how to lay bricks just to help keep up. In fact so proficient did my grandfather become he was allowed to lay all the bricks in the Balcony lavatories on the second floor of the building. Whenever I get the chance I always go and pay ‘homage’ to Harry’s beautifully built walls.

Anyway Harry earned enough money as a labourer on the theatre to start his own bakery in Wellesbourne, which remained in business for nearly thirty years until the big bakeries came along and put most of the small bakers out of business. I remember my grandfather was pretty angry then and could easily have hit someone had there been anyone around.

I remember thinking, as I drank my RST coffee, how the Tin Man looked as if he was going to hit the little man in black. There was a tense moment or two. Instead the Tin Man lit another cigarette and waved to the passengers of a passing pleasure boat who all waved back delighted. The little man in black was furious, but defeated.

Incidentally, the show was great and the Tin Man superb.