North and South

People exaggerate the differences between the northern and southern English, often comparing the urban north with the rural or suburban south. Why don’t they compare Ilkley with the East End of London? Or, better still, why don’t they compare like with like? I grew up in a prosperous part of the north and now live in a prosperous part of the south. I find little difference in friendliness or any other supposed marker of northernness.

I had a university friend who came from Belfast and, for want of a better topic, we once got into a conversation about northern and southern Ireland. This led on to a similar discussion about England. Northerners are supposed to be plain-speaking, I said. I had to come up with something. This plain-speaking Belfastian then pointed out that I wasn’t at all plain-speaking, and I had to agree with him. Furthermore I didn’t know many plain-speaking people back home either. Even further more, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know any. Nor did I want «at least to know where I stood» with such people. I didn’t have any spare emotional energy to devote to them.

People say that Londoners are unfriendly. But the person who says that Londoners are unfriendly is also a Londoner while they’re in London. When I go to London I am a Londoner for a few hours. If I am unfriendly it is because I cannot interact with a multitude as individuals.

And the unfamiliar can sometimes seem unfriendly. If people have a different accent from the one you grew up with they may even come across as aliens. My mother, a northerner like me of course, spent the last few months of her life in the south. She had dementia and, to her, the southerners around her were all Cockneys. She’d never liked Cockneys. They were Cockneys albeit they lived in Sussex, fifty miles from the sound of Bow Bells. She made no distinction. It calmed her a little to know that my brother had a big house right next to her rural Sussex care home. In fact he lived 250 miles away in Yorkshire, but I never corrected her on that point.

Incidentally, I’ve noticed a similar tendency when people compare men and women. They take an educated woman and stand her alongside a geezer, and the geezer tends to emerge worse from the comparison. How often is a sensitive male novelist compared with an Essex Girl? As infrequently as Tatton with Tower Hamlets, I’d say. Though I admit that many educated men aspire to be geezers, and that complicates the issue. Geezer-dom makes them feel less inadequate when chatting with the plumber who’s come to fix their tap, who may also be an intellectual, I hurry to add.