Back Home: A mature Kevin Myers revisits the old reliable English citywhere he was born, and finds the local attitude remains one of tolerant indifference.
Semper Eadem: "Always the same" - the motto of Leicester, where I was born. The city manufactures many things, but dreary decency is its primary industrial product. When my parents moved there from Ireland after the second World War, they spent years wondering how to connect with the local social life before they finally realised there was none. This was a city which welcomed the new year in with a cup of Ovaltine at 10.30 p.m. and then tottered off to bed, firmly resolving: no more late night carousing.
Leicester has produced two writers, CP Snow and Joe Orton, who both fled, firing over their shoulders as they went. It has produced no visual artists. Its contribution to music consists of Showaddywaddy, and if you are unacquainted with that band, you may count yourself thrice-blessed.
I never revisit Leicester without feeling deep a pang of joy at the certainty of my imminent departure. For it is a curiously inert place, its people largely untroubled either by doubt, anger, creativity or humour: all of which made Leicester a wonderfully reassuring place to grow up.
Was mine the last generation to pass through childhood untroubled by fear of any kind? At the age of five, I would walk two miles to junior school, with my twin sister Maggy. Well, not really walked. "I runned and I runned, and I pulled up my socks, and I runned and I runned, but I still couldn't catch him," she sniffed in the kitchen.
At six, unaccompanied, we would cross Leicester to go to primary school, changing buses in the city centre: the equivalent of going from Terenure to St Stephen's Green, and then walking to
O'Connell Street for a bus to Glasnevin. Aged six. In that journey, my mind was opened to vast mysteries. I saw a sign on an office window: "Invisible Police." Ah, as I had suspected. They could glide anywhere undetected, apart from that cigarette burning in mid-air. As my reading improved, my unseen detectives - alas - became an insurance company's invincible policies.
Other discoveries withstood the test of time, for Leicester is Lear-Caster: the city of King Lear. It had an intact and ancient centre, with the largest Roman ruins in England, the Jewry Wall and mosaic; St Nicholas Anglo-Saxon Church: St Mary de Castro Norman Church, finer by far than either Christ Church or St Patrick's: a timbered medieval Guild Hall; cobbled streets in the old town: and the Blue Boar Inn, where Richard III dined before forfeiting his life, his crown and the Yorkist cause at Bosworth Field.
Yet most Leicester people seemed to move unseeingly through their extraordinary legacy, like fish through the dining room in the Titanic. The most notable exception was a Jewish bookseller, old Edgar Backus, who diligently produced calendars of old prints and local histories to be rewarded with a diligent local indifference. Maybe just outsiders have the gift of sight in Leicester.
It was Bradgate Park, just six miles outside the city, which most of all held my childhood heart. The eight Myerses regularly drove there, cramming into the tiny Standard Vanguard in which we also managed - quite mysteriously: it was the size of a fridge - to return to Ireland.
There lay the ruins of the house of Lady Jane Grey, queen for nine days in 1553, before Queen Mary rewarded her impudence with the executioner's axe. In mourning, her servants then beheaded all the oak trees in the 1,000-acre deer-park, and their stunted, gnarled remains remained to enchant my childhood 400 years on.
So, too, did the fat brown trout basking in the pools of the River Linn; the adders slithering through the hot bracken; the deer watching apprehensively from the brakes. And overlooking all: Old John.
Old John was a small jug-shaped 17th-century folly set on the park's highest hill. Peering through the keep's keyhole, we could - we whispered in delicious horror - just see - or so we imagined - the dead body of John laid out on the stone flags. He was, so our myth went, a faithful old huntsman who had perished while saving his master's daughter in a fire. At night, his ghost would glide over the granite escarpments and acid moorlands of Bradgate.
January. I am aged four, snow is falling, and only deer are watching as my father and I are walking through the parklands. I am in shorts, as always, winter and summer, and the snow is up to my calves, filling my little Clark's shoes. The two of us trudge on, up to the top, and then hand in hand we gaze down: the park is laid out before us, covered in a deepening white fleece, through which two lonely furrows mark our floundering route to this point, beneath a lowering, granite sky.
Well, we did it, young fellow-my-lad, declares my father. We did it. It was the proudest moment of my life. But now night was falling, and I could sense Old John stirring ...
At Christ the King Catholic primary school, most children had Irish names, apart, that is, from the Poles, lost to all decency with names composed from just the last three letters of the alphabet. Our headmistress was the fearsome Miss Bratt, often to be seen dabbing the morsels of an unruly child from her chops.
Once, in the middle of a snowball fight in the school playground, a stray missile hit her. You could have heard the silence in Brazil.
My father was a doctor in a lower middle class area of the city. Everyone around us was English, low-church, and avidly Tory. A heavily-pregnant woman arrived at our front door, shrieking that she was in labour. "What does that mean?" I asked. "It means she backs Mr Attlee," declared Maggy solemnly.
Leicester then was 100 per cent Caucasian, and 94.5 per cent Protestant, mostly non-conformist; and to me, Irishness and Catholicism presented an inviolable unity.
On Corpus Christi and in May we paraded through the city streets: on St Patrick's Day we ostentatiously wore our shamrock. We were the pioneers. In time, other immigrants - but from elsewhere - followed.
Leicester will soon be the first city in Britain with a majority of non-whites amongst its 300,000 population.
I wandered the city streets the other day. Edgar Backus and his shop are gone now, and so too is old Leicester: insensate, brutal fly-overs, under-passes and ring roads, have levelled or isolated the various component parts - Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norman and medieval - of the old town. I suspect few children today know of the now invisible Jewry Wall or mosaic, or ever visit poor St Nicholas, trapped like an ancient fly within a web of concrete roadways. I was quite unable to find the Blue Boar Inn, and nobody I asked had even heard of it.
But that's typical Leicester. It is a decent place, but with little public memory or sense of history, for it exists somewhere beyond the event-horizon. Even the Luftwaffe couldn't be bothered to bomb it - or maybe it was simply terrified of Leicester's secret weapon, those deadly batteries of dullness, reaching lethally into the sky.
So the Leicester Mercury reports that nine trees in a conservation area might well be axed, and - bless my soul - another three pruned. The Leicester City Football Club shop is now selling the new team kit, but, sensationally, shirts for toddlers and babies haven't arrived yet. "It's really disappointing, but it's not City's fault," a club spokesman protested.
Politics now, and Leicester MP Andrew Robathan has urged Tony Blair to sack deputy prime minister John Prescott. The Leicester Mercury reported that Mr Blair and John Prescott had refused to comment in this "bitter war of words". Only in Leicester could a "no comment" merit such a description.
Yet this strange vacuity is probably what helped Leicester to assimilate its huge immigrant population almost without any rancour. Large tracts are now without a single white face: and streets where offspring of Irish immigrants oncefollowed the incense with a certain pious arrogance are now filled with the turmeric, cardamom and cumin fragrances of the sub-continent, as the new arrivals absorb and, no doubt, in time come to embody the apparently irresistible passivities of the city.
One of the most Indianised places of all is Bradgate Park. It is as if its essence, a distillate of old England, draws Asians as it once drew the Irish Myerses. Women in saris and men in turbans now stroll past the hunch-backed oaks still grieving the beheaded little girl, while peacocks squawk on the ruined Tudor brickwork of the great house where she once played nearly 500 years ago.
And Leicester-Asian children gather beside the folly of Old John, and peer through the keyhole, whispering in delicious horror, "Look, you can see his body, on the stone flags, there!" Who was he, this Old John? Well, he was a faithful old huntsman who perished rescuing . . . Semper Eadem
