Cry, the Beloved County

It is the twenty-fourth anniversary of the release of Rid of Me so not only am I wearing my monkey badge but it may be time for another PJH-related post - a rant, really, at the colossal condescension of the rest of the world towards the West of England.

Part of my affection for Polly Jean Harvey is of course the fact that we both come from the same place, from beautiful Dorset, and therefore share reference points in that landscape – sometimes quite obscure ones, like the little lookout shelter on The Knoll at West Bexington where she took Seamus Murphy on their pre-Let England Shake photoshoot in 2010. I’m still trying to work out which church it was that they went to next, whose gravestones she’s standing beside in one of the other photos.

But to many other people Dorset is just one element in an undifferentiated West Country. There used to be postcards tourists could buy in newsagents around the county depicting some antediluvian yokel with gigantic wiry grey whiskers and a shapeless hat, gazing vacantly into the doubtless cowpat-spattered distance over a jug of lethal-looking ale. ‘’ave ‘ee bin on Darzet clifftops/Looked on lovely coves below?’, the legend ran, a jangling cacophony of William Barnes-esque doggerel. In fact it was worse than that, because, once you strayed over the westward border into Devon, you could find the self-same postcard, but now reading ‘’ave ‘ee bin on Deb’un clifftops’ as though it didn’t really matter which bit of the West Country you were in, provided you could still get a cream tea. And we don’t talk like that, either. Pirates come from bloody Cornwall.

That’s a vision of Dorset derived from what people outside it think Thomas Hardy’s world was like. The other side of Hardy, as everyone knows, is rain, mud and death, and that edges into a dark, atavistic impression of what goes on west of the River Stour, a kind of English version of the USA’s Deep South, hung with superstition and blighted by social backwardness, where a Londoner walks into a village pub and the place falls silent. In the summer of 1998 the NME sent some wretched journalist to cover PJ’s gig at the Bridport Arts Centre, an excursion which resulted in the following emission:

Perched on a rocky coast in deepest Dorset, sleepy Bridport is Polly Harvey's home turf. Approaching this outpost of rural Britain on humid summer nights, you half expect to encounter the voodoo sprites and feral banshees who haunt her fevered lyrics.

That’s not, I think it’s fair to say, what I have ever anticipated driving towards Bridport from the east, whether along the swooping B3157 coastal road that leads past Burton Bradstock, or the quotidian A35 where I usually spend most of my time waiting for the next bit of dual-carriageway to come up so I can overtake a lorry. I advise readers not to waste too much time listening out for voodoo sprites and feral banshees in the Harveyan oeuvre, either, because there aren’t any, nor can I think of a single one from Dorset’s folklore. And Bridport isn’t perched on a rocky coast, it’s two miles inland in a flat river valley. Perhaps you went to Lyme Regis by mistake?

When Polly first started out, the NME managed to describe her as Cornish when they must surely have known that her then nearest main town, Yeovil, is actually in Somerset. I very recently saw her referred to as Welsh: this is fair enough if you think that everywhere vaguely west of Reading is Wales, though this error hasn’t really been forgivable since the withdrawal of the Roman legions. But perhaps the most offensive instance of this phenomenon comes right at the start of James Blandford’s mid-2000s biography of the singer, Siren Rising. This book is generally respectful if a bit pointless as predictably neither she nor anyone close to her co-operated with its production in any way (I didn’t buy it new, I promise, I found a copy in the Oxfam shop). The chapter about Polly’s childhood is headed, jaw-droppingly, with the line ‘This is a local place, for local people. There’s nothing for you here’. Alert readers will recognise this (adapted) tag as coming from the grotesque TV black comedy The League of Gentlemen. I can only presume that Mr Blandford, and his editors for that matter, were blind to the possible objections that might be raised to a journalist drawing parallels between West Dorset in the 1970s, and fictional Yorkshiremen who shag their sisters and feed unwary travellers to their misbegotten and cannibal offspring upstairs.

The submergence of a complex, varied part of the world which is as modern as any other part of it beneath a range of atrocious stereotypes is, I suppose, not unexpected when geographically-ignorant metropolitan writers reach for something to say that their readers will instantly grasp, but it doesn’t half poke you in the wrong place when you’re at the receiving end of it. Mind you, I was brought up in Bournemouth which you can argue isn’t really Dorset at all so perhaps I have no right to say anything. Sling me another cow pat, you, and take note of this dreadful warning from Dorset pub band Who’s Afear’d (which is, of course, the county’s motto).  And when I say, dreadful, I mean it.