If Norfolk didn’t exist, we would have to make it up, and then regret it.
Every nation has its Norfolk — a region for mockery, a space for low jokes and coarse assumptions, a backward place to allocate dark lusts, incest and idiocy.
Most families have their own secret Norfolks: a cousin or aunt on the register who keeps orphaned guillemots under their armpits.
The thing with constant jokes is that they slowly erode the object of scorn, sculpting it into a cartoon of itself, so you can’t tell if the stereotype of weird, web-footed, dribbling, six-fingered sister-shaggers who shop with traps and eat stuff live — or stunned — is a consequence of national bullying or the reason for it.
Either way, Norfolk lives up to its stereotype with wall-eyed, tongue-tied, spittle-flecked indignation. As you cross the border from Cambridgeshire, there’s a proud sign saying, “Norfolk, twinned with Narnia”.
Advertisement
This has always been a place apart. The hernia on the end of England. A flat, fertile, damp, dank land out of which has grown all manner of revelation and dour certainty. It is a place of witches and heretics, of revisionists and canting contrarians. The fens held on to the resistance to the Normans with Hereward the Wake. From these cloud-raced, flinty farms sprang extreme Protestantism, God’s vengeance of the New Model Army. Tom Paine, the smelly and relentless barker for republics and freedom, who put American independence into words and lit its fuse, is from here, as was Walpole, the kleptocratic Whig prime prime minister. And Julian of Norwich, anchoress: a semidetached hermit who, while critically ill, had intense visions of Christ and was the first Englishwoman to write a book; a charismatic, magic-realist revelation of an incandescently loving Lord. In the midst of the Black Death, she wrote, “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well”, and claimed that the Holy Trinity was Father, Son and Mother. And now Ed Balls, the fat bully shadow minister for smiling anger.
Norfolk turns its back on England and looks out across the North Sea. Its gelt came not just from potatoes and beets, but the rich Hanseatic trade and the herring fleet, all gone. Now it’s a poverty-bitten place, keeping up its stained trousers with baler twine. The flatland is spiked with mockingly grand churches and the occasional enclave of London media folk, who realise that you can get a sizeable manor house for the price of a one-bedroom flat in Battersea, which is wonderful if you don’t want to talk to the neighbours or mind the four-hour commute through the East End of London. “Really, the kids don’t notice now we’ve got videos in the back of the Range Rover, and they have a real gypsy lurcher that we got from a real gypsy.” There are plenty of didicoys out here on the flatlands. You pass covens of them, loitering in broad fields emitting a faint squealing that might be a hare or a child.
I came up here for a wedding. My nephew, Louis, and his bride, Amelia. Before the ceremony, I met up with my mother, stepmother, sister and her boyfriend, with the Blonde and the twins. And, for logistical reasons, we landed up at the Rose & Crown in Snettisham. Not entirely logistical: it has also won awards for hospitality.
Snettisham is a huddled village on the edge of the Wash, where King John lost our crown jewels, which I still feel bitter about. Above it glowers a vast and malevolent church that Pevsner said was “perhaps the most exciting decorated church in Norfolk”. That is a perfectly proportioned example of the damnation of faint praise.
The Rose & Crown is a fine specimen of the old English pub that has been artificially inflated and surgically enhanced to cater to the needs of modern hospitality. In the 14th century, when it first opened its doors, a pewter pot of sileage beer, a cold shrew and a one-legged brass would have been enough to get it awarded family-friendly pub of the year. There is a photograph on the wall of locals being handed an award by Barry Humphries. Tellingly, Dame Edna Everage is the most normal-looking person in the picture and would be the most fanciable one in the bar. Today there are bedrooms, bathrooms and three dining rooms, and the promise of local entertainments, which they say include looking up at birds in a V formation going somewhere more interesting, and kite flying.
Advertisement
We were seated in a large prefabricated refectory that might have got round planning regulations by pretending to be for agricultural use. It’s more of a lambing shed than a hospitable welcome. But the staff were charming and friendly. The menu is, they say, “a mixture of the traditional with a contemporary twist”. I suspect the twist is the timer on the microwave.
We began with broccoli and Binham blue soup. There must be some secret brewers’ edict, some beery curse, that all pub menus have to have boiled broccoli and green cheese broth on the menu. It is invariably repellent, a vile confection of boarding-school tissues and Shrek fart. Happily, the severe winter has all but eradicated the Lincolnshire broccoli harvest. The local pheasant and streaky bacon sausage had the makings of a good idea. Sadly, when made, it wasn’t. Chipolatas of dry, minced bird, salted to the taste and texture of cattle lick. Brancaster mussels marinière were good; nice, chubby bivalves with a watery soup that at least made an effort. Interestingly, there was flounder, gurnard and Cornish sardines — how often do I have to tell you they are pilchards? — which makes me think they had been watching a lot of Jamie and Hugh when not transfixed by geese and kites.
Advertisement
My mother had the flounder because, she said, she hadn’t had one since the war and her mother used to cook them all the time (not a recommendation). It came with cockle butter, which sounds like an STD ointment, and altogether the dish was of more historical interest than gastronomic. My gurnard was the best dish of the day: a pointy, prickly, triangular fish with a look of wide-eyed surprise. It is usually not even landed by English fishermen, or it’s put in crab pots as bait, but Italians love them and make a very good pasta from them. It is a brilliant little fish; firm and dense flesh, with a distinct flavour of kelp-slapped groin and a frisson of mullet. It came with potatoes, broad beans and feta. The cheese was a mistake.
A treacle bread-and-butter pudding with sauce anglaise (why the sudden froggy affectation for custard?) and vanilla ice cream was again a winning idea, but none of the constituent parts was made well enough. The pudding was a gluey, brown wodge that had a suspicion of Marmite.
Maybe I’m being a little hard on the place — it is Norfolk, after all. Its heart is in the right place, even if its location isn’t. And if the menu is more of a wish list than a commitment, and the atmosphere an awkward confection of Travelodge and community centre, well, at least it’s trying. A good intention in a flat and deflated land. So I’m happy to plagiarise Pevsner and offer a quote for the website: “The Rose & Crown has perhaps the most exciting pub food in Norfolk.”