A rubber tramp in Redcar – again

On Monday I left steel city house at 21:03, driving northeast at a steady fifty mph to pull in just before midnight at a deserted layby on Loverose Lane, near the confluence of the A61 and A1 northeast of Ripon. Waking at seven I motored on to Redcar, scene of my very first night as a rubber tramp.

After breakfast and coffee at the Plimsoll Line, a Wetherspoons, I retraced a walk I did on that first visit …

… except then I’d walked clockwise and inland to the mouth of the Tees, back to Redcar by way of Coatham Sands. Now, with tide out and the going firm, I walked anti-clockwise, beach first, to return over fog draped marsh where a few ghostly remnants of steelworks on death row jab at the skyline of an otherworld whose once deafening allegro – the dull thud of the drop hammer keeping time for a symphony of metal on clanging metal against the hiss of superheated steam and shouted banter of armies of bread winners in oil’n sweat stained blue – gave way long ago to a wasteland of silence broken here and there by the thin call and answer of waders, resident or just passing through, foraging a moonscape of pits, furrows and ruins cracked and jagged – foundations for a forgotten empire – else gliding soundless through the reed beds of shallow lakes where once had stood Bessemer forge and rolling mill, blast furnace and foundry.

I recall the pallid faces and sunken eyes of the men I’d seen at nine that morning in the Plimsoll Line, supping lager at Wetherspoons prices. Had they once taken these lanes, night and day, by bus or car share, to clock in for their shifts before the jobs all went to Asia? 

A rubber tramp in Redcar, February 4, 2023

That taconite coke and limestone
Fed my children and made my pay
Them smokestacks reaching like the arms of God
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay …

… Seven-hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir, you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

Tuesday evening I made my way to the Seabreeze fish and chip shop on, I kid you not, Lobster Road. Highly recommended on Tripadvisor, it did not disappoint. The cod flaked to perfection, hit the old tastebuds with oceanic delight and – rarer by far – was coated in the finest of batters as opposed to a quarter inch of fat drenched shellac. With the chips scoring an easy nine out of ten, my cup of joy it ranneth o’er.

As, almost, was yours truly when crossing Redcar Esplanade without looking. The screeching of brakes, blasting of horn and WTF?! glare from white van man reminded me of my mortality as I raised my hands in palms out mea culpa, then scuttled to kerbside sanctuary. So close a shave demanded refortification of the spirit. After a medicinal pint at the Plimsoll Line I made my way to the Regent, on the sea front, for the eight-twenty screening of Heretic.

I’m not a horror fan and this aspect, which only comes to the fore in the denouement, was for me the film’s weakest feature. That aside it’s a splendidly gripping psychological nailbiter from the get go. I first realised Hugh Grant can act – as opposed to cruising through on his latter day Cary Grant looks and gentlemanly English diffidence – when he played Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal.  In Heretic  he punctuates with unsettling élan  the near bumbling amiability of Four Weddings  and Notting Hill  with high end creepy.

To which end he’s as superbly terrifying as his co-stars – Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East as the Mormon fishers of men who knock at his door in an essentially three character, single location play – are superbly terrified. All three convince and, while I do wish the film could have found the more rationally satisfying conclusion it merited, I’d still give it four stars out of five for what it gets so spine-chillingly right.

Back at the car park I cleaned my teeth and sat for a while staring out to sea.

On the beach a hundred yards to my left a fire blazed. Every other minute a November 5 rocket arced across the night sky to descend on the North Sea. At half past midnight I turned in.

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