Jayne Dowle: The South may have the money, but we have the guts to get through hard times

WE live in a small country, but sometimes it feels like a very big one. At the weekend, it took us seven hours to drive from Barnsley to Maidstone for my sister's 40th birthday party.

We left home at 10am, bombed down to Nottingham and came to a halt. An accident had closed the M1. Funnelled into one lane, and facing diversions, we decided to take the A52 to the A1.

I was enjoying the scenery, thinking about what makes the Midlands the Midlands as opposed to the south North, until we came to a halt again.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Roadworks. Three hours after we set off, it struck me that a stage-coach would probably have been making the journey quicker.

Not only do our overcrowded roads demand a mighty leap of faith every time we leave the house, but they also mean that many people choose not to venture far from their own comfort zone. A teaching colleague tells me that a prospective student from the South-West couldn't even place Huddersfield on a map.

We made another traffic-avoiding detour, through the Blackwall Tunnel in East London, not far from where we lived until we moved back to Barnsley six years ago.

Our mouths fell open as we passed the Olympic site in Newham; a huge white stadium rises out of the ground, it's as if a whole new town is being built. And I thought – there had been plenty of time for thinking on this journey – how many of Jack and Lizzie's classmates will ever make it down here to see it?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

My two will always have an excuse, because they have relatives in Kent and Surrey. But it cost us about 70 in diesel, round-trip. If we had taken the train, we would have had to extend the mortgage.

And it wouldn't just be visiting a different town, it would be like going to another country.

We don't yet need passports to cross the Watford Gap, but every time I venture south, I realise just how divided Britain is becoming. And I wonder, always, why the South has to set the pace.

Why can't the North – excuse the sweeping geographical generalisation here – be recognised for what it is, instead of constantly finding itself compared with London or the Home Counties?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

And yet, if we don't address the differences, and examine the

comparisons, we can't possibly understand our own country. We stayed overnight in a new budget hotel, and it was pretty full, with weekenders and families en route to and from the Channel ports.

Barnsley has seen a number of similar hotels open recently, and I bet not one of them is ever fully-booked. I wonder when the business travellers and tourists are ever going to come.

Politicians talk in grand terms about conquering the North-South divide. But all this well-meaning rhetoric doesn't mean a thing in reality; it is all down to bums on seats and heads in beds.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The North struggled to thrive when free-flowing public money propped it up. So where will the cash come from now? We went to Northumbria this summer. As we travelled through the former pit villages clinging to this remote coast, I wondered if David Cameron even realises they exist.

When he talks about the "Big Society" bridging gaps between the haves and have-nots, he should think first about bridging the geographical and cultural gaps which cut through our country like chasms.

On Sunday morning in Maidstone, the shops were jam-packed, people wandering around with carriers full of consumer goods.

There is definitely more disposable income down here. And yet more cars, fighting for parking spaces, cutting each other up. I walked to my sister's house from the shops, a good 20 minute hike. Charlie, my 15-year-old nephew, looked at me in amazement.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

"How come you walk everywhere?" he said. I explained that it's what we do in Yorkshire; I walk into town, I walk to the football at Oakwell, and if motorway congestion carries on the way it is, I might end up walking to Kent.

Charlie, half "Barnsleyish" as he calls it, and half Kentish, has first-hand insight into the differences between North and South. He loves it up here, and always remarks on the genuine friendliness. But he struggles to comprehend why we don't care too much what other people think of us. His big obsession, surprise, surprise, is cars, and he despairs of me driving around in a five-year-old Freelander with gaffer tape holding together the bumper.

I forgive him, because he is family. But this fascination with what money can buy is the key to the difference between the two halves of our country.

It gives me hope, though. The South might have the cash, but we have the warmth, the compassion and the guts to get through even the toughest times.

The North-South divide is getting wider by the minute; in our heads, and in the journey between the two. But whatever battles the North has to fight, I still know which side of it I want to be on.