Anker’s away

Last Saturday was the FA Vase second qualifying round. Though it is notionally a national competition, the early stages most greatly resemble a sort of Northern League Supplementary Cup, so cramped and so crippling their constriction.

Most teams have been drawn against one another, not one has a game outside of the region. Northbound and narked, we catch the train to Chester-le-Street instead.

DARLINGTON station has a sort of trackside flea market, though the vogue term is that they are pop-up shops. None seems particularly busy, or busy in the least, which is the total opposite of the 11.40am TransPennine Express.

Genetically stunted, TransPennine are almost always overcrowded, or ram-packed as Mr Jeremy Corbyn (perhaps erroneously) would have it. The guard apologises; the company promises greater lengths.

Chester-le-Street station is also the home of Chester-le-Track, run by an entrepreneurial and God-fearing gentleman called Alex Nelson, who styles himself station master.

Formerly gaffer of a travel company, Alex passed through Chester-le-Street in 1998, noticed it was boarded and unloved – the only unmanned station between Newcastle and Kings Cross – negotiated a deal for him to take over the ticket-selling function.

Now it’s also a virtual travel centre and virtual shopping centre, with a second outlet at Eaglescliffe station, following a £170,000 revamp funded by Stockton Borough Council. Together they employ 10 people, particularly they try to navigate the idiosyncrasies and absurdities of the railways’ price structure.

Alex also finds time to be a pillar of the town’s St Cuthbert’s Church, a magnificent structure built on the site of a former Roman camp and where the body of St Cuthbert rested for 112 years from 883AD.

It was there, too, that 19th century monks laboriously translated the Lindisfarne Gospels from Latin into Anglo-Saxon. “Something complicated was made more simple in Chester-le-Street,” says Alex. “We are trying to do the same thing with the national fares manual.”

THE church’s attractions include a little museum on the site of the anker’s house. An anker, or anchorite, was a man or woman who in medieval times agreed to be walled in for life in order better to aid prayer and contemplation.

There was no heating, no windows, no sanitation and no pets, since there wasn’t room to swing a cat. Each a glimpse, a narrow slit in the wall – known as a squint – afforded a view of the altar in the adjoining church. Necessaries were passed in through a small hatch, unnecessaries passed out again.

At least six men lived that way at St Cuthbert’s, though not all at the same time. The anker’s apostrophe is perhaps superfluous; you’d never have got two of them in there.

The column ducks in just before 12.30pm closing. The church guide book has a photograph of the gravestone of a young lady said to have died on April 31 – “perhaps the Richardsons were of a puritanical nature and couldn’t bear the thought of their dear girl passing away on May Day,” it says – and also records that Ethelric, an 11th century Bishop of Durham, decided to replace the former wooden church with a stone-built shrine to St Cuthbert.

“A considerable fortune was found in its foundations, whereupon Ethelric resigned the bishopric, claimed the treasure and retired to his native Peterborough to spend it.”

SEVERAL other churches are nearby though Heavenly Heat, it should be stressed, is a tanning salon. Itself once Roman, Front Street seems busy enough. A newsagent boasts “Cheapest tabs in town”, a place called Willie-Nillie offers fashionable things like calligraphy and creative writing but “general mayhem and clarting”, too.

Up at the top of the street, almost opposite Wetherspoons, is an e-cigarette shop called E-nigma, run by our old friend George Reynolds and window-dressed with vituperations against Durham County Council and its chief executive (whom George calls the town clerk).

“You’d be mental to vote for this lot,” it says.

The former Darlington FC chairman, now 80 and himself accustomed to being walled in, though with time off for good behaviour, is chiefly aggrieved at how he believes the council’s parking policies are killing the town and has had printed 80,000 booklets uncompromisingly stating his case. They contain multiple references to Hitler, the Gestapo and the Mafia.

“You’d be better off voting for the Mafia, they make a living out of robbing people,” he says and promises half a million of the booklets – just about one for every living soul in the county – by the time of next May’s elections.

The question of whether George has himself crossed double yellow lines is no doubt being considered at County Hall.

Vapour trail, I look into the shop. The assistant points to her boss, fast asleep in an armchair in front of the big-screen television. “He nodded off as soon as the Labour party election stuff came on,” she says.

E-nigma variation, the temptation to take a picture and flog it to the County Council newspaper is comfortably resisted. What are old friends for, after all?

CHESTER-LE-STREET Cricket Club, champions again, are hosting an open-air film show in aid of St Cuthbert’s Hospice. Outside they watch The Lion King, inside Man United v Leicester City (which, if nothing else, is probably preferable to the Labour leadership stuff.)

The footballers are playing Norton and Stockton Ancients, Vase quarter-finalists just seven years ago but now fallen on rather harder times.

The ground’s at Chester Moor, a mile out of town up the A167, home until 1967 to a colliery which at its deep-digging peak employed nearly 800 men and boys. At least 22 of them were killed there, the youngest just 12.

There were two chapels, Primitive and Wesleyan, school, shops, miners’ welfare. “Good pint, an’ all,” recalls former Chester-le-Street District Council chief executive Tony Golightly, among the crowd of just 68 at the match.

These days Chester Moor has two big pubs, an Indian restaurant, the North-East model centre, village hall, boxing club and about three people.

The crowd also includes familiar North-East cricketer and comedian Dave Greener, told not only that he needs two new knees but that he’d best lose a few stones before going about it. “It was a bloke in a white coat,” he says. “Mind, it might have been the ice cream feller.”

Chester win 3-2, notionally just seven rounds from Wembley. It’s only in the clubhouse afterwards that someone realises that the players’ end-of-season trip to Spain is on the same weekend as the Vase final.

“We’ll cross the bridge when we come to it,” says club chairman Joe Burlison, cheerfully. Next round, who knows, the Railroad might even cross the Tees, an’ all.