This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Just the other afternoon, heading into Norwich city centre on the bus, I looked out of the window and saw Paul Baker’s uncle striding towards me. This in itself isn’t unusual. I tend to come across Mr Baker, the relative of a man with whose child my youngest son long ago played football two or three times a month, wheeling his bicycle, say, around the corner near the park where I walk the dog, hastening out of a Norwich City game a minute or two before the final whistle or exiting a convenience store with a grocery bag on his arm. Mr Baker (Christian name unknown), grey-haired, red-faced and perpetually in motion somewhere, is a Norwich “character”.
The Norwich of my childhood, back in the early 1970s, was full of characters. In fact, not so much full or well-stocked but stuffed to the gills. None of them, significantly, had names, for like many a character inside literature and beyond it they were known by their characteristics.
There was, for example, “The Man With the Shoes”, glimpsed three or four times a week, sometimes with a wife and children in tow, marching along the pavement beyond our front garden and so called for his eye-catching (and to our eyes wholly fantastical) footwear. Stack-heeled boots; vast, canary-coloured moccasins that looked like pairs of hollowed-out bananas; sandals from which his feet bulged like cottage loaves: The Man With the Shoes wore them all, proudly and unrepentantly, with an insouciant, showman’s flourish.
To the Man With the Shoes could be added “The Man with the Dog”, a moustachioed Normandy veteran with an Alsatian in what seemed like permanent transit around the locale, and “Frogman”, a bottle-nosed and (allegedly) harmless old fetishist in diving gear and flippers who prowled the streets at nightfall terrifying girls on their way back from Guide meetings.
Looming up behind them was the huge roster of bygone eccentrics regularly invoked by my father: “Billy Bluelight”, the legendary newspaper seller who used (on foot) to race the pleasure steamers along the River Yare; pub-keeping, jazz-singing “Black Anna” or “Alf the Purse King”, who sold handbags on the back of Norwich Market and was esteemed for his dazzling repartee (“Python, lady. Genuine python. How do I know? Because I went over to Caistor and shot the bugger”).
Coming back to Norwich in the early 2000s, I discovered — not greatly to my surprise — that most of the originals remembered from childhood were still going strong. If The Man With the Shoes had disappeared from public view, then the white-haired old mystic who used to sit in the public library writing poetry whilst a clasp-knife lay open on the desk before him was still at large on Guildhall Hill, and, on one of our first twilit car journeys into town, who should we see grinning from beneath a lamp-post but the Frogman in his wetsuit?
There were new characters on the block to be celebrated and turned into myth
Even better, in our absence the talent pool turned out to have replenished itself. There were new characters on the block to be celebrated, memorialised and turned into myth. “We saw The Cycling Lady again,” the children would say on their return from the park, with reference to the small, intent woman who seemed to spend her entire life biking up and down Unthank Road.
The Man with the Shoes. The Frogman. The Cycling Lady … All this sometimes threatens to give life in a provincial city a slightly ghostly feeling: as if you were wandering through an endless frieze in which the people in the foreground are crowded out by spectral figures clamouring from the margin.
Never has what G.K. Chesterton once called the twitch upon the thread tugged quite so hard as in the moment, not long ago, when, coming out of a coffee shop near the market, I went past an elderly man with a raw, unshaven face and jerky, ataxic movements making his way through the door.
I hadn’t set eyes on him for half a century, but I knew, knew without a doubt, that it was the 70-something incarnation of the boy who I used to watch from my seat on the bus as he bought his ticket, shaking his head over the effort required to hold the purse steady as he drew the money out.
Naturally, these people are worth writing about. Given the modern literary novel’s lack of interest in what might be called the processes of ordinary life, they may well be the only people worth writing about.
But how? No point in approaching The Man With the Shoes in a spirit of scrupulous realism; all that will be left once the smoke rises from the battlefield is a pile of sandals and platform boots. Then there is the fact that his importance — at any rate, to me — is as much symbolic as actual.
To remember someone who populated the landscapes of your childhood is practically to guarantee that you will exaggerate their significance and see them on your terms rather than theirs. The Man With the Shoes, whose footwear in reality was doubtless only slightly more outlandish than anyone else’s, is either a mythical figure or he is nothing.
One of the best templates for writing about places — marginal, left-field places, that is — and the people who inhabit them, comes in Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories. At the start of her career, Proulx was often thought of as a straight-down-the-line realist, an unvarnished chronicler of ground-down rural lives who told it like it is, or was, with no messing.
Close inspection reveals a collection like Fine Just the Way It Is (2008) to be much more “literary” and thereby contrived than its subject matter, treatment and that constant impression you get with Proulx of swiftly-written spontaneity might suggest.
What with their fanciful names (“Berenice Palm”, “Antip Bewley” etc), their stylised dialogue and their (usually) dreadful finales, they are — like The Man With the Shoes — creatures of myth, a succession of unicorns lifting their heads above the Wyoming sagebrush. The suspicion that Proulx is a crafty, meditative strategist rather than a dogged, eyes-down naturalist was reinforced by a tour of the recent New Yorker exhibition at New York Public Library, which displayed an early draft of Brokeback Mountain; let me assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that piece had had some work done on it.
From the trash ranches of old-style Wyoming to 21st century Norwich is not, in the end, that much of a journey. In both cases the people — once given their figurative due and framed in their clouds of metaphorical glory — seem larger than life, not smaller than it.
Meanwhile, there is the problem of the sensibility doing the framing. After 20 years of mooching round Norwich, I have a feeling that I am turning into a Norwich character myself. To the commuters heading into the city along the Newmarket Road or traversing its central thoroughfares, I am probably the man who can be seen jogging desultorily towards the University of East Anglia Broad or the man who sits in Caffé Nero on Gentleman’s Walk scribbling in a notebook — another version, if it comes to that, of Paul Baker’s uncle. There are worse destinies.
