Notes From a Small Island (15 page)

a kind of dogged commitment to ugliness around its fringes.

Sutton Courtenay seemed considerably further on than I recalled it from the map, but it was a pleasant walk with frequent views of the Thames. It is a charming place, with some fine homes, three agreeable-looking pubs, and a little green with a war memorial, beside which stands the churchyard where not only George Orwell lies, but also H.H. Asquith. Call me a perennial Iowa farmboy, but 1 never fail to be impressed by how densely packed with worthies is this little island. How remarkable it is that in a single village churchyard you find the graves of two men of global stature. We in Iowa would be proud of either one of them - indeed, we would be proud of Trigger the Wonder Horse or the guy who invented traffic cones or pretty much anyone at all.

I walked into the graveyard and found Orwell's grave. It had three straggly rose bushes growing out of it and some artificial flowers in a glass jar, before a simple stone with a curiously terse inscription:

Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair Born June 25th 1903     • Died January 21st 1950

Not much sentiment there, what? Near by was the grave of Herbert Henry Asquith. It was one of those tea-caddy tombs, and it was sinking into the ground in an alarming manner. His inscription too was mysteriously to the point. It said simply:

Earl of Oxford and Asquith

Prime Minister of England

April 1908 to December 1916

Born 12 September 1852

Died 15 February 1928

Notice anything odd there? I bet you did if you are Scottish or Welsh. The whole place was a bit strange. I mean to say, here was a cemetery containing the grave of a famous author that was made as anonymous as if he had been buried a pauper, and another of a man whose descendants had apparently forgotten exactly what he was Prime Minister of and which looked seriously in danger of being swallowed by the earth. Next to Asquith lay one Ruben Loveridge 'who fell asleep 29th April 1950' and near by was agrave shared by two men: 'Samuel Lewis 1881-1930' and 'Alan Slater 1924-1993'. What an intriguing little community this was -a place where men are entombed together and they bury you if you fall asleep.

On second thought, I think we lowans would be content to let you keep Orwell and Asquith as long as we could have the guy who was buried alive.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   THIRTEEN

I SUSPENDED MY PRINCIPLES AND HIRED A CAR FOR THREE DAYS. WELL,

I had to. I wanted to see the Cotswolds and it doesn't take long to work out that you can't see the Cotswolds unless you have your own motive power. As long ago as 1933, J.B. Priestley was noting in English Journey that even then, in those golden pre-Beeching days, there was just one line through the Cotswolds. Now there isn't even that, except for one that runs uselessly along the edges.

So I hired a car in Oxford and set off with that giddying sense of unbounded possibility that comes when I find myself in charge of two tons of unfamiliar metal. My experience with hire cars is that generally they won't let you leave a city until they have had a chance to say goodbye to most of it. Mine took me on a long tour through Botley and Hinkley, on a nostalgic swing past the Rover works at Cowley and out through Blackbird Leys before conveying me twice around a roundabout and flinging me, like a spacecraft in planetary orbit, back towards town. I was powerless to do anything about this, largely because my attention was preoccupied with trying to turn off the back windscreen wiper, which seemed to have a mind of its own, and figuring out how to remove an opaque cloud of foamy washing fluid from the front windscreen, which shot out in great obscuring streams irrespective of which switch I pushed or stalk I waggled.

At least it gave me a chance to see the little-known but intriguing Potato Marketing Board building at Cowley, into whose car park I pulled to turn around when I realized I was utterly lost. The building was a substantial 1960s edifice, four storeys high and largeenough, I would have guessed, to accommodate 400 or 500 workers. I got out to wipe the windscreen with some pages torn from an owner's manual I found in the glove box, but was soon staring at the arresting grandeur of the Potato Marketing Board HQ. The scale of it was quite astounding. How many people does it take to market potatoes, for goodness' sake? There must be doors in there marked 'Department of King Edwards' and 'Unusual Toppings Division', people in white shirts sitting around long tables while some guy with a flip chart is telling them about exciting plans for the autumn campaign for Pentland Squires. What a strange circumscribed universe they must live in. Imagine devoting the whole of your working life to edible tubers, losing sleep because somebody else was made No. 2 in Crisps and Reconstituteds or because the Maris Piper graph is in a tailspin. Imagine their cocktail parties. It doesn't bear thinking about.

I returned to the car and spent some time experimenting with the controls and thinking how much I hated these things. Some people are made for cars and some people aren't. It's as simple as that. I hate driving cars and I hate thinking about cars and I hate talking about cars. I especially hate it when you get a new car and go in the pub because somebody will always start quizzing you about it, which I dread because I don't even understand the questions.

'So you've got a new car, huh?' they'll say. 'How's it drive?'

You see, I'm lost already. 'Well, like a car. Why, have you never been in one?'

And then they start peppering you with questions. 'What sort of mileage you get? How many litres? What's the torque? Got twin overhead cams or double-barrelled alternator-cum-carburettorwith a full pike and a double-twist dismount?' I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to know all this shit about a machine. You don't take that kind of interest in anything else. I always want to say: 'Hey, I hear you've got a new refrigerator. How many gallons of freon does that baby hold? What's its BTU rating? How's it coo/?'

This car had the usual array of switches and toggles, each illustrated with a symbol designed to confound. Really now, what is one to make of a switch labelled 101? How can anyone be expected to work out that a rectangle that looks like a television set with poor reception indicates the rear window heater? In the middle of this dashboard were two circular dials of equal size. One clearly indicated speed, but the other totally mystified me. It had

two pointers on it, one of which advanced very slowly and the other of which didn't appear to move at all. I looked at it for ages before it finally dawned on me - this is true - that it was a clock.

By the time I found my way to Woodstock, ten miles north of Oxford, I was quite exhausted and very happy to bump to a halt against a kerb and abandon the thing for a few hours. I must say I like Woodstock very much. I'm told that it can be something of a nightmare in summer, but I've only seen it out of season and it has always been splendid. Its Georgian houses have a confident, almost regal air, its pubs are numerous and snug, its shops interesting and varied and their frontages uniformly unspoiled. There isn't a piece of brass in town that doesn't gleam. The Post Office had an old-fashioned black-and-silver sign, far more elegant and classy than that red-and-yellow logo they use now, and even Barclays Bank had somehow managed to resist the urge to cover the front of its building with lots of aqua-blue plastic.

The High Street was busy with shunting Volvos and tweedy shoppers with raffia baskets slung over their arms. I ambled along the shops, pausing now and again to peer in windows, and past the proud Georgian houses before coming abruptly to the entrance to Blenheim Palace and Park. Beneath an imposing ornamental arch there was a ticket booth and a sign saying that admission for an adult was £6.90, though closer inspection revealed that this included entrance to the palace tour, butterfly house, miniature train, adventure playground and a whole cornucopia of other cultural diversions. Lower down, the sign noted that admission to the grounds alone was 90p. I may be easily fooled, but nobody takes 90p from me without good reason. I had a trusty Ordnance Survey map and could see that this was a public right of way, so I strode through the gate with a sneer and my hand on my wallet, and the man in the ticket booth wisely decided not to tamper with me.

The transformation when you pass through the gate is both immediate and stunning. On one side you are in a busy village, and on the other you are suddenly thrust into a rural Arcadia of the sort that seems incomplete without a couple of Gainsborough figures ambling by. Before me spread 2,000 acres of carefully composed landscape - stout chestnuts and graceful sycamores, billiard-table lawns, an ornamental lake bisected by an imposing bridge, and in the centre of it all the monumental baroque pile of Blenheim Palace. It was very fine.

I followed the curving road through the grounds, past the palaceand busy visitors' car park, and on around the periphery of the Pleasure Gardens. I would come back to check this out, but at the moment I was headed across the park and to an exit on the other side on the Bladon road. Bladon is a nondescript little place trembling under the weight of passing goods traffic, but in its centre is the churchyard where Winston Churchill lies buried. It had begun to rain and as it was a bit of a hike up a busy road, I began to wonder if this was worth the effort, but when I reached it I was glad I had. The churchyard was lovely and secluded and Churchill's grave so modest that it took some finding among the tumbling gravestones. I was the only visitor. Churchill and Clemmie shared a simple and seemingly forgotten plot, which I found both surprisingly touching and impressive. Coming as I do from a country where even the most obscure and worthless of presidents get a huge memorial library when they pop their clogs - even Herbert Hoover, way out in Iowa, has a place that looks like the headquarters of the World Trade Organization - it was remarkable to think that Britain's greatest twentieth-century statesman was commemorated with nothing more than a modest statue in Parliament Square and this simple grave. I was impressed by this commendable show of restraint.

I retraced my steps to Blenheim and had a nose around the Pleasure Gardens and other outdoor attractions. 'Pleasure Gardens' apparently was short for 'It's a Pleasure to Take Your Money', since it seemed largely dedicated to helping visitors to part with further sums in a gift shop and tea-room or by buying garden gates, benches and other such items produced by the Blenheim estate sawmill. Dozens of people poked around happily, seemingly undisturbed by the thought that they had paid £6.90 for the privilege of looking at the sort of items they could see for free at any decent garden centre. As I left the gardens and walked back towards the palace, I took the opportunity to study the miniature steam train. It ran over a decidedly modest length of track across one corner of the grounds. The sight of fifty English people crouched on a little train in a cold grey drizzle waiting to be taken 200 yards and thinking they were having fun is one that I shall not forget in a hurry.

I followed a paved path to the front of the palace and over Vanbrugh's grand bridge to the mighty, absurdly egocentric column that the first Duke of Marlborough erected at the top of a hill overlooking the palace and lake. It really is the most extraordinary edifice, not only because it is lofty and impressive, but because it dominates the view from at least a hundred palace windows. What

kind of person, I wondered, would erect a 100-foot-high column to himself in his own grounds? How striking was the contrast with the simple grave of dear old Winnie.

Maybe I'm a bit simple, but it has always seemed to me that the scale of Blenheim Palace and the scale of Marlborough's achievement are curiously disproportionate. I can understand how in a moment of mad rejoicing a grateful nation might have awarded turn, say, a two-week timeshare for life in the Canaries and maybe a set of cutlery or a Teasmade, but I can't for the life of me comprehend how a scattering of triumphs in obscure places like Oudenard and Malplaquet could be deemed to have entitled the conniving old fart to one of the great houses of Europe and a dukedom. More extraordinary still to my mind is the thought that nearly 300 years later the duke's heirs can litter the grounds with miniature trains and bouncing castles, charge admission and enjoy unearned positions of rank and privilege simply because a distant grandsire happened to have a passing talent for winning battles. It seems a most eccentric arrangement to me.

I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter's homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn't foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.

As I was standing there taking in the view and reflecting on the curious practice of primogeniture, some well-groomed young woman on a bay horse bounded past very near to where I was standing. I've no idea who she was, but she looked rich and privileged. I gave her a little smile, such as one habitually gives strangers in an open place, and she stared flatly back at me as if I was not important enough to smile at. So I shot her. Then I returned to the car and drove on.

I spent two days driving through the Cotswolds and didn't like it at all - not because the Cotswolds were unlovely but because the car was. You are so sealed off from the world in a moving vehicle, and the pace is all wrong. I had grown used to moving about at walking speed or at least at British Rail speed, which is often, of course, much the same thing. So it was with relief, after a day spent dashing about through various Chippings and Slaughters and Tweeness-upon-the-Waters, that I abandoned the car in a car park in Broadway and took to my feet.

The last time I had seen Broadway, on an August afternoon some years before, it had been a nightmare of sclerotic traffic and flocks of shuffling daytrippers, but now, out of season, it seemed quiet and forgotten, its High Street nearly empty. It's an almost absurdly pretty place with its steeply pitched roofs, mullioned windows, prolific gables and trim little gardens. There is something about that golden Cotswold stone, the way it absorbs sunlight and then feeds it back so that even on the dullest days villages like Broadway seem to be basking in a perennial glow. This day, in fact, was sunny and gorgeous, with just a tang of autumn crispness in the air which gave the world a marvellous clean, fresh-laundered feel. Halfway along the High Street I found a signpost for the Cotswold Way and plunged off down a track between old buildings. I followed the path across a sunny meadow and up the long slope towards Broadway Tower, an outsized folly high above the village. The view from the top over the broad Vale of Evesham was, as always from such points, sensational - gently undulating trapezoids of farmland rolling off to a haze of distant wooded hills. Britain still has more landscape that looks like an illustration from a children's story book than any other country I know - a remarkable achievement in such a densely crowded and industrially minded little island. And yet I couldn't help feeling that the view may have been more bucolic and rewarding ten or perhaps twenty years ago.

It is easy to forget, in a landscape so timeless and fetching, so companionably rooted to an ancient past, how easily it is lost. The panorama before me incorporated electricity pylons, scattered housing estates and the distant sunny glints of cash and carry warehouses. Far worse, the dense, carefully knitted network of hedgerows was showing distinct signs of becoming frayed and disjointed, like the pattern on a candlewick bedspread that has been picked off by idle fingers. Here and there fragments of overgrown hedge stood stranded and forlorn in the midst of otherwise featureless fields.

Did you know that between 1945 and 1985 England lost 96,000 miles of hedgerows - enough to girdle the earth four times? So muddled has been government policy towards the countryside that for a period of twenty-four years farmers could actually get one grant to plant hedgerows and another to grub them up. Between 1984 and 1990, despite the withdrawal of government money to plough up hedgerows, a further 53,000 miles were lost. You often hear it said (and I know because I once spent three days at a