The Road to Little Dribbling (11 page)

Chapter 6

A Great Park

I
N 1971, A SMALL,
improbable chain of events was set in motion when the Department of Health in Britain sent posters to American institutions of higher learning that read: “Would you like to train to be a psychiatric nurse in England?”

Since the answer to that question was “Obviously no,” the posters didn’t attract much attention. Most, I suspect, were discarded upon receipt. But one somehow made it onto a crowded bulletin board in a dormitory at the University of Iowa, where two friends of mine from Des Moines, Elsbeth “Buff” Walton and Rhea Tegerstrom, saw it and, remarkably, very possibly uniquely, decided to respond. And so a few weeks later they were, rather startlingly, three thousand miles from home and proudly dressed in the sky blue uniforms and starched white caps of student nurses at Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey.

Large parts of my life are the result of decisive actions taken by others, but I have never been more indebted to anyone than to Buff and Rhea for their bold leap across the ocean, for it changed my life completely, too. If not for them, I would never have settled in England or met my wife and this book would probably be called
My Forty Years in Peoria
. God bless them both.

I was drawn into Buff and Rhea’s happy, eccentric orbit the following year when I stopped to see them at the end of a summer of hitchhiking around Europe. I was supposed to be on my way home to Des Moines, but during the course of an outstandingly convivial evening in the Barley Mow pub in Englefield Green, on the eastern edge of Windsor Great Park, they suggested that I should get a job at the hospital, too. Mental hospitals were always desperate for staff, they assured me. So the next day, I impetuously applied and to my mild astonishment was immediately accepted. It was rather like joining the army. I was sent to a basement storeroom where I was given two charcoal-gray suits, one thin black tie, two white shirts, three neatly folded white lab coats, some sheets and pillowcases, a set of keys, and enough other items to form a stack in my arms that I could not see over. I was assigned a room in the male staff quarters and told to report to Tuke Ward. I was now an employee of the National Health Service, a resident of England, a sort of grownup, and a full-time foreigner—four things I hadn’t expected to be just twenty-four hours before. Not long after that I met a jolly decent student nurse named Cynthia, and found myself falling for her and falling for England simultaneously. Forty years later, I am still with them both.

So this was the part of the world where my English life began. I hadn’t been back to the area for some years, and was eager to spend a day strolling through my former life. So, early on yet another bright summery morning—the weather was being most un-Englishly kind—I set off from my hotel in Windsor and found my way through the still-quiet streets of the town to the broad, processional way known as the Long Walk, leading from the town into Windsor Great Park and to the world of my past just beyond.

Windsor Great Park is a remnant of the ancient Windsor Forest and part of the royal estate. It is a little land of enchantment, like the set of a fairy tale, a rolling, timeless realm of woods and farms and the picturesque cottages of estate workers, charmingly threaded with wandering lanes that are largely free of traffic. (Only those with business on the estate are allowed to use them.) It has a lake, enormous lawns for polo, scattered statues and other ornaments, herds of grazing deer, and occasional walled enclosures beyond which are royal retreats, like the Royal Lodge, where the Queen lived as a girl. It is forty square miles of arcadian glory on the very edge of London, yet relatively few people visit it and hardly any plunge into its bosky interior.

The Long Walk ends with a slow climb to the summit of Snow Hill, where there is a giant equestrian statue of King George III and panoramic views of Windsor Castle and all the countryside around. Henry VIII, it is often said, rode up to this point to listen for the canons of London announcing the execution of Anne Boleyn. Everything was lovely except the sky. Planes wheeled just overhead, dragging shadows over the earth, as they prepared to land at Heathrow, five miles off to the east. They were low enough that I could read the serial numbers on their undersides, and very loud—louder even than at Wraysbury because Windsor is directly on a flight path. Goodness knows what it will be like for the people west of London if Heathrow gets a third runway. Already nearly half a million flights a year come and go at Heathrow. A third runway would increase that to 740,000. At what point do people decide that enough is enough?

I think we are there already. I am forever booking flights from London to distant places, and I can’t remember ever not having lots of choices of every type—of airlines, times of departure, times of return. Does anyone really need 50 percent more of plenty? The argument is that if Heathrow doesn’t expand, other European airports will steal its business. Charles de Gaulle airport, it is pointed out, handles ten million fewer passengers a year than Heathrow, but has four runways to Heathrow’s two. Amsterdam has 20 million fewer passengers but six runways. If Heathrow doesn’t build new runways, the argument goes, it will stop being able to compete. The question that occurs to me is then why hasn’t that happened already?

I’ll tell you what people will actually get with another runway. They will get more takeoffs and landings, but in smaller planes. There used to be five or six flights a day between Chicago and the other main cities of the Midwest. Now you may get a dozen flights a day, perhaps even more, but in tiny regional jets seating thirty people with their knees jammed up against their faces. So you have more choice but a much poorer service. With small planes, for one thing, it is much easier to cancel undersold flights and put everyone on the next plane.

Do you know, incidentally, why Heathrow was built where it is? After the war the task of choosing a location for a new London airport was given to Alfred Critchley, a Canadian-born businessman who had made a fortune first by promoting greyhound racing and then by getting into cement in a big way, so to speak. He consolidated a whole bunch of small cement makers into the mighty enterprise known as Blue Circle and became hugely wealthy in the process. During the war, Critchley helped to set up training programs for fliers, and because he knew a little about aviation and a great deal about the pouring of cement he was given the job after the war of deciding where to build a new airport to replace the old aerodrome at Croydon. I had always assumed that Heathrow was selected for some important practical reason—the porosity of the subsoil or depth of the water table or something—but in fact Critchley chose it because it was halfway between his house in Sunningdale and his office in London.

Critchley died in 1963 before Heathrow became the colossus it is now, so he had no idea what he was inflicting on the world. The Heathrow he last saw was still a place of pleasure and excitement. I happen to own three packets of Viewmaster discs of Heathrow from that period and they are a marvel to behold for they show that Heathrow in those days had about sixteen airplanes and a few dozen well-dressed customers. One man with an excellent mustache seemed to run the control tower all by himself. The terminals were sleek, modern, and practically empty. Everyone involved in the check-in process was immensely happy. Aboard the planes, everyone was happier still. The stewardesses not only served you a large tray of food, but stood smilingly by your seat and watched you eat it.

What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, backyard barbecues, air travel as a commonplace—all were brand-new and marvelously exciting. It is amazing we didn’t choke to death on all the novelty and wonder in our lives. I remember once my father brought home a device that you plugged in and, with an enormous amount of noise and energy, it turned ice cubes into shaved ice, and we got excited about that. We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too.

—

I had an enjoyable amble across the park and exited at a spot called Bishop’s Gate, where I joined a network of wooded back lanes leading to Englefield Green. The broad green for which the village is named is by far its finest feature. It is, I suppose, three or four acres in size, and lined on every side with big houses. At its southern end stands the Barley Mow pub, smaller than I remembered but still handsome. It occurred to me with a shiver that it must be nearly forty years since I was last in it. It was too early for it to be open, but I peered through the windows and was glad to see that it hadn’t changed in any alarming way. Across the green, visible above a fringe of billowy hedges, was a large house that Buff’s boyfriend Ben pointed out to me once as the home of Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint detective stories. This impressed me deeply. In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.

I can’t say I was a fan of Leslie Charteris myself or even knew a single thing about him, but each month my mother bought a
Saint
magazine for twenty-five cents at the supermarket and read the stories avidly, which was recommendation enough for me. This man was not only a famous author, he was a
magazine
. Whenever I passed the house after that, I always dawdled in the hope of glimpsing the elusive Charteris, but I never did. I imagined him to be a suave Englishman, like the Simon Templar character he created for his stories. In fact, I later learned, he was half Chinese, born Leslie Yin in Singapore in 1909. So even if I had seen him, I would probably have thought he was Charteris’s herbalist or something. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but Charteris was a recluse and a bigot. Though he was at the height of his fame thanks to a television series starring Roger Moore, he had long since given up writing his own books, but left it to ghostwriters.

Away from the green, Englefield Green village was never very pretty and now seems to have given up trying. It used to have banks and butchers and greengrocers, but those are mostly gone now and instead there are coffee shops and little restaurants and an inordinate number of garbage bins outside every property. Goodness knows what they get up to there, but it sure generates a lot of waste.

Beyond the village, standing along the busy A30 at the top of Egham Hill, is the campus of Royal Holloway College, an outpost of the University of London. The college began as a single vast building, a kind of English Versailles set down on a hilltop in the outermost suburbs of London, and was the philanthropic gift of a patent medicine manufacturer named Thomas Holloway. Holloway College was one of the grandest buildings built anywhere on the planet in the nineteenth century and it still staggers on first sight. It is five hundred feet long across the front, a third of a mile around. It contains 858 rooms and embraces two spacious courtyards. But where Versailles was made for kings, Holloway College more nobly was built as a women’s college, at a time when women’s colleges were a rarity. Why Thomas Holloway and his wife, Jane, decided to sink much of their wealth into a college for women isn’t known, any more than it is known why they decided to fund a companion building, Holloway Sanatorium, to house well-off deranged people, two and a half miles away in the village of Virginia Water.

Both were designed by an architect named William Henry Crossland, who produced these two colossal buildings, and then fell into a curious professional inertia. Though he lived another twenty-two years, Crossland never did another thing. Instead he took up with an actress eighteen years his junior named Eliza Ruth Hatt, and with her produced a second family while still remaining attached to the first, living some of the time with his wife and daughter in one house and some of the time with Hatt and the children she bore him in another. The effort of it all exhausted his body and his resources, and ultimately the patience of both his wife and mistress, for he died alone and destitute in cheap lodgings in London in 1908.

Which surely proves something.

—

I strolled on to Virginia Water along Bakeham Lane, which in the whimsical fashion of English roads changes its name to Callow Hill about halfway along. The road was rather busier than it had once been, and a good deal more littered around the edges, but otherwise was still leafy and pleasant. It is amazing how much you absorb and evidently hold on to forever on a route you have commonly walked, for I felt I remembered nearly everything—the curve of driveways, the pitch of house roofs, the knockers on front doors. It was extraordinary to recall so vividly things I hadn’t thought about in decades, particularly when you consider that I can’t remember what I had for breakfast or the names of anyone I haven’t spent at least an hour with in the last two weeks.