The Road to Little Dribbling (13 page)

Throughout much of its history, the New Forest has been famous for its wild ponies, which graze wherever they like and wander picturesquely through the villages. Nowadays it is also celebrated for its traffic at Lyndhurst, the unofficial capital of the forest. People come from all over Britain to experience Lyndhurst’s famous traffic jams, often without intending to. Perhaps no other town in Britain has been more comprehensively overwhelmed by the motorcar over a longer period with less imaginative attempts at amelioration. On a typical summer’s day, some fourteen thousand vehicles are funneled through a constricted T-junction on Lyndhurst’s high street, governed by a single set of traffic lights.

Unfortunately, out of all the people in the world to whom the authorities might have turned to solve the problem, they chose highway engineers. In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area. At Lyndhurst some years ago they introduced an astoundingly circuitous one-way system, which appears to have been designed to take vehicles through as many formerly peaceful residential districts as could be packed into a single visit. The system ensures that anyone getting in the wrong lane, which is almost inevitable for newcomers, will have to go around twice more—once to discover that, oops, we’re still in the wrong lane, and once to get into the right one. It has occurred to me that Lyndhurst may not receive fourteen thousand different vehicles a day, but just a couple of thousand going round and round again.

It used to be that people who knew the area would turn off onto back roads before reaching Lyndhurst and detour around the town altogether, thus getting to their destination sooner and helpfully removing themselves from the town’s congestion. That is what I tried to do now. At a place called Pikes Hill, I shot down a side lane toward Emery Down, but discovered at once that the highway engineers, cunning souls, had narrowed the back roads to a single lane with occasional passing places to discourage freelance orienteering, with the result that traffic jams back there were as bad as any in Lyndhurst. I am serious when I say that this is how these halfwits operate—by endeavoring to make everywhere as bad as the part that caused the original problem. It took me an hour and a quarter to get the last mile and a half to my hotel on the high street.

My hiking companions were similarly inconvenienced in different places. By the time we managed to rendezvous it was nearly one o’clock and we were to a man famished, so our first piece of business was to find a place to eat. On the edge of Lyndhurst is a famous beauty spot called Swan Green, where a clutch of thatched cottages overlook the aforesaid green. It is a view that has featured on many a box of fudge. Opposite is the Swan Inn, to which we now repaired, happy to be in each other’s company and looking forward to something to eat after our drives. We studied the bill of fare keenly, then presented ourselves at the bar to place our order.

“Oh, we’re not taking food orders just now,” the young bar attendant told us. “There’s been a run on the kitchen,” he added by way of explanation.

We looked around. It wasn’t that busy.

“How long will it be?” we asked.

He considered the tranquil scene around him. “Hard to say. Three quarters of an hour maybe.”

This was all the more confusing because the Swan Inn is one of those pubs that would like you to regard it as a restaurant, with chalkboards of specials all over the place and menus and silverware on the tables.

“Can I just check I have got this right?” I asked. “On a Sunday afternoon at the height of the tourist season, a number of people have turned up here wanting lunch, and this has taken you by surprise?”

“Well, we’re short of staff because it’s Sunday.”

“But isn’t Sunday one of your busiest days?”

He nodded emphatically. “I’ll say.”

“Yet it is everyone’s day off?”

“Well, it’s Sunday, you see,” he said again as if I hadn’t quite got it the first time.

Andrew was already leading me gently away by the elbow. He must have seen my wife do it at some point. We walked back into Lyndhurst and found a café that was able to serve us lunch without throwing the kitchen into a panic, and afterward, feeling much refreshed, we went for a good healthy tramp through dark woods and sunny heath.

—

What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life, suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good. And to walk with old friends multiplies the pleasure a hundredfold. Lyndhurst was heaving with people, particularly around a beauty spot on the edge of town called Bolton’s Bench, which has a famous yew tree but, more particularly, a nearby parking lot. I read once that the furthest distance the average American will walk without getting into a car is six hundred feet, and I fear the modern British have become much the same, except that on the way back to the car the British will drop some litter and get a tattoo.

But as soon as we headed into the wooded enclosures beyond Bolton’s Bench, we had the forest largely to ourselves, and what a treat it was. It was a perfect day for a walk. The sun was shining, the air was warm. We saw many grazing wild ponies. Wildflowers filled the sunny glades and nodded at the pathside. Andrew, our natural history expert, recited their names for us—ladies’ bedsore, yellow cowpox, tickle-me-knickers, sneezle, old man’s crack. I didn’t have my notebook with me, so I may not have all the names exactly right, but that was the drift of it.

Allow me to introduce my companions:

Daniel Wiles is a retired maker of television documentaries. I met him twenty years ago when we made a program together and we have been friends ever since. He likes naps and an ice cream in the afternoon.

Andrew Orme is an old friend of Daniel’s—indeed a very old friend, for they met at a boarding school when they were small, pale, skinny, frightened boys. They talk about those days a lot. Andrew is by far the smartest of us—he went to Oxford University, as we always boast proudly to landladies—so we let him carry the map and make all the important decisions.

John Flinn was for a long time the travel editor of the
San Francisco Chronicle,
but he is now retired. He does a lot of travel writing still, and passes through England from time to time and is thus able to join us pretty regularly. He loves baseball and shares with me an abiding admiration for the fashion model Cheryl Tiegs as she was forty years ago and, in our memories, will always be.

We tend not to see each other in between our semiannual walks, and so always have a lot of catching up to do. Daniel and Andrew walked along chattering about public school things—flagellation and steamed puddings, I suppose. They can go on for hours like that when they first get together. John and I talked about baseball and American politics. Because he is from California, John always has good stories about people doing strange things. This time he told me about how a person not far from his home had recently been Tasered, almost fatally, by a park warden for not having his dog on a leash.

“He was Tasered for not having his dog on a leash?” I asked. California stories always take a little getting your head around.

“Not intentionally exactly. The warden was trying to stop him from leaving the scene and Tasered him, and he had a heart condition and nearly died.”

“Do the authorities often Taser people in your public parks?”

“There’s a campaign to keep dogs on a leash. They’re having a crackdown.”

“An armed crackdown?”

“Well, they don’t usually Taser people. It’s just that the warden asked him to wait while she checked his identity—”

“Park wardens can do background checks?”

“Apparently. But for some reason it took a while and the man got tired of waiting and said to her, ‘Look, either cite me or let me go.’ But she wouldn’t do either, so eventually, after several minutes more, he said, ‘This is a waste of my time and I’ve got things to do and I don’t think you actually have the authority to detain me because you are just a park warden, so I am going to go now.’ And he started to leave.”

“So she Tasered him?”

“Right between the shoulder blades, I expect.”

We thought about this for a while and then talked about Cheryl Tiegs.

Because of our late start, we didn’t go very far—a little over three miles to a place called Balmer Lawn, near Brockenhurst. It was intensely pretty in the late afternoon sunshine. We stood looking appreciatively at it for a minute, then turned and headed back to Lyndhurst. It was a modest start, but a good one.

—

Back at the hotel, I showered, then sat on the edge of my bed watching TV, waiting for it to be time for a drink, and wondering how many tens of thousands of days have passed since BBC One last showed a program that anyone not on medication would want to watch. I flicked through the channels to see what else was on and the very best option available was a program called
Great British Rail Journeys
in which a former politician named Michael Portillo with a taste for annoyingly colorful suits rides trains around the country for half an hour. Occasionally he would get off the train and spend approximately forty seconds with a local historian who would explain to him why something that used to be there is no longer there.

“So this used to be the site of the biggest prosthetics mill in Lancashire?” Michael would say.

“That’s right. Fourteen thousand girls worked here in its heyday.”

“Gosh. And now it’s this giant supermarket?”

“That’s right.”

“Gosh. That’s progress for you. Well, I’m off to Oldham to see where they used to make sheep dip. Ta-ta.”

And this really was the best thing on.

At dinner I brought the subject up. “I like Michael Portillo,” Daniel said, but then Daniel likes everybody. He told us that shows on some satellite stations have more people working in the studio than are watching at home.

I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people. Daniel, it turned out, had it much worse than I did. He had a whole list of demands for putting the world back to the way it ought to be. I can’t remember exactly what they were, but I believe they included leaving the European Union, returning to the gold standard, bringing back capital punishment and the British Empire, restoring home deliveries of milk, and banning immigration.

“I’m an immigrant,” I pointed out.

He nodded grimly. “You can stay,” he allowed at last, “but you must understand you are permanently on probation.” I assured him that I had never considered myself anything else.

The rest of the evening was mostly filled with drinking too much and recounting our afflictions, but as my afflictions are principally to do with memory loss I don’t recall the details.

II

Years ago I lived next door to Ringo Starr and for about six months didn’t know it. This was during a comparatively short period in my life when my wife and I lived in a row of old workmen’s cottages in Sunningdale, in Berkshire, and when I say “next door” I mean that our back fence backed onto Ringo’s estate. Ringo’s house was hundreds of yards away up a grassy slope and hidden from view by trees, but it was still in the strict sense next door. I learned that Ringo was the owner of the estate from our neighbor Dougie, who lived, in the more traditional sense, next door.

“I’m surprised you haven’t seen him around,” Dougie said. “He’s often in the Nag’s Head. Nice chap.”

I went home and said to my wife: “Guess who lives in the big house on the hill.”

“Ringo Starr,” she said.

“You knew?”

“Of course. We see him all the time around here. I stood behind him in the ironmonger’s the other day. He was buying a hammer. Nice man. He said hi.”

“Ringo Starr said hi to you? A Beatle said hi to you?”

“He’s not really a Beatle anymore.”

I ignored this, of course.

“The Beatle Ringo Starr bought a hammer in our local hardware store and said hi to you and you didn’t think to tell me.”

“It was just a hammer,” she said.

This is the problem with the British. They all have stories like this. In fact, they all have better stories than this. I have no idea how we got onto the subject of the Beatles, but the next day as we were walking along a forestry track in dense woods, I mentioned my Ringo Starr story. My companions nodded appreciatively. Daniel allowed a suitable pause, out of politeness, and then said: “When I was at university I spent an afternoon with John Lennon.”

I could see at once that this was going to out-trump me by about a thousand percent.

“Really?” I said. “How?”

“I did an interview with him. I believe it has become known as ‘the lost interview.’ ”

Make that 10,000 percent.

“You conducted the ‘lost interview’ with John Lennon?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“How?”

“Well, it was the winter of 1968. The Beatles had just done the Sergeant Pepper album. I was at Keele University. Another student, named Maurice Hindle, and I wrote to Lennon asking for an interview for the student magazine, not seriously expecting a reply, never mind an interview, and he said, ‘Sure, come to my house at Weybridge.’ So we took a train to Weybridge and he came and picked us up at the station.”

“John Lennon picked you up at Weybridge station?”

“In a Mini. It was all a bit surreal. We spent the afternoon at his house at St. George’s Hill, which is the most exclusive part of Weybridge. Lennon was very nice, entirely normal. He wasn’t that much older than us, of course, and I think he was just a little lonely for normal conversation. The house was a mess. He and Cynthia had recently split, and none of the dishes had been washed or anything. At one point, we decided to have a cup of tea, but there weren’t any clean ones, so we had to wash some up, and I can just remember thinking, ‘Wow. I am standing at a kitchen sink washing tea cups with John Lennon.’ My job for the interview was to look after the recording, while Maurice took the photographs. When we got back to Keele, Maurice decided to develop the film himself, to save money, and somehow ruined the lot. So there is nothing at all from one of the great days of my life. At the time, I thought I was going to have to kill Maurice.”