The Road to Little Dribbling (21 page)

It was only a little after three o’clock, so I had time for both a cup of tea and a look at the town. It seemed to be an awfully long day. When I got back to the town, Torquay was surprisingly quiet. I spotted a café that looked agreeable, but when I reached the door a man was emerging to lock up.

“Sorry, we’re closing,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “What time do you close?”

“Five o’clock.”

“Oh,” I said again. “What time is it now?”

He looked at me as if I was a little bit slow.

“Five o’clock.”

“Of course,” I said. I showed him my watch. “Battery’s been playing up.”

He pointed to a shop down the street. “I think they’re open till five thirty. You might get a battery there.”

I thanked him and went to the designated shop where a man of about fifty sat impassively at a counter. He looked like he hadn’t moved a muscle for at least twelve hours. I passed him the watch and explained that the battery seemed to be going.

He examined the watch for half a second and passed it back. “We don’t handle these,” he said flatly.

“You don’t handle what? Timepieces?”

“Mondaine. We don’t handle Mondaine.”

“Oh. Do you know anyone who does?”

He shrugged. “You can try Jones.”

He didn’t actually say Jones. He used another name, but because I am kind I am giving it a pseudonym. I managed to coax a street name out of him and a nod of the head to indicate the approximate direction of this alternative possibility.

“Thank you,” I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better.

I hurried along to Jones’s—for some reason this was beginning to feel urgent—to find another fellow of equally sweet disposition.

I explained my problem and passed him my watch. He looked at it and passed it back. “Can’t help you,” he said.

“Why?”

“Haven’t got the batteries in stock. Sorry.”

At least he said sorry, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. I said thank you and left. It was clearly too late to do anything else in Torquay, so I retrieved my car and drove off in the general direction of Totnes. I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves.

Chapter 11

Devon

S
OMETIMES IT DOESN’T PAY
to be first. Britain not only invented the train, but embraced rail travel with more alacrity and enthusiasm than most other nations and ended up with far more capacity than it ever needed. Tracks were laid all over the place as early enthusiasts rushed into the business. The Isle of Wight, an area of 147 square miles, had fifty-five miles of track operated by eight separate companies at one point.

By the time the network was nationalized in 1948, it was antiquated, incoherently structured, and losing money hand over fist. Its holdings included not only trains, stations, repair depots, and the like, but also fifty-four hotels, seven thousand horses, a fleet of buses, some canals and docks, the Thomas Cook travel agency, and a film company. The enterprise was so diverse and slackly managed that no one knew how many people the new company employed; estimates ranged loosely from 632,000 to 649,000.

By 1961, things had grown so bad that the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, instructed his transport secretary, Ernest Marples, to sort things out. Marples was already a contentious figure. As cofounder of a leading construction company, he had made a fortune building roads for the government before becoming part of the government himself. When Opposition members objected that it seemed a little corrupt for a minister of transport to oversee state projects that could easily benefit his own company, Marples came under pressure to dispose of his shares. His first plan was to sell them to his business partner on the understanding that he could buy them back later at the original price. When told that that still wasn’t quite ethical, Marples came up with a more straightforward arrangement: he sold them to a company secretly controlled by his wife.

Marples appointed Richard Beeching to the job of consolidating the railways, at the enormous annual salary of £24,000—more than double what the prime minister was paid. Beeching was a portly, prissy-looking man with a caterpillar mustache, a bad comb-over, and a striking absence of relevant experience. A physicist by training, he was technical director of the chemical company ICI. Though he knew no more about railways than the average rail passenger, Beeching was an able enough administrator, and anyway it didn’t take a lot of vision to see that the railways needed attention. Beeching commissioned a study which showed that the situation was even worse than thought. Some lines were barely doing any business at all. The Invergarry and Fort Augustus line in Scotland was found to be carrying an average of just six passengers a day. The little Llangynog-to-Mochnant line in Wales had average daily earnings of less than £1. Altogether, one half of Britain’s rail network accounted for 96 percent of business, while the other half generated just 4 percent. The obvious solution was to close the unproductive parts. In March 1963, Beeching produced a hefty document called
The Shaping of British Railways,
universally known then and ever since as the Beeching Report, in which he proposed to shut down 2,636 stations, about one-third of the total, along with two hundred branch lines and some five thousand miles of track.

The sacrificing of so many stations for the sake of economic efficiency gave Beeching a notoriety that clings to his memory yet. Had Beeching confined himself to the obscure parts of the network, he would probably never have attracted so much opprobrium, but in a burst of reforming zeal he also recommended closing several prominent stations—Inverness, King’s Lynn, Canterbury, Stratford-upon-Avon, Hereford, Salisbury, Chichester, Blackburn, and Burnley, among many others—and that stirred a furious response.

In point of fact, none of the aforementioned stations closed. Indeed, many of the cuts that followed had little to do with Beeching at all. The Labour Party came to power in 1964 with its own program of rationalizations. Harold Wilson, the new prime minister, spared the well-known stations but closed an additional fourteen hundred that Beeching had not mentioned at all. The cuts were particularly devastating for seaside towns in the West Country. Lyme Regis, Padstow, Seaton, Ilfracombe, Brixham, and many others lost their services. Several resorts are said never to have recovered. Once there was a service called the Atlantic Coast Express. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have something like that now? Today the fastest train to the west, from Paddington station in London to Penzance at the western tip of Cornwall, takes five and a half hours to travel 280 miles, for an average speed of about fifty miles an hour. I have ridden it several times. It is like rigor mortis with scenery.

His work done, Beeching returned to ICI and was given a peerage for services to evisceration. Although Beeching wasn’t responsible for all the cuts commonly attributed to him, he was no hero. About a third of the cuts he proposed were, by any measure, shortsighted or regrettable. It has also been suggested that many of Beeching’s figures were collected intentionally during quiet times—at seaside resorts out of season, for instance—to make certain lines look particularly underutilized. One of the services that Beeching wanted to ax was the Exeter to Exmouth line. It survived and now carries a million passengers a year, suggesting that Beeching’s assessments were not always reliable or even necessarily honest.

Ernest Marples likewise was elevated to the peerage at about the same time, but soon afterward fled the country to escape arrest for tax fraud. He died in France in 1978, never having returned to Britain or having shown the slightest inclination to be other than an odious, oily-haired Tory wanker.

—

So thanks to a scattering of long-dead politicians, my travel across Devon and Cornwall could not be done by train. Nor, I was wearied to discover, could I go by bus either, so poor were local services. To get from Totnes to Salcombe, a distance of nineteen miles, would involve separate journeys from Totnes to Brixham, Brixham to Dartmouth, Dartmouth to Torcross, and Torcross to Salcombe, and then the same again in reverse, but the buses were so infrequent that it would take days to make the full return journey anyway.

So I had no choice but to drive, and it took forever. All the roads were narrow and full of blind corners and tight spots. At every village and hamlet lines of parked cars meant that the roads were not wide enough for two cars to pass, so everyone had to take turns letting other cars through. It was all surprisingly good-natured and agreeable because everyone was considerate and no one cheated. This was the English at their best—like the England that used to exist everywhere, in which you considered the needs of others along with your own on the assumption that they would do likewise with you.

I stopped at one point and counted as a string of twenty-eight cars gratefully accepted my gesture of deferral. They all waved to me a sincere but distracted thanks as they simultaneously squeezed through a tight space between me and a cottage built hard by the road. Whether they wished it or not, all those cars were now part of a convoy slowly making its way across south Devon. Eventually a driver in the distance flashed his lights for me to come through, and I discovered that I was now the head of a convoy of my own. At least two dozen cars were reliant on me to create openings and squeeze through blockages. I found I quite enjoyed the responsibility of it, and I am happy to say I led them successfully to Salcombe with hardly any losses along the way.

Salcombe is a famous yachting community, picturesquely sited on a sweep of green hills overlooking a preposterously pretty cove. The last time I was there, some twenty years ago, you could drive into the village and park by the harbor, but those days are long gone. Today there is a park-and-ride lot on a hilltop just outside the village. Even from a distance I could see there was a queue to get into the lot, but I spotted a space in a lay-by across the road and darted into it with an abrupt and daring maneuver that prompted six or eight other motorists to honk their horns and flash their lights in a spontaneous gesture of admiration.

I walked into the village along the crest of the hill and then down a steep curving road, past cottages that all had jaunty nautical names and the trim but impersonal look of second homes. The population of Salcombe, I read somewhere, increases tenfold during the summer season, from two thousand to twenty thousand. This was definitely the summer season. But even when crowded to bursting, it is a lovely place. In the harbor, little boats with triangular sails floated on the glassy water like party favors. A tangy smell of marine life hung in the air. Gulls cawed and wheeled overhead, dropping splatty white cluster bombs on rooftops and pavements. Goodness knows what those gulls eat, but it certainly keeps them regular.

Salcombe is smart and prosperous and lively. Everyone was dressed like a Kennedy at Hyannisport. I had to get a sweater out of my bag and tie it around my neck to keep people from staring. They all had a robust, healthy, sea-sprayed look about them. These people didn’t walk from place to place, they
bounded
.

The main street in Salcombe is Fore Street. The
Daily Telegraph
has deemed it the sixth coolest street in Britain. I have no idea how they make such an assessment, though I suspect, this being the
Telegraph
, that it has little to do with science or much real thought. The shops were unquestionably upmarket. At the Casse-Croûte Deli, the special of the day was Brie and asparagus tart made with organic cider, which I was pleased and relieved to see. How often have I had to decline a Brie and asparagus tart because the cider wasn’t organic. It occurred to me that in my lifetime British food has gone from strange and unappetizing to strange and unappetizing again with about fifteen years of glorious, unself-conscious tastiness in between. Call me an unreconstructed heathen, but the sooner we get back to a national diet of chips with gravy and that sort of thing, the happier I will be. In my day every restaurant meal started with prawn cocktail and finished with Black Forest gateau and we were all a lot happier, believe me.

Everywhere in Salcombe was packed. I stood not the slightest chance of sitting down with a cup of coffee or organic tart, so I decided to go for a walk and retraced my route back up to the hilltop and along the road toward Kingsbridge. About a mile along, a narrow, beckoning lane ran off to the right through glorious countryside. From my hilltop vantage point, I could see the Kingsbridge estuary poking its skinny arms into various clefts in the middle distance. I had left my Ordnance Survey map in the car, so I couldn’t see where the local footpaths were, but I thought I could amble down the lane to the next village and maybe find a nice, forgotten pub for lunch. I walked for perhaps a third of a mile, unable to see anything beyond the thick hedges pressing in on both sides, then came around a bend and to my dismay found a giant piece of farm machinery coming up the lane toward me. It entirely filled the available space and was roughly brushing the hedges on both sides. There wasn’t any possibility of my standing aside for it, and no gaps for farm gates anywhere along the way to retreat into, so I had no choice but to turn around and walk briskly all the way back up the hill to where I had started, acutely aware that just behind me, moving at a speed just fast enough to be menacing, was a giant piece of machinery that could flatten me like a piece of dropped chewing gum if it elected to. I turned from time to time to the driver to mime a kind of apology for being in his way, indeed for existing at all, and to indicate that I was moving as fast as I could, but found not the tiniest hint of warmth or compassion in his grim, set expression. The faster I tried to move, the more he seemed to speed up. At the top of the hill, I bent double gasping for breath and he sped past without a look of acknowledgment.