The Road to Little Dribbling (22 page)

“You’re welcome, you hayseed fuck!” I called, but I don’t think my words had the wounding effect I wished for. I can only hope that later he reflected on this and felt bad about it, or perhaps that he got a terrible disease and died.

—

I returned to the car and drove a dozen miles along yet more slow but glorious roads to Torcross, a hamlet on a dramatic sweep of coastline overlooking Start Bay. To the north from here stretches a duney expanse called Slapton Sands, so similar to the beaches of Normandy that they used it for a dress rehearsal for D-Day in the spring of 1944. Amid great secrecy, thirty thousand American troops were loaded onto landing craft and taken out onto the bay to practice coming ashore, but by chance nine German torpedo boats spotted the activity and cruised at will among them, blowing the landing craft out of the water with ease and causing all kinds of mayhem. No one from the Allied side, it appears, had thought to line up suitable protection for the exercise, so the U-boats were able to move about unimpeded.

One of those watching the carnage was Eisenhower himself. Nobody seems to know how many people died. Numbers range from 650 to 950 or so. An information board at Torcross says 749 American soldiers and sailors died. Whatever the exact figure, far more Americans were killed that night than died in the actual landing at Utah beach just over a month later. (Casualties were much higher at Omaha beach.) It was the most lopsided rout America suffered during the war, yet nobody has ever heard of it because news of the disaster was withheld, partly for purposes of morale, partly because of the general secrecy surrounding the invasion preparations. What is most extraordinary is that the Germans, having chanced upon a massive collection of boats and men engaged in training exercises just across the sea from the Cherbourg peninsula, failed to recognize that an invasion of northern France was imminent.

Here at last I got a walk in. I strolled up onto a big hill above Torcross village, a taxing climb but worth it, to a field high above the bay. The field was extensively land-mined with cow pats, but no cows were about, I was pleased to see. The view took in the mighty sweep of Start Bay, which is surely one of the very loveliest in England. To the south an attractive white lighthouse stood on a distant eminence called Start Point. To the north at Stoke Fleming, there was some other tower—a church steeple, I decided—and in between sprawled the most exquisite, effortlessly perfect combination of fields, clustered villages, farmhouses, and wandering roads.

Just at this point a herd of cows appeared over a rise and decided to come and have a look at me. They weren’t aggressive, just stupid. All they wanted was to be with me. But of course as soon as they got near they became skittish, which meant they were capable of panicking and trampling me into a shape and consistency not unlike the glistening pats they left everywhere. I didn’t want to panic them, so with an air of stoic resignation I let them escort me to the gate. Returning to sea level, I went for a walk along the sand dunes, which was hard on the ankles but at least free of cows.

Wishing for a cup of tea, I drove on to the historic town of Dartmouth, famed for its gorgeous setting on the River Dart and home of the Royal Naval College. On the outskirts, an illuminated sign beside the road told me on no account to drive into town but to use the park-and-ride system, but I went anyway to see if they were lying. They weren’t. Dartmouth was heaving and it was impossible to park, so I went all around the one-way system and back up the steep hill to an extraordinarily distant park-and-ride lot, where I should have gone in the first place. Parking cost £5, which seemed outrageous to me, bearing in mind that all I wanted was a cup of tea and that I was severely inconveniencing myself already for the sake of their economy, but I felt slightly mollified when I discovered that the charge was reduced to £3 after 2 p.m. So I rode a bus back into town and had a shuffle around, which is what tens of thousands of other people, most of them of about my age and socioeconomic background, were doing. This, I realized, is my future: a dotage spent mooching around in places like Dartmouth, visiting shops and tearooms, bitching about crowds and costly, inconvenient park-and-ride schemes.

Dartmouth used to be filled with charming shops, though I guess I should allow that that was more than twenty years ago when most places were filled with charming shops. Today it seemed to be mostly small, busy cafés and gift shops selling planks of wood with foolish sentiments on them. Dartmouth long had a celebrated independent bookshop, Harbor Books, run by Christopher Milne, son of A. A. Milne, but that closed in 2011, so I was pleased to see a new bookshop in town, the Dartmouth Community Bookshop, a not-for-profit cooperative. It is very small and on a back street, but at least it is a living bookshop and I hope the people of Dartmouth support it. I went in and talked to the manager, Andrea Saunders, and she told me that it was doing well, which I was pleased to hear. But, her books aside, if you gave me a £100 gift certificate I would struggle to spend it in Dartmouth unless it was to make kindling.

I had a cup of tea, then transferred myself to the waterfront, where the town overlooks the broad estuary of the River Dart. This was very much more agreeable, indeed quite beautiful, and I suddenly remembered why someone might choose to pass time here. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a little oik of a kid about thirteen years old in a Chelsea Football Club shirt sitting at a bus stop eating a bag of potato chips. When I came back a few minutes later, the boy was gone and the bag was on the ground. There was a bin three feet away. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever going to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

—

I stayed two nights in Totnes while in south Devon and liked it very much. It is a trim and well-kept place with an interesting range of shops—like Dartmouth used to be, in fact. There was a little more in the way of New Age crystals and that kind of thing than I personally require, but also some interesting galleries and antique shops. I went in four shops one morning as a kind of experiment. At one I was given a friendly good morning by a lady of about my own age, at another I received a wordless nod and small smile—not unfriendly, but not exactly lavish—and at the other two I was completely ignored by the people in charge.

I can never decide which is worse, the titanic indifference of the average British shopkeeper or the suffocating attention of American ones. It’s a tough call. Recently I was in New York and on an impulse I went into an Aveda shop. My wife likes Aveda shampoo (she likes anything that costs more than it ought to) and I thought I might surprise her with a little gift.

“Hello,” said the nice young woman who was in charge, “can I help you find something?”

“Oh, no thanks, I’m just looking,” I replied.

“What’s your pH?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I didn’t bring my soil test kit.” I gave her my friendliest smile. I don’t believe she knew I was joking.

“Have you tried our new performance shampoo?” she asked and thrust a cylindrical green bottle a little more into my face than I would say was altogether a good idea. “It is made with 100 percent plant-surfactants and cleanses gently while engaging the senses.”

“I am really just looking, thanks,” I said again. What I was actually looking for was a price sticker. I’m a generous soul—anyone will tell you that except for those who know me fairly well—but there is a limit to how much I will pay for shampoo, even for someone who has given me children.

As I bent to examine some bottles on a lower shelf, I became aware that the sales assistant was studying the top of my head.

“Have you tried our exfoliating shampoo?” she asked.

I straightened up. “Miss, please,” I said, “I just want to browse quietly and alone. May I do that, please?”

“Of course,” she said and took a step back. She was silent for a nanosecond, then stepped forward again. “I’d recommend the exfoliating for you,” she said.

She had, I realized, Retail Tourette’s Syndrome, a compulsion to blurt advice. There was nothing she could do about it. Whatever I touched or looked at, she would have to comment on. In the end, I had to leave the store. On the plus side, I think she saved me $28.50.

So the manifest impassivity of British shopkeepers doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it does my wife. Still, you do sometimes wonder if it would kill them to say hello. Sometimes I just have this sneaking suspicion that it might help them win some repeat business if they didn’t make it quite so clear how much they loathe you coming into their shop and touching things. Then again, as my wife always points out, no matter how warmly or not they receive me, I am still not going to buy anything because I think everything costs too much and I have everything I need already.

—

From Totnes, I headed to Dartmoor, land of hills and heath, of wild ponies and stone footbridges (called clapper bridges) across tumbling rills. I had just read
In Search of England
by H. V. Morton, which is always described as a classic, presumably by people who have never read it because it is actually quite dreadful. It was written in 1927 and consists largely of Morton motoring around England and slowing down every twenty miles to ask directions of a besmocked bumpkin standing at the roadside. In every village he went to Morton found a man with a funny accent and fuck-all to do, and had a conversation with him.

On Dartmoor he stopped at Widecombe-in-the-Moor and asked an old man leaning on an ash stick whether they really sang the old folk song “Widecombe Fair,” for which Widecombe is, not surprisingly, famed.

“Oi zur,” the man replies. “We zings it after a zing-zong zometimes afore ‘God Save the King’! Oh, aye, zur!”

The impression you get from
In Search of England
is that England is a cheerful, friendly place, peopled with lovable halfwits with comic accents, so it is a little ironic that the book is so often cited as capturing the essence of the nation. An even greater irony is that Morton eventually soured on England because it wasn’t fascist enough for him. He moved to South Africa in 1947 and lived the last thirty-two years of his life there, forgotten by the world but happy to have servants he could shout at. The only thing I remembered from the book was that he made Widecombe-in-the-Moor sound awfully pretty and I was curious to see to what extent it remained so. I am happy to say it is still a gorgeous place. It has a lovely church with a magnificent tower, a green, a pub, and a shop, and stands amid a symphony of rocky hills. I said good morning to an old fellow by the churchyard, but he didn’t say “Oi zur,” or anything amusingly rustic at all.

I drove up into the hills and parked in a parking area—just a rough clearing really—presumably put there for walkers, and got out with my trusty walking stick and map. It was a splendid morning. The hills were sprinkled with sheep and wild ponies and granite outcrops called tors. Dartmoor gets almost eighty inches of rain a year, making it one of the dampest of English regions, which is of course saying a great deal. Because the drainage is poor, the water gathers into what are locally known as “feather beds”—pools of water just covered over with moss. These are practically indiscernible, with the consequence that outsiders frequently step into them and then vanish with a startled glug, or so it is said. I didn’t actually believe this, but I stayed on the paths nonetheless.

I couldn’t for the life of me work out where I was on the map. I couldn’t even find Widecombe. A stiff breeze kept trying to refold the map for me. (Only later, when I was back in the car, did I realize that the map was printed on both sides and that I had been looking at the wrong side.) Wherever exactly I was, it was a lovely walk with top-of-the-world views. Eventually I came to a trig point—always an excitement on a country stroll for they usually indicate that you have reached a summit. “Trig,” if you don’t know, is short for triangulation, and a trig point is a small concrete pillar with a brass inset on the top to which a surveying instrument was once attached in order to make an accurate map of the landscape. Every trig point is within sight (albeit distantly) of two others, so that each is at an apex of a triangle. I am not at all sure how a series of triangles gives you a map of Britain—and please don’t write to tell me; I’m not saying I want to know—but somehow it does and that’s what matters. Sarah Palin named her son Trig. I wonder if he knows that he is named after a concrete block.

The whole of Britain was retriangulated between 1932 and 1962, which is what accounts for all the trig points you find on any walk in the hills. Nowadays of course it is all done with satellites, and trig points aren’t needed, so many of them are vanishing, either through neglect or because they are intentionally removed, which I think is sad.

I expect there is somewhere in Britain a Trig Society. I also imagine that now that I have written this they will ask me to come and speak at their annual meeting. So let me say here that I miss trig points a lot, but not that much.

Chapter 12

Cornwall