The Road to Little Dribbling (37 page)

—

I finished the day in Ashbourne, another very agreeable little town, with the kinds of shops that you hardly see these days: a cheese shop, a sweet shop, a shoe repair shop, at least two butchers, a greengrocer’s, an old-fashioned toy shop, several pubs, and some good-looking antique shops. At one end of town are the Memorial Gardens, which are pleasant if nowhere near as splendid as Buxton’s Pavilion Gardens, and at the other end stands the magnificent Church of St. Oswald’s, with a tall, graceful spire that brings to mind Salisbury Cathedral on a slightly smaller scale.

I went in a snug-looking pub and noticed that one of the guest bitters was from the Ringwood Brewery in my part of the country.

“They do a very nice lager, too,” I said to the bartender, just making conversation.

“We do very nice lagers ourselves,” he responded defensively as if I had just told him his wife was ugly.

I was taken aback. “I wasn’t suggesting anything about your lagers. I just thought this was a good one you might not have heard of.”

“As I say, we have very good lagers already,” he said, a touch frostily, and handed me my change.

“And you’re a bit of a jackass,” I thought, and went with my beer to a corner table, where I sat under a framed newspaper photograph from the time when a lorry with failed brakes had gone through the pub’s front wall. I was kind of sorry now that I had missed that.

Just before leaving home, I had stuck a bundle of forwarded correspondence from a publisher into my rucksack and I pulled it out now. When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors. Recently a man in Huddersfield wrote to tell me that he quite liked some of my books and thought it would be an idea if we swapped houses for a couple of weeks so that he could get to know me through my possessions and I could keep his tropical fish fed. “I haven’t told the wife yet, in anticipation of a positive reply,” he wrote. Another wanted to do a book called
The Great British Breakfast
but wasn’t good at writing, so he proposed that we travel around Britain together; he would eat the breakfasts and describe them to me and I would put the experience into words. He proposed a 70/30 split of the proceeds in his favor since it was his idea and I was quite well off already. Another man wrote saying that in 1974 he was working as a bush pilot in Canada and he gave a lift from Goose Bay, Newfoundland, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to a young man with a reddish beard. The thing he particularly remembered was that the young man was wearing a kilt, and he wondered if I’d ever worn a kilt while traveling in Newfoundland.

Occasionally the mail includes some good surprises, and I was treated to one now. From a padded envelope, I pulled an advance copy of a book called
Maphead
by Ken Jennings, about one man’s passion for geography. It didn’t look my kind of thing at all, but I glanced through it and was immediately hooked. It was ostensibly about the joys of geography, but mostly it was about how uninformed Americans have become with respect to the world.

Jennings relates the story of an assistant professor at the University of Miami named David Helgren who had given freshman students a blank map of the world and asked them to locate thirty well-known places. He expected mixed results, but what he found was that the students mostly couldn’t do any of it. Eleven who were from Miami couldn’t even locate Miami. The
Miami Herald
picked up the story and then it became national news. Helgren was interviewed by lots of newspapers and film crews. And how did the University of Miami respond to this? It fired Helgren. When a colleague spoke up in Helgren’s behalf, it fired him, too.

Other findings have shown that about 10 percent of university students can’t find California or Texas on a map and about a fifth of Americans overall can’t even find the United States on a map. How can you not find your own country on a map? Jennings quotes the response of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA competition when asked to explain why so many Americans couldn’t even find their own country on a map. With solemnity and conviction she responded:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.

Well, thank God at least we haven’t lost our articulacy. I hadn’t intended to have another pint, but I was having such a good time with the book that I went back to the bar and ordered another, so that I could read even more, though this time prudently I didn’t mention to the barman any other beers I had ever had in case he took it personally.

Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.

II

The British are sometimes magnificently sensible. In 1980, the government established the National Heritage Memorial Fund, to provide money to save things that might otherwise be lost, but nowhere did it define what heritage was. So the trustees of the fund are free to save anything they choose as long as money is available and they consider it as coming under the general category of heritage. You couldn’t devise a system more open to foolishness and abuse, yet it has worked brilliantly. It has helped to save everything from works of art to threatened species of birds, but I don’t think the money has ever been better spent than on saving Calke Abbey, my next port of call.

Calke Abbey has never been an abbey—the family that owned it just called it that to make it sound more interesting—but it was once a very substantial estate, spread over some thirty thousand acres in southern Derbyshire. For four hundred years it was the home of the Harpur Crewe family whose defining characteristic was “congenital unsociability,” as the house guidebook nicely puts it. For the last 150 years of their reign, most members of the family barely left the property or let anyone onto it. A visitors’ book from the nineteenth century was found to contain not a single entry. The first automobile wasn’t allowed up the drive until 1949 and electricity wasn’t installed until 1962.

Before the First World War, Calke employed sixty staff, but then the estate fell into decline and by the end it employed no one. When Charles Harpur Crewe died in 1981—amazingly, not to say moronically, intestate—his brother Henry was confronted with an inheritance tax bill so large that the interest alone increased by £1,500 every day. Unable to pay, Henry gave the house to the National Trust. Brilliantly, the Trust decided to keep the house just as it found it. They call it “the un-stately home,” and that couldn’t be more enchantingly correct.

The property had not been improved or substantially decorated since the early 1840s. After Vauncey Harpur Crewe, the tenth baronet, died in 1924, the family retreated to one small corner of the house. When the National Trust arrived in 1985, it opened doors on rooms that hadn’t been entered in more than fifty years. The whole place was a musty time warp.

I was put on a tour with seventeen other people, and it was superb. It lasted a very generous ninety minutes and was led by a well-spoken, good-natured, admirably well-informed lady. The trust has done a superb job of halting the deterioration without losing an air of neglect and decline. Everywhere the paint was peeling or the plaster was rough. I leaned against a wall at one point and one of my fellow tour members whispered to me with great pleasure and many eager nods that the back of my jacket was now absolutely filthy. I took it off to look and he was right, and we both nodded vigorously. As well as the furnishings and a great deal of taxidermy, the house also contains an outstanding collection of archaeological treasures, most of which were found on the grounds by our old friend Basil Brown of Sutton Hoo, I was pleased to learn.

I was so delighted with the whole thing that I decided to make my peace with the National Trust and went straight back to the ticket office and took out membership. I hadn’t realized quite what a big deal it was—I had to provide two sets of fingerprints, a chest X-ray, and swear an oath promising to buy a Volvo and a wax jacket—but I did get my admission to Calke refunded as part of the deal, and I appreciated that very much, as you can imagine.

—

I was on my way to Rutland to visit my son and his family, who live near Oakham. It was a grandchild’s birthday and I seldom miss a family occasion where cake is involved. But I wasn’t expected until teatime and I was pleased to have a day to just pootle around in this most delightful corner of England. The green and rolling countryside shared between Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Nottinghamshire is quite distinctively lovely and hardly anyone outside those counties knows it.

Not far from Calke Abbey is the hamlet of Coton in the Elms, which has the distinction of being the furthest place in Britain from the sea, and I couldn’t resist that. The specific site is Church Flatts Farm, which is officially 70.21 miles from the nearest patch of coastline. Some passerby had marked the spot with a roll of old carpet heaved into the hedge. I pulled over by the farm drive and got out and just stood there, quietly proud to be the least salty person in Britain. About fifteen or twenty seconds into the experience, I realized that it wasn’t going to get any better than this no matter how long I stood there, so I got back in the car and drove on, but with a lasting sense of satisfaction and a profound readiness for a party tea.

Chapter 20

Wales

I
HAD TO GO
to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective.

Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?”

I replied: “London.”

“Can you spell that please?”

I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said.

“Country?”

“England.”

“Can you spell that?”

I spelled England.

She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?”

I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested.

I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest.

“It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can have ‘London, France.’ ”

“Seriously?”

She nodded.

“Well, why not?”

So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the
lobby
back there?”

“That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.”

“Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

I was thinking about all this as I sat now in a motorway services area on the M4 near Bristol. I was on my way to the far west of Wales, and was very much looking forward to it, let me tell you, but it’s a long drive and I was hungry, so I thought I would treat myself to breakfast. I had rather touchingly supposed that I would be strolling with a tray through a brightly lit cafeteria called the Granary, with booths and shiny cutlery and a hearty if not hugely attractive choice of cooked foods, but it turns out that all the Granaries and other motorway restaurants are gone now. Today all you get are food courts served by fast food chains. I ended up with a biscuit filled with whatever they could find that was foodlike and bright yellow—I think it was called a Breakfast Crudwich—accompanied by a little bag of Potato Greasies and watery coffee in a paper cup.