The Road to Little Dribbling (7 page)

I like being in a country where when cows attack, word of it gets around. That’s what I mean when I say Britain is cozy. It is a nice quality for a country to have. The only downside to this is that it means Britons are frightened of things that are never going to happen to them. Cow attacks are actually quite rare. That’s what makes them news when they happen. But because people read about cow attacks at regular intervals, they
perceive
them as being common.

As an experiment, I asked several British friends this question: “What are the chances if you are walking in a field with cows that the cows will attack you?” Every one of them grew instantly animated, and said something along the lines of “Actually, surprisingly good. I read about it in the papers. It happens far more often than you’d expect.”

Ask the same question of an American and he would say: “Why would I be in a field with cows?”

We’ll return to this issue in due course, but first let’s pay a visit to Dover.

—

I know I said at the outset that I was going to avoid the places I went in
Notes from a Small Island,
but I felt I just had to look in on Dover when I was so close by already. I have a peculiar fondness for the place—or if not fondness exactly, a kind of abiding concern—that I can’t entirely explain. Partly, I suppose, it is because Dover was where I first set foot on English soil, so in a very literal sense it is the place I have known the longest. I spent my first forty-eight hours in Britain there and I quite liked Dover. Of course, I knew nothing else of Britain at that point, but in those days Dover wasn’t at all a bad place. It had cinemas and pubs and restaurants and a busy high street. The endless bustle of the ferry port clearly brought people and commerce to the town. But on every subsequent visit I have made to Dover it has visibly deteriorated. I keep hoping to find the buzzing, prosperous little place I first saw, and instead I am greeted by a sad air of ghostliness and decline.

In
Notes from a Small Island,
I wrote about arriving late and looking longingly into the windows of a ritzy hotel on the seafront, where people were dining in an atmosphere of elegance far beyond anything I could afford. That hotel was the Churchill. About seven or eight years ago, arriving in Dover on the car ferry from Calais, on an impulse I decided to stop at the Churchill for lunch—to treat myself to a little of the high life that I couldn’t afford all those years ago. Well, it was a strange experience. The hotel still strived for an air of elegance, but it was based much more on memory than merit. I had the dining room more or less to myself. The menu, instead of being a hefty leatherette book, was just a laminated sheet, and it was full of misspellings. I ordered a Caesar salad. When it arrived there was nothing to eat it with.

The waitress saw my look of puzzlement. “Do you want a knife and fork with that?” she said.

“Well, yes,” I answered. “It’s a salad.”

“I didn’t know if you had your own,” she said grumpily, as if this were mostly my fault, and flumped off to get some.

The salad was a kind of lettuce soup with some shredded chicken afloat on it. It was a small consolation to know that however long I live and however many other disappointing salads are placed before me, I would never receive a worse one than this. With respect to Caesar salads, life could only get better. I assumed from this experience that I would not venture into the Churchill again, but now on this latest visit I found myself approaching it once more, as if drawn by some masochistic magnetism, hoping against hope that I would find it improved since my last visit. Alas, the Churchill was no longer there. Dover’s last outpost of stateliness is gone. The window I had once gazed into was soaped over. A man walking past with a little dog told me that the Churchill had closed about five years earlier, though another hotel now occupied part of the old premises. I looked around the corner and he was right. The central part of the old hotel was now called the Dover Marina Hotel. It looked awfully quiet. Most things in Dover look quiet these days.

Time appears to be leaving Dover behind. Cheap flights to European destinations and the Channel Tunnel are between them slowly killing the ferry business. Hovercraft services to the continent ceased in 2000, and the number of passengers on conventional ferries fell by a third in the following decade, though they seem to have recovered very slightly since then. The loss of business has clearly been a blow to the town, but Dover seems to be doing a pretty good job of its own of running itself down. Not long before my visit, the council installed new benches on the seafront that were designed not to be comfortable. When asked by the local paper why they had chosen uncomfortable benches, a councillor replied somewhat bewilderingly: “If they were too comfortable, we would have the gentlemen and ladies of the day lounging on them.” And that is perhaps all you need to know to understand why Dover is dying.

—

I walked to the old South Foreland lighthouse, which was decommissioned some years ago and is now in the care of the National Trust. For a long time this was the highest lighthouse light in England, though it was the lofty cliff rather than the building itself that made it so. As lighthouses go, this one is pretty squat. South Foreland was the site of an important but forgotten piece of history. It was there that the first electric light in the world was put to use, way back in 1858, long before Thomas Edison brought us the modern lightbulb. The light at South Foreland was an arc lamp, invented by yet another man about whom almost nothing is known, Frederick Hale Holmes. Holmes’s light was too bright for domestic use but perfect for a lighthouse. The equipment was temperamental and expensive, however, and eventually it was given up as too much bother, but for a decade or so this was the one place in the world where you could see an electric light in operation. About a quarter of a century later, South Foreland made history again when Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first international radio signal from there to a receiver at Wimereux, near Boulogne, in France.

I first heard of Frederick Holmes and South Foreland when I was researching another book about five years ago, and visited it then. On that occasion, I was one of a party of three or four people who were shown around by a keen National Trust volunteer. The volunteer didn’t know much about Holmes or Marconi, but he was a fount of knowledge with respect to the mechanical operation of the light. It took one hundred and ten turns of a crank to give two and a half hours of rotation to the light, he told us, and it took forty seconds for the light to make one complete rotation. We also learned that no two lighthouses within a hundred miles of each other had the same light sequences.

“Goodness,” we said appreciatively.

The man showed us banks of batteries and cogs and things like that. The illumination from the lighthouse was one million candlepower, he said. I was so impressed with the equipment that I took a photograph.

He held up a hand like a bodyguard dealing with paparazzi. “Photography is not permitted,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked, bewildered.

“National Trust policy.”

“But it’s a lighthouse,” I pointed out. “It’s not the Bayeux tapestry.”

“Trust policy,” he said again, more crisply this time, in the tone of a man who would stab his wife in the eye with an ice pick if the head office told him it was policy.

I was about to explain to him that this is why I get so frustrated with the National Trust, because of its irksome sense of its own perfection, but I imagined my wife pinching me by the elbow and leading me toward fresh air and the distraction of a sea view, so I said nothing more. My wife has spent so many years pinching my elbow and leading me away from officious idiots—many of them in the employ of the National Trust, it must be said—that I no longer need her there. It’s become a kind of Pavlovian response.

So I stepped outside, back into a beautiful clear day, and instantly felt much better. France, 20.6 miles off, was clearly—startlingly—visible. You could practically wave to people in Calais. Many of the older English visitors around me eyed the French coast grimly, not at all pleased to realize it was that close. Most watched it warily, as if they thought it might be secretly inching closer, stealing English water.

On this latest visit, however, I arrived to find that the lighthouse was closed for the day, which was probably just as well, all things considered. So I just stood and enjoyed the views. France, I was pleased to note, seemed to be exactly where I had last left it.

From up here, I could see the shallow smudge of brown that marked the treacherous Goodwin Sands. You wouldn’t think it on such a tranquil day, but this is one of the most historically lethal places on the planet, the site of the greatest concentration of shipwrecks anywhere. More than a thousand wrecks are recorded on the Goodwin Sands. The worst incident was on November 27, 1703, when the biggest storm anyone had ever seen drove fifty ships onto the sandbanks, where they were tipped on their sides and reduced to splinters. More than two thousand men died. The Royal Navy lost 20 percent of its men that night.

Along the coast in Devon, Henry Winstanley, designer and builder of the celebrated Eddystone Lighthouse—probably the most famous lighthouse in the whole of England at that time—was by chance in the lighthouse that night. He had long expressed a desire to be in it during a really big storm. He got his wish that night but his belief in its impregnability proved to be a little misplaced. When the weather cleared and a crew rowed out to rescue Winstanley, they found the lighthouse had been completely swept away. Winstanley and the five men who were with him were never seen again. And on that sobering note, let’s move on to London.

Chapter 4

London

O
NE OF THE MYSTERIES
of the London Underground these days is whatever became of the trains on the Circle Line. They used to come along every few minutes, but now generally you wait ages. On this particular morning, when our story resumes, a great many of us had been standing on a platform at Gloucester Road station for about twenty-five minutes without any sign of action on the line at all.

“I remember when trains used to go by here,” I said brightly to a man standing beside me.

“Don’t the trains go by here?” he asked in sudden alarm.

He was a fellow American and was evidently new to London and possibly to humor.

“I was just joking,” I said gently and indicated the many people standing on the platform with us. “We wouldn’t all be standing here if there weren’t really any trains.”

“But we are all standing here and there aren’t any trains.”

I couldn’t think of an answer to this, so I just nodded and grew silent. My new American friend was studying a fully unfolded Underground map. He seemed to be giving up on the Circle Line.

“Where do I go to get the Piccadilly Line?” he asked at length.

“Oh, Piccadilly Line trains aren’t stopping here just now.”

He looked at me narrowly, wondering if this was another of my quips.

“They’re replacing the elevators, so Piccadilly Line trains aren’t stopping at this station for the next six months.”

“It’s taking them six months to replace the elevators?” he said in undisguised wonder.

“Well, there are two of them,” I answered in a spirit of fairness. I watched him studying his map. “You may also want to know that the Circle Line doesn’t go in a circle,” I added helpfully.

He looked up with real interest.

“The trains used to go around in endless circles, but now they all stop at Edgware Road and everybody has to get off one train and get on another.”

“Why?” he asked.

“No one knows,” I answered.

“This sure is a screwy country,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed happily.

Just then a train pulled in and everyone moved forward to board.

“Well, I hope you have a good trip,” I said to my new friend.

He got on, but didn’t say thanks or good-bye or anything. I kind of hope he got lost, actually.

—

I do like the London Underground. Putting the Circle Line trains to one side (which is evidently what London Underground does with them these days), nearly everything else about it is splendid. People forget how bad the Underground was once upon a time. When I first came to Britain, it was dirty, poorly managed, and crime-ridden in places. Several stations—Camden Town, Stockwell, and Tooting Bec to name but three—were positively dangerous at night. By 1982, fewer than 500 million people a year, a decline of 50 percent from the early 1950s, ventured into the Underground. A devastating fire at the King’s Cross Underground station in 1987, when thirty-one people died after a discarded cigarette started a blaze in uncleared rubbish beneath a wooden escalator, showed how lamentably undermanaged the Underground had become.

Well, look at it now. The platforms are the cleanest places in London. The service is smooth and reliable. The staff, as far as I can tell, are unfailingly helpful and courteous. Passenger numbers have risen to an astounding 1.2 billion a year, which is more than all the aboveground rail journeys in the country combined. According to
Time Out
magazine, at any given moment six hundred thousand people are on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo. I read in the
Evening Standard
that the average speed of Underground trains is just twenty-one miles an hour, which doesn’t seem very much (unless you travel regularly by train between Liss station and Waterloo, in which case it’s like being on a rocket ship), but it all feels pretty brisk, and to convey such a massive number of people over such an enormous and aged system with rarely a hitch is an extraordinary achievement.