Notes from a Small Island

by Bill Bryson

  The streets of Windsor were shiny with rain and unseasonally dark and wintry, but they were still filled with throngs of tourists. I got a room in the Castle Hotel on the High Street, one of those peculiarly higgledy-piggledy hotels in which you have to embark on an epic trek through a succession of wandering corridors and fire-doors. I had to go up one flight of stairs and, some distance further ON, down another in order to reach the distant wing of which my room was the very last. But it was a nice room and, I presumed,

  handy for Reading if I decided to exit through the window.

  I dumped my pack and hastened back the way I came, keen to see a little of Windsor before the shops shut. I knew Windsor well because we used to shop there when we lived in Virginia Water down the road, and I strode with a proprietorial air, noting which shops had altered or changed hands over the years, which is to say most of them. Beside the handsome town hall stood Market Cross House, a building so perilously leaning that you can’t help wonder if it was built that way to attract Japanese visitors with cameras. It was now a sandwich bar, but, like most of the other shops on the pretty jumble of cobbled streets around it, it has been about a million things, usually tourist-connected. The last time I was here most of them were selling egg-cups with legs; now they seemed to specialize in twee little cottages and castles. Only Woods of Windsor, a company that manages to get more commercial mileage out of lavender than I would ever have thought possible, is still there selling soaps and toilet water. On Peascod Street, Marks & Spencer had expanded, Hammick’s and Laura Ashley had moved locations, and the Golden Egg and Wimpy were, not surprisingly, long gone (though I confess a certain fondness for the old-style Wimpys with their odd sense of what constituted American food, as if they had compiled their recipes from a garbled telex). But I was pleased to note that Daniel’s, the most interesting department store in Britain, was still there.

  Daniel’s is the most extraordinary place. It has all the features you expect of a provincial department store - low ceilings, tiny obscure departments, frayed carpets held down with strips of electrician’s tape, a sense that this space was once occupied by about eleven different shops and dwellings all with slightly differentelevations - but it has the oddest assortment of things on sale: knicker elastic and collar snaps, buttons and pinking shears, six pieces of Portmeirion china, racks of clothing for very old people, a modest few rolls of carpet with the sort of patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard, chests of drawers with a handle missing, wardrobes on which one of the doors quietly swings open fifteen seconds after you experimentally shut it. Daniel’s always puts me in mind of what Britain might have been like under Communism.

  It has long seemed to me unfortunate - and I’m taking the global view here - that such an important experiment in social organization was left to the Russians when the British would have managed it so much better. All those things that are necessary to the successful implementation of a rigorous socialist system are, after all, second nature to the British. For a start, they like going without. They are great at pulling together, particularly in the face of adversity, for a perceived common good. They will queue patiently for indefinite periods and accept with rare fortitude the imposition of rationing, bland diets and sudden inconvenient shortages of staple goods, as anyone who has ever looked for bread at a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon will know. They are comfortable with faceless bureaucracies and, as Mrs Thatcher proved, tolerant of dictatorships. They will wait uncomplainingly for years for an operation or the delivery of a household appliance. They have a natural gift for making excellent jokes about authority without seriously challenging it, and they derive universal satisfaction from the sight of the rich and powerful brought low. Most of those above the age of twenty-five already dress like East Germans. The conditions, in a word, are right.

  Please understand I’m not saying that Britain would have been a happier, better place under Communism, merely that the British would have done it properly. They would have taken it in their stride, with good heart, and without excessive cheating. In point of fact, until about 1970 it wouldn’t have made the slightest discernible difference to most people’s lives, and might at least have spared us Robert Maxwell.

  I rose early the next day and attended to my morning hygiene in a state of small excitation because I had a big day ahead of me. I was going to walk across Windsor Great Park. It is the most splendid park I know. It stretches over forty enchanted square miles and incorporates into its ancient fabric every manner of sylvan charm: deep primeval woodlands, bosky dells, wandering footpaths and bridleways, formal and informal gardens and a long, deeply fetch-ing lake. Scattered picturesquely about are farms, woodland images, forgotten statues, a whole village occupied by estate workers and things that the Queen has brought back from trips abroad and couldn’t think of anywhere else to put - obelisks and totem poles and other curious expressions of gratitude from distant outposts of the Commonwealth.

  “The news had not yet come out that there was oil under the park and that it all soon might turn into a new Sullom Voe (but don’t be Inarmed; the local authority will make them screen the derricks with shrubs), so I didn’t realize that I ought to drink things in carefully in case the next time I came this way it looked like an Oklahoma oilfield. At this time, Windsor Great Park continued to enjoy a merciful obscurity, which I find mystifying in an open space so. glorious on the very edge of London. Only once could I remem-ber any reference to the park in the newspapers, a couple of years before when Prince Philip had taken a curious disliking to an avenue of ancient trees and had instructed Her Majesty’s Tree-Choppers to remove them from the landscape. I expect their branches had imperilled the progress through the park of his horses and plus-four, or whatever it is you call those creaking contraptions he so likes to roam around in. You often see him and other members of the royal family in the park, speeding past in assorted vehicles on their way to polo matches or church services in the Queen Mother’s private compound, the Royal lodge. Indeed, because the public aren’t allowed to drive on the park roads, a significant portion of the little traffic that passes is generated by royals. Once, on Boxing Day when I was ambling along in a paternal fashion beside an offspring on a shiny new tricycle, I became aware with a kind of sixth sense that we were holding up the progress of a car and turned to find that it was being driven by Princess Diana. As I hastened myself and my child out of the way, she gave me a smile that melted my heart, and since that time I have never said a word against the dear sweet girl, however pressed by those who think that she is a bit off her head because she spends £28,000 a year on leotards and makes occasional crank phone calls to hunky military men. (And who among us hasn’t? is my unanswerable reply.)

  I strode along the aptly named Long Walk from the base ofWindsor Castle to the equestrian statue of George IE, known to locals as the Copper Horse, at the summit of Snow Hill, where I rested at the base and soaked up one of the most comely views in England: the majestic sprawl of Windsor Castle 3 miles away at the end of the Long Walk, with the town at its feet and, beyond, Eton, the misty Thames Valley and low Chiltern Hills. Deer grazed in picturesque herds in a clearing below and early-morning strollers began to dot the long avenue framed by my splayed feet. I watched planes taking off from Heathrow and found on the horizon the faint but recognizable shapes of Battersea Power Station and the Post Office Tower. I can remember being very excited to discover that I could see London from way out here. It is, I believe, the only spot this far out where you can see it. Henry VIII rode to this summit to hear the cannons announce the execution of Anne Boleyn, though now all I could hear were the drones of airliners banking to land, and the startling yap of a large shaggy dog that appeared suddenly at my elbow, its owners following up a side hill, and offered me a large saliva specimen, which I declined.

  I struck off through the park, past the grounds of the Royal Lodge, the pink Georgian house where the Queen and Princess Margaret spent their girlhoods, and through the surrounding woods and
fields to my favourite corner of the park, Smith’s Lawn. It must be the finest lawn in Britain, flat and flawlessly green and built on an heroic scale. There’s almost never a soul up there, except when there’s a polo match on. It took me the better part of an hour to cross it, though I went some distance out of my way to investigate a forlorn statue on the periphery, which turned out to be of Prince Albert, and another hour to find my way through the Valley Gardens and on to Virginia Water Lake, steaming softly in the cool morning air. It’s a lovely piece of work, the lake, created by the Duke of Cumberland as a somewhat odd way of celebrating all those Scots he’d left inert or twitching on the battlefield of Culloden, and it is intensely picturesque and romantic in that way that only created landscapes can be, with sudden vistas perfectly framed by trees and a long decorative stone bridge. At the far end there is even a cluster of fake Roman ruins, opposite Fort Belvedere, the country home where Edward VIII made his famous abdication broadcast so that he could be free to go fishing with Goebbels and marry that sour-faced Simpson woman, who, with the best will in the world and bearing in mind my patriotic obligations to a fellow American, has always struck me as a frankly unlikely choice of shag.

  I only mention this because the nation seemed to be embarking on a similar monarchical crisis at this time. I must say, I can’t begin no understand the attitudes of the British nation towards the royal family. For years - may I be candid here for a moment? - I thought they were insupportably boring and only marginally more attractive than Wallis Simpson, but everybody in England adored them. Then when, by a small miracle, they finally started doing arresting and erratic things and making the News of the World on merit - when, in a word, they finally became interesting - the whole nation was suddenly saying, ‘Shocking. Let’s get rid of them.’ Only that week, I had watched with open mouth an edition of Question Time in which one of the questions seriously discussed by the panel had been whether the nation should dispense with Prince Charles and leapfrog to little Prince William. Putting aside for the moment the question of the wisdom of investing a lot of faith in the un-matured genetic output of Charles and Diana, which I would charitably describe as touching, it seemed to me to miss the whole point. If you are going to have a system of hereditary privilege, then surely you have to take what comes your way no matter how ponderous the poor fellow may be or how curious his taste in mistresses.

  My own views on the matter are neatly encapsulated in a song of my own composition called ‘I’m the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son of the Guy Who Fucked Nell Gwynne’, which I should be happy to send under separate cover upon receipt of £3.50 + 50p post and packaging.

  In the meantime, you will have to imagine me humming this cheery ditty as I stepped smartly through the roar of traffic along the A30 and made my way down Christchurch Road to the sedate and leafy village of Virginia Water.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MY FIRST SIGHT OF VIRGINIA WATER WAS ON AN UNUSUALLY SULTRY afternoon at the very end of August 1973, some five months after my arrival in Dover. I had spent the summer travelling around in the company of one Stephen Katz, who had joined me in Paris in April and whom I had gratefully seen off from Istanbul some ten days before. I was tired and road-weary, but very glad to be back in England. I stepped from a London train and was captivated instantly. The village of Virginia Water looked tidy and beckoning. It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived from an arid clime. Beyond the station rose the Gothic tower of Holloway Sanatorium, a monumental heap of bricks and gables in parklike grounds just beyond the station.

  Two girls I knew from my home town worked as student nurses at the sanatorium and had offered me sleeping space on their floor and the opportunity to ring their bath with five months of accumulated muck. My intention was to catch a flight home from Heathrow the next day; I was due to resume my listless university studies in two weeks. But over many beers in a cheery pub called the Rose and Crown, it was intimated to me that the hospital was always looking for menial staff and that I, as a native speaker of English, was a shoo-in. The next day, with a muzzy head and without benefit of reflection, I found myself filling in forms and being told to present myself to the charge nurse on Tuke Ward at 7 a.m. the following morning. A kindly little man with the intelligence of a child was summoned to take me to stores to collect a weighty set of keys and a teetering mountain of neatly folded hospital clothing - two grey suits, shirts, a tie, several white lab coats (what did they have in mind for me?) - and to deliver me to Male Hostel B across the road, where a crone with white hair showed me to a spartan room and, in a manner reminiscent of my old friend Mrs Smegma, issued a volley of instructions concerning the weekly exchange of soiled sheets for clean, the hours of hot water, the operation of the radiator, and other matters much too numerous and swiftly presented to take in, though I was rather proud to catch a passing reference to counterpanes. Been there, I thought.

  I composed a letter to my parents telling them not to wait supper; passed a happy few hours trying on my new clothes and posing before the mirror; arranged my modest selection of paperback books on the window-sill; popped out to the post office and had a look around the village; dined at a little place called the Tudor Rose; then called in at a pub called the Trottesworth, where I found the ambience so agreeable and the alternative forms of amusement so non-existent that I drank, I confess, an intemperate amount of beer; and returned to my new quarters by way of several shrubs and one memorably unyielding lamppost.

  In the morning I awoke fifteen minutes late and found my way blearily to the hospital. Amid the melee of a shift change, I asked the way to Tuke Ward and arrived, hair askew and weaving slightly, ten minutes late. The charge nurse, a friendly fellow of early middle years, welcomed me warmly, told me where I’d find tea and biscuits and cleared off. I scarcely ever saw him after that. Tuke Ward was inhabited by long-stay male patients in a state of arrested insanity who, mercifully, seemed to look entirely after themselves. They fetched their own breakfasts from a trolley, shaved themselves, made their own beds after a fashion and, while I was momentarily engaged in a futile search for antacids in the staff loo, quietly departed. I emerged to find, to my confusion and alarm, that I was the only person left on the ward. I wandered puzzled through the day room, kitchen and dormitories, and opened the ward door to find an empty corridor with a door to the world standing open at its far end. At that moment the phone in the ward office rang.

  ‘Who’s that?’ barked a voice.

  I summoned enough power of speech to identify myself and peered out the office window, expecting to see the thirty-three patients of Tuke Ward dashing from tree to tree in a desperate bid for freedom.’Smithson here,’ said the voice. Smithson was the head nursing officer, an intimidating figure with mutton chops and a barrel chest. He’d been pointed out to me the day before. ‘You’re the new boy, are you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Jolly there?’

  I blinked, confused, and thought what odd turns of phrase the English had. ‘Well, actually it’s very quiet.’

  ‘No, John Jolly, the charge nurse - is he there?’

  ‘Oh. He’s gone.’

  ‘Did he say when he’d be back?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Everything under control?’

  ‘Well actually’ -1 cleared my throat - ‘it appears that the patients have escaped, sir.’

  ‘They’ve what?’

  ‘Escaped, sir. I just went to the bathroom and when I came out-’

  ‘They’re supposed to be off the ward, son. They’ll be on gardening detail or at occupational therapy. They leave every morning.’

  ‘Oh, thank Christ for that.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Thank goodness for that, sir.’

  ‘Yes, quite.’ He rang off.

  I spent the rest of the morning wandering alone around the ward, looking in drawers and ward
robes and under beds, exploring store cupboards, trying to figure out how to make tea from loose leaves and a sieve, and, when my constitution proved up to it, having a private world skidding championship along the well-polished corridor that ran between the patients’ rooms, complete with whispered and respectful commentary. When it got to be one-thirty and no-one had told me to go to lunch, I dismissed myself and went to the canteen, where I sat alone with a plate of beans, chips and a mysterious item later identified to me as a Spam fritter, and noticed that Mr Smithson and some of his colleagues, at a table across the room, were having a discussion of considerable mirth and, for some reason, casting merry looks in my direction.

  When I returned to the ward, I discovered that several of the patients had returned in my absence. Most of them were slumped in chairs in the day room, sleeping off the exertions of a morning spent leaning on a rake or counting Rawlplugs into boxes, except for one dapper and well-spoken fellow in tweeds who was watching a test match on the television. He Invited me to join him and, upon discovering that I was an American, enthusiastically explained to me this most bewildering of sports. I took him to be a member of staff, possibly the mysterious Mr Jolly’s afternoon replacement, possibly a visiting psychiatrist, until he turned to me, in the midst of a detailed explication of the intricacies of spin bowling, and said suddenly and conversationally: ‘I have atomic balls, you know.’