by Bill Bryson
Sighing, and feeling an unaccountable determination to see this place, I headed back through the pedestrian subways, over the open ground and back through the lifeless core of office buildings, reflecting as I went what an extraordinary piece of work it was for a planner, confronted with a blank sheet of paper and a near infinity of possibilities for erecting a model community, to decide to put the shopping centre a mile from the railway station.
It seems almost impossible to believe, but the shopping centre was even worse designed than the town around it. Indeed, it must be a source of mirth wherever shopping-mall designers gather. It was absolutely enormous - more than a million square feet - and it contained every chain store that there has ever been or will ever be. But it was dark and determinedly unlovely and built along two straight, featureless parallel avenues that must run for half a mile. Unless in my delirium I overlooked them, and I think not, there was no foodx:ourt, no central gathering place, nowhere much to sit, no design feature to encourage you to warm to this place to even the most fractional degree. It was like being in the world’s largest bus station. The toilets were few and hard to find, and in consequence were as crowded with users as if it were half-time at a football match. I had always thought of the Metro Centre at Gateshead as my worst nightmare made whole, but it is a place of infinite charm and endless delight compared with the mall at Milton Keynes.
I had a cup of coffee in the grubbiest McDonald’s I ever hope to visit and, clearing a space among the accumulated litter left by earlier users of my table, sat with my railway timetable and accompanying route map and felt a stab of despair at the discovery that the options before me were to go back to London or onward to Rugby, Coventry or Birmingham. I had no desire to do any of these. It seemed like days rather than mere hours since I had dropped off my hire car in Oxford and set off for the station with the simple-minded plan of travelling from Oxford to Cambridge by way of a lunchtime break at Milton Keynes.
Time was leaking away. I had, in some remote, half-forgotten life, sat at a kitchen table in a house in the Yorkshire Dales and worked out that I could comfortably cover the whole country in six or, at the outside, seven weeks. And that included airy plans to go practically everywhere - to the Channel Islands, Lundy, Shetland, Fair Isle, virtually all the cities. I had read John Hillaby’s Journey Through Britain and he had walked from Land’s End to John O’Groats in eight weeks. Surely with the assistance of a fleet modern public transport system I could see most of Britain in six or seven weeks. But now here I was, having used up nearly half my allotted time, and I hadn’t even penetrated as far as the Midlands.
So, in a dim frame of mind, I gathered up my things, walked to the station and caught a train back to London where, in effect, I would have to start all over again. I couldn’t think where to go, so I did what I often do. As the train marched through the rolling, autumn-bare farmlands of Buckinghamshire, I spread out a mapand lost myself in the names. This is, to me, one of the deep and abiding pleasures of life in Britain.
I wonder if other people notice how much comparative pleasure there is in drinking in a pub called The Eagle and Child or Lamb and Flag rather than, say, Joe’s Bar. Personally, I find endless satisfaction in it. I love to listen to the football results and the lulling rollcall of team names - Sheffield Wednesday, West Bromwich Albion, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South; what glory there is in those names - and I find strange comfort in the exotic and mystifying litany of the shipping forecasts. I have no idea what they mean - ‘Viking rising five, backing four; Dogger blowing strong, steady as she goes; Minches gale force twelve, jeez Louise’ - but they exert a powerful soothing effect on me. I genuinely believe that one of the reasons Britain is such a steady and gracious place is the calming influence of the football results and shipping forecasts.
There is almost no area of British life that isn’t touched with a kind of genius for names. Just look at the names of the prisons. You could sit me down with a limitless supply of blank paper and a pen and command me to come up with a more cherishably ridiculous name for a prison and in a lifetime I couldn’t improve on Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways. Even the common names of wildflowers - stitchwort, lady’s bedstraw, blue fleabane, feverfew -have an inescapable enchantment about them.
But nowhere, of course, are the British more gifted than with place names. There are some 30,000 place names in Britain, a good half of them, I would guess, notable or arresting in some way. There are villages without number whose very names summon forth an image of lazy summer afternoons and butterflies darting in meadows: Winterbourne Abbas, Weston Lullingfields, Theddle-thorpe All Saints, Little Missenden. There are villages that seem to hide some ancient and possibly dark secret: Husbands Bosworth, Rime Intrinseca, Whiteladies Aston. There are villages that sound like toilet cleansers (Potto, Sanahole, Durno) and villages that sound like skin complaints (Scabcleuch, Whiterashes, Scurlage, Sockburn). In a brief trawl through any gazetteer you can find fertilizers (Hastigrow), shoe deodorizers (Powfoot), breath fresheners (Minto), dog food (Whelpo) and even a Scottish spot remover (Sootywells). You can find villages that have an attitude problem (Seething, Mockbeggar, Wrangle) and villages of strange phenomena (Meathop, Wigtwizzle, Blubberhouses). And there are villages almost without number that are just endearingly inane - Prittlewell, Little Rollright, Chew Magna, Titsey, Woodstock Slop, Lickey End, Stragglethorpe, Yonder Bognie, Nether Wallop and the unbeatable Thornton-le-Beans. (Bury me there!) You have only to cast a glance across a map or lose yourself in an index to see that you are in a place of infinite possibility.
Some parts of the country seem to specialize in certain themes. Kent has a peculiar fondness for foodstuffs: Ham, Sandwich. Dorset goes in for characters in a Barbara Cartland novel: Bradford Peverell, Compton Valence, Langton Herring, Wootton Fitzpaine. Lincolnshire likes you to think it’s a little off its head: Thimbleby Langton, Tumby Woodside, Snarford, Fishtoft Drove, Sots Hole and the truly arresting Spitall in the Street.
It’s notable how often these places cluster together. In one compact area south of Cambridge, for instance, you can find Bio Norton, Rickinghall Inferior, Hellions Bumpstead, Ugley and (a personal favourite) Shellow Bowells. I had an impulse to go there now, to sniff out Shellow Bowells, as it were, and find what makes Norton Bio and Rickinghall Inferior. But as I glanced over the map my eye caught a line across the landscape called the Devil’s Dyke. I had never heard of it, but it sounded awfully promising. I decided on an impulse to go there.
Thus it was that I found myself late the next morning wandering a back lane outside the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Reach looking for the dike’s start. It was a rotten day. A steamroom fog filled the air and visibility was next to nothing. The dike rose up suddenly, almost alarmingly, out of the soupy greyness, and I clambered up to its top. It is a strange and brooding eminence, particularly in thick fog and out of season. Built during the darkest of the Dark Ages some 1,300 years ago, the Devil’s Dyke is an earthen embankment that rises up to sixty feet above the surrounding landscape and runs in a straight line for 7Vi miles between Reach and Ditton Green. Disappointingly, no-one knows why it is called the Devil’s Dyke. The name isn’t recorded before the sixteenth century. Standing as it does in the midst of flat fenlands, it has a kind of menacing, palpably ancient air, but also a feeling of monumental folly. It required an immense commitment of labour to construct, but it didn’t take a whole lot of military genius to realize that all an invading army had to do was go around it, which is what all of them did, and within no time at all the Devil’s Dyke had ceased to have any use at all except to show people in the fen country what it felt like to be sixty feet high.Still, it offers an agreeable, easy stroll along its grassy summit, and on this bleak morning I had it all to myself. Not until I reached the approximate midway point did I begin to see other people, mostly exercising their dogs on the broad sward of Newmarket Heath and looking ghostly in the unearthly fog. The dike runs right through the grounds of Newmarket Racecourse, which I thought rath
er jolly though I couldn’t see a damn thing, and thence on through prosperous-looking horse country. Gradually the fog began to thin and between the skeletal trees I glimpsed a succession of large stud farms, each with a white-fenced paddock, a big house and a sprawl of ornate stable blocks with cupolas and weather-vanes that made them look uncannily like a modern Asda or Tesco’s. Pleasant as it was to have an easy, flat ramble along such a well-defined route, it was also a trifle dull. I walked for a couple of hours without passing anyone and then abruptly the dike ended in a field outside Ditton Green, and I was left standing there with an unsettling sense of anticlimax. It was only a little after two in the afternoon and I was nowhere near tired. I knew that Ditton had no railway station, but I had presumed I could catch a bus to Cambridge, and indeed I discovered in the local bus shelter that I could - if I waited two days. So I trudged four miles to Newmarket down a busy road, had an idle look around there, then caught a train to Cambridge.
One of the sustaining pleasures of a long tramp in the country, particularly out of season, is the thought that eventually you will find a room in a snug hostelry, have a series of drinks before a blazing fire and then dine on hearty viands to which the day’s exercise and fresh air have clearly entitled you. But I arrived in Cambridge feeling fresh and untaxed and entitled to nothing. Worse still, presuming that the walk would be more challenging than it was and that I might arrive late, I had booked a room in the University Arms Hotel in the expectation that it would have the requisite blazing fire, the hearty viands and something of the air of a senior common room. In fact, as I discovered to my quiet dismay, it was an overpriced modern block and my gloomy room was lamentably at odds with its description in my guidebook.
I had a listless look round the city. Now Cambridge, I know, is a very fine city and a great place for names - Christ’s Pieces alone takes some beating - but I couldn’t make myself warm to it this day. The central market was a tatty mess, there seemed a discouraging surfeit of concrete structures around the centre, and by late afternoon everything was drenched in a cheerless drizzle. I.ended up nosing around in second-hand bookshops. I was looking for nothing in particular, but in one I came across an illustrated history of Selfridges Department Store and I took it eagerly from the shelf, hoping for an explanation of how Highcliffe Castle had fallen into dereliction and, better still, for prurient anecdotes involving Selfridge and the libidinous Dolly Sisters.
Alas, this appeared to be a sanitized version of the Selfridge story. I found only a single passing mention of the Dollys, which implied that they were just a couple of innocent waifs in whom Selfridge took an avuncular interest. Of Selfridge’s precipitate decline from rectitude there was scarcely a mention and of Highcliffe Castle nothing at all. So I put the book back and, realizing that somehow everything I did this day would be touched with disappointment, I went and had a pint of beer in an empty pub, a mediocre dinner in an Indian restaurant, a lonely walk in the rain, and finally retired to my room, where I discovered that there was nothing at all of note on television, and realized that I had left my walking-stick in Newmarket.
I retired with a book only to discover that the bedside lightbulb was gone - not burned out but gone - and passed the remaining hours of the evening lying inert on the bed and watching a Cagney and Lacey rerun, partly out of a curious interest to detect what it is about this ancient programme that so besots the controller of BBC1 (only possible answer: Sharon Gless’s chest) and partly because of its guaranteed narcotic effect. I fell asleep with my glasses on and awoke at some indeterminate hour to find the TV screen a frantic, noisy blizzard. I got up to switch it off, tripped heavily over some unyielding object and managed the interesting trick of turning off the TV with my head. Curious to know how I had managed this, in case I decided to make it a party piece, I discovered that the offending object was my stick, which was not in Newmarket after all, but on the floor, lodged between a chair and a bed leg.
Well, that’s one good thing, I thought and, gracing my nostrils with two walrus tusks of tissue to stanch a sudden flow of blood, climbed wearily back into bed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I WENT TO RETFORD. I CAN’T EXPLAIN IT. THROUGH MY MORNING ablutions, the gentle removal of the tissues from my swollen nostrils, through breakfast and checking out of the hotel and the long walk to the station, it was my solemn and dutiful intention to go to Norwich and thence to Lincoln. But for some reason, as soon as I entered the station and spied a British Rail map on the wall, I had a strange, sudden hankering to go somewhere entirely new, and Retford jumped out at me.
For the past seven years, I had passed through Retford every time I took a train between Leeds and London. It was one of the main stops on the east coast line, but I had never seen anyone get on or anyone get off there. On my British Rail route map, Retford was accorded capital letters, giving it equal typographical standing with Liverpool, Leicester, Nottingham, Glasgow and all the other substantial communities of Britain, and yet I knew nothing about it. In fact, I don’t believe I had even heard of it before I saw its lonely station for the first time from the train. More than that, I had never met anyone who had been there or knew anything about it. My AA Book of British Towns included lavish and kindly descriptions of every obscure community you could think to name -Kirriemuir, Knutsford, Prestonpans, Swadlincote, Bridge of Allan, Duns, Forfar, Wigtown - but of Retford it maintained a stern and mysterious silence. Clearly, it was time to check this place out.
So I caught a train to Peterborough and then another on the main line north. I hadn’t slept particularly well on account of an unsettling dream involving Cagney and Lacey and the discovery that I hadn’t filed a US tax return since 1975 (they threatened to turn me over to that guy who takes his shirt off in the opening credits, so you can imagine the state of my bedclothes when I awoke with a gasp about dawn), and I was looking forward to one of those quiet, soothing journeys of the kind that British Rail are always promising - the ones where your shoes turn into slippers and Leon Redbone sings you to sleep.
So it was with some dismay that I discovered that the seat behind me was occupied by Vodaphone Man. These people are getting to be a real nuisance, aren’t they? This one was particularly irritating because his voice was loud and self-satisfied and littered with moronspeak, and his calls were so clearly pointless:
‘Hello, Clive here. I’m on the 10.07 and should be at HQ by 1300 hours as expected. I’m going to need a rush debrief on the Pentland Squire scenario. What say? No, I’m out of the loop on Maris Pipers. Listen, can you think of any reason why anyone would employ a total anus like me? What’s that? Because I’m the sort of person who’s happy as a pig in shit just because he’s got a mobile phone? Hey, interesting concept.’ Then a few moments of silence and: ‘Hello, love. I’m on the 10.07. Should be home by five. Yes, just like every other night. No reason to tell you at all except that I’ve got this phone and I’m a complete fuckwit. I’ll call again from Doncaster for no reason.’ Then: ‘Clive here. Yeah, I’m still on the 10.07 but we had a points failure at Grantham, so I’m looking now at an ETA of 13.02 rather than the forecast 1300 hours. If Phil calls, will you tell him that I’m still a complete fuckwit? Brill.’ And so it went all morning.
Thus it was with some relief that I found myself, alone among the many passengers, alighting in Retford, an occurrence so unusual that it brought station employees to the windows, and walking into town through a clinging mist of rain. Retford, I am pleased to report, is a delightful and charming place even under the sort of oppressive grey clouds that make far more celebrated towns seem dreary and tired. Its centrepiece is an exceptionally large and handsome market square lined with a picturesque jumble of noble Georgian buildings. Beside the main church stood a weighty black cannon with a plaque saying ‘Captured at Sevastopol 1865’, which I thought a remarkable piece of initiative on the part of the locals -it’s not every day, after all, that you find a Nottinghamshire market town storming a Crimean redoubt and bringing home booty - and
the shops seemed prosperous and well ordered. I can’t say that I feltlike spending my holidays here, but I was pleased to have seen it at last and to have found it trim and likeable.
I had a cup of tea in a little shop, then caught a bus to Worksop, a place of similar size and tempo (and which, by the by, does get an entry in the AA Book of British Towns). Retford and Worksop apparently had had a contest to see which of them would house the headquarters of Bassetlaw District Council, and Worksop had clearly lost since the offices were there. They were predictably hideous and discordant, but the rest of the town seemed agreeable enough in a low-key sort of way.
I had come to Worksop not because I was aching to see it but because near by there was something I had wished to see for a long time: Welbeck Abbey, reputedly one of the finest homes in that curious compact region known as the Dukeries. The seats of five historic dukedoms - Newcastle, Portland, Kingston, Leeds and Norfolk - are all within twenty miles of each other in this obscure corner of the North Midlands, though Leeds and Portland are now extinct and the others, I gather, have mostly gone away. (The Duke of Newcastle, according to Simon Winchester in Their Noble Lordships, lives in a modest house in Hampshire, which I trust has taught him the folly of not investing in bouncing castles and miniature steam trains.)
Welbeck is the ancestral home of the Portland clan, though in fact they haven’t lived there since 1954 on account of a similar unfortunate lack of prescience with regard to adventure playgrounds and petting zoos. The fifth Duke of Portland, one W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck (1800-1879), has long been something of a hero of mine. Old W.J.C., as I like to think of him, was one of history’s great recluses and went to the most extraordinary lengths to avoid all forms of human contact. He lived in just one small corner of his stately home and communicated with his servants through notes passed to him through a special message box cut into the door to his rooms. Food was conveyed to him in the dining room by means of a miniature railway running from the kitchen. In the event of chance encounters, he would stand stock still and servants were instructed to pass him as they would a piece of furniture. Those who transgressed this instruction were compelled to skate on the duke’s private skating-rink until exhausted. Sightseers were allowed to tour the house and grounds - ‘so long,’ as the duke put it, ‘as you would be good enough not to see me.’
