Notes from a Small Island

by Bill Bryson

  It certainly has very little to do with money. Did you know that the Government spends less per person each year on national parks*”* than you spend on a single daily newspaper, that it gives more to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden than it does to all ten national parks together? The annual budget for the Lake District National Park, an area widely perceived as the most beautiful and environmentally sensitive in England, is £2.4 million, about the same as for a single large comprehensive school. From that sum the park authorities must manage the park, run ten information centres, pay 127 full-time staff and forty part-time staff in summer, replace and maintain equipment and vehicles, fund improvements to the landscape, implement educational programmes and act as the local planning authority. That the Lakes are so generally wonderful, so scrupulously maintained, so seldom troubling to mind and spirit is a ringing testament to the people who work in them, the people who live in them and the people who use them. I recently read that more than half of Britons surveyed couldn’t think of a single thing about their country to be proud of. Well, be proud of that.

  I spent a happy few hours tramping about through the sumptuous and easygoing landscape between Windermere and Coniston Water, and would gladly have stayed longer except that it began to rain - a steady, dispiriting rain that I foolishly had not allowed for in regard to my walking apparel - and anyway I was growing hungry, so I made my way back to the ferry and Bowness.

  Thus it was that I found myself an hour or so and an overpriced tuna sandwich later, back in the Old England, staring out at the wet lake through a large window and feeling bored and listless in that special way peculiar to wet afternoons spent in plush surroundings. To pass a half-hour, I went to the residents’ lounge to see if I couldn’t scare up a pot of coffee. The room was casually strewn with ageing colonels and their wives, sitting amid carelessly folded Daily Telegraphs. The colonels were all shortish, round men with tweedy jackets, well-slicked silvery hair, an outwardly gruff manner that concealed within a heart of flint, and, when they walked, a rakish limp. Their wives, lavishly rouged and powdered, looked as if they had just come from a coffin fitting. I felt seriously out of my element, and was surprised to find one of them - a grey-haired lady who appeared to have put on her lipstick during an earth tremor -addressing me in a friendly, conversational manner. It always takes me a moment to remember in these circumstances that I am now areasonably respectable-looking middle-aged man and not a gangly young rube straight off the banana boat.

  We began, in the customary fashion, with a few words about the beastliness of the weather, but when the woman discovered I was an American she went off on some elaborate tangent about a trip she and Arthur - Arthur, I gathered, being the shyly smiling clot beside her - had recently taken to visit friends in California, and this gradually turned into what appeared to be a well-worn rant about the shortcomings of Americans. I never understand what people are thinking when they do this. Do they think I’ll appreciate their candour? Are they winding me up? Or have they simply forgotten that I am one of the species myself? The same thing often happens when people talk about immigration in front of me.

  They’re so forward, don’t you think?’ the lady sniffed and took a sip of tea. ‘You’ve only to chat to a stranger for five minutes and they think you’ve become friends. I had some man in Encino - a retired postal worker or some such thing - asking my address and promising to call round next time he’s in England. Can you imagine it? I’d never met the man in my life.’ She took a sip of tea and grew momentarily thoughtful. ‘He had the most extraordinary belt buckle. All silver and little gemstones.’

  ‘It’s the food that gets me,’ said her husband, raising himself a little to embark on a soliloquy, but it quickly became evident that he was one of those men who never get to say anything beyond the first sentence of a story.

  ‘Oh yes, the food!’ cried his wife, seizing the point. ‘They have the most extraordinary attitude to food.’

  ‘What, because they like it tasty?’ I enquired with a thin smile.

  ‘No, my dear, the portions. The portions in America are positively obscene.’’

  ‘I had a steak one time,’ the man began with a little chortle.

  ‘And the things they do to the language! They simply cannot speak the Queen’s English.’

  Now wait a minute. Say what you will about American portions and friendly guys with colourful belt buckles, but mind what you say about American English. ‘Why should they speak the Queen’s English?’ I asked a trifle frostily. ‘She’s not their queen, after all.’

  ‘But the words they use. And their accents. What’s that word you so dislike, Arthur?’

  ‘Normalcy,’ said Arthur. ‘I met this one fellow.’

  ‘But normalcy isn’t an Americanism,’ I said. ‘It was coined in Britain.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, dear,’ said the woman with the certainty of stupidity and bestowed a condescending smile. ‘No, I’m sure not.’

  ‘In 1687,’ I said, lying through my teeth. Well, I was right in the fundamentals - normalcy is an anglicism. I just couldn’t recall the details. ‘Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders,’ I added in a flash of inspiration. One of the things you get used to hearing when you are an American living in Britain is that America will be the death of English. It is a sentiment expressed to me surprisingly often, usually at dinner parties, usually by someone who has had a little too much to drink, but sometimes by a semi-demented, overpowdered old crone like this one. There comes a time when you lose patience with this sort of thing. So I told her - I told them both, for her husband looked as if he was about to utter another fraction of thought - that whether they appreciated it or not British speech has been enlivened beyond measure by words created in America, words that they could not do without, and that one of these words was moron. I showed them my teeth, drained my coffee, and with a touch of hauteur excused myself. Then I went off to write another letter to the editor of The Times.

  By eleven the next morning, when John Price and a very nice fellow named David Partridge rolled up at the hotel in Price’s car, I was waiting for them by the door. I forbade them a coffee stop in Bowness on the grounds that I could stand it no longer, and made them drive to the hotel near Bassenthwaite where Price had booked us rooms. There we dumped our bags, had a coffee, acquired three packed lunches from the kitchen, accoutred ourselves in stylish fell-ware and set off for Great Langdale. Now this was more like it.

  Despite threatening weather and the lateness of the year, the car parks and verges along the valley were crowded with cars. Everywhere people delved for equipment in boots or sat with car doors open pulling on warm socks and stout boots. We dressed our feet, then fell in with a straggly army of walkers, all with rucksacks and knee-high woolly socks, and set off for a long, grassy humpback hill called the Band. We were headed for the fabled summit of Bow Fell, at 2,960 feet the sixth highest of the Lakeland hills. Walkers ahead of us formed well-spaced dots of slow-moving colour leading to an impossibly remote summit, lost in cloud. As ever, I was quietly astounded to find that so many people had beenseized with the notion that struggling up a mountainside on a damp Saturday on the winter end of October was fun.

  We climbed through the grassy lower slopes into ever-bleaker terrain, picking our way over rocks and scree, until we were up among the ragged shreds of cloud that hung above the valley floor perhaps a thousand feet below. The views were sensational - the jagged peaks of the Langdale Pikes rising opposite and crowding against the narrow and gratifyingly remote valley, laced with tiny, stonewalled fields, and off to the west a swelling sea of hefty brown hills disappearing in mist and low cloud.

  As we pressed on the weather severely worsened. The air filled with swirling particles of ice that hit the skin like razor nicks. By the time we neared Three Tarns the weather was truly menacing, with thick fog joining the jagged sleet. Ferocious gusts of wind buffeted the hillside and reduced our progress to a creeping plod. The fog cut visibility to a few yards. Once or
twice we briefly lost the path, which alarmed me as I didn’t particularly want to die up here - apart from anything else, I still had 4,700 unspent Profiles points on my Barclaycard. Out of the murk ahead of us emerged what looked disconcertingly like an orange snowman. It proved on closer inspection to be a hi-tech hiker’s outfit. Somewhere inside it was a man.

  ‘Bit fresh,’ the bundle offered understatedly.

  John and David asked him if he’d come far.

  ‘Just from Blea Tarn.’ Blea Tarn was ten miles away over taxing terrain.

  ‘Bad over there?’ John asked in what I had come to recognize was the abbreviated speech of fell walkers.

  ‘Hands-and-knees job,’ said the man.

  They nodded knowingly.

  ‘Be like that here soon.’

  They nodded again.

  ‘Well, best be off,’ announced the man as if he couldn’t spend the whole day jabbering, and trundled off into the white soup. I watched him go, then turned to suggest that perhaps we should think about retreating to the valley, to a warm hostelry with hot food and cold beer, only to find Price and Partridge dematerializing into the mists thirty feet ahead of me.

  ‘Hey, wait for me!’ I croaked and scrambled after.

  We made it to the top without incident. I counted thirty-three people there ahead of us, huddled among the fog-whitened

  boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker -the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountain top in an ice storm - and realized there was no way you could explain it. We trudged over to a rock, where a couple kindly moved their rucksacks and shrank their picnic space to make room for us. We sat and delved among our brown bags in the piercing wind, cracking open hard-boiled eggs with numbed fingers, sipping warm pop, eating floppy cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, and staring into an impenetrable murk that we had spent three hours climbing through to get here, and I thought, I seriously thought: God, I love this country.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I WAS HEADING FOR NEWCASTLE, BY WAY OF YORK, WHEN I DID another impetuous thing. I got off at Durham, intending to poke around the cathedral for an hour or so and fell in love with it instantly in a serious way. Why, it’s wonderful - a perfect little city - and I kept thinking: ‘Why did no-one tell me about this?’ I knew, of course, that it had a fine Norman cathedral but I had no idea that it was so splendid. I couldn’t believe that not once in twenty years had anyone said to me, ‘You’ve never been to Durham? Good God, man, you must go at once! Please - take my car.’ I had read countless travel pieces in Sunday papers about weekends away in York, Canterbury, Norwich, even Lincoln, but I couldn’t remember reading a single one about Durham, and when I asked friends about it, I found hardly any who had ever been there. So let me say it now: if you have never been to Durham, go at once. Take my car. It’s wonderful.

  The cathedral, a mountain of reddish-brown stone standing high above a lazy green loop of the River Wear, is, of course, its glory. Everything about it was perfect - not just its setting and execution but also, no less notably, the way it is run today. For a start there was no nagging for money, no ‘voluntary’ admission fee. Outside, there was simply a discreet sign announcing that it cost £700,000 a year to maintain the cathedral and that it was now engaged on a £400,000 renovation project on the east wing and that they would very much appreciate any spare money that visitors might give them. Inside, there were two modest collecting boxes and nothing else - no clutter, no nagging notices, no irksome bulletin boards or stupid Eisenhower flags, nothing at all to detract from the unutterable soaring majesty of the interior. It was a perfect day to see it. Sun slanted lavishly through the stained-glass windows, highlighting the stout pillars with their sumptuously grooved patterns and spattering the floors with motes of colour. There were even wooden pews.

  I’m no judge of these things, but the window at the choir end looked to me at least the equal of the more famous one at York, and this one at least you could see in all its splendour since it wasn’t tucked away in a transept. And the stained-glass window at the other end was even finer. Well, I can’t talk about this without babbling because it was just so wonderful. As I stood there, one of only a dozen or so visitors, a verger passed and issued a cheery hello. I was charmed by this show of friendliness and captivated to find myself amid such perfection, and I unhesitatingly gave Durham my vote for best cathedral on planet Earth.

  When I had drunk my fill, I showered the collection pot with coins and wandered off for the most fleeting of looks at the old quarter of town, which was no less ancient and beguiling, and returned to the station feeling simultaneously impressed and desolate at just how much there was to see in this little country and what folly it had been to suppose that I might see anything more than a fraction of it in seven flying weeks.

  I took an intercity train to Newcastle and then a local to Pegswood, eighteen miles to the north, where I emerged into more splendid, unseasonal sunshine and hiked a mile or two along an arrow-straight road to Ashington.

  Ashington has long called itself the biggest mining village in the world, but there is no mining any more and, with a population of 23,000, it is scarcely a village. It is famous as the birthplace of a slew of footballers - Jackie and Bobby Charlton, Jackie Milburn and some forty others skilled enough to play in the first division, a remarkable outpouring for a modest community - but I was drawn by something else: the once famous and now largely forgotten pitmen painters.

  In 1934, under the direction of an academic and artist from Durham University named Robert Lyon, the town formed a painting club called the Ashington Group, consisting almost exclusively of miners who had never painted - in many cases had never seen a real painting - before they started gathering in a hut on Monday evenings. They showed an unexpected amount of talent and’carried the name of Ashington over the grey mountains’, as a critic for the Guardian (who clearly knew fuck-all about football) later put it. In the 1930s and ‘40s particularly, they attracted huge attention, and were the frequent focus of articles in national papers and art magazines, as well as exhibitions in London and other leading cities. My friend David Cook had an illustrated book by William Feaver called Pitmen Painters, which he had once shown me. The illustrations of the paintings were quite charming, but it was the photographs of burly miners, dressed up in suits and ties and crowded into a little hut, earnestly hunched over easels and drawing-boards, that stuck in my mind. I had to see it.

  Ashington was nothing like I expected it to be. In the photographs from David’s book it appeared to be a straggly, overgrown village, surrounded by filthy waste heaps and layered with smoke from the three local pits, a place of muddy lanes hunched under a perpetual wash of sooty drizzle, but what I found instead was a modern, busy community swimming in clean, clear air. There was even a new business park with fluttering pennants, spindly new trees and an impressive brick gateway on what was clearly reclaimed ground. The main street, Station Road, had been smartly pedestrianized and its many shops appeared to be doing a good trade. It was obvious that there was not a great deal of money in Ashington - most of the shops were of the Price Busters/ Superdrug/Wotta Loada Crap variety, their windows papered with strident promises of special offers within - but at least they appeared to be thriving in a way that those of Bradford, for instance, were not.

  I went to the town hall to ask the way to the site of the once-famous hut, and set off down Woodhorn Road in search of the old Co-op building behind which it had stood. The fame of the Ashington Group, it must be said, rested on a large measure of well-meaning but faintly objectionable paternalism. Reading the old accounts of their exhibitions in places like London and Bath, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Ashington artists were regarded by critics and other aesthetes rather like Dr Johnson’s performing dog: the wonder was not that they did it well but that they did it at all.

  Yet the Ashington painters represented only a small fragmen
t of a greater hunger for betterment in places like Ashington, where most people were lucky to come away with more than a few years of primary education. It is quite astonishing, seeing it now, to realize just how rich life was, and how enthusiastically opportunities were seized, in Ashington in the years before the war. At one time the town boasted a philosophical society, with a busy year-round programme of lectures, concerts and evening classes; an operatic society; a dramatic society; a workers’ educational association; a miners’ welfare institute with workshops and yet more lecture rooms; and gardening clubs, cycling clubs, athletics clubs, and others in similar vein almost beyond counting. Even the work-ingmen’s clubs, of which Ashington boasted twenty-two at its peak, offered libraries and reading-rooms for those who craved more than a pint or two of Federation Ale. The town had a thriving theatre, a ballroom, five cinemas, and a concert chamber called the Harmonic Hall. When, in the 1920s, the Bach Choir from Newcastle performed on a Sunday afternoon at the Harmonic Hall, it drew an audience of 2,000. Can you imagine anything remotely like that now?

  And then, one by one, they faded away - the Thespians, the Operatic Society, the reading-rooms and lecture halls. Even the five cinemas all quietly closed their doors. Today the liveliest diversion in Ashington is a Noble’s amusement arcade, which I passed now on my way to the Co-op building, which wasn’t hard to find. At the back of the Co-op stood a large, unpaved car park surrounded by a scattering of low buildings - a builder’s merchants, a boy scout hut, a DHS compound, a Veterans’ Institute building made of wood and painted a bright veridian green. I knew from William Feaver’s book that the Ashington Group hut had stood beside the Veterans’ Institute, but on which side I didn’t know and now there was no telling.

  The Ashington Group was one of the last local institutions to go, though its decline was slow and painful. Throughout the 1950s, its numbers inexorably fell as the older members died off and younger people decided that it was naff to put on a suit and tie and ponce about with paintboxes. For the last several years, only two surviving members, Oliver Kilbourn and Jack Harrison, regularly showed up on Monday nights. In the summer of 1982, they received a notice that the ground rent on the hut was to be raised from 50p a year to £14. ‘That,’ as Feaver notes, ‘plus the £7 standing quarterly charge for electricity seemed too much.’ In October 1983, just short of its fiftieth anniversary and for want of £42 a year in running costs, the Ashington Group was disbanded and the hut pulled down.Now there is nothing to look at but a car park, but the paintings are faithfully preserved in the Woodhorn Colliery Museum another mile or so up Woodhorn Road. I walked there now, past endless ranks of former miners’ cottages. The old colliery still looks like a colliery, its brick buildings intact, its old winding wheel hanging in the air like some kind of curious and forlorn fairground ride. Rusting iron tracks still curve across the grounds. But all is quiet now and the marshalling yards have been turned to tidy green lawns. I was almost the only visitor.