At the same time as Daphne du Maurier was marrying ‘Tommy’ Browning in Fowey, a group of actors led by Rowena Cade were staging The Tempest in the open-air amphitheatre created by the gully above the Minack Rock, with the Atlantic Ocean as its backdrop. That performance in 1932 saw the creation of the Minack Theatre, and over the next decade Rowena Cade herself, along with her gardener and a friend of his, built the mosaic stage floor, the columns, the arches, the stone steps and the seating area. They broke up granite, heaved timber into place and carefully placed stones so that the theatre looks as if it must be thousands of years old. In fact, it is not even a hundred years since it was covered in grass and gorse.
I never went there as a child, but having walked Cornwall’s coastal paths, its moorland and its wooded lanes I have to admit that the area has a real claim on my soul. I once walked from the Minack Theatre to Land’s End with the novelist Patrick Gale. It was a stormy Daphne day, evidence of how the wind and the waves had buffeted the rocks into Barbara Hepworth-style sculptures. The sea was throwing spray up on to the cliffs, where it would stay for a second and then be sucked back again. Patrick was brought up on the Isle of Wight, but now Cornwall is his home.
‘You have a landscape you were raised by and a landscape you marry,’ he said. ‘I was raised by the landscapes of Hampshire, but I was betrothed to Cornwall as a seven-year-old, when I first came here, and moved here as soon as I could.’
Patrick looked like an MI6 spy. He was wearing a beige canvas trench coat, turned up at the collar to meet his silvering hair, and he had a notepad in the giant pocket in case an idea should come to mind.
‘I’m a restless person and I do a lot of writing in my head when I’m walking, so it’s very much part of my routine. There’s something very enabling about leaving your manuscript behind, and sometimes I find I’ve been wrestling with a plot point and it’ll be while on a walk that I have that eureka moment.’
We battled through the wind to reach the ancient hamlet of St Levan, named after the priest who banned anyone called Joanna from being baptised in his chapel. He did it because he was cross with one particular woman called Joanna who told him off for fishing on a Sunday; the ban stands to this day. St Levan’s Well has three enormous stones above it, and one below to kneel on. Patrick told me that it was a good place for dogs to have a drink, although he’d left his ageing wolfhound and lurcher at home.
We had a mutual rant about the tendency of dog walkers to leave poo bags tied to hedges or fences.
‘I mean, for God’s sake, do they think there’s a poo fairy who will come along and pick them all up?’ I was shouting, partly because of the wind and partly in anger. ‘It’s just so stupid. Either kick it out of the path or pick it up and put it in a bin, but don’t do this!’
I flicked at a loaded poo bag hanging from a hawthorn branch. It fell down, so I picked it up and carried it for the next five miles, fuming at the idiocy of the dog owner and secretly wondering if picking up alien poo, albeit in a bag, was an act of piety likely to score points with the saintly community.
Land’s End is different from the rest of the Cornish coast. There is heather and bracken and gorse, but no trees – nothing over about five foot in height, apart from the occasional palm tree. Chunks of granite emerge from the soil like teeth, pushing their way up to the surface. Cornwall was peri-glacial, so it went through a period of freezing, then melting, freezing, then melting. This meant that granite was shifted by the muddy, melted flow of mush and was randomly scattered over the land, leaving it looking as if a team of giants has been playing football on it.
We walked through an alley of hedgerow and flowers, Patrick stopping to nibble on things and smell them. He and his partner, Aidan, often go for an evening dip in the sea, once the tourists have disappeared.
‘It’s a very exciting swim here, a bit like swimming in a washing machine.’
Patrick schooled me more in the pagan traditions. The local hospital is the only one in the country (possibly in the world) to have a white witch on hand as well as a Catholic and Protestant priest.
As we walked towards the sunset I had that feeling of being right at the end of the line, at the furthest point west one could be. There was horizon all around us, the cliffs making face-like shapes. No wonder they have been given names such as the Armed Knight, Dr Johnson’s Head and Dr Syntax’s Head. The landscape sings with the songs of ancient souls, and yet it is also an area of thriving technology. Not long ago, it was highly industrial.
Patrick recommended the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum if you wanted to learn more about how the UK was linked by cables to the rest of the Empire. This was where those submarine cables came ashore, and Porthcurno was, for a hundred years, the largest cable station in the world. Without the cable and wireless technology they pioneered, we would have no transatlantic phone calls, no faxes and, probably, no Internet.
I was interested in the technology, but I was even more interested in the cabling inside Patrick Gale’s head. It seemed that walking was absolutely essential to him to create, that he was as much a product of his environment as Daphne du Maurier or Anna Maria Murphy.
‘I worry about my characters as if they were real friends having a bad time, which I think is a healthy sign, but it can get very peculiar when I’ve been writing for hours. So walking is a very nice airlock between writing the novel and heading back home.’
We ended our walk just short of his house, looking at a family of seals poking their heads above the frothy waves. My cheeks tightened and exfoliated by the wind – a free ‘Cornish facelift’ – I left Patrick to his characters and his plots.
The north coast of Cornwall is equally thrilling and gives more of a sense of the rich industrial history of the area. You will stumble across ruined engine rooms and the wonderfully named ‘buddles’ that were used to separate and clean the tin that came from the mines. Once, the area was busy with buildings, machinery, pools and hundreds of people mining tin. The noise of industry has been replaced by the loud call of the stonechat, which sounds like pebbles being knocked together, or the descant song of the willow warbler. The colours of the workers’ clothes have been replaced by the pink sprays of thrift or the bell-like bulbs of sea campion, mottled with pink veins and emanating white flowers, and the bright yellow of the gorse.
The gorse flower is supposed to help those who have lost belief or hope. I’d suggest a bracing walk along the North Cornwall cliffs would be the remedy for most things, especially on a stormy day. There’s no point just seeing Cornwall in its benign state. You need to see it in all weathers and all times of year to appreciate its vitality and to let it inside you. Once it gets there, it will always be a part of you.
I am looking again at the photograph on the wall opposite my desk. Alice has just come in with a cup of tea, and I’ve asked her if we can go and live in Cornwall.
‘No, darling. We live here. But you can go walking there again if you like. Any time.’
She smiles at me indulgently, ruffles my hair and heads out again. ‘Archie will need another walk in half an hour, so get on with your writing.’
She leaves me my cup of tea and softly closes the door.
8
‘What a lovely day,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ agreed my walking companion. ‘Perfect weather to see every bottle cap, every cigarette pack, every tin can.’
On a bright and relatively warm April afternoon I was with the author and comedian David Sedaris. We were in West Sussex, heading across the A283 to Broomers Hill Lane, a typical hedge-lined country road that went uphill from Pulborough to nowhere in particular.
Usually, I’d be soaking up the best of the trees, the birdsong, the sheep dotting the distance like cotton-wool buds. But now my eyes were fixed to the ground just in front of me, with occasional darting glances to each side.
This walk was different. This was about a microscopic vision, digging into the underbelly of the landscape, searching for the ugliness. We were rubb
ish collecting.
It’s funny how people with a passion see the world through a prism that is tilted the way they need it to be. The light comes in the same way for all of us, but it bounces off in the direction we choose.
When he is not touring America or selling books across Europe, David Sedaris goes out each day to collect litter.
On Broomers Hill Lane, David was immediately in action, stooping down to pluck bottles and cans from the banks.
‘It’s the same stuff over and over,’ he said, as his bin liner filled. ‘This is not abnormal in any way. This is completely unremarkable.
‘I have this crazy belief that tomorrow people are going to stop doing it. So I can clean up today, because tomorrow all of this is going to change. And I know how insane that is, but if I didn’t believe that I would just focus on how futile it is.’
I started reading David’s books when I was writing My Animals and Other Family. I wanted to see how he’d described his own family in a way that, to quote a literary critic, was ‘warped, without being bitter’. I devoured Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. He was so rude and so funny, always going further or being more outrageous than I would dare.
He grew up in America, but now lives in Britain. Karen Gregor, who shares the production of Ramblings with Lucy, had heard that he was avid about picking up litter, and we thought he’d fit as part of a series about self-improvement: someone trying to improve their environment by cleaning it up. Alice was free that day and I wanted her to meet David, so we both got on the train and headed south.
I wouldn’t recommend the Southern Railway as Britain’s finest mode of transport. The trains are invariably late and, in our case, don’t always stop at the advertised stations. The panic spread at Clapham Junction as it was announced that nearly every train to Gatwick Airport or beyond was delayed or cancelled. One poor group of tourists, who had a plane to catch, rushed off to the taxi rank. Five minutes later, a train that was going to Gatwick stopped at our platform. I hate to guess what their taxi fare came to and how long it took them to get there. I suspect they missed their flight.
We got on the train, which slowed down at Pulborough, where we wanted to get out. But it didn’t stop. I rang Karen.
‘The bloody train won’t stop. No, I don’t know why. We may end up in Bognor at this rate, but if it stops before then we’ll get out and take one back again.’
Karen never panics and never gets cross with me. She has two small boys, and I think she has learned patience through them. She rang David and his boyfriend, Hugh, who were picking us up from the station. They said it happens all the time.
Half an hour later, having negotiated a swift change in trains at Amberley, we met in Pulborough, West Sussex. I knew of the village as the place where the brilliant Dancing Brave was trained by Guy Harwood. In the summer of 1986 he won the 2000 Guineas, the Eclipse and the Arc de Triomphe. He should have won the Derby as well but was given too much ground to make up and finished second to Shahrastani. It is one of the most famous defeats in Epsom history.
So, in my mind, Pulborough was all about Dancing Brave. It’s a classically beautiful part of the British countryside, with fertile emerald fields on the floodplain of the River Arun, thick hedgerows and views across to the South Downs. Every year they stage a twelve-hour lawnmower race and, on the August bank holiday, a charity duck race. I suspect the lawnmowers are easier to control than the ducks.
Hugh dropped us off in a car park and headed home.
‘Have fun, and make sure you come back for lunch,’ he said. ‘I’m cooking a pie.’
David is a slight man, with brown-rimmed glasses. From a distance, you might mistake him for a younger Woody Allen. He was wearing a blue jacket over a white hooded sweatshirt and khaki trousers. All his clothes looked slightly too big for him. He is not naturally gregarious, but when he gets a subject he wants to talk about his energy and intensity come to the surface.
His favourite subject is litter. I say ‘favourite’, but it’s only in a negative way. He is obsessive about litter.
‘I live for litter,’ he told me.
My Uncle Willie would approve. He doesn’t like Christmas much and does his best to avoid us all, sometimes by going to Tot Hill Services to pick up litter. It’s his way of changing the world – and of getting out of a family gathering.
‘I filled three bags and I put them outside the entrance to McDonald’s,’ Uncle Willie told me proudly one year. ‘It was mostly their stuff anyway.’
Uncle Willie’s full name is William Edward Robin Hood Hastings-Bass, 17th Earl of Huntingdon.
‘He’s not like a normal Earl,’ say my nephews. They’re right, he’s not, although I’m not sure how many Earls they have met.
Uncle Willie likes to wear cut-off cargo pants and a rugby shirt or jeans with frayed rips that he’s bought from TK Maxx. He goes to the gym regularly and favours the aerobic classes, in which he is thrilled to say that he is the only man. He reads widely, watches films and goes to concerts and plays – which he then summarizes, to save you the cost of a ticket. He is interested in what other people are up to and loves to help restructure their lives, but always gives the impression that he has somewhere else that he has to be. At nearly sixty-five, he prefers to ‘hang out’ with people half his age. They rejuvenate him. He loves the Internet and spends his mornings hooked up to the other side of the world – doing what, I am never quite sure.
He used to be a racehorse trainer and won the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot three years in a row. He trained in Australia for a while and got his brass four-poster bed shipped out on a cargo ship. They called him Bill Bass, and he loved it, but he came back to train in England, then suddenly gave up when he couldn’t make the numbers work. Nor did he like dressing up, and he would refuse to wear a morning suit to go into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, preferring a long waterproof Driza-Bone jacket or a grey suit and to be in the general enclosure. He may be an Earl, but he’s descended from Robin Hood, and as such is a man of the people.
Uncle Willie’s mobile phone is always buzzing with messages or calls, because people love to talk to him and seek his advice. He’s very good at giving it – even if you may not have asked for his input.
‘What have you been up to?’ I ask, with genuine interest, as I have no idea what he actually does on a daily basis.
‘Oh, you know, a million things,’ he says. ‘I’ve been up since six. Very busy. Got to go now. Pop by if you can, but I may not be there.’
Uncle Willie does a bit of buying and selling of horses and goes to the yearling sales in France, Germany and Australia. He doesn’t like paying for hotels so will stay with friends or pitch a tent nearby. He once managed to persuade a hotel in Deauville to let him put his tent up in their garden, so he got access to their pool and gym. He’s quite resourceful in his quest to save money.
His latest venture is to open and run a bed and breakfast in Grandma’s old house. He has got a good deal on a new carpet and he’s patched up the kitchen, but he refuses to update the bathrooms. He is convinced that an avocado bathroom suite is a historically important period design feature. Alice and I have tried to point out that the house was built in a bloody awful period and guests will not be impressed with shocking decor and a headache-inducing shade of green.
I’ve given him a WiFi extender for the guest rooms, because the one thing I know people can’t abide is a poor Internet connection. He will offer them his home-made granola for breakfast, and fresh fruit.
‘The best bit,’ I tell him, ‘is that they will get life coaching and career advice as well as breakfast – and they won’t even have to pay extra for it!’
‘Quite right,’ says Uncle Willie. ‘They don’t know how lucky they are.’
Back in the car park in Pulborough, David Sedaris insisted that I don the uniform that might save my life. It was a fluorescent jacket with ‘Horsham District Council’ written on it. He also handed me a bin bag with a metal
hoop and one of those mechanical fingers that means you can pick things up quickly, as long as you are accurate. I hadn’t seen one since I was a child, so I practised in the car park on a crisp packet. (We may just have found Uncle Willie’s next Christmas present.)
Alice took a bin bag and a metal hoop, too. She wasn’t just coming along for the ride. My family say I am competitive – which is true: I would rather win a game than lose it. But Alice is in a whole different league. She is determined to do not just her best but better than anyone else. She played lacrosse as a teenager and made it on to the Junior England squad before she got sidetracked into acting and reading the news on the radio. She has a winner’s mentality.
I was shocked at how much litter you see as soon as you stop to look.
There seemed to be a pattern to the discarded pieces of people’s lives. They either throw out the packaging for things that are unhealthy and are perhaps being consumed in secret (beer cans, bottles, cigarette packets), or things that we think of as disposable (ketchup packets, fast-food containers, sandwich wrappers).
There is a whole world you can invent for the people driving along hurling things out of their cars: perhaps they are unhappy at home, secret alcoholics, binge eaters who stuff a burger in their face before going home for a roast dinner, stressed executives who puff away on a fag before arriving home to a house full of kids.
David said that quite often he finds a doughnut box with one doughnut left in it, or a vodka bottle half full, or a cigarette packet with cigarettes still in it. His theory is that the person is in denial and wants to get rid of the evidence of eating, drinking or smoking as fast as possible: if it’s no longer in the car, he or she can’t be guilty.
One can make up all these storylines, but it still doesn’t excuse the fact that these people are wilfully throwing rubbish out of their cars into the hedgerows of Pulborough, confident that someone else will pick it up, or perhaps simply not caring whether they do or not.
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