The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson

  ‘So she Tasered him?’

  ‘Right between the shoulder blades, I expect.’

  We thought about this for a while and then talked about Cheryl Tiegs.

  Because of our late start, we didn’t go very far – a little over three miles to a place called Balmer Lawn, near Brockenhurst. It was intensely pretty in the late afternoon sunshine. We stood looking appreciatively at it for a minute, then turned and headed back to Lyndhurst. It was a modest start, but a good one.

  Back at the hotel, I showered, then sat on the edge of my bed watching TV, waiting for it to be time for a drink, and wondering how many tens of thousands of days have passed since BBC One last showed a programme that anyone not on medication would want to watch. I flicked through the channels to see what else was on and the very best option available was Michael Portillo riding a train in the north of England in a pink shirt and yellow trousers, clutching an old guidebook. Occasionally he would get off the train and spend approximately forty seconds with a local historian who would explain to him why something that used to be there is no longer there.

  ‘So this used to be the site of the biggest prosthetics mill in Lancashire?’ Michael would say.

  ‘That’s right. Fourteen thousand girls worked here in its heyday.’

  ‘Gosh. And now it’s this Asda superstore?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Gosh. That’s progress for you. Well, I’m off to Oldham to see where they used to make clogs for sheep. Ta-ta.’

  And this really was the best thing on.

  At dinner I brought the subject up. ‘I like Michael Portillo,’ Daniel said, but then Daniel likes everybody. He told us that shows on some satellite stations have more people working in the studio than are watching at home.

  I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people. Daniel, it turned out, had it much worse than I did. He had a whole list of demands for putting the world back to the way it ought to be. I can’t remember exactly what they were, but I am pretty sure they included leaving the European Union, returning to the gold standard, banning planes from flying over Chiswick, restoring the British Empire and home deliveries of milk, and stopping immigration.

  ‘I’m an immigrant,’ I pointed out.

  He nodded grimly. ‘You can stay,’ he allowed at last, ‘but you must understand you are permanently on probation.’ I assured him that I had never considered myself anything else.

  The rest of the evening was mostly filled with drinking too much and recounting our infirmities, but as mine are principally to do with memory loss I don’t recall the details.

  II

  Years ago I lived next door to Ringo Starr and for about six months didn’t know it. This was during a comparatively short period in my life when my wife and I lived in a row of old labourers’ cottages in Sunningdale, in Berkshire, and when I say ‘next door’ I mean that our back fence backed on to Ringo’s estate. Ringo’s house was hundreds of yards away up a grassy slope and hidden from view by trees, but it was still in the strict sense next door. I learned that Ringo was the owner of the estate from our neighbour Dougie, who lived, in the more traditional sense, next door.

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t seen him around,’ Dougie said. ‘He’s often in the Nag’s Head. Nice chap.’

  I went home and said to my wife: ‘Guess who lives in the big house on the hill?’

  ‘Ringo Starr,’ she said.

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Of course. We see him all the time around here. I stood behind him in the ironmonger’s the other day. He was buying a hammer. Nice man. He said hi.’

  ‘Ringo Starr said hi to you? A Beatle said hi to you?’

  ‘He’s not really a Beatle any more.’

  I ignored this, of course.

  ‘The Beatle Ringo Starr bought a hammer in our local hardware store and said hi to you and you didn’t think to tell me.’

  ‘It was just a hammer,’ she said.

  This is the problem with the British. They all have stories like this. In fact, they all have better stories than this. I have no idea how we got on to the subject of the Beatles, but the next day as we were walking along a forestry track in dense woods, I mentioned my Ringo Starr story. My companions nodded appreciatively. Daniel allowed a suitable pause, out of politeness, and then said: ‘When I was at university I spent an afternoon with John Lennon.’

  I could see at once that this was going to out-trump me by about a thousand per cent.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘How?’

  ‘I did an interview with him. I believe it has become known as “the lost interview”.’

  Make that ten thousand per cent.

  ‘You conducted “the lost interview” with John Lennon?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, it was 1968. The Beatles had just done the Sergeant Pepper album. I was at Keele University. Another student, named Maurice Hindle, and I wrote to Lennon asking for an interview for the student magazine, never seriously expecting a reply, never mind an interview, and he said, “Sure, come to my house in Weybridge.” So we took a train to Weybridge and he came and picked us up at the station.’

  ‘John Lennon picked you up at Weybridge station?’

  ‘In a Mini. It was all a bit surreal. We spent the afternoon at his house at St George’s Hill. He was very nice, entirely normal. He wasn’t that much older than us, of course, and I think he was just a little lonely for normal conversation. The house was a mess. He and Cynthia had recently split, and none of the dishes had been washed or anything. At one point, we decided to have a cup of tea, but there weren’t any clean ones, so we had to wash some up, and I can just remember thinking, “Wow. I am standing at a kitchen sink washing teacups with John Lennon.” My job for the interview was to look after the recording, while Maurice took the photographs. When we got back to Keele, Maurice decided to develop the film himself, to save money, and somehow ruined the lot. So there is nothing at all from one of the great days of my life. At the time, I thought I was going to have to kill Maurice.’

  We indicated that we all could understand that.

  ‘Lennon never did anything like that again,’ Daniel went on. ‘It became known as the lost interview, though in fact it was never lost because I kept the tapes. Forty years later, we auctioned them at Sotheby’s for £23,750. They were bought by the Hard Rock Cafe.’

  ‘Wow,’ we all said.

  I decided it wasn’t worth trying to impress everybody with my Leslie Charteris story.

  ‘But your Ringo Starr story is very sweet,’ Daniel said generously to me.

  John was reminded of a time when, as a fourteen-year-old boy in Manhattan, he saw Cheryl Tiegs come out of an apartment building and followed her for several blocks till she disappeared into another building. Cheryl Tiegs didn’t mean anything to Daniel and Andrew, so they started talking between themselves about canings and ice-cold morning showers, but I was all ears about Cheryl Tiegs, of course, and made John several times retell the part about how he repeatedly walked briskly past her till he was about twenty or thirty yards ahead, then casually turned and walked back, so that he could see her face on. John did this about eleven times in four blocks, but is pretty sure she didn’t notice on account of his careful air of nonchalance. I loved that story.

  And so passed a happy morning walking in the woods.

  Our destination for the day was Minstead, a village in a glade in the northern part of the forest. Andrew had read that it was a good walk – which it indubitably was, through long stretches of undisturbed forest – and that Minstead had a lovely church. As a bonus, the churchyard contained the grave of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

  It was spiritualism that brought Doyle to the New Forest just about a hundred years ago. Spiritualism became curiously popular at that ti
me. Its devoted followers included not just Arthur Conan Doyle but also the future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the philosopher William James and the renowned chemist Sir William Crookes. By about 1910, Britain contained so many devoted spiritualists that they seriously considered forming a political party. But nobody outdid Doyle for devotion. He wrote some twenty books on spiritualism, became president of the International Spiritualist Congress, and opened a psychic bookshop and museum near Westminster Abbey in London. (The building was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. You would think he’d have seen that coming.)

  The problem was that even by the elastic and forgiving standards of spiritualism and the paranormal Doyle’s beliefs grew increasingly loopy. He became convinced that fairies and other woodland sprites were real and wrote a book, The Coming of the Fairies, insisting on their existence. Through seances he developed a friendship with an ancient Mesopotamian named Pheneas, who gave him lifestyle guidance and warned him of a coming cataclysm. In the book Pheneas Speaks, Doyle revealed that in 1927 the world would be rocked by floods and earthquakes, and that one of the continents would sink beneath the seas. When these events failed to come to pass, Doyle conceded that Pheneas had got the year wrong (he’d been using a Mesopotamian calendar evidently), but that they would most assuredly happen sometime.

  On the advice of Pheneas, Doyle bought a house near Minstead and there passed his days sitting quietly in the woods with a camera waiting hopefully for fairies to emerge (they never did) and his evenings holding seances at which he communicated with Britain’s most eminent dead. Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad both asked him to finish the novels they had left uncompleted at death, and the recently deceased Jerome K. Jerome, who had mocked Doyle in life, now sent a message through a third party saying: ‘Tell Arthur I was wrong.’ All this Doyle took as self-evident vindication of his beliefs. Remarkably, throughout all this Doyle continued to produce his celebrated Sherlock Holmes stories, all based on fastidiously rational thinking, and resisted the temptation, which must have been great, to have the famous detective call on spiritualism to solve his cases.

  In 1930, Doyle died (though in fact spiritualists don’t die; they just get very still apparently) and was buried in the garden of his main home in Crowborough in Sussex. His wife was tipped in beside him when her time came, but in 1955 the house was sold and the new owners weren’t keen on having skeletons cluttering up the garden, so Arthur and his wife were dug up and reinterred in the churchyard of All Saints, Minstead – a move that was not without controversy since spiritualists are not really Christian on account of their dogged refusal to die. Still, it must be said that the Doyles have been in Minstead churchyard for more than half a century and not caused any fuss.

  All Saints is a handsome church, with a fine multi-level pulpit and an unusual side room, called a ‘parlour pew’, which is essentially a small living room, with its own furniture and fireplace, where the owners of nearby Malwood Castle could watch sermons in homely comfort. We examined it thoroughly and appreciatively, then repaired to the nearby Trusty Servant pub for lunch. It is an old pub, but it has been modernized in an artificial style that I find vaguely irritating, like when a hotel puts some books in a bar and calls it The Library. The prices were astounding. A chicken, pesto and mozzarella burger was £12.75. Confit of duck, with bok choy, pickled rhubarb and redcurrants was £16.25. I would pay to have some of those things taken off my plate. But the place was full of people happily chowing this stuff down. Bitching bitterly I parted with £8.50 for a cheese ploughman’s.

  After lunch we went and had a look at the Rufus Stone, which stands in a clearing about two and a half miles from Minstead and marks the spot where King Rufus – more properly King William II, son of William the Conqueror – had a bad day in the summer of 1100. Rufus was hunting with some cronies when an arrow fired by one Walter Tyrrell twanged into his chest and killed him more or less outright. Rufus was no great loss. He was short and fat, with lank blond hair and a ruddy complexion. (Rufus means ruddy.) He was impious, licentious and famously effeminate. He never married, and seemed wholly disinclined to produce an heir. Tyrrell maintained that the king’s death was just an unfortunate accident – that his arrow ricocheted off a tree – but hardly anyone bought that story. Just to be on the safe side, Tyrrell fled to France, reportedly on a horse that had been shod with its shoes facing backwards to confuse any followers.

  The Rufus Stone is a simple black obelisk, about four feet high, with inscriptions on three sides. No one knows whether this was really the spot, or even close to the spot, where Rufus fell. Some authorities say he died at Beaulieu, a dozen or so miles away to the southeast. I know it was a long time ago, but I think it is interesting to find an English king commemorated so modestly.

  The thing about walking is that, generally speaking, it is a great deal more fun to do than to read about, so I won’t challenge your patience by telling you all about our third day other than to say it was awfully nice and that it took us past another literary connection in the form of the fallen estate of Cuffnells. This was once the home of Alice Liddell, who is better remembered by posterity as the Alice of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I knew that Alice as a child in Oxford had provoked the unhealthy stirrings of Charles L. Dodgson, a stammering mathematician, and that he had written stories to amuse her, which became Through the Looking-Glass and all that. But I had never paused to wonder what had become of her afterwards. Well, the answer is that she turned into a beauty and lived a fairly unhappy life in the New Forest.

  It might have been otherwise. Alice as a young woman was pursued by Leopold, Duke of Albany, youngest son of Queen Victoria. The young Ms Liddell was both beautiful and intelligent; her genetic input would have done the royal family no harm at all. But the Queen rejected her because she was a commoner, so Leopold had to look elsewhere for breeding stock and Alice ended up with an amiable cypher named Reginald Hargreaves.

  Hargreaves had grown up in and inherited Cuffnells, a magnificent house and estate half a mile outside Lyndhurst. Cuffnells was one of the finest homes in the district, with twelve bedrooms, massive drawing and dining rooms, and a hundred-foot-long orangery. There Reginald and Alice lived quietly and dully, and in increasingly straitened circumstances. Reginald was not much of a businessman, it seems, and kept selling pieces of the estate to make ends meet until there wasn’t much of it left. The couple had three sons. Two died in the First World War and the third lived a life of dissipation in London. In 1926, Reginald also died, abruptly, leaving Alice alone and unhappy in a crumbling house. She became an ill-tempered recluse, and was mean to her servants. In 1934, she died aged eighty-two. Cuffnells, falling apart, was demolished a short while later. Today the space where Cuffnells once stood has vanished into woodland. You would never guess now that once a great house had stood there.

  We parted the next morning, but there is a postscript to our adventure in the woods. The hotel we stayed at in Lyndhurst was called the Crown Manor House Hotel. It seemed a decent enough place to us all – not hugely friendly or charming or well run, but decent enough – but soon after our visit Andrew forwarded to each of us an interesting article from the Southern Daily Echo of Southampton, concerning the hotel’s devotion to hygiene. The article stated:

  A Hampshire hotel has been ordered to pay more than £20,000 in fines and costs after preparing food in rat-infested areas. The Crown Manor House Hotel in Lyndhurst, which twice closed its kitchens after inspectors found evidence of the infestation, admitted five food hygiene offences in a case heard at Southampton Magistrates’ Court. They included two offences involving the production, processing and distribution of food in areas where there was ‘an ongoing infestation of rats’.

  ‘I thought those peppercorns tasted funny,’ I quipped merrily, but I was genuinely astounded to read about this, and for two reasons. First, I was naturally a touch chagrined, as you might expect, to learn that I had been staying in a hotel that wa
s so slyly squalid, but I was also, and almost equally, amazed to find that I could now read about this sort of thing in a daily newspaper. I worked for the Southern Daily Echo’s sister paper in Bournemouth for two years in the 1970s, and in that time I don’t believe we ever ran a story about a filthy hotel or restaurant. That wasn’t because there weren’t filthy hotels and restaurants, I am sure, but because those things were secret.

  Everything was secret in Britain then. Everything. People’s lives were secret. They hid their houses behind tall hedges and put net curtains in the windows so that no one could see in. Almost everything the government did was secret. There was even a law, the Official Secrets Act, designed to make sure that essentially no one could know anything. It was quite extraordinary when I think back on it. Among matters that were classified in Britain in those days, ostensibly on grounds of national security, were: levels of chemical additives in foods, hypothermia rates among the elderly, the carbon monoxide levels of cigarettes, leukaemia rates near nuclear power stations, certain road accident statistics, even some proposals to widen roads. In fact, according to the wording of Section 2 of the Act, all government information was secret until the government declared it otherwise.

  Sometimes all this became a little ridiculous. During the Cold War, Britain had a programme of building rockets for the delivery of warheads, and naturally it needed to test them. It was notionally a top secret programme. It even had a slick secret code name: Black Knight. The problem is that Britain is small and doesn’t have vast deserts in which to conduct secret tests. In fact, there isn’t any part of Britain that is really secret at all. For various reasons, it was determined that the best place to test the rockets was at a famous landmark and popular tourist site on the Isle of Wight called the Needles. The Needles are clearly visible from the British mainland, so the firing up of the rockets could be seen and heard for miles around. A friend of mine told me that whole communities used to turn out on the beaches of southern Hampshire to watch the smoke and flames. Even though the firings were visible to thousands, the tests were officially secret. No newspaper could report them. No official could speak of them.