by Bill Bryson
So my question is a serious one. Why do these things have to be so horrible? Britain used to have a kind of instinct for producing jaunty, agreeable everyday objects. I don’t suppose any other nation has devised more incidental infrastructure about which one can feel a kind of connectedness and fondness – black taxicabs, double-decker buses, pub signs, Victorian lampposts, red mailboxes and phone booths, the absurdly impractical but endearing policeman’s helmet and much more. These things were not always especially efficient or sensible – it could take an almost superhuman amount of exertion to heave open a cast-iron phone box door if there was a wind blowing – but they gave life a quality and distinctiveness that set Britain apart. And now they are nearly all gone. Even black cabs in London are giving way to Mercedes vans with automatic doors that you get shouted at by the driver if you try to open yourself, and the police are dressed in yellow vests that make them look like the people who repair railway lines. In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier. Well, I don’t like it at all.
I was headed to Mousehole, a famously pretty fishing village. The curious name (pronounced mowz-ull) is of uncertain provenance, but probably comes from some old Cornish word. The village is about three miles along the coast road from Penzance. It was a fine morning, and quiet because it was Sunday. The views across Mount’s Bay were glittery and serene. Somewhere between the village of Newlyn and Mousehole itself I came upon the old Penlee Lifeboat Station, and that brought me up short because I knew it was famous for something but I couldn’t immediately think why. An information board beside the station filled in the details that my memory couldn’t supply. This was the site of an act of great but tragic heroism some thirty years earlier.
On the evening of 19 December 1981, a small cargo ship, the Union Star, on its maiden run from Holland to Ireland, got in trouble in heavy seas off the Cornish coast. It had been a wild day and by early evening the storm had turned into a Force 12 gale – the biggest in the area in some time. As well as its normal complement of five crew, the Union Star was carrying the captain’s wife and two teenage daughters so that the family could celebrate Christmas together in Ireland. In the worst possible conditions, the ship’s engines failed and it began to drift helplessly. When word of a mayday call was brought into the village pub in Mousehole, the station captain, Trevelyan Richards, chose seven men and they set off at once for the station. With great difficulty the Penlee lifeboat put to sea and found its way to the stricken ship, where it managed somehow to get alongside and to get four people off. That in itself was an extraordinary achievement. Waves were up to fifty feet high.
Captain Richards radioed that they were bringing the four rescued people to shore and then would go back for the others. That was the last message ever sent. The presumption is that in the next moment a wave dashed the boats together and both sank. Whatever happened, sixteen people lost their lives. The Penlee station was never used again, but has been left just as it was that night as a permanent memorial.
I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people – teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub – drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, imperilling their own lives, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that? The RNLI – I looked this up later – is an organization run by volunteers, supported entirely by public donations. It maintains 233 stations around the coast of Britain and averages twenty-two call-outs per day. It saves 350 lives a year on average. There are times when Britain is the most wonderful country in the world – genuinely the most wonderful. This was one of them.
All this only deepened my admiration for Mousehole, which is in any case an absolutely lovely place. Its streets are narrow and crazily twisting. Many are too narrow for cars. Several lanes are more like staircases than streets. At the foot of the village stands a little harbour surrounded by a protective wall. The tide was out so the boats lay aslant on seaweed and mud. The sea beyond sparkled in the morning sun. St Michael’s Mount shimmered, like a galleon in stone, across the bay. Overlooking the harbour was the Ship Inn, a most perfect-looking pub. This was where the lifeboat men had set off from. On the front wall was a plaque in memory of its former landlord, Charles Greenhaugh, who was one of the eight Mousehole men to die that night. Because it was early on a Sunday morning, the village was quiet and everything shut, so I just shuffled around a little, admired the view, then took a long, rather pensive walk back to Penzance.
In Penzance, I stood beside my car with a book of maps opened to Cornwall, trying to think what to do next when my eye fell on a place that I hadn’t been to, or even thought of, for forty years: Tintagel.
And so I had my next destination. I am not actually quite sure why because I don’t have deep and happy memories of it. I didn’t even like it the first time, but I felt a kind of compulsion to see it again. I think the very fact that I hadn’t seen it for forty years made it automatically of interest. I was curious not so much to re-experience Tintagel, but just to see how much, if any, of it came back to me.
Tintagel, if you don’t know it, is a promontory with a ruined castle, traditionally associated with King Arthur, standing high above a crashing sea on a bleak stretch of Cornish coast between Newquay and Bude. It is only about seven or eight miles off the A39, the main road through north Cornwall, but the lanes leading to it are so maze-like and slow that it feels like much more. On my first visit, I walked there from Camelford, little realizing that I would have to step into hedges every time a vehicle passed – which mercifully wasn’t all that often – and was dumbfounded to discover that the route was both further and more confusing than was indicated by the inch or so of space it took up on my map. As I stood at an unsignposted crossroads, map open, confused, a battered, ancient car pulled up alongside me and a window crashed down.
‘Going to Tintagel?’ said a woman with a posh voice.
I bent down to look in the window. There was a second woman in the passenger seat. ‘Why, yes,’ I said.
‘Hop in. We’ll give you a lift.’
I squeezed gratefully into a back seat that was tiny already and more or less filled to the roof with suitcases and travel gear. I sat with my legs hooked over my ears. We took off with a sudden vrooom – one of the few times in my life that I have experienced actual G forces. I don’t know what kind of car it was, but the woman drove it as if she were Stirling Moss and this was the Nürburgring. She appeared to be short and almost perfectly round. Her companion, a woman of similar years, was tall and lean. I remember thinking that they could go to a fancy dress party as the number ten.
The round one – the driver – began probing me with questions. What was I doing in Britain? Where had I been so far? She was particularly eager to know what I liked and disliked about their little island. I answered diplomatically that I liked it all.
‘There must be something you don’t like,’ she insisted.
I could see at once that this was a scenario without a winning outcome, so I said no, really, I liked everything.
‘Surely there must be something you don’t like,’ she persisted.
‘Think hard,’ urged her companion.
‘Well, I am not crazy about the bacon,’ I said.
‘You don’t like our bacon,’ said the round woman and in the rear-view mirror I could see her eyebrow arch nearly to the roof. ‘And what is wrong with English bacon, pray?’
‘It’s just different. We have it crisp in America.’
‘And you think that’s better, do you?’
‘It’s just the way I am used to it, I suppose.’
‘When I was in Sunt Lewey,’ said the thin one abruptly, ‘I had something they called hotcakes. Can you imagine it – cakes for breakfast.’
‘They’re not really cakes,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes, they’re called hotcakes. I specifically remembe
r,’ the thin one insisted.
‘What are they like, dear?’ asked the small, round one.
‘Well, they’re rather like our pancakes.’
‘They are pancakes,’ I said. ‘It’s just a different name.’ But the women weren’t listening to me at all now.
‘And they have them for breakfast?’
‘Every day.’
‘Never!’
‘They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie.’
‘For breakfast?’
‘No, for lunch and dinner. But it’s not a pie at all, it’s a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it.’
‘Sounds dreadful.’
‘Oh, it is,’ agreed her companion. ‘Quite dreadful.’
‘Do you eat pizza pie?’ the round one asked me accusingly now.
I allowed that sometimes I did.
‘And you prefer it to English bacon?’
This question was too confusing to answer, so I just made some speaking shapes with my mouth, but no words came out.
‘It’s very odd that you would like pizza pie but not English bacon. Don’t you find that odd, dear?’ the short, round one said to the thin one.
‘Most peculiar,’ agreed her friend. ‘But then Americans are quite peculiar if one is completely honest about it.’
The round one was looking at me narrowly in the mirror. ‘And what else don’t you like?’ she said.
I was going to maintain my stance of diplomacy, but I found myself, against my own wishes and better judgement, saying, ‘Well, I am not actually crazy about the sausages either.’
‘Our sausages? You don’t like our sausages?’
‘I prefer the American ones.’
I was dismissed from the conversation again.
‘Did you have sausages in Sunt Lewey, dear?’ asked the round one of her friend.
‘Yes, and they were most peculiar. They were small and rather spicy.’
‘Ooh, I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘No,’ agreed the thin one.
The round one was looking at me critically again.
‘Well, I hope you are not starving in this country. You seem to dislike everything.’
This was actually more or less correct, but I said, ‘No, I like everything else.’ Then after about five minutes, I added: ‘It’s Saint Lewis, by the way. It’s pronounced Saint Lewis, not Sunt Lewey.’ This was received with silence and I realized that our experiment in transatlantic friendship had come to an end. We parted ways in the central car park in Tintagel, and the last words I heard were the tall, lean one saying, ‘Most peculiar. And rather ill-mannered, don’t you think?’
I parked now in the same spacious car park and ventured on to the high street. I had no recollection whatever of the community of Tintagel and could immediately see why. It was a spectacularly unmemorable place, consisting primarily of a single street lined with shops selling mostly New Age tat. It was very busy with tourists and all the cafés and tearooms were packed.
I didn’t remember the castle either, but that is not entirely surprising since there is no castle to remember. It is just a few scraps of ruined wall standing on a windy platform of grass and rock 190 feet above the sea. The history of Tintagel Castle is a little obscure. It enters the literary record in a twelfth-century work by Geoffrey of Monmouth called History of the Kings of Britain. The story as told by Geoffrey was that the King of Britain, Uther Pendragon, fell for the beautiful wife of the Duke of Cornwall. Alarmed, the duke had his dear wife locked up in the stony fastness of Tintagel Castle while he went off to fight battles in some distant place. Uther, not to be denied, had his crafty wizard, Merlin, transform him into the very likeness of the Duke and in this guise the king gained entrance to Tintagel. There he had his way with the duke’s unsuspecting (or at least uncomplaining) wife, and thus turned the duke into the first Cornish patsy, so to speak. The beautiful duchess soon afterwards discovered that she was pregnant. The child of this union was King Arthur.
One of a great many difficulties with this story is that Geoffrey was writing six hundred years after the events described and, as far as can be told, was making everything up anyway. If Arthur existed at all, he could have been any of several historical figures, only some of whom had a connection to Cornwall. Arthur’s seat, Camelot, may actually have been on the other side of the country in East Anglia. It has been suggested with some plausibility that the name Camelot may have come from Camulodunum, the Roman name for Colchester, in Essex. What is certain is that Arthur, Uther, Merlin and all the others never saw Tintagel Castle for it wasn’t yet built.
I had a respectful look around and read the information panels, then descended to sea level to have a look at a natural feature called (again without historical basis) Merlin’s Cave, then trudged all the way back up to the clifftops. I walked back into the village to find that it was still packed with people, almost none of whom seemed to be heading for the castle but were evidently content to nose around in the shops looking at candles and tarot cards and the like.
On my first visit, all those years ago, after viewing the castle I returned to the car park, hoping that my lady friends would take pity on me and convey me back to the known world – it was, however faint, my only hope – but the space where their car had been was bare. So I walked out of town on the road on which we had come in, presumably without a great deal of thought as to how foolish it was to leave the only inhabited place for miles just as darkness was falling. I can’t imagine what outcome I hoped for, but before long I was hungry and cold and pretty well lost. It was at this point that I came across a lonely farmhouse – and this is, let me say, an absolutely true story – with a B&B sign out front. I could hear quite a lively argument going on inside even before I reached the door. It stopped at once when I pushed the buzzer. After a minute, the door was opened very slightly by a haggard-looking woman. She didn’t speak but just looked at me with an impassive expression that said: ‘What?’
‘Do you have a room for the night?’ I asked.
‘A room?’ She seemed astounded. I expect she had more or less forgotten that she had a sign out front. Then, remembering, she said quickly: ‘It’s a pound.’
Confused as always, I thought she was describing the nature of the lodging. ‘A pound like where dogs sleep?’ I asked in tentative dismay.
‘No, it costs a pound.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’ll be fine.’
She showed me to a room at the back of the house on the ground floor. It was a bit cold and spartan, with a narrow bed, bedside locker, a chest of drawers and a sink with just a cold tap, but clean.
‘Is there anywhere around here I can get something to eat?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘I could do you something. Won’t be much.’
‘Oh, that would be great,’ I said, sincerely grateful. I was starving.
‘Cost you another pound.’
‘Fine.’
‘Wait here. I’ll bring it when it’s ready.’
She left me in the room. Almost at once the most ferocious shouting ensued from a room nearby. It was clear that I had now become part of the argument. Over the next half-hour, doors and drawers slammed and voices were continually raised in anger. Something heavy – possibly a toaster – crashed against a wall. Then abruptly all the noise stopped. The next moment my door opened and the woman brought a tray in. It was a wonderful, enormous meal. It included a large slab of cake and a can of beer.
‘Leave the tray outside the door when you’ve finished,’ she said, then left and the arguing resumed at an even more intense and angry pitch than before. I ate quietly, half expecting my door to fly open at any moment and a man about seven feet tall in bib overalls to be standing there with an axe, but that never happened. Once the woman shrieked and said, ‘Put that down!’ and then things like ‘You just dare’ and ‘Go ahead, you sick bastard.’ There was the sound of a struggle and a chair being knocked over. Then it wen
t quiet for a while and then there were more ructions and the sounds of things being flung. I didn’t know whether to intervene or escape out the window. Instead I sat on the edge of the bed and ate my cake. It was delicious.
I went to bed about 8 pm – there was nothing else to do – and listened to the fighting in the dark. After about an hour it moved upstairs, where it continued intermittently until about eleven when at last the house grew quiet and we all slept.
In the morning my haggard hostess brought me an enormous, lovely breakfast on a tray. ‘You need to go when you finish that,’ she said. ‘I’m going out and I don’t want to leave you alone here with him.’ She put the tray on the chest of drawers, accepted two pounds from me and departed. A few minutes later I heard a car go down the driveway.
I ate the breakfast in about seventeen seconds, gathered up my things and stepped out of my room for the first time since arriving. Down the corridor a man was standing at a mirror adjusting a tie. He looked at me without expression, then returned to the tie.
I let myself out the front door and walked briskly and without a backward glance the four miles to Boscastle, where I got on the first bus that was going anywhere. This was in 1972. Except for my few visits to Penzance, I hadn’t been back to Cornwall since.
Chapter 13
Ancient Britain
I DIDN’T DO STONEHENGE justice when I went there in Notes from a Small Island, but in those days it really didn’t do itself justice. Back then, the car park and visitor centre stood conveniently but unattractively near the stone circle, just off the busy A344. The visitor centre had the warmth and charm of a Portakabin. The exhibitions were grudging, the snack bar grubby. The whole thing was commonly termed a national disgrace.
Well, what a transformation. Today, discreetly tucked away behind a neighbouring hill, there rises a sleek new visitor centre, glassy and inviting, with a generous exhibition space incorporating informative displays and space-age technology. The old car park and visitor centre and a good stretch of the old A344 have been taken away and grassed over, a blissful improvement. Once there were plans also to put the very busy A303, which skirts the southern edge of the site, into a tunnel, which would have made Stonehenge the silent and solitary wonder it once was, but that plan was eventually rejected as too expensive. Still, with the recent improvements, Stonehenge is a thousand times better than it was until just a couple of years ago.
