by Bill Bryson
Chapter 20
Wales
I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective.
Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: ‘City?’
I replied: ‘London.’
‘Can you spell that please?’
I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. ‘L-O-N-D-O-N,’ I said.
‘Country?’
‘England.’
‘Can you spell that?’
I spelled England.
She typed for a moment and said: ‘The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?’
I assured her it was. ‘Try Britain,’ I suggested.
I spelled that, too – twice (we got the wrong number of Ts the first time) – and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest.
‘It’ll take France,’ the girl said after a minute.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You can have “London, France”.’
‘Seriously?’
She nodded.
‘Well, why not?’
So she typed ‘London, France’, and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: ‘Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?’
‘That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.’
‘Shoot,’ she said and looked chagrined.
Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.
I was thinking about all this as I sat now in a motorway services area on the M4 near Bristol. I was on my way to the far west of Wales, and was very much looking forward to it, let me tell you, but it’s a long drive and I was hungry, so I thought I would treat myself to breakfast. I had rather touchingly supposed that I would be strolling with a tray through a brightly lit cafeteria called the Granary, with booths and shiny cutlery and a hearty if not hugely attractive choice of cooked foods, but it turns out that all the Granaries and other motorway restaurants are gone now. Today all you get are food courts served by fast food chains. I ended up with a biscuit filled with whatever they could find that was foodlike and bright yellow – I think it was called a Breakfast Crudwich – accompanied by a little bag of Potato Greasies and watery coffee in a paper cup.
As I sat nibbling my crudwich and worrying about the deterioration of the modern human mind, I pulled from my rucksack a document titled ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’. This is the famous study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in New York mentioned a few chapters ago that launched the new science of what we might call Stupidology.
It is an academic paper, so it has some jargon in it: ‘metacognitive skills’, ‘regression effects’, ‘interrater correlation analysis’ and so on, but its basic premise appears to be that if you are truly stupid you not only do things stupidly but are in all likelihood too stupid to realize how stupidly you are doing them. I can’t pretend that I understood it all, which is worrying in a paper on stupidity, but some of it was a little technical. Consider this sentence: ‘Top-quartile participants did not, however, underestimate their raw score on the test, M = 16.9 (perceived) versus 16.4 (actual), t(18) = 1.37, ns.’ I read that eight or ten times, and all the sentences just before and after it and I still cannot understand any of it beyond about the fourth word. However, I am at least aware that I don’t understand it, which I gather indicates that I am just averagely stupid and not dangerously stupid.
Dunning and Kruger have unquestionably done groundbreaking work, but their paper was written in 1999 and world stupidity has raced ahead in the years since, as we have just seen in Texas. One clear shortcoming of the Dunning-Kruger study is that it gives no guidance on how to assess one’s own mental acuity. This troubled me greatly, so as I returned to the open road and headed west into Wales, in a spirit of public service I constructed a checklist of ways to tell if you are becoming dangerously stupid yourself. This list isn’t comprehensive by any means, but it should help you to decide whether your own situation is worrisome. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
1. In a Thai restaurant when your plate comes garnished with a decorative flower carved from a carrot, do you really believe that yours is the only plate that flower has been on this week?
2. Do you think that if you pat your pockets enough times it will make a missing object reappear?
3. If someone wearing oven gloves brings you food and says, ‘Careful, the plate is very hot,’ do you touch it anyway, just to see if it is?
4. If you have been to a tanning salon, do you think that because you cannot see that your eyelids are white no one else can?
5. If you are a man about to go on holiday and you buy some trousers that are too long to be called shorts but are too short to be trousers, are you able nonetheless to wear them publicly without embarrassment?
6. If you are waiting for a lift that’s slow to come, do you push the button again and again in the belief that that will speed things up?
7. In hotels, do you believe that the coffee cups in your room have ever been near a dishwasher, washing-up liquid or anything other than a quick swill under the cold tap in the bathroom?
8. Do you sometimes spend £70 on a shirt with a little polo pony on it in the belief that that will somehow bring you a more rewarding sex life? (The people who sold you the shirt for £70 are having the rewarding sex life.)
9. Do you think that you can feed seven or eight coins into a vending machine without the last one being rejected? Do you keep putting the rejected coin back in the slot anyway? Why?
10. Do you think you can write down a list of questions in a notebook balanced on your thigh while driving on a motorway without drifting dangerously across one or sometimes two other lanes?
11. Do you understand what is meant by a vigorous up-and-down hand gesture made by drivers in Britain as they pass?
That’s as far as I got, but I hope it is some help. We shall return to this subject when we get to Tenby, but for the moment let’s leave all these angry motorists and turn on to the quiet and winding A4066 and follow it through the valley of the River Taf to the comely village of Laugharne.
The poet Dylan Thomas lived in Laugharne (pronounced larn) from 1949 to 1953 in a cottage called the Boathouse and did some of his best, and ultimately final, work there. I parked beneath the stately ruins of Laugharne Castle, and followed a helpful directional sign to a paved path along the broad tidal estuary of the Taf and up on to a wooded hill.
Here I came upon Thomas’s famous writing hut, perched on the cliff edge. The hut is permanently locked, but you can look through the window. Inside, it is as if Thomas has just toddled off to Brown’s Hotel in the village for a lunchtime refresher but will be back soon. It has a couple of wooden chairs, a table strewn with work, some shelves of books, wadded paper balls on the floor. The hut doesn’t look very comfortable, but the setting is sublime. It was here, according to the Boathouse website, that Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood and ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ (though actually I think he wrote the poem earlier).
A short way beyond and no less beautifully situated is the Boathouse, where Thomas lived with his wife, Caitlin, and children after his friend and patron Margaret Taylor (wife of the historian A. J. P. Taylor) bought it for them, an act of startling generosity. Today it is a museum with lots of interesting Thomas memorabilia. It is very small, but snug and cheery. I thought it would be busy – 2014 was the centenary of Thomas’s birth – but I was one of just three visitors.
On a wall upstairs was a front page from the South Wales Argus for 10 November 1953 reporting the death of Thomas in New York after a spectacular bender (though actually his whole life was a spectacular bender). The main story, however, concerned the mysterious disappearance of a farm couple, John and Phoebe Harries, from their eleven-acre holding just down the road in Pendine. Their bodies were found a week or so later in a shallow grave. They had been bludgeoned to death. A young but distant relative named Ronald Harries was subsequently tried and found guilty, and hanged the following spring, one of the last criminals to be executed in Wales. I thought it was interesting that all this got much more play in the Argus than the death of a drunken poet.
Seventeen miles around Carmarthen Bay from Laugharne is the old resort of Tenby. I had heard that it is a charming place, but in fact it is exquisite – full of pastel-coloured houses, sweet-looking hotels and guesthouses, characterful pubs and cafés, glorious beaches and gorgeous views. It is everything you could want in a coastal retreat. How had this escaped me for so long?
Tenby stands on a steep-sided promontory high above its many beaches, which are reached by fetching zigzag paths, and seems bounded everywhere by water. The beaches are long and broad and, at the time of my visit, quite empty. I am not a beach person, as I think we have established, but these beckoned even for me.
The artist Augustus John was born in Tenby and spent a miserable childhood in a house on Victoria Street, just off the clifftop Esplanade. John’s mother died of rheumatic gout when he was just six (I have gout; nobody ever told me it was lethal) and he grew up in a house that was silent and gloomy, presided over by a grieving and unfeeling father. It is said that the young Augustus never showed any talent for art until at the age of seventeen while diving off some rocks at Tenby he smashed his head and emerged from the water ‘a bloody genius’. That seems a little improbable – I have hit my head a lot and it has never improved anything – but in any case he cultivated drawing from that point and became so skilled that John Singer Sargent declared him the best draughtsman since the Renaissance.
I walked up and down practically every street in Tenby and I don’t think I passed a house or cottage that I wouldn’t have been happy to own. I strolled along the beaches and admired the boats in its harbour and the views to Caldey Island, two miles offshore.
Just after I was there, the local paper ran a story about two visitors from my own dear native land who set the satellite navigation system in their hire car to take them from Tenby to Caldey Island. The satnav directed them down a boat ramp, on to the beach and into the great zone of blue that lay beyond, and it seems they dutifully followed. I’d love to have heard the conversation inside the car as they made their way towards the sea. As it turned out, their car got bogged down in sand halfway across the beach, robbing them of the opportunity to become the first motorists in history to reach Caldey Island from beneath the sea. The visitors declined to give their name to the local paper, though they did say they were from Illinois.
I trust you see what I’m saying. It’s getting worse and it’s spreading.
In the morning, I drove on to St Davids, on the westernmost point of the Welsh mainland, above the rolling surf and crashing waves of St Brides Bay. St Davids’ boast is that it is Britain’s smallest city, which is really just another way of saying that it is the smallest place that has a cathedral. By any other measure, it’s a village, but an adorable one, on a hill a bit inland from the sea. It is very pretty and prosperous, with a butcher’s, a National Trust shop, a tiny bookshop, even a Fat Face.
The town and cathedral are named for the patron saint of Wales who was resident here a very long time ago. I knew nothing about him, so I looked him up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography before leaving home. I defy anyone to read the Oxford DNB entry on St David and not lose consciousness by about a third of the way through. Here is a typical sentence: ‘Yet the declaration that David was predestined to sanctity was also designed to confirm the Augustinian orthodoxy of the hagiographer, Rhigyfarch, and to foreshadow the culmination of David’s career at the Synod of Llanddewibrefi (second 7), when he preached against the Pelagian heresy.’ What I was able to gather is that David lived in the sixth century and that the only interesting things about him were that he liked to stand up to his neck in cold water and that he was said to live to 147.
The cathedral is terrific and interesting. I was one of only two people there. The most striking thing to me was that the floor slopes quite conspicuously. If you put a marble down near the altar, it would roll pretty quickly into the northwest corner. I asked a steward, a genial and impressively well-informed gentleman named Philip Brenan, about this. ‘Yes, it is quite a slope,’ he agreed with enthusiasm, ‘and the interesting thing is that it must have been built that way intentionally because all the lintels and window sills and so on are still perfectly horizontal. If the slope was from subsidence, they would have tilted too. So happily the slope doesn’t indicate structural problems. But it is indeed strange.’
He showed me some other oddities. The nave is bounded on both sides by arches, which are rounded and neatly symmetrical in the Romanesque style until you get to the very end when the last arch on either side abruptly takes on a pointed but clumsily asymmetrical gothic shape. He also indicated how the outer walls, when looked at closely, seem to be falling outwards. ‘All this was done on purpose but no one knows why,’ he said.
The greatest curiosity of all is where the cathedral is built. It’s at the bottom of a steep hill, in a depression, so that it is almost invisible till you get right upon it. The village, which came later, stands on the hillside above. It is as if the builders didn’t want anyone to find them.
I spent a very happy morning exploring St Davids and the gorgeous peninsula on which it stands. Nearly everywhere in Pembrokeshire the land ends in rounded cliffs, like the backs of whales, which provide the most striking and memorable views. It is about as lovely as a coast can get.
In the afternoon, I drove on to Fishguard, the place that I was most eager to see. I have a very fond memory of Fishguard, which is a little strange because I was only there for eight or nine hours forty years ago and I spent most of that time asleep. In the summer of 1973 when I was hitchhiking around Europe and was on my way to Ireland, some kindly lorry driver dropped me in the centre of town very late at night. I remember that I was by a little park opposite a row of shops, all with awnings. The street light cast a light distinctly reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting. It seemed a little corner of perfection. I looked around the upper town briefly, but, finding nowhere better, I returned to the compact park, spread my sleeping bag and slept on the dewy grass. In the morning I woke very early, with Fishguard still asleep, and walked down a steep curving road to the harbour and caught the first ferry to Rosslare.
That was the entirety of my experience, but I was so curious to see it again now that I parked off the High Street and went for a walk around
the town before checking in to my guesthouse. Fishguard was an oddity, I have to say. Three large pubs on the main square were out of business – the Abergwaun Hotel, Farmers Arms and Royal Oak – as was the Ship and Anchor up the road. Several shop premises were empty, yet Fishguard still had a bookshop, a florist, a craft shop-and-café – the very kinds of places you would expect to be first to go when a town is on its uppers. I found my sleeping place with difficulty. The little park I recalled was really just a patch of grass. The shops across the road were still there, but weren’t in any way special. The awnings were long gone.
I stayed in the Manor Town House, a stylish guesthouse with entrancing sea views from all the back windows – quite the nicest guesthouse I stayed in on the trip. It was run by a friendly couple named Chris and Helen Sheldon. I chatted to Chris for quite a long time about Fishguard and west Wales generally. This part of Wales has a lot of economic problems – its GDP is just two thirds of the EU average, which is not all that spectacular in its own right since it includes places like Bulgaria and Romania – and yet it is a popular tourist area because of the beauty of the Pembrokeshire coast. So some places like Tenby and St Davids are prosperous and lovely and some like Milford Haven and Haverfordwest are struggling and a few like Fishguard don’t quite know which camp they fall into.
Chris told me that the three pubs on the square had all failed fairly recently, but that about half a dozen others had preceded them. Fortunately, one that survived was the tiny and exquisite Fishguard Arms, across the street. There were five locals lounging comfortably in the front bar when I called in about half past six. They looked surprised to find a stranger in their midst, but gave me friendly nods.
