The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson

  All this happened in an instant, but to me, and I daresay to the toddler, it proceeded in a kind of paralysing slow motion, in total silence. I was watching a little boy go to his death, and mine was about to be the last face he would ever see. How’s that for an image to spend the rest of your life with?

  And then, abruptly and miraculously, real time reasserted itself and the world became noisy again. I shouted and his mother in the same instant looked over and, with a shriek, scrambled to the water’s edge and snatched him out before he was swept away. The mother and her friend fussed over the little boy, but I could see he was OK. After a few moments, the friend looked up and signalled an all-clear to me and a kind of thanks. There was nothing more I could do and I was late anyway, so I waved back and continued on my way.

  I am not a religious soul, but I must say it does seem a little uncanny that on that morning of all mornings I should have looked over the bridge at such a propitious moment. I mentioned the story at lunch to one of the members of the cathedral, and he nodded sagely and pointed a finger heavenward, as if to say, ‘It was God, of course.’

  I nodded and didn’t say anything, but thought: ‘Then why did He push him in?’

  *

  Beyond Elvet Bridge, a cobbled street called the Bailey leads up to Palace Green, a giant lawned square with the cathedral rising like a mountain of shaped stone at one end and Durham Castle, now part of the university, standing sentinel at the other. I entered the cathedral through its massive oak doors and for about the two hundred and fiftieth time, I would guess, was staggered by its grandeur. It is unquestionably one of the great, humbling spaces of the world.

  At the eastern end of the cathedral, in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, is a breathtakingly enormous rose window, ninety feet in circumference, a giant kaleidoscope of stained glass of an almost liquid intensity, held in place by the most delicate stone tracery. I was once told by a member of the cathedral staff that some years ago, while putting together a programme of maintenance, a team of conservators comprehensively measured every facet of the window and sent the numbers off to an engineering firm to be crunched in a supercomputer. Three weeks later an urgent message came back saying: ‘Whatever you do, don’t build that window!’

  I asked Christopher Downs, the architect, about it when I met him and he smiled tolerantly. The story, he said, was apocryphal, but the substance was true. No one would dare to build such a window now. It is, he told me, at the very limit of engineering tolerances. ‘Somehow, without computers or other sophisticated tools, they knew precisely how far they could push things,’ he told me. ‘It is quite miraculous really.’

  I had a look around the cathedral now, then strolled through the exquisite cathedral close – known here as the College – then along the Bailey and down a woodland path to another landmark, Prebends’ Bridge. It is unquestionably one of the loveliest views in England, with the cathedral above and the river, tranquil and green, sliding along below. It is a prospect that has barely changed since it was memorialized in a famous painting by J. M. W. Turner in 1817.

  People come from all over to marvel at the cathedral and enjoy these views without appreciating that not one bit of what they see takes care of itself. Prebends’ Bridge is part of the cathedral estate. A couple of years ago, it had to be assessed for structural wear. The dean of the cathedral, Michael Sadgrove, told me that the scaffolding alone would cost £100,000. I asked him how much cathedral visitors donated. The average visitor leaves 40 pence, he told me. More than half leave nothing at all.

  I had to hasten on to Newcastle to attend a dinner and then take part in a charity walk for the Northern Institute for Cancer Research, a heroic organization that I first learned of through Jon Davidson, my old friend who force-marched me through the Lake District in 2010 as part of his coast-to-coast charity hike. The institute is run by Prof H. Josef Vormoor, who is Sir James Spence Professor of Child Health at Newcastle University and one of the foremost child cancer specialists in Britain.

  I was thinking about Josef because on the drive to Newcastle I listened to the news on Radio 4, and it contained an item about David Cameron renewing his pledge to reduce the number of immigrants to Britain. My ears always perk up at this because of course I am an immigrant myself. So, too, is Josef. He is from Germany. His wife, Britta, is from Germany, and she is even lovelier than Josef. She is a GP. I wish she was my GP because she is smart and kind. Now here’s the thing that just drives me crazy.

  If Josef and Britta went home tomorrow, the government would log it as a gain for the country. Britain’s immigration numbers would be reduced by two and therefore the nation would have moved a tiny bit closer towards some notional concept of perfection. The smartest person I know is Carlos Frenk of Durham University. He is one of the world’s leading cosmologists. He attracts the best possible talent to his department. Carlos is from Mexico. He comes from a fabulously wealthy family; he isn’t in Britain because it is making him wealthier. He could be at Harvard or Caltech or anywhere, but he likes Durham. If he went tomorrow, it would also be logged as a net gain to the country. Do I really have to point out how foolish that is?

  I am not suggesting that Britain shouldn’t try to control its population numbers. I am just saying that the process ought to involve a little more than a body count. Jon Davidson’s wife, Donna, also comes from America. She is enormously lovely too and very gifted. She helps design visitor centres all over the world for an American company, so she earns dollars for the British economy, and, not incidentally, in her spare time raises lots of money for the Northern Institute for Cancer Research. There are loads of people like us. We are all here because we like it here or are married to Britons or both. If I may say so, you are a little more cosmopolitan, possibly even a little more dynamic and productive, sometimes even more adorable and gorgeous, because we are here with you. If you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot.

  And, by the way, every one of us puts more than 40p in the collecting pots at cathedrals.

  That evening I attended a most enjoyable fundraising dinner for the NICR at which a delightful lady from the Barbour clothing family gave an extremely magnanimous donation, so I suggest that we all go out and buy something from Barbour some time very soon, and then the following day I went to the Blagdon Hall estate, which was hosting the charity hike.

  Blagdon Hall is the ancestral home of the Viscounts Ridley. The present viscount is the author and kindly soul more widely known to the world as Matt Ridley. I have known Matt for years but for a very long time had no idea that he was a viscount in waiting. It was only when I visited him at his house for the first time and found him standing at the front door of a building about the size of my high school that I realized his background involved a certain measure of privilege.

  In his younger years, Matt worked as a journalist on The Economist and for a time was based in America. He told me that once he went to Iowa for the political caucuses and was checking into a motel when he noticed that on the wall behind the check-in desk was a reproduction of a painting of an English country estate from the eighteenth century. The painting was awfully familiar to Matt since it was of Blagdon. The original hung in his house. He said to the young check-in clerk, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll believe this, but that’s my house.’ She glanced at the print and then looked at him as if he had just told her that he lived in Tinker Bell’s castle at Disneyland, and completed the check-in process without reference to his comment.

  Matt’s wife, Anya, who is also lovely and has a brain like a mainframe computer, is a leading neuroscientist based at Newcastle University. She’s American, too. Their son Matthew, a student at Cambridge, was one of the members of last year’s winning University Challenge team, so he is obviously tremendously smart, too, as is their lovely daughter Iris. The children are British, but half their brains and frankly about three quarters of their looks are American.

  That really is all
I am going to say about this.

  The walk was a great success, as it always is, and a lot of fun, but above all heartening because nearly everyone on it has been touched by childhood cancer as parent or sibling or victim. I don’t have to tell you what the walk was like because I am certain that you have taken part in a few such walks yourself. Who in Britain hasn’t? But what you may not appreciate is how unusual that is in the wider world. When we moved to New Hampshire in 1995 and learned that one of our new neighbours was doing the Boston Marathon, I said to her, ‘Oh, I’ll sponsor you,’ and she looked horrified. She thought I meant that I would sponsor her as Nike or Adidas might, as a commercial proposition, and that I would expect her to wear sandwich boards saying, ‘Buy Bill Bryson’s Books’ or something. The idea of running to raise money for charity was completely unknown.

  So that is just another small thing that makes Britain rather a special place. That and having quite a number of jolly decent immigrants.

  Oh, and here’s one other thing: a giant piece of sculpture called Northumberlandia, designed by the artist Charles Jencks and erected on land donated by the Ridleys, who also provided part of the funding. Matt took me to see it just after a previous walk. He is very proud of it and for good reason. It is just the most wonderful creation. It is an enormous figure of a recumbent woman, a quarter of a mile long and a hundred feet high, made of earth dug up during the course of mining for coal on Ridley’s land, then lined with paths and planted over with grass.

  The scale of it is staggering. ‘It is,’ Matt told me, ‘the largest representation of a woman in the world.’ It is beautiful to behold but also a pleasure to walk over. Paths lead to the top of her head, to the twin summits of her breasts, along her arms, down her grassy thighs. It was just splendid, the best thing I have seen in a long time.

  I would love to have spent hours clambering over Northumberlandia again, but I had tracks of another sort to make. It was time to head to Scotland. My English adventure was coming to an end.

  II

  I stayed the night in North Berwick, ninety miles north of Newcastle and comfortably inside Scotland. My plan was to drive to Edinburgh in the morning, then proceed north through the Cairngorms to Inverness and thence onward to Ullapool and Cape Wrath. I didn’t have much time to linger – the Cape Wrath season, such as it is, was coming to an end – but I was looking forward very much to the experience of driving into the Highlands. It’s a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind of purply glory and you know you are there. That’s what I was looking forward to.

  North Berwick is sometimes confused with Berwick-upon-Tweed, but is a different place entirely, forty miles further up the coast on the Firth of Forth. I knew nothing about it and ended up there simply because it was conveniently on the way to Edinburgh. Well, it is lovely – a prosperous and attractive coastal town with a celebrated ocean-front golf course strikingly similar to St Andrews’. I liked it a lot.

  I dropped my luggage at a hotel, then strolled into town. I went into the Ship Inn, which seemed a pleasant place, and read a day-old copy of the East Lothian Courier which I found lying on a table. The paper had an interesting report on a recent litter pick by an organization called the Forth Coastal Litter Campaign. The FCLC not only fastidiously picks up litter, bless them, but then apparently counts it all. Altogether it collected over fifty thousand pieces of litter on this recent sweep, including fifty-five party poppers, twenty-three traffic cones, twelve toothbrushes, forty-three surgical gloves and fifteen colostomy bags. It was the colostomy bags that gave me pause. How do you account for that? Did one person drop colostomy bags on fifteen separate occasions or was it a party of colostomy bag users on perhaps an annual outing? If the latter, might this also explain the party poppers? Unfortunately, the Courier failed to specify.

  The news pages of the paper were liberally sprinkled with articles about pub beatings – five on one page, just from this area – but everything else was about flower shows and fun runs and people shaving their heads for charity. I had never seen such a range of kindliness and violence coexisting in one locality. When I went for a second pint, I turned round and a guy was standing behind me waiting to take my place at the bar. We went through that little side-to-side dance where you keep inadvertently blocking the other person’s way. I smiled helplessly, as you do, and he looked at me as if he was thinking about shoving my head through the wall. That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead.

  Afterwards I dined at a Thai restaurant on the main street, then went down to the seafront and looked across to a scattering of islands just off the coast. One of them, called Fidra, is said to have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. He spent a lot of time in the town as a boy evidently. The view was lovely. I didn’t see any colostomy bags.

  As I stood there, I was severely startled to have my phone ring. It was my wife telling me that there was a problem at home. I can’t tell you what it was. I was involved in litigation in America – I had begun action against someone – and part of the subsequent settlement of that case was that I agreed not to discuss it. But something had come up and I had to go home. The Highlands would have to wait.

  Chapter 26

  To Cape Wrath (and Considerably Beyond)

  I

  THERE ARE TWO hard things about getting to Cape Wrath from the south of England. The first is getting to Cape Wrath from the south of England. It is a long way, you see – seven hundred miles from my back door, according to Google Maps – and involves at a minimum a train journey, a car journey, a ferry trip across the lonely Kyle of Durness, and a bouncy ride on a minibus through an uninhabited wilderness. So the logistics take some working out.

  The second and even more unsettling part of the undertaking is determining whether you can get there at all. The Cape Wrath website stresses that ferry crossings are subject to the vagaries of tides and weather, which in this part of Scotland can be both disruptive and extreme. The whole of the Cape Wrath peninsula also closes from time to time, apparently without a great deal of notice, when the Ministry of Defence, which owns 25,000 acres there, uses it to practise shooting and blowing up things. On top of all that, the ferry and minibus services shut for half the year. If you miss the last autumn ferry, you have to wait six months for the next one in the spring.

  Hoping to introduce a little certainty into the process, my wife called to make a reservation for me.

  ‘We don’t take reservations,’ the man told her.

  ‘But he’s coming a long way,’ she said.

  ‘Everybody who comes up here has come a long way,’ the man pointed out.

  ‘Well, what are the chances of him getting on the boat if he just turns up?’

  ‘Oh, he should be OK,’ the man said. ‘We’re not that busy at the moment. Well, most days we’re not. Sometimes we are.’

  ‘I don’t know how to interpret that.’

  ‘If he gets here early, he should be OK.’

  ‘How early?’

  ‘Earlier the better,’ the man said. ‘Bye now.’ And he rang off.

  Thus it was that I found myself on a rainy Sunday evening, in a mood of vague unease, with no certainty that I was going to get to where I ultimately wanted to go, walking along the imposing length of the famous Caledonian Sleeper at Euston station in London and finding my way to carriage K and the little berth that was to be my home for the night and my conveyance to the distant north of Scotland.

  The train, I have to say, was a little past its best. In fact, if I am completely honest, it was several miles past the point at which it was a little past its best, but it was clean and reasonably comfortable and the staff were friendly. According to a leaflet left on the bed, the company will be acquiring seventy-five new sleeper carr
iages in 2018, but in the meanwhile is making some other small improvements. The leaflet noted with particular pride that all the bedlinens had been ‘refreshed’. I don’t know what they mean by that exactly; ‘refreshed’ sounds to me like at least one whole level below laundering, but perhaps I was just misreading things.

  I wandered down to the lounge car for a drink. Half a dozen people were there already. I had a look at a little menu that stood on my table. Everything on offer was robustly Scottish and not the least bit appealing to someone from Iowa. (I believe I can speak for my entire state on this.) The dinner options featured haggis, neeps and tatties, and the snacks included Tunnock’s teacake, haggis-flavoured crisps and Mrs Tilly’s Scottish Tablet, which sounded to me not at all like a food but more like something you would put in a tub of warm water and immerse sore feet in. I would imagine it makes a fizzing sound and produces streams of ticklish bubbles. The drinks were all Scottish, too, even the water. I ordered a Tennent’s lager.

  It is perhaps dangerous to conclude too much about the character and intentions of a nation based on a snacks menu in a railway carriage, but I couldn’t help wonder if Scottish nationalism hasn’t gone a little too far now. I mean, these poor people are denying themselves simple comforts like Kit-Kats and Cornish pasties and instead are eating neeps and foot medications on grounds of patriotism. Seems a bit unnecessary to me.