“It’s Queen Victoria’s birthday this weekend, mates. Is it left to us colonials to celebrate it alone? Why, where is your national pride?”
Karl blanches and tugs at my elbow to sit down. By now the patrons are averting their eyes, obviously regarding me as just so much déclassé foreign trash. I would never have done such a thing in North America and am embarrassed. But dammit, surely it’s time for the English to shrug off their hangdog political correctness and celebrate their past with a little chutzpah. They may have much to apologize for, but the English have even more to be proud of — little things, such as empathy and liberty. Karl pours me another glass of Shiraz and then wanders to the bar to order a brandy.
If I had made my outburst in an American tavern, I might have been assaulted. But here, well, I am only guilty of bad manners. Pierre Daninos writes about English reticence, opining that “men who are ceaselessly battered by the wind and rain and shrouded in a permanent fog end up themselves turning into raincoats which shed criticism as easily as an oilskin sheds water.” Nothing ruffles these people. But I broke a sacred code and intruded upon the privacy of bystanders. Had I been a cross-dresser in pink pantaloons, stockings, and gaudy makeup who kept to myself, no one would have minded. But I crossed a line. And judging by their disdainful expressions, I have been scorned and upbraided.
Mabel is waiting for us at our B&B, still apprehensive about the possibility of the police calling. Of greater concern to me is that there is no heat in our room. Somewhere I have read that the English hate heat but love a bright fire. In our room I observe that the solitary pillow on my bed is rather flat. So I go back downstairs to speak to Mabel.
“Uh, Mabel, do you think that I could have one or two large, poofy pillows? I suffer from acid reflux and need big high ones.”
Her eyes grow steely. “Poofy, you say?”
“Well, yes, you know, very soft and large, please.”
“And I suppose you’d like them well rounded, too, would ye, love” — a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. “Well, then, love, I will see what I can do.”
Mabel bustles into the nether region of the dark, chilly hallway and emerges with two large, rose-tinted pillows, which she hands to me.
“Thanks so much.” I dare not push my luck and ask for the heat to be turned on.
When I enter the room upstairs, Karl is in his narrow bed already, staring at the ceiling. He is unusually quiet.
“Sweet dreams, Karl. I am sure knackered.”
But Karl tosses and turns most of the night, thinking about poor Tiffany.
2
Horseshoes, Wood Pigeons, and Paris
Peace is the walk.
Happiness is the walk.
Walk for yourself
And you walk for everyone.
—THICH NHAT HANH—
The Long Road Turns to Joy
I AWAKE WITH A START. Outside my open window the distinctive Ooo-oo urgings of the wood pigeon tell me it is indeed an English spring morning. It’s mating time.
Other grunting sounds intrude. What kind of bird is that? Then I realize that it is only Karl in the adjoining room doing his morning push-ups — all fifty of them.
“The wood pigeon call reminds me of our grouse in Canada,” muses Karl at the breakfast table. “I sure would like to try some pigeon pie.”
“That may be wishful thinking. Though I grant you, these wood pigeons we see flying out of the hedgerows are plump enough for eating, a far cry from domestic pigeons. My grandfather used to keep pigeons on his farm in the Fraser Valley; he let me feed them nuts and crumbs.”
Mabel sets down a cafetière — “French press” to North Americans — and invites me to have another cuppa. Five years ago one would have been served instant coffee at a B&B, but the English are now into better brewing.
“And what shall I be telling the police if they enquire about ye?” Mabel asks.
“Don’t worry, Mabel, we will call them, and in any case, they know we’re walking the Macmillan Way.”
After one more cup of java, we heft packs. Mine is a little lighter, I confess to Karl, as I have just thrown away my extra pair of Nikes and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
“You should have kept the Pepto,” says Karl, “given your sensitive stomach.”
He is referring to the fact that I can’t handle more than half a bottle of wine with the evening meal without waking with a splitting headache, whereas he can down a pre-dinner pint of Guinness, a double Scotch, and half a bottle of Shiraz with the meal, then finish off with a double shot of brandy — and yet wake up humming the “Colonel Bogey March,” raring to go.
“My stomach’s not sensitive — yours is just cast iron, Karl.”
A lone magpie stalks about on the lawn as we leave — surely the ugliest, most ungainly of British birds. My wood pigeon is still calling his mate. But it is the distinctive song of the thrush that bids us adieu down Mabel’s path to the road. From here we decide to briefly explore the town and ogle the impressive Georgian-style buildings, including the Stamford Union Workhouse, built in 1836.
During the Victorian era, numerous workhouses were established for the poor, perhaps out of guilt over the presence of poor people in a country grown rich from industrialization and trade. The British have long had a schizoid streak when it comes to the poor. The same Victorian society that condoned children performing dangerous jobs of toil and drudgery — such as chimney sweeping and coal mining — was determined to bring relief to the poor, homeless, and sick. London alone saw schools, birth houses for indigent women, residences for the elderly and infirm, Coram’s Foundling Hospital, the Lock Hospital for venereal disease, the Bethlehem lunatic asylum — known as “Bedlam” — and even a School for the Indigent Blind, all founded by private charities. As the historian Ben Wilson observes, “Few other peoples lavished so much money on charity as the British.”
Stamford is the first of five market towns we will pass through en route to Chesil Beach — the others being Stow-on-the-Wold, Cirencester, Tetbury, and Sherborne — and the only one that was administered as part of the Danelaw. In 1066, when the Normans arrived, only 10 percent of the population resided in towns. Yet market towns were key to the survival of the surrounding villages and farms. By royal decree, markets and trading could occur only in these designated centres.
The weekly market provided an opportunity for women and children to sell their cottage wares to supplement the family income. The Victorian writer William Howitt wrote, “There are few things which give such a feeling of the prosperity of the country, as seeing the country people pour into a large town on market-day,” boys and girls with “baskets of tame rabbits, and bunches of cowslips, primroses, and all kinds of flowers, and country productions imaginable.” The pubs did a roaring business on market day, and Howitt further observed that farmers left the market for home “three times as fast as they came in, for they are primed with good dinners, and strong beer.”
The railway was late in arriving at Stamford, but this proved a blessing because the town was left unblemished by the sooty Victorian railway centres and Corn Exchange buildings one sees around the country — huge, ugly buildings that have more in common with Soviet than traditional English architecture. Here, ancient timber-framed structures interweave with Georgian delights. There are myriad twisting alleyways and open squares, lending much of the town a medieval flavour. Stamford was proclaimed the first Conservation Town in England, in 1967.
Stamford wool was famous for its quality throughout the kingdom, and the town was also renowned for centuries as the producer of most of England’s glazed pottery. Today chain stores are interspersed with a host of independent shops with tasteful exterior decor. There may be much chintz and bling, but the presentation is low-key. Even the McDonald’s has a lovely Georgian façade.
Just south of Stamford we cross a meadow and walk smack into a historical legend. A plaque identifies this spot as where the Celtic queen Boadicea pursued the remnants of the Roman Nint
h Legion as they fled across the River Welland in AD 61. Boadicea was the wife of Prasutagus, king of the Iceni tribe of Britons, who ruled over present-day East Anglia. The Iceni had submitted to Roman rule in AD 43 and had become a vassal state. But when Prasutagus died in 61, Roman legionnaires seized Boadicea and gave her a public beating, likely using the flagrum, a short whip that was exceedingly painful. Soldiers then raped her two daughters. The Iceni were insulted, and they revolted, led by Boadicea as their new queen.
Boadicea was amazingly successful as a warrior queen. First she led the Iceni and a second tribe, the Trinovantes, into a siege that totally destroyed Roman Colchester (Camulodunum). The Roman general Suetonius heard of this and rushed to London (Londinium) to defend it, but then decided he had insufficient troops and evacuated the city on the Thames, leaving it to be burned by Boadicea, who led some 100,000 soldiers. For almost two years Boadicea pillaged Roman settlements. She was eventually defeated in the Battle of Watling Street, after which she either committed suicide or died of illness. The spirit of the Celts was epitomized by this brave woman, who is quoted as declaring, “It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters . . . But heaven is on the side of a righteous vengeance . . . If you weigh well the strength of the armies, and the causes of the war, you will see that in this battle you must conquer or die. This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.”
So great was Boadicea’s fame that nineteen centuries later Queen Victoria willingly portrayed herself as the Celtic queen’s successor. Prince Albert commissioned a giant bronze statue of Boadicea and her daughters standing in her war chariot; completed in 1905, it stands next to Westminster Bridge. The fury and wrath of the warrior queen is captured by the warlike chariot, which points toward the Houses of Parliament as if to warn the governing powers of a woman’s wrath. (Margaret Thatcher was said to be fond of the sculpture.) The inscription reads:
Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway.
On this balmy Sunday morning, Boadicea and her Roman foes seem far away. Field after field of delightful meadows full of buttercups are bordered by the gently winding stream. For the first time on Macmillan we encounter numerous walkers on our path, elderly and young couples alike rambling along, many of them with picnic baskets, strollers, and romping dogs. Laughing children run in the meadow, rainbow kites trailing in the breeze. It is all very festive.
We are greeted by a chorus of twittering skylarks as we locate and follow upward a hedged pathway toward Easton on the Hill. Karl plunges ahead like a beagle on the scent. I stop for a moment to watch a pair of larks as they climb skyward. The air is so fresh I can taste it. And somewhere beyond the briar hedge the scent of new-mown hay wafts pungent to my nostrils.
One’s humour ebbs and flows on a long-distance walk. Robert Louis Stevenson writes of this in his essay “Walking Tours”: “In the course of a day’s walk, you see, there is much variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one extreme towards the other.”
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh stresses that walking is essential therapy for all human beings. In The Long Road Turns to Joy he exhorts, “If you see something along the way that you want to touch with your mindfulness — the blue sky, the hills, a tree, or a bird — just stop, but while you do, continue breathing mindfully. If you don’t breathe consciously, sooner or later your thinking will settle back in, and the bird or the tree will disappear. Always stay with your breathing.” My mother always told me to take deep measured breaths throughout the day. She herself suffered from weak lungs. I must remember to follow this advice — a Buddhist monk and my own mother can’t both be wrong.
Yellow celandines, wild violets, and cow parsley line the verges where the hedgerows dissipate. Farther on, rose hips appear in the hedge. On a hawthorn branch I notice the mangled corpse of a sparrow, its ravaged body dangling. Karl opines that it may be the work of a shrike, a predatory bird that likes to impale its victims on a thorn and store up a larder. It has earned the reputation as the “butcher bird.”
Skylarks continue to sing above us over the open fields. The male ascends to a great height before diving in free fall toward the female, putting on an aerial acrobatics show to impress his intended. The skylark population in Britain has plummeted by about half since 1980, largely as a result of changing farming methods that have seen reduced crops of barley and wheat, which provide the stubble needed by larks for foraging. A second factor is the spraying of herbicides and insecticides that destroy both insects and weed-producing seeds upon which larks depend.
The lark is important in English literature and history. William Wordsworth honours the bird in his poem “To a Skylark.” Ralph Vaughan Williams also gave tribute in his famous musical piece The Lark Ascending. From the aerial show above, I can now better appreciate how Vaughan Williams received his inspiration. The skylark is the quintessential English harbinger of spring, and Vaughan Williams captures its grand aerial antics perfectly in his composition. An anonymous elderly Englishman posted this comment online after hearing a recent performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra: “Always takes me back to my childhood — lying on my back in wonderment, on a grassy hillside on a hot summer’s day, watching and listening to a skylark circling higher and higher, singing louder and louder . . . that marvellous music from the heavens on a background of blue sky. A long time ago, with the occasional Lancaster Bomber passing high overhead.”
We are walking ancient paths, byways, and lanes exactly one hundred years after the first appearance of motor cars on English roads, in 1904. In Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee notes that he and his family were born into a silent world, with long and dusty distances between villages and “white narrow roads rutted by hooves and cart wheels, innocent of oil or petrol.” Then that world was shattered. Field horses screamed as noisy brass-lamped cars crawled down the lanes and coughed their way up the hillsides. The very warp and woof of society was irrevocably altered. No one could be truly isolated any longer.
Villages we encounter typically boast a Norman church on a hill, a pub that sells local ales and beer, a picturesque brook, a cricket or soccer pitch, perhaps a vicarage or rectory, a village shop with a post office, many cute cottages, and, just outside the village, an old stone or brick mansion, refurbished and owned by a stockbroker or lawyer, with an Audi and a Land Rover in the driveway.
Most villagers today fall into three categories: farmers who have retained a chunk of land adjoining the village sufficient to sustain an income; retired folk; and wealthy urbanites who are part-time only, arriving from London and environs on weekends. Although there is no longer the sense of community that existed prior to the Enclosure movement, there is at least a quiet understanding among these three groups to try to preserve the best of the English countryside.
The village represents the first organized communal event in human history. It was the catalyst for civilization, and ancient villagers would look askance today at the limited role the village plays within the national matrix. Yet that role is still important. Even in the cities, people revert to “neighbourhoods” that mimic the village and give each district a distinct flavour — one need look no further than London and such colourful neighbourhoods as Chelsea, Soho, Greenwich, Hampstead, Covent Garden, Bloomsbury, and Southwark. Prince Charles’s experiment to create the ideal English village at Poundbury in Dorset is not as utopian as it may sound. Planners in both North America and Europe are trying to design communities that are self-contained, are less dependent upon the automobile, and use local building materials and tradi-tional designs.
The term global village was coined by Marshall McLuhan, who anticipated the growth of technology that would connect the world but recognized the village as the most basic form of community; for
it is within a community that one is judged by one’s fellows. The popular American singer Katy Perry proclaims, “I am every woman. It takes a village to make me who I am.”
DIARY: Over a stile in a hedge full of honeysuckle, avoiding mudholes in field, then across a tarmac drive to enter Easton on the Hill. The village sits high above the Welland Valley, with a variety of tawny-hued stone houses.
The National Trust administers a priest’s house here that dates to the fifteenth century. The building is a combination of church and residence. The church itself is spacious. A display of the local Collyweston slate and its history is found inside, so there is an educational purpose as well as a religious one. Like most English churches we will encounter along Macmillan, this one is a hybrid of Norman and Gothic. England’s parish churches have six styles of architecture: Anglo-Saxon, Norman (sometimes called “Romanesque”), Transitional, Early English Gothic, Decorated Gothic, and Perpendicular Gothic. The last three styles are collectively called “Gothic.”
Everyone recognizes the ubiquitous square Norman tower, but usually there are elements of other styles as well. Round arches hint at Anglo-Saxon or Norman construction, whereas the “pointy arch” is Gothic. Some churches have a chapel, others just an additional altar, while the more impressive ones boast a spire. Interestingly, the north face of the church was regarded in medieval times as the “devil’s side.” No reputable person was ever buried to the building’s north.
Every parish church is unique in its interior design. Some possess carved pews, intricate floor tiles, choir stalls, wall paintings, stained glass, monuments, lecterns, and fonts. Quite often an effigy of a knight or other major figure prominent in the early history of the parish is found inside. The font is typically the oldest part. Some churches we visit have misericords, carved brackets beneath the hinged choir seats upon which it was acceptable to lean during a “standing” part of the church service.
Walking to Camelot Page 4
