Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

After the show’s final curtain, we scoot out of the theater and scramble to get a cab, finally catching one after some difficulty. Go back to the Russell, pick up our bags from storage, then have another hassle trying to get another cab. One cab stops for us, but when the driver, an old Russian (I think) man, gets out, he is obviously drunk, staggering and swaying and almost unable to stay on his feet. I tell him, bluntly, “You’re drunk. I’m not going anywhere with you.” He screams, “Fuck you!” and I devastate him with my wit by making the brilliant, Oscar Wilde-like retort of “Fuck you, too.” Unwilling to push this any further—being Large does sometimes have its advantages—he staggers back to his cab and screeches away. (I make a point, after this, of only catching the traditional black cabs, if possible, since the only bad and/or unfriendly drivers we run into seem to be driving the non-traditional sort.) We finally do get another cab, drive to Waterloo Station, find our way to the Night Riviera train to Cornwall, find our sleeping car and our adjoining rooms. I go up to sit in the Night Riviera lounge car, have a cup of tea, and catch up with this diary. I must say that the British sleeper trains are much nicer than Amtrak’s, with the equipment much more modern and in much better condition. A British traveller used to these cars must feel that he’s in a Third World nation when he takes a sleeping car in the States, where most of the equipment, east of the Mississippi at least, is broken-down and shabby and at least thirty years old.

  By this time, we are underway, sliding by the sleeping industrial suburbs of London by night. Go back to my room. Goodbye, London. On to Cornwall!

  Friday, August 11th—Trebrea Lodge, Trenale, Truro, & Tintagel, Cornwall

  Wake up about six with the green Cornish countryside sliding by the window. Hassle-filled morning, first hurrying through the breakfast brought by the brusque room steward, a woman who looked like the warder in an old prison movie, and then hurrying to get ready before our stop, On the platform in Truro, things start to go wrong immediately—there are no cabs, the car rental place is all the way across town, and, when I try to call a cab, I find that my recently acquired phonecard seems to be depleted, although I only made one local call with it . . . and, of course, we have no change. When we finally do get a cab, he takes us up a maze of hilly back streets, and drops us in front of the car rental place—a small garage on a quiet residential street, which is tightly closed. There’s no one at all around after the cab leaves, and who knows how long it’s going to take for the car rental place to open. We loiter restlessly in front of the garage for more than an hour, grouchy and dispirited. Just before the car rental place does finally open, an elderly lady comes out from the house next door and offers to bring us out a cup of tea, and the kindness of this simple human gesture cheers us up a bit.

  Finally do manage to get the car—a kind we’ve never seen before, a South Korean car called a Daewoo—and hit the road, aiming for and finally connecting up with the A39 toward Tintagel. Drive past several wind-farms stretched across the crests of the rolling hills, their huge plastic windmills whirling away like children’s whirligigs grown mutated and huge and strange; I had expected not to like these, to find them an ugly intrusion upon the rural countryside, but they add such a surreal touch to the landscape, like driving into a Dali painting, that I actually find them attractive, somehow not an intrusion at all—besides, their lines are so clean and simple and functional that they are intrinsically pretty in their own right, as objects, and the flowing smoothness of their motion somehow fits in well with the long rolling lines of the countryside itself. We continue on, past fields full of cows and sheep and horses, the roads getting smaller and the hedges on either side of the road higher the nearer we get to Tintagel, until finally the smallest road of all takes us from Trewarmett, a tiny hill town overlooking the sea, to Trenale, an even smaller town, and we find our inn, Trebrea Lodge, set just off an extremely narrow lane, barely wider than the car.

  Our room isn’t ready yet, but the proprietor, John, gives us a brief tour of the main house, a lovely old stone mansion. Then we drive into Tintagel, park at the park-and-display, walk up to the Old Post Office, hitting various little shops on the main street along the way. Tintagel is much hotter than London had been, and the sun is stinging and fierce, strong enough to make me feel the need for sunscreen for the first time this trip; I buy some at the local chemists. The drought has obviously had an effect here, too—the rear garden at the Old Post Office, which l remember as one of the most beautiful gardens in England from our last trip, is wilted and sparse, with the snowballs on the snowball bushes burnt brown. Hit some more craft shops and gift shops, wilting somewhat ourselves in the oppressive heat and the relentless sun (this actually will turn out to be the hottest single day of the trip). The streets are full of men wearing nothing but bathing suits, or men without shirts, giving Tintagel something of the air of a town on the New Jersey shore in summer. We look around for a restaurant, finally settle for one that smells good, because of the on-view bakery in the front. Eat in a field in back at tables with umbrellas, both of us having Cornish Pasties, which are heavy but very good.

  We drive out to the 14th Century Norman church on top of Glebe Cliff, and park in the lot next to it. Walk over the cliff-tops to the ruins of Tintagel Castle, Susan being nervous about the height. This time, I decide to walk down the extremely steep and winding staircase to the bottom and up the other side onto Tintagel Head itself, where the rest of the castle ruins are, something I had wanted to do last time, but had talked myself out of because of the effort involved; I tell myself this time that I won’t have too many more years when I am physically capable of doing stuff like this, so if I want to do it, I’d better do it now, while I have the chance. Susan going along is out of the question, of course, because she has a mild touch of acrophobia, so she stays behind on the walled terrace of the ruins, while I set off. The climb is quite strenuous; on the way down the very steep staircase, with its eroded and uneven stone steps, I immediately rub a big blister on my right palm from bracing my weight against the wooden railing as I descend, and then tear it open bloodily as I haul myself up the stairs onto Tintagel Head. The return trip is even tougher, especially the return leg back up to the mainland side of Tintagel Castle, where the stairs are so steep that I end up practically hauling myself up them hand over hand, like Batman walking up a wall with a rope in the campy old TV series. This is probably a dangerous level of exertion for someone of my age and weight, especially in the smothering heat. But the views from the top of Tintagel Head, headland after headland opening up down the coast until they are swallowed by the haze, are glorious, and it is strangely serene up there on top of the headland, a sort of vibrant, singing white silence, lonely and splendid. Probably not much different from the way it had been when the Celts and the Romans lived up here. The constant pressure of the sun, like a hand on top of your head, the keening of the wind and the screaming of the seabirds wheeling above, the occasional cannon-like booming of the surf hitting the rocky cliffs below—all would have been the same on any afternoon for thousands of years back into the past as they are today on this afternoon in August in the year 1995, toward the end of a troubled century. You could have come up here during the reign of Hadrian or Ethelred the Unready or the first Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, and found it all exactly the same. The wind and the birds and the sun are indifferent to what kind of man walks around up here, or whether any do at all. As are the insects, who have their own intricate ecologies going down around the grass-roots and the mosses and the heather, and would have been doing exactly the same things they’re doing now when Stonehenge was being put up away across Salisbury plain to the east, and would be doing exactly the same things whether humankind existed on the planet at all—and who probably will still be doing the same things up here on a sunny afternoon long after the last human has vanished from the Earth.

  When I finally haul myself back up onto the terrace on the mainland side of Tintagel Castle, I’m sweaty and staggering and exhausted. We go back t
o Trebrea Lodge, where we finally get into our room, Number 8, which turns out to be one of the nicest rooms we’ve ever had—it’s set in a small two-story stone structure that probably was once one of the outbuildings, and we have the entire structure to ourselves, bedroom on the top floor, and, on the ground floor, a bathroom that is far larger than our whole hotel room at the Russell had been. We have dinner at the Lodge, salmon and boiled potatoes. Walk out front afterward into the tiny country lane that winds past the Lodge, listen in the dark to sheep baaing, watch the flocks of startled crows who periodically burst up from the forested hill behind the main house, wheeling behind the gabled roof of the Lodge and crying out harshly as they fly. Meanwhile, the black-and-white lodge cat is sitting in the dark by our feet, looking out across the edge of a farmer’s field and thinking of mice.

  Saturday, August 12th—Chysauster, Land’s End & Penzance

  Wake about six as usual, but manage to get back to sleep for an hour or so. Breakfast at the Lodge; pat the lodge dog, whose name is Sam, a black mix of flatcoat retriever and spaniel who seems to take our attention as his due, a tithe every guest is obligated to pay, and then hit the road, taking the A39 to the A307, heading for South Cornwall and the ruined Iron Age village of Chysauster. Drive through a brief spot of rain, our first this trip, and manage to avoid a traffic jam down around Truro, but both traffic and rain have thinned by the time we hit the top of the peninsula that leads at last to Land’s End. We ignore Paddy Hancock’s advice, from the BBC Travel Show, and do, by necessity, drive in St. Ives, but only until we can cut through the edge of town and on to the B3306, a winding narrow road that hugs the coast.

  A while later, we stop in rolling hill country above the sea, at a roadside cut-off somewhere east of Zennor, get out of the car, cross the narrow road, and stand by the edge of the hill looking out and down to the sea. In some ways, this is one of the best moments of the whole trip. The sky has mostly cleared, with the sun breaking out of the scattering clouds. The hill-country silence is vibrant, a cool breeze has come up, and below, away down the hill, are stone farm buildings and fields full of cows, and then the sea, bright and tossed with whitecaps, with a big boat moving out near the horizon. On a hilltop nearby you can see the ruins of a neolithic hill-fort, with the clouds rushing by it. When a big cloud comes up and hides the sun for a minute, you can see the crisp edge of a line of shadow sweeping down the hill in front of us, over the farm houses, over the fields, until it reaches the sea. There’s very little sound, except the whoosh and whine of a car rushing by every once in a while, or, occasionally, the lowing of a cow coming up from the fields below (I check through my binoculars, and can spot three different kinds of cows: black with white markings, white with black markings, and brown ones; they all seem to moo the same, though).

  At last, we press on, looking for the unnumbered road that leads to Chysauster. It turns out to be unmarked, too, and we miss both turnoffs for it, at Zennor and Porthmeor, and get all the way to Morvah before we realize we have to turn back. Finally find the unmarked turn, just past Porthmeor, and drive a few miles inland to the site of Chysauster. Park at the inevitable car-park (every ancient monument in Britain, no matter how small or obscure, seems to have one), climb up some steep stone stairs and then up a steep gravel path to the ticket kiosk (every monument in Britain also somehow manages to be uphill, both ways . . . and have a ticket kiosk), then on up the rounded swell of the hill to the ruins of the old village itself. Mostly only the outer walls of the ancient houses are left standing, grey stone walls thickly overgrown with weeds and purple flowers, although you can see the interior divisions that marked-off the rooms, and where the hearths once stood. Strange to think that we are walking through someone’s house, and I wonder if, thousands of years ago, they feel the air stir, and look up, and faintly sense our passage, ghosts of the future? I spend as much time as I spent looking at the ruins watching a hawk soaring over the valley, sometimes at our level, sometimes above, swooping way out across the valley toward the sea, finding a thermal, riding an invisible elevator of air up into the top of the sky, circling, swooping again. Yes, of course, it’s hunting—but I wonder if, at the same time, it’s also playing, enjoying riding the rivers of the air? On the way back, see the sign on the ticket kiosk that warns you that adders may be sunning themselves on the rocks—a sign I’m glad I didn’t see on the way up! Would have been much more careful climbing around in the ruins—as it was, we enjoyed the bliss of ignorance, and tromped around in a perfectly carefree manner, unaware that there might be adders all around us. A good metaphor for life in general.

  Continue on around the peninsula to St. Justs, the day clouding up and growing grey, and then on to Land’s End, stopping just beforehand at the Wrecker’s Inn for a mediocre lunch, Susan ordering chicken salad, and, to her surprise, instead of getting what you’d get in the States, getting instead a piece of cold chicken and some salad; what you have to ask for instead, we discover, if you want what we would think of as chicken salad, is a chicken mayonnaise. Proceed on to Land’s End. The end of the peninsula is covered with an incredibly tacky Fun-Fair, but, once you get beyond all that, the view from the cliffs out over the Atlantic to the offshore sea-stacks and islands is still beautiful and worthwhile. (I don’t understand the English tendency to huddle in Holiday Camps and Fun-Fairs and Theme Parks and caravan sites and huge soulless camping-grounds, ignoring the natural splendor of the landscape all around them, but they do; some of them spend their vacations in rigidly organized Holiday Camps, which are sort of like concentration camps you pay to get into, surrounded with barbed wire and with Jolly British Muzak coming over the PA systems all day and most of the night, and never venture outside into the surrounding countryside at all. I’d pay to get out of having to go to one of these places, which I imagine as like taking your vacation in a Basic Training camp, with DJs and tennis laid on.) While we’re looking out over the cliffs at Land’s End, we have our first serious, discomforting rain—not a downpour, but a steady moderate rain, fading fitfully in and out of a drizzle. (It will turn out to be just about the only real rain we get until we reach Skye.)

  Drive in to Penzance, get out and walk around for a while in the center of the town, but it is still drizzling and we’re getting tired, so we have our first real cream tea of the trip at the Penzance Buttery (it’s almost as difficult to get real clotted cream in London or Scotland as it is to get it back in Philadelphia), and then drive home. Dinner at the Lodge (chicken paprikas of a sort), during which we consume between us an entire bottle of wine. Retire unsteadily to bed.

  Sunday, August 13th—Clovelly & Hartland Point

  Breakfast at the Lodge, during which I muse about all the old sites of environmental rape we’ve seen here in Cornwall that are now tourist attractions, with people paying money to get in to see the old tin mines and slag-heaps and quarries. Wonder what the old miners who slaved their lives away there would have thought of that?

  After breakfast, stop for petrol (the attendant washes our windscreen and then says “Lovely job!” to himself in congratulations as he finishes and saunters away), then head north on the A39 toward that area where the Cornish coast turns east into Devon. Huge grey clouds sweep overhead, alternating with patches of bright blue sky and brilliant sunshine. We drive through a rain shower, but it is over in a few seconds, and then the sun is blazing again; this pattern persists for the entire day. We pass over the border into Devon, and arrive at the town of Clovelly after about an hour’s drive.

  We park in the lot at the top of the cliff, pay to get into the town (for Clovelly is entirely privately owned, and you have to agree to a long list of regulations, and be approved by a board, in order to live here; the entire town is run as one big tourist attraction), pause to watch a group of the donkeys and mules who are kept to haul tourists and their luggage up and down the hill from the hotel below being herded by (prompting Susan to comment later, “Donkeys always look so sad. I suppose that’s because they have to be
donkeys.”), and then slowly walk down the steep cobblestone paths which lead to the very steep but wide cobblestone steps which fall down through the town. The street, which is made up entirely of steps, is so narrow, especially through the “Upalong” and the “Downalong” in the upper part of the village, that the houses on either side seem almost piled one on top of the other, so that you get the feeling that you could jump from one roof to another all the way down the hill; apparently it is possible to lean out of one upstairs window and shake the hand of someone leaning out of another window in a house across the street. Most of the houses fronting the street have tiny bright gardens, and it seems that every other garden has a cat sitting in it. We see more cats here in ten minutes than we’ll see anywhere else in Britain, by far, and Susan speculates that maybe people here tend to have cats because there’s really no place in these steep narrow streets to walk dogs. The streets are so steep and so narrow that the only way to get supplies down them in winter is by sledge, and most of the houses have one leaning up against the wall outside.

  We walk on down to the stone quay at the bottom of the hill, walk out along it to the end, look at the ocean, watch the Brits who are lounging on blankets on a stone beach full of very uncomfortable-looking rocks as if they are on the finest sand beach in the Caribbean; their children are playing with sand-buckets and shovels, just like at home, but, since they have no sand to shovel, they are carefully piling up little heaps of stones instead of making sandcastles—perhaps this is the origin of the cairn, and it was originally Neolithic children on stone beaches who came up with the idea. We have lunch at the Red Lion Hotel, Cornish Pastie for me, ham ploughman for Susan, while another brief rain shower sweeps by outside; by the time we finish our last bites, the sun is blazing again—good timing. We pay to take the Range Rover back up to the top of the cliff, seventy pence apiece, and consider it money well-spent; certainly I’ve wasted many a 70 p on this trip on things I’ve gotten much less benefit from.