Or so we hoped.
Devon had other ideas, however, and presented us with a huge big sodding hill straight after welcoming us. It stretched on for about six miles until just before the town of Okehampton, where it allowed us a brief downhill to gain its forgiveness.
It wasn’t the best start. We had only been in Devon for a couple of hours and already thought it was shitter than Cornwall.
Okehampton looked like Devon’s answer to the Wild West. Its main high street - which is called Fore Street, as many in Devon and Cornwall are for some reason – was unusually wide. Imposing flat fronted buildings banked each side of the road, and we half expected a gunslinger to swagger out from a dusty saloon. Only this was Devon, and there were no dusty saloons, or gunslingers for that matter. Instead, a blue-rinsed granny hobbled out of Specsavers.
The town is right on the northern edge of Dartmoor, and is considered one of the gateways to the national park. The main A30 used to pass straight through the town centre, which explains why Fore Street is so wide. A bypass was built in 1988 and the town now enjoys a little more peace and quiet from the traffic.
We arrived in Okehampton at about 7.30pm and decided to ask at The White Hart Hotel - a huge hotel on the edge of town - about the possibility of doing some work in exchange for somewhere to sleep.
The manager’s name was Glyn - a small bird-like lady.
‘So what you’re saying is that you’ll do some jobs for me around the hotel, and in exchange I’ll give you some dinner and somewhere to sleep,’ she said with a strong Yorkshire accent.
‘Well, yes, but you don’t have to feed us.’
‘But you don’t have any money or food.’
‘No, that’s true.’
‘So if you have something to eat, and a bed for the night, I can write you a list of jobs and you’ll do them. Is that right?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘I have to say this is a first, but, ok, take a seat and I’ll write a list of things.’
This was more like it. Good honest work in exchange for board and lodging. She returned with a handwritten list.
Remove ALL leaves from car-park
Clean out bin room
Wash outside of hotel
The White Hart is probably the biggest hotel in Devon - possibly the world. And we had to wash it.
Glyn gave us a tour of our duties and described exactly what she wanted doing.
‘You see these leaves on this path? I want every leaf picked up. EVERY LEAF... You see all these leaves all over the car park? I want every one of those picked up. EVERY ONE. This bin room needs sweeping, and clearing up, and the bins need wiping down... Take a large bucket with some soapy water – NOT TOO MUCH SOAP – and wipe down the black bit all the way down to the floor... Leave THAT bit, the council own that, so they can do it... Wipe down all the door frames and window frames, and that should just about do it.’
It was dark by the time we started.
As we scraped up huge piles of soggy leaves with our bare hands, it was obvious that they were all coated in urine. It was clear that people stopped to relieve themselves on their way back to their car after a night on the beers. Don’t drink and drive, kids. In fact, if you’re a kid, don’t drink at all. Or drive for that matter.
The bin room was rank, too. It looked like foxes had been at the bins, as the contents were strewn across the floor. We scooped up eggshells and rotten vegetables with a shovel and put it all into black bin bags. As I knelt to reach under a big wheelie bin I managed to get rotten egg all over my suit trousers. The smell lingered with me for several days.
Whilst cleaning we met Arek, a Polish chef who had been in England nearly a year. He began working in the kitchen in the main restaurant, and then helped set up a pizzeria at the back of the hotel.
‘My name iz Arek. I come from The Poland. My English izza not so good. I learn English for tree manths.’
‘Your English is very good,’ I said. ‘It’s almost better than mine and it’s definitely better than Ben’s. So, do you like living in England?’
‘Yessa. I come to England and see English people they only eat steak and kidney pudding, chips and graaavy. I think I want show English people something new, something different, so I cook them pizza. So we bring piiizzas, 11 manth ago, to England. Is gone down very well.’
Pizza? How groundbreaking. Ben and I had to ask Arek what it was as we had never heard of pizza before. Apparently it’s some sort of radical food that consists of a dough base, baked with tomatoes, cheese and various other toppings. They’re going to become very popular in the UK, thanks to Arek. You heard it here first.
We told Arek why we were washing the hotel, which amused him greatly. We explained that Glyn was giving us a bed for the night and some food.
‘I cook you piiiiizza!’ he shouted.
‘I’m not sure that’s what Glyn had planned for us,’ said Ben.
‘Is ok. I speak her. I cook you piiiiizza. You come find me after and I cook you piiiiizza. Then we go uppa to my house abovva hotel and we drink beers from The Poland, ok?’
‘Ok.’
Washing the hotel didn’t take as long as we had thought. We slopped hot soapy water over the walls (with NOT TOO MUCH SOAP) and although we couldn’t see what we were doing, it felt as though we were cleaning it.
It was 10.30pm by the time we had finished our chores. We had cycled 52 miles on children’s bikes, had to scrounge our lunch and then spent 2 ½ hours cleaning a hotel. We were in need of our piiiizza.
Not only did Arek manage to wangle us a pizza each, but he also poured us both a pint, after Glyn had stated categorically that he should only give us squash.
Arek was slightly crazy. He made a big show of making our pizzas; tossing the dough in the air and catching it on his head. At one point he tied two tea-towels around his head leaving only his eyes visible. He then grabbed hold of the young assistant manager and held a kitchen knife to his neck. The other Polish kitchen staff found it hilarious. The young assistant manager, who looked like a work experience student, did his best to smile but was quietly shitting himself.
Arek’s pizza was great. Not particularly revolutionary, but it was very tasty all the same. At about 11.30pm he closed up the restaurant. We had been the only guests. Apparently Devon was not quite ready for pizza.
As promised, Arek got some Polish beers and we headed up to his flat above the hotel. His friend Oukash came too but hardly spoke a word all evening.
Arek had lived in England for just under a year. He had ended up in Okehampton because Oukash – his friend from home – had come to England before him and had encouraged him to come over with the promise of work.
At about 12.30am we tried to leave.
‘No, no, no,’ said Arek. ‘I stay and drink beer with my English friends.’
‘But we’ve cycled a long way today and we’ve got to cycle a long way tomorrow,’ I pleaded.
‘Polish people, they stay up and they drink and they talk. I talk here and I drink here with my English friends. Here we stay and talk and drink and talk.’
It was 3am when we finally crawled back to our room, having stayed and talked, and drank and talked.
Day 5 - Mrs Rogers
Okehampton to Walton - 81 miles
I felt like I had been in a car accident. We had stupidly requested an alarm call at 6.45am with the intention of having an early start. My body felt like it belonged to someone 50 years older.
Again, I had foolishly tried to wash my boxer shorts late at night and have them dry by the morning. Again I had failed.
Glyn, the manager, was at the reception when we went downstairs.
‘Good morning. Dave will sort you out with some breakfast in the dining room, and then I’ll do an inspection to see if you did your jobs properly. Then I’ll decide whether you can have your bikes back.’
She didn’t look like she was joking.
Dave was in his sixties and clearly wanted to be anywhere els
e, other than serving breakfast in a hotel in Okehampton.
‘Morning, Dave. Sleep well?’ asked Ben
‘Too well. That’s why I was late this morning. So what will it be? Two full Englishes?’
‘Sounds perfect. Thanks.’
During breakfast, the ketchup bottle exploded when I opened it. It covered my t-shirt, face, suit trousers, the table, the surrounding tables, the old couple on the next table, the ceiling and the window. Ben, who had somehow escaped unmarked, howled with laughter.
‘Everything alright?’ asked Dave when he came to offer us more tea.
‘Errrr… I kinda covered the room in ketchup,’ I said. Dave took one look at me and then began laughing and pointing.
‘Ha ha, look it’s all over your face and clothes.’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘How strange. I wonder how that happened?’ he said, with the smirk of someone who knew exactly how it happened. He handed me a napkin, picked up the ketchup bottle and walked off.
It didn’t take a genius to work out that he and the other kitchen staff probably had something to do with it. A couple of teaspoons of baking soda would have probably done the trick. I could hardly blame them; they had cooked and served breakfast to a couple of dirty, non-paying guests. I probably would have done the same thing.
After breakfast Glyn led us round the hotel checking we had completed the jobs to her standard. In the daylight it was clear that we had missed most of the leaves.
‘It must have been really windy last night, because this car park was spotless when we finished last night,’ I said.
This seemed to do the trick, and she seemed happy enough with our efforts. There were also several patches of the outside of the hotel that looked like we had failed to clean. We made sure that we were deep in conversation with Glyn whilst she checked these, and we managed to distract her sufficiently to get her seal of approval. We passed with flying colours and she allowed us our bikes back.
Arek was still asleep when we left.
We were both feeling like death. A combination of the Polish beer, the lack of sleep and the fact that we were cycling to Scotland on tiny bikes had started to take its toll. For the first few miles of that morning, neither of us enjoyed the ride. The road climbed yet again after leaving Okehampton. Devon was just one big fat hill after another, and we still had 2 ½ weeks and nearly 900 miles to go. It was demoralizing.
We were following what was once the main road between Cornwall and Somerset, before the A30 was built parallel to it. It was satisfying to hear the distant buzz of traffic on the very busy A30 that many End to Enders follow from Land’s End all the way to Somerset. The road we followed, however, was completely deserted, and it didn’t take long for us to get back into the spirit of the trip.
We gradually warmed to Devon. Its hills became less severe, and the countryside it offered us was breathtaking. Our route led us through the tiny villages of Belstone Corner and Coleford, which were little more than collections of houses. Dogs barked at us as we passed through these places, as though we were the first visitors in many years.
Quiet country roads are obviously a pleasure to cycle along, but they also have their drawbacks. As there are so few vehicles about, many of the vehicles that do use the roads assume that they are the only ones to be doing so. I turned a corner to be met with an oil tanker that was travelling in the middle of the road at a ridiculous speed. It would have vaporised me had it made contact. Fortunately, I managed to dive into the relative comfort of the hedge. I turned to see if Ben had survived, as he had been trailing slightly behind. There was no sign of him. I heard the screeching of the tanker’s brakes and so feared the worst, but Ben soon emerged round the corner, looking like he had also taken refuge in the hedge.
Ben was becoming increasingly frustrated with me and The Falcon. Its chain had got into the habit of falling off at regular intervals for no apparent reason, and these occurrences were becoming more frequent. As if that wasn’t irritating enough, its front wheel then fell off midway through the morning. It quite literally detached itself from the bike as I was cycling. Fortunately, I was moving relatively slowly at the time, trying to avoid a pothole, but when I pulled at the handlebars to attempt to hop over it, the front wheel stayed in contact with the ground and continued rolling. The bike’s front forks then hit the ground and scraped along the road surface as I tried to regain my footing.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Ben. ‘Is there anything else that can go wrong with the bloody bike?’
‘Calm down. It’s only a wheel. I’ll get it sorted.’
‘ONLY a wheel? Because it’s not like wheels are important on bikes or anything.’
I flipped the bike upside down and reattached the wheel, tightening the bolts as best I could with my hands. It needed to be fastened with a spanner, though, or it was going to become a regular event. We were in the middle of the countryside and miles from anywhere.
‘I’ll just take it easy until we pass a house or garage or something, and we’ll borrow a spanner there,’ I said.
‘But you might be dead before we get there.’
‘At least you won’t have to keep stopping for me then.’
‘That’s true.’
Just as I was climbing back on my bike, I saw Ben running off down the road, waving his arms at a passing campervan.
‘Excuse me! Excuse me! Can you stop for a second?’ he shouted. The van pulled over, and I immediately saw what Ben had spotted. The campervan – a badly converted transit van – had three BMX bikes on the back, and another two on the roof.
‘Hello. I’m really sorry to bother you,’ said Ben, ‘but I saw your bikes and thought you might have a spanner that we could borrow. The wheel has just fallen off one of ours.’
Max was a very cool, dreadlocked man in his early thirties. He happened to be a professional BMX stunt performer, who was on his way to do a show in Cornwall. The back of his van was like a bike repair shop. He had tools and parts of all descriptions, and he set to work immediately. After securing the front wheel, he tightened a few other bolts, and gave both bikes a spray of oil.
‘There we go. As good as new,’ he laughed.
‘Thanks so much. I don’t suppose you want to swap this bike for one of yours?’ Ben joked.
‘Unfortunately not. Mine are all specially designed stunt bikes.’
‘So is mine,’ I said. ‘I can do this great trick where I detach the front wheel whilst I’m cycling along.’
‘Ha! I’ll have to try and put that one in my repertoire. Good luck with the rest of your trip, guys.’
We arrived in the village of Thorverton shortly before midday, having covered about 20 miles that morning. After our long breakfast, the ketchup incident, and Glyn’s inspection, our planned early start had become 10am. We had made good progress, though – considering the issues with The Falcon - so decided to try for an early lunch, and then embark on a mammoth afternoon of cycling.
Thorverton is a relatively small village with an attractive little garden in the middle. Unlike usual village greens, this one was an actual garden. It had a stream running through it, flowerbeds, trimmed shrubs and a bench. We sat on the bench for a few minutes and assessed the two pubs that we could see and decided on The Thorverton Arms. We pretended to lock our bikes in the beer garden at the back and entered the pub.
A sporty looking lady was manning the bar. She was in her forties and gave the impression from the way she was rearranging the bottles that she was the landlady.
‘What can I get you?’ she said with a smile.
‘Hello. Do you have any work that needs doing in exchange for some food?’ asked Ben.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re on a mission to get to John O’Groats without spending any money and thought we might be able to help you out with some jobs, in exchange for something to eat.’
A large bearded man appeared behind the bar. He looked sporty too, in his own special way.
&nb
sp; ‘There’s some washing up you can do, if you want. One of the lads called in sick today so they could do with a hand back there,’ he said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for two people to walk in off the street and do the washing up. ‘Then when that’s done, I’ll sort you out with some lunch.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Which way is the kitchen?’
The sink was piled several feet high with dirty pans and dishes, but between the two of us we figured we would have it all washed in no time.
‘Then when you’ve finished all the stuff in the sink there are a few things behind you that need doing,’ he said.
We turned around and every inch of the kitchen’s serving station was stacked with plates, cutlery, pots, baking trays, knives and mixing bowls. On the other side of the carnage, we could just about make out two guys working away at the stoves.
‘Hi, guys. I’m George and this is Ben. We’re here to help you with the washing up in exchange for some lunch.’
‘Cheers, dudes,’ said the younger of the boys. ‘We’ve been completely swamped and haven’t had a chance to do any all day. We’ve been washing stuff up as we need it.’
‘That technique has worked for me for years,’ said Ben.
Their names were Ryan and Matthew. They looked about 17 and 19 respectively. They were both aspiring young cooks who travelled half an hour each day to the pub, because of the reputation it was gaining. It won the Newcomer of the Year Award 2006, but whether this was a national award, or a competition at the Thorverton Village Fete, I don’t know.
They were putting a huge amount of effort and concentration into their cooking, but were still keen to talk and find out about our trip. They were making what looked to be posh cheese-on-toast.
Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain Page 9
