England is Full of Surprises

Ah, But You Are Americans, Aren’t You?”
Page Two
By Hunter James

“Well, I do simply love this country. Even with the roundabouts. I told you we should have taken the train anyway.”

“You miss too much on the train.”

We finally made it on up to the Lake Country, where, on a hill behind Dove cottage, I found a smooth pebble which I immediately realized, by psychic instinct, had once been fondled by Wordsworth himself and perhaps inspired some of his greatest poetry.

I brought it home and placed it above my desk, but I don’t guess psychic rocks work for everyone.

We even made it to Edinburgh and gained new respect for Robert Burns, though our belief in the old folklore of the niggardliness of the Scottish race was almost instantly confirmed — by a young American at that — who adamantly refused to give us a drink of water.

Not in a clean cup anyway. We could first buy coffee and drink it all and we could have all the water we wished — within reason.

“Coffee?”

“Yes. You can drink it, you see, and then I can fill your cups with water. No problem with that at all.”

“Not sure I understand.”

“Well, you see, they count the cups at the end of each day. I have to be responsible for every one. I can see you think it’s a bit crazy. So did I at first. But then it reminded me that we Americans are much too wasteful of everything. You see, I am only working her until I can get enough money to get back home to Colorado.”

Later, out on a little side street, we cornered a chap in military dress. “Ah, Americans!” he said. He smiled pleasantly and perhaps a bit sardonically while informing us that he knew our little game: “You’ve only come to talk to the locals haven’t you, to gather up local color? Cram it all in, in half a hour? Oh, we’re quite used to that, you see. Quite.”

The important thing for anybody coming to this part of the world, first-time visitor or not, is to go out and walk the Royal mile — all the way from Edinburgh Castle down through main part of the town and on out to a kind of parade ground, where, on the day we were there, a militia in traditional Scottish kilts was going through its paces.

All along the famous mile I found myself nurturing a new sympathy for Robert Burns and Afton Waters and all things Scottish even though I was limping badly from an old knee operation long before the end of our excursion.

In the end you begin to get the hang of it. Traditional England has taught you a lot. You plunge headlong into the roundabouts, trying your best to bite off the other fellow’s fender for a change, having learned that this quaint custom is nothing more than a distinctively English version of Russian Roulette.

On the open road you are OK because you have learned to keep the pedal to the metal and to hell with the speed limit signs and just don’t ever slow down at all, even for a sideways glance at Stonehenge, or try to pull off the road or do anything whatsoever except plunge ahead as fast as you can with both hands on the wheel, looking neither to the right or the left and pretending that your wife isn’t really screaming at you, only practicing for her next Little Theater role.

“We should have taken Brit Rail!”

“I keep telling you: You can’t get to all the places you want to go by train!”

A good argument, except by the time I got back to Gatwick to turn in the car I wasn’t exactly sure where I had been. There were vague memories of Oxford and the great cathedral at Salisbury and the mysterious dolomite stones at Avesbury, and the ghost of a man, either a druid or a Capuchin monk doing obeisance before one of the rocks.

And the Sunday morning that we found ourselves peeping out of a heavy fog in the old community of Bishops Canning. I would never have found the place at all if I hadn’t made the horrible mistake of taking my eyes off the road for a moment. Just lucky, I guess. Or perhaps for a moment looked upon with friendly eyes by whatever mysterious deity lords it over the United Kingdom these days.

I’m not sure exactly how to describe Bishops Canning. Not a town, hardly even a community, a place so remote and forgotten that you couldn’t even find it in the guide books. I wondered how many Britons themselves knew about this remarkable place. One of the many villages we would never have found if we had gone by Brit Rail.

I could think of nothing like it, except, perhaps, remotely, some of the old lost towns hidden away in Virginia, way back in the woods, with no markers to show you the way in—towns that if anybody other than the postman finds them at all it is only because he took a wrong turn somewhere.

As for Bishops Canning, I assumed that it’s only reason for being was the pleasant old Anglican church itself. Doubtless full of quaint historic events and old legends. Yet where was the time for us to explore them all?

I stood there in grass up to my knees, with the thick fog hanging over me, and a flock of sheep munching contentedly as the parishioners gathered for worship. I watched them coming up the narrow path that had been mowed for their convenience, the rest of the churchyard having been left for the sheep or perhaps to camouflage the landing of UFOs, which are truly a big part of the folklore in this part of the world. How often, I wondered, had the redoubtable Thomas Hardy witnessed such a scene?

Had he once walked these same roads, amid the tall grass and the heavy fogs and the flocks of sheep, watching the parishioners go in for devotions. Almost every page of Hardy hints of such a world, of fog and lonely moors and men and women caught up in the throes of an implacable fate.

We drove south into Dorset, Hardy’s own town, on the same day, passing onto the main thoroughfare past a copper bust of the great man, only to find that this most fatalistic of British novelists, once considered for an English peerage, had been something of a bounder among the people who knew him best.

The talk was that he would go for long brooding walks in the English dusk, growling at the neighborhood children and sweeping them out of his way with his cane. Was that the real Hardy — or only the partly excusable behavior of a magnificent artist preoccupied with resolving some new, onerous and exceedingly complex turn of plot? Yet there is no doubt that he was a singularly humorless cuss.

“All laughing,” he once wrote, “comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.”

Well, neither the technology of the motorcar nor the British highway system had got very far in Hardy’s day. He must have learned his lessons of fate and humankind in some more subtle fashion. From Schopenhauer, some say. Me?

By that time, after more than a week on the road, everything had become something of a blur. But it would not be easy to forget the country where Hardy lived and wrote. Druids at their worship, those heavy morning fogs, sheep in the tall grass, witches going quietly about their work. Or for that matter the house back at Hampstead Heath where Keats composed his last great odes. Or the long walk along the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle and especially the friendly reminder of the curator at Stratford:

“Do you have relatives who would wish to be informed?”

You finally make it back to the airport to turn in your keys, knowing there will be hell to pay, looking absolutely terrified and shaking all over and wondering how you will explain all the damage to your rental car and wondering how much more training you will need before you can go back home and enter the Indy 500. Worst of all, I hadn’t even tried to drive in London yet I felt like a weakling, a coward, a failure, a mere colonist.

There was a different girl at the counter this time; but she, too, was a real sport about everything. It was almost as if she had been expecting a wrecked car—would, in fact, have been utterly surprised if I had brought back anything else.

“Don’t worry. It’s nothing. We’ll take care of it. We’re very used to this sort of thing, you see.” She looked at me more narrowly. “You are American, aren’t you?”

Hunter James is a former editorial page writer and correspondent for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the Baltimore Sun. He lives in Winston Salem, NC.

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