Notes From a Small Island (12 page)

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   TEN

I   SPENT   THE   NIGHT   IN   LYME   REGIS   AND   PASSED   THE   FOLLOWING

morning poking about in the town before catching a bus to Axminster and a train on to Exeter, a process that consumed considerably more time than I had expected. Daylight was fading by the time I stepped from Exeter St David's into a light but annoying rain.

I wandered through the city examining hotels from the street, but they all seemed a bit grand for me, and eventually ended up at the central tourist office, feeling mildly lost and far from home. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing here. I looked through racks of leaflets for shire-horse centres, petting zoos, falconry centres, miniature pony centres, model railways, butterfly farms, and something called - I jest not - Twiggy Winkie's Farm and Hedgehog Hospital, none of which seemed to address my leisure requirements. Nearly all the leaflets were depressingly illiterate, particularly with regard to punctuation -1 sometimes think that if I see one more tourist leaflet that says 'Englands Best' or 'Britains Largest' I will go and torch the place - and they all seemed so pathetically modest in what they had to offer. Nearly all of them padded out their lists of featured attractions with things like 'Free Car Park', 'Gift Shop and Tea-Room' and the inevitable 'Adventure Playground' (and then were witless enough to show you in the photograph that it was just a climbing-frame and a couple of plastic animals on springs). Who goes to these places? I couldn't say, I'm sure.

There was a notice on the counter saying that the office booked rooms, so I asked the helpful lady if she would secure me lodgings.

She interviewed me candidly with regard to how much I was prepared to pay, which I always find embarrassing and frankly un-English, and by a process of attrition we established that I fell into a category that could be called cheap but demanding. It happened that the Royal Clarence was doing a special deal with rooms at £25 a night if you promised not to steal the towels, and I leapt at that because I'd passed it on the way in and it looked awfully nice, a big white Georgian place on the cathedral square. And so it proved to be. The room was newly decorated and big enough for hotel-room Olympics - wastebin basketball, furniture steeplechase, jumping on to the bed by means of a swing on the bathroom door and a well-timed leap, and other perennial favourites of the lone traveller. I had a short but vigorous workout, showered, changed and hit the streets famished.

Exeter is not an easy place to love. It was extensively bombed during the war, which gave the city fathers a wonderful opportunity, enthusiastically seized, to rebuild most of it in concrete. It was only a little after six in the evening, but the city centre was practically dead. I wandered around beneath gloomy street lights, looking in shop windows and reading those strange posters - bills, as they are known in the trade - that you always find for provincial newspapers. I have an odd fascination with these because they are always either wholly unfathomable to non-locals ('Letter Box Rapist Strikes Again', 'Beulah Flies Home') or so boring that you can't imagine how anyone could possibly have thought they would boost sales ('Council Storm Over Bins Contract', 'Phone Box Vandals Strike Again'). My favourite - this is a real one, which I saw many years ago in Hemel Hempstead - was 'Woman, 81, Dies'.

Perhaps I took all the wrong streets, but there seemed to be no restaurants anywhere in central Exeter. I was only looking for something modest that didn't have 'Fayre', 'Vegan' or 'Copper Kettle' in the title, but all that happened was I kept wandering down restaurantless streets and coming up against monstrous relief roads with massive roundabouts and complicated pedestrian crossings that clearly weren't designed to be negotiated on foot by anyone with less than six hours to spare. Finally, I happened on a hilly street with a few modest eateries and plunged randomly into a Chinese restaurant. I can't say why exactly, but Chinese restaurants make me oddly uneasy, particularly when I am dining alone. I always feel that the waitress is saying: 'One beef satay and fried rice for the imperialist dog at table five.' And I find chopsticksfrankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years, haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? I spent a perplexed hour stabbing at rice, dribbling sauce across the tablecloth and lifting finely poised pieces of meat to my mouth only to discover that they had mysteriously vanished and weren't to be found anywhere. By the time I finished, the table looked as if it had been at the centre of a violent argument. I paid my bill in shame and slunk out the door and back to the hotel where I watched a little TV and snacked on the copious leftovers that I found in sweater folds and trouser turnups.

In the morning, I rose early and went out for a look round the town. Exeter was locked in a foggy gloom that didn't do anything for its appearance, though the cathedral square was very handsome and the cathedral, I was impressed to find, was open even at eight in the morning. I sat for some time at the back and listened to the morning choir practice, which was quite wonderful. Then I wandered down to the old quay area to see what I might find there. It had been artily renovated with shops and museums, but all of them were closed at this time of day - or perhaps this time of year - and there wasn't a soul about.

By the time I returned to the High Street, the shops were opening. I hadn't had breakfast because it wasn't included in my special room rate, so I was feeling immoderately peckish and began a hunt for cafes, but again Exeter seemed strangely lacking. In the end, I went into Marks & Spencer to buy a sandwich.

Although the store had only just opened, the food hall was busy and there were long queues at the tills. I took a place in a line behind eight other shoppers. They were all women and they all did the same mystifying thing: they acted surprised when it came time to pay. This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, That's four-twenty, love,' or whatever, they suddenly look as if they've never done this sort of thing before. They go 'Oh!' and start rooting in a flustered fashion in their handbag for their purse or chequebook, as if no-one had told them that this might happen.

Men, for all their many shortcomings, like washing large pieces of oily machinery in the kitchen sink or forgetting that a painted

door stays wet for more than thirty seconds, are generally pretty good when it comes to paying. They spend their time in line doing a wallet inventory and sorting through their coins. When the till person announces the bill, they immediately hand over an approximately correct amount of money, keep their hand extended for the change however long it takes or foolish they may begin to look if there is, say, a problem with the till roll, and then - mark this -pocket their change as they walk away instead of deciding that now is the time to search for the car keys and reorganize six months' worth of receipts.

And while we're on this rather daring sexist interlude, why is it that women never push toothpaste tubes up from the bottom and always try to get somebody else to change a lightbulb? How are they able to smell and hear things that are so clearly beyond the range of human acuity, and how do they know from another room that you are about to dip a finger into the icing of a freshly made cake? Why, above all, do they find it so unsettling if you spend more than four minutes a day on the toilet? This last is another long-standing mystery to me. A woman of my close acquaintance and I regularly have surreal conversations that run something like this:

'What are you doing in there?' (This said in an edgy tone.) 'I'm descaling the kettle. What do you think I'm doing in here?' 'You've been in there half an hour. Are you reading?' 'No.'

'You're reading, aren't you? I can hear the pages.' 'Honestly, I'm not.' That is to say, I was reading until a minute ago but now, of course, I'm talking to you, dear.

'Have you covered up the keyhole? I can't see anything.' 'Please tell me that you're not down on your hands and knees trying to look through the keyhole at your husband having a bowel movement in his own bathroom. Please.'

'You come out of there now. You've been in there for nearly three-quarters of an hour just reading.'

As she retreats, you sit there thinking, Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into a Dada exhibition? And then, shaking your head, you return to your magazine.

Still, it must be said that women are great with children, vomit and painted doors - three months after a painted door has dried they will still be touching it as if suspecting it might turn on them - which makes up for a lot, so I smiled benignly at the parade offlustered ladies ahead of me until it was my turn to demonstrate to the ones following how to do this sort of thing properly, but frankly I don't think they took it in.

I ate my sandwich on the street, then returned to the hotel, gathered up my things, settled the bill, stepped back outdoors and thought: Now what? I wandered back to the rail station and had a look at the flickering television screens. I thought about catching a train to Plymouth or Penzance but the next one wasn't for a couple of hours. There was, however, a train to Barnstaple leaving shortly. It occurred to me that I could go there and then make my way by bus along the north Devon coast to Taunton or Minehead. I could stop en route at Lynton and Lynmouth, and possibly Porlock and Dunster. It seemed a capital idea.

I asked the man in the ticket window for a single to Barnstaple. He told me a single was £8.80, but he could do me a return for £4.40.

'You wouldn't care to explain the logic of that to me, would you?' I asked.

'I would if I could, sir,' he responded with commendable frankness.

I took my pack and ticket to the requisite platform, where I sat on a bench and passed the time watching the station pigeons. They really are the most amazingly panicky and dopey creatures. I couldn't imagine an emptier, less satisfying life. Here are instructions for being a pigeon: 1. Walk around aimlessly for a while, pecking at cigarette butts and other inappropriate items. 2. Take fright at someone walking along the platform and fly off to a girder. 3. Have a shit. 4. Repeat.

The platform televisions weren't working and I couldn't understand the announcements - it took me ages to work out that 'Eczema' was actually Exmouth - so every time a train came in, I had to get up and make enquiries. For reasons that elude rational explanation, British Rail always puts the destinations on the front of the train, which would be awfully handy if passengers were waiting on the tracks, but not perhaps ideal for those boarding it from the side. Most of the other passengers evidently couldn't hear the announcements because when the Barnstaple train eventually came in, half a dozen of us formed a patient queue beside a BR employee and asked him if this was the Barnstaple train.

For the benefit of foreign readers, I should explain that there is a certain ritual involved in this. Even though you have heard the

conductor tell the person ahead of you that this is the Barnstaple train, you still have to say, 'Excuse me, is this the Barnstaple train?' When he acknowledges that the large linear object three feet to your right is indeed the Barnstaple train, you have to point to it and say, 'This one?' Then when you board the train you must additionally ask the carriage generally, 'Excuse me, is this the Barnstaple train?' to which most people will say that they think it is, except for one man with a lot of parcels who will get a panicked look and hurriedly gather up his things and get off.

You should always take his seat since you will generally find that he has left behind a folded newspaper and an uneaten bar of chocolate, and possibly a nice pair of sheepskin gloves.

Thus it was that I found myself sliding out of Exeter St David's Station while a man laden with parcels trotted along beside my window mouthing sentiments I couldn't decipher through the thick glass, and taking stock of my new possessions - a Daily Mirror and a Kit Kat, but unfortunately no gloves. We rattled out through the Exeter suburbs and into the lush Devon countryside. I was on what was called the Tarka Line - something to do with that story about an otter, which evidently was written somewhere in the vicinity. The countryside round about was gorgeous and extravagantly green. You could be excused for thinking that the principal industry of Britain is the manufacture of chlorophyll. We chuntered along between wooded hills, scattered farms, churches with square towers that made them look like leftover pieces from a very large chess set. I soon settled into that happy delirium that the motion of a train always induces in me, and only half noted the names of the little villages we passed through - Pinhead, West Stuttering, Bakelite, Ham Hocks, Sheepshanks.

It took over an hour and a half to cover the thirty-eight miles to Barnstaple, where I alighted and headed into town across a long bridge over the swift-flowing River Taw. I wandered around for a half an hour through narrow shopping streets and a large, cheerless covered market thinly arrayed with people selling handicraft items, and felt content that there was no need to linger here. Barnstaple used to be a major rail interchange, with three stations, but now there is just the one with its infrequent pootling services to Exeter, and a bus station overlooking the river. I went into the bus station and found two women sitting in an office beyond an open door, talking together in that quaint 'Oi be drinkin zoider' accent of this part of the world.I asked them about buses to Minehead, about thirty miles to the east along the coast. They looked at me as if I'd asked for connections to Tierra del Fuego.