Notes From a Small Island (17 page)

One of the sustaining pleasures of a long tramp in the country, particularly out of season, is the thought that eventually you will find a room in a snug hostelry, have a series of drinks before a blazing fire and then dine on hearty viands to which the day's exercise and fresh air have clearly entitled you. But I arrived in Cambridge feeling fresh and untaxed and entitled to nothing. Worse still, presuming that the walk would be more challenging than it was and that I might arrive late, I had booked a room in the University Arms Hotel in the expectation that it would have the requisite blazing fire, the hearty viands and something of the air of a senior common room. In fact, as I discovered to my quiet dismay, it was an overpriced modern block and my gloomy room was lamentably at odds with its description in my guidebook.

I had a listless look round the city. Now Cambridge, I know, is a very fine city and a great place for names - Christ's Pieces alone takes some beating - but I couldn't make myself warm to it this day. The central market was a tatty mess, there seemed a discouraging surfeit of concrete structures around the centre, and by late

afternoon everything was drenched in a cheerless drizzle. I.ended up nosing around in second-hand bookshops. I was looking for nothing in particular, but in one I came across an illustrated history of Selfridges Department Store and I took it eagerly from the shelf, hoping for an explanation of how Highcliffe Castle had fallen into dereliction and, better still, for prurient anecdotes involving Selfridge and the libidinous Dolly Sisters.

Alas, this appeared to be a sanitized version of the Selfridge story. I found only a single passing mention of the Dollys, which implied that they were just a couple of innocent waifs in whom Selfridge took an avuncular interest. Of Selfridge's precipitate decline from rectitude there was scarcely a mention and of Highcliffe Castle nothing at all. So I put the book back and, realizing that somehow everything I did this day would be touched with disappointment, I went and had a pint of beer in an empty pub, a mediocre dinner in an Indian restaurant, a lonely walk in the rain, and finally retired to my room, where I discovered that there was nothing at all of note on television, and realized that I had left my walking-stick in Newmarket.

I retired with a book only to discover that the bedside lightbulb was gone - not burned out but gone - and passed the remaining hours of the evening lying inert on the bed and watching a Cagney and Lacey rerun, partly out of a curious interest to detect what it is about this ancient programme that so besots the controller of BBC1 (only possible answer: Sharon Gless's chest) and partly because of its guaranteed narcotic effect. I fell asleep with my glasses on and awoke at some indeterminate hour to find the TV screen a frantic, noisy blizzard. I got up to switch it off, tripped heavily over some unyielding object and managed the interesting trick of turning off the TV with my head. Curious to know how I had managed this, in case I decided to make it a party piece, I discovered that the offending object was my stick, which was not in Newmarket after all, but on the floor, lodged between a chair and a bed leg.

Well, that's one good thing, I thought and, gracing my nostrils with two walrus tusks of tissue to stanch a sudden flow of blood, climbed wearily back into bed.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER  FIFTEEN

I WENT TO  RETFORD.  I  CAN'T EXPLAIN IT.  THROUGH MY MORNING

ablutions, the gentle removal of the tissues from my swollen nostrils, through breakfast and checking out of the hotel and the long walk to the station, it was my solemn and dutiful intention to go to Norwich and thence to Lincoln. But for some reason, as soon as I entered the station and spied a British Rail map on the wall, I had a strange, sudden hankering to go somewhere entirely new, and Retford jumped out at me.

For the past seven years, I had passed through Retford every time I took a train between Leeds and London. It was one of the main stops on the east coast line, but I had never seen anyone get on or anyone get off there. On my British Rail route map, Retford was accorded capital letters, giving it equal typographical standing with Liverpool, Leicester, Nottingham, Glasgow and all the other substantial communities of Britain, and yet I knew nothing about it. In fact, I don't believe I had even heard of it before I saw its lonely station for the first time from the train. More than that, I had never met anyone who had been there or knew anything about it. My AA Book of British Towns included lavish and kindly descriptions of every obscure community you could think to name -Kirriemuir, Knutsford, Prestonpans, Swadlincote, Bridge of Allan, Duns, Forfar, Wigtown - but of Retford it maintained a stern and mysterious silence. Clearly, it was time to check this place out.

So I caught a train to Peterborough and then another on the main line north. I hadn't slept particularly well on account of an unsettling dream involving Cagney and Lacey and the discovery

that I hadn't filed a US tax return since 1975 (they threatened to turn me over to that guy who takes his shirt off in the opening credits, so you can imagine the state of my bedclothes when I awoke with a gasp about dawn), and I was looking forward to one of those quiet, soothing journeys of the kind that British Rail are always promising - the ones where your shoes turn into slippers and Leon Redbone sings you to sleep.

So it was with some dismay that I discovered that the seat behind me was occupied by Vodaphone Man. These people are getting to be a real nuisance, aren't they? This one was particularly irritating because his voice was loud and self-satisfied and littered with moronspeak, and his calls were so clearly pointless:

'Hello, Clive here. I'm on the 10.07 and should be at HQ by 1300 hours as expected. I'm going to need a rush debrief on the Pentland Squire scenario. What say? No, I'm out of the loop on Maris Pipers. Listen, can you think of any reason why anyone would employ a total anus like me? What's that? Because I'm the sort of person who's happy as a pig in shit just because he's got a mobile phone? Hey, interesting concept.' Then a few moments of silence and: 'Hello, love. I'm on the 10.07. Should be home by five. Yes, just like every other night. No reason to tell you at all except that I've got this phone and I'm a complete fuckwit. I'll call again from Doncaster for no reason.' Then: 'Clive here. Yeah, I'm still on the 10.07 but we had a points failure at Grantham, so I'm looking now at an ETA of 13.02 rather than the forecast 1300 hours. If Phil calls, will you tell him that I'm still a complete fuckwit? Brill.' And so it went all morning.

Thus it was with some relief that I found myself, alone among the many passengers, alighting in Retford, an occurrence so unusual that it brought station employees to the windows, and walking into town through a clinging mist of rain. Retford, I am pleased to report, is a delightful and charming place even under the sort of oppressive grey clouds that make far more celebrated towns seem dreary and tired. Its centrepiece is an exceptionally large and handsome market square lined with a picturesque jumble of noble Georgian buildings. Beside the main church stood a weighty black cannon with a plaque saying 'Captured at Sevastopol 1865', which I thought a remarkable piece of initiative on the part of the locals -it's not every day, after all, that you find a Nottinghamshire market town storming a Crimean redoubt and bringing home booty - and the shops seemed prosperous and well ordered. I can't say that I feltlike spending my holidays here, but I was pleased to have seen it at last and to have found it trim and likeable.

I had a cup of tea in a little shop, then caught a bus to Worksop, a place of similar size and tempo (and which, by the by, does get an entry in the AA Book of British Towns). Retford and Worksop apparently had had a contest to see which of them would house the headquarters of Bassetlaw District Council, and Worksop had clearly lost since the offices were there. They were predictably hideous and discordant, but the rest of the town seemed agreeable enough in a low-key sort of way.

I had come to Worksop not because I was aching to see it but because near by there was something I had wished to see for a long time: Welbeck Abbey, reputedly one of the finest homes in that curious compact region known as the Dukeries. The seats of five historic dukedoms - Newcastle, Portland, Kingston, Leeds and Norfolk - are all within twenty miles of each other in this obscure corner of the North Midlands, though Leeds and Portland are now extinct and the others, I gather, have mostly gone away. (The Duke of Newcastle, according to Simon Winchester in Their Noble Lordships, lives in a modest house in Hampshire, which I trust has taught him the folly of not investing in bouncing castles and miniature steam trains.)

Welbeck is the ancestral home of the Portland clan, though in fact they haven't lived there since 1954 on account of a similar unfortunate lack of prescience with regard to adventure playgrounds and petting zoos. The fifth Duke of Portland, one W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck (1800-1879), has long been something of a hero of mine. Old W.J.C., as I like to think of him, was one of history's great recluses and went to the most extraordinary lengths to avoid all forms of human contact. He lived in just one small corner of his stately home and communicated with his servants through notes passed to him through a special message box cut into the door to his rooms. Food was conveyed to him in the dining room by means of a miniature railway running from the kitchen. In the event of chance encounters, he would stand stock still and servants were instructed to pass him as they would a piece of furniture. Those who transgressed this instruction were compelled to skate on the duke's private skating-rink until exhausted. Sightseers were allowed to tour the house and grounds - 'so long,' as the duke put it, 'as you would be good enough not to see me.'

For reasons that can only be guessed at, the duke used his

considerable inheritance to build a second mansion underground. At its peak, he had 15,000 men employed on its construction, and when completed it included, among much else, a library nearly 250 feet long and the largest ballroom in England, with space for up to 2,000 guests - rather an odd thing to build if you never have guests. A network of tunnels and secret passageways connected the various rooms and ran for considerable distances out into the surrounding countryside. It was as if, in the words of one historian, 'he anticipated nuclear warfare'. When it was necessary for the duke to travel to London, he would have himself sealed in his horse-drawn carriage, which would be driven through a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel to a place near Worksop Station and loaded onto a special flatcar for the trip to the capital. There, still sealed, it would be driven to his London residence, Harcourt House.

When the duke died, his heirs found all of the above-ground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floorless. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the duke resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.

So in a state of some eagerness I strolled out of Worksop to the edge of Clumber Park, a neighbouring National Trust holding, and found what I hoped was a path to Welbeck Abbey, some three or four miles away. It was a long walk along a muddy woodland track. According to the footpath signs I was on something called the Robin Hood Way, but this didn't feel much like Sherwood Forest. It was mostly a boundless conifer plantation, a sort of farm for trees, and it seemed preternaturally still and lifeless. It was the kind of setting where you half expect to stumble on a body loosely covered with leaves, which is my great dread in life because the police would interview me and I would immediately become a suspect on account of an unfortunate inability to answer questions like 'Where were you on the afternoon of Wednesday the third of October at 4 p.m.?' I could imagine myself sitting in a windowless interview room, saying, 'Let's see, I think I might have been in Oxford, or maybe it was the Dorset coast path. Jeez, I don't know.' And the next thing you know I'd be banged up in Parkhurst or some place, and with my luck in the meantime they'd have replaced Michael Howard as Home Secretary so there wouldn't be any chance of just lifting the latch and letting myself out.Things got stranger. An odd wind rose in the treetops, making them bend and dance, but didn't descend to earth so that at ground level everything was calm, which was a little spooky, and then I passed through a steep sandstone ravine with tree roots growing weirdly like vines along its face. Between the roots, the surface was covered with hundreds of carefully scratched inscriptions, with names and dates and occasional twined hearts. The dates covered an extraordinary span: 1861, 1962, 1947, 1990. This seemed a strange place indeed. Either this was a popular spot for lovers or some couple had been going steady for a very long time.

A bit further on I came to a lonely gatehouse with a machicolated roofline. Beyond it stood a sweep of open field full of stubbly winter wheat, and beyond that, just visible through a mantle of trees, was a large and many-angled green copper roof - Welbeck Abbey, or so at least I hoped. I followed the path around the periphery of the field, which was immense and muddy. It took me nearly three-quarters of an hour to make my way to a paved lane, but I was sure now that I had found the right place. The lane passed alongside a narrow, reedy lake, and this, according to my trusty OS map, was the only body of water for miles. I followed the lane for perhaps a mile until it ended at a rather grand entrance beside a sign saying PRIVATE - NO ENTRY, but with no other indication of what lay beyond.

I stood for a moment in a lather of indecision (the name I would like, incidentally, if I am ever ennobled: Lord Lather of Indecision) and decided to venture up the drive a little way - just enough to at least glimpse the house which I had come so far to see. I walked a little way. The grounds were meticulously and expensively groomed, but well screened with trees, so I walked a little further. After a few hundred yards the trees thinned a little and opened out into lawns containing a kind of assault course, with climbing nets and logs on stilts. What was this place? A bit further on, beside the lake, there was an odd paved area - like a car park in the middle of nowhere - which I realized, with a small cry of joy, was the duke's famous skating-rink. Now I was so far into the grounds that discretion hardly mattered. I strode on until I was square in front of the house. It was grand but curiously characterless and it had been clumsily graced with a number of new extensions. Beyond in the distance was a cricket pitch with an elaborate pavilion. There was no-one around, but there was a car park with several cars. This was clearly some kind of institution - perhaps a training centre for

somebody like IBM. So why was it so anonymous? I was about to go up and have a look in the windows when a door opened and a man in a uniform emerged and strode towards me with a severe look on his face. As he neared me, I could see his jacket said 'MOD Security'. Oh-oh.

'Hello,' I said with a big foolish smile.

'Are you aware, sir, that you are trespassing on Ministry of 'Defence property?'

I wavered for a moment, torn between giving him my tourist-from-Iowa act ('You mean this isn't Hampton Court Palace? I just gave a cab driver £175') and fessing up. I fessed. In a small respectful voice I told him about my long fascination with the fifth Duke of Portland and how I had ached to see this place for years and couldn't resist just having a peep at it after coming all this way, which was exactly the right thing to do because he obviously had an affection for old W.J.C. himself. He escorted me smartishly to the edge of the property and kept up something of a bluff manner, but he seemed quietly pleased to have someone who shared his interests. He confirmed that the paved area was the skating-rink and pointed out where the tunnels ran, which was pretty much everywhere. They were still sound, he told me, though they weren't used any longer except for storage. The ballroom and other underground chambers, however, were still regularly employed for functions and as a gymnasium. The MOD had just spent a million pounds refurbishing the ballroom.

'What is this place anyway?' I asked.

'Training centre, sir,' was all he would say and in any case we had reached the end of the drive. He watched to make sure I went. I walked back across the big field, then paused at the far end to look at the Welbeck Abbey roof rising from the treetops. I was pleased to know that the Ministry of Defence had maintained the tunnels and underground rooms, but it seemed an awful shame that the place was so formidably shut to the public. It isn't every day after all that the British aristocracy produces someone of W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck's rare and extraordinary mental loopiness, though in fairness it must be said they give it their best shot.

And with this thought to chew on, I turned and began the long trudge back to Worksop.