Notes From a Small Island (25 page)

out of control in the Seventies must have seemed bewildering and inexplicable to these poor people as they watched Blackpool, just twenty miles to the south, going from strength to strength.

Foolishly, but not unnaturally, Morecambe responded by trying to compete with Blackpool. It built an expensive dolphinarium and a new outdoor swimming-pool, and recently there had been some half-assed plan to open a Mr Blobby amusement park. But really its charm, and certainly its hope, lies in being not Blackpool. That is what I liked about it - that it is quiet and friendly and well behaved, that there is plenty of room in the pubs and cafes, that you aren't bowled off the kerb by swaggering youths and don't go sidewalk surfing on abandoned styrofoam chip platters and vomit slicks.

One day, I would like to think, people will rediscover the charms of a quiet break at the seaside, the simple pleasures of strolling along a well-kept front, leaning on railings, drinking in views, sitting in a cafe with a book, just pottering about. Then perhaps Morecambe can thrive again. How nice it would be if the Government actually erected a policy to this end, took steps to restore fading places like Morecambe - rebuilt the pier to its original plans, gave a grant for a new Winter Gardens, insisted on the restoration of seafront buildings, perhaps moved a division of the Inland Revenue or some other bureaucracy to the town to give it a bit of year-round life.

With a little priming and a thoughtful long-term plan, I am sure you could attract the sort of people who would want to open bookshops, little restaurants, antique shops, galleries, maybe even tapas bars and the odd boutique hotel. Well, why not?

Morecambe could become a little northern English equivalent of Sausalito or St Ives. You may smirk at the thought of it, but what other possible future is there for a place like Morecambe? People could come for weekends to eat quality meals in new seafront restaurants overlooking the bay and perhaps take in a play or concert at the Winter Gardens. Yuppie fell walkers could spend the night there and thus ease pressure on the Lake District. It would all make eminent sense. But of course it will never happen, and partly, if I may say so, because you smirk.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   TWENTY-THREE

I HAVE A SMALL, TATTERED CLIPPING THAT I SOMETIMES CARRY WITH ME

and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It's a weather forecast from the 'Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.'

There you have in a single pithy sentence the English weather captured to perfection: dry but rainy with some warm/cool spells. The Western Daily Mail could run that forecast every day - for all I know, it may - and scarcely ever be wrong.

To an outsider the most striking thing about the English weather is that there isn't very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger - tornadoes, monsoons, raging blizzards, run-for-your-life hailstorms - are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles, and this is just fine by me. I like wearing the same type of clothing every day of the year. I appreciate not needing air conditioning or mesh screens on the windows to keep out the kind of insects and flying animals that drain your blood or eat away your face while you are sleeping. I like knowing that so long as I do not go walking up Ben Nevis in carpet slippers in February I will almost certainly never perish from the elements in this soft and gentle country.

I mention this because as I sat eating my breakfast in the dining room of the Old England Hotel in Bowness-on-Windermere, two days after leaving Morecambe, I was reading an article in The Times about an unseasonable snowstorm - a 'blizzard', The Times called it - that had 'gripped' parts of East Anglia. According to The Times report, the storm had covered parts of the region with 'more

than two inches of snow' and created 'drifts up to six inches high'. In response to this, I did something I had never done before: I pulled out my notebook and drafted a letter to the editor in which I pointed out, in a kindly, helpful way, that two inches of snow cannot possibly constitute a blizzard and that six inches of snow is not a drift. A blizzard, I explained, is when you can't get your front door open. Drifts are things that make you lose your car till spring. Cold weather is when you leave part of your flesh on doorknobs, mailbox handles and other metal objects. And then I crumpled the letter up because I realized I was in serious danger of turning into one of the Colonel Blimp types who sat around me in considerable numbers, eating cornflakes or porridge with their blimpish wives, and without whom hotels like the Old England would not be able to survive.

I was in Bowness because I had two days to kill until I was to be joined by two friends from London with whom I was going to spend the weekend walking. I was looking forward to that very much, but rather less to the prospect of another long, purposeless day in Bowness, pottering about trying to fill the empty hours till tea. There are, I find, only so many windowsful of tea-towels, Peter Rabbit dinnerware and patterned jumpers I can look at before my interest in shopping palls, and I wasn't at all sure that I could face another day of poking about in this most challenging of resorts.

I had come to Bowness more or less by default since it is the only place inside the Lake District National Park with a railway station. Besides, the idea of spending a couple of quiet days beside the tranquil beauty of Windermere, and wallowing in the plump comforts of a gracious (if costly) old hotel, had seemed distinctly appealing from the vantage of Morecambe Bay. But now, with one day down and another to go, I was beginning to feel stranded and fidgety, like someone at the end of a long period of convalescence. At least, I reflected optimistically, the unseasonable two inches of snow that had brutally lashed East Anglia, causing chaos on the roads and forcing people to battle their way through perilous snowdrifts, some of them as high as their ankletops, had mercifully passed this corner of England by. Here the elements were benign and the world outside the dining-room window sparkled weakly under a pale wintry sun.

I decided to take the lake steamer to Ambleside. This would not only kill an hour and let me see the lake, but deliver me to a place rather more like a real town and less like a misplaced seaside resortthan Bowness. In Bowness, I had noted the day before, there are no fewer than eighteen shops where you can buy jumpers and at least twelve selling Peter Rabbit stuff, but just one butcher's. Ambleside on the other hand, though hardly unfamiliar with the manifold possibilities for enrichment presented by hordes of passing tourists, did at least have an excellent bookshop and any number of outdoor shops, which I find hugely if inexplicably diverting - I caiPspend hours looking at rucksacks, kneesocks, compasses and survival rations, then go to another shop and look at precisely the same things all over again. So it was with a certain animated keenness that I made my way to the steamer pier shortly after breakfast. Alas, there I discovered that the steamers run only in the summer months, which seemed shortsighted on this mild morning because even now Bowness gently teemed with trippers. So I was forced, as a fallback, to pick my way through the scattered, shuffling throngs to the little ferry that shunts back and forth between Bowness and the old ferry house on the opposite shore. It travels only a few hundred yards, but it does at least run all year.

A modest line-up of cars was patiently idling on the ferry approach, and there were eight or ten walkers as well, all with Mustos, rucksacks and sturdy boots. One fellow was even wearing shorts - always a sign of advanced dementia in a British walker. Walking - walking, that is, in the British sense - was something that I had come into only relatively recently. I was not yet at the point where I would wear shorts with many pockets, but I had taken to tucking my trousers into my socks (though I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me what benefits this actually confers, other than making one look serious and committed).

I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a bookstore and being surprised to find a whole section dedicated to 'Walking Guides'. This struck me as faintly bizarre and comical -where I came from people did not as a rule require written instructions to achieve locomotion - but then gradually I learned that there are, in fact, two kinds of walking in Britain, namely the everyday kind that gets you to the pub and, all being well, back home again, and the more earnest type that involves stout boots, Ordnance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in its terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in inappropriate weather.

For years, I watched these walker types toiling off up cloud-hidden hills in wet and savage weather and presumed they were

genuinely insane. And then my old friend John Price, who had grown up in Liverpool and spent his youth doing foolish things on sheer-faced crags in the Lakes, encouraged me to join him and a couple of his friends for an amble - that was the word he used - up Haystacks one weekend. I think it was the combination of those two untaxing-sounding words, 'amble' and 'Haystacks', and the promise of lots of drink afterwards, that lulled me from my natural caution.

'Are you sure it's not too hard?' I asked.

'Nah, just an amble,' John insisted.

Well, of course it was anything but an amble. We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us. Beyond it lay even greater and remoter summits that had been quite invisible from the ribbon of black highway thousands of feet below. John and his chums toyed with my will to live in the cruellest possible way; seeing me falling behind, they would lounge around on boulders, Smoking and charting and resting, but the instant I caught up with them with a view to falling at their feet, they would bound up refreshed and, with a few encouraging words, set off anew with large, manly strides, so that I had to stumble after and never got a rest. I gasped and ached and sputtered, and realized that I had never done anything remotely this unnatural before and vowed never to attempt such folly again.

And then, just as I was about to lie down and call for a stretcher, we crested a final rise and found ourselves abruptly, magically, on top of the earth, on a platform in the sky, amid an ocean of swelling summits. I had never seen anything half so beautiful before. 'Fuck me,' I said in a moment of special eloquence and realized I was hooked. Ever since then I had come back whenever they would have me, and never complained and even started tucking my trousers in my socks. I couldn't wait for the morrow.

The ferry docked and I shuffled on board with the others. Windermere looked serene and exceedingly fetching in the gentle sunshine. Unusually there wasn't a single pleasure boat disturbing its glassy calmness. To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement. Some 14,000 powerboats - let me repeat that number: 14,000 - ate registered to use the lake. On a busy summer's day, as many as 1,600 powerboats may be outon the water at any one time, a good many of them zipping along at up to 40 mph with water-skiers in tow. This is in addition to all the thousands of other types of floating objects that may be out on the water and don't need to register - dinghies, sailboats, sailboards, canoes, inflatables, li-los, various excursion steamers and the old chugging ferry I was on now - all of them searching for a boat-sized piece of water. It is all but impossible to stand on a lakeside bank on an August Sunday watching water-skiers slicing through packed shoals of dinghies and other floating detritus and not end up with your mouth open and your hands on your head.

I had spent some weeks in the Lakes a year or so before working on an article for National Geographic and one of the passing thrills of the experience was being taken out for a morning on the lake on a national park launch. To show me just how dangerous it could be to let high-powered craft race around in this kind of crowded environment, the park warden pootled the launch out into the middle of the lake, told me to hang on -1 smiled at this: listen, I do 90 on the motorways - then opened the throttle. Well, let me say this: 40 mph in a boat is nothing like 40 mph on a road. We took off with a velocity that snapped me back in the seat and had me clutching on for dear life with both hands, and bounced across the water like a flat stone fired from a gun. I have seldom been so petrified. Even on a quiet morning out of season, Windermere was clogged with impediments. We shot between little islands and skittered sideways past headlands that loomed up with alarming suddenness, like frights on a funfair ride. Imagine sharing this space with 1,600 other similarly dashing craft, most of them in the control of some pot-bellied urban halfwit with next to no experience of powered craft, plus all the floating jetsam of rowboats, kayaks, pedalos and the like and it is a wonder that there aren't bodies all over the water.

The experience taught me two things - first, that vomit vaporizes at 40 mph in an open boat and second that Windermere is an exceedingly compact body of water. And here we come to the point of all this. Britain is, for all its topographical diversity and timeless majesty, an exceedingly small-scale place. There isn't a single natural feature in the country that ranks anywhere in world terms - no Alp-like mountains, no stunning gorges, not even a single great river. You may think of the Thames as a substantial artery, but in world terms it is little more than an ambitious stream.

Put it down in North America and it wouldn't even make the top one hundred. It would come in at number 108, to be precise, outclassed by such relative obscurities as the Skunk, the Kuskokwim and even the little Milk. Windermere may have pride of place among English lakes, but for each twelve square inches of Windermere's surface, Lake Superior offers 268 square feet of water. There is in Iowa a body of water called Dan Green Slough, which even most lowans have never heard of, and it is bigger than Windermere. The Lake District itself takes up less space than the Twin Cities.

I think that's just wonderful - not that these features are modest in their dimensions but that they are modest, in the middle of a densely crowded island and still wonderful. What an achievement that is. Do you have any idea, other than in a vague theoretical sense, just how desperately crowded Britain is? Did you know, for instance, that to achieve the same density of population in America you would have to uproot the entire populations of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado and Texas and pack them all into Iowa? Twenty million people live within a day-trip of the Lake District and 12 million, roughly a quarter of England's population, come to the Lakes each year. No wonder on some summer weekends it can take two hours to get through Ambleside and that you could almost walk across Windermere by stepping from boat to boat.

And yet even at its worst, the Lake District remains more charming and less rapaciously commercialized than many famed beauty spots in more spacious countries. And away from the crowds -away from Bowness, Hawkshead and Keswick, with their tea towels, tea-rooms, teapots and endless Beatrix Potter shit - it retains pockets of sheer perfection, as I found now when the ferry nosed into its landing and we tumbled off. For a minute the landing area was a hive of activity as one group of cars got off, another got on and the eight or ten foot passengers departed in various directions. And then all was blissful silence. I followed a pretty, wooded road around the lake's edge before turning inland and heading for Near Sawrey.

Near Sawrey is the home of Hilltop, the cottage where the inescapable Potter drew her sweet little watercolours and contrived her soppy stories. For most of the year, it is overrun with tourists from far and wide. Much of the village is given over to large (but discreetly sited) car parks and the tea-room even has a sign outfront advertising its fare in Japanese, egads. But the approaches to the village - actually, it's just a hamlet (and do you know the difference, by the way, between 'village' and 'hamlet'? Surprisingly few people do, but it's quite simple really: one is a place where people live and the other is a play by Shakespeare) - from every direction are exquisite and unspoiled: a meadowy green Eden laced with wandering slate walls, woodland clumps and low white farms against a backdrop of blue, beckoning hills. Even Near Sawrey itself has a beguiling, well-concocted charm that belies the overwhelming hordes who come to shuffle through its most famous residence. Such indeed is Hilltop's alarming popularity that the National Trust doesn't even actively advertise it any more. Yet still the visitors come. Two coaches were disgorging chattering white-haired occupants when I arrived and the main car park was already nearly full.