The Road to Little Dribbling (12 page)

At length I came to Christchurch Road, the straight and stately avenue leading into the village of Virginia Water. Once this was the loveliest road I could imagine, lined on both sides for a mile or so with dark and jaunty houses in a rambling arts and crafts style, each one a happy jumble of gables, porches, and jostling chimney pots, each standing in its own paradise of billowy shrubs and tumbling roses. It was, as I said in
Notes from a Small Island,
like stepping into the pages of a 1937 copy of
House Beautiful
magazine. Those houses are nearly all gone now, bought for a fortune only to be torn down and replaced by much larger homes in a style that might be called Russian Gangster.

The village center is much changed, too. Nearly all that I remember fondly is gone. The Tudor Rose, the world’s most endearingly terrible restaurant, where all the food was black or dark brown, except the peas, which were a pale gray, has long since departed and is much missed by me, if no one else. The fishmongers, travel agents, and greengrocers are all gone, too. One of them—I don’t remember which—had a royal warrant from the Queen Mother, which always impressed me. Barclays, the only bank in the village, had just permanently closed. A sign on the door invited us to go to Chertsey for our banking needs. Even more tragically vanished was the bookshop owned by the writer, actor, and film director Bryan Forbes. It was the ideal bookshop. I spent hours in there; read whole books in there. Every once in a while you would see Forbes himself, and that was always a thrilling moment for me, a boy from Iowa. Once I saw him talking to Frank Muir, a television personality known for his wit and erudition, and almost fainted from the excitement.

The bookshop was also the scene of my most outstanding moment of manliness in life. I happened to be browsing there one day when a patient from the sanatorium whom I’ll call Arthur came in. Arthur was middle-aged and unexpectedly distinguished-looking. Like many of the patients at the sanatorium, he came from a privileged background (the hospital had been private until the late 1940s) and he dressed quite well in the tweedy style of a country gentleman. You would never have taken him for a madman. But he had one quirk that kept him permanently institutionalized. He could not abide being spoken to by strangers. If someone merely smiled and said good day, Arthur would explode in froth and fury and pour forth a tumult of startlingly original insults. Everyone in the village knew this, so no one disturbed him on his daily rounds. It happened, however, that on this day the bookshop was in the care of a sweet, newly employed young woman who had no idea of Arthur’s peculiarities, and asked him if she could help him find anything.

Arthur turned on her more in amazement than anger. It had been years since anyone had addressed him in a public place.

“H
OW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME, YOU SLUTTISH BITCH
,” he hissed, swiftly warming to the task. “D
ON’T YOU COME ANYWHERE NEAR ME, YOU PUSTULANT, SPREAD-EAGLED DAUGHTER OF
S
ATAN
.” Arthur was nothing if not expressive when roused. The young woman stared at him with a look I had only ever seen on a female face in horror movies in the moment between a shower curtain being yanked open and a dagger coming down.

I stepped up and in a sharp tone said: “Arthur, put the book down and leave at once.”

That was all you had to do with Arthur—just speak to him firmly. Meekly, he returned the book to its shelf and wordlessly left the shop.

The young woman looked at me with simple, heartfelt amazement. “Thank you,” she breathed.

I gave her a winning but bashful smile as I had seen Gary Cooper do in the movies. “Glad to be of help,” I said. If I’d had a cowboy hat I would have touched the brim.

The door opened and Arthur put his head in. “Will I be allowed pudding tonight?” he asked anxiously.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, my tone curt once more. “We’ll have to see how you behave.”

Arthur made to depart again, but I called him back.

“And, Arthur, you must never trouble this young lady again,” I added. “Do you understand?”

He muttered some pathetic acknowledgment and slunk off. I gave the woman another Gary Cooper smile. She was now regarding me with a look of frankest adoration. It’s funny, but sometimes life throws these moments at you that have the capacity to change everything in an instant. In other circumstances, who knows where this encounter might have led? Unfortunately she was only about four feet tall and nearly spherical, so I simply shook her hand and wished her a good day.

—

Virginia Water has always been an outpost of great wealth, with private roads lined with giant houses curling around the exclusive Wentworth golf course. But around the fringes of the village are some neighborhoods of more modest homes, and it was in one of these, a prewar brick duplex with an unusually big garden, that my wife and I passed half a dozen happy years when my children were small and I was a young journalist on
The Times
. The area in which we lived was called Trumps Green, and I was very pleased, when I strode up there now, to find that it hadn’t changed much. Our old road had lots more cars parked along it than formerly but otherwise was much the same. Around the corner from our house was a parade of shops that provided for more or less all our daily needs—a butcher’s, a post office and newsagent, a small grocery store, and the world’s most astonishingly well-stocked hardware store, presided over by a kindly man named Mr. Morley.

I loved Mr. Morley’s shop. You were never disappointed there. Whatever was on your shopping list—linseed oil, two-inch masonry nails, coal scuttle, small can of Brasso metal polish—Mr. Morley had it. I am sure if you said to him, “I need 125 yards of razor wire, a ship’s anchor, and a dominatrix outfit in a size eight,” he would find them for you after rooting around for a few minutes among bird feeders and bags of bone meal.

Mr. Morley was always cheerful and upbeat. Business was always “not bad, could be worse.” Mr. Morley seemed to me the last bastion of a vanishing world. So I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see the shop sign
Morley Hardware
still in place and the windows still crowded with tools and useful items. When civilization finally collapses, when the dead rise up and walk again and the North Sea floods British shores, Mr. Morley will still be there, selling mothballs, flyswatters, seed packets, and galvanized wheelbarrows. As Britain sinks beneath the waves, it will be Mr. Morley, standing on the tallest of his many stepladders, who will be the last to go.

I pushed through the door, eager to see him. Mr. Morley always remembers me. I expect he remembers all his old customers. To my surprise there was another man behind the counter. I had never not seen Mr. Morley in there. I swear if you’d gone to the shop at midnight, you’d have found Mr. Morley standing at the counter in the dark, just waiting for it to be time to open.

“Is Mr. Morley on holiday?” I said.

“Oh, he’s gone,” said the man in a quiet, grave tone.

“Gone?”

“Dead, I’m afraid. Massive heart attack. About four years ago.”

I was temporarily speechless. “Poor man,” I said at last, but I was really thinking of myself. Mr. Morley and I were about the same age. “What a shame.”

“Yes.”

“What a terrible thing. Poor man.”

“Yes.”

I couldn’t think of another thing to say. It occurred to me that I didn’t have the faintest idea of whether Mr. Morley had a family or where he lived or anything at all about him. But then how would I ever have found out such a thing? “Good afternoon, Mr. Morley. Could I have a bag of mothballs and are you in a happy, stable relationship, heterosexual or otherwise?” He had no existence that I knew of outside his shop. So I just said thank you and in somber mood departed.

—

I strolled back into the village proper, to the boundary of the old sanatorium, now an elegant gated compound called Virginia Park. The sanatorium closed in 1980 and the building was converted into apartments. The grounds, where once there were gardens and a cricket pitch, are now filled solid with executive homes. For £895,000, according to a glossy brochure, you can buy a “magnificent townhouse in this Grade I–listed restored mansion.” Well, let’s be quite clear about this. It is not a restored mansion at all. It was a building full of gloriously demented people, some of them from Britain’s finest families. Where you lay your head tonight could very well be where Lady Boynton routinely peed in the corner.

But what a wonderful retreat it was in its day. People have never had a more beautiful place to be lost and addled. Of William Henry Crossland’s two great creations for Thomas Holloway, the sanatorium is to my mind much the finer. It, too, has an enormous frontage, but it is broken up with a great central tower and gables that make it more interesting and less forbidding. I remember one June evening when I was new there looking out a window from high up in the building onto the grounds and thinking it was the finest view I had ever seen. A cricket match between the Holloway staff and the staff of some other hospital was moving toward a stately conclusion below me. Long, end-of-day shadows lay across the lawn. The gardening detail—a ragtag army of patients lethally but trustingly armed with scythes and hoes and shears—was marching in broken ranks back from the vegetable garden. Britain in that moment really seemed a perfect place.

It’s all long gone now, I’m afraid. When the sanatorium shut, the patients were moved to a new unit within a general hospital at Chertsey. In the beginning they were allowed to roam freely, as they always had, but that had to be brought to an end because the patients, robbed of all that was familiar, wandered into places they shouldn’t go and disturbed people in the waiting areas by asking them for fags or calling them pustulant whores or any number of other things that weren’t compatible with an efficient, modern general hospital. So they had to be locked away, and in no time at all most of them had sunk into a permanent torpor from which none of them ever stirred and no one had time to rouse them.

But it was great while it lasted. Looking back now, I really do think Britain had attained something approaching perfection just around the time of my arrival. It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets, the poorer it thinks itself.

All of the long-term patients at Holloway were quite mad—that is why they were long-term mental patients, after all—but sufficiently institutionalized on the whole that they could go to the village each day to buy tobacco or a newspaper or have a cup of tea in the Tudor Rose. To any outsider it must have seemed extraordinary, a village filled with normal citizens going about their daily business, but also liberally scattered with people who were clearly not right in the head, who conversed in an animated fashion with empty space or stood at the back of the village bakery with their nose pressed to the wall. You can’t have a more civilized community than one in which hospital staff play cricket at the end of a summer’s day and lunatics can wander and mingle without exciting comment or alarm. It was wonderful, possibly unsurpassable. It really was.

That was the Britain I came to. I wish it could be that place again.

Chapter 7

Into the Forest

I

O
NCE OR TWICE A
year I go walking with my old friends Daniel Wiles and Andrew Orme, and sometimes we are joined by another friend from California, John Flinn, as we were this year. We have walked the ancient tracks of England, from Offa’s Dyke to the Ridgeway, traipsed through the steep hills and green meadows of the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales, followed the Thames from source to sea, clambered to the tops of Dorset’s highest hills, and met many other challenges and adventures. Once we were chased from a Thames path by a very angry swan—you’d have fled, too, believe me—but otherwise our adventures have been pretty largely marked by hardiness, fortitude, and courage in the face of cows, with just tiny amounts of bitching here and there.

This year for various reasons we could only get together for three days, so we decided to meet at a hotel in Lyndhurst, in the heart of the New Forest, which pleased me very much. I lived for two years on the edge of the New Forest near Christchurch when I worked in Bournemouth as a young man, and have spent many a happy Saturday tramping around there. It’s a lovely area. If you are from another country, you may need to be told that the New Forest isn’t in fact new and not even altogether a forest. It hasn’t been new since the time of the Norman Conquest and, though much of it is wooded, a great deal of it is open heathland and nothing like a forest as we normally think of it. “Forest” originally signified any area set aside for hunting. It could be wooded but didn’t have to be. Nearly all of Britain’s once-great forests—Sherwood Forest, Charnwood, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden—have gone altogether or are much reduced. Only the New Forest retains something of its ancient dimensions.