The Road to Little Dribbling (16 page)

Luckily, one thing Bournemouth has in abundance is alternative hotels and my wife had booked me into a boutique establishment—the Slightly Up Ourselves Hotel, I think it may have been called—on the East Cliff, where I dropped my bags, admired the arrangement of twigs in a bowl by the door, and hastened back out, eager to see the town. By chance, the hotel was by the bus stop where I used to get off for work each morning, so I decided to retrace the steps I took back then from bus stop to workplace to see how much I could recall.

I loved coming to work in those days. I was young, newly married, in my first real job. The English seaside was still something special then. Bournemouth was the queen of the south coast resorts and I felt lucky to spend every day in a place that other people saved up to visit occasionally. I rode each morning on a yellow double-decker bus from Christchurch, via Tuckton, Southborne, and Boscombe. I always sat upstairs, usually at the front, and experienced every journey like a seven-year-old on a school outing. Bounding off the bus on a hill above the sea, I walked a few hundred yards through the town, down one hill and up another, to the rather grand art deco offices of the
Echo
on Richmond Hill, one of several hundred people whose important job it was to get the town up and running each morning. I enjoyed the responsibility.

Early on I discovered a shortcut through a wooded cemetery tumbling down a hillside behind St. Peter’s Church. One morning, when I stopped to tie a shoelace, I found that I was looking at the grave of Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein and widow of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. I had no idea that she was there, but then few people do. Mary Shelley only went to Bournemouth once, to visit her son who was living there, but she declared a wish to be buried there with her parents, the writer William Godwin and the noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin—a somewhat odd request since they were long dead and had no connection with the town either. Nonetheless Mary’s son dutifully had their remains brought from London and deposited beside his mother. Someone also tossed in the heart of Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water), who had drowned in Greece nearly thirty years before. It was his first visit to Bournemouth, too. So Bournemouth’s most famous (and possibly most crowded) grave contains the last earthly remains of four people who had nothing to do with the place, three of whom never even saw it.

For years all this felt like my little secret—even people in Bournemouth, I found, didn’t know about the grave—but when I passed it now I was interested to see that two bouquets had been laid on the lid, so someone must miss her. A couple of other mourners, lacking flowers, had left empty crisp packets, bless them, while someone else had placed an empty can of Carlsberg lager on the grave of a man named Duckett, who went to a greater reward, according to the inscription, in 1890.

Opposite the cemetery, where a small supermarket stood in my day, is now a large Wetherspoon’s pub called, interestingly, the Mary Shelley. She really has been rediscovered. Around the corner there used to be a Forte’s café where the coffee machine sounded like a jet taking off (and the coffee tasted like jet fuel with milk in it), and where I stopped each morning for a coffee and to study one or two of the broadsheets in a desperate daily effort to swot up on English life and current affairs. And from there, suddenly vaguely nervous, I proceeded to work.

Now it can’t be argued that being a downtable copy editor on the
Bournemouth Evening Echo
was the most stressful and high-powered job in journalism in the 1970s, but it was stressful enough for me. The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa. Employing me was an act of kindness. I had only the barest working knowledge of British spelling, punctuation, grammar, and idiom, and almost no acquaintance at all with vast areas of the nation’s history, politics, and culture.

I remember one day I was given a Press Association story to edit that I couldn’t follow at all—or actually could only partly follow, which made it even more confusing. The story was clearly about declining stocks of seafood off the west coast of Cornwall, or something like that—it was all about bivalves and mollusks, I remember—but scattered through it were frequent unrelated references to a certain well-known northern railway station. I didn’t know if this was a mistake or just the Press Association being eccentric in some way that I didn’t yet understand. I had no idea what to do, so I just read the story over and over. For two or three paragraphs the story would make sense and then suddenly there would be a mysterious, seemingly nonsensical reference to this railway station.

As I sat there, paralyzed with uncertainty, a copy boy came past and dropped a slip of paper on my desk, and all suddenly became clear. The slip of paper was a correction, and it said: “In Cornish fisheries story, for ‘Crewe Station,’ please read ‘crustacean.’ ”

And I thought then, “I will
never
master this country” and I was right. I never have. Luckily for me, the people I worked with were kind and patient and looked after me. By sad coincidence two of them, Jack Straight and Martin Blaney, died within a couple of weeks of each other in early 2015, which is why I mention them, in affectionate commemoration, here.

—

I looked now for the café where I used to have my morning coffee, but couldn’t find it anywhere—couldn’t even find the 1950s arcade of which it used to be a part—and then I strode up to Richmond Hill and examined the old and very slightly faded offices of the
Echo
.

They dropped “Evening” from the title a few years ago in recognition that no one wants an evening paper anymore, but they can’t do anything about the consideration that hardly anyone wants a paper at all. The
Echo
’s circulation was about sixty-five thousand in my day, which wasn’t very robust even then; it’s under twenty thousand now. In one recent six-month period it fell by 21 percent. The
Echo
used to occupy the whole building, but now most of the downstairs belongs to a bar called the Ink Bar and a restaurant called the Print Room, both closed for refurbishment when I passed. But at least the
Echo
is still hanging in there. Since 2008, 150 local papers have closed in England, including some once major ones like the
Surrey Herald
and
Reading Post
. That’s not good. Without local newspapers there’s no one to tell you when somebody’s been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

The
Echo
doesn’t seem to be the only thing in Bournemouth that isn’t quite what it once was. The whole of the town center was eerily quiet for a weekday afternoon. In my day, the streets of Bournemouth were nearly always busy—when I close my eyes and recall it, it’s always sunny, with men in suits and women in summer dresses—but now it was nearly as empty as Sundays used to be. Bournemouth has always had an interesting downtown in that it consists of two shopping areas divided by the Pleasure Gardens, a long and lovely park with a bandstand, flower beds, and a little stream running through it. It used to be an agreeable intrusion, a leafy break from commerce when you were going from, say, Dingle’s Department Store on one side of the gardens to Woolworth’s on the other. But that was a pace for another age. Now people want to get everything accomplished in a hurry, and not have a lot of trees and lawns in the way, so they seem to have abandoned the heart of town altogether, on both sides of the park.

Some years ago they pedestrianized the Old Christchurch Road, a pleasantly curving shopping street, and gave it benches and tubs of flowers and smart brick paving, but over the years wherever the bricks have been lifted to renew pipes or do other groundwork, the intrusions have been roughly patched with asphalt, leaving behind long black gashes and unsightly rectangles. This is the problem with Austerity Britain. Repairs are either not made at all or are done in a slapdash fashion. There is a gradual deterioration until at some indefinable point the place stops being agreeable and instead becomes rundown and depressing. Welcome to Bournemouth. The tragedy for so many town councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right.

But then again, perhaps not. Bournemouth’s tourism numbers have plunged in recent years. Domestic visits fell from 5.6 million in 2000 to 3.3 million in 2011, and visitor nights in the same period more than halved from 23 million to 11.4 million. Bournemouth in my day prided itself on the range and elegance of its diversions. It had good theaters, stylish shops and restaurants, a renowned Sinfonietta Orchestra, and many other outposts of culture and refinement, but much of that is gone now. The Sinfonietta closed in 1999. The Winter Gardens went in 2002. The Pier Theatre followed more recently. A giant Imax theater opened on the seafront in 2002, but almost immediately ran into financial difficulties and closed three years later. In 2013, the council paid £7.5 million for the building just to tear it down. When I passed by now, the site was a giant hole in the ground.

But at least it still has the sea. Bournemouth boasts seven miles of golden beaches lined with cliffs and beach huts and indented here and there with steep wooded valleys called chines. There are still some very fine neighborhoods tucked up in those hills. I decided now to walk the four miles along the beachside promenade to Canford Cliffs, a neighborhood of old homes and considerable wealth at the top of Branksome Chine, and then back along the cliff tops.

It was a better day for walking than bathing—cool and overcast. Still, there were a fair number of people on the beach. Some were pretending to enjoy themselves. A few were doggedly sunbathing in defiance of the fact that the sky was a duvet of clouds. A small number were actually swimming, or at least bouncing in the waves. Years ago, when my wife and I were just dating, she took me on a day trip to the seaside at Brighton. It was my first exposure to the British at play in a marine environment. It was a fairly warm day—I remember the sun came out for whole moments at a time—and large numbers of people were in the sea. They were shrieking with what I took to be pleasure, but now realize was agony. Naively, I pulled off my T-shirt and sprinted into the water. It was like running into liquid nitrogen. It was the only time in my life in which I have moved like someone does when a movie film is reversed. I dived into the water and then straight back out again, backward, and have never gone into an English sea again.

Since that day, I have never assumed that anything is fun just because it looks like the English are enjoying themselves doing it, and mostly I have been right.

Later that same day this lovely young English girl, this person in whom I was about to entrust my permanent happiness and well-being, took me to a seafood wagon and bought me a little tub of whelks. If you have never dined on this marine delicacy, you may get the same experience by finding an old golf ball, removing the cover, and eating what remains. The whelk is the most flavorless and indestructible thing ever to be regarded as a food. I think I still have one of them in a jacket pocket somewhere.

—

At some point along the way to Canford Cliffs you leave Bournemouth and enter the neighboring town of Poole. I used to think Canford Cliffs was a perfect place, apart from a curious shortage of pubs. But it had pleasant residential streets on the wooded cliffs above the sea, a lovely little library and a proper village center, and I was pleased to see now, as I hauled myself a touch breathlessly up the steep road from the beach to the village, that it was more or less unchanged from thirty-odd years ago. I was rather more dismayed, though not altogether surprised, to find that the village center had lost a lot of shops—there was no greengrocer, butcher, bookshop, hardware store, or proper tearoom, the things every good village must have if it longs for my goodwill and patronage. Long ago, when it had those things, I used to imagine how pleasant it would be to live in a big house in Canford Cliffs and stroll to the shops each day to run your errands, but now the greater bulk of those shops are occupied by realtors. The one thing you can do well in Canford Cliffs these days is buy property, but of course that is the last thing you want to do if you are living there already. Or indeed if you want a cup of tea.

The only place I could find for refreshment was a modest establishment called the Coffee Saloon, which, as the name suggests, is like a saloon that sells coffee. It was fine—the tea was perfectly all right, the service friendly—but it wasn’t exactly the atmosphere I had in mind. As I sat drinking my tea, thinking that, with the best will in the world, this was not the most fun I had had in a long time, my cell phone rang.

It never rings. I had no idea where it was. I had to feel in every pocket and search through my backpack before I finally located it, down on the bottom under a couple of old whelks, on about the fifteenth ring. It was my wife. She sounded happy.

“You have a new granddaughter,” she said. “Come home.”

Chapter 9

Day Trips