The Road to Little Dribbling (20 page)

Anyway, I can’t pretend to really understand British systems, but I can tell you that on the fine spring morning when our story resumes I made my way west through Hampshire and Dorset principally along the B3006, A31, and A354 but with an interesting discontinuity on the A3090 between Hockley Viaduct and Oliver’s Battery, and, after taking advice at a filling station as to the best route between Romsey and Blandford Forum, reached Lyme Regis in late morning.

—

I have a great fondness for Lyme Regis, based almost exclusively on a hotel my wife and I stayed there many years ago over a wintry weekend as an extravagant treat when we were young and poor. It was a small hotel on the cliff top with long views across a cold sea. I think it had once been a private home, and it had seen better days, but to us it was the height of elegance because it had its own bar and there was a sweets trolley—which is to say, a wheeled cart laden with puddings and trifles and other rich treasures—at dinner. When the sweets trolley came rattling out each evening, every head in the dining room craned eagerly, believe me. The hotel was run by one harried, irritable man who seemed to be engaged in a long-term battle with the hotel infrastructure. I remember ordering a pint of lager in the tiny bar, and for the next ten minutes watched as he held a glass to a spigot that coughed and sputtered while he waggled the handle impatiently. At length he presented me with a glass about three-quarters filled with what seemed to be warm shaving foam. “I’ll have to change the barrel,” he muttered unhappily, as if I were being unreasonable with respect to beverages, and disappeared through a door. We never saw him in the bar again.

Lyme Regis remains a fine town, with a very steep high street, called Broad Street, leading up from Lyme Bay to a feast of wooded hills, which formerly were made up exclusively of large Victorian houses, but now seem also to incorporate a great many municipal parking lots. Lyme clearly struggles to accommodate the number of people who wish to drive through its narrow streets and leave their cars to sun while they amble around looking for refreshments and knickknacks. For a long time, the principal gift shop item in Britain seemed to be mugs, tea towels, and other kitchen items that said “Keep Calm and Carry On” on them, but now the thing seems to be to have planks of wood bearing inspirational messages like:

“Live Well, Love Much, Laugh Often”

or

“This Kitchen Is Seasoned with Love”

or

“Life Isn’t About Waiting for the Storm to Pass. It’s About Learning to Dance in the Rain.”

Every gift shopwindow in Lyme Regis, and there are many, had at least a couple of signs like this. I wanted to put stickers on them that said: “Caution: These Signs May Induce Bulimia,” but I guess there is a market for them. I walked around Lyme Regis pleased with the thought that nearly all my shopping in life is behind me. One of the great pleasures of dotage is the realization that you have pretty much everything you will ever need. Apart from a few perishable essentials like lightbulbs, batteries, and food, I require almost nothing. I don’t need any more furniture, books, decorative bowls, lap rugs, cushions with messages expressing my feelings about animals or housework, hot-water-bottle covers, paper clips, rubber bands, spare cans of paint, dried out paintbrushes, miscellaneous lengths of electrical wire, or any kind of metal objects that might one day theoretically come in handy for some as yet unimagined purpose. Thanks to years of travel at other people’s expense, I have a lifetime supply of soaps, small bottles of shampoo, aromatic lotions, sewing kits, and shoe mitts. I have over eleven hundred shower caps and require now only a reason to use them. I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist.

I am especially set for clothes. I have reached the time of life where all I want is to wear out the clothes I have and never get another thing. I think many men of a certain age will nod in agreement when I say there is a real satisfaction when you wear something out and can finally discard it—a feeling of a job well done. It’s not always easy. I have an L.L.Bean shirt that I have been trying to wear out for nearly twenty years. I wear that shirt up to two dozen times a month. I have washed the car with it. I have used it to clean the grate on the barbecue. I hate that shirt. I didn’t actually particularly like it the day I bought it. But I will wear it out if it kills me.

And so I walked about Lyme Regis with a slightly superior air, looking in windows and thinking, “No, I don’t need a dog basket or a plank of wood with a sentimental message on it or a new paperback thriller written with the blessing and possible light assistance of James Patterson or anything else for sale in Lyme Regis, but thank you very much for offering.”

I had a cup of coffee in a stylish deli, and went down to the seafront and walked along the Cobb, the magnificent curving seawall made famous by John Fowles in
The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
and there admired the views along the coastline.

I have walked this stretch of coast a few times and it is rolling perfection. When I first came to Dorset, nobody called it anything but the Dorset coast, but now it is the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, which is obviously a lot more impressive. There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological names—Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician—but that the one epoch that everybody knows about is named for the Jura Mountains in France, even though the Dorset coast is actually the best place in the world to see Jurassic outcrops.

There is, or at least always was, a sensational walk west from Lyme Regis to Seaton along a hanging path that has sheer cliffs above and below. Large signboards at each end warned you that for the next seven miles the path was inaccessible from sea, land, or air and that if you got in trouble rescue teams couldn’t airlift you out. This made the walk seem pleasingly dangerous and daring. Little did I know that it actually was. A big section of cliff face collapsed in early 2014, carrying away the path with it, though fortunately no walkers. The path has since been rerouted inland; it seems unlikely that the original can ever be reopened.

Dorset’s unstable cliffs have claimed many lives and a good deal of property over the years. One notable casualty was Richard Anning, who tumbled over a cliff in Lyme in 1810 and never got up again. Anning himself isn’t remembered now, but his daughter Mary is. She was just ten when her dad died, leaving the family in poverty, but Mary almost immediately embarked on a long career of excavating and selling fossils that she found along the sea strand. She is commonly credited with being the person referred to in the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore.”

To say that Mary Anning had an affinity for excavation is to put it mildly. In a career of more than thirty years she found the first British pterodactyl, the first complete plesiosaurus, and the finest ichthyosaurus. These were not the kind of fossils you could stick in your handbag: the ichthyosaurus was seventeen feet long. Excavating them took years of delicate, patient, expert toil. The plesiosaur alone occupied ten years of Anning’s life. She not only extracted with the utmost skill, but also provided lucid descriptions and first-rate drawings, and in consequence enjoyed the respect and friendship of many leading geologists and natural historians. But because important finds were rare and the work slow, she spent most of her life in straitened circumstances at the best of times. The house where she lived is now the local museum, and it is, let me say at once, a perfect little institution. If you go to Lyme Regis, don’t miss it.

The other memorable thing about Mary Anning, incidentally—though there wasn’t anything incidental about it to those around her—was that she seemed a curiously unlucky person to be close to. In addition to her father tumbling over a cliff, one of her sisters died in a house fire and three other siblings were killed by a lightning strike. Mary, sitting right beside them, was miraculously spared.

I’d have happily stayed longer but I had tracks to make. I was still sixty miles from Totnes, in Devon, where I had booked a room for the night, and as anyone who has traveled in the region in summer will know, sixty miles in the West Country is a very long way. Besides, I had one other place I wanted to stop en route: Torquay.

II

The British are an ingenious race. There can be no question about that. Their contribution to the world’s comfort and knowledge is way beyond what, measured proportionately, ought to come off a little island in the North Sea. Some years ago, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry made a study of national inventiveness and concluded that in the modern era Britain had produced 55 percent of all the world’s “significant inventions,” against 22 percent for the United States and 6 percent for Japan. That is an extraordinary proportion. But cashing in on them has been another matter altogether, and Torquay offers a salutary example of that in the shape of the now forgotten figure of Oliver Heaviside.

Heaviside was born in London in 1850, but passed much of his life in Torquay, a stately resort built around a lovely bay on a stretch of south Devon coastline known, just a touch hyperbolically, as the English Riviera. It remains a fine, old-fashioned town, with a promenade, some noble buildings, and a harbor picturesquely filled with pleasure boats, the whole backed by hills containing pink and cream-colored villas. It was to one of these hillside villas, where Heaviside lived and worked and died, that I directed my attention first.

Heaviside was short, ill-tempered, and hard of hearing, which no doubt contributed to his testiness. He had flaming red hair and a beard and, if surviving photographs are a reliable guide, a permanently crazed look. Children apparently followed him down the road and threw things at him. But he was possibly the greatest modern British inventor of whom no one has ever heard.

He was entirely self-taught. As a young man, he worked for a few years in telegraph offices, but quit that job at the age of twenty-four and never held another. Instead he moved to Devon and devoted himself to the private study of electromagnetism. Working from a flat above his brother’s music shop in Torquay, Heaviside made a number of important breakthroughs. For years people had been puzzled by how radio signals followed the curve of the earth instead of shooting off in a straight line into space. Even Marconi couldn’t explain how his radio messages reached ships that were over the horizon. Heaviside deduced the existence of a layer of ionized particles in the upper atmosphere which was bouncing radio signals back. It became known as the Heaviside layer.

Heaviside’s most singular contribution to modern life, however, was devising a way to boost telephone signals while simultaneously eliminating distortion—two things that had long been thought impossible. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Heaviside’s breakthrough. It made instantaneous long-distance communications possible and in so doing changed the world.

Heaviside’s house was on Lower Warberry Road, a very pleasant residential street, up in the hills above the bay, lined with some big houses, many of which have been converted into flats or nursing homes. I can think of worse places to end up than in an old house overlooking the sea at Torquay. Heaviside’s residence was a cream-colored building, hidden behind a high wall. Heaviside had just a room or two upstairs. After Heaviside’s time, the house spent some years as a small hotel, then gradually slid into dereliction. In 2009 it was damaged in a fire, probably accidentally started by a squatter. Today it remains abandoned, hidden behind high walls and plywood hoardings. There is supposedly a blue plaque on the building commemorating Heaviside, but I couldn’t see it anywhere from the road. I don’t imagine too many people come to look.

Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn’t bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest corporations in the world thanks in large part to its unrivaled lead in long-distance telephony. Heaviside should have ended up a multimillionaire but instead passed his last years living in angry poverty in a bedsit in Torquay with children following him down the road taunting him.

It is remarkable how often Britons invent or discover something of great value, then fail to cash in on it. The list of things invented, discovered, or developed in Britain that benefited Britain barely or not at all includes computers, radar, the endoscope, the zoom lens, holography, in vitro fertilization, animal cloning, magnetically levitated trains, and Viagra. Only the jet engine and antibiotics are British inventions from which the British still benefit. I had just read an interesting book called
The Compatibility Gene
by Daniel M. Davis, a professor at the University of Manchester, who noted in passing how two medical researchers, Derrick Brewerton in Britain and Paul Terasaki in the United States, had coincidentally made the same important breakthrough in the understanding of genes at the same time in the 1970s. Terasaki formed a company to exploit the commercial potential of his discovery and grew so wealthy that eventually he was making donations of $50 million a time. Brewerton wrote a book on arthritis and chaired a committee devoted to saving a beach near his home on the south coast. Somebody needs to explain to me why that seems so inevitable.

Heaviside wasn’t the only famous resident of this steep and pleasant neighborhood. Peter Cook, the comedian, was born a short distance away on Middle Warberry Road in a house then called Shearbridge, now called Kinbrae, and I decided to walk up there now and have a look. It took me some time to work out that although the streets are parallel and clearly from the same family, they don’t seem to be on talking terms because there was almost nowhere where they connected. So I walked quite a distance before finding my way to Kinbrae, which proved to be a biggish house divided, not terribly attractively, into apartments. I stood looking at it for a good while, without anything like a real thought in my head, then turned and, still thoughtless, walked through pleasant streets back downhill to the town.