The Road to Little Dribbling (24 page)

At about 10 p.m., the waitress asked me if I wanted dessert, and we immediately agreed that I was unlikely to live long enough to enjoy it, so we just settled on another pint of beer and the bill. It was quite a wonderful evening in the end—but then when did anyone ever drink seven or eight pints of beer and not have a good time?

Afterward I discovered that it is possible to get so drunk that you walk a mile and a half in the wrong direction to the hotel you used to stay at and then spend thirty minutes circling the building wondering why it is covered in scaffolding and your key doesn’t work in any of the doors. I don’t remember anything in detail after that, but I woke up the next morning on top of my bed in the correct hotel, wearing one shoe but otherwise fully dressed, and in the posture of (and feeling remarkably like) someone who has just fallen out of a tree.

II

Isn’t it amazing how many people in the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don’t like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia. The people at TripAdvisor would hate you, if they weren’t so fucking stupid. Almost all frontline hotel employees detest you, as do airline employees without exception. But nobody, absolutely nobody, hates you as much as the people who make English bus shelters. I’ve no idea why, but their most earnest wish, the single-minded thought that carries them through every working day, is to make sure that no user of a bus shelter in the United Kingdom ever experiences a single moment’s comfort. So all they give you to rest on is a red plastic slat, canted at an angle so severe that if you fail to maintain a vigilant braced position you will slide off, like a fried egg off Teflon.

I mention this here because after breakfast the next morning I went for a walk along the seafront and passed a new bus shelter that didn’t even have a canted rail in it, but just a simple pole—like a scaffolding pole, but shinier—resting on three legs. I went into the shelter and tried it just out of interest. It actually hurt to sit on. Goodness knows what a pensioner would make of it. And the shelter was ugly, too. Bus shelters in Britain used to be like little cottages, with pitched roofs and built-in wooden benches. Now they are just wind tunnels with advertisements.

So my question is a serious one. Why do these things have to be so horrible? Britain used to have a kind of instinct for producing jaunty, agreeable everyday objects. I don’t suppose any other nation has devised more incidental infrastructure about which one can feel a kind of connectedness and fondness—black taxicabs, double-decker buses, pub signs, Victorian lampposts, red mailboxes and phone booths, the absurdly impractical but endearing policeman’s helmet, and much more. These things were not always especially efficient or sensible—it could take an almost superhuman amount of exertion to heave open a cast-iron phone booth door if there was a wind blowing—but they gave life a quality and distinctiveness that set Britain apart. And now they are nearly all gone. Even black cabs in London are giving way to Mercedes vans with automatic doors that you get shouted at by the driver if you try to open yourself, and the police are dressed in yellow vests that make them look like the people who repair railway lines. In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier. Well, I don’t like it at all.

—

I was headed to Mousehole, a famously pretty fishing village. The curious name (pronounced
mowz-ull
) is of uncertain provenance, but probably comes from some old Cornish word. The village is about three miles along the coast road from Penzance. It was a fine morning, and quiet because it was Sunday. The views across Mount’s Bay were glittery and serene. Somewhere between the village of Newlyn and Mousehole itself I came upon the old Penlee Lifeboat Station, and that brought me up short because I knew it was famous for something but I couldn’t immediately think why. An information board beside the station filled in the details that my memory couldn’t supply. This was the site of an act of great but tragic heroism some thirty years earlier.

On the evening of December 19, 1981, a small cargo ship, the
Union Star,
on its maiden voyage from Holland to Ireland, got in trouble in heavy seas near here. It had been a wild day and by early evening the storm had turned into a Force 12 gale. As well as its normal complement of five crew, the
Union Star
was carrying the captain’s wife and two teenage daughters so that the family could celebrate Christmas together in Ireland. In the worst possible conditions, the ship’s engines failed and it began to drift helplessly. When word of a Mayday call was brought into the village pub in Mousehole, the lifeboat captain, Trevelyan Richards, selected seven volunteers and they set off at once for the station. With great difficulty the Penlee lifeboat put to sea and found its way to the stricken ship, where it managed somehow to get alongside and to get four people off. That in itself was an extraordinary achievement. Waves were up to fifty feet high.

Captain Richards radioed that they were bringing the four rescued people to shore and then would go back for the others. That was the last message ever sent. The presumption is that in the next moment a wave dashed the boats together and both sank. Whatever happened, sixteen people lost their lives. The Penlee station was never used again, but has been left just as it was that night as a permanent memorial.

I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people—teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub—drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that? The RNLI—I looked this up later—is an organization run by volunteers, supported entirely by public donations. It maintains 233 stations around the coast of Britain and averages twenty-two callouts per day. It saves 350 lives a year on average. There are times when Britain is the most wonderful country in the world—genuinely the most wonderful. This was one of them.

All this only deepened my admiration for Mousehole, which is in any case an absolutely lovely place. Its streets are narrow and crazily twisting. Many are too narrow for cars. Several lanes are more like passageways than streets. At the foot of the village stands a little harbor surrounded by a protective wall. The tide was out so the boats lay aslant on seaweed and mud. The sea beyond sparkled in the morning sun. St. Michael’s Mount shimmered, like a galleon in stone, across the bay. Standing on the quayside was the Ship Inn, a most perfect-looking pub. This was where the lifeboat men had set off from. On the front wall was a plaque in memory of its former landlord, Charles Greenhaugh, who was one of the eight Mousehole men to die that night. Because it was early on a Sunday morning, the village was quiet and everything shut, so I just shuffled around a little, admired the view, then took a long, rather pensive walk back to Penzance.

—

In Penzance, I stood beside my car with a book of maps opened to Cornwall, trying to think what to do next when my eye fell on a place that I hadn’t been to, or even thought of, for forty years: Tintagel.

And so I had my next destination. I am not actually quite sure why because I don’t have deep and happy memories of it. I didn’t even like it the first time, but I felt a kind of compulsion to see it again. I think the very fact that I hadn’t seen it for forty years made it automatically of interest. I was curious not so much to reexperience Tintagel, but just to see how much, if any, of it came back to me.

Tintagel, if you don’t know it, is a promontory with a ruined castle, traditionally associated with King Arthur, standing high above a crashing sea on a bleak stretch of Cornish coast between Newquay and Bude. It is only about seven or eight miles off the A39, the main road through north Cornwall, but the lanes leading to it are so mazelike and slow that it feels like much more. On my first visit, I walked there from the nearby town of Camelford, little realizing that I would have to step into hedges every time a vehicle passed—which mercifully wasn’t all that often—and was dumbfounded to find that the route was both farther and more confusing than was indicated by the inch or so of space it took up on my map. As I stood at an unsignposted crossroads, map open, confused, a battered, ancient car pulled up alongside me and a window crashed down.

“Going to Tintagel?” said a woman with a refined voice.

I bent down to look in the window. A second woman was in the front passenger seat. “Why, yes,” I said.

“Hop in. We’ll give you a lift.”

I squeezed gratefully into a backseat that was tiny already and more or less filled to the ceiling with suitcases and travel gear. I sat with my legs hooked over my ears. We took off with a throaty
vrooom
—one of the few times in my life that I have experienced actual g-forces. I don’t know what kind of car it was, but the woman drove it as if she were Stirling Moss and this was the Nürburgring. She appeared to be short and almost perfectly round. Her companion, a woman of similar years, was tall and lean. I remember thinking that they could go to a costume party as the number 10.

The round one—the driver—began probing me with questions. What was I doing in Britain? Where had I been so far? She was particularly eager to know what I liked and disliked about their little island. I answered diplomatically that I liked it all.

“There must be something you don’t like,” she insisted.

I could see at once that this was a scenario without a winning outcome, so I said no, really, I liked everything.

“Surely there must be
some
thing you don’t like,” she persisted.

“Think hard,” urged her companion.

“Well, I am not crazy about the bacon,” I said.

“You don’t like our bacon,” said the round woman and in the rearview mirror I could see her eyebrow arch nearly to the ceiling. “And what is wrong with English bacon, pray?”

“It’s just different. We have it crisp in America.”

“And you think that’s better, do you?”

“It’s just the way I am used to it, I suppose.”

“When I was in Sunt Lewey,” said the thin one abruptly, “I had something they called hotcakes. Can you imagine it—cakes for breakfast.”

“They’re not really cakes,” I pointed out.

“Yes, they’re called hotcakes. I specifically remember,” the thin one insisted.

“What are they like, dear?” asked the small, round one.

“Well, they’re rather like our pancakes.”

“They
are
pancakes,” I said. “It’s just a different name.” But the women weren’t listening to me at all now.

“And they have them for breakfast?”

“Every day.”

“Never!”

“They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie.”

“For breakfast?”

“No, for lunch and dinner. But it’s not a pie at all, it’s a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it.”

“Sounds dreadful.”

“Oh, it is,” agreed her companion. “Quite dreadful.”

“Do you eat pizza pie?” the round one asked me accusingly now.

I allowed that sometimes I did.

“And you prefer it to English bacon?”

This question was too confusing to answer, so I just made some speaking shapes with my mouth, but no words came out.

“It’s very odd that you would like pizza pie but not English bacon. Don’t you find that odd, dear?” the short round one said to the thin one.

“Most peculiar,” agreed her friend. “But then Americans
are
quite peculiar if one is completely honest about it.”

The round one was looking at me narrowly in the mirror. “And what else don’t you like?” she said.

I was going to maintain my stance of diplomacy, but I found myself, against my own wishes and better judgment, saying, “Well, I am not actually crazy about the sausages either.”

“Our sausages? You don’t like our sausages?”

“I prefer the American ones.”

I was dismissed from the conversation again.

“Did you have sausages in Sunt Lewey, dear?” asked the round one of her friend.

“Yes, and they were most peculiar. They were small and rather spicy.”

“Ooh, I don’t like the sound of that.”

“No,” agreed the thin one.

The round one was looking at me critically again.

“Well, I hope you are not starving in this country. You seem to dislike everything.”

This was actually more or less correct, but I said, “No, I like everything else.” Then after about five minutes, I added: “It’s Saint Lewis, by the way. It’s pronounced
Saint Lewis,
not
Sunt Lewey
.” This was received with silence and I realized that our experiment in transatlantic friendship had come to an end. We parted ways in the central parking lot in Tintagel, and the last words I heard were the tall one saying, “
Most
peculiar. And rather ill-mannered, don’t you think?”

—

I parked now in the same spacious parking lot and ventured onto the high street. I had no recollection whatever of the community of Tintagel and could immediately see why. It was a spectacularly unmemorable place, consisting primarily of a single street lined with shops selling mostly New Age tat. It was very busy with tourists, and all the cafés and tearooms were packed.

I didn’t remember the castle either, but that is not entirely surprising since there is no castle to remember. It is just a few scraps of ruined wall standing on a windy platform of grass and rock 190 feet above the sea. The history of Tintagel Castle is a little obscure. It enters the literary record in a twelfth-century work by Geoffrey of Monmouth called
History of the Kings of Britain
. The story as told by Geoffrey was that the King of Britain, Uther Pendragon, fell for the beautiful wife of the Duke of Cornwall. Alarmed, the duke had his dear wife locked up in the stony fastness of Tintagel Castle while he went off to fight battles in some distant place. Uther, not to be denied, had his crafty wizard, Merlin, transform him into the very likeness of the duke and in this guise the king gained entrance to Tintagel. There he had his way with the duke’s unsuspecting (or at least uncomplaining) wife, and thus turned the duke into the first Cornish patsy, so to speak. The beautiful duchess soon afterward discovered that she was pregnant. The child of this union was King Arthur.