The Road to Little Dribbling (39 page)

That was the entirety of my experience, but I was so curious to see it again now that I parked off the high street and went for a walk around the town before checking in to my guesthouse. Fishguard was an oddity, I have to say. Three large pubs on the main square were closed down—the Abergwaun Hotel, Farmers Arms, and Royal Oak—as was the Ship and Anchor up the road. Several shop premises were empty, yet Fishguard still had a bookshop, a florist, a craft-shop-and-café—the very kinds of places you would expect to be first to go when a town is not doing well. I found my sleeping place with difficulty. The little park I recalled was really just a patch of grass. The shops across the road were still there, but weren’t in any way special. The awnings were long gone.

I stayed in the Manor Town House, a stylish guesthouse with entrancing sea views from all the back windows—quite the nicest guesthouse I stayed in on the trip. It was run by a friendly couple named Chris and Helen Sheldon. I chatted to Chris for quite a long time about Fishguard and west Wales generally. This part of Wales has a lot of economic problems—its GDP is just two-thirds the EU average, which is not all that spectacular in its own right since it includes places like Bulgaria and Romania—and yet it is a popular tourist area because of the beauty of the Pembrokeshire coast. So some places like Tenby and St. David’s are prosperous and lovely, and some like Milford Haven and Haverfordwest are struggling, and a few like Fishguard don’t quite know which camp they fall into.

Chris told me that the three pubs on the square had all failed recently, but that about half a dozen others had preceded them. Fortunately, one that survived was the tiny and exquisite Fishguard Arms, across the street. Five locals lounged comfortably in the front bar when I called in about half-past six. They looked surprised to find a stranger in their midst, but gave me amiable nods.

I retired with a beer to a small table in the corner. As I sat there, watching the golden bubbles of happiness rising in my glass, feeling awfully contented, I became aware that a man at the bar was looking at me in a not unfriendly way.

“You look like Bill Bryson,” he said.

I never know quite how to answer that.

“Do I?” I said stupidly.

“I saw Bill Bryson at the Hay Festival two years ago and you do look quite like him.”

You can see how powerfully I sear myself into people’s consciousnesses. The man had spent ninety minutes in my company at a literary festival and still wasn’t sure he recognized me.

The upshot is that I was outed, and I had to explain to them why I was in their fair little town, which elicited much interest. My new acquaintances couldn’t have been more welcoming. From them I learned all about Fishguard and its history—people in pubs always know everything—including that it was the last place in Britain invaded by a foreign army. That was in 1797 when a large French force led by a seventy-year-old American named William Tate came ashore in the harbor below, hoping that the Welsh would join them in revolt. In fact, the people of Wales didn’t like being invaded and fired guns at them. Since Tate’s army was made up of criminals and men who had been pressed into service—and since, let’s be frank, they were French—they surrendered more or less at once. Twelve invaders dropped their weapons and put their hands up when a farmer’s wife pointed a musket at them. All the invaders, including apparently Tate, were sent back to France and told never to do anything like that again, and they didn’t.

With warm feelings for Fishguard and the Fishguard Arms, and with one pint too many sloshing in my stomach, I bade my new friends farewell and toddled off in search of dinner.

—

In the morning, I drove down to the ferry terminal and had a look. It’s rather a forlorn place now. When I sailed from there in the 1970s, nearly a million people a year passed through Fishguard’s terminal. Today the number is 350,000 and falling. Now just two ferries a day go to Ireland and one of them leaves at two thirty in the morning. The other departs at two thirty in the afternoon. In between times, it seems, the place is dead.

I continued north to Aberystwyth, the main town along this stretch of coast, on a road between the sea and the Preseli Mountains. The hills were big and bleak, made bleaker by a sudden squally rain, which fell in sheets across the bare slopes. Somewhere in the crags above, now lost in gray swirl, was the outcrop from which the bluestones of Stonehenge came. It seemed to me beyond extraordinary that the people of Salisbury Plain would even know about stones high up in these remote hills, never mind decide to haul eighty of them home with them. There isn’t anything about that ancient world that doesn’t stagger.

Aberystwyth squatted, grim and gray, beneath a steady rain around a crescent bay. It is both an old seaside resort and a university town—one of several outposts of the University of Wales—which I thought might give it a certain perkiness, and perhaps it does in fine weather, but on this day of falling rain it was never going to be anything but miserable. There were no students on the streets—indeed, almost no people. I parked on the seafront and walked along its long, curving, lavishly puddled promenade. The prom had been battered by storms the previous winter and was being extensively reconstructed, but there were no workers visible, just idle machinery. At one end of the prom was a strikingly ugly pier. Photographs show that it was once quite lovely, but it has since been boxed in with what looked like painted plywood. How do people get permission to do these things? Beyond the pier was a headland with a big war memorial featuring a female figure with a curiously erotic air. I studied that for a minute, rain running down my neck, then went and had a cup of coffee. Then I shuffled around the town center pretending to look with interest in shopwindows, until I realized that this was ridiculous, so I squelched back to the car and returned to the road.

I drove inland past Devil’s Bridge, a beauty spot, and on through two attractive old spa towns, Llandrindod Wells and Builth Wells, stopping from time to time to have a look around and get wet all over again, and finally in midafternoon headed for the Brecon Beacons. This is an area of big hills and lush valleys of an intense and celebrated beauty, though I could see hardly any of it because of the clinging mists and drifting rain. It was an altogether wretched day.

The radio was full of talk of the upcoming Scottish referendum, in which the Scots were to decide whether they wished to remain in the United Kingdom or not, and I wondered idly why the Welsh weren’t more restive, too. They seem at least as marginalized as their Scottish cousins, and even more visibly a separate nation because of the Welsh language, whose wondrous agglomerations of consonants
^*
are visible everywhere—in street signs, house names, and in Welsh programs on the radio and television. You even quite often hear people speaking Welsh, whereas in Scotland the number of people who seriously speak Gaelic would barely fill a shower stall.

Not so long ago, Wales was the more conspicuously disgruntled member of the British tribe. Between 1979 and 1993, some two hundred English-owned second homes in Wales were burned down or seriously damaged in politically motivated arson attacks. Only one man was ever held accountable, a fellow named Sion Roberts, who was sent to prison for seven years in 1993, but he could hardly have been the only one doing it since he was only seven years old when the attacks began. After Roberts’s jailing the attacks abruptly ceased, and Wales returned to being tranquilly beautiful and entirely peaceful.

The Welsh had a referendum of their own in 1997 to decide on self-rule. It didn’t exactly electrify the nation. Voter turnout was barely 50 percent, and the vote to create a semi-autonomous Welsh Assembly passed by just 6,700 votes, out of 1,116,000 votes cast.

The weather cleared as I headed through the big valleys to my final destination, the little town of Crickhowell. The mists thinned and vanished, the sky filled with a fleet of puffy clouds, and the sun poured golden light across the hillsides. In the west, a nearly perfect rainbow shimmered above the hills. Wales was glorious.

Crickhowell is a perfect community, charming, prosperous, well preserved, with good shops and streets of pretty cottages. I checked into my hotel, the Bear, an old coaching inn, then went straight out to stretch my legs and enjoy being dry. The one problem with Crickhowell is that it is bombarded with traffic. All the routes out of the village seemed to turn into busy highways, unpleasant and difficult to stroll along, but at length I found my way down to the little River Usk and followed a path along the north bank through the valley. It was intensely beautiful.

Looking at my trusty Ordnance Survey map, I was slightly shocked to realize that just over the hills before me was the Rhondda Valley, once home of the greatest concentration of coal mines in the world. Among the communities was the famously tragic Aberfan, cruelly devastated by a landslide in 1966. I remember very clearly sitting at a kitchen table three thousand miles away, reading with horror about the sudden death of teachers and schoolchildren. I was fourteen years old and I think it may have been the only time in my adolescence that I interrupted my own enormous self-absorption to think about others.

I couldn’t remember many of the details now, but later back in my room I looked on the Internet. The story is simply told: one morning in October 1966, the people of Aberfan heard a terrible rumbling and looked up to see tens of thousands of tons of mining waste crashing down upon them. Years of mining spoil, casually heaped on a slope above the village, had broken loose. It wiped out the local school and much of the neighborhood around. One hundred and sixteen children and twenty-eight adults perished. Had the landslide happened a half hour earlier, the school would have been empty and nearly all those lives would have been spared. Had it happened the following day, the children would have been on half-term holiday and no one at all would have been hurt. They couldn’t have been unluckier.

Lord Robens, head of the National Coal Board, didn’t go to Aberfan at once, but instead stopped at the University of Surrey to receive an honor, an act of callous indifference. He refused to accept any blame, personal or collective, for the disaster. People from all over the world sent money to help Aberfan rebuild, but the NCB gave only £500 from the disaster fund to each family that lost a child, and only after making them prove that they were actually close to their children. At the same time, the NCB secretly appropriated £150,000 from the fund to clean up the mess that its own negligence had created. An inquiry later found the NCB wholly responsible for the landslide, and it paid the money back. No one was ever punished for all those deaths.

And with that melancholy thought floating through my head, I went to the hotel bar and had a very quiet beer before dinner.

*
Just to give you an idea, the Welsh for “What’s your name?” is “Be’ ydy’ch enw chi?” and “Do you speak English?” is “Ydych chi’n siarad Saesneg?”

Chapter 21

The North

O
NE OF THE THINGS
I noticed almost at once when I first came to Britain was how quiet it was. The United States, for all its other virtues, exists in a permanent din. It is a noisy country. We are noisy people. Our voices carry. You can sit in a crowded restaurant in America and follow every conversation in the room. If a guy fifty feet away has hemorrhoids, you’re going to know about it. You’re probably going to know what kind of unguent he is using and whether he applies it with two fingers or three. (We are medically candid as well.)

Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Check-in clerks bark: “Next in line!” Baristas at Starbucks shout: “Conchita, your order’s ready!” (I prefer not to give them my real name.) Disembodied voices in big stores ceaselessly hector you to take up their special offers or fill the air with thinly coded messages that someone’s having a heart attack in housewares. (“Attention: horizontal event in aisle seven.”) Moving walkways tell you over and over again that you are coming to the end and need to prepare yourself for independent locomotion.

England was so quiet in comparison. The whole country was like a big library. Even airport announcements were preceded by a gentle
bing-bong
sound, soothing in itself, followed by a soft female voice telling you that the 15:34 to Kuala Lumpur was now boarding. And there was such politeness, too. The voices in England didn’t order you to do something. They invited you to make your way.

All that is gone now. Today Britain is noisy, too, thanks mostly to cell phones. It’s a strange thing, but people in Britain still whisper when sharing a confidence face to face, but give them a cell phone, a seat in a railway car, and a sexually transmitted disease and they’ll share the news with everyone. I was on a packed rush-hour train from Swindon to London a while back when some idiot farther down the car put a conversation on speakerphone. The whole car could hear every word loud and clear. It was actually quite fascinating. You don’t usually get to hear both ends of a conversation, particularly when both parties are cretins. The man at our end was evidently seated with colleagues—they appeared to be returning from a regional meeting—and was speaking to another colleague back at the office. The banter between them was excruciating. I can’t remember anything at all of the conversation except that at one point the man back at the office said, in a hearty voice, “So how’s the fat slag?” and suddenly the speakerphone was switched off and the conversation became much quieter. It appeared that the man in the office didn’t know he was on speakerphone. All of us in my area beamed happily and returned to our reading. Nothing brings the English together like witnessing a deserving humiliation.