Walking to Camelot (15 page)

Imagine quaint country lanes, robins chirping, blossoms overflowing in orchards, and you will see our world today on the Macmillan Way. Imagine Arcadia — all that's missing are the Hesperidean nymphs. We pass over the gurgling infant River Evenlode and enter Lower Oddington. It's time to rest a bit in the churchyard. My eye fixes upon an enormous effigy of an unknown woman with Brobdingnagian feet sticking out from under her dress. Jumbled tombs are spread higgledy-piggledy throughout the rear of the graveyard beneath ancient yew trees.

“Mile 142, Karl, and just entering the environs of Stow.”

“You choose the pub, John boy. I am parched.”

“I can see it in my mind's eye. Tally ho!”

The long climb from the northeast up the main Stow road takes us past a vast meadow used by the gypsies for their annual Stow Horse Fairs. On a telephone pole I read a High Court order banning wagons and lorries from this field. Immediately beyond is a sprinkling of antique shops, chic clothing outlets, and towering Cotswold-stone buildings housing retailers at street level with living quarters above. Near the top of the hill is a rabbit warren of narrow alleys, ancient inns, and the town square. Stow has a reputation for severe weather: “Stow-on-the-Wold, where the winds blow cold and the cooks can't roast their dinners.”

Stow stands at the convergence of eight ancient roadways. Traders have passed through here for centuries with their wares: salt from Worcestershire, fish from the Severn estuary, iron and charcoal from the Forest of Dean. At Stow they exchanged goods and purchased food, shelter and stabling, pottery, saddles, and harnesses. But in later centuries the wool trade dominated all. At one of two annual fairs, vast flocks of sheep would be driven to the town's environs and then into the town square down narrow alleyways. Some twenty thousand sheep would be sold on a good day. Foreign goods were sold too, and monastic buyers came from six monasteries within thirty-five miles of the town. The spring fair was one of the largest in the country. When the wool market died, the traditional fair declined and the gypsy Horse Fair became the residual event. Today it remains one of the largest gatherings of its kind in England — popular with artists, photographers, and those appreciating traditions of a raunchy, folksy nature.

We have decided to stop an extra day here and are booked for two nights at the Old Stocks Hotel, named after the stocks that still rest on the green outside. These are about 150 years old, having replaced the originals that were used to bind minor miscreants and humiliate them in front of their tomato- and egg-throwing fellow townspeople. Today some shop owners would like to use the stocks once again to pelt the gypsies and chavs who occasionally frequent their town.

We are given a warm welcome by Jason and Helen Allen. At the bar one runs into patrons of all types: a ruddy-faced mason who specializes in laying Cotswold stone; an elderly couple up from Dorset for a weekend; Camera Club seniors from Oxford; even a Roy Orbison look-alike who dresses in black with long sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses. The music is a blend of sixties and seventies classic soft rock — the Beatles, Chad & Jeremy, Leonard Cohen, Orbison, with a bit of Frank Sinatra and Vera Lynn thrown in. Relaxed and mellow.

The Old Stocks dates to the sixteenth century and has the usual floorboard creaks here and there, but by and large it is all you would expect in a small hotel. It has also been discovered by American travel guru Rick Steves, so one must book well in advance. I ask Jason — a dapper, quick-witted man given to sarcasm with uppity guests — what's with all the orange traffic cones around town, and, for that matter, all over the roads of England? There are even a couple of orange cones in my field of vision from our bow-window table in the dining room, lying obtrusively next to the rustic old stocks. I go out to examine them and find they are only protecting grass. I ask Jason to remove them, for the cones are detracting from the ambience of the town square — not to mention the myriad tourists who want to be photographed sitting in the stocks.

Next morning I am sitting enjoying my poached eggs on toast and notice that the orange cones are now even more offensively placed: perched on the very top of the stocks! Jason has undoubtedly done this just to perturb me. So I decide that it is time for some colonial self-help action and trundle outside to determine how to remove the offensive objects. Jason must have seen me, as they subsequently disappeared altogether.

The streets are quiet at the moment, but I envision what it must have been like on that spring day in 1646, when the Royalist forces of Charles
I
, commanded by Sir Jacob Astley, were trapped in the square in front of me and slaughtered — thousands of horses and men fighting at close quarters, the heavy clashing of sword against sword, the neighing of the horses, mingled screams. Astley finally ordered 1,600 Royalist troops to put down their weapons, and Roundhead troops then marched them to the church, where they were held overnight. Popular tradition has it that the blood ran so thick that ducks floated in pools down Digbeth Street.

After breakfast Karl and I stroll over to the church. The north door is flanked by two enormous yew trees standing like sentries. This is the most enchanting church entrance I have ever seen. (Tolkien, it is said, was so transfixed by these gnarled, knobby ancient yews — a primordial vision of tangled roots, trailing moss, and earthy fecundity — that this doorway became his inspiration for the portal to Moria in
The Lord of the Rings
.) After a visit we duck into the coffeehouse next door for some mocha java. I reflect that the town centre looks much like it would have in the seventeenth century.

Next door to the Old Stocks is the Royalist Hotel, reputed to be the oldest inn in England, dating from the year 947. An ancient tunnel leads from the bar to the church across the square. In some guest rooms and to the left of the hotel's massive fireplace, “witch's marks” are clearly visible. These medieval symbols were intended to ward off spells cast by witches. The obsession with witches reached its climax during the Civil War, when one Matthew Hopkins claimed to be “Witch-Finder General,” ferreting out witches across the country. He was aided by zealous Puritan ministers and oddball fanatics.

St. Edward's Hall in the town square must surely be the only town hall built solely from the proceeds of unclaimed deposits at a town bank. Mysterious Fleece Alley dates from sheep-fair days. Swank shops and tourist nooks are the rule — upscale coffeehouses, bookshops, a chemist, stores like Groovy2Shoes, Styles of Stow, Laurie Leigh Antiques, Cotswold Baguettes, and one selling wood-burning stoves — though one would have to own a dukedom to afford wood in this country. Stow is all about Burberry and leather. No Oxfam here, please.

Stow is perpetually full of tourists — chiefly Japanese, North Americans, and elderly Brits from miles around who come here to stroll the streets, enjoy a cream tea, examine fine linens, and explore the curios, brass, and oak buffets in the cozy antique shops. “Look, Martha, imagine having to use one of those enamel chamber pots!” Of course, the tweedy rich don't browse; they come to certain shops by special appointment, blowing ten or twenty thousand pounds in an afternoon on such collectibles as a cobalt Ming vase, a Queen Anne glass bookcase, or a nineteenth-century edition of Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

We are treated this weekend to much activity in the town square, including Morris dancing, which dates back to medieval times and is still very popular in this part of England. Ironically, this quintessentially English dance originated with the Moors in Spain,
Morris
being a derivative of
Moorish
. Six men dress in costumes of white shirt and trousers, each with a hat colourfully garnished with flowers and ribbon. They wear gaiters with bells and carry sticks and handkerchiefs which they toss about, all to the accompaniment of a fiddler. Morris dancing had died out in Victorian England, but in reaction to industrialization, the late 1880s saw a revival of many rural customs, including quilting, folk music, and, of course, walking the footpaths. Although Morris dancing is still largely a male endeavour, we see a group of mixed young men and women practising the art. All participants are enjoying themselves immensely, as are the photo-snapping tourists.

Of course, there is that little problem of customer relations here. Unlike North America, the customer is not God, and should form a queue and wait patiently in line if there is anyone else near the counter. At the chemist's to purchase some Pepto-Bismol pills (to replace my bottle so injudiciously discarded en route), I ask the young clerk how things are going. She replies, “Just now, things are fine. But all morning it was simply horrible! Customers just kept coming in!” (One is reminded of the long-running sitcom
Are You Being Served?
)

There is still difficulty with servicing large groups of people, such as at restaurants, hotels, and food stores. Paul Theroux notes in
The Kingdom by the Sea
that the English “were brilliant at running a corner shop, but were failures when they tried their hands at supermarkets . . . The English do small things well and big things badly.”

The propensity of the English to close things up has even pervaded the churches. In London a notice was recently posted on a church door: “This is the Gate of Heaven. Enter ye all by this Door. This Door kept locked because of the draft. (Please use side door.)” The moral here: If the English can find an excuse to close it, they will. Whatever and whenever the English can squirrel away from the public, they will — their castles, their wares, their thermostats, themselves.

This is an oversimplification. Our Old Stocks is operated efficiently, and the Tesco supermarkets are big, bright, and generally well run. Though it was a tad perplexing to go shopping at the Stow Tesco at nine-thirty on a Sunday morning and be upbraided at the counter when I brought my apples and water bottles up:

“Sorry, sir, we are not yet open.”

The polite, brown-eyed cashier with the smart frock glanced at me pleasantly but firmly.

“
I don't understand,
”
I stammered. “I am here. You are open.”

“
No, sir, on Sundays we don't open until ten. Customers are only allowed to browse until we open.”

“
You mean I have to wait another twenty minutes to ring these few items through?”

“
I am afraid so, sir.”

“Right. Thank you so much. I am very sorry.”

So I cooled my heels in the wine section of the store, admiring all of the Australian brands of Shiraz that we never see in North America. What an odd little isle! Yet it once ruled half the world.

I reflect on the use of “sorry” in England. It is used as an important safety valve for people's emotions. It is a way to apologize without losing face, or a means of embarrassing the other person when they are clearly in the wrong — as if to say, “Is my eye bothering your elbow?” — or as a means of conveying a lack of understanding of the other person's position. The English are masters at defusing a tense situation by using this word to allow the other person to back down after you have been the first to apologize — without, of course, meaning it. Just when you think the English are the politest nation in the world — as they are — you realize that the constant use of such terms as “sorry,” “thank you,” and “please” is really a very clever means of defusing an embarrassing situation, limiting confrontation, or achieving one's own devious ends.

Stow is a pleasant place, but twice a year it is traumatized. Below the town in the large meadow Karl and I passed on entry, the gypsies gather twice a year for the Stow Horse Fair. The group is disparate, as it includes true Romany gypsies, travellers — as the Irish strain is known — plus camp followers. Some two thousand of them arrive in mid-May in their caravans and lorries, with hundreds of horses and ponies in tow. The mud is something awful. The May host is the largest, and last year I visited their encampment. One needed high boots to walk through the camp gumbo, alive with colourful wagons, wagging dogs wallowing in mire, and little boys in costume riding piebald ponies. Stallholders offer wares of silver, gold jewellery, utensils, exotic peasant costumes, horse equipment,
CD
s, and birds, plus traditional victuals like kebabs and frankfurters.

In late afternoon during fair week, hordes of young people roam the streets of Stow, and the County Council sends a hundred constables to patrol the streets, a few of whom actually stand inside the larger stores. Many shops close for the week. A pub was wrecked one night during a bar fracas. And each evening, dozens of gypsy girls prance and promenade up and down the streets wearing very little clothing — high boots, tank tops, and short cut-offs — on the prowl, and evidently not for just a one-night stand. It's a tradition for gypsies to broaden the bloodlines by seeking spouses for their young men and women outside the immediate community.

Locals allege that the owner of the horse meadow only offers it to the gypsies out of spite, because the County Council refuses to let him subdivide the acreage. Numerous injunctions have been obtained forbidding more than a handful of caravans to park in the field, but they are studiously ignored. That said, the right to a horse fair is ancient: royal charter gave it to Stow in 1476. For travellers, this is their equivalent to the Caribbean carnival — but many locals and policemen don't see it that way.

True gypsies belong to a wandering race that may be Indian in origin; their language, Romany, is a corrupted dialect of Hindi. Gypsies arrived in Britain in the late fifteenth century and have been part of the cultural mosaic ever since. They originally prospered in metalworking, and later branched out into basket and peg making, horse-dealing, flowers and herbs, and fortune-telling, and excelled as pipers and fiddlers. William Howitt, a nineteenth-century educator, wrote, “The picture of the rural life of England must be wholly defective which should omit those singular and most picturesque squatters on heaths and in lanes — the Gypsies; they make part and parcel of the landscape scenery.” There are thought to be more than 300,000 Romany and travellers in Britain today, and both groups are officially recognized as distinct ethnic minorities under the Race Relations Act.