Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (6 page)

Leave Okehampton, drive to Tavistock on the A386, park in the ubiquitous car-park, walk around looking for the tea-room we’d eaten in in 1987, finally give up and have lunch in a place called The Coffee Mill. Toasted cheese and bacon sandwich for Susan, cream tea for me—the Cornish clotted cream and the Devon clotted cream are not quite the same, the Devon variety having a texture more like that of butter; both are good, but the Cornish version has the edge, I think. Shopped in town for a while, trying to determine how difficult it would be to send a bottle of Dartmoor Mead back to the States for Janet and Ricky Kagan (very difficult, as it turns out, so we give up the idea), then drive up on to the moor on the B3212, stopping briefly just before Princetown, somewhere near Merrivale, and stopping again later on somewhere up near Postbridge. The color of the hills on this side is predominantly purple, the color of the heather, which makes them look almost red from a distance. On the other side, where we stopped yesterday near Dartmeet, the hills were much more golden, the color of the gorse, as there was more of it there admixed with the heather. Drive to Mortonhampstead, passing the pony center again, then up the A382 to the B3219, up the A3072 to Coppelstone, then home on the A377 and along the network of back roads past Morchard Bishop to Wigham.

It’s still quite hot and bright, drought weather instead of the more usual English weather, and so we take a swim, joined by the new guests, the promised-to-be “quiet” English couple, who turn out to be a pleasant middle-aged English couple called Eva and Bill (he somewhat older than her; he remembers being wakened as a small child in the middle of the night when the news of VJ Day came in, and hearing all the boats in the harbor sounding their whistles—he was a retail buyer of china, who had bought plates for the
Queen Mary
and the
Queen Elizabeth;
she was an English teacher until her recent retirement, blonde, still pretty), and later by Steve and Dawn (Steve obviously somewhat apprehensive about the upcoming birth; talks uneasily about the birthing classes they are taking, hoping that the baby doesn’t come until they graduate), and then by Zulu, who splashes into the pool, swims around for awhile, and then tries to get out by the pool ladder, slipping and scrambling and whining, but finally clawing her way out (amusing to me that Dawn is concerned about the legal consequences of the French smoking, but doesn’t seem to care about the dog swimming in the pool with the guests, which in the States would almost certainly be enough of a Board of Health violation to shut them down). Zulu shakes herself dry, and then pounces on the cat when it comes wandering by, biting it ferociously—not really hurting it, but obviously annoying it. The cat makes protesting noises, and then finally gets fed up when Zulu won’t stop and starts to fight back; they disappear into the distance, still fighting and barking and spitting.

Dinner is again served at the big wooden table that night, but this time with just us and the English couple: chicken in a brownish sauce with bits of mushroom and bacon, red cabbage with juniper berries, roasted potatoes, squash (or marrows, as they’re called here) in tomato sauce—not tremendously good, but there’s lots of it, served family style in big bowls, and it’s considerably better than the night before; you get the feeling that they’re trying a bit harder now that the French, who they obviously didn’t much like, are gone. Pleasant dinner conversation with Eva and Bill during dinner and in the sitting room afterward, mostly about the inadequacies of various educational systems. Then to bed.

Wednesday, August 16
^th
—
Kelmscot Manor, Fallowfields & Kingston Bagpuise

Up about 7:20. When I go down to the gravel terrace before breakfast to write up these notes, Zulu comes prancing up with her food bowl in her jaws and thrusts it into my lap; do you think she’s trying to tell me something? A pleasant breakfast with Bill and Eva, over which we linger too long—we’re getting a late start today, and it’s a bad time for it, since today we also face the longest uninterrupted drive of the trip, from Devon almost to Oxford.

Drag our suitcases down to the car, pack up, and set off, on the road about 10:40. Take the A377 to Credition, then the A3072 to the M5. Take the M5 to the M4. It’s amazing how much quicker travel is on the M roads than it is on even the A roads in rural areas like Cornwall and Devon—it only takes us a bit more than two hours to get up near the Oxford area once we hit the M roads, and it takes us an hour just to get to where we pick up the M5 in the first place from Morchard Bishop; some of our journeys around Cornwall and Devon actually took as long or longer than it takes us to get from Exeter to Oxford.

Get off the main road a few miles from Kingston Bagpuise, about ten miles from Oxford, and, after some difficulty, find our way to Kelmscot, the country estate of William Morris, where Rossetti and others of the Pre-Raphaelites used to hang out, which is why Susan wants to see it. Stopped for an indifferent lunch at a pub called, believe it or not, the Plough Inn, and then pushed on to Kelmscot Manor itself. Explored the manor, which had unusually lovely hangings, tiles, wallpaper, and design elements, far superior to other country houses of this sort that we’ve seen—not surprising, I guess, considering that Morris and his artist friends designed and/or executed just about everything in the house themselves. Interesting that a man who considered himself a devoted socialist and who apparently would scold his wife for being extravagant in the shops would have such a rich and lovely home, but then Morris was full of contradictions, like many artistic people both then and now.

Finished touring Kelmscot about 4:15, drove back to the A420 to the A415, and so to Kingston Bagpuise, and our next inn, Fallowfields. This is another stone manor house, set a little closer to the main road than I had thought it would be, but there
are
extensive grounds behind the main house, including a large vegetable garden and some flower gardens. On the lawn in the rear is a sequoia that has been hit by lightning and blasted into an odd shape (the host seems surprised when we don’t recognize it, as though Americans see sequoias every day, but Susan explains that its almost as far to the nearest sequoia from our home in Philadelphia as it is from Philadelphia to Oxford). The host is named Anthony. His wife, Peta, is the behind-the-scenes person, while he deals with the public—this seems to be the way it usually breaks down at these B&Bs that are run by couples: one front person, usually the man (always was the man, anyway, in every place we stayed on this trip, and usually is at B&Bs at home, too), to deal directly with the guests, and one person, usually the woman, behind the scenes to deal with logistics and organization, and usually to do the cooking. Anthony’s duties also include taking care of the huge vegetable garden, and he tells us that when he first moved up here from London, he was quite a Green, and would never willingly have harmed an animal, but that maintaining a vegetable garden is a constant war with pests who want to eat your vegetables, and now, after two years of it, he now feels no compunction about going out with a .12 gauge and shooting the wood pigeons, who eat his brussel sprouts. Across the rear lawn, the one with the sequoia, is a field where sheep, and, occasionally, horses graze. House martins flit about under the eves of the main house, doing incredible aerial acrobatics; they nest right up under the eaves right above the window to our room, and we constantly see them flashing past the window as they swoop out to gobble bugs, or swoop home again.

We take a swim before dinner in one of the strangest swimming pools I’ve ever seen, an oddly designed stone pool set a few steps down from the lawn, overhung by grape vines and lavender. The deep end extends all the way across the long end of the pool, rather than dividing it in half horizontally in traditional fashion, and I can’t help wonder if the Aga Khan, whose mansion this formerly was, might not have come up with its eccentric design himself. (Later the thought occurs to me that perhaps we were swimming in the former horse trough.) We swim for about an hour, while sheep graze and bleat in the field alongside the pool, horses move restlessly around in the distance, and butterflies dart about near the lavender bushes. Spend some time rescuing ladybugs from drowning in the pool, scooping them up and putting them down by the poolside—probably largely a wasted effort, since many of them seem determined to march right back into the water again as soon as they recover themselves.

Dinner at the inn is expensive but fairly good. All Americans in attendance for the first time this trip, one nice couple from Chicago, and a nerdy fellow with an annoying voice who we take a dislike to at once, who is here with his family: a resigned-looking wife, and two daughters who he’s taking on a tour of Oxford in order to encourage them to go to English colleges. They look less than enthusiastic about the prospect.

Thursday, August 17th—
Uffington, Burford, Bourton-on-the-Water
&
Upper Slaughter

Called the car-rental company this morning to see if we can drop the car off in Oxford tomorrow rather than in Heathrow as we had originally arranged. Apparently, we can. The idea is that we will take the train into London from Oxford to catch our overnight sleeper to Inverness; this will save us a 40 pound cab ride in from Heathrow, and, since we have the rail flexipasses, should actually cost us nothing at all, as far as money out of our dwindling supply of cash is concerned, anyway.

After breakfast, drive out to see the Uffington White Horse. We park in the car park and walk up the long swell of a hill toward the White Horse, but are somewhat disappointed—because of the angle that the chalk figure is cut into the hill, it’s tilted away from our position here, and you really can’t get that good a look at it; you’d probably get a better angle on it and a better overview of it from one of the back roads in the valley below, but we don’t have the time to look for such a vantage point. Giving up on the White Horse, we drive on up into the Cotswalds, stopping at Burford. There’s a stream next to the car park, and we feed the ducks and swans the piece of toast we’ve brought all the way up from Tintagel (its companion having been carried off to an Unknown Fate by Sam the Dog), having forgotten to feed it to anything on Dartmoor the previous two days; the birds don’t seem to be particularly impressed by all the trouble we’ve gone to to import this piece of toast hundreds of miles especially for them, and devour it with neither more nor less enthusiasm than usual, although it is, by now, stale enough to be of the same consistency as sheet iron. We visit a craft’s fair in an old almshouse next to an ancient church and graveyard, then walk up the steep main street of Burford
(everything
here is uphill, remember?), shopping, buying presents for Ricky—a knife, that should be fun to get through customs—and for Tess, an Italianate plaster cherub for her garden.

Get back in the car and drive to Bourton-on-the-Water, park in a car park on the outskirts of town. Long hot walk in beside the little river Windrush. Bourton-on-the-Water is absolutely
packed
with tourists, with a population density that puts that other world-class tourist trap, New Hope, Pennsylvania—which it otherwise reminds us of—to shame; they also have more gift shops per square foot than New Hope does, an amazing accomplishment, and one that I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible. The walkway along the river and the narrow footbridges over it are especially crowded and busy, with several naked or near-naked children wading in the ankle-deep river, splashing, throwing stones, pushing each other over. Also see lots of dogs leaping in and out of the water, happily shaking themselves dry, leaping in again to retrieve a stick or a ball. Picnickers are everywhere. We also see lots of people being wheeled along the riverside and through the town in wheelchairs; we see far more handicapped people here in fifteen minutes than we’ve seen in all of England so far, or that we will see in Scotland—why so many in this one particular town, I wonder? Susan suggests that it’s because this is one of the few places we’ve been where everything isn’t sharply uphill; perhaps it’s also because it’s within day-trip range of bigger cities such as Oxford and London.

After lunch, which we have out under the trees in a grassy square in the center of town (Susan has a strange dish which consists of an enormous, hollowed-out Yorkshire Pudding full of Steak & Kidney Pie mix
and
french fries (sorry, chips)), we walk back along the river to the car, passing a clever duck who is hanging in the water downstream, comfortably out-of-sight from the main mass of tourists, and eating all the goodies that those tourists have let fall into the water, and which the current is now bringing to him: pieces of bread, bits of cake and cookies, ice-cream cones, etc. He can afford to be choosey, and he is only selecting the
very
choicest delicacies, which the current delivers almost right into his beak, with very little effort needed on his part except to open his beak at the right time. Smart duck.

Drive through Lower Slaughter, can’t find anyplace to park, drive on up to Upper Slaughter, on the hill above, park there. In contrast to Bourton-on-the-Water, there are almost no tourists at all in the Slaughters, particularly Upper Slaughter, although they are at least as lovely as Bourton-on-the-Water, and perhaps even more so. We have the whole village nearly to ourselves; the place is as deserted as a Hollywood back lot after working hours. We walk around looking at the fine old Cotswald stone buildings, walk down the hill to a ford over a small stream (a car conveniently fording it just as we arrive, splashing through water about a third of the way up its wheels, as if it is demonstrating the ford for us), then back up and around on the other side of town, back to the tiny square where we are parked. It’s getting late by now, so, reluctantly, we head back to Fallowfields.

Back at the inn, we go down to the pool for a swim, joining an English couple from Yorkshire named Sid and Kate, who are already down by the poolside. The inn cat, Healy, crouches nearby throughout, staring at us in amazement and some alarm as we actually put ourselves
into the water.
Willingly! (Strange, inscrutable creatures, these humans . . .) He is careful not to get too near, in case we should drag
him
in, too. We have a swim and a nice chat with Sid and Kate, then sit out by the pool and have drinks, very civilized. At dusk, the house martins dart about, gobbling up bugs, and then swoop up under the eaves, seeming to be about to fly right in our open bedroom window. They look like little jet fighters silhouetted against the darkening sky.