As a writer, mounds of scribbled notes, papers, file folders, and edited manuscripts seem to accumulate on my desk. During my last effort to figure this out, I came across a photograph of a group of forty complete strangers, standing in the center of the back row, a thatched-roof house as a backdrop. I look at him now, remembering the group with bittersweet nostalgia. They were all foreign to me, but after eleven days on a bus in England, I remember them fondly.
When I told my father that I wanted to visit England, he said in his thick Yorkshire accent, “What the hell do you want to go there for?” Not Mr. Happy at best, he had a low opinion of the old country of him. What he wanted to answer was, “I’d like to know if his psychological problems are social in nature or based on individual idiosyncrasies,” but I bit my tongue. I was determined to one day visit the land of my ancestors.
I listed for him the many reasons to visit England. The main reason was that as well as being English by blood, if not by citizenship, the country is a huge cultural influence of the modern age. Birthplace of many luminaries, from Shakespeare to Churchill, the country has spawned an endless list of notable historical names in every field of endeavor. The fact that he wasn’t one of them was no reason to be bitter towards everyone.
Like hugging an octopus, one has to choose how to approach England. You can buy any number of rail passes at reasonable prices that allow you to get on and off at any time convenient for you. There are plenty of options, from walking tours of London to guided bike tours, or renting motorbikes and staying in Bed and Breakfasts. The problem is figuring out which one suits you best. In the end I opted for a guided coach tour of England, leaving out Wales and Scotland, which I’m sure are great, but would have taken the tour another ten days.
Whoever did the coach tour recommended it to me. The reasons became apparent after a while. The English drive on the other side of the road and after a lifetime of easy right-hand turns here, they suddenly become extremely dangerous there. You’ll appreciate the coachman’s driving skills once he’s seen how narrow some of the roads are. To make things easy for you, the trip itinerary is planned for you. On the first day you will see Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral, stay at your Plymouth hotel, leave in the morning to continue your tour of Devon and Cornwall and so on.
Beware, catalog tours change frequently, if not every year. The tour he had decided to take a year earlier was no longer offered. I settled for an eleven-day tour of England. The coach would leave London and travel around the country in a clockwise direction, stopping at picturesque towns and cities along the way. The pace was listed as a ‘busy’ itinerary, code for not exactly leisurely. Sometimes when we stopped we just had time to buy coffee and use the bathroom and then get back on the bus. A slower pace means you’ll be able to spend more time at each stop, but it also means fitting in fewer sites in the same amount of time. So if you stop at Bletchley Park on a ‘busy’ tour, you better be able to understand subtraction cipher in twenty seconds or you’ll be back on the bus without all the information about the German Enigma machine. That’s the thing about designing your own tour; you can stay as long as you want if something interests you.
Think of the coach tour as Introduction to England 101. They give you an overview and you decide what you would like most for your next visit. Another good thing about England is that they speak a form of English there. Well, outside of London they do. Within London, it would be difficult to find Englishmen other than the Queen. In fact, in all of England, except for bokes dressed as medieval falconers and their tour guide, you may have a hard time finding genuine English people. Those wonderful PBS shows like Downton Abby, Upstairs Downstairs and the like are all shams, reflecting a nonexistent, nostalgic vision of England, England as it used to be. That, in a way, is what the coach tour presents.
You see, England exported its lower ranks, people like the Schofields, and not having abandoned the class system yet, it needed to import a new batch of servants and coal miners from the colonies. That’s where all foreigners fit in. All the waiters, hotel concierges, room cleaners you meet will be foreigners, few of whom have a decent command of the language. The first clue should have been the customs agent who was African and spoke with a strong French accent asking me “How are you hare? Wuz da porpoze you visit?” Damn terrorists, I thought, the plane has been diverted to the Middle East while I slept! A Russian took me to my hotel and answered all my questions with unintelligible growls. The Egyptian concierge got mad at us colonials, the Polish room cleaner didn’t understand that I wanted her out of the room, and the Serbian maitre d’ pointed at the buffet and made energetic “Eat!” hand signals. he said: “Zix o’clock – eat!” Ah, merry old England!
All hotels have buffet breakfasts. I’ve heard it said that if you want to eat well in England, eat breakfast three times a day. The English kill their food with a hammer and then boil it for a day to remove any remaining flavor. When you travel the world, notice that there are no English restaurants, just many Scottish ones (MacDonald’s). Eat the buffet, it’s the best there is and it’s included in the price.
The tour was very reasonable at $2200 Canadian and put us in moderately good hotels. Please note that an English hotel with a four star rating is probably a three star hotel in the US or Canada. After my coach tour, I stayed two days in a dive that was below average for a motel but rated three stars. Our prisons have better accommodations. That one-bed room with peeling ceiling paint and creepy red stains dripping down the walls is $250 a night. There were better options I’m sure, but it was conveniently located for my planned excursions to Oxford and the Imperial War Museum in the other direction the next day.
The visit was great after leaving London. We stopped at Salisbury Cathedral and saw a copy of Magna Carter. Our group’s attorney said he made the trip worthwhile. Lawyers must be Toastmasters by nature; every time he spoke to me, it felt like he was praying before a sleeping jury, and his slow, loud pronouncements could be heard three counties away. We took a boat tour of Plymouth Harbor and saw the steps where the first settlers of the New World would have departed on the Mayflower.
We visited some picturesque towns on the Cornish coast, notably Tintagel, home to King Arthur’s court, and Clovelly, a quirky little cliffside fishing village where donkeys still haul supplies up the steep cobbled paths. The retired judge from South Carolina scraped the knees of his pants when he fell. We visited Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare, Bath, an ancient Roman town, and Chester, a quaint Elizabethan town of narrow streets lined with Tudor houses, where our talented tour guide helped us understand the history of street baths , which I almost made a contribution due to the length of your discussion. At the old Stratford hotel, the directions to my room were “Two stairs up, turn left, go down one flight, watch your head, then right, then go up one flight of stairs.” By now you have developed a Bill Bryson English accent. “Cheers” or “Very well, then,” you reply.
Next he goes to Liverpool, a surprise because it was not the city he thought it would be. I lived there as a baby and heard many stories about his appalling living conditions. It was also the second most important port in its day. Beatles fans will be able to see the Cavern Club, Penny Lane and relevant houses. This thrilled a young woman from Texas whose mother had bought her the trip for her nineteenth birthday. She knew more than the tour guide about the Fab Four. Liverpool, now quite modern, is also home to the headquarters of the White Star Line of Titanic fame. I bought a coffee from a Liverpuddlian but his English was worse than the Russians in Devon so I gave up trying to order milk and sugar, taking what I was given. Be warned, average coffee prices are two pounds, about $3.75 Canadian. Think of it as a visit to another planet and you’ll be fine, don’t try to make sense of everything. “Meat an shooha ova da, mayeet. Ta.” He says that, so you give him money. Smiles everywhere. Until you drink the coffee.
From there we went to the Lake District and took a boat trip on Lake Windermere, ten miles long, the largest lake in England. Home to many melancholy English authors and poets, it made me laugh because we have thousands of lakes, all bigger. However, they beat us melancholy poets.
Next it’s off to York, a gem of a city. We dined in a private mansion where we were graciously served by a well-to-do couple in their forties. It was at this evening that two Singaporean ladies asked, “How long do you have to stay married to a Canadian before you can get half ownership?” One year, was the answer, to which they both smiled widely.
The last stop on our tour was Cambridge and King’s College. I found a shop that sold obsolete military surplus, including Grenadier Guards tunics and bear skins. Street vendors on the River Cam sold bateas, the famous flat-bottomed boats in which a pole is used to propel the boat. Oh yeah, and lots of girls on bikes in skimpy dresses! Sorry I couldn’t stay for a Ph.D. or two.
I am a big fan of Inspector Lewis and added a trip to Oxford after the coach tour concluded. I wanted to see the small college town where three people are murdered every week, many of them, appropriately enough, academics. I also wanted to be able to tell people “I went to Oxford” and revel in his reactions when they draw the wrong conclusions. I sat on a bench by the Thames chatting with an older couple who knew Collin Dexter, the creator of the original Inspector Morse.
On my last day in England I visited the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, an easy tube ride to the south side of the Thames. World War II has been an abiding interest of mine since I was fifteen. The museum turned out to be smaller and more crowded than I had imagined. One day is enough to cover the exhibits, but I suspect I could have spent a lifetime in the upstairs library.
I had an uncle who died in that war as a pilot and I wanted to know if he was one of ‘the few’ that Churchill was referring to in his famous speech. The librarian said the military archives were now at Kew, but as my flight home was the next morning it would have to be another trip.
If you are looking for a pleasant and safe trip, I recommend England by bus. If you are an Anglophile, well, what are you waiting for? And no, not everyone in England is as miserable as dear Mr. Happy.
