"Notes from a small Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bryson Bill)

 CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE

 I HAVE A SMALL, TATTERED CLIPPING THAT I SOMETIMES CARRY WITH ME and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It's a weather forecast from the 'Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.'

 There you have in a single pithy sentence the English weather captured to perfection: dry but rainy with some warm/cool spells. The Western Daily Mail could run that forecast every day for all I know, it may and scarcely ever be wrong.

 To an outsider the most striking thing about the English weather is that there isn't very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger tornadoes, monsoons, raging blizzards, runforyourlife hailstorms are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles, and this is just fine by me. I like wearing the same type of clothing every day of the year. I appreciate not needing air conditioning or mesh screens on the windows to keep out the kind of insects and flying animals that drain your blood or eat away your face while you are sleeping. I like knowing that so long as I do not go walking up Ben Nevis in carpet slippers in February I will almost certainly never perish from the elements in this soft and gentle country.

 I mention this because as I sat eating my breakfast in the dining room of the Old England Hotel in BownessonWindermere, two days after leaving Morecambe, I was reading an article in The Times about an unseasonable snowstorm a 'blizzard', The Times called it that had 'gripped' parts of East Anglia. According to The Times report, the storm had covered parts of the region with 'more than two inches of snow' and created 'drifts up to six inches high'. In response to this, I did something I had never done before: I pulled out my notebook and drafted a letter to the editor in which I pointed out, in a kindly, helpful way, that two inches of snow cannot possibly constitute a blizzard and that six inches of snow is not a drift. A blizzard, I explained, is when you can't get your front door open. Drifts are things that make you lose your car till spring. Cold weather is when you leave part of your flesh on doorknobs, mailbox handles and other metal objects. And then I crumpled the letter up because I realized I was in serious danger of turning into one of the Colonel Blimp types who sat around me in considerable numbers, eating cornflakes or porridge with their blimpish wives, and without whom hotels like the Old England would not be able to survive.

 I was in Bowness because I had two days to kill until I was to be joined by two friends from London with whom I was going to spend the weekend walking. I was looking forward to that very much, but rather less to the prospect of another long, purposeless day in Bowness, pottering about trying to fill the empty hours till tea. There are, I find, only so many windowsful of teatowels, Peter Rabbit dinnerware and patterned jumpers I can look at before my interest in shopping palls, and I wasn't at all sure that I could face another day of poking about in this most challenging of resorts.

 I had come to Bowness more or less by default since it is the only place inside the Lake District National Park with a railway station. Besides, the idea of spending a couple of quiet days beside the tranquil beauty of Windermere, and wallowing in the plump comforts of a gracious (if costly) old hotel, had seemed distinctly appealing from the vantage of Morecambe Bay. But now, with one day down and another to go, I was beginning to feel stranded and fidgety, like someone at the end of a long period of convalescence. At least, I reflected optimistically, the unseasonable two inches of snow that had brutally lashed East Anglia, causing chaos on the roads and forcing people to battle their way through perilous snowdrifts, some of them as high as their ankletops, had mercifully passed this corner of England by. Here the elements were benign and the world outside the diningroom window sparkled weakly under a pale wintry sun.

 I decided to take the lake steamer to Ambleside. This would not only kill an hour and let me see the lake, but deliver me to a place rather more like a real town and less like a misplaced seaside resortthan Bowness. In Bowness, I had noted the day before, there are no fewer than eighteen shops where you can buy jumpers and at least twelve selling Peter Rabbit stuff, but just one butcher's. Ambleside on the other hand, though hardly unfamiliar with the manifold possibilities for enrichment presented by hordes of passing tourists, did at least have an excellent bookshop and any number of outdoor shops, which I find hugely if inexplicably diverting I caiPspend hours looking at rucksacks, kneesocks, compasses and survival rations, then go to another shop and look at precisely the same things all over again. So it was with a certain animated keenness that I made my way to the steamer pier shortly after breakfast. Alas, there I discovered that the steamers run only in the summer months, which seemed shortsighted on this mild morning because even now Bowness gently teemed with trippers. So I was forced, as a fallback, to pick my way through the scattered, shuffling throngs to the little ferry that shunts back and forth between Bowness and the old ferry house on the opposite shore. It travels only a few hundred yards, but it does at least run all year.

 A modest lineup of cars was patiently idling on the ferry approach, and there were eight or ten walkers as well, all with Mustos, rucksacks and sturdy boots. One fellow was even wearing shorts always a sign of advanced dementia in a British walker. Walking walking, that is, in the British sense was something that I had come into only relatively recently. I was not yet at the point where I would wear shorts with many pockets, but I had taken to tucking my trousers into my socks (though I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me what benefits this actually confers, other than making one look serious and committed).

 I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a bookstore and being surprised to find a whole section dedicated to 'Walking Guides'. This struck me as faintly bizarre and comical where I came from people did not as a rule require written instructions to achieve locomotion but then gradually I learned that there are, in fact, two kinds of walking in Britain, namely the everyday kind that gets you to the pub and, all being well, back home again, and the more earnest type that involves stout boots, Ordnance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in its terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in inappropriate weather.

 For years, I watched these walker types toiling off up cloudhidden hills in wet and savage weather and presumed they were genuinely insane. And then my old friend John Price, who had grown up in Liverpool and spent his youth doing foolish things on sheerfaced crags in the Lakes, encouraged me to join him and a couple of his friends for an amble that was the word he used up Haystacks one weekend. I think it was the combination of those two untaxingsounding words, 'amble' and 'Haystacks', and the promise of lots of drink afterwards, that lulled me from my natural caution.

 'Are you sure it's not too hard?' I asked.

 'Nah, just an amble,' John insisted.

 Well, of course it was anything but an amble. We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us. Beyond it lay even greater and remoter summits that had been quite invisible from the ribbon of black highway thousands of feet below. John and his chums toyed with my will to live in the cruellest possible way; seeing me falling behind, they would lounge around on boulders, Smoking and charting and resting, but the instant I caught up with them with a view to falling at their feet, they would bound up refreshed and, with a few encouraging words, set off anew with large, manly strides, so that I had to stumble after and never got a rest. I gasped and ached and sputtered, and realized that I had never done anything remotely this unnatural before and vowed never to attempt such folly again.

 And then, just as I was about to lie down and call for a stretcher, we crested a final rise and found ourselves abruptly, magically, on top of the earth, on a platform in the sky, amid an ocean of swelling summits. I had never seen anything half so beautiful before. 'Fuck me,' I said in a moment of special eloquence and realized I was hooked. Ever since then I had come back whenever they would have me, and never complained and even started tucking my trousers in my socks. I couldn't wait for the morrow.

 The ferry docked and I shuffled on board with the others. Windermere looked serene and exceedingly fetching in the gentle sunshine. Unusually there wasn't a single pleasure boat disturbing its glassy calmness. To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement. Some 14,000 powerboats let me repeat that number: 14,000 ate registered to use the lake. On a busy summer's day, as many as 1,600 powerboats may be outon the water at any one time, a good many of them zipping along at up to 40 mph with waterskiers in tow. This is in addition to all the thousands of other types of floating objects that may be out on the water and don't need to register dinghies, sailboats, sailboards, canoes, inflatables, lilos, various excursion steamers and the old chugging ferry I was on now all of them searching for a boatsized piece of water. It is all but impossible to stand on a lakeside bank on an August Sunday watching waterskiers slicing through packed shoals of dinghies and other floating detritus and not end up with your mouth open and your hands on your head.

 I had spent some weeks in the Lakes a year or so before working on an article for National Geographic and one of the passing thrills of the experience was being taken out for a morning on the lake on a national park launch. To show me just how dangerous it could be to let highpowered craft race around in this kind of crowded environment, the park warden pootled the launch out into the middle of the lake, told me to hang on 1 smiled at this: listen, I do 90 on the motorways then opened the throttle. Well, let me say this: 40 mph in a boat is nothing like 40 mph on a road. We took off with a velocity that snapped me back in the seat and had me clutching on for dear life with both hands, and bounced across the water like a flat stone fired from a gun. I have seldom been so petrified. Even on a quiet morning out of season, Windermere was clogged with impediments. We shot between little islands and skittered sideways past headlands that loomed up with alarming suddenness, like frights on a funfair ride. Imagine sharing this space with 1,600 other similarly dashing craft, most of them in the control of some potbellied urban halfwit with next to no experience of powered craft, plus all the floating jetsam of rowboats, kayaks, pedalos and the like and it is a wonder that there aren't bodies all over the water.

 The experience taught me two things first, that vomit vaporizes at 40 mph in an open boat and second that Windermere is an exceedingly compact body of water. And here we come to the point of all this. Britain is, for all its topographical diversity and timeless majesty, an exceedingly smallscale place. There isn't a single natural feature in the country that ranks anywhere in world terms no Alplike mountains, no stunning gorges, not even a single great river. You may think of the Thames as a substantial artery, but in world terms it is little more than an ambitious stream.

 Put it down in North America and it wouldn't even make the top one hundred. It would come in at number 108, to be precise, outclassed by such relative obscurities as the Skunk, the Kuskokwim and even the little Milk. Windermere may have pride of place among English lakes, but for each twelve square inches of Windermere's surface, Lake Superior offers 268 square feet of water. There is in Iowa a body of water called Dan Green Slough, which even most lowans have never heard of, and it is bigger than Windermere. The Lake District itself takes up less space than the Twin Cities.

 I think that's just wonderful not that these features are modest in their dimensions but that they are modest, in the middle of a densely crowded island and still wonderful. What an achievement that is. Do you have any idea, other than in a vague theoretical sense, just how desperately crowded Britain is? Did you know, for instance, that to achieve the same density of population in America you would have to uproot the entire populations of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado and Texas and pack them all into Iowa? Twenty million people live within a daytrip of the Lake District and 12 million, roughly a quarter of England's population, come to the Lakes each year. No wonder on some summer weekends it can take two hours to get through Ambleside and that you could almost walk across Windermere by stepping from boat to boat.

 And yet even at its worst, the Lake District remains more charming and less rapaciously commercialized than many famed beauty spots in more spacious countries. And away from the crowds away from Bowness, Hawkshead and Keswick, with their tea towels, tearooms, teapots and endless Beatrix Potter shit it retains pockets of sheer perfection, as I found now when the ferry nosed into its landing and we tumbled off. For a minute the landing area was a hive of activity as one group of cars got off, another got on and the eight or ten foot passengers departed in various directions. And then all was blissful silence. I followed a pretty, wooded road around the lake's edge before turning inland and heading for Near Sawrey.

 Near Sawrey is the home of Hilltop, the cottage where the inescapable Potter drew her sweet little watercolours and contrived her soppy stories. For most of the year, it is overrun with tourists from far and wide. Much of the village is given over to large (but discreetly sited) car parks and the tearoom even has a sign outfront advertising its fare in Japanese, egads. But the approaches to the village actually, it's just a hamlet (and do you know the difference, by the way, between 'village' and 'hamlet'? Surprisingly few people do, but it's quite simple really: one is a place where people live and the other is a play by Shakespeare) from every direction are exquisite and unspoiled: a meadowy green Eden laced with wandering slate walls, woodland clumps and low white farms against a backdrop of blue, beckoning hills. Even Near Sawrey itself has a beguiling, wellconcocted charm that belies the overwhelming hordes who come to shuffle through its most famous residence. Such indeed is Hilltop's alarming popularity that the National Trust doesn't even actively advertise it any more. Yet still the visitors come. Two coaches were disgorging chattering whitehaired occupants when I arrived and the main car park was already nearly full.

 I had been to Hilltop the year before, so I wandered past it and up a littleknown track to a tarn on some high ground behind it. Old Mrs Potter used to come up to this tarn regularly to thrash about on it in a rowingboat whether for healthful exercise or as a kind of flagellation I don't know but it was very lovely and seemingly quite forgotten. I had the distinct feeling that I was the first visitor to venture up there for years. Across the way, a farmer was mending a stretch of fallen wall and I stood and watched him for a while from a discreet distance, because if there is one thing nearly as soothing to the spirit as mending a drystone wall it is watching someone else doing it. I remember once, not long after we moved to the Yorkshire Dales, going for a stroll and happening across a farmer I knew slightly rebuilding a wall on a remote hill. It was a rotten January day full of drifting fog and rain and the thing is there wasn't any discernible point in his rebuilding the wall. He owned the fields on either side and in any case there was a gate that stood permanently open between the two so it wasn't as if the wall had any real function. I stood and watched him awhile and finally asked him why he was standing out in a cold rain rebuilding the wall. He looked at me with that special pained look Yorkshire farmers save for onlookers and other morons and said: 'Because it's fallen down, of course.' From this I learned, first of all, never to ask a Yorkshire farmer any question that can't be answered with 'pint of Tetley's' and that one of the primary reasons so much of the British landscape is so unutterably lovely and timeless is that most farmers, for whatever reason, take the trouble to keep it that way.

 It certainly has very little to do with money. Did you know that the Government spends less per person each year on national parks*"* than you spend on a single daily newspaper, that it gives more to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden than it does to all ten national parks together? The annual budget for the Lake District National Park, an area widely perceived as the most beautiful and environmentally sensitive in England, is .2.4 million, about the same as for a single large comprehensive school. From that sum the park authorities must manage the park, run ten information centres, pay 127 fulltime staff and forty parttime staff in summer, replace and maintain equipment and vehicles, fund improvements to the landscape, implement educational programmes and act as the local planning authority. That the Lakes are so generally wonderful, so scrupulously maintained, so seldom troubling to mind and spirit is a ringing testament to the people who work in them, the people who live in them and the people who use them. I recently read that more than half of Britons surveyed couldn't think of a single thing about their country to be proud of. Well, be proud of that.

 I spent a happy few hours tramping about through the sumptuous and easygoing landscape between Windermere and Coniston Water, and would gladly have stayed longer except that it began to rain a steady, dispiriting rain that I foolishly had not allowed for in regard to my walking apparel and anyway I was growing hungry, so I made my way back to the ferry and Bowness.

 Thus it was that I found myself an hour or so and an overpriced tuna sandwich later, back in the Old England, staring out at the wet lake through a large window and feeling bored and listless in that special way peculiar to wet afternoons spent in plush surroundings. To pass a halfhour, I went to the residents' lounge to see if I couldn't scare up a pot of coffee. The room was casually strewn with ageing colonels and their wives, sitting amid carelessly folded Daily Telegraphs. The colonels were all shortish, round men with tweedy jackets, wellslicked silvery hair, an outwardly gruff manner that concealed within a heart of flint, and, when they walked, a rakish limp. Their wives, lavishly rouged and powdered, looked as if they had just come from a coffin fitting. I felt seriously out of my element, and was surprised to find one of them a greyhaired lady who appeared to have put on her lipstick during an earth tremor addressing me in a friendly, conversational manner. It always takes me a moment to remember in these circumstances that I am now areasonably respectablelooking middleaged man and not a gangly young rube straight off the banana boat.

 We began, in the customary fashion, with a few words about the beastliness of the weather, but when the woman discovered I was an American she went off on some elaborate tangent about a trip she and Arthur Arthur, I gathered, being the shyly smiling clot beside her had recently taken to visit friends in California, and this gradually turned into what appeared to be a wellworn rant about the shortcomings of Americans. I never understand what people are thinking when they do this. Do they think I'll appreciate their candour? Are they winding me up? Or have they simply forgotten that I am one of the species myself? The same thing often happens when people talk about immigration in front of me.

 They're so forward, don't you think?' the lady sniffed and took a sip of tea. 'You've only to chat to a stranger for five minutes and they think you've become friends. I had some man in Encino a retired postal worker or some such thing asking my address and promising to call round next time he's in England. Can you imagine it? I'd never met the man in my life.' She took a sip of tea and grew momentarily thoughtful. 'He had the most extraordinary belt buckle. All silver and little gemstones.'

 'It's the food that gets me,' said her husband, raising himself a little to embark on a soliloquy, but it quickly became evident that he was one of those men who never get to say anything beyond the first sentence of a story.

 'Oh yes, the food!' cried his wife, seizing the point. 'They have the most extraordinary attitude to food.'

 'What, because they like it tasty?' I enquired with a thin smile.

 'No, my dear, the portions. The portions in America are positively obscene.''

 'I had a steak one time,' the man began with a little chortle.

 'And the things they do to the language! They simply cannot speak the Queen's English.'

 Now wait a minute. Say what you will about American portions and friendly guys with colourful belt buckles, but mind what you say about American English. 'Why should they speak the Queen's English?' I asked a trifle frostily. 'She's not their queen, after all.'

 'But the words they use. And their accents. What's that word you so dislike, Arthur?'

 'Normalcy,' said Arthur. 'I met this one fellow.'

 'But normalcy isn't an Americanism,' I said. 'It was coined in Britain.'

 'Oh, I don't think so, dear,' said the woman with the certainty of stupidity and bestowed a condescending smile. 'No, I'm sure not.'

 'In 1687,' I said, lying through my teeth. Well, I was right in the fundamentals normalcy is an anglicism. I just couldn't recall the details. 'Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders,' I added in a flash of inspiration. One of the things you get used to hearing when you are an American living in Britain is that America will be the death of English. It is a sentiment expressed to me surprisingly often, usually at dinner parties, usually by someone who has had a little too much to drink, but sometimes by a semidemented, overpowdered old crone like this one. There comes a time when you lose patience with this sort of thing. So I told her I told them both, for her husband looked as if he was about to utter another fraction of thought that whether they appreciated it or not British speech has been enlivened beyond measure by words created in America, words that they could not do without, and that one of these words was moron. I showed them my teeth, drained my coffee, and with a touch of hauteur excused myself. Then I went off to write another letter to the editor of The Times.

 By eleven the next morning, when John Price and a very nice fellow named David Partridge rolled up at the hotel in Price's car, I was waiting for them by the door. I forbade them a coffee stop in Bowness on the grounds that I could stand it no longer, and made them drive to the hotel near Bassenthwaite where Price had booked us rooms. There we dumped our bags, had a coffee, acquired three packed lunches from the kitchen, accoutred ourselves in stylish fellware and set off for Great Langdale. Now this was more like it.

 Despite threatening weather and the lateness of the year, the car parks and verges along the valley were crowded with cars. Everywhere people delved for equipment in boots or sat with car doors open pulling on warm socks and stout boots. We dressed our feet, then fell in with a straggly army of walkers, all with rucksacks and kneehigh woolly socks, and set off for a long, grassy humpback hill called the Band. We were headed for the fabled summit of Bow Fell, at 2,960 feet the sixth highest of the Lakeland hills. Walkers ahead of us formed wellspaced dots of slowmoving colour leading to an impossibly remote summit, lost in cloud. As ever, I was quietly astounded to find that so many people had beenseized with the notion that struggling up a mountainside on a damp Saturday on the winter end of October was fun.

 We climbed through the grassy lower slopes into everbleaker terrain, picking our way over rocks and scree, until we were up among the ragged shreds of cloud that hung above the valley floor perhaps a thousand feet below. The views were sensational the jagged peaks of the Langdale Pikes rising opposite and crowding against the narrow and gratifyingly remote valley, laced with tiny, stonewalled fields, and off to the west a swelling sea of hefty brown hills disappearing in mist and low cloud.

 As we pressed on the weather severely worsened. The air filled with swirling particles of ice that hit the skin like razor nicks. By the time we neared Three Tarns the weather was truly menacing, with thick fog joining the jagged sleet. Ferocious gusts of wind buffeted the hillside and reduced our progress to a creeping plod. The fog cut visibility to a few yards. Once or twice we briefly lost the path, which alarmed me as I didn't particularly want to die up here apart from anything else, I still had 4,700 unspent Profiles points on my Barclaycard. Out of the murk ahead of us emerged what looked disconcertingly like an orange snowman. It proved on closer inspection to be a hitech hiker's outfit. Somewhere inside it was a man.

 'Bit fresh,' the bundle offered understatedly.

 John and David asked him if he'd come far.

 'Just from Blea Tarn.' Blea Tarn was ten miles away over taxing terrain.

 'Bad over there?' John asked in what I had come to recognize was the abbreviated speech of fell walkers.

 'Handsandknees job,' said the man.

 They nodded knowingly.

 'Be like that here soon.'

 They nodded again.

 'Well, best be off,' announced the man as if he couldn't spend the whole day jabbering, and trundled off into the white soup. I watched him go, then turned to suggest that perhaps we should think about retreating to the valley, to a warm hostelry with hot food and cold beer, only to find Price and Partridge dematerializing into the mists thirty feet ahead of me.

 'Hey, wait for me!' I croaked and scrambled after.

 We made it to the top without incident. I counted thirtythree people there ahead of us, huddled among the fogwhitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountain top in an ice storm and realized there was no way you could explain it. We trudged over to a rock, where a couple kindly moved their rucksacks and shrank their picnic space to make room for us. We sat and delved among our brown bags in the piercing wind, cracking open hardboiled eggs with numbed fingers, sipping warm pop, eating floppy cheeseandpickle sandwiches, and staring into an impenetrable murk that we had spent three hours climbing through to get here, and I thought, I seriously thought: God, I love this country.