A Slice of England

Why England? Good question.

It's quasi-European, but they speak English there. It's a non-stop flight, a mere eight hours across the "pond." We hadn't been there in forty-odd years. And there were a few places we'd never been that we wanted to see, especially south of London.

We set up an itinerary that included three nights in London followed by stops in Canterbury, Rye, Eastbourne, and a few villages in Dorset and Wiltshire. What we were going to do, specifically, was entirely open. As the trip began to take shape I might have mentioned Greenwich, Hampstead Heath, and Samuel Johnson's house as places I'd never been that might be interesting. We went to none of those places. Rather, we wandered London, visiting the National Gallery and the British Museum, Hyde Park and Westminster Abbey, and attended an international art song competition at Wigmore Hall—all of which places we'd been to before. So what? 

On our first morning, after dropping our bags at our B&B near Marble Arch, we wandered out into Hyde Park, where a large section of open ground had been roped off. Bobbies and military women and men wearing berets were at attention maybe a hundred yards apart. I asked one of them what was going on.

"We're going to do a 41-gun salute to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the queen." Interesting. The field was full of geese and crows; there was no artillery in sight.

A half-hour later, while we were eating some sandwiches at a café overlooking the Serpentine, a pack of elaborately uniformed horsemen rode by just outside. Time to head back to that field. We arrived to see them charge down from the north dragging cannons, set them up, and blow them off one at a time. Then do it again. And again.

On the first blast, the crows and geese took off. The smoke billowed out of the cannons and hung in the air in clouds fifteen feet off the ground. I could hear a military band playing on the other side of the field, where a crowd had gathered that seemed slightly larger than the fifteen or twenty passersby we were among.

It took a while to reach forty-one blasts, but we had time. Then they reattached the cannons to the horses and charged by us again, their swords and accoutrements clattering at their sides.

 

A few hours later, on the advice of the couple who ran our B & B, we were sitting at a table on the sidewalk in front of the Duke of Kendal Gastropub. It's situated on the triangular tip of a backstreet intersection in quiet Connaught Village, a neighborhood just north of Hyde Park that I'd never heard of until I looked it up just now. The streets here are lined with tiny shops—cheese, patisserie, fresh flowers—and "ethnic" cafés, including a Persian "tapas" restaurant and two Iraqi places. On our plates, fish and chips and a fresh Greek salad. People were conversing in twos and threes at nearby tables over beer or wine. Bicycles and cars whizzed by. The best of European life on a mild sunny evening.   

We wandered London for two days, then hopped a train to Canterbury, a fairly large town masquerading successfully as a lively village. Lots of restaurants, street musicians, tourists ogling the impressive cathedral, and students attending one of the four local universities. Two blocks off main street things quite down. We enjoyed a peaceful walk along the river, listened to the bells chiming at some length, and attended an evensong at the towering cathedral, which was directly behind our hotel.

Another short train ride took us to Dover, where we'd rented a car. That night we were at an inn near the coast just outside the village of Winchelsea. Taking a walk across the fields at sunset we came upon a man out for a stroll with his son. Formerly the London bureau-chief of Knight-Ridder news service, he wanted to talk about Trump. Why? Why? Why? I finally had to remind him about Brexit, and said, "Liz Truss wasn't too impressive, either."

"Tell me about it," he said. "The first day she was in office, I lost ten percent of my pension."

I asked him whether there was a footpath from Winchelea to Rye, which lies a few mile to the east along the coast.

"There is; you can do it," he replied, "but it's a rotten trail."

The next morning we drove into Winchelsea, one of the few English towns laid out in a grid—it's only a few blocks long—and hunted down the house where Ford Madox Ford lived for several years early in his career. Ford's work is not well known today, but I was deeply impressed in college by his tetralogy of WWI novels that were later published together under the title No More Parades.

Here, in a nutshell, is the way Amazon describes his career.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and editor. He was an international influence in early 20th-century literature. Ford grew up in a cultured, artistic environment as the son of a German music critic and grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown. He wrote his first novel at 18 and went on to publish more than 70 works. He is remembered for Parade's End and his generous encouragement of younger writers.

For many years I was in the habit of hunting down Ford's lesser books in used-book stores, and over time I amassed quite a few, most of which now languish in a box in the basement alongside forgotten works by W. H. Hudson and George Moore. I took a closer look at one of Ford’s early travel books, The Heart of the Country,  before we embarked on our whirlwind trip across the countryside of the southern Home Counties, but it didn’t grab me. I’m reading it again now, having been there, with greater pleasure.

Our next stop was Lamb House in nearby Rye, where Henry James lived for several decades in the early twentierth century. Not large, but “well appointed,” as they say. The walls of the study ar lined with pencil scetches of those of James’s literary friends who also happened to be friends, including Ford, Kipling, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and others.

I’m not a huge fan of “the Master,” as Ford often referred to James. He seemed to be fond of writing books about things that didn’t happen, at increasingly great length. My approach has been—the shorter the better: Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle.

I asked both of the tour guides present in the house whether they were full-fledged fans of James’s work, and neither would admit to it. I shared two quips with the knowledgeable guide in the bedroom and got a hearty laugh from both. “Henry Adams’ wife once remarked that in his later novels Henry James chewed more than he bit off.” And “I believe it was Oscar Wilde who remarked that James wrote novels as if it were a painful duty.”

But I have it in mind to give James another go … right after I finish The Heart of the Country.

In an entirely different key, we drove out the Rye Harbor Nature Reserve, a vast and impressive collection of trains through salt marshes and across beaches at the edge of the English Channel. And we saw some new birds there, including the little egret, common redshank, eurasian curlew, eurasian oystercatcher, great crested grebe, little grebe, and great cormorant.

From that point on our route was designed to take us past long-distance footpaths. England has quite a few. We had planned to walk the last few miles of the North Downs Way, following the route pilgrims used to take into Canterbury, but events intervened. We picked up the South Downs Way at Beachy Head and walked it for a few miles, high above the sea. And we joined it again thirty-odd miles inland just west of Steyning, where it proved a lot harder to hike up to it than to follow it once we reached the top of the “down.” We were overtaken by a psychiatrist and his Irish setter during our ascent who advised us as to the best way to the top, and during our subsequent trek I enjoyed chatting with a man who spends his winters in Crete about the recently concluded U.S. Open, where the rising British star Jack Draper had made an impressive run to the semi-finals.

The countryside was grand. We passed yellow fields of wheat and herds of white cattle, with blackberries in the hedgerows and red kites occasionally hovering above. And from time to time we could see the English Channel glistening on the horizon far to the south.

The most luxurious of our lodgings was Gore Farm, an AirB&B a few miles south of Shaftsbury. We were surprised when the caretaker informed us that the little cottage we’d rented, which looked out onto a plowed field surrounded by mature woods, was appended to the home of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, renowned orchestra conductor and founder of the Monteverdi Choir. That evening we sat on the terrace in front of the house with a glass of wine and watched the shadows lengthen across the recently plowed field as the sun set while listening to some Bach cantatas Hilary had called up on her phone. The next morning we walked through the woods and across the road to Fontmell Downs, the obscure but lovely National Trust holding that had attracted us to the area in the first place.

Near the end of our two-week circuit we spent some time wandering the famous landscape garden at Stourhead and exploring the Stone Age archeological sites in the vicinity of Avebury. These generally ill-formed stone megaliths are less concentrated and less impressive than the ones at nearby Stonehenge, but they’re more extensive, cover a much wider area, and are a delight to wander among. The nearby West Kennet Long Barrow, sitting on the top of a hill in a farmer’s field, is also an impressive site. The burial remains it contained have been dated to around 3600 B.C.E. 

A mile or two down the road we parked at the top of Hackpen Hill and walked a few miles on the Ridgeway Trail to Barbury Castle—not a castle at all, but an ancient grass-covered hill ringed by primitive earthen defenses.