The Road to Little Dribbling Read online

  Also by Bill Bryson

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  Mother Tongue

  Troublesome Words

  Neither Here Nor There

  Made in America

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  A Walk in the Woods

  Notes from a Big Country

  Down Under

  African Diary

  A Short History of Nearly Everything

  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

  Shakespeare (Eminent Lives series)

  Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors

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  One Summer

  Copyright © 2015 Bill Bryson

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Map and Line Illustrations Copyright © 2015 Neil Gower

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bryson, Bill, author

  The road to Little Dribbling : more notes from a small island / Bill Bryson.

  ISBN 978-0-385-68571-9 (bound). ISBN 978-0-385-68572-6 (epub)

  1. Bryson, Bill–Travel–England. 2. Bryson, Bill–Travel–England–Humor. 3. England–Description and travel. I. Title.

  DA632.B795 2015 914.204’86 C2015-906300-0

  C2015-906301-9

  Jacket images: (bulldog) Eric Isselee / Shutterstock images;

  (bow tie) mattasbestos / Shutterstock images

  Jacket design: CS Richardson

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To James, Rosie and Daphne. Welcome.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  1 Bugger Bognor!

  2 Seven Sisters

  3 Dover

  4 London

  5 Motopia

  6 A Great Park

  7 Into the Forest

  8 Beside the Seaside

  9 Day Trips

  10 To the West

  11 Devon

  12 Cornwall

  13 Ancient Britain

  14 East Anglia

  15 Cambridge

  16 Oxford and About

  17 The Midlands

  18 It’s So Bracing!

  19 The Peak District

  20 Wales

  21 The North

  22 Lancashire

  23 The Lakes

  24 Yorkshire

  25 Durham and the Northeast

  26 To Cape Wrath (and Considerably Beyond)

  Brief afterword and acknowledgements

  About the author

  Prologue

  I

  ONE OF THE THINGS that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself. Recently, in France, I was hit square on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I don’t think I could have managed in my younger, more alert years.

  There are really only two ways to get hit on the head by a parking barrier. One is to stand underneath a raised barrier and purposely allow it to fall on you. That is the easy way, obviously. The other method – and this is where a little diminished mental capacity can go a long way – is to forget the barrier you have just seen rise, step into the space it has vacated and stand with lips pursed while considering your next move, and then be taken completely by surprise as it slams down on your head like a sledgehammer on a spike. That is the method I went for.

  Let me say right now that this was a serious barrier – like a scaffolding pole with momentum – and it didn’t so much fall as crash back into its cradle. The venue for this adventure in cranial trauma was an open-air car park in a pleasant coastal resort in Normandy called Etretat, not far from Deauville, where my wife and I had gone for a few days. I was alone at this point, however, trying to find my way to a clifftop path at the far side of the car park, but the way was blocked by the barrier, which was too low for a man of my dimensions to duck under and much too high to vault. As I stood hesitating, a car pulled up, the driver took a ticket, the barrier rose and the driver drove on through. This was the moment that I chose to step forward and to stand considering my next move, little realizing that it would be mostly downwards.

  Well, I have never been hit so startlingly and hard. Suddenly I was both the most bewildered and relaxed person in France. My legs buckled and folded beneath me and my arms grew so independently lively that I managed to smack myself in the face with my elbows. For the next several minutes my walking was, for the most part, involuntarily sideways. A kindly lady helped me to a bench and gave me a square of chocolate, which I found I was still clutching the next morning. As I sat there, another car passed through and the barrier fell back into place with a reverberating clang. It seemed impossible that I could have survived such a violent blow. But then, because I am a little paranoid and given to private histrionics, I became convinced that I had in fact sustained grave internal injuries, which had not yet revealed themselves. Blood was pooling inside my head, like a slowly filling bath, and at some point soon my eyes would roll upwards, I would issue a dull groan, and quietly tip over, never to rise again.

  The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life that is left to you. I spent most of the following three days gazing appreciatively at Deauville, admiring its tidiness and wealth, going for long walks along its beach and promenade or just sitting and watching the rolling sea and blue sky. Deauville is a very fine town. There are far worse places to tip over.

  One afternoon as my wife and I sat on a bench facing the English Channel, I said to her, in my new reflective mood, ‘I bet whatever seaside town is directly opposite on the English side will be depressed and struggling, while Deauville remains well off and lovely. Why is that, do you suppose?’

  ‘No idea,’ my wife said. She was reading a novel and didn’t accept that I was about to die.

  ‘What is opposite us?’ I asked.

  ‘No idea,’ she said and turned a page.

  ‘Weymouth?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Hove maybe?’

  ‘Which part of “no idea” are you struggling to get on top of?’

  I looked on her smartphone. (I’m not allowed a smartphone of my own because I would lose it.) I don’t know how accurate her maps are – they often urge us to go to Michigan or California when we are looking for some place in Worcestershire – but the name that came up on the screen was Bognor Regis.

  I didn’t think anything of this at the time, but soon it would come to seem almost prophetic.

  II

  I first came to England at the other end of my life, when I was still quite young, just twenty.

  In those days, for a short but intensive period, a very high proportion of all in the world that was worth taking note of came out of Britain. The Beatles, James Bond, Mary Quant and miniskirts, Twiggy and Justin de Villeneuve, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s love life, Princess Margaret’s love life, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, suit jackets without collars, television series like The Avengers and The Prisoner, spy novels by John le Carré and Len D
eighton, Marianne Faithfull and Dusty Springfield, quirky movies starring David Hemmings and Terence Stamp that we didn’t quite get in Iowa, Harold Pinter plays that we didn’t get at all, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, That Was the Week That Was, the Profumo scandal – practically everything really.

  Advertisements in magazines like the New Yorker and Esquire were full of British products in a way they never would be again – Gilbey’s and Tanqueray gin, Harris tweeds, BOAC airliners, Aquascutum suits and Viyella shirts, Keens felted hats, Alan Paine sweaters, Daks trousers, MG and Austin Healey sports cars, a hundred varieties of Scotch whisky. It was clear that if you wanted quality and suavity in your life, it was British goods that were in large part going to supply it. Not all of this made a great deal of sense even then, it must be said. A popular cologne of the day was called Pub. I am not at all sure what resonances that was supposed to evoke. I have been drinking in England for forty years and I can’t say that I have ever encountered anything in a pub that I would want to rub on my face.

  Because of all the attention we gave Britain, I thought I knew a fair amount about the place, but I quickly discovered upon arriving that I was very wrong. I couldn’t even speak my own language there. In the first few days, I failed to distinguish between collar and colour, khaki and car key, letters and lettuce, bed and bared, karma and calmer.

  Needing a haircut, I ventured into a unisex hairdresser’s in Oxford, where the proprietress, a large and vaguely forbidding woman, escorted me to a chair, and there informed me crisply: ‘Your hair will be cut by a vet today.’

  I was taken aback. ‘Like a person who treats sick animals?’ I said, quietly horrified.

  ‘No, her name is Yvette,’ she replied and with the briefest of gazes into my face made it clear that I was the most exhausting idiot that she had encountered in some time.

  In a pub I asked what kind of sandwiches they had.

  ‘Ham and cheese,’ the man said.

  ‘Oh, yes please,’ I said.

  ‘Yes please what?’ he said.

  ‘Yes please, ham and cheese,’ I said, but with less confidence.

  ‘No, it’s ham or cheese,’ he explained.

  ‘You don’t do them both together?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, surprised, then leaned towards him and in a low, confidential tone said: ‘Why not? Too flavourful?’

  He stared at me.

  ‘I’ll have cheese then, please,’ I said contritely.

  When the sandwich came, the cheese was extravagantly shredded – I had never seen a dairy product distressed before serving – and accompanied by what I now know was Branston pickle, but what looked to me then like what you find when you stick your hand into a clogged sump.

  I nibbled it tentatively and was pleased to discover that it was delicious. Gradually it dawned on me that I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvellous. It is a feeling that has never left me.

  My time in Britain describes a kind of bell curve, starting at the bottom left-hand corner in the ‘Knows Almost Nothing at All’ zone, and rising in a gradual arc to ‘Pretty Thorough Acquaintanceship’ at the top. Having attained this summit, I assumed that I would remain there permanently, but recently I have begun to slide down the other side towards ignorance and bewilderment again as increasingly I find myself living in a country that I don’t altogether recognize. It is a place full of celebrities whose names I don’t know and talents I cannot discern, of acronyms (BFF, TMI, TOWIE) that have to be explained to me, of people who seem to be experiencing a different kind of reality from the one I know.

  I am constantly at a loss in this new world. Recently I closed my door on a caller because I couldn’t think what else to do with him. He was a meter reader. At first I was pleased to see him. We haven’t had a meter reader at our house since Edward Heath was prime minister, so I let him in gladly and even fetched a stepladder so that he could climb up and get a clear reading. It was only when he departed and returned a minute later that I began to regret our deepening relationship.

  ‘Sorry, I also need to read the meter in the men’s room,’ he told me.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It says here there is a second meter in the men’s room.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have a men’s room because this is a house, you see.’

  ‘It says here it’s a school.’

  ‘Well, it’s not. It’s a house. You were just in it. Did you see roomfuls of young people?’

  He thought hard for a minute.

  ‘Do you mind if I have a look around?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Just a little look. Won’t take five minutes.’

  ‘You think you’re going to find a men’s room that we have somehow overlooked?’

  ‘You never know!’ he said brightly.

  ‘I’m shutting the door now because I don’t know what else to do,’ I said and shut the door. I could hear him making mild bleatings through the wood. ‘Besides I have an important appointment,’ I called back through the wood. And it was true. I did have an important appointment – one, as it happens, that has everything to do with the book that follows.

  I was about to go to Eastleigh to take a British citizenship test.

  The irony of this was not lost on me. Just as I was becoming thoroughly remystified by life in modern Britain, I was being summoned to demonstrate that I understood the place.

  III

  For a long time, there were two ways to become a British citizen. The first, the trickier but paradoxically much the more common method, was to find your way into a British womb and wait for nine months. The other way was to fill out some forms and swear an oath. Since 2005, however, people in the second category have additionally had to demonstrate proficiency in English and pass a knowledge test.

  I was excused the language test because English is my native tongue, but no one is excused the knowledge test, and it’s tough. No matter how well you think you know Britain, you don’t know the things you need to know to pass the Life in Britain Knowledge Test. You need to know, for instance, who Sake Dean Mahomet was. (He was the man who introduced shampoo to Britain. Honestly.) You need to know by what other name the 1944 Education Act is known. (The Butler Act.) You need to know when life peerages were created (1958) and in what year the maximum length of a working day for women and children was reduced to ten hours (1847). You have to be able to identify Jenson Button. (No point asking why.) You can be denied citizenship if you don’t know the number of member states in the Commonwealth, who Britain’s enemies in the Crimean War were, the percentages of people who describe themselves as Sikh, Muslim, Hindu or Christian, and the actual name of the Big Ben tower. (It’s the Elizabeth Tower.) You even have to know a few things that aren’t in fact true. If, for instance, you are asked, ‘What are the two most distant points on the British mainland?’ you have to say, ‘Land’s End and John o’Groats’ even though they are not. This is one tough test.

  To prepare, I ordered the full set of study guides, consisting of a shiny paperback called Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents and two auxiliary volumes: an Official Study Guide, which tells you how to use the first book (essentially, start at page one and move through the following pages one at a time, in order), and a volume of Official Practice Questions and Answers, containing seventeen practice tests. Naturally, I did a couple of these before reading a word of the study guides and was horrified at how poorly I did. (When you are asked ‘What are Welsh MPs called?’ the answer is not ‘Gareth and Dafydd mostly.’)

  The study guide is an interesting book, nicely modest, a little vacuous at times, but with its heart in the right place. Britain, you learn, is a country that cherishes fair play, is rather good at art and literature, values good manners, and has often shown itself to be commendably inventive, especially around things that run on steam. The people are a generally decent lot who garden, go for walks in the country, eat roast beef and Yor
kshire pudding on Sundays (unless they are Scottish, in which case they may go for haggis). They holiday at the seaside, obey the Green Cross Code, queue patiently, vote sensibly, respect the police, venerate the monarch, and practise moderation in all things. Occasionally they go to a public house to drink two units or fewer of good English ale and to have a game of pool or skittles. (You sometimes feel that the people who wrote the guidebook should get out more.)

  At times the book is so careful about being inoffensive that it doesn’t actually say anything at all, as in this discussion, given here in full, of the contemporary music scene: ‘There are many different venues and musical events that take place across the UK.’ Thank you for that rich insight. (And I don’t like to be a smart alec, but venues don’t take place. They just are.) Sometimes the book is simply wrong, as when it declares that Land’s End and John o’Groats are maximally remote, and sometimes it is dubious and wrong. It cites the actor Anthony Hopkins as the kind of person Britons can be proud of without apparently pausing to reflect that Anthony Hopkins is now an American citizen living in California. It also misspells his first name. It calls the literary area of Westminster Abbey ‘Poet’s Corner’, perhaps in the belief that they only keep one poet at a time there. Generally, I try not to be overfussy about these things, but if it is a requirement that people who take the test should have a full command of English, then perhaps it would be an idea to make certain that those responsible for the test demonstrate a similar proficiency.

  And so, after a month’s hard study, the day of my test arrived. My instructions were to present myself at the appointed hour at a place called Wessex House in Eastleigh, Hampshire, the nearest testing centre to my home. Eastleigh is a satellite of Southampton and appears to have been bombed heavily during the Second World War, though perhaps not quite heavily enough. It is an interestingly unmemorable place – not numbingly ugly but not attractive either; not wretchedly poor but not prosperous; not completely dead in the centre, but clearly not thriving. The bus station was just an outer wall of Sainsbury’s with a glass marquee over it, evidently to give pigeons a dry place to shit.