Notes from a Small Island Read online

  I’d intended to turn in early, but on the way to my room I noticed a door marked RESIDENTS’ LOUNGE and put my head in. It was a large parlour, with easy chairs and a settee, all with starched antimacassars; a bookcase with a modest selection of jigsaw puzzles and paperback books; an occasional table with some well-thumbed magazines; and a large colour television. I switched on the TV and looked through the magazines while I waited for it to warm up. They were all women’s magazines, but they weren’t like the magazines my mother and-sister read. The articles in my mother’s and sister’s magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like ‘Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms’, ‘Office Sex - How to Get It’, ‘Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex’ and ‘Those Shrinking Rainforests - Are They Any Good for Sex?’ The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They had titles like ‘Knit Your Own Twinset’, ‘Money-Saving Button Offer’, ‘Make This Super Knitted Soap-Saver’ and ‘Summer’s Here - It’s Time for Mayonnaise!’

  The programme that unfolded on the television was called Jason King. If you’re of a certain age and lacked a social life on Friday evenings in the early Seventies, you may recall that it involved a ridiculous rake in a poofy kaftan whom women unaccountably appeared to find alluring. I couldn’t decide whether to take hope from this or be depressed by it. The most remarkable thing about the programme was that, though I saw it only once more than twenty years ago, I have never lost the desire to work the fellow over with a baseball bat studded with nails.

  Towards the end of the programme another resident came in, carrying a bowl of steaming water and a towel. He said, ‘Oh!’ in surprise when he saw me and took a seat by the window. He was thin and red-faced and filled the room with a smell of liniment. He looked like someone with unhealthy sexual ambitions, the sort of person your PE teacher warned that you would turn into if you masturbated too extravagantly (someone, in short, like your PE teacher). I couldn’t be sure, but I would almost have sworn that I had seen him buying a packet of fruit gums at Suburban Wife-Swap that afternoon. He looked stealthily at me, possibly thinking something along the same lines, then covered his head with the towel and lowered his face to the bowl, where it remained for much of the rest of the evening.

  A few minutes later a bald-headed, middle-aged guy - a shoe salesman, I would have guessed - came in, said, ‘Hullo!’ to me and ‘Evening, Richard,’ to the towelled head and took a seat beside me. Shortly after that we were joined by an older man witha walking-stick, a dicky leg and a gruff manner. He looked darkly at us all, nodded the most tinily precise of acknowledgements, and fell heavily into his seat, where he spent the next twenty minutes manoeuvring his leg this way and that, as if positioning a heavy piece of furniture. I gathered that these people were all long-term residents.

  A sitcom came on called My Neighbour is a Darkie. I suppose that wasn’t its actual title, but that was the gist of it - that there was something richly comic in the notion of having black people living next door. It was full of lines like ‘Good lord, Gran, there’s a coloured chappie in your cupboard!’ and ‘Well, I couldn’t see him in the dark, could I?’ It was hopelessly moronic. The bald-headed guy beside me laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes, and from under the towel there came occasional snorts of amusement, but the colonel, I noticed, never laughed. He simply stared at me, as if trying to remember what dark event from his past I was associated with. Every time I looked over, his eyes were fixed on me. It was unnerving.

  A starburst briefly filled the screen, indicating an interval of adverts, which the bald-headed man used to quiz me in a friendly but confusingly disconnected way as to who I was and how I had fallen into their lives. He was delighted to find that I was American. ‘I’ve always wanted to see America,’ he said. ‘Tell me, do you have Woolworth’s there?’

  ‘Well, actually, Woolworth’s is American.’ ‘You don’t say!’ he said. ‘Did you hear that, Colonel? Woolworth’s is American.’ The colonel seemed unmoved by this intelligence. ‘And what about cornflakes?’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Do you have cornflakes in America?’ ‘Well, actually, they’re American, too.’ ‘Never!’

  I smiled weakly, and begged my legs to stand me up and take me out of there, but my lower body seemed oddly inert.

  ‘Fancy! So what brings you to Britain then if you have cornflakes already?’

  I looked at him to see if the question was serious, then embarked reluctantly and falteringly on a brief resume of my life to that point, but after a moment I realized that the programme had restarted and he wasn’t even pretending to listen, so I tailed off, and instead spent the whole of part two absorbing the heat of the colonel’s glare.

  When the programme finished, I was about to hoist myself from the chair and bid this happy trio a warm adieu when the door opened and Mrs Smegma came in with a tray of tea things and a plate of biscuits of the sort that I believe are called teatime variety, and everyone stirred friskily to life, rubbing their hands keenly and saying, ‘Ooh, lovely.’ To this day, I remain impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited by the prospect of a hot beverage.

  ‘And how was World of Birds tonight, Colonel?’ asked Mrs Smegma as she handed the colonel a cup of tea and a biscuit.

  ‘Couldn’t say,’ said the colonel archly. ‘The television -’ he smacked me in the side of the head with a meaningful look ‘- was tuned to the other side.’ Mrs Smegma gave me a sharp look, too, in sympathy. I think they were sleeping together.

  ‘World of Birds is the colonel’s favourite,’ she said to me in a tone that went some distance past hate, and handed me a cup of tea with a hard whitish biscuit.

  I mewed some pitiful apology.

  ‘It was puffins tonight,’ blurted the red-faced fellow, looking very pleased with himself.

  Mrs Smegma stared at him for a moment as if surprised to find that he had the power of speech. ‘Puffins!’ she said and gave me a still more withering expression that asked how anyone could be so lacking in fundamental human decency. ‘The colonel adores puffins. Don’t you, Arthur?’ She was definitely sleeping with him.

  ‘I do rather,’ said the colonel, biting unhappily into a chocolate bourbon.

  In shame, I sipped my tea and nibbled at my biscuit. I had never had tea with milk in it before or a biscuit of such rocklike cheer-lessness. It tasted like something you would give a budgie to strengthen its beak. After a minute the bald-headed guy leaned close to me and in a confiding whisper said, ‘You mustn’t mind the colonel. He hasn’t been the same since he lost his leg.’

  ‘Well, I hope for his sake he soon finds it,’ I replied, hazarding a little sarcasm. The bald-headed guy guffawed at this and for one terrifying moment I thought he was going to share my little quip with the colonel and Mrs Smegma, but instead he thrust a meaty hand at me and introduced himself. I don’t remember his name now, but it was one of those names that only English people have -Colin Crapspray or Bertram Pantyshield or something similarlyimprobable. I gave a crooked smile, thinking he must be pulling my leg, and said, ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied coldly. ‘Why, do you find it amusing?’

  ‘It’s just that it’s kind of ... unusual.’

  ‘Well, you may think so,’ he said and turned his attention to the colonel and Mrs Smegma, and I realized that I was now, and would doubtless forever remain, friendless in Dover.

  Over the next two days, Mrs Smegma persecuted me mercilessly, while the others, I suspected, scouted evidence for her. She reproached me for not turning the light off in my room when I went out, for not putting the lid down in the toilet when I’d finished, for taking the colonel’s hot water - I’d no idea he had his own until he started rattling the doorknob and making aggrieved noises in the corridor - for ordering the full English breakfast two days running and then leaving the fried tomato both times. ‘I see you’ve left the fried tomato again,’ she said on the second occasion. I didn’t know qu
ite what to say to this as it was incontestably true, so I simply furrowed my brow and joined her in staring at the offending item. I had actually been wondering for two days what it was. ‘May I request,’ she said in a voice heavy with pain and years of irritation, ‘that in future if you don’t require a fried tomato with your breakfast that you would be good enough to tell me.’

  Abashed, I watched her go. ‘I thought it was a blood clot!’ I wanted to yell after her, but of course I said nothing and merely skulked from the room to the triumphant beams of my fellow residents.

  After that, I stayed out of the house as much as I could. I went to the library and looked up ‘counterpane’ in a dictionary so that I might at least escape censure on that score. (I was astonished to find out what it was; for three days I’d been fiddling with the window.) Within the house, I tried to remain silent and inconspicuous. I even turned over quietly in my creaking bed. But no matter how hard I tried, I seemed fated to annoy. On the third afternoon as I crept in Mrs Smegma confronted me in the hallway with an empty cigarette packet, and demanded to know if it was I who had thrust it in the privet hedge. I began to understand why innocent people sign extravagant confessions in police stations. That evening, I forgot to turn off the water heater after a quick and stealthy bath and compounded the error by leaving strands of hair in the plughole. The next morning came the final humiliation. Mrs Smegma marched me wordlessly to the toilet and showed me a little turd that had not flushed away. We agreed that I should leave after

  breakfast. I caught a fast train to London, and had not been back to Dover

  since.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE ARE CERTAIN IDIOSYNCRATIC NOTIONS THAT YOU QUIETLY COME to accept when you live for a long time in Britain. One is that British summers used to be longer and sunnier. Another is that the England football team shouldn’t have any trouble with Norway. A third is the idea that Britain is a big place. This last is easily the most intractable.

  If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, ‘Well, now that’s a bit of a tall order,’ and then they’ll launch into a lively and protracted discussion of whether it’s better to take the A30 to Stockbridge and then the A303 to Ilchester or the A361 to Glastonbury via Shepton Mallet. Within minutes the conversation will plunge off into a level of detail that leaves you, as a foreigner, swivelling your head in quiet wonderment.

  ‘You know that layby outside Warminster, the one with the grit box with the broken handle?’ one of them will say. ‘You know, just past the turnoff for Little Puking but before the B6029 mini-roundabout. By the dead sycamore.’

  At this point, you find you are the only person in the group not nodding vigorously.

  ‘Well, about a quarter of a mile past there, not the first left turning, but the second one, there’s a lane between two hedgerows -they’re mostly hawthorn but with a little hazel mixed in. Well, if you follow that road past the reservoir and under the railway

  bridge, and take a sharp right at the Buggered Ploughman -’

  ‘Nice little pub,’ somebody will interject - usually, for some reason, a guy in a bulky cardigan. ‘They do a decent pint of Old Toejam.’

  ‘- and follow the dirt track through the army firing range and round the back of the cement works, it drops down onto the B3689 Ram’s Dropping bypass. It saves a good three or four minutes and cuts out the rail crossing at Great Shagging.’

  ‘Unless, of course, you’re coming from Crewkerne,’ someone else will add eagerly. ‘Now, if you’re coming from Crewkerne. ..’

  Give two or more men in a pub the names of any two places in Britain and they can happily fill hours. Wherever it is you want to go, the consensus is generally that it’s just about possible as long as you scrupulously avoid Okehampton, the Hanger Lane gyratory system, central Oxford and the Severn Bridge westbound between the hours of 3 p.m. on Fridays and 10 a.m. on Mondays, except bank holidays when you shouldn’t go anywhere at all. ‘Me, I don’t even walk to the corner shop on bank holidays,’ some little guy on the margins will chirp up proudly, as if by staying at home in Staines he has for years cannily avoided a notorious bottleneck at Scotch Corner.

  Eventually, when the intricacies of B-roads, contraflow blackspots and good places to get a bacon sandwich have been discussed so thoroughly that your ears have begun to seep blood, one member of the party will turn to you and idly ask over a sip of beer when you were thinking of setting off. When this happens, you must never answer truthfully and say, in that kind of dopey way of yours, ‘Oh, I don’t know, about ten, I suppose,’ because they’ll all be off again.

  ‘Ten o’clock?’ one of them will say and try to back his head off his shoulders. ‘As in ten o’clock a.m.?’ He’ll make a face like someone who’s taken a cricket ball in the scrotum but doesn’t want to appear wimpy because his girlfriend is watching. ‘Well, it’s entirely up to you, of course, but personally if / was planning to be in Cornwall by three o’clock tomorrow, I’d have left yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ someone else will say, chortling softly at this misplaced optimism. ‘I think you’re forgetting, Colin, that it’s half-term in North Wiltshire and West Somerset this week. It’ll be murder between Swindon and Warminster. No, you want to have left a week last Tuesday.’

  ‘And there’s the Great West Steam Rally at Little Dribbling thisweekend,’ somebody from across the room will add, strolling over to join you because it’s always pleasant to bring bad motoring news. ‘There’ll be 375,000 cars all converging on the Little Chef roundabout at Upton Dupton. We once spent eleven days in a tailback there, and that was just to get out of the car park. No, you want to have left when you were still in your mother’s womb, or preferably while you were spermatozoa, and even then you won’t find a parking space beyond Bodmin.’

  Once, when I was younger, I took all these alarming warnings to heart. I went home, reset the alarm clock, roused the family at four, to protests and general consternation, and had everyone bundled into the car and on the road by five. As a result, we were in Newquay in time for breakfast and had to wait around for seven hours before the holiday park would let us have one of their wretched chalets. And the worst of it was that I’d only agreed to go there because I thought the town was called Nookie and I wanted to stock up on postcards.

  The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretence that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Oh, yes, I know you are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe near by and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday on the Med, but it’s not near by in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is. If your concept of world geography was shaped entirely by what you read in the papers and saw on television, you would have no choice but to conclude that America must be about where Ireland is, that France and Germany lie roughly alongside the Azores, that Australia occupies a hot zone somewhere in the region of the Middle East, and that pretty much all the other sovereign states are either mythical (viz., Burundi, El Salvador, Mongolia and Bhutan) or can only be reached by spaceship. Consider how much news space in Britain is devoted to marginal American figures like Oliver North, Lorena Bobbitt, and OJ. Simpson - a man who played a sport that most Britons don’t understand and then made commercials for rental cars and that was it - and compare that with all the news reported in any year from Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. It’s crazy really. If there’s a political crisis in Italy or a nuclear spill in Karlsruhe, it gets maybe eight inches on an inside page. But if some woman in Shitkicker, West Virginia, cuts off her husband’s dick and flings it out the window in a fit of pique, it’s second lead on the 9 O’clock News and The Sunday Times i
s mobilizing the ‘Insight’ team. You figure it.

  I can remember, after I had been living about a year in Bournemouth and bought my first car, fiddling with the car radio and being astounded at how many of the stations it picked up were in French, then looking at a map and being even more astounded to realize that I was closer to Cherbourg than I was to London. I mentioned this at work the next day and most of my colleagues refused to believe it. Even when I showed them on a map, they frowned doubtfully and said things like, ‘Well, yes, it may be closer in a strict physical sense,’ as if I were splitting hairs and that really a whole new concept of distance was required once you waded into the English Channel - and of course to that extent they were right. Even now, I am frequently dumbfounded to realize that you can get on an airplane in London and in less time than it takes to get the foil lid off the little container of UHT milk and its contents distributed all over yourself and the man next to you (and it’s amazing, isn’t it, how much milk one of those little tubs holds?), you’re in Paris or Brussels and everyone looks like Yves Montand or Jeanne Moreau.

  I mention this because I was experiencing much the same sort of sense of wonderment as I stood on a dirty beach at Calais, on an unusually bright, clear autumn afternoon, staring at an outcrop on the horizon that was clearly and sunnily the White Cliffs of Dover. I knew, in a theoretical sort of way, that England was only a spit over 20 miles off, but I couldn’t quite believe that I could stand on a foreign beach and actually see it. I was so astonished, in fact, that I sought confirmation from a man trudging past in reflective mood.

  ‘Excusez-moi, monsieur,’ I enquired in my best French. ‘C’est Angleterre over there?’