In the quarter-century of my visits to Britain, the English have made some progress in the advancement of plumbing. It may be a result of their conversion to decimal coinage, requiring as it does less time counting in twelves and twenties and giving greater opportunity to evaluate the possibilities of twentieth-century plumbing. Yet, while their tellies pluck signals from satellites, their water closets and basins still ignore the convenience of a hot-cold mixer faucet or the economy of a shower rather than a tub. Nevertheless, near my bed was a small shower offering three selections of water: scalding, numbing, and a tepid trickle.
Village Selborne is quiet and fully English in nearly its every detail inside and out: thatched or slate roofs, orange chimney pots, ivied walls, and a church from the time of the Plantagenets (Richard, Coeur de Lion). It’s famous because of an eighteenth-century book without characters (other than a turtle), plot, dialogue, or the slightest suspense; instead, it presents a text entirely of scientific letters composed by an Anglican curate. Any one of those details in America would doom it to oblivion, yet in England, Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in 1789, has not merely never been out of print, it is the fourth-most-republished book in the realm, standing behind only—as you might guess—the Bible and Shakespeare. How it comes in after John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress escapes me, but then salvation as a topic for me ranks just above, say, a documentary history of King James’s Privy Council; White, unassisted by any lures of salvation, employs scientific observations to carry along his lovely sentences. Here are four about a mice nest he found in a field of “corn”, i.e., wheat:
One of these nests I procured this autumn, most artificially platted, and composed of blades of wheat; perfectly round, and about the size of a cricket-ball; with the aperture so ingeniously closed that there was no discovering to what part it belonged. It was so compact and well filled that it would roll across the table without being discomposed, though it contained eight little mice that were naked and blind. As this nest was perfectly full, how could the dam come at her litter respectively, so as to administer a teat to each? Perhaps she opens different places for that purpose, adjusting them again when the business is over; but she could not possibly be contained herself in the ball with her young which, moreover, would be daily increasing in bulk.
At a time when belief in alchemy was not yet quite extinguished, his empirically observed and interpreted flora, fauna, and historical monuments, all presented in lucid and charming prose, stand without peer. My library shelves hold five different editions of White’s Natural History, one of them a four-volume tooled-leather version which is about number three or four on my to-grab-in-case-of-fire list, all of this perhaps explaining the return to Selborne.
We walked down the lane to his spacious home, the Wakes, to see his garden and its ha-ha (a kind of sunken, invisible fence against roaming sheep), his sundial, penned manuscripts, and books before moving on into the village, with his History in hand as a guide. Selborne was quite recognizable from White’s descriptions, even after two centuries: written words, a living village, and wayfarers drawn into a long linkage—surely one of the higher ends of travel.
An eighteenth-century ha-ha
That night, after hearing about an eighteenth-century resident ghost common to such inns, I was suddenly awakened in the early hours when the shower noisily turned itself on for a full minute before shutting itself off. A groggy voice from the darkness: “Why are you showering at two-seventeen in the morning?” I said I was not in the shower, I was in bed. “So you’re laying this off onto English plumbing?” and she was again asleep. Well, either it was one of the quirks of English plumbing or it was the ghost, but that leaves the question of how a specter gets itself dirty.
The next morning Lucy and I went up the lane to see the great and ancient yew growing next to the eight-hundred-year-old church belltower. The tree—White describes it, of course—had been there for about fourteen-hundred years; it was a sapling when Old English was the language of the land. Were I then traveling nearby, a curious fellow might have asked me, “How went it with you on the road?” but his words would have been, “Hu lomp eow on lade?” Or at least that’s the way a host questions Beowulf.
When I first saw the yew a few years earlier, I measured its circumference at six arm spans. For a trunk so large, it was not a tall tree, perhaps sixty feet, but its limbs were massive and stretched out far laterally. In their shade sat not just Gilbert White but countless other people, some of whom spoke the language of Beowulf and others who must have laid eyes on Henry the Eighth.
I was talking to Lucy about such longevity in a living organism as we came in sight of it. Where its massive crown once was, where limbs the size of lesser trees once were, now only scraggly branches showed, things not big enough even for a walking stick. The great yew of Selborne, one of the most celebrated trees in England, had been blown over by a gale two years previous and was dead. Although villagers laboriously reset it after the storm so that it sprouted the following spring, the shock was too much. Older than the legends of King Arthur, it was now a twelve-foot-high stump shedding thick bark as beetles and borers chewed it back into dust. No matter how fine the church furniture that craftsmen were about to fashion from its huge boughs, the yew would now be milled lumber rather than a living link to what had gone before.
The great yew tree of Selborne, England, in the nineteenth century
Some local antiquaries believed that sixty generations ago, near the entrance to an earlier church on the site, Saxons fused pagan lore and a newer religious belief by planting the yew as a symbol of Christian life everlasting. But if a symbol dies, then what happens to the belief it represents? Can a sanctuary bench holding village hindquarters symbolize eternity? (I have heard a sermon or two where that link is fitting.) Villagers took a waist-high cutting from the great tree and set it near the stump and called upon a woman in her ninety-first year and a boy in his first—the oldest and youngest residents—to add ceremonial handfuls of earth. Should that offshoot live as long as its parent, some writer might apotheosize it in A.D. 3400, yet another dispatch the ancient yew will have elicited.
The forecast called for Sunday to be “mainly dull,” and I hoped the phrase described the sky and not our events under it, and, indeed, the English morning did begin so, unbroken clouds an evenly dismal gray like the inside of an old galvanized bucket. Lucy and I headed toward Wales, and, for a while, we endured the motorway, the whole time reminded that a man at the helm of an eighteen-wheel lorry cannot maintain self-respect unless he drives eighty-five miles an hour, eight-point-five feet off the rear bumper of a small Japanese auto. (Later, a traveling Londoner—not a trucker—told me in all solemnity that his rental car seemed rather sluggish at 110 mph.)
We left the four-lane at first opportunity to take up the English game of two-lane dodge-’em: In addition to dodging moving vehicles, I dodged parked ones, sheep, cattle, five bicycles (two of them pedaled by nuns in breezy habits), a stone barn thrusting a corner into the roadway, and a game of netless badminton using the road as a court. Then, to emphasize the travail in our travel, the weather got in on it with a drizzle that slowed us but no one else.
About the time I was trying to recall the reason I’d left the quiet of my reading chair at home, the answer arrived in Ross-on-Wye, a name that sounds as if it should be on a dinerette menu. In that fine village near the Welsh border, we passed a half-timbered shop selling antiquarian books—a place ideal for a mainly dull day. That’s when I remembered my usual, nonpareil reason for visiting England: the chance to turn up a fine edition of some beloved book. This time I had in mind one I’d hunted for years. As remote as the possibility of finding it was, the bookshop did provide a reason to escape dodging and drizzle.
I asked the elderly proprietor, whose age had not removed his smile, if he might have a nicely bound copy of Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. “You’re wanting
,” he said, thinking, “a fine edition, perhaps full leather around vellum. Oh, that’s a difficult one, that is.” Shaking his head, he went to a glass-front cabinet, climbed a short ladder—“Not commonly found, that one”—stepped up on a chair so unsteadily I stood behind him at the ready. Still shaking his head and mumbling, he unlocked the case, fumbled among its disheveled shelves, head shaking, murmuring, “No. That’s not—Oh my word! I thought possibly—” Shaking his head, grumbling. “My memory, you see, age—Oh, dash it all! Not here, not there. Confound it!”
Then he went silent. Pulling forth a small tome, quarter leather with marbled boards, he said, “I do have this. Had it for some time, quite some time. I’m afraid it’s rather dear.” But what was it? He opened the book, studied it. “Oh yes, Mrs. Wilcox brought it in from the Barrington estate. That was, let’s see, four or five years ago. Yes, I’m almost certain of that. The Barrington estate. Unless it was the Jordan estate. That was quite a sale too.” What was he holding?
He rambled on so long he forgot why he was on the ladder and started to put the book back. I asked might I see it. “Oh, indeed!” And he handed down—ye gods and vestal maidens! It was Johnson’s Journey! A 1775 first edition, no less, a book Johnson himself might have held. After years of looking, I could scarcely believe it. At last! The spine would need repair, but the interior was immaculate. Expensive, yes, but to me the price was fair. I said to Lucy something along the lines of being able now to go home, and she reminded me the ship didn’t sail for another couple of weeks. Enough time to read on a day mainly dull.
We had tea and shortbread nearby in a café where the diners, in the English custom, sat sipping and whispering—not to keep secrets but to avoid disturbing, or sharing with, others. The aura in the place reminded me of a brass door-plaque I’d once seen in Norwich on the Strangers’ Club: MEMBERS ONLY. The tearoom was ideal to evaluate a rare volume, to turn its goldenly aged pages, to discover a perfectly drilled, quarter-inch-deep tunnel of a bookworm, a touch of character bespeaking mileage through two centuries. The text employed the charming, if challenging, eighteenth-century practice of using the so-called medial or long s that looks like an f. On the title page was a minuscule inscription in faded ink:
For W Fanshaw 1818
Johnson was gone by then, so the writing was not his, nor were several brief and faint penciled notations in a cursive from another century, a touch no new book can have until it has survived the maws of time. The pencilings here and there “corrected” Johnson’s use of commas but never his expression.
Lucy said, “Do you think you might put the book down and converse?” Of course, and I read her the Doctor’s first sentence, changing only Boswell’s name to hers and deliberately mispronouncing each medial s as f.
I had deſired to viſit the Hebrides, or Weſtern Iſlands of Scotland, for long, that I ſcarcely remember how the wiſh was originally excited; and was in the Autumn of the year 1773 induced to undertake the journey, by finding in Mſ. Lucy a companion, whoſe acuteneſs would help my inquiry, and whoſe gaiety of converſation and civility of manners are ſufficient to counteract the inconveniencies of travel.
“You’re making that up. Let me see it.” I passed the book, she smiled, handed it back, and I thereby gained, without further cavil, another ten minutes with Johnson.
The subsequent miles through drizzle into Wales now passed easily, my mind imagining a quiet inn with an easy chair by a rain-streaked window. Every so often I glanced at the wrapped book on the backseat. Corpulent Samuel Johnson squeezed into a small Japanese auto on his way into Wales. Were a volume actually its author—as in “ten minutes with Johnson”—the oft-cantankerous Doctor would not be pleased. Maybe the most intriguing aspect of a book is that it will cover more territory, go more places, and slip into secret realms beyond any its author can accomplish.
With the last daylight, we crossed the border at Hay-on-Wye, a village famous for bookshops, ones I could afford now to overlook. We went down the Wye Valley and, five miles along, turned onto a lane in the hamlet of Three Cocks and, a couple miles beyond, came up to the four-hundred-year-old Gwernyfed Country Manor behind a low rock fence, its three-storey stone walls dripping wet ivy in the dusk. Near the ruin of the south wing, roofless and windowless, a caliginous rook croaked from a beech large enough to hold a couple of colonies of the birds. Lucy said, “To sleep with ghosts in this place is going to cost you,” and correct she was, but the manor house looked ideal for a quiet corner to turn eighteenth-century pages.
The landlord, Roger Beetham, led us past cases of stuffed birds and up to our—there’s no other word for it—chamber; to talk across it, we had to raise our volume. Beetham had a grizzled red beard and the mellifluous speech common among those who grow up speaking Welsh (one must be nimble of tongue to pronounce village names like Bwlch-Clawdd and Cwymllyfri).
He said, “We call this the Tudor Room because the ceiling once had Tudor roses carved all over it. Charles the First came here after his disastrous battle at Naseby in sixteen-forty-five to visit Sir Henry Williams, one of his lawyers, one of those who didn’t do him much good, being that Charles went to the executioner’s block four years later.” As our host closed the door, he added, “Did I mention that King Charles slept in this very room?”
The next morning after breakfast downstairs I asked Beetham to show us the place. When he went to change his apron, Lucy said, “I don’t think—in front of him—you should call our room the Headless Charlie Suite.”
The house, built in the latter sixteenth century, served as the manor of the area for two-hundred years before the south wing went up in flames in 1780; according to local notions, the conflagration fulfilled a curse that fell on Gwernyfed when the first owner stole a small door and wooden porch from a monastery shut down by Henry the Eighth. The studded, plank door, which even a tall six-year-old must bend to pass through, is still the central entry. From 1780 to 1930 the manor served tenant farmers who took progressively less and less care of it until the Banqueting Hall lay open to the sky, and trees grew within the oak-paneled walls.
Wanting to escape city life in Cardiff, Beetham’s parents saw a newspaper ad and bought Gwernyfed in 1964. Later, almost accidentally, they found themselves turning it into lodgings. In 1979 Roger and his wife moved from London to assume the role of proprietors. He had been a history teacher with no experience as a keeper of a bed-and-breakfast, but, like his parents, he too wanted away from urban life.
The rest was history, quite literally so, because Beetham began peeling away later wall and ceiling modifications to discover frescoes, carved roses, a spiral staircase with a newel made from a spar off a Spanish armada galleon wrecked on the Welsh coast, a twelve-foot-wide fireplace, and a secret compartment a priest might hide in to escape Henry the Eighth’s anti-papal fervor. Roger also became curious about rather inexpert and uninterpretable letters inscribed on four wooden pillars supporting a minstrel gallery in the now-restored Banqueting Hall. Tradition held that Charles I carved a coded message for his second in command, Prince Rupert, who was to arrive at Gwernyfed after the king departed there in 1645.
Beetham struggled to decipher the message, ordinary capital letters, albeit some of them reversed or upside down as if to disguise their import. A friend went to work on it and, with the help of two guests who fortuitously were code-breakers for MI5, the British intelligence agency, the riddle of the ancient inscription finally came to light:
Beware to whom thou dost disclose
The secrets of the wooden poles
In future wiser than before
According to their kind ignore.
A military message? Something religious? Masonic? A riddle? A joke?
His knowledge of history led Beetham to a different interpretation: the Elizabethan amusement of writing verse in code, often hiding the poet’s name among the words. Indeed, the Gwernyfed inscription contained six extra letters in this order:
I M W Y L S.
�
�An interesting detail,” Beetham said, “and perhaps coincidental, but living eight or nine miles from here were friends of William Shakespeare. Did he visit?”
Studying the letters, Lucy blurted, “Whoa! It’s like a vanity license plate! I M WYL S! Shakespeare was here! Did he also sleep in the Headless—I mean, the Tudor Suite?”
“I can’t give assurance he did not,” Beetham said, “but I M W Y L S is also an Elizabethan anagram for Williams, as in Sir Henry Williams.”
“Nuts,” she said.
The morning we were to leave Gwernyfed, a guest who collected antique bottles told us his wife the night before had perceived by her bed a ghostly “emanation, something cold.”
A couple of hours later, on our way north, Lucy asked, “What would you have given for Headless Charlie or William Shakespeare to stand at the foot of your bed?”
Nodding, I thought, Probably more than you really want to know.
Our route lay, generally, along the current Welsh-English border, formerly marked by an eighty-mile earthen bank called Offa’s Dyke after a Mercian king wanting to control the movement of people and goods in the eighth century. Some of the dyke was visible, but it required a keen historical imagination to see it as something more than an overgrown hump. That morning, the Telegraph carried a story about the impending opening of “the Chunnel”—the tunnel under the English Channel to France—the report focusing on widespread British grousing about it. While politicians and corporations wanted the link, millions of Britons valued their traditional insularity more; after all, a farmer here must gain permission to tear out a rural hedgerow. Among the British, something there is that loves a wall.
Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road Page 15