by Bill Bryson
Now none of this would bother me a great deal except that everyone, but everyone, you talk to in Oxford thinks that it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with all that that implies in terms of careful preservation and general liveability. Now I know that Oxford has moments of unutterable beauty. Christ Church Meadow, Radcliffe Square, the college quads, Catte Street and Turl Street, Queens Lane and much of the High Street, the botanic garden, Port Meadow, University Parks, Clarendon House, the whole of north Oxford - all very fine. It has the best collection of bookshops in the world, some of the most splendid pubs and the most wonderful museums of any city of its size. It has a terrific indoor market. It has the Sheldonian Theatre. It has the Bodleian Library. It has a scattering of prospects that melt the heart.
But there is also so much that is so wrong. How did it happen? This is a serious question. What sort of mad seizure was it that gripped the city’s planners, architects and college authorities in the 1960s and 1970s? Did you know that it was once seriously proposed to tear down Jericho, a district of fine artisans’ homes, and to run a bypass right across Christ Church Meadow? These ideas weren’t just misguided, they were criminally insane. And yet on a lesser scale they were repeated over and over throughout the city. Just look at the Merton College Warden’s Quarters - which is not by any means the worst building in the city. What a remarkable series of improbabilities were necessary to its construction. First, some architect had to design it, had to wander through a city steeped in 800 years of architectural tradition, and with great care conceive of a structure that looked like a toaster with windows. Then a committee of finely educated minds at Merton had to show the most extraordinary indifference to their responsibilities to posterity and say to themselves, ‘You know, we’ve been putting up handsome buildings since 1264; let’s have an ugly one for a change.’ Then the planning authorities had to say, ‘Well, why not? Plenty worse in Basildon.’ Then the whole of the city - students, dons, shopkeepers, office workers, members of the Oxford Preservation Trust - had to acquiesce and not kick up a fuss. Multiply this by, say, 200 or 300 or 400 and you have modern Oxford. And you tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, well-preserved cities in. the world? I’m afraid not. It is a beautiful city that has been treated with gross indifference and lamentable incompetence for far too long, and every living person in Oxford should feel a little bit ashamed.
Goodness me! What an outburst! Let’s lighten up and go look at some good things. The Ashmolean, for instance. What a wonderful institution, the oldest public museum on Planet Earth and certainly one of the finest. How is it that it is always so empty? I spent a long morning there politely examining the antiquities, and had the place all to myself but for a party of schoolchildren who could occasionally be sighted racing between rooms pursued by a harried-looking teacher, then strolled over to the Pitt-Rivers and University museums, which are also very agreeable in their quaint, welcome-to-the-1870s sort of way. I trawled through Blackwell’s and Dillon’s, poked about at Balliol and Christ Church, ambled through University Parks and Christ Church Meadow, ranged out through Jericho and the stolid, handsome mansions of north Oxford.
Perhaps I’m too hard on poor old Oxford. I mean, it is basically a wonderful place, with its smoky pubs and bookshops and scholarly air, as long as you fix your gaze on the good things and never go anywhere near Cornmarket or George Street. I particularly like it at night when the traffic dies away enough that you don’t need an oxygen mask and the High Street fills up with those mysteriously popular doner kebab vans, which tempt me not (how can anyone eat something that looks so uncannily as if it has been carved from a dead man’s leg?) but do have a kind of seductive Hopperish glow about them. I like the darkness of the back lanes that wander between high walls, where you half expect to be skewered and dismembered by Jack the Ripper or possibly a doner kebab wholesaler. I like wandering up St Giles to immerse myself in the busy conviviality of Brown’s Restaurant - a wonderful, friendly place where, perhaps uniquely in Britain, you can get an excellent Caesar salad and a bacon cheeseburger without having to sit among pounding music and a lot of ersatz Route 66 signs. Above all, I like to drink in the pubs, where you can sit with a book and not be looked on as a social miscreant, and be among laughing, lively young people and lose yourself in reveries of what it was like when you too had energy and a flat stomach and thought of sex as something more than a welcome chance for a lie-down.I’d impetuously said I would stay for three nights when I booked into my hotel, and by mid-morning of the third day I was beginning to feel a little restless, so I decided to have a walk to Sutton Courtenay for no reason other than that George Orwell is buried there and it seemed about the right distance. I walked out of the city by way of a water meadow to North Hinksey and onwards towards Boar’s Hill through an area called, with curious indecisiveness, Chilswell Valley or Happy Valley. It had rained in the night and the heavy clay soil stuck to my boots and made the going arduous. Soon I had an accumulation of mud that doubled the size of my feet. A bit further on the path had been covered with loose chippings, presumably to make the going easier, but in fact the chippings stuck to my muddy boots so that it looked as if I were walking around with two very large currant buns on my feet. At the top of Boar’s Hill I stopped to savour the view- it’s the one that led Matthew Arnold to spout that overwrought nonsense about ‘dreaming spires’, and it has been cruelly despoiled by those marching electricity pylons which Oxfordshire has in greater abundance than any county I know - and to scrape the mud from my boots with a stick.
Boar’s Hill has some appealing big houses but I don’t think I could happily settle there. I noted three driveways with signs saying ‘No Turning’. Now tell me, just how petty do you have to be, how ludicrously possessive of your little piece of turf, to put up a sign like that? What harm can there possibly be in some lost or misdirected person turning a car round in the edge of your driveway? I always make a point of turning round in such driveways, whether I need to or not, and I urge you to join me in this practice. It is always a good idea to toot your horn two or three times to make sure that the owner sees you. Also, while I think of it, can I ask you to tear up your junk mail, particularly when that mail invites you to take on more debt, and return it to the sender in the postpaid envelope? It would make a far more effective gesture if there were thousands of us doing it.
I reached Abingdon by way of a back lane from Sunningwell. Abingdon had one of the best-kept council estates I think I’ve ever seen - huge sweeps of lawn and neat houses - and a handsome town hall built on stilts as if somebody was expecting a forty-day flood, but that’s as much as I’m prepared to say for Abingdon. It has the most appalling shopping precinct, which I later learned had been created by sweeping away a raft of medieval houses, and a kind of dogged commitment to ugliness around its fringes.
Sutton Courtenay seemed considerably further on than I recalled it from the map, but it was a pleasant walk with frequent views of the Thames. It is a charming place, with some fine homes, three agreeable-looking pubs, and a little green with a war memorial, beside which stands the churchyard where not only George Orwell lies, but also H.H. Asquith. Call me a perennial Iowa farmboy, but 1 never fail to be impressed by how densely packed with worthies is this little island. How remarkable it is that in a single village churchyard you find the graves of two men of global stature. We in Iowa would be proud of either one of them - indeed, we would be proud of Trigger the Wonder Horse or the guy who invented traffic cones or pretty much anyone at all.
I walked into the graveyard and found Orwell’s grave. It had three straggly rose bushes growing out of it and some artificial flowers in a glass jar, before a simple stone with a curiously terse inscription:
Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair Born June 25th 1903 • Died January 21st 1950
Not much sentiment there, what? Near by was the grave of Herbert Henry Asquith. It was one of those tea-caddy tombs, and it was sinking into the ground in an alarming manner. His inscription
too was mysteriously to the point. It said simply:
Earl of Oxford and Asquith
Prime Minister of England
April 1908 to December 1916
Born 12 September 1852
Died 15 February 1928
Notice anything odd there? I bet you did if you are Scottish or Welsh. The whole place was a bit strange. I mean to say, here was a cemetery containing the grave of a famous author that was made as anonymous as if he had been buried a pauper, and another of a man whose descendants had apparently forgotten exactly what he was Prime Minister of and which looked seriously in danger of being swallowed by the earth. Next to Asquith lay one Ruben Loveridge ‘who fell asleep 29th April 1950’ and near by was agrave shared by two men: ‘Samuel Lewis 1881-1930’ and ‘Alan Slater 1924-1993’. What an intriguing little community this was -a place where men are entombed together and they bury you if you fall asleep.
On second thought, I think we lowans would be content to let you keep Orwell and Asquith as long as we could have the guy who was buried alive.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I SUSPENDED MY PRINCIPLES AND HIRED A CAR FOR THREE DAYS. WELL, I had to. I wanted to see the Cotswolds and it doesn’t take long to work out that you can’t see the Cotswolds unless you have your own motive power. As long ago as 1933, J.B. Priestley was noting in English Journey that even then, in those golden pre-Beeching days, there was just one line through the Cotswolds. Now there isn’t even that, except for one that runs uselessly along the edges.
So I hired a car in Oxford and set off with that giddying sense of unbounded possibility that comes when I find myself in charge of two tons of unfamiliar metal. My experience with hire cars is that generally they won’t let you leave a city until they have had a chance to say goodbye to most of it. Mine took me on a long tour through Botley and Hinkley, on a nostalgic swing past the Rover works at Cowley and out through Blackbird Leys before conveying me twice around a roundabout and flinging me, like a spacecraft in planetary orbit, back towards town. I was powerless to do anything about this, largely because my attention was preoccupied with trying to turn off the back windscreen wiper, which seemed to have a mind of its own, and figuring out how to remove an opaque cloud of foamy washing fluid from the front windscreen, which shot out in great obscuring streams irrespective of which switch I pushed or stalk I waggled.
At least it gave me a chance to see the little-known but intriguing Potato Marketing Board building at Cowley, into whose car park I pulled to turn around when I realized I was utterly lost. The building was a substantial 1960s edifice, four storeys high and largeenough, I would have guessed, to accommodate 400 or 500 workers. I got out to wipe the windscreen with some pages torn from an owner’s manual I found in the glove box, but was soon staring at the arresting grandeur of the Potato Marketing Board HQ. The scale of it was quite astounding. How many people does it take to market potatoes, for goodness’ sake? There must be doors in there marked ‘Department of King Edwards’ and ‘Unusual Toppings Division’, people in white shirts sitting around long tables while some guy with a flip chart is telling them about exciting plans for the autumn campaign for Pentland Squires. What a strange circumscribed universe they must live in. Imagine devoting the whole of your working life to edible tubers, losing sleep because somebody else was made No. 2 in Crisps and Reconstituteds or because the Maris Piper graph is in a tailspin. Imagine their cocktail parties. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I returned to the car and spent some time experimenting with the controls and thinking how much I hated these things. Some people are made for cars and some people aren’t. It’s as simple as that. I hate driving cars and I hate thinking about cars and I hate talking about cars. I especially hate it when you get a new car and go in the pub because somebody will always start quizzing you about it, which I dread because I don’t even understand the questions.
‘So you’ve got a new car, huh?’ they’ll say. ‘How’s it drive?’
You see, I’m lost already. ‘Well, like a car. Why, have you never been in one?’
And then they start peppering you with questions. ‘What sort of mileage you get? How many litres? What’s the torque? Got twin overhead cams or double-barrelled alternator-cum-carburettorwith a full pike and a double-twist dismount?’ I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to know all this shit about a machine. You don’t take that kind of interest in anything else. I always want to say: ‘Hey, I hear you’ve got a new refrigerator. How many gallons of freon does that baby hold? What’s its BTU rating? How’s it cool?’
This car had the usual array of switches and toggles, each illustrated with a symbol designed to confound. Really now, what is one to make of a switch labelled 101? How can anyone be expected to work out that a rectangle that looks like a television set with poor reception indicates the rear window heater? In the middle of this dashboard were two circular dials of equal size. One clearly indicated speed, but the other totally mystified me. It had two pointers on it, one of which advanced very slowly and the other of which didn’t appear to move at all. I looked at it for ages before it finally dawned on me - this is true - that it was a clock.
By the time I found my way to Woodstock, ten miles north of Oxford, I was quite exhausted and very happy to bump to a halt against a kerb and abandon the thing for a few hours. I must say I like Woodstock very much. I’m told that it can be something of a nightmare in summer, but I’ve only seen it out of season and it has always been splendid. Its Georgian houses have a confident, almost regal air, its pubs are numerous and snug, its shops interesting and varied and their frontages uniformly unspoiled. There isn’t a piece of brass in town that doesn’t gleam. The Post Office had an old-fashioned black-and-silver sign, far more elegant and classy than that red-and-yellow logo they use now, and even Barclays Bank had somehow managed to resist the urge to cover the front of its building with lots of aqua-blue plastic.
The High Street was busy with shunting Volvos and tweedy shoppers with raffia baskets slung over their arms. I ambled along the shops, pausing now and again to peer in windows, and past the proud Georgian houses before coming abruptly to the entrance to Blenheim Palace and Park. Beneath an imposing ornamental arch there was a ticket booth and a sign saying that admission for an adult was £6.90, though closer inspection revealed that this included entrance to the palace tour, butterfly house, miniature train, adventure playground and a whole cornucopia of other cultural diversions. Lower down, the sign noted that admission to the grounds alone was 90p. I may be easily fooled, but nobody takes 90p from me without good reason. I had a trusty Ordnance Survey map and could see that this was a public right of way, so I strode through the gate with a sneer and my hand on my wallet, and the man in the ticket booth wisely decided not to tamper with me.
The transformation when you pass through the gate is both immediate and stunning. On one side you are in a busy village, and on the other you are suddenly thrust into a rural Arcadia of the sort that seems incomplete without a couple of Gainsborough figures ambling by. Before me spread 2,000 acres of carefully composed landscape - stout chestnuts and graceful sycamores, billiard-table lawns, an ornamental lake bisected by an imposing bridge, and in the centre of it all the monumental baroque pile of Blenheim Palace. It was very fine.
I followed the curving road through the grounds, past the palaceand busy visitors’ car park, and on around the periphery of the Pleasure Gardens. I would come back to check this out, but at the moment I was headed across the park and to an exit on the other side on the Bladon road. Bladon is a nondescript little place trembling under the weight of passing goods traffic, but in its centre is the churchyard where Winston Churchill lies buried. It had begun to rain and as it was a bit of a hike up a busy road, I began to wonder if this was worth the effort, but when I reached it I was glad I had. The churchyard was lovely and secluded and Churchill’s grave so modest that it took some finding among the tumbling gravestones. I was the only visitor. Churchill and Cle
mmie shared a simple and seemingly forgotten plot, which I found both surprisingly touching and impressive. Coming as I do from a country where even the most obscure and worthless of presidents get a huge memorial library when they pop their clogs - even Herbert Hoover, way out in Iowa, has a place that looks like the headquarters of the World Trade Organization - it was remarkable to think that Britain’s greatest twentieth-century statesman was commemorated with nothing more than a modest statue in Parliament Square and this simple grave. I was impressed by this commendable show of restraint.
I retraced my steps to Blenheim and had a nose around the Pleasure Gardens and other outdoor attractions. ‘Pleasure Gardens’ apparently was short for ‘It’s a Pleasure to Take Your Money’, since it seemed largely dedicated to helping visitors to part with further sums in a gift shop and tea-room or by buying garden gates, benches and other such items produced by the Blenheim estate sawmill. Dozens of people poked around happily, seemingly undisturbed by the thought that they had paid £6.90 for the privilege of looking at the sort of items they could see for free at any decent garden centre. As I left the gardens and walked back towards the palace, I took the opportunity to study the miniature steam train. It ran over a decidedly modest length of track across one corner of the grounds. The sight of fifty English people crouched on a little train in a cold grey drizzle waiting to be taken 200 yards and thinking they were having fun is one that I shall not forget in a hurry.