by Bill Bryson
Live Well, Love Much, Laugh Often
or
This Kitchen Is Seasoned With Love
or
Life Isn’t About Waiting for the Storm to Pass. It’s About Learning to Dance in the Rain.
Every gift shop window in Lyme Regis, and there are many, had at least a couple of signs like this. I wanted to put stickers on them that said: ‘Caution: These Signs May Induce Bulimia’, but I guess there is a market for them. I walked around Lyme Regis pleased with the thought that nearly all my shopping in life is behind me. One of the great pleasures of dotage is the realization that you have pretty much everything you will ever need. Apart from a few perishable essentials like light bulbs, batteries and food, I require almost nothing. I don’t need any more furniture, books, decorative bowls, lap rugs, cushions with messages expressing my feelings about animals or housework, hot-water-bottle covers, paper clips, rubber bands, spare cans of paint, dried-out paintbrushes, miscellaneous lengths of electrical wire or any kind of metal objects that might one day theoretically come in handy for some as yet unimagined purpose. Thanks to years of travel at other people’s expense, I have a lifetime supply of soaps, small bottles of shampoo, aromatic lotions, sewing kits and shoe mitts. I have over 1,100 shower caps and require now only a reason to use them. I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist.
I am especially set for clothes. I have reached the time of life where all I want is to wear out the clothes I have and never get another thing. I think many men of a certain age will nod in agreement when I say there is a real satisfaction when you wear something out and can finally discard it – a feeling of a job well done. It’s not always easy. I have an L.L.Bean shirt that I have been trying to wear out for nearly twenty years. I wear that shirt up to two dozen times a month. I have washed the car with it. I have used it to clean the grate on the barbecue. I hate that shirt. I didn’t actually particularly like it the day I bought it. But I will wear it out if it kills me.
And so I walked about Lyme Regis with a slightly superior air, looking in windows and thinking, ‘No, I don’t need a dog basket or a plank of wood with a sentimental message on it or a new paperback thriller written with the blessing and possible light assistance of James Patterson or anything else for sale in Lyme Regis, but thank you very much for offering.’
I had a cup of coffee in a stylish deli, and went down to the seafront and walked along the Cobb, the magnificent curving seawall made famous by John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and there admired the views along the coastline.
I have walked this stretch of coast a few times and it is rolling perfection. When I first came to Dorset, nobody called it anything but the Dorset coast, but now it is the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site which is obviously a lot more impressive. There is a certain irony in the thought that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological terms – Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician – but that the one area that everybody knows about is named for the Jura Mountains in France, even though the Dorset coast is actually the best place in the world to see Jurassic outcrops.
There is, or at least always was, a sensational walk west from Lyme Regis to Seaton along a hanging path that has sheer cliffs above and below. Large signboards at each end warned you that for the next seven miles the path was inaccessible from sea, land or air and that if you got in trouble rescue teams couldn’t airlift you out. This made the walk seem pleasingly dangerous and daring. Little did I know that it actually was. A big section of cliff face collapsed in early 2014, carrying away the path with it, though fortunately no walkers. The path has since been rerouted inland; it seems unlikely that the original can ever be reopened.
Dorset’s unstable cliffs have claimed many lives and a good deal of property over the years. One notable casualty was Richard Anning, who tumbled over a cliff in Lyme in 1810 and never got up again. Anning himself isn’t remembered now, but his daughter Mary is. She was just ten when her dad died, leaving the family in poverty, but Mary almost immediately embarked on a long career of excavating and selling fossils that she found along the sea strand. She is commonly credited with being the person referred to in the tongue-twister ‘She sells seashells by the seashore.’
To say that Mary Anning had an affinity for excavation is to put it mildly. In a career of more than thirty years she found the first British pterodactyl, the first complete plesiosaurus and the finest ichthyosaurus. These were not the kind of fossils you could stick in your handbag. The ichthyosaurus was seventeen feet long. Excavating them took years of delicate, patient toil. The plesiosaur alone occupied ten years of her life. Anning not only extracted with the utmost skill, but provided lucid descriptions and first-rate drawings, and in consequence enjoyed the respect and friendship of many of the period’s leading geologists and natural historians. But because important finds were rare and the work slow, she spent most of her life in straitened circumstances, if not downright poverty. The house where she lived is now the site of the local museum, and it is, let me say at once, a perfect little institution. If you go to Lyme Regis, don’t miss it.
The other memorable thing about Mary Anning, incidentally – though there wasn’t anything incidental about it to those around her – was that she seemed a remarkably unlucky person to be close to. In addition to her father tumbling over a cliff, one of her sisters died in a house fire and three other siblings were killed by a lightning strike. Mary, sitting right beside them, was miraculously spared.
I’d have happily stayed longer but I had tracks to make. I was still sixty miles from Totnes, in Devon, where I had booked a room for the night, and as anyone who has travelled in the region in summer will know, sixty miles in the West Country is a very long way. Besides, I had one other place I wanted to stop en route: Torquay.
II
The British are an ingenious race. There can be no question about that. Their contribution to the world’s comfort and knowledge is way beyond what, measured proportionately, ought to come off a little island in the North Sea. Some years ago, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry made a study of national inventiveness and concluded that in the modern era Britain had produced 55 per cent of all the world’s ‘significant inventions’, against 22 per cent for America and 6 per cent for Japan. That is an extraordinary proportion. But cashing in on them has been another matter altogether, and Torquay offers a salutary example of that in the shape of the now forgotten figure of Oliver Heaviside.
Heaviside was born in London in 1850, but passed much of his life in Torquay, a stately resort built around a lovely bay on a stretch of south Devon coastline known, just a touch hyperbolically, as the English Riviera. It remains a fine, old-fashioned town, with a promenade, some noble buildings and a harbour picturesquely filled with pleasure boats, the whole backed by hills containing pink and cream-coloured villas. It was to one of these hillside villas, where Heaviside lived and worked and died, that I directed my attention first.
Heaviside was short, ill-tempered and hard of hearing, which no doubt contributed to his testiness. He had flaming red hair and a beard and, if surviving photographs are a reliable guide, a permanently crazed look. Children apparently followed him down the road and threw things at him. But he was possibly the greatest modern British inventor of whom no one has ever heard.
He was entirely self-taught. As a young man, he worked for a few years in telegraph offices, but quit that job at the age of twenty-four and never held another. Instead he moved to Devon and devoted himself to the private study of electromagnetism. Working from a flat above his brother’s music shop in Torquay, Heaviside made a number of important breakthroughs. For years people had been puzzled by how radio signals could follow the curve of the earth and not just fly off into space. Even Marconi couldn’t explain how his radio messages reached ships that were over the horizon. Heaviside deduced the existence of a layer of ionized particles in the upper atmosphere which was bouncing
radio signals back. It became known as the Heaviside layer.
Heaviside’s most singular contribution to modern life, however, was devising a way to boost telephone signals while simultaneously eliminating distortion – two things that had long been thought impossible. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Heaviside’s invention. It made instantaneous long-distance communications possible and in so doing changed the world.
Heaviside’s house was on Lower Warberry Road, a very pleasant residential street up in the hills above the bay, lined with some big houses, many of which have been converted into flats or nursing homes. I can think of worse places to end up than in an old house above Torbay. Heaviside’s residence was a cream-coloured building, hidden behind a high wall. Heaviside had just a room or two upstairs. After his time there, the house spent some years as a small hotel, then gradually slid into dereliction. In 2009 it was damaged in a fire, probably accidentally started by a squatter. Today it remains abandoned, hidden behind high walls and plywood hoardings. There is supposedly a blue plaque on the building commemorating Heaviside, but I couldn’t see it anywhere from the road. I don’t imagine too many people come to look.
Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn’t bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest corporations in the world thanks in large part to its unrivalled lead in long-distance telephony. Heaviside should have ended up a multi-millionaire but instead passed his last years living in angry poverty in a bedsit in Torquay with children throwing wine gums at his back.
It is remarkable how often Britons invent or discover something of great value, then fail to cash in on it. The list of things invented, discovered or developed in Britain that benefited Britain barely or not at all includes computers, radar, the endoscope, the zoom lens, holography, in vitro fertilization, animal cloning, magnetically levitated trains and Viagra. Only the jet engine and antibiotics are British inventions from which the British still benefit. I had just read an interesting book called The Compatibility Gene by Daniel M. Davis, a professor at the University of Manchester, who noted in passing how two medical researchers, Derrick Brewerton in Britain and Paul Terasaki in the United States, had coincidentally made the same important breakthrough in the understanding of genes at the same time in the 1970s. Terasaki formed a company to exploit the commercial potential of his discovery and grew so wealthy that eventually he was making donations of $50 million a time. Brewerton wrote a book on arthritis and chaired a committee devoted to saving a beach near his home on the south coast. Somebody needs to explain to me why that seems so inevitable.
Heaviside wasn’t the only famous resident of this steep and pleasant neighbourhood. Peter Cook, the comedian, was born a short distance away on Middle Warberry Road in a house then called Shearbridge, now called Kinbrae, and I decided to walk up there now and have a look. It took me some time to work out that although the streets are parallel and clearly from the same family, they don’t seem to be on speaking terms because there was almost nowhere where they connected. So I walked quite a distance before finding my way to Kinbrae, which proved to be a biggish house divided, not terribly attractively, into flats. I stood looking at it for a good while, without anything like a real thought in my head, then turned and, still thoughtless, walked through pleasant streets back downhill to the town.
It was only a little after three o’clock, so I had time for both a cup of tea and a look at the town. It seemed to be an awfully long day. When I got back to the town, Torquay was surprisingly quiet. I spotted a café that looked agreeable, but when I reached the door a man was emerging to lock up.
‘Sorry, we’re closing,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said, surprised. ‘What time do you close?’
‘Five o’clock.’
‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘What time is it now?’
He looked at me as if I was a little bit slow.
‘Five o’clock.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I showed him my watch. ‘Battery’s been playing up.’
He pointed to a shop down the street. ‘I think they’re open till five thirty. You might get a battery there.’
I thanked him and went to the designated shop where a man of about fifty sat impassively at a counter. He looked like he hadn’t moved a muscle for at least twelve hours. I passed him the watch and explained that the battery seemed to be going.
He examined the watch for half a second and passed it back. ‘We don’t handle these,’ he said flatly.
‘You don’t handle what? Timepieces?’
‘Mondaine. We don’t handle Mondaine.’
‘Oh. Do you know anyone who does?’
He shrugged. ‘You can try Jones.’
He didn’t actually say Jones. He used another name, but because I am kind I am giving it a pseudonym. I managed to coax a street name out of him and a nod of the head to indicate the approximate direction of this alternative possibility.
‘Thank you,’ I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better.
I hurried along to Jones’s – for some reason this was beginning to feel urgent – to find another fellow of equally sweet disposition.
I explained my problem and passed him my watch. He looked at it and passed it back. ‘Can’t help you,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Haven’t got the batteries in stock. Sorry.’
At least he said sorry, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. I said thank you and left. It was clearly too late to do anything else in Torquay, so I retrieved my car and drove off in the general direction of Totnes. I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves.
Chapter 11
Devon
SOMETIMES IT DOESN’T pay to be first. Britain not only invented the railway, but embraced rail travel with more enthusiasm than other nations and ended up with way more capacity than it ever needed. There were lines all over the place. The Isle of Wight, an area of 147 square miles, had fifty-five miles of lines operated by eight separate companies.
By the time the network was nationalized in 1948, it was antiquated, incoherently structured and losing money hand over fist. Its holdings included not only trains, stations, repair depots and the like, but also fifty-four hotels, seven thousand horses, a fleet of buses, some canals and docks, the Thomas Cook travel agency and a film company. The enterprise was so diverse and slackly managed that no one knew how many people the new company employed; estimates ranged loosely from 632,000 to 649,000.
By 1961, things had grown so bad that the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, instructed his Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, to sort things out. Marples was already a contentious figure. As co-founder of Marples, Ridgeway & Partners, a construction company, he had made a fortune building roads for the government before becoming part of the government himself. When Opposition members pointed out that it seemed a little corrupt for a transport minister to oversee state projects that could benefit his own company, Marples came under pressure to dispose of his shares. His first plan was to sell them to his business partner on the understanding that he could buy them back later at the original price. When told that that still wasn’t ethical, Marples came up with a more straightforward arrangement: he sold them to a company secretly controlled by his wife.
Marples appointed Richard Beeching to the job of consolidating the railways, at the enormous annual salary of £24,000 – more than double what the Prime Minister was paid. Beeching was a portly, prissy-looking man with a caterpillar moustache, a bad comb-over and a striking absence of relevant experience. A physicist by training, he was technical director of the chemical company ICI. Though he knew no more about railways than the average rail passenger, Beeching was an able enough adminis
trator, and anyway it didn’t take a lot of vision to see that the railways needed attention. Beeching commissioned a study which showed that the situation was even worse than thought. Some lines were barely doing any business at all. The Invergarry and Fort Augustus line in Scotland was found to be carrying an average of just six passengers a day. The little Llangynog-to-Mochnant line in Wales had average daily earnings of less than £1. Altogether, one half of Britain’s rail network accounted for 96 per cent of business, while the other half produced just 4 per cent. The obvious solution was to close the unproductive parts. In March 1963, Beeching produced a hefty document called The Shaping of British Railways, universally known then and ever since as the Beeching Report, in which he proposed to shut down 2,636 stations, about one-third of the total, along with two hundred branch lines and some five thousand miles of track.
Had Beeching confined himself to the obscure parts of the network, he would probably never have attracted lasting opprobrium, but in a burst of reforming zeal he also recommended closing several prominent stations – Inverness, King’s Lynn, Canterbury, Stratford-upon-Avon, Hereford, Salisbury, Chichester, Blackburn and Burnley, among many others – and that stirred a furious response.
In point of fact, none of the aforementioned stations closed. Indeed, many of the cuts that followed had little to do with Beeching at all. The Labour Party came to power in 1964 with its own programme of rationalizations. Harold Wilson, the new Prime Minister, spared the well-known stations but closed an additional 1,400 that Beeching had not mentioned at all. The cuts were particularly devastating for seaside towns in the West Country. Lyme Regis, Padstow, Seaton, Ilfracombe, Brixham and many others lost their services. Several resorts are said never to have recovered. Once there was a service called the Atlantic Coast Express. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have something like that now? Today the fastest train to the west, from Paddington to Penzance, takes five and a half hours to travel 280 miles, at an average speed of about 50 miles an hour. I have ridden it several times. It is like rigor mortis with scenery.