The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson

  Just beyond Overstrand is Cromer, another old seaside resort, with a grand old hotel, the Hotel de Paris. I can’t imagine where it gets its business from. I was here to see Cromer pier, which I think is the best and handsomest in the nation. Once there were about a hundred piers in Britain, but today there are barely half that number and a great many of them – Bognor springs to mind, or it would if there was anything left in it capable of springing – are falling down or are scarcely worthy of the name. Cromer’s was badly damaged by a winter storm in 2013, and I’d heard that there was talk of tearing it down, which would have been beyond a tragedy, but happily it was repaired and seems good as new now.

  A few years ago, when Daniel and Andrew and I were walking this section of coast, Daniel discovered to his great and improbable excitement that the pier theatre was staging a show of songs from the Second World War, and that one of the performers was someone he had once worked with. Daniel insisted that we go to that day’s matinee. I was frankly dubious, but in the event enjoyed myself immensely. The performance was well attended, mostly by elderly people who arrived on coaches. I believe Daniel, Andrew and I were the only members of the audience not sitting on incontinence pads. The cast consisted of just three performers, but they were excellent. It helped a lot that the female singer was pretty and talented and that the whole thing lasted only a little over an hour. And I must say it was refreshing to see a pier theatre being used for something other than a Queen tribute.

  Cromer is a pleasant, old-fashioned place and I had a good look around it, then returned to Sheringham and had another look around there for want of anything more sensational to do. Then I returned to the Burlington Hotel, and sat very quietly until it was a respectable enough hour to go and have a drink.

  III

  You can’t go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn’t. The Sutton Hoo story begins with a man named Col. Frank Pretty, who didn’t do much of anything for the first fifty years or so of his life, then did rather a lot in quite a short period. He married a middle-aged spinster named Edith May, moved with her on to a big estate called Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk, fathered a son and then abruptly died, on his fifty-sixth birthday.

  Left on her own with a small son and a large, lonely house, Mrs Pretty took up spiritualism and developed an interest in the twenty or so grassy mounds that stood on heathland about five hundred yards from her house. Deciding to excavate them, she contacted the Ipswich Museum, which put her in touch with a curious figure named Basil Brown.

  Brown was a farm labourer and odd-job man with no archaeological training. He had left school at twelve, but he continued to educate himself through private study, and acquired certificates of attainment in geography, geology, astronomy and drawing. My own interest in him began when I lived in Norfolk and discovered that he had married a girl from our village and lived with her for some years on a neighbouring property called Church Farm. Brown had a rustic Norfolk accent his whole life and was often likened in appearance and manner to a ferret, but he had a genius for archaeology. He spent nearly all his free time cycling around Norfolk looking for likely archaeological sites and, to an almost uncanny degree, finding them.

  Brown agreed to have a look at Mrs Pretty’s estate, but had no great expectations of finding much. The mounds, it was well known, had been extensively picked over in the past. That was probably why the job was offered to Brown rather than someone of greater stature. Mrs Pretty gave Brown a small salary and lodgings in the chauffeur’s cottage, and lent him two estate workers as assistants. Brown and his team had no special tools. They used jugs, bowls and sieves brought down from the pantry. The most delicate work was done with pastry brushes from the kitchen and a bellows from the library. In the summer of 1938, Brown dug trenches through three of the mounds, but found nothing. Undaunted, he returned the following summer and excavated what is now called mound one. Almost at once he found a piece of metal, which he correctly deduced was a ship’s rivet and that this was a ship burial. This was quite an insight for there was no history of ship burials in Britain – this is still one of only two ever found – and anyway the mound was a mile or so from water. Nobody had ever discovered a ship burial this far inland. The only reference work Brown could find to guide him was a heavy volume in Norwegian from 1904 describing the excavation of the Viking ship Oseberg from western Norway.

  It is important to remember that Brown didn’t find a ship. He found the impression of a ship – the indentations of a long-vanished structure. It was intensely delicate work – like trying to excavate a shadow. But what a payoff. Brown had found the greatest haul of treasure ever recovered in Britain – jewels, coins, gold and silver plate, armour, weapons and decorative objects of every sort. The goods came from as far away as Egypt and Byzantium. No one knows who was buried in the ship, or indeed that anyone actually was, for it contained no remains. It may be that every bit of the body percolated away in the acidic soil, or it may be that the occupant was cremated and his ashes sprinkled among the relics. The person most often cited as the most likely occupant was Raedwald, king of the East Angles, but that is just a guess.

  When it was realized how priceless a find this was, government archaeologists rushed in and Basil Brown was roughly cast aside. For years, his role in the discovery was either unmentioned or discussed with condescension. A typical assessment was that of the archaeologist Richard Dumbreck who described Brown as ‘having the appearance of a ferret’ and said that he excavated ‘like a terrier after a rat. He would trowel furiously, scraping the spoil between his legs, and at intervals he would stand back to view progress and tread in what he had just loosened … The sad thing is that with training he might have been a brilliant archaeologist.’ In much the same way, I suspect, with enough training Dumbreck might have become a decent human.

  The discovery of the Sutton Hoo treasure came at exactly the wrong time, just as war was breaking out, and all excavations were halted for the duration. The military took over Mrs Pretty’s estate and used it, amazingly, for tank training. When archaeologists returned after the war, they found tracks running right through the excavations. Mrs Pretty gave the recovered treasure to the British Museum. It remains the single most valuable donation ever made to the museum by a living person. Curators spent years cleaning the finds. The biggest challenge was a golden helmet, which had broken up into more than five hundred fragments. Putting it together took a team of experts until 1951, and almost at once other experts pointed out that the helmet as rebuilt was unwearable. It also emerged that several pieces had been left out because they couldn’t be made to fit. For the next twenty years, a patently incorrect helmet is what visitors to the British Museum saw. Finally, in 1971, the whole was taken apart and reassembled into the form it has today, which uses all the pieces and is presumed to be correct. It is one of the most arresting objects in the British Museum.

  Basil Brown spent another twenty years riding his bicycle around East Anglia and sometimes further afield, finding Saxon and Roman artefacts and even occasionally an entire farmstead or settlement. He retired in 1961, but lived until 1977, when he died aged eighty-nine. He occasionally went to the British Museum to look at the Sutton Hoo hoard. He was never formally honoured for its discovery.

  I enjoyed a long walk around the site. The mounds are a fair hike from the visitor centre. There are about twenty altogether, though all of them are much lower than they once were because of ploughing and plundering, and several are barely visible at all. You can also now visit the Prettys’ house, which is decorated as it would have been in Mrs Pretty’s day. Each room had a laminated information card giving details of Mrs Pretty’s life there. These contained many spelling errors and instances of mispunctuation, which is a little unfortunate, but at least they attempted to convey useful information. I don’t remember the house being open in 2009, when I last visited, but then I don’t remember things I saw two weeks ago.

  The visitor centre is sty
lish and bright, and the displays are interesting and informative and give a good impression of what the burial would have looked like when it was new and again when it was found centuries later. The actual treasures are all at the British Museum, but the exhibition includes some very good replicas. I had a sandwich and a cup of tea in the café and was feeling so benignly pleased with the whole experience that I didn’t bitch even privately to myself that the sandwich was a little dry and cost roughly double what, in a reasonable world, it should have. Well, maybe I did bitch inwardly just a little, but I didn’t say anything grumbly to anyone and that is surely a mark of progress.

  I drove on to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. Aldeburgh is a smart and good-looking town, well supplied with fashionable retailers. It has a Fat Face and a Joules, an Adnams brewery shop, several locally owned boutiques and cafés, a good bookshop. Somebody needs to explain to me how it is that Aldeburgh and Southwold, another resort just up the road, remain thriving and chic while so many other resorts are dying. It can’t have anything to do with accessibility or underlying beauty – Aldeburgh and Southwold are harder to get to and no more attractively situated than Bognor or Margate and much less blessed by nature than Penzance – so what does explain it? I am genuinely at a loss to say.

  Once, in my more ambitious days when I made a Panorama television programme about the problem of litter in Britain, in the touchingly naive belief that large numbers of people might want to do something about it, I visited a beach clean-up at Aldeburgh being undertaken by the Marine Conservation Trust, to interview the saintly souls who were doing the work. From them I learned that every kilometre of shoreline in Britain contains on average 46,000 pieces of litter, mostly tiny bits of plastic, much of which ends up in the stomachs of birds in fairly staggering amounts. In one study, 95 per cent of fulmars washed ashore along the North Sea were found to have plastic in their stomachs – and not just a little but a lot: forty-four pieces on average. Transparent bags, meanwhile, choke a great many turtles because they mistake them for jellyfish.

  From the Suffolk team I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the doors pop open and the contents float to the surface. One of the volunteers I met, an artist named Fran Crowe, showed me a crisp packet she had picked up – one of several thousand that had washed on to the beach at Aldeburgh. The crisps inside had long since dissolved, but the packets themselves were in pristine condition. The one Fran Crowe showed me bore a price label of 3p and came with an offer expiring on 31 December 1974. It had been under the water for forty years before becoming part of a fiesta of flotsam in Suffolk.

  I mentioned that once when I was in the Scilly Isles I saw lots of clear plastic glistening on a beach at Tresco and it turned out to be thousands of saline drip bags, all empty, produced by a British company in Lancashire but with writing in Spanish.

  ‘Happens all the time,’ Fran said. She once came upon a beach containing hundreds and hundreds of bicycle seats. She has also found computers, fridges and vacuum cleaners. Lots more floats than you would ever expect, it seems.

  I spent the night in Dunwich at a jolly nice pub called the Ship. Dunwich is an odd place in that it mostly isn’t there any more. In the twelfth century, it was one of the most important ports in England, nearly three times the size of Bristol and not that much smaller than London. It was home to four thousand people and boasted eighteen churches and monasteries. But in 1286 a mighty storm swept away four hundred houses, and further storms in 1347 and 1560 took away much of the rest. Today most of the original Dunwich is under water. St Peter’s Church is nearly a quarter of a mile offshore, and some people with no attachment to acoustic reality claim that you can still hear its bell ringing late at night if you listen carefully. All that is left of Dunwich these days is a beach café, a few houses, a ruined priory and its chirpy pub.

  In the evening, in a desperate effort to keep from starting drinking too early, I went for a longish walk and ended up at the seafront. Ships, prettily lit, slid across the horizon, presumably headed for or coming from Felixstowe, just around the corner to the south.

  I had just read in The Economist that Felixstowe is now the world’s leading exporter of empty cardboard boxes. The world sends Britain its products and Britain sends back the boxes. It isn’t that Britain is more vigilant than other nations about gathering up old cardboard, but more that other nations don’t export it. They recycle it. Britain prefers to send its discarded packaging abroad for expert handling by poorly paid people in distant places. In 2013, the United Kingdom exported more than one million tonnes of cardboard, considerably more than any other nation proportionate to its population.

  And with that proud thought to sustain me, I walked back up to the Ship to toast, in my own private way, my adopted nation.

  Chapter 15

  Cambridge

  ON THE PLATFORM at Cambridge station was a poster for a Jeremy Clarkson book. It had a photo of Clarkson looking adorably doleful and a caption that read: ‘Dads. Everything they say. Everything they do. Everything they wear. Its all completely wrong.’ Oh, the wit. But note the absence of the apostrophe in ‘its’. I know it is way too much to ask that Jeremy Clarkson should take an interest in the literacy of his posters, but surely someone at Penguin ought to care.

  We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but evidently don’t realize that there are fundamentals. Many people – people who make posters for leading publishers, write captions for the BBC, compose letters and advertisements for important institutions – seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle indiscriminately through any collection of words. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: ‘Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results’. All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is ‘the daily Telegraph’? Is it really possible to be that unobservant?

  Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an email from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in the UK. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: ‘Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families …’

  In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and got the name of her own department wrong – this from a person whose job is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a paediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word children’s twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children’s specialist working in a children’s hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

  People everywhere have abandoned whole elements of grammatical English, and I don’t understand it. I was watching a Brian Cox television documentary in which he was standing in a field in Mexico talking about bombardier beetles when he said: ‘The bombardier beetle and me, and in fact every living thing you can see, are exposed to the same threat … Me and my friend the beetle have both reached the same solution.’ Now don’t get me wrong. I have great respect for Brian Cox. He has a brain so big that it crosses whole time zones, and he is normally impeccable with the language, so why on earth would he say ‘the bombardier beetle and me’ when it is surely more natural, and clearly more respectable, to say ‘the bombardier beetle and I’? Soon after this, I watched a documentary by another eminent young scientist, Adam Rutherford, and he said: ‘Now I’ve got just 33 vertebrae in my spinal column, but Belle here [a boa constrictor]
has got 304, and the amazing thing is it’s the same handful of genes that determine how many vertebrae both me and her have.’

  Then I was watching a repeat of Outnumbered, which had this snatch of dialogue in it:

  Outnumbered kid: ‘Why do I have to look after Karen?’

  Hugh Dennis: ‘Because me and Mum and Ben are going to be at Ben’s parents’ evening.’

  Hugh Dennis was educated at Cambridge in real life, and he plays a teacher who should really know better.

  Then I heard Samantha Cameron, wife of the Prime Minister, say to a television interviewer, ‘Me and the kids help to keep him grounded.’

  So here is all I am saying about this. Stop it.

  I thought it would be quiet in Cambridge on a Sunday, but it was the very opposite. The streets were teeming with tourists and shoppers, as if there were a festival on, but it was just the usual Sunday shuffle, people passing their day of rest by aimlessly wandering between shops, with lunch and an occasional hot beverage and day-old pastry thrown in. It used to be that on Sunday mornings the only people you would see in a commercial district were homeless people looking in litter bins. In those days all you could buy on a Sunday was cigarettes, sweets, milk and newspapers. If you had forgotten to shop for food on Saturday, you had Smarties and a glass of milk for dinner.

  How the world has changed. Now there were more people on the streets of Cambridge than lived in Cambridge. Some streets were packed primarily with locals, some primarily with tourists. Every few steps some cheerful young person would thrust a leaflet at me for some kind of a tour – coach tour, walking tour, ghost tour, hop on/hop off bus tour. Every shop doorway and postcard rack, indeed every available space within sight of a historic building, was crowded with gaggles of foreign youngsters, usually with matching backpacks. I wanted a coffee, but the cafés were filled to overflowing, so I went to John Lewis on the presumption that I would find a quiet café there, up on the top floor, with views over rooftops. John Lewis always has a café with a view over rooftops, and it did have here, too, but it was packed, with a queue stretching back to the Keep Calm and Carry On giftware section. At least two dozen people hadn’t even reached the wet plastic trays yet. (Why are trays at John Lewis always wet? How do they think that helps?) The idea of creeping along behind people who couldn’t decide between a pain aux raisins and a fruit cup, or who wondered if they could just have a daub of Dijon on the side and were happy to stop the line while some hapless skivvy went down to the cellars to fetch a new jar, or who got to the till and didn’t have the right money and had to send a search party to fetch Clive – well, I couldn’t face that. So I gave up on coffee and went and looked at televisions because that’s what men do in John Lewis. There were over three hundred of us, moving solemnly up and down the rows of televisions, considering each in turn, even though the televisions were all essentially identical and none of us needed a television anyway. Then I examined laptops – tapped the keys, opened and closed the lids, nodding ruminatively, like a judge at a vegetable-growing competition – and finally waited my turn to listen to the demonstrator Bose headphones. I dropped the headphones on to my ears and immediately I was in a tropical jungle – and I mean right in it, aurally immersed – listening to cawing birds and skitterings in the undergrowth. Then I was in Manhattan at rush hour with murmured voices and honking horns. Then in a cleansing spring shower with just an occasional crack of thunder. The fidelity was uncanny. Then I opened my eyes and I was back in John Lewis in Cambridge on a Sunday. It was perhaps little wonder that six men were waiting behind me for a go on the headphones.