by Bill Bryson
I retired with a beer to a small table in the corner. As I sat there, watching the golden bubbles of happiness rising in my glass, feeling awfully contented, I became aware that a man at the bar was looking at me in a not unfriendly way.
‘You look like Bill Bryson,’ he said.
I never know quite how to answer that.
‘Do I?’ I said stupidly.
‘I saw Bill Bryson at the Hay Festival two years ago and you do look quite like him.’
You can see how powerfully I sear myself into people’s consciousnesses. The man had spent ninety minutes in my company and still wasn’t sure he recognized me.
The upshot is that I was outed, and I had to explain to them why I was in their fair little town, which elicited much interest. My new acquaintances couldn’t have been more welcoming. From them I learned all about Fishguard and its history – people in pubs always know everything – including that it was the last place in Britain invaded by a foreign army. That was in 1797 when a large French force led by a 70-year-old American named William Tate came ashore in the harbour below, hoping that the Welsh would join them in revolt. In fact, the people of Wales didn’t like being invaded and fired guns at them. Since Tate’s army was made up of criminals and men who had been pressed into service – and since, let’s be frank, they were French – they more or less surrendered at once. Twelve invaders dropped their weapons and put their hands up when a farmer’s wife pointed a musket at them. All the invaders, including apparently Tate, were sent back to France and told never to do anything like that again, and they didn’t.
With warm feelings for Fishguard and the Fishguard Arms, and with one pint too many sloshing in my stomach, I bade my new friends farewell and toddled off in search of dinner.
In the morning, I drove down to the ferry terminal and had a look. It’s rather a forlorn place now. When I went to Ireland in the 1970s, nearly a million people a year passed through Fishguard’s terminal. Today the number is 350,000 and falling. Now there are just two ferries a day to Ireland and one of them leaves at 2.30 in the morning. The other departs at 2.30 in the afternoon. In between times, it seems, the place is dead.
I continued north to Aberystwyth, the main town along this stretch of coast, on a road between the sea and the Preseli Mountains. The hills were big and bleak, made bleaker by a sudden squally rain, which fell in sheets across the bare slopes. Somewhere in the crags above, now lost in grey swirl, was the outcrop from which the bluestones of Stonehenge came. It seemed to me beyond extraordinary that the people of Salisbury Plain would even know about stones high up in these remote hills, never mind decide to haul eighty of them home with them. There isn’t anything about that ancient world that doesn’t stagger.
Aberystwyth squatted, grim and grey, beneath a steady rain around a crescent bay. It is both an old seaside resort and a university town – one of several outposts of the University of Wales – which I thought might give it a certain perkiness, and perhaps it does in fine weather, but on this day of falling rain it was never going to be anything but miserable. There were no students on the streets – indeed, almost no people. I parked on the front and walked along its long, curving, lavishly puddled promenade. The prom had been battered by storms the previous winter and was being extensively reconstructed, but there were no workers visible, just idle machinery. At one end of the prom was a strikingly ugly pier. Photographs show that it was once quite lovely, but it has since been boxed in with what looked like painted plywood. How do people get permission to do these things? Beyond the pier was a headland with a big war memorial featuring a female figure with a curiously erotic air. I studied that for a minute, rain running down my neck, then went and had a cup of coffee. Then I shuffled around the town centre pretending to look with interest in shop windows, until I realized that this was ridiculous, so I squelched back to the car and returned to the road.
I drove inland past Devil’s Bridge, a beauty spot, and on through two attractive old spa towns, Llandrindod Wells and Builth Wells, stopping from time to time to have a look around and get wet all over again, and finally in mid afternoon headed for the Brecon Beacons. This is an area of big hills and lush valleys of an intense and celebrated beauty, though I could see hardly any of it because of the clinging mists and drifting rain. It was an altogether wretched day.
The radio was full of talk of the upcoming Scottish referendum, and I wondered idly why the Welsh weren’t more restive. They seemed at least as forgotten as their Scottish cousins, and even more visibly a separate nation because of the signs in Welsh everywhere. I think I would be a little resentful if I were Welsh. For a while some of them were. Between 1979 and 1993, some two hundred arson attacks were recorded on English-owned second homes in Wales. Only one man was ever held accountable for the attacks, a fellow named Sion Roberts, who was sent to prison for seven years in 1993, but he could hardly have been the mastermind since he was only seven years old when the attacks began. After Roberts’s jailing the attacks ceased as abruptly as they had begun, and Wales returned to being tranquilly beautiful and entirely peaceful.
The weather cleared as I headed through the big valleys to my final destination, Crickhowell. The mists thinned and vanished, the sky filled with puffy clouds and the sun poured golden light across the hillsides. In the west, a nearly perfect rainbow shimmered above the hills. Wales was glorious.
Crickhowell is a perfect village, charming and prosperous with good shops and streets of pretty cottages. I checked into my hotel, the Bear, an old coaching inn, then went straight out to stretch my legs and enjoy being dry. The one problem with Crickhowell is that it is bombarded with traffic. All the roads out of the village seemed to turn into busy highways, but at length I found my way down to the little River Usk and followed a path along the north bank through the valley for a ways. It was intensely beautiful.
Looking at my trusty OS map, I was slightly shocked to realize that just over the hills before me was the Rhondda Valley. Not so very long ago, the greatest concentration of coal mines in the world was crammed into that landscape. Among the communities was the famously tragic Aberfan, cruelly devastated by a landslide in 1966. I remember very clearly sitting at a kitchen table three thousand miles away, reading with horror about the sudden death of teachers and schoolchildren. I was fourteen years old and I think it may have been the only time in my adolescence that I interrupted my own enormous self-absorption to think about others.
I couldn’t remember many of the details now, but later back in my room I looked on the internet. The story is simply told: one morning in October 1966, the people of Aberfan heard a terrible rumbling and looked up to see tens of thousands of tonnes of mining waste crashing down upon them. Years of mining spoil, casually heaped on a slope above the village, had broken loose. It wiped out the local school and much of the neighbourhood around. One hundred and sixteen children and twenty-eight adults perished. Had the landslide happened a half-hour earlier, the school would have been empty and nearly all those lives would have been spared. Had it happened the following day, the children would have been on half-term holiday and no one at all would have been hurt. They couldn’t have been unluckier.
Lord Robens, head of the National Coal Board, didn’t go to Aberfan immediately, but instead went to the University of Surrey that afternoon, to be installed as chancellor, an act of callous indifference. He refused to accept any blame, personal or collective, for the disaster. People from all over the world sent money to help Aberfan rebuild, but the NCB gave only £500 from the disaster fund to each family that lost a child and only then after making them prove that they were actually close to their children. At the same time, the NCB secretly appropriated £150,000 from the fund to clean up the mess that its own negligence had created. An inquiry later found the NCB wholly responsible for the landslide, and it paid the money back. No one was ever punished for all those deaths.
And with that melancholy thought floating through my head, I went to the hotel bar and had a very q
uiet beer before dinner.
Chapter 21
The North
ONE OF THE THINGS I noticed almost at once when I first came to Britain was how quiet it was. The United States – and I don’t mean this quite as cruelly as it sounds – exists in a kind of mindless din. It is a noisy country. We are noisy people. Our voices carry. You can sit in a crowded restaurant in America and follow every conversation in the room. If a guy fifty feet away has haemorrhoids, you’re going to know about it. You’re probably going to know what kind of unguent he is using and whether he applies it with two fingers or three. (We are medically candid as well.)
Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Check-in clerks bark: ‘Next in line!’ Baristas at Starbucks shout: ‘Conchita, your order’s ready!’ (I prefer not to give them my real name.) Disembodied voices in big stores ceaselessly hector you to take up their special offers or fill the air with thinly coded messages that someone’s having a heart attack in housewares. (‘Attention: horizontal event in aisle seven.’) Moving walkways tell you over and over again that you are coming to the end and need to prepare yourself for independent locomotion.
England was so quiet in comparison. The whole country was like a big library. Even airport announcements were preceded by a gentle bing-bong sound, soothing in itself, followed by a soft female voice telling you that the 15.34 to Kuala Lumpur was now boarding. And there was such politeness, too. The voices in England didn’t order you to do something. They invited you to make your way.
All that is gone now. Today Britain is noisy, too, thanks mostly to mobile phones. It’s a strange thing, but people in Britain still whisper when sharing a confidence face to face, but give them a mobile phone, a seat in a railway carriage and a sexually transmitted disease and they’ll share the news with everyone. I was on a packed rush-hour train from Swindon to London a while back when some idiot further down the carriage put a conversation on speakerphone. The whole carriage could hear every word loud and clear. It was actually quite fascinating. You don’t usually get to hear both ends of a conversation, particularly when both parties are cretins. The man at our end was evidently seated with colleagues – they appeared to be returning from a regional meeting – and was speaking to another colleague back at the office. The banter between them was excruciating. I can’t remember anything at all of the conversation except that at one point the man back at the office said, in a hearty voice, ‘So how’s the fat slag?’ and suddenly the speakerphone was switched off and the conversation became much quieter. It appeared that the man in the office didn’t know he was on speakerphone. All of us in my area beamed happily and returned to our reading. Nothing brings the English together like witnessing a deserved humiliation.
I was thinking about this now because I was on a train from London to Liverpool and I was surrounded by people on cell phones. Behind me, unseen but nearby, a young woman was holding an intense and apparently endless conversation with a friend that appeared to involve saying everything three times: ‘He’s a knob. He’s a total knob. I’ve told you a million times, Amber, he’s a total knob … I told her, but she wouldn’t listen. She never listens. She never listens to anything … But then that’s just Derek, isn’t it? That’s Derek all over. Derek’s never going to change. He’s a knob …’
Across the aisle, a young woman was having exactly the same conversation but in a Slavic language. Once, I would have been helplessly trapped with these people, but now I can do something about it. I rooted in my rucksack and pulled out a small zippered case containing noise-reduction headphones – the very model I had played with at John Lewis in Cambridge recently. I had told my wife about them and she had bought me a pair as a surprise, as an anniversary present. I really wanted a red sports car, but that’s OK. The headphones are miraculous. It’s like being back in the Britain I used to know. I don’t listen to music or anything recorded. I just enjoy the silence. It’s lovely. It is like being adrift in outer space.
The woman across the aisle was still talking away but now I saw only silently moving lips. Looking around, I noticed that almost everyone near me had wires dangling from their ears. Isn’t it interesting that we have all this technology at our disposal that allows us to do these marvellous, theoretically stimulating things and what we use it for is to escape into a private space where we can be mindless?
I turned on my laptop. ‘Installing update 911 of 19,267,’ it told me.
So instead I closed my eyes and just drifted through space, like Sandra Bullock in Gravity, but calmer. The next thing I knew we were in Liverpool and my installation was nearly complete.
I was in Liverpool for a football match: Everton v. Manchester City. I can’t pretend that this was an event of huge moment to me, or even necessarily to many people who follow football, but it was a big deal for my son-in-law Chris, who lives and dies for Everton. This is a trifle odd as he grew up two hundred miles away in Somerset. He became an Everton supporter simply because Everton won the first match he ever watched on TV and because he quite liked their blue uniform. (He was ten years old.) I find that endearing and pathetic in roughly equal measure. In all his years of support, he had never seen Everton play at home, so for his birthday his dear wife, my dear daughter, had bought him four tickets to today’s match: for him, his two little boys and for me. It was going to be a guys’ day out. I was very excited.
Chris and his boys – Finn, aged nine, and Jesse, six – had travelled up from London the day before, so we had arranged to meet in the city centre for lunch. I spied them walking towards me up Chapel Street, all three of them dressed, without embarrassment, as if for a competition called ‘How Many Things Can You Wear That Say “Everton” on Them?’
They would easily have won for they were the only people in the centre of Liverpool wearing anything at all with ‘Everton’ on it. You soon discover that Everton Football Club is something of a secret even in its own city.
We had lunch, then took a cab to the ground, or at least to within about half a mile of the ground, which is as close as it could get on a match day. Here there were tens of thousands of people dressed in Everton jerseys, scarves, hats and other tribal regalia – a sight that staggered my two grandsons. These boys live in outer London. Every one of their friends supports Chelsea or Arsenal. They had never seen another Everton supporter before, and now here were forty thousand of them. It was as if they had died and gone to heaven, albeit a heaven populated largely by people with enormous bellies and neck tattoos.
Everton Football Club isn’t actually in Everton. It’s in Walton, a neighbouring district full of boarded-up pubs, mean terraced houses and vacant lots filled with builders’ rubble. Google ‘Walton, Liverpool’ and you get a succession of entries like ‘Off-licence in Walton targeted by ram-raiders’, ‘Walton burglary gang jailed’, ‘Two men arrested after stabbing in Walton’. I had never seen an area quite this rough. I stayed close to Chris. He’s a London policeman and, more to the point, retired Metropolitan Police Force middleweight boxing champion. The boys and I held his jacket.
Everton’s ground is Goodison Park, which is not merely the most venerable stadium in English football, but in the world. It was built in 1892 and is evidently the oldest surviving purpose-built football ground anywhere. This sounds charming but what it means in practice is that even places like Liberia and Burkina Faso have more modern, up-to-date stadiums. Still, because of its cherished history, we assumed reverential countenances as we entered the stadium and found our way to the tiny vice-like numbered spaces that are called seats. They were unbelievably uncomfortable and so narrow that I could sit on only one buttock at a time, but eventually both cheeks became so numb that I lost any active awareness of discomfort.
And so the match began. I do love a live sporting match. I had brought some small binoculars and I spent much of the first half looking at all the peripheral things that aren’t shown to you when you watch on television, like what the goalkeepers
do when play is at the other end of the pitch (stand there with their hands at their sides and occasionally jump up and down once or twice, then do some neck rolls, then stand some more) or what the players do when the ball is nowhere near them. I particularly liked watching the linesmen run sideways up and down the sidelines, as if imitating a giraffe.
I noticed, as I have often noticed at English football matches, that I was the only person in the stadium enjoying himself. The rest of the spectators, on both sides, were perpetually stressed and dismayed. A man behind me was simply full of despair.
‘Now why did he do that?’ he would say. ‘What was he thinking? Why didn’t he pass it?’ Then he would say it all again.
His companion seemed to have some issues with eighteenth-century German metaphysics because he kept saying over and over, ‘Fucking Kant.’ I am not quite sure how he was relating this to the actions before us, but every time Everton failed to score he called them a ‘load of fucking Kants’.
‘Oh, now why did they do that?’ said the despairing man.
‘Because they’re fucking Kants,’ replied his partner bitterly.
At half-time the score was 0–0. Naively I said to Chris, ‘Well, you must be reasonably happy with that,’ for Everton were the underdogs, and he said, ‘Are you kidding? We had so many missed chances. We were just rubbish.’ He looked wretched.
In the second half, Manchester City scored a goal, leaving us sitting in suicidal silence, but then Everton came back and drew level and it was like Mardi Gras. When the referee blew the final whistle with the score 1–1, I thought honour had been satisfied, but we were gloomy once more at our end of the pitch.
I chose to look on the bright side.
‘It is, after all, just a game,’ I pointed out philosophically.
‘Fucking Kant,’ said the man behind me, still philosophical himself.