by Bill Bryson
Item three is that Britain is fundamentally sane. I appreciate that in a country. I regret to say that this point also occurred to me while travelling in my native land. Let me say at once that America is a wonderful country. Think what the world would be like today if the United States hadn’t intervened in the Second World War and led the reconstruction afterwards. America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn’t always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity.
Where this thought most recently occurred to me was in a hotel coffee shop in Baltimore, where I was reading the local paper, the Sun, and I saw a news item noting that Congress had passed a law prohibiting the US Department of Health and Human Services from funding research that might lead, directly or indirectly, to the introduction of gun controls.
Let me repeat that but in slightly different words. The government of the United States refuses to let academics use federal money to study gun violence if there is a chance that they might find a way of reducing the violence. It isn’t possible to be more stupid than that. If you took all the commentators from Fox News and put them together in a room and told them to come up with an idea even more pointlessly idiotic, they couldn’t do it.
Britain isn’t like that, and thank goodness. On tricky and emotive issues like gun control, abortion, capital punishment, the teaching of evolution in schools, the use of stem cells for research, and how much flag waving you have to do in order to be considered acceptably patriotic, Britain is calm and measured and quite grown up, and for me that counts for a great deal.
Quality of life, I decided, is my fourth point. There is something in the pace and scale of British life – an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking – that makes life strangely agreeable. The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.
On international quality-of-life comparisons, Britain always does remarkably well. Some nations are happier and some are wealthier, but almost none are happier and wealthier. Britain also comes near the top in a category called ‘life satisfaction’, which, I must say, surprised me. I’ve known the country pretty intimately for forty years and I don’t recall ever meeting anyone you would really call satisfied, but then it occurred to me that that is the secret of it.
The British, you see, are always happy when they ought to be – when the sun is shining and they have a drink in their hands and that sort of thing – but they are also very good at remaining happy when others would falter. If, for instance, they are walking in the countryside and it starts to rain, they pull on their waterproofs and accept that that’s just the way it sometimes is. Living in a British climate teaches patience and stoicism. I admire that.
But what really sets the British apart is that when things go very wrong and they have a legitimate reason to bitch deeply, bitterly and at length, that is when they are the happiest of all. A Briton standing in a minefield with a leg blown off who can say, ‘I told you this would happen,’ is actually a happy man. I quite like that in a people.
My fifth reason is one I knew from the outset. I have only put it last because it is the most important to me. I don’t suppose you will be surprised to hear that it is the beauty of the countryside. Goodness me, what an achievement.
Just after I returned home from America, I went to a place I had hoped to go to while travelling for this book, but never quite managed to reach: the ancient White Horse of Uffington. This is a giant stylized chalk figure of a horse, nearly four hundred feet long, carved into a hillside in Oxfordshire. It is strikingly modern – it looks like it was designed by Picasso – and very beautiful. It stands just beneath the even more ancient track known as the Ridgeway.
This is where England gets really old. The Ridgeway has been a thoroughfare for at least ten thousand years. For a long time, nobody could say just how old the White Horse is, but now with a procedure called optical stimulated luminescence it is known that it has been there, galloping across its hillside, for three thousand years. So it is older than England, older than the English language. For all those centuries it has been continuously maintained. If people didn’t climb up the hill and tend it, grass would grow over the chalk and the White Horse would disappear. The White Horse is a magnificent creation but its preservation and continuous maintenance over three thousand years is perhaps more magnificent still.
You can’t actually see the horse from the Ridgeway. You have to go partway down the hill to see it at all, and even then you can’t tell what it is because of its immense size. But if you can’t see the horse from White Horse Hill, you can see the countryside for miles around and that is awfully fine, too. I have said it many times before, but it really cannot be stated too often: there isn’t a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world’s largest park, its most perfect accidental garden. I think it may be the British nation’s most glorious achievement.
All we have to do is look after it. I hope that’s not too much to ask.
Brief afterword and acknowledgements
In the interval between the events just described and the book’s publication quite a lot happened in Britain. In a referendum on 18 September 2014, the people of Scotland voted by 55.3 per cent to 44.7 per cent to remain in the United Kingdom, but then began almost at once to talk again about leaving. In November 2014, Bill Bryson became a citizen of the United Kingdom in a small ceremony in Winchester. On 7 May 2015, the Conservative Party under David Cameron won a general election, which it interpreted as an endorsement of its strategy of perpetual austerity. In early July 2015, a panel called the Airports Commission under Sir Howard Davies recommended that a new runway be built at Heathrow rather than at Gatwick. The government’s final decision on the matter will come after this book is published, but, if nothing else, it appears that Staines Moor and the lovely gravel ponds of Wraysbury are safe from development. In the midst of all this, but most important of all, my daughter Felicity – last seen heavily pregnant in Chapter 4 – had her baby (Daphne, exquisite, thank you).
I should note that an early draft of the story that begins the book – about my painful encounter with an automatic parking barrier in France (an absolutely true story, by the way) – first appeared as part of a charity appeal, kindly arranged by audible.co.uk, for the Love Hearts appeal in aid of the cardiac unit of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. I remain much obliged to Audible and to Sally Page, head of business affairs, for their generous support for this exceedingly worthy cause.
As ever, I am immensely grateful to many people for support and guidance in the preparation of this book. In particular, I wish to thank my saintly and patient editors and publishers Larry Finlay, Marianne Velmans, Gerry Howard and Kristin Cochrane, and their colleagues Zoe Willis, Katrina Whone, Suzanne Bridson and Deborah Adams, as well as the immensely versatile and talented Neil Gower for the cover design, illustrations and map.
I am also much in debt to my kind and sporting friends Aosaf Afzal, John Flinn, Andrew Orme, Daniel Wiles, Matt and Anya Ridley, Josef and Britta Vormoor, and the entire Davidson family – Jon, Donna, Max and Daisy.
For additional help I am most grateful to Margaret Paren, chief executive of the South Downs National Park, and her colleagues Nick Heasman, Chris Manning and Nina Williams; Beth McHattie of English Heritage; Kate Davies and Lucy Barker of Stonehenge; and Edward J. Davis of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in New York.
Thanks also to all my family, with special thanks to my daughter Catherine for devoted secretarial assistance and to my son Sam for the author photograph. Above all, and as always, my most special thanks to my dear and infinitely patient wife, Cynthia.
About the author
Bill Bryson’s best-selling travel books include The Lost Continent
, Neither Here Nor There and Notes from a Small Island. Another travel book, A Walk in the Woods, has now become a major film starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson.
His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, on history, and on his own childhood in the hilarious memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His last critically lauded bestsellers were At Home: a Short History of Private Life, and One Summer: America 1927.
Bill Bryson was born in the American Midwest, and now lives in the UK. A former Chancellor of Durham University, he was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England for five years, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society.