He had made the trip on a heavy, three-geared bicycle, and had to walk uphill in many places in the Alps, and then again in the Dolomites. But from the Italian lakes all the way down to Rome he was able to stay in the valleys, he said.
“It was the finest country, Italy, save, of course, for Mussolini and his band of gypsies. Friendly people. They would always put me up in the little hill towns, took pity on me, don’t you know, fed me, sent me on with directions to some cousin one day’s ride away, and all the way down to Rome like that. And it was better coming back four years later.”
He meant the war. He had landed at Salerno and fought his way northward, hill by hill, town by town, all the way to France.
“We were fagged by the time we got up into Umbria. March into the little villages and the old men weeping, the women smiling through their tears and shouting viva l’inglesi and so on, and the flags and the pretty girls. But we didn’t care. We’d been liberating villages since Sorrento.”
It was hard to believe that this frail old fellow, with his papery skin and thin fingers, had undertaken such a journey, and following this had spent four years fighting against boys his age, who not three years earlier stood him to rounds of lager in the beer gardens of Germany. But such, I suppose, are the ravages of time.
I told him my own traveling plans, and he began giving me very good advice about routes through the highlands, and suggested that rather than slog up to Fort William in the west of Scotland, I take a train on the last leg. And then he told me that since I was in the general area, I should take a ride along the Swaledale, which was, he said, one of the most beautiful valleys of the region. I stood him to another whiskey and soon he was reminiscing on the beauties of the past, and that eloquent, somehow ominous calm before the storm of the war years when everyone was poor, and life was, as he phrased it, “topped up” and there was nothing that could stop you.
“It’s why I made that bicycle trip. I wanted to see the fountains of Rome and I could not for the world of me think of any reason why I should not go. I had not a shilling to my name, but I kissed me mum goodbye, rolled me old bike out the garden gate, and rode off without a fare-thee-well. Oh, those were fine times we had before the storm,” he said, “and all the girls knew what was coming”—he winked at me knowingly—“and I do believe the sun shone more brightly and more often back then and it was none of this gray you see nowadays.” He glanced out the back window toward the North Sea, where a lowering sky had covered the gray brown chop of the waters.
I think this joie de vivre must have been more a question of his chronological age than the spirit of the times. I had heard other stories from the thirties in England when there was no coal, and the only time people would heat a parlor was when someone in the household was about to die. But I knew what he meant. I felt the same way as he once had. What’s to lose? You’ve got the strength, you make the time, and so you ride on.
The next day I pedaled over to Bempton Cliffs, which are even higher than the rocky heights of Flamborough Head. I watched more seabirds circling and then skirted the curve of the coast, with kittiwakes never out of sight or sound, and a cold North Sea wind biting at me. At Filey there was a great expanse of smooth sandy beach stretching off to the sea, and, having found a room for the night, I took a walk along the strand, trying to fight the wind as well as the sense that it was about to rain. This was a small, dreary spot, not a place where one would want to wait out the rain for a few days.
My premonitions proved true. That night on the roof I could hear the drumming of a serious northern downpour.
In London I had purchased some better foul weather gear for just such an occasion, and so I set out in the teeth of the rain, riding, fortuitously, with the wind. All along the coast under the whipping downpours there were wild tides and huge gray breakers roaring in, growling and smashing up on the rocky shores or wailing at the base of the sea cliffs where the kittiwakes and the gannets circled and cried. In the afternoon the weather began to clear, and I came into a country of sharp hills, with pastures and planted pine forests and sweeping, high moorland. Then the grades smoothed out, the sun appeared, and I stripped off the rain gear and began flying over long easy grades like a kittiwake over seas of brown heather, with islanded shades of green and banks of yellow gorse.
This was desolate, empty country, and as I tripped along, I heard for the first time a sound that would be with me for the next week or so, the high descending whinny of the curlew. In late afternoon, beaten up and tired, I turned off the main road, such as it was, and descended again to the coast, down a precipitous, narrow track to the little town of Robin Hood’s Bay. The road was so long and steep and curving and wet that I actually had to get off my bicycle and walk it down. By the time I got to the town I was chilled again and stopped in at a little well-lit tea room and had poached eggs with toast and a pot of tea. They were so good I had another plate.
As often seemed the case in the precious village tea rooms of the British Isles, there were two sympathetic waitresses serving.
“Any little bed and breakfasts in this town?” I asked one of them.
“Well, not really,” she said.
“You do have Harry’s place, though,” said the second one, a plump woman named Betty.
“Right,” said the first. “You’ve got Harry’s. I suppose.”
“And this Harry’s …?” I asked, tipping my head.
“Oh it’s nice, all right,” Betty said.
“Right,” said the other.
“But …?” I asked.
“But then you got Harry.”
“We’ve got the key if you like.”
“Any place else?” I had a sense that Harry’s might not be the best place in town.
“No. I’ll fetch the key,” Betty said. “Harry might not be home tonight. You’ll have the run of the place, if he doesn’t come home.”
Harry’s turned out to be a snug, narrow little house, set, like a beached ship, right out on the very rocks of the coast. The seas were beating against the east walls. In fact the whole of Robin Hood’s Bay was very much like being on shipboard. Narrow companionways that served for streets led down to a shingle beach, and huge breakers swept in at high tide and smashed up against the sea walls that protected the town, spraying the windows of the coast-facing houses, only to retreat a quarter of a mile back across the seaweed-strewn flats at low tide.
By six that night the town closed up, and I was left with the run of Harry’s house.
Nice Betty had set me up in a shiplike little cabin in an upstairs room, paneled in blond wood, with a heavy white comforter and a good clean smell. She showed me the kitchen and a study with a big television in it, and then brought out a shepherds pie and showed me how to warm it.
“Now you just make yourself at home here. Harry won’t mind. And if he comes home, it’ll be all right. He’ll understand he’s got a house guest tonight.”
“I hope Harry won’t become enraged when he finds me here,” I said.
I was beginning to imagine an ogre who stomps in and then eats his house guests, like Polyphemus.
“Don’t you worry. Harry won’t eat you for dinner,” Betty said.
I tried to make myself at home, cooked up my shepherds pie as instructed, made a pot of tea, and was sorely tempted by Harry’s whiskey cupboard, but felt I would be overstepping my bounds if I took a nip. I cleaned up after my dinner and then began perusing Harry’s books: Glories of Scotland. A Pictorial History of the Second World War. Great Battles of History. The Holy Bible. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Great Medical Mysteries, and finally The Royal Family.
I was tempted to poke around some more but instead went out for another walk. By now it was low tide and I crossed the slippery green flats looking for sandworms and “winkies” as the locals called the myriad species of periwinkles that forage on the flats.
The tides were huge here. When I had come into town the waters of the North Sea were breaking on the shore, and n
ow the surf line was barely visible, set way out across the tidal flats. This is, of course, as we learned in sixth grade science class, the work of the moon, the theory being that the gravity of the moon exerts a pull on the waters of the globe. The side of the earth nearest the moon experiences a slightly greater pull as a whole, while the far side experiences a lesser pull. The effect of this is most evident in large bodies of water, such as the oceans.
The length of time that it takes the earth to rotate completely in relation to the moon causes two high tides and two low tides each day, and the size of these tides can vary tremendously from season to season and month to month because of the changes in the positions of the sun and moon over the course of a year. All this celestial-driven ebb and flow, this changing half-land half-sea environment, has created here on the planet earth a whole range of species such as the periwinkles and limpets that are able to survive in both environments. But the sun has an influence even on those species that live in the deep oceans.
The same cycles of growth, death, and decay that are at work on land also function in the seas and are regulated, as on land, by the solar cycles. In spring, as the life-giving rays penetrate deeper beneath the surface and the temperatures warm, there is a sudden and rapid growth of phytoplankton, which, especially in shallow areas, is stirred and mixed by spring storms and currents. The warming waters and the increase in plant food supplies beget blooms of planteating plankton, which in turn encourages plankton-eating species, everything from tiny newborn fish fry to immense creatures such as the baleen whales. The whole cycle reverses in winter. The weaker sun and the subsequent colder temperature slow the process and the oceanic year of growth and decay comes to an end.
In spite of the fact that the summer season on the sea was approaching, it was cold out on the flats, with an east wind whipping in, so I went back into town to look for a warm pub with one of those little gas fireplaces where I could take the chill off. All the streets in the town were steep and wet and glistening with salt spray and there was no green save for a few flowerpots, and no trees or shrubs to speak of anywhere. And no pubs. After a few explorations I went back and sat down in front of the blank TV and turned on the space heater to try to warm myself.
Around ten o’clock, just as I was about to head up for bed, I heard keys in the lock and a burly man with a graying beard and a heavy white cable sweater came in.
“I heard you were here,” he said, gruffly. “I’m Harry. And you would be the chap on the bicycle, wouldn’t you?”
“I am he, I believe,” I said.
“And it was you down at The North Light Inn, drinking whiskey with Old John Dawkins and talking of the war in Italy.”
“I was.”
“And I take it you believed that drivel he spilled about Italian girls and liberating the villages.”
“Well he did tell me some stories, but wasn’t any of it true?”
“Some. Maybe. But it wasn’t like that, and I’m here to tell you.”
This begat a history of his own wartime adventures, stories of imprisonment in Lithuania, long discursive rants against communism, the righteousness of the American position in Vietnam, Stalingrad, the Battle of the Bulge, attempts on Hitler’s life, the despicable nature of Poles, the dangers of the Chinese, the future of the Labor Party, why Royalty should be restored, and, finally, a long discourse on the history of the Standard Bearers of Her Majesty’s Body Guard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms, an elite band of pensioners of which, he said, his father, god bless his dear departed soul, was a long-standing member. This went on and on until one in the morning, when, on the excuse of an early start, I managed to extricate myself and get up to bed.
At least I was able to have a glass or two of the whiskey I had been coveting.
Sometime in the night I heard his heavy footsteps ascending the stairs and woke up, fearing he would break in, roust me out, and make me stand at attention and listen to more stories of Lithuanian prison camps.
After a fitful sleep I woke up the next morning to find a note instructing me to pay Betty and have my breakfast at the tea room.
“Get a little history lesson, last night?” Betty asked, when I came in.
After a filling breakfast of fried eggs and rashers, a stack of hot buttered toast, and coffee I rode up to Whitby along the coast.
The town itself is an ancient fishing port at the mouth of the River Esk and consists of a maze of alleyways and narrow streets that run down to the busy quayside. The village is dominated by the looming skeleton of Whitby Abbey, which sits high on a cliff and ranks as one of the most haunting ruins in all of England. The wall of arches and crumbled stone seem to hover above the landscape and the ruin is visible both from sea and land for miles around.
The sky had cleared by the time I got there and the green carpet of grass that had overgrown the flags of the old abbey floor was wet and sweet smelling, and here, in the sheltered corners of the ruins, I discovered a warm place out of the wind and put my face up to the sun to bask.
Whitby Abbey was founded about 657 by Oswy, one of the powerful kings of Northumberland, and was made famous by its first abbess, St. Hilda, who enlarged the community of monks and nuns and constructed new buildings on the site. The monastery flourished until about 687, when it was reduced to ruins by the raiding Danes. The community of monks dispersed, and the abbot fled to Glastonbury, taking the relics of St. Hilda with him.
The abbey’s finest hour occurred in 664 when a synod of bishops met there to settle a long-standing dispute concerning the actual date of Easter, which had divided the Christians of northern England, who had been converted by the Celts, from Christians in southern England, whom the Romans had converted. Such small matters, and even so small a matter as the correct tonsure of Christian monks, mattered greatly to these early Christians and, of course, would matter even more after the Reformation. But in the seventh century the issue had become especially pressing to King Oswy, who followed the Celtic rule, whereas his wife, Queen Eanfleda, followed the Roman. After a month-long debate the king decided in favor of Rome, and the date of Easter was set as the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. All that remained was to predict exactly when the vernal equinox would occur.
This was easy enough in theory: You simply note when the day and night are equal length and then wait for the next full moon. The trouble came with the elaborate celebrations that would take place in the Christian church at Easter. Given the communication systems of the period, under the old method, there was hardly time to announce the holiday and prepare for the events. Furthermore, both the equinox and the full moon occur at different times at different places on the earth, which meant that there still was no general day of celebration—something that did not serve an institution such as the Roman Catholic Church, which was attempting to make claims to universal truths. As a result, in the twelfth century the popes, some of whom were greatly interested in astronomy themselves, encouraged a closer examination of the apparent motions of the sun and moon in the heavens and a means to enable them to predict far in advance when the vernal equinox would occur.
During this period, Europe was operating under the Great Compilation of Ptolemy, which had been introduced in Córdoba by Maimonides and Averroës in the tenth century and had spread through France and Italy. Under the Ptolemaic system, the earth sat at the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, and stars circled around in perfect symmetry. In order to calculate the time of the return of the sun each spring, astronomers determined that they would have to lay out a meridian line, north to south, in some dark building with a hole in its roof. They had but to mark the spot on the line where light from the sun crossed at noon on the day of the vernal equinox, and observe how long the sun’s noon image took to return to the same spot on the line a year later.
Buildings of the right sort already existed it turned out—the great Gothic cathedrals of Italy and France. And so astronomers laid out meridians in stone on the church f
loors, pierced holes in the cathedral roofs or high walls, and began studying the heavens inside the churches. In effect, the churches became solar observatories. The irony was that in the very house of the Christian God, at the center of church power, and no more than a few feet from the sacred altars of Christianity, astronomers uncovered the great flaws in the dominant Ptolemaic earth-centered system that had dominated Europe and church doctrine for four hundred years, and ended up proposing a solar-based system. This development eventually shook apart the rock foundation upon which the church was based.
In 1543, by studying ancient astronomical records, Nicolaus Copernicus determined mathematically that the sun must be at the center of the solar system, but he still accepted the Ptolemaic model that held that the planets move in perfect circles. Fifty years later, by studying the skies with a newly invented device, the telescope, Galileo determined that the Copernican heliocentric model was correct. But even though he privately taught the system to his students, he did not openly declare the doctrine, since it was diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church. In 1616, the system of Copernicus had been officially denounced as dangerous to faith. Word got out of Galileo’s teachings and he was summoned to Rome and instructed to stop teaching the system. In spite of this pressure, in 1632 he published a work that supported the heliocentric theory. That brought down upon him the infamous courts of the Inquisition. He was recalled to Rome and tried, found guilty, and forced to recant, which he did. More or less. Legend holds that as he rose from his knees in front of the judges he mumbled “Epur si muove” (“Nevertheless it moves”).
Some four hundred years later, in 1992, the Church officially accepted the theory and apologized for its error.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 25