Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  We drive through extremely narrow roads bordered closely on either side by high hedges to Hartland Point, on one occasion having to back up a fair way to let another car get past. Park at Hartland Point, which is an impressive headland stretching up 350 feet above the Atlantic, and walk down a moderately steep (although not as steep as Clovelly) path that gradually curves around the face of the cliffs and down to sea-level, where the lighthouse is. It’s still a working lighthouse, although automated now. It seems to be low-tide, and there is an impressive collection of kelp-fringed rocks surrounding the lighthouse, with a shipwreck—the rusting hulk of a tanker, broken in two—resting on some of them. This is obviously not a place you’d want to be offshore of in a boat during a storm. Sea cliffs march away south. Straight ahead is nothing but open sea, with North America somewhere on the other side of it.

  Long, tiring walk back up, then drive back to the Lodge, overshooting and ending up in Camelford, and having to backtrack. On the tiny road that leads to Trenale and the Lodge, we stop to look at the view down over the fields to the sea, alarming an old lady who lives in a stone hut by the road, and who fears that we’re going to take a photo of her house and sell it to criminals so that they can figure out how to rob her. She makes us promise not to do this. Back at the room, Corky the black-and-white lodge cat marches inside and settles himself down on Susan’s bed, apparently ready to stay for as long as we are—well, we had joked earlier about getting a “travel cat” for the trip, and now it appears that we have one. Later, when we’re taking a walk around the grounds before dinner, Corky follows Susan everywhere, “following” her by dashing ahead and then waiting for us to catch up, in that way that cats have. When he even follows us across the road when we go to look at the horses in the adjacent field, we decide to go back to the “snug”—there are two bars or lounges, the more formal one upstairs, and the “snug room” on the ground floor—for a drink before we get Corky run over. Dinner is beef in some sort of sauce, potatoes, and brown-bread ice-cream, which is quite good. Split another bottle of wine, stagger to bed, reeling through the country silence.

  Monday, August 14th—Dartmoor, Two Bridges, Wigham & Morchard Bishop

  Last breakfast at the Lodge (which proved to be our favorite place to stay on the entire trip, rivalled only by Fallowfields, near Oxford). Check out, say goodbye to Sam the dog, who lunges up and snatches a piece of toast I’m holding in my hand (to feed to the birds later), and then trots proudly around the yard with the toast in his mouth for the next five minutes, while we load the car. A trophy, perhaps?

  Leave Cornwall behind, drive into Devon, this time heading east. Drive to Moretonhampstead on the A30 and the A382, and then into Dartmoor on the B3212, stopping at the miniature pony center, where they had pigs and piglets and some newborn baby ponies, who were not much bigger than a small dog, as well as the adult miniature ponies, which are used for pony rides. (The adult miniature ponies looked at me with suspicion and growing alarm, but I was in a benevolent mood and made no attempt to ride them.) Move on down the B3212. Somewhere just to the north of Postbridge—in the high treeless country I think of as “the real moor,” although I suppose all of it, high and low, valley forest and barren rocky hill, is all officially Dartmoor—we park the car by the side of the road, in a cutting, and walk up a long rolling hill covered with purple heather and golden gorse. Also covered with sheep-droppings, which are everywhere—not surprising, since the sheep themselves are everywhere. Two of them wander up the hillside in front of me on a faint trail that they and their kin have probably broken themselves, not hurrying or alarmed, but not letting me close with them either, always staying the same distance ahead of me. There is a wild moor pony off some distance to the left, and he too, although also seeming unalarmed, moves away in an unhurried fashion when I approach, stopping to graze every few steps in an unconcerned way, but still not letting me close with him. A ruined hill-fort is visible in the distance on the ridge line, with hikers moving toward it; in the other direction, down the hill past the car, herds of sheep move and bleat, and, as I watch, a party consisting of four riders and two happily panting dogs comes by. I spend a contented half-hour or so wandering around on the high moor, in heather up to my knee, stepping on sheep-berries, bees buzzing by my ears and the wind soughing, looking at the hill-forts on the surrounding ridge-lines through my binoculars, occasionally breaking into a whistled chorus of “The Heather on the Hill,” which doesn’t seem to either startle the ever-receding sheep into moving any faster or intrigue them into investigating. I find the high moor country strangely attractive and inviting—odd, since I usually instinctively dislike and avoid places where there isn’t any shade, and here on these bare rocky hills there is no shelter from the sun at all. Nevertheless, I am strangely happy here, and would probably be content to spend the entire vacation tramping aimlessly around over the moors. (I am fundamentally a mountain person, always happiest when I am in high country, and Susan is fundamentally a water person, happiest near or on a large body of water; I later noticed that throughout the trip, whenever I would say “Look at that!” and point at something particularly scenic, I would usually be pointing at a mountain view; when Susan would do the same, she was almost inevitably pointing at a view of a lake or of the ocean.)

  Continued on to Two Bridges, which consists almost entirely of the Two Bridges Hotel, where we have a mediocre lunch (lunch is almost always the meal that the British do the worst job on; breakfasts are usually quite good, sometimes the best meal of the day, and many of our dinners were perfectly acceptable, too, but we had few lunches that rose above mediocre—most of them, in fact, sucked). After lunch, took the B3357 to Ashburton, up and across the high moor again, the narrow road practically lined with sheep, their coats splashed with green or red or blue, some of them laying half-in the road, all of them seemingly unafraid of cars, although surely a tourist must hit one occasionally, the road is so winding and narrow, there’s so much traffic, and so much of it drives unnervingly fast. There are also groups of wild moor ponies here and there by the side of the road, usually being cooed at by tourists, all of whom, British and American, are feeding the ponies, of course, although supposedly this is illegal; the ponies, though, don’t seem in the least concerned about participating in an illegal event. We stop again on the high moor somewhere west of Dartmeet. There’s another ruined hill-fort visible from here, closer to us, on the crest of another hill, and I’m tempted to hike up to it, but the afternoon is dying, and we don’t really have the time. Continue on, stopping at a narrow stone bridge over the river Dart, just as we did eight years ago. At Ashburton, turn off on to the A38 to Exeter, then creep along behind hay-trucks and lorries on the A377, turning off at Morchard Bishop and following unnumbered back roads and then a private road to Wigham, our next inn.

  Greeted by the proprietor, Steve, and two black dogs, one of whom is just a puppy, not much more than a month or two old. Steve helps us up to our room with our immensely heavy suitcases, while the puppy, Zulu, frisks about and play-bites our hands. Both of us are somewhat disappointed in Wigham, especially coming off of our stay at Trebrea Lodge, which we loved. Wigham is extremely twee, with throw-pillows and cute little stuffed animals everywhere, a sort of a Disneyfied version of the traditional thatched cottage that it advertises itself to be. I am also bothered by the fact that there’s “no there there”—at Trebrea, we could stroll around the extensive grounds, but all there is here is the main house, with a gravel terrace in front of it, everything squeezed in between the driveway/parking area and the fence that blocks access to the “working farm” part, which is private; on the other side of the gravel terrace with its picnic tables is the swimming pool, set down a level, and on the other side of that, down the hill a bit, are fenced-in fields full of sheep . . . so there’s really no place to go here unless you get back in the car and leave, no place to stroll around. (Susan points out that it’s odd that a place that makes such a big deal about being an “organic farm,”
all very self-consciously and piously Green, should have animal-skin rugs all over the floors . . . but it does.) We go swimming, and the pool is nice, and welcome, since the sun is still high and blazing, although the pool is much dirtier than a pool even in a small roadside motel in the States would be, full of dead floating bugs and twigs and leaves. Susan goes upstairs while I sit at one of the picnic tables on the gravel terrace and work on these notes, listening to the almost constant baa-ing of the sheep, counterpointed by the occasional lowing of a cow. A black-and-white cat comes by, crying as it walks, seeming almost to be answering the mewling cries of the sheep; but perhaps it is only calling its kittens.

  Dinner is late because the other guests, a party of eight French people travelling together, are late returning from Clovelly and Hartland Point, where we were yesterday. We are offered a free drink as compensation; I have a Tia Maria and Susan has a gin and tonic. Finally the French arrive, and we are introduced to them, although only one or two of them speak even a word of English; Susan has a smattering of tourist French, but they speak so fast that this turns out to be largely useless. Dinner is served family style around one big wooden table—rice with raisins, steamed vegetables, with skimpy portions of some sort of sweet-and-sour pork put on the plates first. The French clearly do not like the food, and several of them barely bother to touch it; jokes about the food are made in rapid French, which Steve, who speaks French haltingly, seems to catch and resent. The eight French people, four couples, all late middle-aged, talk loudly and enthusiastically to each other during dinner, with much shouting and laughing and gesturing and even a brief outbreak of singing, and this seems to embarrass our hosts, who keep whispering apologies to us for the exuberance of the French, and promising us that things will be “much quieter” tomorrow, when there will be only an English couple and us. The black labrador puppy, Zulu, is clearly very popular with the French people, and circles the table while several of them call his name, leaping up to have his head tousled and to chew on people’s fingers. I play tug-of-war with him with a napkin, which he joyously shreds into little pieces. After dinner, the French all troop outside onto the terrace and light up cigarettes, in defiance of the inn’s strict no-smoking policy. While they’re puffing away, I hear the innkeeper’s five-month-pregnant wife, Dawn, complaining bitterly in the kitchen about the fact that the French people are smoking, saying that if there’s a fire, it will void their insurance. If the French hear her, they either don’t understand or don’t care, because they continue to smoke for some time, while we go up to bed.

  Tuesday, August 15th—Okehampton Castle & Tavistock

  When we wake, we are socked-in—very foggy, although as yet no rain, and we tell ourselves maybe it will burn off. Susan says that when she first looked out an hour or two earlier, the fog was like cheesecloth pressed against the window. Even now you can’t see beyond the edge of the gravel terrace, and the mournful voices of the sheep rise up out of the fog.

  Breakfast is late because our hostess is busy screaming at her assistant in the kitchen over his request for more time off, and they continue to fight vindictively for quite some time instead of starting breakfast, which makes for a very tense atmosphere which the French, upon arriving, either ignore or are oblivious to. After everyone has been waiting around the table for a while, the hostess and her assistant belatedly notice and pull themselves together, and breakfast begins. Am amused to note during breakfast that the puppy Zulu is sticking her nose into the big bowl that holds the cold cereal, and is happily eating it. Fortunately, I’m not planning to have cereal here tomorrow.

  Take off after breakfast, miss our turning, and end up taking the “backdoor” route to Coppelstone, through tiny towns called Oldbourough and Newbuildings, along roads so small that the hedges on either side of them scratch the sides of the car as we pass. At Coppelstone, take the A3072 to Okehampton, park, walk up to tour Okehampton Castle. On the way to the castle, we explore a few yards down a footpath marked romantically “Lover’s Meet,” and find waiting for us there, romantically, a backhoe, which is parked sitting partially in the stream. It is, however, we tell ourselves, a very romantic backhoe. At the castle, Susan buys earphones and takes an “audio tour” of the castle while I, disdaining the earphones, walk around at my own pace, speculating that someday people will be able to take “virtual tours” of castles, seeing projected around them as they walk the castle as it would have looked when it was intact, perhaps not bothering to look at the ruins in the real world at all. I am amused by a sign that says that, while in attendance, the Lord of the manor maintained a retinue that included eight men-at-arms and fourteen lawyers. If he had that much more use for lawyers than for men-at-arms, then I guess that things haven’t really changed all that much since the 14th Century.

  Leave Okehampton, drive to Tavistock on the A386, park in the ubiquitous car-park, walk around looking for the tea-room we’d eaten in in 1987, finally give up and have lunch in a place called The Coffee Mill. Toasted cheese and bacon sandwich for Susan, cream tea for me—the Cornish clotted cream and the Devon clotted cream are not quite the same, the Devon variety having a texture more like that of butter; both are good, but the Cornish version has the edge, I think. Shopped in town for a while, trying to determine how difficult it would be to send a bottle of Dartmoor Mead back to the States for Janet and Ricky Kagan (very difficult, as it turns out, so we give up the idea), then drive up on to the moor on the B3212, stopping briefly just before Princetown, somewhere near Merrivale, and stopping again later on somewhere up near Postbridge. The color of the hills on this side is predominantly purple, the color of the heather, which makes them look almost red from a distance. On the other side, where we stopped yesterday near Dartmeet, the hills were much more golden, the color of the gorse, as there was more of it there admixed with the heather. Drive to Mortonhampstead, passing the pony center again, then up the A382 to the B3219, up the A3072 to Coppelstone, then home on the A377 and along the network of back roads past Morchard Bishop to Wigham.

  It’s still quite hot and bright, drought weather instead of the more usual English weather, and so we take a swim, joined by the new guests, the promised-to-be “quiet” English couple, who turn out to be a pleasant middle-aged English couple called Eva and Bill (he somewhat older than her; he remembers being wakened as a small child in the middle of the night when the news of VJ Day came in, and hearing all the boats in the harbor sounding their whistles—he was a retail buyer of china, who had bought plates for the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth; she was an English teacher until her recent retirement, blonde, still pretty), and later by Steve and Dawn (Steve obviously somewhat apprehensive about the upcoming birth; talks uneasily about the birthing classes they are taking, hoping that the baby doesn’t come until they graduate), and then by Zulu, who splashes into the pool, swims around for awhile, and then tries to get out by the pool ladder, slipping and scrambling and whining, but finally clawing her way out (amusing to me that Dawn is concerned about the legal consequences of the French smoking, but doesn’t seem to care about the dog swimming in the pool with the guests, which in the States would almost certainly be enough of a Board of Health violation to shut them down). Zulu shakes herself dry, and then pounces on the cat when it comes wandering by, biting it ferociously—not really hurting it, but obviously annoying it. The cat makes protesting noises, and then finally gets fed up when Zulu won’t stop and starts to fight back; they disappear into the distance, still fighting and barking and spitting.

  Dinner is again served at the big wooden table that night, but this time with just us and the English couple: chicken in a brownish sauce with bits of mushroom and bacon, red cabbage with juniper berries, roasted potatoes, squash (or marrows, as they’re called here) in tomato sauce—not tremendously good, but there’s lots of it, served family style in big bowls, and it’s considerably better than the night before; you get the feeling that they’re trying a bit harder now that the French, who they obviously didn’t much lik
e, are gone. Pleasant dinner conversation with Eva and Bill during dinner and in the sitting room afterward, mostly about the inadequacies of various educational systems. Then to bed.

  Wednesday, August 16th—Kelmscot Manor, Fallowfields & Kingston Bagpuise

  Up about 7:20. When I go down to the gravel terrace before breakfast to write up these notes, Zulu comes prancing up with her food bowl in her jaws and thrusts it into my lap; do you think she’s trying to tell me something? A pleasant breakfast with Bill and Eva, over which we linger too long—we’re getting a late start today, and it’s a bad time for it, since today we also face the longest uninterrupted drive of the trip, from Devon almost to Oxford.

  Drag our suitcases down to the car, pack up, and set off, on the road about 10:40. Take the A377 to Credition, then the A3072 to the M5. Take the M5 to the M4. It’s amazing how much quicker travel is on the M roads than it is on even the A roads in rural areas like Cornwall and Devon—it only takes us a bit more than two hours to get up near the Oxford area once we hit the M roads, and it takes us an hour just to get to where we pick up the M5 in the first place from Morchard Bishop; some of our journeys around Cornwall and Devon actually took as long or longer than it takes us to get from Exeter to Oxford.

  Get off the main road a few miles from Kingston Bagpuise, about ten miles from Oxford, and, after some difficulty, find our way to Kelmscot, the country estate of William Morris, where Rossetti and others of the Pre-Raphaelites used to hang out, which is why Susan wants to see it. Stopped for an indifferent lunch at a pub called, believe it or not, the Plough Inn, and then pushed on to Kelmscot Manor itself. Explored the manor, which had unusually lovely hangings, tiles, wallpaper, and design elements, far superior to other country houses of this sort that we’ve seen—not surprising, I guess, considering that Morris and his artist friends designed and/or executed just about everything in the house themselves. Interesting that a man who considered himself a devoted socialist and who apparently would scold his wife for being extravagant in the shops would have such a rich and lovely home, but then Morris was full of contradictions, like many artistic people both then and now.