Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Finished touring Kelmscot about 4:15, drove back to the A420 to the A415, and so to Kingston Bagpuise, and our next inn, Fallowfields. This is another stone manor house, set a little closer to the main road than I had thought it would be, but there are extensive grounds behind the main house, including a large vegetable garden and some flower gardens. On the lawn in the rear is a sequoia that has been hit by lightning and blasted into an odd shape (the host seems surprised when we don’t recognize it, as though Americans see sequoias every day, but Susan explains that its almost as far to the nearest sequoia from our home in Philadelphia as it is from Philadelphia to Oxford). The host is named Anthony. His wife, Peta, is the behind-the-scenes person, while he deals with the public—this seems to be the way it usually breaks down at these B&Bs that are run by couples: one front person, usually the man (always was the man, anyway, in every place we stayed on this trip, and usually is at B&Bs at home, too), to deal directly with the guests, and one person, usually the woman, behind the scenes to deal with logistics and organization, and usually to do the cooking. Anthony’s duties also include taking care of the huge vegetable garden, and he tells us that when he first moved up here from London, he was quite a Green, and would never willingly have harmed an animal, but that maintaining a vegetable garden is a constant war with pests who want to eat your vegetables, and now, after two years of it, he now feels no compunction about going out with a .12 gauge and shooting the wood pigeons, who eat his brussel sprouts. Across the rear lawn, the one with the sequoia, is a field where sheep, and, occasionally, horses graze. House martins flit about under the eves of the main house, doing incredible aerial acrobatics; they nest right up under the eaves right above the window to our room, and we constantly see them flashing past the window as they swoop out to gobble bugs, or swoop home again.

  We take a swim before dinner in one of the strangest swimming pools I’ve ever seen, an oddly designed stone pool set a few steps down from the lawn, overhung by grape vines and lavender. The deep end extends all the way across the long end of the pool, rather than dividing it in half horizontally in traditional fashion, and I can’t help wonder if the Aga Khan, whose mansion this formerly was, might not have come up with its eccentric design himself. (Later the thought occurs to me that perhaps we were swimming in the former horse trough.) We swim for about an hour, while sheep graze and bleat in the field alongside the pool, horses move restlessly around in the distance, and butterflies dart about near the lavender bushes. Spend some time rescuing ladybugs from drowning in the pool, scooping them up and putting them down by the poolside—probably largely a wasted effort, since many of them seem determined to march right back into the water again as soon as they recover themselves.

  Dinner at the inn is expensive but fairly good. All Americans in attendance for the first time this trip, one nice couple from Chicago, and a nerdy fellow with an annoying voice who we take a dislike to at once, who is here with his family: a resigned-looking wife, and two daughters who he’s taking on a tour of Oxford in order to encourage them to go to English colleges. They look less than enthusiastic about the prospect.

  Thursday, August 17th—Uffington, Burford, Bourton-on-the-Water & Upper Slaughter

  Called the car-rental company this morning to see if we can drop the car off in Oxford tomorrow rather than in Heathrow as we had originally arranged. Apparently, we can. The idea is that we will take the train into London from Oxford to catch our overnight sleeper to Inverness; this will save us a 40 pound cab ride in from Heathrow, and, since we have the rail flexipasses, should actually cost us nothing at all, as far as money out of our dwindling supply of cash is concerned, anyway.

  After breakfast, drive out to see the Uffington White Horse. We park in the car park and walk up the long swell of a hill toward the White Horse, but are somewhat disappointed—because of the angle that the chalk figure is cut into the hill, it’s tilted away from our position here, and you really can’t get that good a look at it; you’d probably get a better angle on it and a better overview of it from one of the back roads in the valley below, but we don’t have the time to look for such a vantage point. Giving up on the White Horse, we drive on up into the Cotswalds, stopping at Burford. There’s a stream next to the car park, and we feed the ducks and swans the piece of toast we’ve brought all the way up from Tintagel (its companion having been carried off to an Unknown Fate by Sam the Dog), having forgotten to feed it to anything on Dartmoor the previous two days; the birds don’t seem to be particularly impressed by all the trouble we’ve gone to to import this piece of toast hundreds of miles especially for them, and devour it with neither more nor less enthusiasm than usual, although it is, by now, stale enough to be of the same consistency as sheet iron. We visit a craft’s fair in an old almshouse next to an ancient church and graveyard, then walk up the steep main street of Burford (everything here is uphill, remember?), shopping, buying presents for Ricky—a knife, that should be fun to get through customs—and for Tess, an Italianate plaster cherub for her garden.

  Get back in the car and drive to Bourton-on-the-Water, park in a car park on the outskirts of town. Long hot walk in beside the little river Windrush. Bourton-on-the-Water is absolutely packed with tourists, with a population density that puts that other world-class tourist trap, New Hope, Pennsylvania—which it otherwise reminds us of—to shame; they also have more gift shops per square foot than New Hope does, an amazing accomplishment, and one that I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible. The walkway along the river and the narrow footbridges over it are especially crowded and busy, with several naked or near-naked children wading in the ankle-deep river, splashing, throwing stones, pushing each other over. Also see lots of dogs leaping in and out of the water, happily shaking themselves dry, leaping in again to retrieve a stick or a ball. Picnickers are everywhere. We also see lots of people being wheeled along the riverside and through the town in wheelchairs; we see far more handicapped people here in fifteen minutes than we’ve seen in all of England so far, or that we will see in Scotland—why so many in this one particular town, I wonder? Susan suggests that it’s because this is one of the few places we’ve been where everything isn’t sharply uphill; perhaps it’s also because it’s within day-trip range of bigger cities such as Oxford and London.

  After lunch, which we have out under the trees in a grassy square in the center of town (Susan has a strange dish which consists of an enormous, hollowed-out Yorkshire Pudding full of Steak & Kidney Pie mix and french fries (sorry, chips)), we walk back along the river to the car, passing a clever duck who is hanging in the water downstream, comfortably out-of-sight from the main mass of tourists, and eating all the goodies that those tourists have let fall into the water, and which the current is now bringing to him: pieces of bread, bits of cake and cookies, ice-cream cones, etc. He can afford to be choosey, and he is only selecting the very choicest delicacies, which the current delivers almost right into his beak, with very little effort needed on his part except to open his beak at the right time. Smart duck.

  Drive through Lower Slaughter, can’t find anyplace to park, drive on up to Upper Slaughter, on the hill above, park there. In contrast to Bourton-on-the-Water, there are almost no tourists at all in the Slaughters, particularly Upper Slaughter, although they are at least as lovely as Bourton-on-the-Water, and perhaps even more so. We have the whole village nearly to ourselves; the place is as deserted as a Hollywood back lot after working hours. We walk around looking at the fine old Cotswald stone buildings, walk down the hill to a ford over a small stream (a car conveniently fording it just as we arrive, splashing through water about a third of the way up its wheels, as if it is demonstrating the ford for us), then back up and around on the other side of town, back to the tiny square where we are parked. It’s getting late by now, so, reluctantly, we head back to Fallowfields.

  Back at the inn, we go down to the pool for a swim, joining an English couple from Yorkshire named Sid and Kate, who are already down by the poolside. The
inn cat, Healy, crouches nearby throughout, staring at us in amazement and some alarm as we actually put ourselves into the water. Willingly! (Strange, inscrutable creatures, these humans . . .) He is careful not to get too near, in case we should drag him in, too. We have a swim and a nice chat with Sid and Kate, then sit out by the pool and have drinks, very civilized. At dusk, the house martins dart about, gobbling up bugs, and then swoop up under the eaves, seeming to be about to fly right in our open bedroom window. They look like little jet fighters silhouetted against the darkening sky.

  Rack of lamb for dinner. Afterward, sat outside on the rear lawn, watching the stars; you can see an amazing number of stars from here, for someplace so close to the light-pollution of Oxford, and I see something describing a perfectly circular path across the night sky at a fast but steady pace that I’m sure is a satellite in earth orbit. Anthony, who was a Navigator in the RAF, tells a story about being in a plane packed solid with soldiers inside all the way to the tail, and needing to go to the loo, which was in the back of the plane, and the sergeant gruffly ordering his men to bend over, so that Anthony could walk over their backs, literally stepping on them, to the rear of the plane to reach the loo. As an old enlisted man myself, this sounds like perfectly normal officer behavior to me, but I refrain from telling Anthony so.

  Friday, August 18th—Oxford, London, Train to Inverness

  A day mostly spent dealing with major and minor hassles, and more packed with frustrations than sightseeing. Check out of the inn, drive into Oxford, get lost, and spend a half-hour or so driving around before finally finding the train station. We offload the luggage, then find that none of the lockers at the station are even remotely large enough to check our suitcases in, thus ending our plan to leave the luggage there and go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford this morning before taking the train for London. Reload the luggage into the car, and then spend almost two hours of escalating annoyance driving back and forth through the streets of Oxford trying to locate the car rental company, at one point missing a turn and driving a good deal of the distance out to Blenheim Palace before we can find an exit on the highway that lets us turn around in a tiny village called Wigham and get headed back in the right direction again. Finally do find the car rental place, which turns out to be quite some distance from town, so that we need an expensive cab ride back into Oxford, where we miss our train by seconds, forcing us to wait more than an hour for the next one. Then a hot ride into London, with our suitcases jammed into the aisle of the fortunately nearly empty train car, since they won’t fit in any of the available luggage-storage spaces. Then another cab ride, from Paddington Station to Euston.

  Find, to our relief, that there is an actual left-luggage department at Euston Station, and gladly pay the money to leave our luggage there. We are too limp and exhausted from all of this to want to do much, so we give up on our half-formed alternate plan to tour the Victoria and Albert Museum, and decide to take one of the city bus tours instead; at least we won’t have to walk to do that. Take a cab to Russell Square, where we know we can catch such a tour, and get there just a second or two after the bus pulls away. I find it oddly pleasing to be standing in front of the Russell Hotel again, and I decide that this feeling comes from the fact that, after a week of navigating mostly new and unfamiliar territory, here I know where everything is: the American Express office is just down the block, as is the newsstand where you can buy bottled water, the Night and Day, where you can get an ice-cream cone, the Italian place with the outdoor tables where you can get dessert, the little cafe near the British Museum where you can get a scone for breakfast, and so on. Somehow this makes it seem almost like stepping back into last week. (Later learn that George R.R. Martin was probably in the Russell while we were standing out in front of it, since he was staying there that day, but we had no way of knowing that at the time.)

  Catch a cab to Victoria, hoping to catch up with a tour bus there, but, near Trafalgar Square, we spot a London double-decker tour bus waiting by the curb, hop out of the cab, and board it—or rather, board one we’re directed to a few blocks away, in front of Charing Cross Station. Sit up on the top deck, of course, in the open air. The tour drives us by nothing we’re not already familiar with, but it’s a pleasant way to kill an hour and a half, and one that doesn’t involve walking or carrying huge suitcases. Susan becomes noticeably more relaxed and cheerful, now that she no longer has the responsibility of driving, which has clearly been weighing heavily on her. We pass the Statue of Eros (actually, the Spirit of Christian Charity, although no one will call it that) in Piccadilly Circus, where I’d once spent a night sitting on the fountain steps, decades ago, and although the fountain itself is the same (as are the hordes of shabbily romantic/Byronic kids sitting in romantic gloom on the steps), the surrounding Circus has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. Pass the grounds of Buckingham Palace, noticing the very heavy-duty and sincere barbed wire that tops the high surrounding walls and fences. Pass Green Park, which has been baked nearly brown by the sun.

  We get out across from Charing Cross, walk up to Covent Gardens, where the little streets in front of the pubs are completely blocked by loitering customers, foaming pints in hand; later, we peek into the end of Leicester Square, and that’s so crowded that the tourists are literally standing packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, as though they are at some kind of political rally or free rock concert—but they’re just taking in the night. I don’t recall London being quite this jammed with tourists twenty-five years ago, and I wonder if the tourist density level is this high every year now . . . or is this just another effect of the unusually hot and dry and prolonged (and very un-English) summer weather? Perhaps all the crowds who usually go to Spain or Italy or Florida “seeking the sun” have stayed home instead this year. (Florida, by the way, is by far the most popular destination in the States for British tourists; just about every British person we met had been to Florida, although most of them had been nowhere else in the States during their trip, and in several bookstores guides to Florida were the only travel books on U.S. destinations available—the Brits may not have seen New York City or L.A. or Washington, D.C. or Seattle, but they’ve seen Disney World . . . which must offer a somewhat distorted view of what the life in the States is like!) Have a decent if unexciting Indian meal, then have coffee and strawberry pie down the street in a little place named Crank’s. As we eat, I look out the open window-wall of the restaurant at the bustling sidewalk traffic, mostly young people out looking for one sort of action or another, and again think of myself here when I was young. Feel a pang when I think that this may well be my last glimpse of London for many years, or perhaps ever in this life.

  Go back to Euston Station, pick up our luggage, drag it to the sleeper train for Inverness. Have tea in the lounge car, and, while we are sipping it, London slips silently away behind us, without any fuss, and is gone.

  Saturday, August 19th—Inverness, Moray Firth & Polmaily House, Drumnadrochit, Urquhart Castle

  Slept fitfully, woke about 6:40. Rugged Scottish hills sliding by the train window. Stony high hills, very bleak, with purple heather on their sides. In the valleys and below the tree-line, what appear to be spruce or fir forests, with here and there trees that look like silver birches, glinting like bone in the dull green body of the woods. Lots of rabbits running away across the fields. Sit down to have a cup of coffee in the lounge car as we arrive at Aviemore. Brief drizzle later at Slough Summit, where the grey clouds clamp down overhead like an iron skillet lid, obscuring the tops of highest hills. It’s what the Irish call a “soft day”—fine constant mist, not quite rain—by the time we get to Inverness, where we get off the train.

  Check out the various posters advertising boat rides and bus and taxi tours, and then catch a cab to the car rental place, where we pick up our new car, a blue Ford Mondeo this time, which proves to be nowhere near as comfortable as our faithful Daewoo (no air conditioning, for one thing; it’s been an amusement to me throughout
our trip that although our rooms weren’t air-conditioned, our car was. The Brits tend to sneer at or at least be extremely patronizing to Americans about their dependency on air-conditioning, but a few more summers like this one in Britain, and they may find themselves putting air-conditioners in as well; already, in London, we were seeing hand-lettered signs on some restaurants promising that it was “Air-conditioned inside!” or “Fully air-conditioned!” or just “Cool inside!” . . . and I remember the movie theaters using the same ploy to attract customers back in the ‘50s—remember the Chilly Willy signs outside movie houses?—when Americans didn’t have home air-conditioners either).

  Drive through town and down to the harbor, where we park at dockside and book passage on the Moray Firth Dolphin-Watching Cruise. Inverness doesn’t seem to be a terribly pretty or terribly interesting town, striking me as an unpretentious no-nonsense no-frills working-class town, an impression confirmed or at least emphasized for me when we walk around the harbor area while waiting for the cruise to leave, strolling around the corner and over a bridge to a quiet, working-class neighborhood: a sleeping pub, a laundromat, a take-away fish-and-chips shop, and a bakery, where I buy a “potato pie” (something like an inferior Cornish Pastie) and a “battery,” which turns out to be a greasy lump of cold fried dough or batter (hence the name), served plain, without even powdered sugar on it, the dough itself not even remotely sweet—it tastes mostly like cold congealed grease.