A Year in the World

by Frances Mayes

  We shopped with the matrons for those delectable local cheeses we’d been served the night before. If I had a kitchen in Bath, I would try the cockles and samfire, a seaweed offered in bins outside the fishmonger’s. We loaded our shopping bag with scones, buns and fresh breads, and bottles of elder flower juice. Walking back to the car, we fell into step with a brisk lady, upswept hair and linen suit, who hoped we liked Bath and pointed out her black varnished door in a circle of gracious houses around a park with one vast tree. “Don’t come in town at night. It’s shameful what has happened. Hippies and drugs, the girls are devils, tough as boys. They’ll take your teeth if they’re false.”

  At an outdoor antique/junk market, Beatles music blared. Humming “Hey, Jude,” I found a starch-and-crochet christening dress some baby wore 150 years ago, four ivory-handled cheese knives (forty pence apiece!), and a pair of tiny horn spectacles, also worn by a child whose eyes are long since shut. Ed found an old level and an unfolding wood and brass measurer. I overheard a Scottish woman say, “Their junk is different from our junk.” By midmorning, the sidewalks were thronged with tourists and local shoppers. Morris dancers performed in a closed street. A homeless man leaned against a doorway reading Wild Spain. The street people are known as crusties. They are cuffy, meaning “down and out.”

  We were herded through the Roman baths, then spent an hour in the big parish church, reading the epitaphs on gravestones in the floor and on the walls: Walter Clarke Darby, Mary Henrietta Cotgrave, Marmaduke Peacocke, Cecilia Blake. Maybe Jane Austen perused the stones for her characters’ names. Amid the tourists, one of whom was eating from a box of Cracker Jacks, a priest was conducting a religious ceremony for a group of five ancient ladies. As we passed, we heard him boom out, “Lead us not into temptation.” Four silver heads were bowed; the fifth lady, looking contemplative, examined her manicure, her hand outstretched. Of the five, perhaps she was the one once led into temptation.

  We took care of the split tire and headed for Wales.

  We crossed into Wales and drove up to the Isle of Anglesey, Ynys Môn in Welsh, where we had rented a cottage with the beguiling name of Mermaid, right on the water. Taking slow roads through pastureland put us there at nine at night, still the long Welsh summer twilight, with the tide rushing back in to fill the strait, and the slanted rays striking a great castle across the water. We carried our Bath provisions inside, looking forward to a picnic of various meat pies and cheeses on the terrace. On the road in, we’d stopped at an organic vegetable stand and a pick-your-own berries field. The customers chatted in Welsh, oldest of Great Britain’s languages. We paused, fingering the beans, just to listen. The sound was at once musical and hard, like a vase of marbles emptied into the sink. We felt ebullient to be in Wales. Nearby was the first garden on my list, Plas Newydd, designed by my distant ancestor, Humphrey Repton. Our garden-to-garden vacation was beginning. As we unloaded the car, the rising moon looked like a big gooseberry, translucent gold in the milky sky. The whitewashed cottage, a former stable, had been remodeled recently. When we walked inside, we almost dropped our bags. It was hideous. Someone had furnished it like a cheap trailer. “No. This can’t be.” I walked through, peering into two cramped bedrooms. “It has a five-teacup rating from the tourist board.” I’d thought the Welsh teacup system so cozy.

  “Must have been based on quantity, not quality. The number of beds and spoons.” Ed pushed the bed, and the mattress sank. The coverlet of pilled polyester was slightly damp, the bath done up like a two-dollar bordello, and the kitchen floor’s low-grade plastic wood gave at each step. Only the unattractive living room redeemed it. French doors opened to the water view, and if I concentrated on that, I didn’t notice the bad leather furniture “suite” or the plastic flowers atop the TV or the itchy-looking wall-to-wall. “Beware of renting on the Internet. Weren’t there photographs?”

  “No, they didn’t have them yet, and I took a chance. The photo of the outside looked so wonderful, and the agent said the whole place was just redone . . . Let’s don’t talk about it anymore.” I’m guilty.

  The luscious twilight lasted until eleven o’clock. We walked along the shore of the Strait of Menai and decided that things would be better in the morning. But in the blank light of day, the place was still tawdry. As if to confirm my impression, a trailer surrounded by various large metal storage containers was parked outside the kitchen window. “Do you want to go? Even though we’ll lose the money, I’m not sure we can sleep on that squat little bed. My feet hang off and practically touch the floor. Chalk it up,” Ed said. He started looking in the guidebook for a hotel.

  “Those synthetic bed linens feel like sandpaper. Let’s just stay until we see what’s around here.” We set off. We found Wales sublime. The saturated-green air looked aquatic, as though someone just pulled the plug, draining away the watery world and leaving swaying meadows, fields, trees, and hills washed and gleaming. “Do we need to go to gardens? All Wales seems to be a garden,” Ed said. The roads we took were actually lanes, with hedgerows crowding the edges and the green banks profligate with wild foxglove. For three days we left early and stayed out late, eating in pubs and pushing on toward the next interesting town rather than going “home” and cooking, imagining we lived facing that changeable strait, picking fruit down the road, as we’d like to have done.

  We spent hours at the garden of Plas Newydd, which also overlooked the Strait of Menai. My distant relative Humphrey Repton, involved in the original planning, created one of his rare design portfolios called a Red Book for the property in 1798–99. We didn’t go inside the huge house. I have an allergy to hearing anecdotes about ghosts in the hallway. Dead houses depress me. Unless one looks fascinating, I skip it. In the gardens I’m free to wander among the old guards’ legacies that still grow. I can’t tell what’s left of the Repton design, but the garden has an especially expansive feel, partly because water views open a property as nothing else can. Grand trees and islands of hydrangeas punctuate the greenswards. In Wales hydrangeas bloom prolifically and intensely, that blue of the Madonna’s dress in Renaissance painting, and deep pink globes. I’ve only seen such blue in the hydrangeas on the campus where I used to teach. They bloomed under pine trees, a respite in an urban campus. I always thought the blue came from the Pacific sea air, not from acid levels in the soil; perhaps that’s the secret here as well.

  Conwy, nearby on the mainland, is an active castle town. I wonder if someday I can take my new grandson Willie to such places in Wales instead of Disneyland. Conwy, like many Welsh towns, centered on a stupendous castle to explore or to climb for the views. We took tea with apple pie on High Street; then while Ed looked for paper supplies, I walked around photographing the window boxes and baskets of flowers that dangled from most shops, the flowers flourishing far above dog level. Riotously blooming, not a dried-up one to be seen, densely planted, these blaring bouquets made the streets gay and cared for. “What kind of fertilizer do you use?” I asked a woman outside a bed and breakfast. I would love to be staying behind her bright blue door.

  “Oh, any old thing,” she replied. “Can’t stop them.” Petunias, ivy, impatiens, geraniums, campanula, lobelia, all planted by the armful, even fuchsias mixed with geraniums, shade or sun preference be damned. Breathtaking, a great big yellow and apricot trailing begonia basket hanging against a pale stone wall. This simple addition to the street rescued the whole block from drabness. Mainly for the name, we buy dinky pork pie, along with some Llanboidy cheddar. On the way out of Conwy, we stopped in at the Teapot Museum. After all, we’re in England. The eccentric collection consists of more than a thousand teapots, some classic and pretty, some kitschy, and many outlandish, such as Princess Diana with bright yellow hair, a camel, a majolica fish swallowing another fish, Elvis, and a World War II tank. Crammed into one upstairs room, the collections seemed right at home in the castle wall mews.

  At night we headed back to Mermaid House with the same lavish view as the great house at
Plas Newydd.

  Portmeirion—the entire town—is a folie de grandeur of Clough Williams-Ellis, who wanted to build the ideal village. His purpose was didactic—he meant to demonstrate that development could be for the good—but his result is peculiar. The village, constructed from 1925 to 1975, never became a real town with cheese monger and dry cleaners, but it did become a magnified toy town with an amalgamated Mediterranean flavor, quite surreal in the Welsh landscape. Now a hotel, with various tea and gift shops, the pretty village on the water feels like a TV set, which it has been. Only the garden, mostly white and blue, anchors Portmeirion in reality. I sketched the iron urns of bountiful snowy white hydrangeas and imagined having a few of their square wrought-iron structures made for Bramasole’s roses to climb. As in every Welsh garden, banks of hydrangeas, these a lighter blue, drifted around the park at the town’s center. A sublime climbing rose of flat white blooms and pink buds obscured the front of one house. We didn’t linger; pretty as Portmeirion was, we found it artificial. I kept thinking of Asolo in the Veneto, a town even lovelier, with real people living and working there, moving easily through layers of time.

  Bodnant was also someone’s dream, but only of a house and large garden. We glanced at the upright Tudor mansion, perkier than most, with many pointed dormers and crisp white paint between the beams. The sublime first impression of wide terraces above the river Conwy and views of mountains only began the extravagant delights of Bodnant. We thought we were late for roses, but in July they were blooming, especially the pinks. Many were new to me: Octavia Hill’s flopping pale clusters; Ann Aberconway, a satin beauty; Rose Gaujard, white with rosy edges; the glorious many-petaled, open-faced Prima Ballerina and, nearby, the similar Picadilly; and the cupped Superstar, exactly the color of watermelon. Another big spender was the splendid yellow rose with the unlikely name of Grandpa Dickson. Boule de Neige, a white miracle with yellow center, changed my opinion of white roses with its delicacy. I’ve always associated white roses with Mother’s Day in the Methodist church of my childhood. Wearing a white rose symbolized that the mother was dead. The rest of us wore red. This particular ball of snow looks distinctly felicitous, not at all sad. Another rose I immediately envisioned planting in my own garden was Glenfiddich, named for the amber Scotch whiskey or the place it’s bottled, I suppose, but reminding me of a decadent, burnished yellow-silk slip my mother wore. The veined petals looked bloodshot—like the eyes of someone who drank too much Glenfiddich. I will have to tell my friends Susan and Bernice about City Girl, a saucy little social climber of apricot and pink blooming in bouquets like Sally Holmes.

  Although vast, the garden felt totally scaled for enjoyment. Usually gardens are most interesting around the house. When I take outlying paths into woods and dales, my attention is not held. But following Bodnant’s woodland paths seems like stepping into a “Sleeping Beauty” landscape. The hydrangeas, lining the banks of the languid little river Hiraethlyn, mimicked the flow of water. Blurry blue reflections doubled the dreaminess. The woods were silent, except for sparkling river sounds. Any minute Peter Pan might have popped out from behind a rock. We might step inside a fairy ring.

  “We’re in the presence of these trees,” I said. Thanks, Henry Duncan. He took over this garden in 1902, continuing the tradition of his grandfather, who began planting trees in 1792. Enchanting, the sun-dappled ferns, the dark-leaved rhododendrons, and the circuitous walk over streams and through glades of straw-colored light.

  At the end we came to a long pergola of laburnum. The sun shone through the filigree of leaves, and we dawdled there, imagining the dazzling gold arch in full bloom.

  “Isn’t that what Rebecca took a fatal dose of—laburnum? In high school I always wondered what it was. Now I know.”

  “Who? Oh, Daphne du Maurier? I never read Rebecca.” Ed bought a postcard in the gift shop of the tunnel of bright yellow. “This must be one of the most outstanding accomplishments of any garden in the world. Imagine the bees and butterflies it draws.”

  “And tourists. Any one of whom could nibble the little black seeds and croak on the spot.” We’d enjoyed Bodnant with only a few others that day.

  “Let’s come back. When the laburnum is blooming, you must feel like you’re sleepwalking under here. Or like you’re standing in a shower of gold. Are you sure it wasn’t laudanum she swallowed?”

  Back at the house, we took a last walk along the water. The tide was out. A man out in the mud hauled in the edible seaweed we saw for sale in Bath. The late sunlight seemed liquid, a faded watercolor with pastels smearing the sky into the water already rushing back into the channel from the sea. “Ready to take off?” Ed asked.

  “Yes, let’s go. Try to exit by eight tomorrow.”

  Aiming vaguely for the Cotswolds, we drove through Loughborough, the town where my great-great-grandparents and my great-grandparents were born. My grandfather was born in nearby Leicester. We passed a large cemetery with ancient trees. “Maybe some of the Mayeses are in there. Stop! Let’s look.” We combed the cemetery but found no family name. We were startled to come upon three men lying in the grass. Were they waiting for burial? But one rose on his elbow and said they were caretakers, having a nap after lunch. I was surprised because the cemetery had a forlorn appearance, with tipped and collapsed graves, caved in so that if you lifted a few stones, you might see a femur or jawbone. Not a posy in the place. I’d never seen such an abandoned graveyard, except in San Miguel de Allende once, where small boys played soccer with a skull, and I picked up one myself, a child’s, and have it still. The sleepy one told us he had no record of burials but to call Nelly Callahan at the registry office in town. We finished combing the other half. I half-hoped no ancestor lay there and half-hoped that the next Elizabeth I saw—Elizabeth must have been in the top-ten names in the 1800s—would be my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Repton Mayes. But she lies elsewhere. I wish I’d asked more genealogy questions before my relatives died. Such a small clutch of stories, ending with my grandfather at nine sailing alone to America to join his father and his new wife. Elizabeth Repton, his mother, had died, leaving him and a sister, Lily. I never knew why she stayed behind when the nine-year-old Jack set off with a bag of apples and a small suitcase. Loughborough seems oddly like an American town. Short on charm, it was at least thriving and rather pleasant. I wonder about those Mayeses—what they did, where they lived. When we stopped in a pub, I asked the waitress if I could see a telephone book. I find Mayes at least sixty times. In San Francisco there are five.

  Mrs. Callahan called me back after an hour of searching and said no Mayes is buried in a municipal cemetery. She directed me to the Leicester Historical Society and to local parish churches. Ed looked alarmed. The Mayes clan’s graves will have to wait for their armfuls of roses.

  By late afternoon we’d checked into a country house in Hambleton, a hamlet with a church and graveyard that could have been a model for Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” where those whose hearts were “once pregnant with celestial fire” slept in their narrow cells. After the drive from Wales, we walked to unkink. Thatched, calendar-perfect homes with bountiful gardens of yellow hollyhocks and roses lined the road. This was the day for churchyards. Among Hambleton’s leaning stones and majestic trees, mourning doves cooed in iambics, and I thought of Gray’s “moping owl.” The poem seemed dreary and sentimental to me when I read it in college. Later, I saw some of the hard perceptions which his soft decasyllables perhaps glossed. The homiletic inscriptions on the gravestones, he wrote, “teach the rustic moralist to die.” At the end of one verse, Gray asks if anything can salvage you:

  Can storied urn or animated bust

  Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

  Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

  Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

  The answer is a resounding, nihilistic no, despite the poem’s reputation for romanticism.

  Death has a whole diff
erent construct here than in Italy, where photo- and flower-bedecked graves keep a continuum with life. The Cortona cemetery, just below the town, replicates the walled town. The graves are lighted at night by votives. You can imagine the dead rising as though from siesta to converse with their friends. These hallowed English stones go solemn immediately and provide no comfort of denial. Even recent burials blend quickly with the most ancient dead.

  Like the priory where we spent the first night in England, the hotel where we sought refuge was a manor. We were guests of the lord, paying guests. In the bar, luxuriating in the tempting menu while we had a drink, the owner joined us. He was happy to see Americans. The terrorist scare had kept them at home. “The field is thinning,” he said. “There just are not rich Americans driving up with their chauffeurs anymore.” Having driven there in a rented car of the anonymous sort, we simply smiled and nodded. A man and woman at the bar discussed a rally in London in support of fox hunting. “Does four hundred years of tradition mean nothing?” I heard her say. “They’re the ones who are barbaric,” he scoffed. Scotland recently banned hunting with dogs, and passage of the same law was imminent in England. The House of Commons voted 253–0 in favor of abolishing hunting foxes with dogs—then the bill mired in committee regulations. The foxes feel frisky; soon they’ll be free. The woman, middle-aged with fluffy blondish hair, wore a bright flowered dress with big sleeves, belt, and gathered skirt. “Where did she get that dress?” I wondered to Ed. “I haven’t seen a dress like that since the one I wore to the junior-senior prom. I loved that dress. I like hers! It’s so anti-chic. Mine was white organdy, floor length and strapless, printed with violets.”

  “She got it out of the same closet where he got that rusty vintage jacket. He looks like the Duke of Windsor. You know they send people out to fill the foxholes the night before a hunt? That doesn’t seem sporting.” The waiter refilled our champagne glasses. “What do you think of the fox-hunting law?” Ed asked him.