We began to pass impressively large, rugged cliffs and to catch glimpses of the sea. The lady from Philadelphia left, expressing a heartfelt wish that everything would go smoothly for us. A little while later, the train stopped at Torquay.
35
Arrival at the Castle
WE TOOK A CAB and went down winding hilly road after winding hilly road; there were Victorian houses, some with little front yards and some without. Here and there we saw a palm tree.
“I see you have palm trees here,” Jordan said to the cabdriver.
“Oh, yes, it’s quite warm here all winter,” the driver said.
“What sort of hotel is the Castle?” Jordan asked.
“Oh, it’s a five star hotel. Oh, it’s very elegant. Cost a fortune to put up.”
At a considerable distance from the railway station, we drove through tall gates surrounded by greenery and stopped at a portico before the entrance to the hotel, which was constructed of stone. The lobby was carpeted in red with enormous yellow and green flowers, and filled with fat, nineteen-thirtyish “modernistic” furniture.
Upstairs we were escorted to a three-room suite: large and light and spotlessly clean, painted white, with white furniture. Our room had a balcony looking out on to the Castle grounds: these were undulating and heavily planted with evergreen trees, dense and green to the point of blackness. I was reminded forcibly of The Magic Mountain. I could see myself lying on a chaise on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the thick silent forest.
Mark said it was cool.
“I wonder why everything is white,” Jordan said. “It looks like a hospital. You do like it, don’t you?” he asked me, anxiously.
“It’s marvelous,” I said sincerely. “It’s awfully nice.”
It was dinner time, so we went downstairs. The dining room was enormous, with large windows and off-white paneled walls. Through the windows you could see the omnipresent, brooding grounds; the trees were always still.
On the table was a plate of toast, cold and curled, the only form of bread available at the Castle Hotel. We had a cheerful young uniformed waiter. He brought us big soup plates, each with half an inch of clear soup nestled in the bottom.
“Meals must be included,” Jordan said.
After the soup was taken away, we were brought a plate of fish fillet with red sauce. Then came a small slice of meat, faintly lamby, on a large plate. In addition, the waiter passed around two kinds of potatoes and some varieties of bean. At this point some very old musicians filed in, took their places on a low platform directly behind us, and broke into an awful cacophony that raised all the small hairs on the back of my neck. It appeared to be a tune from Mary Poppins, played in march tempo.
“What’s that?” we asked the waiter.
“Harry Evans and the Orchestra,” he replied. He took away our plates. For dessert we were offered a “choice of cold sweets from the trolley.” They were rainbow-colored and trembled slightly. “We also have Castle Pudding with jam sauce,” the waiter said.
The other diners were middle-aged, and looked strangely out of date: the women had marcelled hair and bosomy print dresses; the men’s suits had wide shoulders and wide pleated pants, or trousers. The familiar Time Machine sensation crept over me.
“Sometimes in London,” I said, “I felt as though I had gone back eighty years. It was weird. But here … it could be nineteen thirty-five. Don’t you think so?”
“I wish you wouldn’t overstate things,” Jordan said. “It could easily be nineteen thirty-nine.”
Mark said it was wild.
All eyes followed us as we left the dining room. I felt rather flashy in my Mary Quant dress with the outrageous hemline. We went upstairs and watched television, on a set that we had ordered, for an hour. It was even more horrible than London television: the clergyman who read the evening sermon looked as though he were melting. I put the drops in Bruce’s eye and tucked the children in. Then Jordan and I took a cab to the Imperial Hotel: the cabdriver told us it was the best hotel in Torquay.
“Maybe it’s more modern than the Castle?” Jordan asked hopefully.
“Oh, the old Castle’s gone down,” the driver said. “Once it was five star. Now I think it’s only three. But the Imperial’s very nice. Royalty stay there.”
The Imperial had a swimming pool and a beach, and no furniture in the lobby. The people wandering about were slender and none of them had finger waves.
“We’re full up,” the girl said. “Sorry.” Back we went to the Castle and so to bed.
36
Life at the Castle
THE NEXT MORNING we were shown to the same table, which had obviously been assigned to us, with the same tablecloth in the condition in which we had left it the night before. The napkins were the same too, but they had been neatly folded and placed in rings. I was surprised that Eric’s napkin had been preserved, but in Rome you know. Jordan and Eric had hot cereal for breakfast and we all had eggs. The toast was cold but not curled. I noticed that an unprepossessing woman at the next table was staring at me fixedly.
“That woman’s staring at me,” I said to Jordan.
“Ignore her,” he advised, but it was difficult because I was facing her. She sat and stared; she even stared while she ate.
After breakfast we walked out into the grounds. They were very expansive, and encompassed a golf course. If you went far enough, walked over a little bridge and down a flight of stone steps, you could reach a small harbor just behind the hotel. A boardwalk overlooked the rocky beach with its small stretch of gritty sand. While the children climbed gingerly over the rocks, Jordan and I sat in rented chairs, enveloped by pale watery sunshine. Nobody was swimming; apart from the fact that we could see sharp stones littering the shallow bottom, it was too cold to swim. We were glad that we were all wearing sweaters.
There were a great many young people there. None of them wore shorts: some of the girls were in slacks, but most of them were wearing summer dresses. They carefully folded their skirts back as they sat sunning their white legs. Jordan and I began to talk about the train. I thought we had lowered our voices, until I turned my head and realized that my neighbor had been hanging on our every word.
“She says the train smells of sour milk,” she announced to her companions. “The train’s lovely, isn’t it?”
I felt I had done my bit for international relations that morning. The sky clouded over and drops began to fall. We called the children and went back to the hotel for lunch. Once more we were served cold curled toast, clear soup, a fish course, a meat course, two kinds of potatoes, and cabbage. The sweets glowed and trembled on the trolley. “Have a Glass of Wine with your Meals,” the menu suggested.
After lunch the children went to swim in the indoor pool, and Jordan and I took a bus into Torquay; we sat on the open top in the light rain. Torquay was filled with shops; we browsed for a while in the paperback section of a large bookstore. Most of the crowd in the streets looked like extras for one of those post-war British films about working-class life. The men wore cloth caps and the women wore curlers. There were posters everywhere announcing a beauty contest in Babbacomb.
We returned to the hotel, helped the children clean up after their afternoon of swimming in the dank and chilly pool room, and descended once again for dinner. This time the soup was Creamed Asparagus, but the bowl was just as big and the portion just as small as the Clear Soups. There was fish in a white sauce, and Grenadin of Veal, tasting faintly lamby. We had the two kinds of potato, and some cauliflower.
The menu had a choice of three entrees on it.
“What’s forcemeat and chipolata?” Mark asked.
“Turkey, I think,” Jordan said, “and sausage.”
“I couldn’t eat anything called forcemeat,” Mark said.
The woman at the next table was still staring at me. She picked her tooth with her fingernail, wiped the nail ostentatiously on her napkin, and went on staring.
“She’s sti
ll staring at me,” I complained, “and what’s more I think she’s revolting.”
“Change places with Mark,” Jordan said. So I sat in Mark’s place with my back to the revolting starer.
“She’s saying something to her husband and pointing at us,” Mark announced.
“Rhubarb and apple tart for dessert,” the waiter said, “or Windsor jellies, of course.”
Jordan asked if coffee could be served with dessert.
“Coffee is served in the lounge, sir,” the waiter said, “after dinner.”
“But we’d like it with dessert.”
“I’ll see what can be arranged,” the waiter said.
Nothing could be arranged, because dessert was served without coffee. We went into the lounge, sat in the fat chairs and watched the rain streaking the tall windows. There were several fireplaces in the lounge, but they were cold and empty. An icy wind whistled about our ears. The children went off to explore, and came back excited.
“Hey, there are slot machines back there,” Bruce said. “Can I have a shilling?”
We gave them money, and they went away. There were slot machines in “arcades” all over Torquay. In a little while Mark came rushing in to announce that he had won the jackpot. We trailed after him to the sun porch. In addition to dusty wicker furniture, it housed a collection of slot machines made in Chicago, and one of those machines with a claw that fishes out plastic combs and thimbles, and avoids the cameras and binoculars that enticed you in the first place. There were a lot of children and adults in the porch; no one reached out the hand of friendship to the traveler. Our children had always made friends in the many hotels we had stayed at in America. Here they were regarded with a decidedly fishy eye. I thought about the reception an English family would have at an American resort. Maud Tweak had touched on this topic with me at our party.
“We are not quick to make friends,” she said, “but when we do make friends, I’m afraid our friendships last longer than yours do.”
After the money was gone, we went upstairs and I put the drops in Bruce’s eye, which was much improved. Eric was complaining about a gumboil. We watched some clergymen on television and then turned in.
The next morning, after our hot cereal and eggs, we repaired once again to the beach; this time Jordan and the boys went out in a motor boat until the rain drove them to shore again. For lunch we ate our soup, our toast, our fish, a very small lamb chop tasting faintly lamby, boiled potatoes, creamed potatoes and buttered runner beans. Eric refused everything and looked out the window at the steady rain on the dark trees.
“Are you sick?” I asked.
“I hate this food,” he said. “My gumboil hurts.”
I noticed that he had dark smudges under his eyes and his face was the size and color of a slice of lemon. “He’s starving,” I said to Jordan, alarmed. “He must have a gumboil because of vitamin deficiency.”
“Don’t you want your potatoes?” Jordan asked Eric.
“No,” Eric said, and sighed.
After lunch we all went into Torquay on the bus. The town was packed; it was difficult to make our way down the street. We bought ice cream and passed a movie: Help.
“We’ll see that tomorrow,” Jordan said.
We took a taxi back to the hotel and hung around till dinner. Eric ate a little, helping himself to boiled potatoes from the waiter’s serving dish.
“Say ‘thank you,’” Jordan said to Eric.
“Oh, it’s all right,” the waiter said. “He hasn’t been in England long enough to learn ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.” He went off with his dish.
“Did you hear that?” I asked, seething.
“He didn’t mean it that way,” Mark said.
“’What do you mean? What other way could he mean it?’’
“Oh, Ma,” Mark said.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Bruce.
“No, I didn’t catch it,” Bruce said.
“Eat up,” Jordan said. “It isn’t every day you have braised Wilshire ham with noodles.”
“No, thank God,” I said.
“That woman is glaring at us,” Mark observed.
Harry Evans and the Orchestra were in fine fettle.
“That noise is driving me crazy,” Jordan said.
We took our coffee in the lounge and the children went off to play table tennis. I sat and read. After a while the boys went back to the wicker room to try and win the jackpot again, and then we went up to bed.
The next morning we had two hours on the boardwalk before the rain started, and then we went into town to see Help, starring the Beatles. We walked in line, realized we would have to miss lunch, and bought candy bars instead. Help was on a double bill with a terrible American picture. We ate a lot of candy bars and watched Help; we found it less appealing than A Hard Day’s Night. We were in fact bewildered by it. That may have been due to our situation at the time, because when we saw it again months later, we enjoyed it. We returned to the hotel for tea: bread and butter and mashed sardines. After that the children gambled until dinner.
The next day was our last in Devon. There were specialties for sale in Torquay, like Devonshire cream and apple cider, but they were not available in the hotel, and the shops were literally too crowded to enter. “Where do all the people come from?” we asked the waiter at lunch, as he removed our soup plates and before he brought the fish course.
“The factories close in the Midlands in August,” he said. “Most of the people come down here for their holiday.”
I had read in a pamphlet that the English Riviera had come into being as a result of the Napoleonic wars. Nobody could go to the Continent, so they came to Devon and Cornwall instead. I could certainly sympathize with them: the same thing had happened to us. We hadn’t been able to get to the Continent either.
Lunch ended, and the sun was still shining. This was unprecedented, so we decided to do some sightseeing. Not far away was a little village called Cockington Forge; it was supposed to be preserved in an ancient state. We all piled into a taxi and off we went.
Cockington Forge consisted mainly of souvenir shops. We strolled along a path leading through a grassy park, dotted here and there with large signs saying “Toilets.” There was an old church on a hill: it was very old, dating from Norman times. We read all about it, and examined the restorations; they looked very convincing to us. There was a café near the church, but we didn’t go in. We had just had lunch, and, too, something about the look of it reminded us of the café in London where you couldn’t sit at the table unless you ordered a meal, even if you were the only one in a large party who wasn’t hungry, and where all the crockery and silver was chipped and/or greasy.
We walked back down the hill to the shops to see what we could buy. There were a lot of brass ashtrays and little bells, and china ducks and cuckoo clocks. We called a cab and went outside to sit in the sun and wait for it. It was actually warm, although rather damp and stuffy. Eventually the cab came and took us back to Torquay.
The boys went outside for a while. When it started to rain, they came back in; we gave them each half a crown and they went off to gamble. Then we got dressed for our final dinner at the Castle Hotel. I put on my dangly earrings and my Mary Quant dress and we went downstairs. In the hall near the elevator, or lift, was a smallish room for the maids. An overpowering smell of fish emanated from it, mixed with something like cocoa. I held my breath and hurried down the stairs; the lift never seemed to be in operation.
For dinner we had Creamed Vegetable Soup, which tasted like Creamed Asparagus Soup. Then we had Grilled Lamb Chop, one small chop apiece. It tasted faintly lamby.
Eric ate a boiled potato; his face looked more like a slice of lemon than ever. The vegetable was buttered Brussels sprouts.
“I’ll be glad to get back to London again,” Jordan said, “to get something to eat, and I never thought I’d say that.”
Harry Evans and the Orchestra were playing something with violins in it. A ve
ry fat blonde lady with an upswept hairdo and a flowered décolletage kept time with her fork against a water glass.
“I don’t believe this place,” Mark said. “I don’t, I can’t.”
“Tapioca Milk Pudding,” the waiter said, “Normandy Pudding, or of course the cold sweets from the trolley.” He gestured toward them, and they winked at us, shimmering in five colors.
“Does anyone ever complain about Harry Evans and the Orchestra?” Jordan asked him, emboldened by the approach of our departure.
“Oh,” the waiter replied, “he’s been here so long I expect everyone has forgotten why he ever started in the first place. Nobody ever thinks about him one way or the other.”
We took the puddings. “That woman is still staring at us,” Mark said. “Now she’s saying something to her husband. Wait a minute, she’s choking.”
A ragged noise of coughing rose in the air behind my back.
“I think she’s choking to death,” Mark reported. “He’s getting up. He’s pounding her on the back. She looks like a hippopotamus with a bird caught in its throat.”
“That’s hardly kind,” I said, because I thought I should.
“She’s all right now,” Mark said, in a disappointed voice.
“This pudding is full of lumps,” Bruce said.
We decided to pack it in, and rose as a family. As I passed the Staring Woman, she turned to her husband and said loudly, “Funny looking creature, isn’t she?”
While we sipped our coffee in the lounge, Mark fumed and fretted. “Did you hear it?” he kept saying. “Did you hear what she said?”
“Actually,” Bruce said to me, “she’s funnier looking than you are.”
We went into the large and echoey table tennis room and played table tennis. After a while footsteps pounded outside the door and two fat little girls whom we had seen in the wicker room, dashed in. “Where’s Bruce?” they screamed. We were all, including Bruce, surprised that they knew his name.
Tea & Antipathy Page 18