We were very tired, having lost six hours and plenty of sleep, but Heathrow shunted us efficiently through Immigration and Customs, down the corridors to Baggage Claim and out to the Avis desk.
After an initial false start in the wrong direction, we headed off for Canterbury, our first destination, me driving and Heather with her finger on the map, which wanted us to drive right across London.
After stopping for cups of stewed tea and coffee at an American style self-service diner we drove through the West End, past Harrods, through Lambeth, where Heather was born, and eventually out on to the M2. The traffic was very heavy — the smell of diesel and petrol very oppressive. On the motorway we stopped at Nellie’s Transport cafe, full of truckies, and paid 46p each for a sandwich and more stewed tea.
We managed to keep our eyes open through to Canterbury and checked in at the Cathedral Gateway Hotel, an ancient creaking rabbit warren but comfortable, with cooking facilities and a good bed. Toilet and bathroom down the hall. Clean. Nice English lady in charge.
§
The view from our little hotel window was the moment that I realised how old the Old Country was.
“You look across a tumble of roofs to the cathedral. The roof tiles are reddish, thin and uneven. They look as if they’ve been formed by hand and shaped while soft to fit the structure underneath.”
New Zealand was the obverse — new, washed up by the high tide of British migration. Our oldest houses can’t have been much above a hundred years old. My Yorkshire boss Trevor’s reaction when he came to Auckland was understandable. Everything looked so new, temporary, jerry-built to him. Wooden houses! If you saw brick it wasn’t real, just standing in for weatherboards.
When I think of the houses my Baugh and McCarroll grandparents built, Trevor wasn’t wrong, and the little 1950s bungalows we’ve lived in ourselves wouldn’t have seemed much better. We live in one now — changed a bit — and one of our English friends wasn’t impressed when she first visited. “It has no bones,” she said.
§
We visited the cathedral with mixed feelings. Stonework sadly decaying from age and atmospheric pollution. Lovely soaring stone interiors, the walls lined with memorials to archbishops and soldiers and scholar divines. The choir singing, its lovely sound filling the vaulted ceilings.
I walked around moist eyed, thinking of things that don’t normally come to mind. The crypts were the best places. Little plain chapels in the stone. The best memorials those of the bishops who simply had their names and dates carved in the stone underfoot. The stone steps outside worn down by centuries of worshippers.
It sobered me. I wasn’t thinking so much of the bishops or the divines, or even the choir, but of the people who built it, the architects and artists; the craftsman and workmen who may well have spent entire lives on it. And the resources that went into building it over the span of a thousand years. In twenty years we would see in the new millennium. This building, in one of its manifestations, saw in the last.
§
We had a ghastly cafe meal that evening. I had fat “lamb” cutlets and potato and peas, with apple pie and cream. Heather, still resisting, had mushrooms in butter on toast. We were in bed at 8.30 to recoup last night’s lack of sleep.
Next day we drove through the green Kentish countryside, along narrow tarred roads that wound between hedges and over soft little hills. Very closely housed. Sometimes there seemed a pub on every corner.
We looked through Battle Abbey, at the scene of the Battle of Hastings. Ancient and largely ruined. Miserable, wet crypts in the Abbey wall. A dirt floor. Had lunch at a pleasant pub near Litchfield. A pint of Bitter, a Campari and Soda and Ploughman’s Lunches became regulars on the road.
§
In Cowfold we rang Bert and Kath, Heather’s aunt and uncle, for directions, then dropped South on the fast road. Got sidetracked briefly traversing Southampton and arrived at Ringwood at six o’clock.
At that point we decided to find an off-license and buy Bert a bottle of whisky, but were flagged down by a mousy old lady, grey, thin and tired, dressed in slacks, top, cardigan and coat, carrying shopping bags, and drunk. She asked us if we were going to the “Jungle”, where she lived. It’s near the motorway, she said. We were headed there, so we forgot the off-licence and took her home — she offered to pay us with a pot of jam — then tried to follow the directions to Bert’s place. We got lost again, phoned again, and Bert came to meet us.
Their house was upper middle modest. A brick bungalow, insulated walls, double glazing they said, on a spacious, quiet, gardened section.
I’d met Bert in New Zealand at Heather’s mother’s and instantly liked him. We’d talked, and he’d drunk me under the table. Well almost — I’d certainly needed help getting back to the car. He’d flown Mosquitoes during the war and been a BOAC pilot afterwards. He had nervous mannerisms, like forcing his left shoulder jerkily up to rub his chin. He liked whisky and I wished the old lady from the Jungle hadn’t distracted us.
Kath was Heather’s Aunt and I liked her too. She sat very straight in her chair and when she swallowed her tea you could hear it land, as from a height. We talked until midnight — loudly, like all the Sharpes, I reckon — and I thought, as I always have, that I was lucky in my choice of in-laws.
We suffered under their shower, which either burnt you or dried to a useless trickle, and went to bed.
§
One thing we came to learn was that if you want a reliable shower America is the place to be. They know their plumbing. Even at the Seton that held true. Maybe you had to keep the door closed with your foot but the toilet was civilised and the shower generous. On the other side of the Atlantic you couldn’t be so sure.
And this was the time that travellers decided they no longer wanted to go down corridors and share the facilities 1930s style. So in England we’d find tiny bathrooms crammed into the bedrooms of old, old hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, and wonder if they’d leak, and if they leaked would they destroy the building. And meanwhile would they work.
§
After a leisurely morning, we drove back to Southampton to see Heather‘s Aunty Bim and her husband Wally. He was gentlemanly, she effervescent. They’d lived in their cozy flat for 20 years. We had ham and potatoes for lunch, sat and talked in the garden, and looked at photo albums. Heather photographed some of the pages, including beauties of her young mother, and I photographed the three of them.
We headed back through the New Forest, mainly scrub and inferior grass where we were, and stopped to pat tame, sway backed ponies. There were lots of people out driving and catching the Autumn sun in deck chairs. We could make no sense of the little winding roads and got lost again, but made it home by six, had a nice dinner with Kath and Bert, and drank and talked some more. Bert demonstrated his stereo. We talked about flying and the war and family and headed to bed again after midnight.
§
Our destination next day was my sister Colleen and her family in Wiltshire, where at the behest of her restless husband Keith they were getting a year’s taste of the old country. I admired them for their adventurousness. Their next overseas stop was Perth, Western Australia. Keith was prepared to work at anything to make these experiences possible, and in Warminster he’d been packing bananas.
So we headed off through Bath and Salisbury, where we looked through the cathedral with its lovely dark stone pillars, and nearby Old Sarum — in turns a prehistoric site, a Saxon and Norman fort, and finally a Catholic cathedral that had been deconstructed and its stone used in the “new” cathedral.
Then on to Stonehenge, which, unlike the cathedrals, you could walk around but not walk through. My photo makes a lie of my diary:
“Along with hundreds of other people in coaches and cars we gawked at them from behind rope barriers, took our photos and listened to a garrulous guide. The massive stones seemed insignificant and lost, washed around and diminished by the tide of tourists.”
Maybe I just managed to keep them out of shot. We were lucky to get that close. And again that overawed thought came — who put them there, and why? And how?
§
The next couple of days were a quick tour through the North. We stayed a night in Sheffield at Evelyn and Derek’s pub. Another pleasant evening. We’d first met Evelyn in Hikurangi in the ‘60s when she’d come there with her first husband. We’d played cards and I’d mimicked her accent. “Six bluckberries,” I’d bid. I thought she sounded like my grandparents, only younger.
Next day we parted company with Colleen and Keith, who’d come with us to Sheffield, and headed across to Lancashire. We tried phoning a relative from somewhere in my family tree but he didn’t reply and we couldn’t delay.
We found Dad’s old home in Westhoughton, visited the Methodist church where he was christened, and drove on past Manchester to Kendal in the Lake District. I’m sure it was lovely — it is lovely — but the only thing I can remember is that it was hard finding somewhere to stay.
It’s funny what you remember places for. We’d be on the road, feeling hungry, and drive slowly through towns looking for somewhere interesting to eat. You’d spot a sign, “Sunday Lunch” for example, park and walk in expectantly.
“Sorry, we’re clowsed,” they said on that occasion.
“But the sign says you’re open Sundays!”
“Oh, thuts an owld sign,” they said.