We have returned to England many times since leaving in 1967, each for a different reason. For the first few years these visits largely concerned my own family. For example, in 1969 I stayed with Gran and Granddad at Martlets, visiting our Farley Road home to prepare it for sale, cleaning up inside and lighting huge crackling bonfires in the long back yard. In ‘72 we all stayed in Foxglove Cottage to visit an aging Gran and Granddad, then holidaying in Athens and Mikonos on the way back. In 1979 I arrived in England to find Granddad a lonely, sick old man in a dismal nursing home. We talked of old times for a few days but he was fading, and he died the day after Joan joined me. I had picked Joan up from Heathrow at 5 a.m. on an icy winter morning. Passing the bleak hulk of Battersea Power Station in sleet and grey drizzle Joan muttered “I don’t think I could live in England again”. But the Queen had already removed that option so, now as foreigners, we came for short periods, usually in the summer. We looked up old friends all over England, Gill Duberley in Hereford, John Duberley now in Scotland, the Simpsons in Milton Keynes, and Avril in Kent. Michel Worms was an apprentice with me when we climbed the Bristol Suspension Bridge, he played banjo in the Paramount Jazz band, and we tracked him down in Surrey. I was at school with Mike Toogood, he was best man at our wedding, and here I am walking Thomas Hardy country with him in Dorset. Chris Richardson was also an apprentice with me, also climbed the Bridge, I was best man at his wedding, and here we are sailing on the Solent, one reef in the mainsail and rolling 40 degrees. He always used sail when he should have otherwise been on motor, and always enjoyed the resulting look of horror on my face.
On each visit I saw Gran, who was now moving to be near Tim, Kathy and Zsolti.
But from the mid 1980s, if there was a central reason for our travels, it was that we were in search of our children and grandchildren. A string of extraordinary events had led John to Brisbane, Kate to Hong Kong, Madeleine to England, and Rebecca to India. Joan and I were left at its epicentre, dealing with aftershocks that rumbled for 20 years. I tried writing family newsletters while Joan forgave each pain and, in times of need, provided help and rocked the babies. But now, writing after the most happy events of my eightieth year, there can be no doubts of the loving solidarity of our family. There were also other reasons for our travel. Twice I was awarded study leave, twice I got a contract to teach in Macau, and four times we enrolled in music tours in Europe. For all these reasons England became our travel hub, the centre of a network spanning Hong Kong, India and Europe. You will find this network in later chapters. For now, these two chapters on England draw together our life at the hub.
IN 1993 A FAMILY TRAIL LED FROM HONG KONG AND INDIA TO ENGLAND
To Cockleshurds via Delhi Belhi. “Dad, can I have a coke?”An elderly Sikh with a turban and a Wolverhampton accent, and two sons with crew cuts, sit in front of me on the flight from Delhi. We sleep somewhere over Turkey, which we will visit in four years. We wake somewhere over Oberamergau, where Joan attended the Passion Play in 1960. We begin our descent to Paris as a pink dawn breaks over the Jura mountains, where Chris and Madeleine spent a few days with us last time. The research engineer next to me on the airbus to London is from Taiwan, attending a conference on aerodynamic computer simulation in Swansea. But while the new world up there spins endlessly, the old world of rural England dreams along. Cockleshurds, the Cotswold stone cottage that Madeleine and Chris are renting, is 400 years old with rough stone floors, low ceilings, deep windows, good cooking at one end, and hi-tech engineering and electronics at the other. Upstairs, the ceilings in our bedroom are whitewashed and supported by ancient curved blackened beams. The view through our tiny window is to the lush and drowsy growth of high summer. This, coupled with the accumulated effects of monsoon-damp clothes, Delhi Belhi and a soggy Air France omelette, lulls us into a deep afternoon sleep.
“We’re looking for the Cotswold Way” And I point an elderly couple, boots, long socks, knobbly knees and haversacks to an ancient walking track through farms, fields and forests which hasn’t changed in a thousand years. It stretches north from Bath, wrapping around the back of Cockleshurds, and heads up along the Severn River escarpment. Leaving one car at Lansdown, we climbed over stiles and up and down rolling Wiltshire hills back to Cold Ashton. It was one of those bitterly cold Sunday mornings that characterise England at the height of summer, but the last steep climb, up past Judge Jeffries’ cottage, warmed us up. It was Judge Jeffries who convicted all those poachers and petty thieves, for stealing a rabbit or a handkerchief, transporting them to New South Wales. I love walking in the countryside, called bushwalking in Australia, hiking in England. And so, with the sun peeping in at 4 a.m., I fell into the pleasant habit of hiking to the escarpment, listening to skylarks too high to see, breakfasting on the shoulder-high wheat kernels I forged though, for that final breathtaking view across to Wales.
Tim’s garden is immaculate, and Kathy has started work on her knitting machine again. Gran, approaching 88, is writing her life in Malaysia and Guyana. The Royal Snail has brought documents awarding Joan 88 percent in music, and Chris five distinctions in computing. We celebrated both with Somerset cider and Italian Frascati. Never idle, Chris has located, test driven, negotiated and cleaned up a three year old Fiat Tipo for us, and Joan and I drove in to Bath for Saturday evening mass. It was one of those rare summer evenings of startling clarity and, as we walked back to the car, “beep beep beep” went a horn behind us. Madeleine and Chris had packed a hamper for supper. We sat watching the river Frome frothing and curdling between the piers of Pulteney Bridge, as a slanting sun touched the tips of the Abbey and the Roman Baths.
All Souls but no students. I had sung Mozart next to Derek in a remote valley of the Blue Mountains two months earlier (Joan is president of the “Friends of the Philharmonic” and this was fund-raising). The resort was named:”Where Waters Meet” which I immediately annoyed everyone by renaming it “H2O Junction”. As happens when travelling, we met up later with Derek in Oxford, his old university, and he showed us round. Kate’s father-in-law John Henshaw used to say that education consisted of casting artificial pearls before genuine swine. But All Souls College had solved this problem of troublesome students years ago. Following an escape route to academic nirvana, they dispensing altogether with students and invested its generous endowments into a library for quiet afternoons and a wine cellar for riotous evenings. “Membership? We invite who we please. Qualifications? You must be a good after-dinner speaker”. Derek took us round his own college Christ Church, its ancient stones Raw Sienna in the wan afternoon sun, Sepia in its shadows. “It’s all terribly commercial these days” he said, as we walked past stands selling academic T-shirts and plastic dummy degrees. We paid, Derek got in free. So, as a graduate of Cambridge, the sister university, I asked the Proctor if I could get in at half price. “No sir, we charge you people double.”
Wasps, orphan rabbits, and Henry the Eighth’s weekender. “They attacked us without warning” complained Madeleine. So then Chris opened his scorched earth strategy with a can of petrol. But the surviving wasps simply gathered in a holding pattern above us, thirsting for revenge. So we delivered a second, pre-emptive strike and, for a few days, the smoke of battle drifted through Madeleine’s rows of onions, beetroot, potatoes and carrots. “Good home wanted for homeless and abandoned rabbits” said the sign in Chippenham’s newspaper shop. This could only happen in England, and I imagine Pa would have snorted and made a suitable comment about the beneficial uses of Myxomatosis. Now, on a visit to Essex, Chris’ Mum Audrey showed us round Hadleigh Castle, gloomy and crumbling, where three of Henry’s wives used to be parked out of the way at weekends.
“Never trust a Campbell” as the McDonald clan used to say. John Duberley had given Joan away at our wedding, and we have all at various times visited John, Gill and family, until John remarried and moved up north to Scotland. We visited Gill two days ago, driving up the Wye valley, past the stark ruins of Tintern Abbey, stopping at a huge field of strawberries to “Pick your own”. Now we are visiting John at Spean Bridge, 500 miles north. My first ever drive to Scotland, meandering through England’s tortuous post-war road system, took four days, but that was before the motorways. Today we started at six a.m., breakfasted in Yorkshire, and lunched on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond. Glencoe was appropriately shrouded in mist and rain, mourning the evil massacre. In this famous “Glen of weeping” the McDonalds, guests of the Campbells, were killed by them, in a plot Shakespeare seems to have anticipated in Macbeth. But at the top of that dismal glen we burst into brilliant sunshine and reached Spean Bridge to find John unchanged and proud of the Scottish salmon he has caught and cooked for our dinner.
The Great Glen. Millions of years ago an earthquake opened up Loch Lochy and Loch Ness, bisecting Scotland along a diagonal from Fort William to Inverness, sliding the northern half of Scotland 60 miles north-east along the fault line. In the 19th century Telford completed the split with his Caledonian Canal. This morning the massive bulk of Ben Nevis looked down on us as we in turn looked down on “Neptune’s Staircase”, the six locks that lift small ships 70 feet up from sea level to Loch Lochy. True to Scots parsimony, the tourist information centre consists of a small padlocked display case containing a tiny map and an out of date bus timetable. Further up the road is Banquo’s house, but his ghost was out at the time of our visit.
The road to the Isles. This has been a cold, wet summer in England, let alone in Scotland, but the Meteorological Office has blundered, letting in that glorious day that happens but once a year in Scotland. We joined clusters of railway enthusiasts waiting to photograph the steam train to Mallaig, huffing and puffing up the glen above Loch Shiel to pass the monument to Bonnie Prince Charlie. Dropping down to the coast we lunched on a pebbly beach opposite a deserted castle overlooking Rhona Island. It was so clear we could see on the horizon the fairytale cones and peaks of Rhum and Eigg, and of Skye itself. And now at last I had actually seen “the far Cuillins”, the mountains in the calendar that hung in our loo in Georgetown all those years ago and that had haunted me ever since. And, always hoping to see what was “on the other side”, there over the horizon beyond Skye were the tips of Uist and the Outer Hebrides. Way out of sight, way round the corner at the top end of Scotland, lie the Orkneys of my ancestry.
Some reflections on Scotland. In the Highland Clearances landlords removed crofter families and replaced them with sheep, since sheep were more profitable. The model for this brutality was the English Enclosures in which peasants’ lands were enclosed and they were driven into to the cities of the Industrial Revolution. Little is known of the reasons why my own great-grandfather left Scotland for Guyana in 1836, or why other branches of the family emigrated to Canada. There is, however, a story of one who went to seek his fortune in Canada, betrothed to the younger daughter of the minister, and who was to follow him. But when he met the sailing ship, there was the elder daughter instead with a note “We deem it most unseemly for the younger to be married before the elder.” He couldn’t afford to return her, had to marry her, and was a morose and bitter man the rest of his life.
Midsummer frost on the grass as, at six a.m. we headed south, the tips of the Bens sparkling with early frost. To Pitlochry, the geographical centre of Scotland, past Gleneagles, Perth and St Andrews. Now over the border and into heavy rain everywhere except, for some reason, at the test match at Birmingham. Australia 4 for 97, Waugh past his fifty. If it is fine in Birmingham it must be fine in North Wales, so we turn right. By now we know the drill. You find a dark brown patch on the map, which means mountains, turn off into winding lanes, and look for a B&B in an old farmhouse or a quaint half-timbered pub. We found both, the front door of Mrs. Jones the farmer is dated 1716 and the Sun Inn with its low oak beams is fourteenth century. “Look you man, don’t crack your head” says Jones the landlord as I order a pint and, through the bottle glass windows, watch a bubbly River Dee tumbling down the valley. There is a wartime story of MI5 asking about a German spy in a Welsh village. “Oh, you must mean Jones the Spy” they answered.
The Cross Guns is an old pub with a lock-keepers cottage where the long narrow barges on the Kennet and Avon Canal poke along the viaduct soaring 50 feet above the River Avon on its way to Bristol. Tim and Kathy are our hosts for pub lunch, cider and beer, and we catch up with Zsolti and meet his girl friend Helen. “Reckon I can get a fiver from these suckers” said Louis, opening his farm gate for car parking. It was last month and the normally sleepy little village and church of Cold Ashton were propelled into the twentieth century and the glare of its media. It was the wedding of Lady Raine, more popularly known as Acid Raine or a paine in the glutinous maximus, to a French Count with a name that sounded like Jean de Floret des Sources. A bishop from London celebrated, accompanied by a hastily assembled choir of cowgirls held in line by organist Judith and soprano Madeleine. Madeleine performs also in a group called “Fingers and Frets” and on Wednesday we went to hear them play at a Bristol old people’s home. The pensioners tapped their feet and even sang along and then, to our surprise, the lead Fret announced a new work “Jugoslavia” composed in six parts by Madeleine Smiley. And the twelve mandolins, guitars and banjos will perform it in October at the British Amateur Music Association in London.
Now getting ready for Italy. The twins Pat and Pam Cole were bridesmaids at our wedding, and their daughter Margaret and New Zealand husband Guy have called in for Tandoori chicken marinaded by Madeleine and barbecued by Chris. The day before we caught the Poole-Cherbourg ferry we had walked early through misty rolling valleys from St. Catherine up to the small hut called the Cold Ashton Community Centre for a fund raising breakfast. Later we dropped Madeleine to the Open University residential summer school in Bath. Sitting in the car, Joan and I watched the middle-aged Dads, all slightly apprehensive, delivering middle-aged Mums, all bubbling with excitement. Madeleine phoned that evening to say the first philosophy tutorial had been held in a pub. This could only happen in England, though the wisdom found in the bottom of a glass is probably universal. We have enrolled in Italian at the University for Strangers in Perugia. Unknown to me Joan, who never does things by half, has enrolled simultaneously to sing Italian Madrigals in an ancient monastery in San Sepulchro. But that is another story which I have parked in a later chapter.
NOW BACK AT COLD ASHTON FROM PERUGIA, BUT STILL IN 1993, JUST
Chimney sweeps and Handel’s Messiah. We get up at 8 a.m. in the black cold of England’s dreary winter mornings, by which time Chris has been in his workshop, and Madeleine at work in Bath, since 6 a.m. The field mice have left their summer residences in the dry-stone garden walls and taken up winter quarters in the two-foot thick bedroom walls. The recession and the weather have hit them too, times are hard and food is short and every morning there are sharp little tooth marks in the bathroom soap. The heavy Raeburn cooker that squats in the kitchen also heats the water and keeps the house warm, but now needs cleaning. The chimney sweep came and did himself out of a job by giving Chris a wealth of information on how to clean it next time. In Bath we have seen the film “The Piano” and, shivering high up in the organ loft, Chris and I have heard alto and soprano Joan and Madeleine in the choir for Handel’s Messiah.
Jane Austen’s uncle. From Sevenoaks to the National Gallery is not far, and there we found the three Piero della Francesca’s, the end of a trail that started three months ago in San Sepulchro. The “Saint Michael” had actually come from a church in San Sepulchro. The “Nativity “ portrayed the usual obese and dumpy Bambino, with a soppy Madonna far outclassed by a bold and startling composition of five determined, no-nonsense angels playing lutes and singing praises. Avril is combining a university course in archaeology with fieldwork, a “dig” in order to build an undercroft in the crypt of Sevenoaks church. Last week they dug up the uncle.
O Westron Wynde when will Thow Blow. I don’t know where the quote comes from but the western wind blew last Wednesday at 98 MPH causing widespread damage and havoc across England. In the week before we had been in Stratford hoping for a picnic in the park before Will Shakespeare’s version of the westron wynde, “The Tempest”. Maybe it was the choice of play, because icy winds drove us into the foyer where the lady in the box office watched disdainfully as we dropped our crumbs and spilled our thermos on her carpet. There were T-shirts for sale labelled “Will Power” and so I resisted the temptation to buy any. But occasionally England’s cruel climate lifts its curtain of cloud and drizzle and lets sunshine onto a soft and gentle land of great beauty. Joan always had a soft spot for our children’s “great-granny” so we tidied up the simple little grave in Pevensey churchyard where she and granddad sleep next to the walls of the Roman castle. Then, all morning we drove west amongst the wooded valleys and bare-backed hills of the South Downs with distant views of the sun glinting on the English Channel. The vast Turner sunset had faded by the time we passed the silhouette of Stone Henge’s mysteries, and it was dark when we called in on an unexpecting Gran and phoned Madeleine to say we would be late for supper.
Christmas shopping at Sainsburys. At 8:25 we all jostle the new wide-wheelbase trolleys lined up at the grid. At 8:30 the gates open and the trolleys take off like formula ones into the first bend. There is a bad pile-up at fruit and veg so I steer wide and take the escape lane right up to wine and spirits. On Christmas day it snowed.
From Keepers Cottage to Afternoon Beach. When Joan was pregnant with Kate, Mike and Mollie Windrum had invited us down from London for a weekend at “Keepers”, a tiny Cotswold cottage in a meadow by a stream in its own secluded valley near Castle Combe. On Christmas Eve Chris helped us find the magic place again. The shipping forecast for Britain’s icy waters ranged from “Gale force 8 increasing” to “Gale force 9”, but Wiltshire had a peaceful white Christmas, the first since 1956. Gran, Tim, Kathy and Zsolti came over for Joan’s roast turkey, crackers and blazing pudding, and Gran joined in the carol singing afterwards. Chris and Madeleine were already in Essex where we joined them on Boxing Day for Audrey’s turkey and plum pudding and Paul’s homemade crackers. Chris, Paul and I, outnumbered by Audrey, Madeleine, Joan, Amanda and Lillian, rallied strongly at “Trivial Pursuit” and won 3 nil. As the gentleman said in My Fair Lady: “By and large, we are a marvellous sex”. Minus 56 C and a tailwind near Teheran. Plus 38 C and bushfires near Sydney! But meanwhile we have an appointment with Kate on Afternoon Beach, the one opposite Morning Beach, on Cheung Chow Island.
IN SEPTEMBER 1995 I VISITED ENGLAND FOR GRAN’S 90th BIRTHDAY
The nurses had complained about Gran speeding round corners with her zimmer, so Madeleine made up an L-plate to go on the front. Tim, Kathy and Zolti, Chris, Madeleine and I helped Gran with the birthday cake Joan had baked in Sydney, and I passed on many congratulations and good wishes from England and from overseas.
The ploughing match. A week after Gran’s birthday Tim took us all to a pub lunch at the Bell Inn at Rode, near Upton Scudamore. And a week later I am a long way from places with quaint names like Upton Scudamore, and quaint traditions such as the Sunday ploughing match now going on at Church farm, behind the Bell Inn, in a part of England which never changes. The English couple next to me on the 747 were visiting Australia for the first time. I had explained all about Sydney’s marvellous weather when the co-pilot announced most unusual conditions ahead as he cut the engines for our descent. For the children it was as good as the big dipper at the fun fair and they ooh’d and aah’d at each violent lurch. The adults gripped their arm rests in grim silence until a silky-smooth touch-down brought spontaneous applause from us all for the skill of the pilot. Joan had brought two umbrellas which we forced horizontally against the gale which lashed the car park, and we drove through suburbs where 44,000 houses were without electricity. Our own power line was split by a falling branch and we had to use the primus lamp for two nights. I hope the English couple enjoyed their few days inside the Menzies hotel; there would not have been anywhere else to go!
IN 1997 WE CAME FOR THE ARRIVAL OF FAITH SPARKES. Since we has negotiated a good rent for Morton Street, this paid for eight months travelling round Europe either side of the arrival of Faith, for which event Joan will be assistant midwife .
My main memory of the flight was the cabin steward suddenly realising that he had served the wrong mains choice to 35 rows of passengers. After the first cold day at Cockleshurds, when I mistook icy sleet for pollen blowing across the lane, we have had skylarks early, sun all day, and a bright comet at night with a tail 35 million miles long.
April fools. “I recommend a background of Hilarius Mucus, edgings of Dubious Harmonium and Canelloni Hysteria, a border of Insidius Virus, and Polyfilla Hernia for the rockery” said the gardening correspondent on Radio 3. Then, the music correspondent devoted a program to PDQ (pretty damn quick) Bach, a recently discovered relative of JS, JC, and CPE. “PDQ wrote music mainly for the short-tempered clavier, but also the Trite Quintet, the Goldbrick Variations, and his famous Unbegun Symphony”. This we heard on the way back from Cornwall when Chris had driven us 400 miles there and back in 5 hours. We hit the coast north of Newquay and stopped high above a beach with a perfect surf break to which many surfers were paddling. Not quite perfect, since I noticed they were wearing booties and gloves with their long wetsuits. The last time I was here I was 5,000 feet above our summer camp at St. Austell airfield practicing barrel rolls. And 2,000 feet below me a squadron of bombers was practicing tight formation for a Queen’s coronation. Soon we would be on another trajectory: Athens, the Greek Islands and Turkey.
A tight schedule. Faith will be born on May 29, let us call it F day. Keeping in touch during nearly 2 months travelling we are in Istanbul on F minus8, Cold Ashton F minus 7. Ann and Mary arrive from Istanbul F minus 6, they drive our Fiat to Devon F minus 3 returning the car on F minus 2. On F minus 1 we picnic under Brunel’s suspension bridge, we all go for a curry in Warminster that evening and Madeleine’s contractions start 6 hours later with Joan as assistant midwife. On F plus 3 Chris’ family visit from Essex and Joan does lunch for twelve. F plus 4 and Ann and Mary to Scotland and back. So, with Madeleine and Faith doing well, we set off for Ireland with Ann and Mary.
“Irish Mist” translates as heavy rain, and Irish signs are quaint. In the pub in Doolin “People bring happiness to this place – some when they come – some when they go.” On the postcard at Ballyvaughan: “Drink is the curse of this land. It makes you fight your neighbour, It makes you try to shoot your landlord, it makes you miss him.” On a bend in County Clare “SLOW PUFFINS AHEAD”. While I was trying to decide where the comma should be Mary braked just in case and we stopped outside a snack bar called “Puffins”. Further on we see a hairdresser called “Headmaster” and everywhere there are T-shirts, “What do you call an Irishman who steals your beer? Nick McGuiness” and “How do you get an Irishman on to the roof? Tell him drinks are on the house.”
Glacial erratics and Pirate Queens. Yesterday we had peered over the dizzy 700 foot Cliffs of Moher, pounded by the Atlantic swell, then sat near “The Corner for Musicians” tapping our feet to fiddles, concertinas, banjos and tin whistles. Today we walk the Burren Way, ancient craggy limestone scraped and scarred by glaciers leaving those huge rocks they call Glacial Erratics. There are other erratic problems. The wind is pushing us one way, the slope the other, and there is a herd of bulls facing us on the track. Joan leads our escape over a crazy wall that can only be described as “dry stone erratic” but bringing the top two layers down on top of her. Ann hears the rumble and peeps over, not sure if she will see Joan or a Cairn. In Mayo County we drive the spectacular Atlantic Route peering through more Irish Mist to the mountains of Clare Island. From this island Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen, commanded an army and a fleet that attacked all passing ships. After Grace defeated the English army Elizabeth the First offered to make her a countess. Grace declined because “I am already a queen.”
Some reflections on Ireland. Some of Joan’s ancestors would have lived through, but many died in, The Great Famine between 1845 and 1852. A million died of starvation, and another million emigrated to America, carrying the hatred of the English that can still be found there. English schoolbooks blame the potato blight, but the bookshelves in every Irish B&B we stayed in told a different story, increasingly supported by modern academic histories. The “Ascendency class” of English and Anglo-Irish owned most of the land with almost unlimited power over the Irish peasantry, creating a class of what today we call “freedom fighters” or “terrorists”. The English landlords therefore found it convenient to be absentees, leaving the collection of rent to well-paid but voracious middlemen. The Earl of Lucan, for example, owned 60,000 acres. The seventh Earl, “Lucky Lucan”, appears to have diversified his family’s oppressive traditions. He disappeared in 1974, following the murder of his children’s nanny, and there has been no verified sighting of him since.
The Battle of Lansdown. The vet whom Madeleine helps with the lambing has invited us to BBQ lunch across the road, and on to the re-enactment of the battle in the same field it took place in 350 years ago. Nine of us cram into his Range Rover, seat belts unimportant to a man used to dealing with animals rather than humans. Some 2000 Royalist and Roundheads fight it out with pikes, muskets and unreliable cannon in front of a huge crowd with a commentary on the rules of the “game”. “Republican or royalist?” asks the flag seller. Brian’s father, who flew Lancaster bombers in the war, and I wave republican flags, the rest are Royalists. From across the seas to “this sceptred isle” have come letters from the remnants of its empire, from Hong Kong and Calcutta. Rebecca had had a slow train journey from Delhi to Calcutta, four families pulling the emergency cord when near their home, then running across the tracks.
Life at Cockleshurds is normally busy, extra busy when there is a new baby to admire. From Essex came Audrey, Paul, Amanda, Bethany and George, from Trowbridge Tim, Kathy, Zsolti and Helen, and from London Robert King. Ann and Mary came and went, while hurtling between Cornwall, Scotland, London and Paris. Sandra and Richard, having acquired Luke and Adam since they stayed with us in Sydney. Paree and Neil, a week after bumping into Ann and Mary on the Champs Elysee. I nearly forgot Ann and Carmen the midwives, competent, dedicated and in love with their job, who simply said “It was a privilege to be there”. Joan somehow carried this large catering load, but it was hard to keep Madeleine out of the kitchen. My main job was washing and hanging out across the garden 12 nappies and two jumpsuits each morning, this semaphore being quickly picked up by passers-by, leading to more visitors. Chris adapted to the work of fatherhood by working long evenings and weekends on his projects. But now, as life returns to normal, he is upgrading Madeleine’s automatic printing equipment, designing and manufacturing the prototype of a new invention, and refurbishing the Landrover they bought for two hundred pounds. I had suggested, as a joke, that Chris could automate Faith’s pushchair. Two mornings later I find, clamped to the kitchen stove, a pneumatic jack. On the floor a programmable logic unit energises a solenoid for ten seconds, allowing compressed air (via a long tube connected to Madeleine’s printing machinery in the back room) to extend the jack. At the end of ten seconds the spring-loaded valve returns, revealing a hole through which compressed air returns the jack to its starting position. Attached to the other end of the jack is Faith’s pushchair which thus moves ten inches backwards and forwards across the bumpy flagstone kitchen floor. She loves the bumps.
Middle England was once associated with fox-hunting, described by Oscar Wilde as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”. It has also been defined as anywhere outside London’s SW1, but for us it was anywhere outside Cold Ashton. So, in London we stayed with Nick and Sally, and saw Simon Toogood, who once gave Madeleine a high speed ride up to Kilcare on his motorbike. At the Aldeburgh festival we saw The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son. Ted and Phillipa, who we kept meeting in the Mediterranean, explained the famous decorative Bosses in Norwich Cathedral. John and Chris, who long ago showed Kate and Rebecca how canal locks worked, showed us round the famous gardens at Stowe. In Cheltenham we heard Sweet Honey in the Rock though Faith, aged two months, had a few strident criticisms to make of the singing. At Brighton I heard from two town planners from St. Petersburg how their tax reforms had been torpedoed by the World Bank. At evensong in Gloucester Cathedral my white T-shirt collar was mistaken for an ecclesiastical one and, until they realised their mistake, I was elevated into the Anglican hierarchy and given a seat in the choir stalls.
St. Erth Praize. But now we go to France, returning in two months from Spain to the hub. We leave the ferry and, since our QANTAS package included six pairs of B&B vouchers, we arrive at the Smugglers Inn at St. Erth Praize, near Hale in Cornwall. They are pleased to see us since other guests from Holland have just phoned to say they have arrived in Hale in Lancashire. We rendezvous with Madeleine, Chris and baby Faith. It is Madeleine’s birthday and Chris is taking us all to Rick Stein’s restaurant at Padstow. Next day we all climb up St. Michaels Mount, a smaller version of the one in France, then head for our home in Cold Ashton. And soon we are heading for our home in Sydney, QF2 flying us over the Alps, Capadoccia and Rangoon.
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
The English. While Shakespeare waxed patriotic about “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden”, both the Dutch (William of Orange) and the Germans (the house of Hanover) have taken over the English throne without firing a shot. For example “The current royal family, like the Hanovarians before them, are as much German as British. In fact George V invented the family name Windsor, after his favourite castle, in 1917 at the height of the First World War when the family’s real name, Saxe-Coburg & Gotha, had caused patriotic grumbling. When the Kaiser heard of this he demanded, in a rare flash of wit, a staging of that famous opera, “The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha.” (Economist 22 Oct 1994). Though the English sense of fair play will usually queue them in an orderly fashion, on the M25 anyone driving slower than you is a queue-stopper and anyone driving faster than you is a queue-jumper.
The English class system. “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him” (from Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion). In London, West-enders still mimic East-enders’ accents and, in TV comedies, the accents of people from Somerset always define them as rustics, as yokels. Less so in Australia. When we were introducing ourselves to John, sitting in the spa bath at Wondakiah, he had said to Joan “Oh, so you are a country girl”. And I realised from his tone he was complimenting Joan for the resourcefulness and adaptability that Australians associate with those from the bush. But things in England have changed since Bernard Shaw wrote the play that was turned into My Fair Lady, and Inglesi, a book Avril has lent me, maps that change. For example, before WWI nine out of ten families paid rent to private landlords, now only three out of ten. The new British property owning middle class “spend their money on an extension at the back, where the Italians would buy an Alfa-Romeo and park it in the front”.
And what has happened to the top? According to Inglesi, the 26 dukes, the nobility, are still OK, they live in national monuments exempt from taxes and receiving income from millions of tourists, with the Duke of Westminster holding landed assets worth 2.5 billion. These old-fashioned conservatives used to feel for other peoples’ miseries, and at Christmas they would visit tenants with blankets and boxes of biscuits, but never offer to reduce their rent. As that prolific writer Anon once said “The poor have always looked after the poor. That is not the problem. The problem is that the poor also have to look after the rich.”
The institution we call class is of quite extraordinary importance in many ways. Olson, for example, maintains that the difference between rich and poor countries has nothing to do with resources in labour, capital and land, but everything to do with the institutions that draw rent from these resources. Extreme poverty, in turn, gives rise to other problems, in human rights abuses, the destruction of forests and, ultimately, armed conflict. Technological innovations and social reforms may have floated up the poor in the North into semi-prosperity. But in the South, where neither has happened, grinding poverty remains.