chapter Fourteen
I WENT TO MILTON KEYNES, FEELING THAT I OUGHT TO AT LEAST HAVE a look at a new. town. Milton Keynes takes some getting to from Oxford, which is a little odd because it's only just up the road. I selected it as my destination on the basis of a quick look at a road map, assuming that I would, at worst, have to take a train to Bicester or some such place and then another from there. In fact, I had to go all the way back to London, catch an Underground train to Euston and then finally a train to Milton Keynes - an overall journey of perhaps 120 miles in order to travel between two towns about thirty miles apart.
It was costly and time-consuming and left me feeling a tiny bit fractious, not least because the train from Euston was crowded and I ended up sitting facing a bleating woman and her ten-year-old son, who kept knocking my shins with his dangling legs and irritating me by staring at me with piggy eyes while picking his nose and eating the bogies. He appeared to regard his nose as a kind of mid-faced snack dispenser. I tried to absorb myself in a book, but I found my gaze repeatedly rising against my wishes to find him staring at me with a smug look and a busy finger. It was quite repellent and I was very pleased, when the train finally pulled into Milton Keynes, to get my rucksack down from the overhead rack and drag it across his head as I departed.
I didn't hate Milton Keynes immediately, which I suppose is as much as you could hope for the place. You step out of the station and into a big open square lined on three sides with buildings of reflective glass, and have an instant sense of spaciousness such as you almost never get in English towns. The town itself stood on the slope of a small hill a good half-mile away beyond a network of pedestrian tunnels and over a large open space shared by car parks and those strange new-town trees that never seem to grow. I had the distinct feeling that the next time I passed this expanse of grass and asphalt it would be covered with brick office buildings with coppery windows.
Though I have spent much time wandering through new towns trying to imagine what their creators could possibly have been thinking, I had never been to Milton Keynes. In many ways, it was much superior to any new town I had seen before. The underpasses were faced with polished granite and were largely free of graffiti and the permanent murky puddles that seem to be a design feature of Basingstoke and Bracknell.
The town itself was a strange amalgam of styles. The grassless, shady strips along the centres of the main boulevards gave them a vaguely French air. The landscaped light industrial parks around the fringes looked German. The grid plan and numbered street names recalled America. The buildings were of the featureless sort you find around any international airport. In short, it looked anything but English.
The oddest thing was that there were no shops and no-one about. I walked for some distance through the central core of the town, up one avenue and down another and through the shadowy streets that connected them. Every car park was full and there were signs of life behind the gaping office windows, but almost no passing traffic and never more than one or two other pedestrians along the endless vistas of road. I knew there was a vast shopping mall in the town somewhere because I had read about it in Mark Lawson's The Battle for Room Service, but I couldn't for the life of me find it, and I couldn't even find anyone to ask. The annoying thing was that nearly all the buildings looked like they might be shopping malls. I kept spotting likely looking contenders and going up to investigate only to discover that it was the headquarters for an insurance company or something.
I ended up wandering some distance out into a residential area -a kind of endless Bovisville of neat yellow-brick homes, winding streets, and pedestrian walkways lined with never-grow trees - but there was still no-one about. From a hilltop I spied a sprawl of blue roofs about three-quarters of a mile off and thought that might be the shopping mall and headed off for it. The pedestrian walkways,which had seemed rather agreeable to me at first, began to become irritating. They wandered lazily through submerged cuttings, nicely landscaped but with a feeling of being in no hurry to get you anywhere. Clearly they had been laid out by people who had thought of it as a two-dimensional exercise. They followed circuitous, seemingly purposeless routes that must have looked pleasing on paper, but gave no consideration to the idea that people, faced with a long walk between houses and shops, would mostly like to get there in a reasonably direct way. Worse still was the sense of being lost in a semi-subterranean world cut off from visible landmarks. I found myself frequently scrambling up banks just to see where I was, only to discover that it was nowhere near where I wanted to be.
Eventually, at the end of one of these muttered scrambles, I found that I was beside a busy dual carriageway exactly opposite the blue-roofed sprawl I had begun searching for an hour earlier. I could see signs for Texas Homecare and a McDonald's and other such places. But when I returned to the footway I couldn't begin to work out how to get over there. The .paths forked off in a variety of directions, disappearing round landscaped bends, none of which proved remotely rewarding when looked into. In the end I followed one sloping path back up to street level, where at least I could see where I was, and walked along it all the way back to the train station, which now seemed so absurdly remote from the residential areas that clearly only a total idiot could possibly have thought that Milton Keynes would be a paradise for walkers. It was no wonder that I hadn't passed a single pedestrian all morning.
I reached the station far more tired than the distance walked would warrant and gasping for a cup of coffee. Outside the station there was a map of the town, which I hadn't noticed on the way in, and I studied it now, dying to know where the shopping mall was. It turned out that I had been about a hundred feet from it on my initial reconnoitre of the town centre, but had failed to recognize it.
Sighing, and feeling an unaccountable determination to see this place, I headed back through the pedestrian subways, over the open ground and back through the lifeless core of office buildings, reflecting as I went what an extraordinary piece of work it was for a planner, confronted with a blank sheet of paper and a near infinity of possibilities for erecting a model community, to decide to put the shopping centre a mile from the railway station.
It seems almost impossible to believe, but the shopping centre was even worse designed than the town around it. Indeed, it must be a source of mirth wherever shopping-mall designers gather. It was absolutely enormous - more than a million square feet - and it contained every chain store that there has ever been or will ever be. But it was dark and determinedly unlovely and built along two straight, featureless parallel avenues that must run for half a mile. Unless in my delirium I overlooked them, and I think not, there was no foodx:ourt, no central gathering place, nowhere much to sit, no design feature to encourage you to warm to this place to even the most fractional degree. It was like being in the world's largest bus station. The toilets were few and hard to find, and in consequence were as crowded with users as if it were half-time at a football match. I had always thought of the Metro Centre at Gateshead as my worst nightmare made whole, but it is a place of infinite charm and endless delight compared with the mall at Milton Keynes.
I had a cup of coffee in the grubbiest McDonald's I ever hope to visit and, clearing a space among the accumulated litter left by earlier users of my table, sat with my railway timetable and accompanying route map and felt a stab of despair at the discovery that the options before me were to go back to London or onward to Rugby, Coventry or Birmingham. I had no desire to do any of these. It seemed like days rather than mere hours since I had dropped off my hire car in Oxford and set off for the station with the simple-minded plan of travelling from Oxford to Cambridge by way of a lunchtime break at Milton Keynes.
Time was leaking away. I had, in some remote, half-forgotten life, sat at a kitchen table in a house in the Yorkshire Dales and worked out that I could comfortably cover the whole country in six or, at the outside, seven weeks. And that included airy plans to go practically everywhere - to the Channel Islands, Lundy, Shetland, Fair Isle, virtually all the cities. I had read John Hillaby's Journey Through Britain and he had walked from Land's End to John O'Groats in eight weeks. Surely with the assistance of a fleet modern public transport system I could see most of Britain in six or seven weeks. But now here I was, having used up nearly half my allotted time, and I hadn't even penetrated as far as the Midlands.
So, in a dim frame of mind, I gathered up my things, walked to the station and caught a train back to London where, in effect, I would have to start all over again. I couldn't think where to go, so I did what I often do. As the train marched through the rolling, autumn-bare farmlands of Buckinghamshire, I spread out a mapand lost myself in the names. This is, to me, one of the deep and abiding pleasures of life in Britain.
I wonder if other people notice how much comparative pleasure there is in drinking in a pub called The Eagle and Child or Lamb and Flag rather than, say, Joe's Bar. Personally, I find endless satisfaction in it. I love to listen to the football results and the lulling rollcall of team names - Sheffield Wednesday, West Bromwich Albion, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South; what glory there is in those names - and I find strange comfort in the exotic and mystifying litany of the shipping forecasts. I have no idea what they mean - 'Viking rising five, backing four; Dogger blowing strong, steady as she goes; Minches gale force twelve, jeez Louise' - but they exert a powerful soothing effect on me. I genuinely believe that one of the reasons Britain is such a steady and gracious place is the calming influence of the football results and shipping forecasts.
There is almost no area of British life that isn't touched with a kind of genius for names. Just look at the names of the prisons. You could sit me down with a limitless supply of blank paper and a pen and command me to come up with a more cherishably ridiculous name for a prison and in a lifetime I couldn't improve on Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways. Even the common names of wildflowers - stitchwort, lady's bedstraw, blue fleabane, feverfew -have an inescapable enchantment about them.
But nowhere, of course, are the British more gifted than with place names. There are some 30,000 place names in Britain, a good half of them, I would guess, notable or arresting in some way. There are villages without number whose very names summon forth an image of lazy summer afternoons and butterflies darting in meadows: Winterbourne Abbas, Weston Lullingfields, Theddle-thorpe All Saints, Little Missenden. There are villages that seem to hide some ancient and possibly dark secret: Husbands Bosworth, Rime Intrinseca, Whiteladies Aston. There are villages that sound like toilet cleansers (Potto, Sanahole, Durno) and villages that sound like skin complaints (Scabcleuch, Whiterashes, Scurlage, Sockburn). In a brief trawl through any gazetteer you can find fertilizers (Hastigrow), shoe deodorizers (Powfoot), breath fresheners (Minto), dog food (Whelpo) and even a Scottish spot remover (Sootywells). You can find villages that have an attitude problem (Seething, Mockbeggar, Wrangle) and villages of strange phenomena (Meathop, Wigtwizzle, Blubberhouses). And there are villages almost without number that are just endearingly inane -
Prittlewell, Little Rollright, Chew Magna, Titsey, Woodstock Slop, Lickey End, Stragglethorpe, Yonder Bognie, Nether Wallop and the unbeatable Thornton-le-Beans. (Bury me there!) You have only to cast a glance across a map or lose yourself in an index to see that you are in a place of infinite possibility.
Some parts of the country seem to specialize in certain themes. Kent has a peculiar fondness for foodstuffs: Ham, Sandwich. Dorset goes in for characters in a Barbara Cartland novel: Bradford Peverell, Compton Valence, Langton Herring, Wootton Fitzpaine. Lincolnshire likes you to think it's a little off its head: Thimbleby Langton, Tumby Woodside, Snarford, Fishtoft Drove, Sots Hole and the truly arresting Spitall in the Street.
It's notable how often these places cluster together. In one compact area south of Cambridge, for instance, you can find Bio Norton, Rickinghall Inferior, Hellions Bumpstead, Ugley and (a personal favourite) Shellow Bowells. I had an impulse to go there now, to sniff out Shellow Bowells, as it were, and find what makes Norton Bio and Rickinghall Inferior. But as I glanced over the map my eye caught a line across the landscape called the Devil's Dyke. I had never heard of it, but it sounded awfully promising. I decided on an impulse to go there.
Thus it was that I found myself late the next morning wandering a back lane outside the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Reach looking for the dike's start. It was a rotten day. A steamroom fog filled the air and visibility was next to nothing. The dike rose up suddenly, almost alarmingly, out of the soupy greyness, and I clambered up to its top. It is a strange and brooding eminence, particularly in thick fog and out of season. Built during the darkest of the Dark Ages some 1,300 years ago, the Devil's Dyke is an earthen embankment that rises up to sixty feet above the surrounding landscape and runs in a straight line for 7Vi miles between Reach and Ditton Green. Disappointingly, no-one knows why it is called the Devil's Dyke. The name isn't recorded before the sixteenth century. Standing as it does in the midst of flat fenlands, it has a kind of menacing, palpably ancient air, but also a feeling of monumental folly. It required an immense commitment of labour to construct, but it didn't take a whole lot of military genius to realize that all an invading army had to do was go around it, which is what all of them did, and within no time at all the Devil's Dyke had ceased to have any use at all except to show people in the fen country what it felt like to be sixty feet high.Still, it offers an agreeable, easy stroll along its grassy summit, and on this bleak morning I had it all to myself. Not until I reached the approximate midway point did I begin to see other people, mostly exercising their dogs on the broad sward of Newmarket Heath and looking ghostly in the unearthly fog. The dike runs right through the grounds of Newmarket Racecourse, which I thought rather jolly though I couldn't see a damn thing, and thence on through prosperous-looking horse country. Gradually the fog began to thin and between the skeletal trees I glimpsed a succession of large stud farms, each with a white-fenced paddock, a big house and a sprawl of ornate stable blocks with cupolas and weather-vanes that made them look uncannily like a modern Asda or Tesco's. Pleasant as it was to have an easy, flat ramble along such a well-defined route, it was also a trifle dull. I walked for a couple of hours without passing anyone and then abruptly the dike ended in a field outside Ditton Green, and I was left standing there with an unsettling sense of anticlimax. It was only a little after two in the afternoon and I was nowhere near tired. I knew that Ditton had no railway station, but I had presumed I could catch a bus to Cambridge, and indeed I discovered in the local bus shelter that I could - if I waited two days. So I trudged four miles to Newmarket down a busy road, had an idle look around there, then caught a train to Cambridge.
One of the sustaining pleasures of a long tramp in the country, particularly out of season, is the thought that eventually you will find a room in a snug hostelry, have a series of drinks before a blazing fire and then dine on hearty viands to which the day's exercise and fresh air have clearly entitled you. But I arrived in Cambridge feeling fresh and untaxed and entitled to nothing. Worse still, presuming that the walk would be more challenging than it was and that I might arrive late, I had booked a room in the University Arms Hotel in the expectation that it would have the requisite blazing fire, the hearty viands and something of the air of a senior common room. In fact, as I discovered to my quiet dismay, it was an overpriced modern block and my gloomy room was lamentably at odds with its description in my guidebook.
I had a listless look round the city. Now Cambridge, I know, is a very fine city and a great place for names - Christ's Pieces alone takes some beating - but I couldn't make myself warm to it this day. The central market was a tatty mess, there seemed a discouraging surfeit of concrete structures around the centre, and by late afternoon everything was drenched in a cheerless drizzle. I.ended up nosing around in second-hand bookshops. I was looking for nothing in particular, but in one I came across an illustrated history of Selfridges Department Store and I took it eagerly from the shelf, hoping for an explanation of how Highcliffe Castle had fallen into dereliction and, better still, for prurient anecdotes involving Selfridge and the libidinous Dolly Sisters.
Alas, this appeared to be a sanitized version of the Selfridge story. I found only a single passing mention of the Dollys, which implied that they were just a couple of innocent waifs in whom Selfridge took an avuncular interest. Of Selfridge's precipitate decline from rectitude there was scarcely a mention and of Highcliffe Castle nothing at all. So I put the book back and, realizing that somehow everything I did this day would be touched with disappointment, I went and had a pint of beer in an empty pub, a mediocre dinner in an Indian restaurant, a lonely walk in the rain, and finally retired to my room, where I discovered that there was nothing at all of note on television, and realized that I had left my walking-stick in Newmarket.
I retired with a book only to discover that the bedside lightbulb was gone - not burned out but gone - and passed the remaining hours of the evening lying inert on the bed and watching a Cagney and Lacey rerun, partly out of a curious interest to detect what it is about this ancient programme that so besots the controller of BBCI (only possible answer: Sharon Gless's chest) and partly because of its guaranteed narcotic effect. I fell asleep with my glasses on and awoke at some indeterminate hour to find the TV screen a frantic, noisy blizzard. I got up to switch it off, tripped heavily over some unyielding object and managed the interesting trick of turning off the TV with my head. Curious to know how I had managed this, in case I decided to make it a party piece, I discovered that the offending object was my stick, which was not in Newmarket after all, but on the floor, lodged between a chair and a bed leg.
Well, that's one good thing, I thought and, gracing my nostrils with two walrus tusks of tissue to stanch a sudden flow of blood, climbed wearily back into bed.