Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

I know the Army needs some place for gunnery practice, but surely they could find some new and less visually sensitive location to blow up Keighley, say. The odd thing was that I couldn't see any sign of devastation on the hillsides. Big red numbered signs were scattered strategically about, but they were uniformly unblemished, as was the landscape around them. Perhaps the Army shoots Nerf balls or something. Who can say? Certainly not I because my diminishing physical resources were entirely consumed by the challenge of hauling myself up a killer slope that led to the summit of Rings Hill, high above Worbarrow Bay. The view was sensational I could see all the way back to Poole Harbour but what commanded my attention was the cruel discovery that the path immediately plunged back down to sea level before starting back up an even more formidable flanking hill. I fortified myself with a Panda Cola and plunged on.

The neighbouring eminence, called Bindon Hill, was a whopper. It not only rose straight up to the lower reaches of the troposphere but then presented a lofty upanddown ridge that ran on more or less for ever. By the time the straggly village of West Lulworth hove into view and I began a long, stumbling descent, my legs seemed able to bend in several new directions and I could feel blisters bubbling up between my toes. I arrived in Lulworth in the delirious stagger of someone wandering in off the desert in an adventure movie, sweatstreaked, mumbling and frothing little nose rings of Panda Cola.

But at least I had surmounted the most challenging part of the walk and now I was back in civilization, in one of the most delightful small seaside resorts in England. Things could only get better.

ONCE MANY YEARS AGO, IN ANTICIPATION OF THE CHILDREN WE WOULD one day have, a relative of my wife's gave us a box of Ladybird Books from the 1950s and '60s. They all had titles like Out in the Sun and Sunny Days at the Seaside, and contained meticulously drafted, richly coloured illustrations of a prosperous, contented, litterfree Britain in which the sun always shone, shopkeepers smiled, and children in freshly pressed clothes derived happiness and pleasure from innocent pastimes riding a bus to the shops, floating a model boat on a park pond, chatting to a kindly policeman.

My favourite was a book called Adventure on the Island. There was, in fact, precious little adventure in the book the high point, I recall, was finding a starfish suckered to a rock but I loved it because of the illustrations (by the gifted and muchmissed J. H. Wingfield), which portrayed an island of rocky coves and long views that was recognizably British, but with a Mediterranean climate and a tidy absence of payanddisplay car parks, bingo parlours and the tackier sort of amusement arcades. Here commercial activity was limited to the odd cake shop and tearoom.

I was strangely influenced by this book and for some years agreed to take our family holidays at the British seaside on the assumption that one day we would find this magic place where summer days were forever sunny, the water as warm as a sitzbath and commercial blight unknown.

When at last we began to accumulate children, it turned out that they didn't like these books at all because the characters in them never did anything more lively than visit a pet shop or watch a fisherman paint his boat. I tried to explain that this was sound preparation for life in Britain, but they wouldn't have it and instead, to my dismay, attached their affections to a pair of irksome little clots called Topsy and Tim.

I mention this here because of all the little seaside places we went to over the years, Lulworth seemed the closest to this idealized image I had in my head. It was small and cheerful and had a nice oldfashioned feel. Its little shops sold seasidetype things that harked back to a more innocent age wooden sailboats, toy nets on poles, colourful beachballs held in long string bags and its few restaurants were always full of happy trippers enjoying a cream tea. The intensely pretty, almost circular cove at the village's feet was strewn with rocks and boulders for children to clamber over and dotted with shallow pools in which to search for miniature crabs. It was altogether a delightful spot.

So imagine my surprise, when I emerged freshscrubbed from my hotel in search of drink and a hearty, wellearned dinner, to discover that Lulworth wasn't anything like I remembered. Its central feature was a vast and unsightly car park, which I had quite forgotten, and the shops, pubs and guesthouses along the street to the cove were dusty and looked hard up. I went in a large pub and almost immediately regretted it. It had that sickly, stale smell of slopped beer and was full of flashing fruit machines. I was almost the only customer in the place, but nearly every table was covered with empty pint glasses and ashtrays overflowing with fag ends, crisp packets and other disorderly detritus. My glass was sticky and the kger was warm, I drank up and tried another pub near by, which was marginally less grubby but scarcely more congenial, with battered decor and loud music of the Kylie Minogue Shout Loud and Wiggle Your Little Tits school of musical entertainment. It's small wonder (and I speak as an enthusiast) that so many pubs are losing their trade.

Discouraged, I repaired to a nearby restaurant, a place where my wife and I used to have crab salads and fancy ourselves genteel. Things had changed here, too. The menu had plunged downmarket to the scampi, chips and peas level, and the food was heartily mediocre. But the truly memorable thing was the service. I have never seen such resplendent ineptitude in a restaurant. The place was packed, and it soon became evident that not one party was happy. Almost every dish that appeared from the kitchen had something on it that hadn't been ordered or lacked something that had.Some people sat foodless for ages while others at their table were presented all their courses more or less at once. I ordered a prawn cocktail, waited thirty minutes for it and then discovered that several of the prawns were still frozen. I sent it back and never saw it again. Forty minutes later a waitress appeared with a plate of plaice, chips and peas and couldn't find a taker so I had it, although I'd ordered haddock. When I finished, I calculated my bill from the menu, left the right money, minus a small reckoning for the frozen prawns, and departed.

Then I went back to my hotel, a place of deep and depressing cheerlessness, with nylon sheets and cold radiators, went to bed and read by the light of a 7watt bulb and made a small, heartfelt vow never to return to Lulworth so long as I might live.

In the morning I awoke to find rain falling over the hills in great blown sheets. I breakfasted, settled the bill and spent a protracted period struggling into waterproofs in the front hallway. It's a funny thing. I dress myself most days without incident, but give me a pair of waterproof trousers to put on and it's as if I've never stood unaided. I spent twenty minutes crashing into walls and furniture, falling into pot plants and, in one particularly notable outburst, hopping on one leg for some fifteen feet before wrapping my neck around a newel post.

When at last I was fully kitted out, I caught a glimpse of myself in a fulllength wall mirror and realized I looked uncannily like a large blue condom. Thus attired and accompanied with each step by an irritating rustle of nylon, I picked up my rucksack and walkingstick and took to the hills. I proceeded up Hambury Tout, past Durdle Door and the steepsided valley engagingly called Scratchy Bottom, and on up a steep, muddy, zigzagging path to a lonely, fogshrouded eminence called Swyre Head. The weather was appalling and the rain maddening.

Indulge me for a moment, if you will. Drum on the top of your head with the fingers of both hands and see how long it takes before either it gets seriously on your nerves or everyone in the vicinity is staring at you. In either case, you will find that you are happy to stop it. Now imagine those drumming fingers are raindrops endlessly beating on your hood and that there's nothing you can do about it, and moreover that your glasses are two circles of steamy uselessness, that you are slipping around on a rainslickened path a single misstep from a long fall to a rocky beach a fall that would reduce you to little more than a smear on a piece of rock, like jam on bread. I imagined the headline ' American writer dies in fall; was leaving country anyway' and plodded on, squinting Magoolike, with feelings of foreboding.