Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

The proprietor flinchingly soaked up my abuse and responded with fluttering hands and a flood of apologies. He offered me a tray of tea and sandwiches, to dry and press my wet clothes, to escort me to my room and turn on my radiator personally. He did everything but fall to my feet and beg me to run him through with a sabre. He positively implored me to let him bring me something warming on a tray.

'I don't want anything but to go to my room and count the minutes until I get out of this fucking dump!' I shouted, perhaps a trifle theatrically but to good effect, and stalked up the stairs to the first floor where I plodded about heatedly in the corridor for some minutes and realized that I didn't have the faintest idea which was my room. There was no number on the key.

I returned to the reception area, now once more in semidarkness, and put my head by the basement door. 'Excuse me,' I said in a small voice, 'could you please tell me what room I'm in?'

'Number twentyseven, sir,' came a voice from the darkness.

I stood for some time without moving. 'Thank you,' I said.

'It's quite all right, sir,' came the voice. 'Have a good night.'

I frowned and cleared my throat. Thank you,' I said again and retired to my room, where the night passed without further incident.

In the morning, I presented myself in the sunny dining room and, as I had feared, the proprietor was waiting to receive me. Now that I was dry and warm and well rested I felt terrible about my outburst of the night before.

'Goodmorning, sir!' he said brightly as if nothing had happened, and showed me to a window table with a nice view of the sea. 'Sleep all right, did you?'

I was taken aback by his friendliness. 'Uh, yes. Yes, I did as a matter of fact.''Good! Splendid! Juice and cereal on the trolley. Please help yourself. Can I get you the full English breakfast, sir?'

I found this unmerited bonhomie unbearable. I tucked my chin into my chest and in a furtive grumble said: 'Look here, I'm very sorry for what I said last night. I was in a bit of a temper.'

'It's quite all right, sir.'

'No really, I'm, um, very sorry. Bit ashamed, in fact.'

'Consider it forgotten, sir. So full English breakfast, is it?'

'Yes, please.'

'Very good, sir!'

I've never had such good or friendly service anywhere, or felt more like a worm. He brought my food promptly, chattering away about the weather and what a glorious day it promised to be. I couldn't understand why he was so forgiving. Only gradually did it occur to me what a strange sight I must have presented a middleaged man with a rucksack, visiting a place like Weston out of season for no evident reason, fetching up at their hotel and bellowing and stomping about over a trifling inconvenience. He must have thought I was mad, an escaped lunatic perhaps, and that this was the safest way to approach me. Either that, or he was just an extremely nice person. In either case, I salute him now.

Weston was surprisingly lovely in morning sunshine. Out in the bay an island called Flat Holm basked in the clear, clean air and beyond it rose the green hills of Wales, twelve miles or so across the water. Even the hotels that I had disdained the night before didn't look half bad.

I walked to the station and took a train to Chepstow and a bus on to Monmouth. The Wye Valley was as beautiful as I remembered it from years before dark woods, winding river, lonely white farmhouses high up on steep slopes but the villages between were rather astonishingly charmless and seemed to consist mostly of petrol stations, pubs with big car parks and gift shops. I watched out for Tintern Abbey, made famous, of course, by the wellknown Wordsworth poem, 'I Can Be Boring Outside the Lake District Too', and was disappointed to find that it didn't stand out in the country as I recalled but on the edge of an unmemorable village.

Monmouth, however, seemed to be a fine, handsome town with a sloping High Street and an imposing town hall. In front of it stood a statue of Charles Stewart Rolls, son of Lord and Lady Llangattock, 'pioneer of ballooning, motoring and aviation, who died in a crash at Bournemouth in July 1910', according to the inscription. He was shown holding a model of an early biplane, which made him look rather like King Kong swatting away attacking craft. There was no indication of what his local connection might be. The Monmouth Bookshop on Church Street had a book of mine in the window, and so of course gets a mention here.

I had it in mind to do another little walk while the weather was fine, so I didn't linger. I bought a pasty in a baker's and ate it as I found my way to the Wye. I picked up a riverside path by the town's handsome stone bridge and followed it north along the Welsh bank. For the first forty minutes, I was accompanied by the ceaseless roar of traffic on the A40, but at a place called Goldsmith's Wood the river bent sharply away from the road and I was suddenly in another, infinitely more tranquil world. Birds fussed and twittered in the trees above and small, unseen creatures plinked into the water at my approach. The river, sparkling and languid and framed by hills of autumncoloured trees, was very beautiful and I had it all to myself. A mile or two further on, I paused to study the map and noticed a spot on a nearby hill called King Arthur's Cave. I couldn't pass that up, so I lumbered up the hill and poked around among likely spots. After about an hour of clambering over boulders and fallen trees, I found it, to my mild astonishment. It wasn't much just a shallow chamber hewn by nature from a limestone cliffface but I had a pleasing sense of being its first visitor in years. At any rate, there were none of the usual signs of visitation graffiti and abandoned beer cans which may make it unique in Britain, if not the world.

Because time was getting on, I decided to take a shortcut through the hilly woods, but I neglected to note that I was at the uppermost of a very tight band of contour lines. In consequence, I found myself a moment later descending a more or less perpendicular hill in an entirely involuntary fashion, bounding through the woods with great leaps and outflung arms in a manner oddly reminiscent of George Chakiris in West Side Story, except of course that this was Wales and George Chakiris didn't shit himself with terror, before eventually, after several bouncing somersaults and an epochal eightyyard slide on my stomach, ending up on the very lip of a giddy precipice, with a goggleeyed view of the glittery Wye a hundred feet below. I cast my gaze back along my suddenly motionless body to find that my left foot had fortuitously snagged on a sapling. Had the sapling not been there I would not be here.

Muttering, 'Thank you, Lord, I owe you one,' I hauled myself tomy feet, dusted twigs and leafmould from my front, and clambered laboriously back up the hill to the path I had so intemperately forsaken. By the time I reached the riverbank another hour had gone. It took another hour or so to hike on to Symonds Yat, a spacious wooded bluff at the top of a formidable hill, with long views in many directions. It was exceedingly fetching a hangglider's vista over the meandering river and an Arcadian landscape of fields and woodland stretching off to the distant Black Mountains.

'Not bad,' I said, 'not bad at all,' and wondered if there was anywhere near by where I could get a cup of tea and possibly change my pants.

THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS THAT YOU HAVE TO BE BRITISH OR AT LEAST older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: Sooty, Tony Hancock, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Marmite, skiffle music, that Morecambe and Wise segment in which Angela Rippon shows off her legs by dancing, Gracie Fields singing 'Sally', George Formby doing anything, Dixon of Dock Green, HP sauce, salt cellars with a single large hole, travelling funfairs, making sandwiches from bread you've sliced yourself, really milky tea, allotments, the belief that household wiring is an interesting topic for conversation, steam trains, toast made under a gas grill, thinking that going to choose wallpaper with your mate constitutes a reasonably good day out, wine made out of something other than grapes, unheated bedrooms and bathrooms, seaside rock, erecting windbreaks on a beach (why, pray, are you there if you need a windbreak?) and taking an interest in byelections. There may be one or two others that don't occur to me at the moment.