Bill Bryson: Notes from a small Island

'No, Suburban WifeSwap,' I answered in a confused and furtive voice.

Inside, another new world opened for me. I saw my first cinema adverts, my first trailers presented in a British accent, my first British Board of Film Censors certificate ('This movie has been passed as suitable for Adults by Lord Harlech, who enjoyed it very much'), and discovered, to my small delight, that smoking was permitted in British cinemas and to hell with the fire risks. The film itself provided a rich fund of social and lexical information, as well as the welcome opportunity to rest my steaming feet and see a lot of attractive young women disporting in the altogether. Among the many terms new to me were 'dirty weekend', 'loo', 'complete pillock', 'au pair', 'semidetached house', 'shirtlifter' and 'swift shag against the cooker', all of which have proved variously useful since. During the interval another exciting new development for me I had my first KiaOra, purchased from a monumentally bored young lady who had the remarkable ability to pull fifteen selected items from her illuminated tray and make change without ever removing her gaze from an imaginary spot in the middle distance. Afterwards I dined at a small Italian restaurant recommended by Pearl and Dean and returned contentedly to the guesthouse as night stole over Dover. It was altogether a thoroughly satisfying and illuminating day.

I'd intended to turn in early, but on the way to my room I noticed a door marked RESIDENTS' LOUNGE and put my head in. It was a large parlour, with easy chairs and a settee, all with starched antimacassars; a bookcase with a modest selection of jigsaw puzzles and paperback books; an occasional table with some wellthumbed magazines; and a large colour television. I switched on the TV and looked through the magazines while I waited for it to warm up. They were all women's magazines, but they weren't like the magazines my mother andsister read. The articles in my mother's and sister's magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like 'Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms', 'Office Sex How to Get It', 'Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex' and 'Those Shrinking Rainforests Are They Any Good for Sex?' The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They had titles like 'Knit Your Own Twinset', 'MoneySaving Button Offer', 'Make This Super Knitted SoapSaver' and 'Summer's Here It's Time for Mayonnaise!'

The programme that unfolded on the television was called Jason King. If you're of a certain age and lacked a social life on Friday evenings in the early Seventies, you may recall that it involved a ridiculous rake in a poofy kaftan whom women unaccountably appeared to find alluring. I couldn't decide whether to take hope from this or be depressed by it. The most remarkable thing about the programme was that, though I saw it only once more than twenty years ago, I have never lost the desire to work the fellow over with a baseball bat studded with nails.

Towards the end of the programme another resident came in, carrying a bowl of steaming water and a towel. He said, 'Oh!' in surprise when he saw me and took a seat by the window. He was thin and redfaced and filled the room with a smell of liniment. He looked like someone with unhealthy sexual ambitions, the sort of person your PE teacher warned that you would turn into if you masturbated too extravagantly (someone, in short, like your PE teacher). I couldn't be sure, but I would almost have sworn that I had seen him buying a packet of fruit gums at Suburban WifeSwap that afternoon. He looked stealthily at me, possibly thinking something along the same lines, then covered his head with the towel and lowered his face to the bowl, where it remained for much of the rest of the evening.

A few minutes later a baldheaded, middleaged guy a shoe salesman, I would have guessed came in, said, 'Hullo!' to me and 'Evening, Richard,' to the towelled head and took a seat beside me. Shortly after that we were joined by an older man witha walking stick, a dicky leg and a gruff manner. He looked darkly at us all, nodded the most tinily precise of acknowledgements, and fell heavily into his seat, where he spent the next twenty minutes manoeuvring his leg this way and that, as if positioning a heavy piece of furniture. I gathered that these people were all longterm residents.

A sitcom came on called My Neighbour is a Darkie. I suppose that wasn't its actual title, but that was the gist of it that there was something richly comic in the notion of having black people living next door. It was full of lines like 'Good lord, Gran, there's a coloured chappie in your cupboard!' and 'Well, I couldn't see him in the dark, could I?' It was hopelessly moronic. The baldheaded guy beside me laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes, and from under the towel there came occasional snorts of amusement, but the colonel, I noticed, never laughed. He simply stared at me, as if trying to remember what dark event from his past I was associated with. Every time I looked over, his eyes were fixed on me. It was unnerving.

A starburst briefly filled the screen, indicating an interval of adverts, which the baldheaded man used to quiz me in a friendly but confusingly disconnected way as to who I was and how I had fallen into their lives. He was delighted to find that I was American.

'I've always wanted to see America,' he said. 'Tell me, do you have Woolworth's there?'

'Well, actually, Woolworth's is American.' 'You don't say!' he said. 'Did you hear that, Colonel? Woolworth's is American.' The colonel seemed unmoved by this intelligence. 'And what about cornflakes?' 'I beg your pardon?' 'Do you have cornflakes in America?' 'Well, actually, they're American, too.' 'Never!'

I smiled weakly, and begged my legs to stand me up and take me out of there, but my lower body seemed oddly inert.

'Fancy! So what brings you to Britain then if you have cornflakes already?'

I looked at him to see if the question was serious, then embarked reluctantly and falteringly on a brief resume of my life to that point, but after a moment I realized that the programme had restarted and he wasn't even pretending to listen, so I tailed off, and instead spent the whole of part two absorbing the heat of the colonel's glare.

When the programme finished, I was about to hoist myself from the chair and bid this happy trio a warm adieu when the door opened and Mrs Smegma came in with a tray of tea things and a plate of biscuits of the sort that I believe are called teatime variety, and everyone stirred friskily to life, rubbing their hands keenly and saying, 'Ooh, lovely.' To this day, I remain impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited by the prospect of a hot beverage.

'And how was World of Birds tonight, Colonel?' asked Mrs Smegma as she handed the colonel a cup of tea and a biscuit.

'Couldn't say,' said the colonel archly. 'The television ' he smacked me in the side of the head with a meaningful look 'was tuned to the other side.' Mrs Smegma gave me a sharp look, too, in sympathy. I think they were sleeping together.

'World of Birds is the colonel's favourite,' she said to me in a tone that went some distance past hate, and handed me a cup of tea with a hard whitish biscuit.

I mewed some pitiful apology.

'It was puffins tonight,' blurted the redfaced fellow, looking very pleased with himself.

Mrs Smegma stared at him for a moment as if surprised to find that he had the power of speech. 'Puffins!' she said and gave me a still more withering expression that asked how anyone could be so lacking in fundamental human decency. 'The colonel adores puffins. Don't you, Arthur?' She was definitely sleeping with him.

'I do rather,' said the colonel, biting unhappily into a chocolate bourbon.

In shame, I sipped my tea and nibbled at my biscuit. I had never had tea with milk in it before or a biscuit of such rocklike cheerlessness. It tasted like something you would give a budgie to strengthen its beak. After a minute the baldheaded guy leaned close to me and in a confiding whisper said, 'You mustn't mind the colonel. He hasn't been the same since he lost his leg.'