Bill Bryson: At Home

ALSO BY BILL BRYSON

The Lost Continent

Mother Tongue

Neither Here Nor There

Made in America

Notes from a Small Island

A Walk in the Woods

I’m a Stranger Here Myself

In a Sunburned Country

Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words

Bill Bryson’s African Dictionary

A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors

DOUBLEDAY

Copyright © 2010 by Bill Bryson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a Random House Group Company, London.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bryson, Bill.

At home : a short history of private life / Bill Bryson.

p. cm.

1. Dwellings—Psychological aspects. 2. Dwellings—Environmental aspects. 3. Rooms—Psychological aspects. 4. Rooms—Environmental aspects. I. Title.

GT165.5.B79 2010

643′.1—dc22

2010004008

eISBN: 978-0-385-53359-1

v3.1_r1

To Jesse and Wyatt

• CONTENTS •

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

Chapter I THE YEAR

Chapter II THE SETTING

Chapter III THE HALL

Chapter IV THE KITCHEN

Chapter V THE SCULLERY AND LARDER

Chapter VI THE FUSE BOX

Chapter VII THE DRAWING ROOM

Chapter VIII THE DINING ROOM

Chapter IX THE CELLAR

Chapter X THE PASSAGE

Chapter XI THE STUDY

Chapter XII THE GARDEN

Chapter XIII THE PLUM ROOM

Chapter XIV THE STAIRS

Chapter XV THE BEDROOM

Chapter XVI THE BATHROOM

Chapter XVII THE DRESSING ROOM

Chapter XVIII THE NURSERY

Chapter XIX THE ATTIC

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Some time after my wife and I moved into a former Church of England rectory in a village of tranquil anonymity in Norfolk, in the easternmost part of England, I had occasion to go up into the attic to look for the source of a slow but mysterious drip. As there are no stairs to the attic in our house, the process involved a tall stepladder and much unseemly wriggling through a ceiling hatch, which was why I had not been up there before (or have returned with any enthusiasm since).

When I did finally flop into the dusty gloom and clambered to my feet, I was surprised to find a secret door, not visible from anywhere outside the house, in an external wall. The door opened easily and led out onto a tiny rooftop space, not much larger than a tabletop, between the front and back gables of the house. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural bewilderments, but this one was starkly unfathomable: why an architect had troubled to put in a door to a space so lacking in evident need or purpose was beyond explanation, but it did have the magical and unexpected effect of providing the most wonderful view.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before. I was perhaps fifty feet above the ground, which in mid-Norfolk more or less guarantees a panorama. Immediately in front of me was the ancient flint church to which our house was once an adjunct. Beyond, down a slight incline and slightly separate from church and rectory, was the village to which both belonged. In the distance in the other direction was Wymondham Abbey, a heap of medieval splendor commanding the southern skyline. In a field in the middle distance a tractor rumbled and drew straight lines in the soil. All else in every direction was quiet, agreeable, timeless English countryside.

What gave all this a certain immediacy was that just the day before I had walked across a good part of this view with a friend named Brian Ayers. Brian had just retired as the county archaeologist, and may know more about the history and landscape of Norfolk than anyone alive. He had never been to our village church, and was eager to have a look. It is a handsome and ancient building, older than Notre Dame in Paris and about the same vintage as Chartres and Salisbury cathedrals. But Norfolk is full of medieval churches—it has 659 of them, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world—so any one is easily overlooked.

“Have you ever noticed,” Brian asked as we stepped into the churchyard, “how country churches nearly always seem to be sinking into the ground?” He pointed out how this one stood in a slight depression, like a weight placed on a cushion. The church foundations were about three feet below the churchyard around it. “Do you know why that is?”

I allowed, as I often do when following Brian around, that I had no idea.

“Well, it isn’t because the church is sinking,” Brian said, smiling. “It’s because the churchyard has risen. How many people do you suppose are buried here?”

I glanced appraisingly at the gravestones and said, “I don’t know. Eighty? A hundred?”

“I think that’s probably a bit of an underestimate,” Brian replied with an air of kindly equanimity. “Think about it. A country parish like this has an average of 250 people in it, which translates into roughly a thousand adult deaths per century, plus a few thousand more poor souls that didn’t make it to maturity. Multiply that by the number of centuries that the church has been there and you can see that what you have here is not eighty or a hundred burials, but probably something more on the order of, say, twenty thousand.”

This was, bear in mind, just steps from my front door. “Twenty thousand ?” I said.

He nodded matter-of-factly. “That’s a lot of mass, needless to say. It’s why the ground has risen three feet.” He gave me a moment to absorb this, then went on: “There are a thousand parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all the centuries of human activity by a thousand parishes and you can see that you are looking at a lot of material culture.” He considered the several steeples that featured in the view. “From here you can see into perhaps ten or twelve other parishes, so you are probably looking at roughly a quarter of a million burials right here in the immediate landscape—all in a place that has never been anything but quiet and rural, where nothing much has ever happened.”

All this was Brian’s way of explaining how a bucolic, lightly populated county like Norfolk could produce twenty-seven thousand archaeological finds a year, more than any other county in England. “People have been dropping things here for a long time—since long before England was England.” He showed me a map of all the known archaeological finds in our parish. Nearly every field had yielded something—Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, Bronze Age graves, Viking farmsteads. Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant.

To me that was, and remains, an amazement: the idea of a man in a toga, standing on what is now the edge of my land, patting himself all over, and realizing with consternation that he has lost his treasured keepsake, which then lay in the soil for seventeen or eighteen centuries—through endless generations of human activity; through the comings and goings of Saxons, Vikings, and Normans; through the rise of the English language, the birth of the English nation, the development of continuous monarchy and all the rest—before finally being picked up by a late-twentieth-century farmer, presumably with a look of consternation of his own.