A Traveller's Life (8 page)

In the summer of 1927, I went on holiday with my parents to Swanage, a smallish seaside resort on the Dorset coast, between Bournemouth and Weymouth. We travelled by train from Waterloo, and as soon as my father had made sure of our reserved seats in the compartment, we took our seats in the dining-car. I had already been allowed on the footplate of the engine, hauled up on to it by the driver or the fireman, both of them grimy, friendly men. In those days it was commonplace for small boys to visit the crew and be shown the engine before setting out on a journey.

I remember the snowy-white, ferociously starched tablecloths that began to be spotted with specks of black from the engine as soon as the train started, the smell of food, mixed with the acrid smell of train, itself a compound of oil and burning coal and other unidentifiable ingredients, and the musical tinkling of glasses and cutlery as we picked our way among the points, past a platform marked Brookwood, from which my father told me special funeral trains set out for what was England's largest cemetery, some thirty miles away in the country.

‘Why,' I asked, ‘did they take dead people all that way when
they could be buried in a cemetery where their houses were? Didn't they have cemeteries?' We had cemeteries near us in Barnes, as I well knew.

‘Brookwood,' my father replied, ‘is for well-off people,' which, although he seemed to think this a sufficient answer to my question, did not really answer it.

The train roared on through deepest Surrey (I found later on, when I was given a bicycle and explored it, that a lot of Surrey was not really country at all, being covered with firing ranges, barracks, golf courses and lunatic asylums), while the soup served by one of the resplendently uniformed dining-car attendants slopped over on to the recently spotless tablecloth however much I tried to stop it.

‘That's where the crematorium is,' my father said as we flashed past a small railway station and a lot of pines and tombstones.

‘What's a crematorium?' I asked.

‘I'll tell you when you've finished your lunch,' he replied.

It was on this train, too, that I first experienced the pleasure of looking down a railway lavatory pan and seeing the permanent way rushing past beneath me, something that has never ceased to fascinate me, whether on the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the 12.15 to Ernakulam Junction, or the 16.30 to Penzance.

Every day that summer at Swanage, if the weather was fine, morning or afternoon according to the state of the tide, we went to the beach where my father had hired a bathing tent for the duration of the holiday. The tent was situated at what was widely regarded as ‘the better end' of the beach, beyond the Beach Café, inland of which some of the more hideous urban developments were taking place. The beach near the centre of the town, where stood a monument to a naval victory by King Alfred over the Danes in AD 877 (crowned, rather surprisingly, with iron cannon balls), was equally widely regarded as being the place where the
‘day trippers', who used to come over from Bournemouth on the paddle-steamer, congregated. It was at the Beach Café the following year that, in my father's absence on a journey with the coat and suit collection in the North, my mother and I became hooked on what were then in Britain the new-fangled Bell Fruit Machines with such disastrous results that we voluntarily signed a document in which we promised to renounce them for ever. Much earlier my mother had signed a similar document in which she promised not to order anything from Harrods other than household necessities without first consulting my father.

It was while on the way to the ‘better end' from what was presumably the ‘worse end' that we used to pass the place where motor charabancs were parked and their proprietors used to lie in wait for customers. They advertised their various excursions on blackboards, using coloured chalks, sometimes, if they had the facility, making little vignettes of the principal attractions – ‘Ancient Corfe Castle', ‘Lovely Lulworth', ‘Weymouth, Naples of the West', ‘Historic Wimborne – See the Famous Chained Library in the Minster', and so on. And always, without the vignette but sometimes with the insertion of a large question mark, ‘A Mystery Tour', with an opportunity for partaking of a ‘Real Dorset Cream Tea' (not included in the price of the ticket).

Eventually, by going on long enough about it, I managed to persuade my parents to take tickets for the mystery tour. To me their comparative lack of enthusiasm for this project, the thought of which threw me into transports of excitement, was a slight surprise, especially as both of them loved the open air and what my father called ‘a good blow' in an open motor car. They would certainly get a sufficiency of air in a charabanc.

It was not until much later that I realized that neither my father nor my mother, while inhaling their quota of fresh air, wished to do so in the company of large numbers of other human beings.
Just as I did not realize at the time that both of them were bored to death by beaches and that the hired tent and our daily visits to what sometimes amounted to only a few feet of sand between it and high water (none at all if it was a spring tide), was solely for my benefit. And it was my mother who told me this years later, goaded into doing so by some unkindness on my part, and at the same time telling me that my father had disliked every seaside holiday he ever had and was only really happy when he was sculling on the Thames.

We took our seats in the charabanc. I was practically delirious with joy. A charabanc was originally a horse-drawn vehicle of French antecedents, with banks of seats one behind the other, hence its name. A motor charabanc, apart from its seating arrangements bore, unlike an electric brougham, comparatively little semblance to its horse-drawn predecessor. Motor charabancs looked like enormously inflated versions of open touring motor cars, painted in more powerful colours – this one was bright red. They were fitted with folding canvas hoods which could be put up if the weather turned nasty but with the same sort of difficulty, if there was a strong wind, that when I became a sailor I associated with the handling of a royal or an upper topgallant in similar circumstances. The banks of seats in motor charabancs became progressively higher towards the back, as in some theatres, so that the passengers there, in the equivalent of the pit, as it were, would not miss anything. It was the rearmost seat that I ‘bagged' for the three of us.

Watching the charabanc fill up I began dimly to apprehend, in spite of my excitement, some of the reasons that might have contributed to my parents' apparent lack of keenness for this outing, although they were now putting a brave face on it. The other passengers, at least the majority of them, were trippers, whether day trippers or other sorts of trippers it was impossible
for me to say; but trippers they undoubtedly were. They were certainly not the sort of people who had their own bathing tents hired by the week, month or fortnight. In fact, a number of them looked exactly like the characters depicted in the ‘rude' postcards on sale near the sea-front, of which my parents used to express abhorrence, rushing me past them, but which, nevertheless, I discovered, they used to send to their more frivolous acquaintances ‘in the better end of the business' under plain cover, or else used to keep as souvenirs hidden in drawers at Three Ther Mansions, where I subsequently discovered them, together with even more interesting material.

In spite of their appearance the trippers were both jolly and friendly, much more so than some of our neighbours at the ‘better end'. They asked me if I was enjoying myself and being a good boy, called my father ‘governor', my mother ‘mum' and the charabanc (which I called a ‘sharrabang', believing the name to be something to do with the noise it made), a ‘sharrer'.

Then we were off. By now I had found myself a more desirable seat, immediately behind the driver who was large and easy-going and who allowed me to chatter away to him – there were no prohibitions about talking to the driver in those days. As soon as we got out of the town he allowed me to honk away on the rubber bulb of the motor horn, telling me when to do it when we rounded the bends.

At that time the official speed limit for such vehicles as charabancs was still as it was for cars. God knows what speed we actually attained in our red ‘sharrer' that warm August afternoon; but whatever speed it attained it was sufficient to make some of the more timid female passengers utter shrieks of fear as we roared round the bends, horn blasting, and to make other passengers complain about the head-on collisions they were having with various sorts of insects which, as well
as making a nasty mess of their clothes, were quite painful if they were hit in the face by them at such a velocity. This did not matter to the driver, whose name was Fred, to me, or to the other passengers in the front row of seats, since we were protected by a huge expanse of what in the event of an accident was still, in 1927, lethal plate glass.

At Corfe Castle Fred came to a halt sufficiently long enough to address us through an old tin megaphone.

‘This is Corfe Castle,' he said, ‘and that is the castle,' as if we could miss seeing the vast looming ruin and making me wonder if he was ‘all there'. ‘We shall be stopping here for forty minutes on the homeward run. This allows ample time to inspect the ruins and partake of a Dorset cream tea at the Castle Tea Rooms,' which seemed pretty silly, telling us all this, when we were supposed to be on a mystery tour. Anyway
we
had already visited Corfe Castle under our own steam, walking the four and a half miles or so to it from Swanage by way of Nine Barrow Down, travelling back by train afterwards.
We
had no need to visit the ruins with the trippers.
We
could concentrate on the cream tea.

From Corfe Castle our tour took us westwards along the foot of the Purbeck Hills. Eventually we crossed them by a narrow serpentine road, the charabanc leaving behind it a long plume of white dust, and entered an entrancing region where the wild Purbeck heathland mingled with more gentle, domesticated country in the long, narrow enclave of the valley of the River Frome, a singularly beautiful stream which has its source high in the North Dorset Downs. To the north of this valley was yet more heathland, Hardy's Egdon.

To the left of the lane, and to the right of it too, was heath, but already partially tamed, with little fields, some with ponies in them. There were also spinneys of young leaf-bearing trees among the pines and the blazing yellow gorse, like parts of the New Forest,
of which I had enjoyed almost equally fleeting glimpses travelling from Waterloo to Swanage on the train.

Just before Wareham Fred turned off into a long stony lane, which he said was called Holme Lane. He was still going at such a rate that when we came to a hump-backed bridge over the branch line from Wareham to Swanage, he hit the hump such a crack that it was a miracle we were not all thrown out, and this elicited a few more shrieks from the ladies, although no one actually complained. Probably no one on board, including my parents who, although they had both driven, were certainly not competent to do so, knew much about how to drive a motor car, let alone a motor charabanc. Not that I cared, sitting behind Fred, honking the horn when he told me to, watching what I thought was the most beautiful lane I had ever seen unroll in front of me, between plantations of silver birch and pine and through tunnels of what had been until recently a riot of mauve rhododendrons, past green fields with cattle grazing in them, and a park with huge old trees, oaks and beeches and cedars growing in it, with a gentleman's residence in the background, before which Fred momentarily halted his charabanc to give us the opportunity to admire it. Beyond it, to the right of the road (although I did not see them until years later while on a cycling holiday), were the lush water meadows of the Frome, with water-mills and fish-ponds and weirs and sluices and the site of a medieval church and priory, and here and there the sort of cottage I had always imagined King Alfred burning the cakes in, ever since receiving the illustrated
Nursery History of England
as a Christmas present. And to the left were the Purbeck Hills, fleetingly glimpsed across dark expanses of heathland.

Eventually, having driven us through a couple of water splashes, throwing up clouds of spray and churning up the gravel in the process, and thereby giving cause for more shrieking, Fred
deposited us on the threshold of the first mystery. He was a terror, Fred. He drove like a mad Persian I met years later in Meshed. The place where this mystery was to be unveiled seemed highly suitable, a point where the lane, close to the River Frome now on the edge of its water meadows, skirted a spooky-looking wood. Here was a gate with a drive beyond and for a moment when he stopped, before the passengers found their voices and Fred found his megaphone, there was a silence broken by the hum of insects and the semi-somnolent sound of wood pigeons.

At the end of the drive there was what I would now identify as a Gothic gatehouse, with a pointed entrance arch, window tracery and mock battlements, but at that time described to me as being like the wood, spooky, which was what the builder no doubt intended.

Any suggestion of spookiness, however, was soon dispelled by Fred with his megaphone, which sounded more like a foghorn in these otherwise peaceful surroundings.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,' he said, ‘this is a Beauty Spot. The ruins of Bindon Abbey. The Abbey was built, 1172, by monks and knocked down at the Reformation. Among the ruins you will see the open grave in which Angel Clare laid Tess, having carried her here from Wool Manor House on the other side of the Frome, as written about in his famous novel
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Mr Thomas Hardy, now living at Dorchester, whose house you can see if you take our Hardy Country Tour. As this is a Beauty Spot we will stop here for fifteen minutes to allow you ample time to view the ruins and the outside of the house which is not open to the public. Likewise, the picking of flowers, wild or otherwise, is prohibited. Bindon Abbey is the property of Mr Weld of Lulworth, a member of the well-known Roman Catholic family. Admission tickets, price twopence, may be obtained at the gatehouse. I will sound my horn, once only, when it is time to leave.'