The Road to Little Dribbling (14 page)

We indicated that we all could understand that.

“Lennon never did anything like that again,” Daniel went on. “It became known as the lost interview, though in fact it was never lost because I kept the tapes. Forty years later, we auctioned them at Sotheby’s in London for £23,750. They were bought by the Hard Rock Cafe.”

“Wow,” we all said.

I decided it wasn’t worth trying to impress everybody with my Leslie Charteris story.

“But your Ringo Starr story is very sweet,” Daniel said generously to me.

John was reminded of a time when, as a fourteen-year-old boy in Manhattan, he saw Cheryl Tiegs come out of an apartment building and followed her for several blocks till she disappeared into another building. Cheryl Tiegs didn’t mean anything to Daniel and Andrew, so they started talking between themselves about canings and ice-cold morning showers, but I was all ears about Cheryl Tiegs, of course, and made John several times retell the part about how he repeatedly walked briskly past her till he was about twenty or thirty yards ahead, then casually turned and walked back, so that he could see her face-on. John did this about eleven times in four blocks, but is pretty sure she didn’t notice on account of his careful air of nonchalance. I loved that story.

And so passed a happy morning walking in the woods.

—

Our destination for the day was Minstead, a village in a glade in the northern part of the forest. Andrew had read that it was a good walk—which it indubitably was, through long stretches of undisturbed forest—and that Minstead had a lovely church. As a bonus, the churchyard contained the grave of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

It was spiritualism that brought Doyle to the New Forest just about a hundred years ago. Spiritualism became curiously popular at that time. Its adherents included not just Arthur Conan Doyle but also the future prime minister Arthur Balfour, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the philosopher William James, and the renowned chemist Sir William Crookes. By about 1910, Britain contained so many devoted spiritualists that they seriously considered forming a political party. But nobody outdid Doyle for devotion. He wrote some twenty books on spiritualism, became president of the International Spiritualist Congress, and opened a psychic bookshop and museum near Westminster Abbey in London. (The building was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. You would think he’d have seen that coming.)

The problem was that even by the elastic and forgiving standards of spiritualism and the paranormal, Doyle’s beliefs grew increasingly loopy. He became convinced that fairies and other woodland sprites were real and wrote a book,
The Coming of the Fairies,
insisting on their existence. Through séances he developed a friendship with an ancient Mesopotamian named Pheneas, who gave him lifestyle guidance and warned him of a coming apocalypse. In the book
Pheneas Speaks,
Doyle revealed that in 1927 the world would be rocked by floods and earthquakes, and that one of the continents would sink beneath the seas. When these events failed to pass, Doyle conceded that Pheneas had got the year wrong (he’d been using a Mesopotamian calendar evidently), but that they would most assuredly happen sometime.

On the advice of Pheneas, Doyle bought a house near Minstead and there passed his days sitting quietly in the woods with a camera waiting hopefully for fairies to emerge (they never did) and his evenings holding séances at which he communicated with Britain’s most eminent dead. Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad both asked him to finish the novels they had left uncompleted at death, and the recently deceased Jerome K. Jerome, who had mocked Doyle in life, now sent a message through a third party saying: “Tell Arthur I was wrong.” All this Doyle took as incontrovertible vindication of his beliefs. Remarkably, throughout all this Doyle continued to produce his celebrated Sherlock Holmes stories, all based on fastidiously rational thinking, and resisted the temptation, which must have been great, to have the great detective call on spiritualism to solve his cases.

In 1930, Doyle died (though in fact spiritualists don’t die; they just get very still apparently) and was buried in the garden of his main home in Crowborough in Sussex. His wife was tipped in beside him when her time came, but in 1955 the house was sold and the new owners weren’t keen on having skeletons cluttering up the garden, so Arthur and his wife were dug up and reinterred in the churchyard of All Saints, Minstead—a move that was not without controversy since spiritualists are not really Christian on account of their dogged refusal to die. Still, it must be said that the Doyles have been in Minstead churchyard for more than half a century and not caused any fuss.

All Saints is a handsome church, with a fine multilevel pulpit and an unusual side room, called a “parlor pew,” which is essentially a small living room, with its own furniture and fireplace, where the owners of nearby Malwood Castle could watch sermons in homey comfort. We examined it thoroughly and appreciatively, then repaired to the nearby Trusty Servant pub for lunch. It is an old pub, but it has been modernized in an artificial style that I find vaguely irritating, like when a hotel puts some books in a bar and calls it The Library. The prices were astounding. A chicken, pesto, and mozzarella burger was £12.75. Confit of duck, with bok choy, pickled rhubarb, and red currants was £16.25. I would pay to have some of those things taken off my plate. But the place was full of people happily chowing this stuff down. Bitching bitterly, I parted with £8.50 for a cheese ploughman’s.

After lunch we went and had a look at the Rufus Stone, which stands in a clearing about two and a half miles from Minstead and marks the spot where King Rufus—more properly King William II, son of William the Conqueror—had a bad day in the summer of 1100. Rufus was hunting with some cronies when an arrow fired by one Walter Tyrrell twanged into his chest and killed him more or less outright. Rufus was no great loss. He was short and fat, with lank blond hair and a ruddy complexion. (“Rufus” means ruddy). He was impious, licentious, and famously effeminate. He never married, and seemed wholly disinclined to produce an heir. Tyrrell maintained that the king’s death was just an unfortunate accident—that his arrow ricocheted off a tree—but hardly anyone bought that story. Just to be on the safe side, Tyrrell fled to France, reportedly on a horse that had been shod with its shoes facing backward to confuse any followers.

The Rufus Stone is a simple black obelisk, about four feet high, with inscriptions on three sides. No one knows whether this was really the spot, or even close to the spot, where Rufus fell. Some authorities say he died at Beaulieu, a dozen or so miles away to the southeast. I know it was a long time ago, but I think it is interesting to find an English king commemorated so modestly.

—

The thing about walking is that, generally speaking, it is a great deal more fun to do than to read about, so I won’t challenge your patience by telling you all about our third day other than to say it was jolly nice and that it took us past another literary connection in the form of the fallen estate of Cuffnells. This was once the home of Alice Liddell, who is better remembered by posterity as the Alice of
Alice in Wonderland
. I knew that Alice as a child in Oxford had provoked the unhealthy stirrings of Charles L. Dodgson, a stammering mathematician, and that he had written stories to amuse her, which became
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
and all that. But I had never paused to wonder what had become of her afterward. Well, the answer is that she turned into a beauty and lived a fairly unhappy life in the New Forest.

It might have been otherwise. Alice as a young woman was pursued by Leopold, Duke of Albany, youngest son of Queen Victoria. The young Ms. Liddell was both beautiful and intelligent; her genetic input would have done the royal family no harm at all. But the Queen rejected her because she was a commoner, so Leopold had to look elsewhere for breeding stock and Alice ended up with an amiable cipher named Reginald Hargreaves.

Hargreaves had grown up in and inherited Cuffnells, a magnificent house and estate half a mile outside Lyndhurst. Cuffnells was one of the finest homes in the district, with twelve bedrooms, massive drawing and dining rooms, and a hundred-foot-long orangery. There Reginald and Alice lived quietly and dully, and in increasingly straitened circumstances. Reginald was not much of a businessman, it seems, and kept selling pieces of the estate to make ends meet until there wasn’t much of it left. The couple had three sons. Two died in the First World War and the third lived a life of dissipation in London. In 1926, Reginald also died, abruptly, leaving Alice alone and unhappy in a crumbling house. She became an ill-tempered recluse, and was mean to her servants. In 1934, she died aged eighty-two. Cuffnells, falling apart, was demolished a short while later. Today the space where Cuffnells once stood has vanished into woodland. You would never guess now that once a great house had stood there.

—

We parted the next morning, but there is a postscript to our adventure in the woods. The hotel we stayed at in Lyndhurst was called the Crown Manor House Hotel. It seemed a decent enough place to us all—not hugely friendly or charming or well run, but decent enough—but soon after our visit Andrew forwarded to each of us an interesting article from the
Southern Daily Echo
of Southampton, concerning the hotel’s devotion to hygiene. The article stated:

A Hampshire hotel has been ordered to pay more than £20,000 in fines and costs after preparing food in rat-infested areas. The Crown Manor House Hotel in Lyndhurst, which twice closed its kitchens after inspectors found evidence of the infestation, admitted five food hygiene offences in a case heard at Southampton Magistrates’ Court. They included two offences involving the production, processing and distribution of food in areas where there was “an ongoing infestation of rats.”

“I thought those peppercorns tasted funny,” I quipped merrily, but I was genuinely astounded to read about this, and for two reasons. First, I was naturally a touch chagrined, as you might expect, to learn that I had been staying in a hotel that was so slyly squalid, but I was also, and almost equally, amazed to find that I could now read about this sort of thing in a daily newspaper. I worked for the
Southern Daily Echo
’s sister paper in Bournemouth for two years in the 1970s, and in that time I don’t believe we ever ran a story about a filthy hotel or restaurant. That wasn’t because there weren’t filthy hotels and restaurants, I am sure, but because those things were secret.

Everything was secret in Britain then. Everything. There was even a law, the Official Secrets Act, designed to make sure that essentially no one could know anything. Honestly. It was quite extraordinary when I think back on it. Among matters that were classified in Britain in those days, ostensibly on grounds of national security, were: levels of chemical additives in foods, hypothermia rates among the elderly, the carbon monoxide levels of cigarettes, leukemia rates near nuclear power stations, certain road accident statistics, even some proposals to widen roads. In fact, according to the wording of Section 2 of the act, all government information was secret until the government declared it otherwise.

Sometimes all this became a little ridiculous. During the Cold War, Britain had a program of building rockets for the delivery of warheads, and naturally it needed to test them. It was notionally a top secret program. It even had a slick secret code name: Black Knight. The problem is that Britain is small and doesn’t have vast deserts in which to conduct secret tests. In fact, there isn’t any part of Britain that is really secret at all. For various reasons, it was determined that the best place to test the rockets was at a famous landmark and popular tourist site on the Isle of Wight called the Needles. The Needles are clearly visible from the British mainland, so the firing up of the rockets could be seen and heard for miles around. A friend of mine told me that whole communities used to turn out on the beaches of southern Hampshire to watch the smoke and flames. Even though the firings were visible to thousands, the tests were officially secret. No newspaper could report them. No official could speak of them.

Even better was the Post Office Tower in London. For over a decade and a half, it was the tallest building in Europe. It dominated the London skyline. Yet because it was used for satellite communications, its existence was officially a secret. It wasn’t allowed to appear on Ordnance Survey maps until 1995.

So I was delighted to find that Britain’s Food Standards Agency now makes public all its inspection reports. You can look up the ratings of any restaurant and food handler in the country. This, I discovered, provides hours of absorption. I checked out every restaurant I have ever gone to, and found that two of my favorites aren’t nearly as keen on hygiene as I would like them to be, which is why you don’t see me in them anymore. One striking feature is that many of the inspection reports are not very current. A good many are up to three years old. This is because local-authority food inspection budgets have been slashed. It is evidently more important, in this curious age in which we live, to save taxpayers’ money than it is to be vigilant in ensuring that their local restaurants aren’t poisoning them.

When I read about the court case against the Crown Manor House, I felt sufficiently moved to do something I had never done before: I opened an account with TripAdvisor, created a password, and submitted a review. It wasn’t actually a review, but a message alerting customers that the hotel had been fined for having rats in its kitchens and directing readers to a link to the newspaper article. My feeling was that if I were considering booking into a hotel that had been fined recently for having rats in its kitchens, I would very much appreciate it if someone drew my attention to it. A few days later, TripAdvisor sent me an e-mail saying:

We have opted not to publish your review as it does not meet our guidelines…We accept reviews that detail first-hand experiences with the facilities or services of an establishment. General discussion that does not detail a substantial experience will not be posted. No second-hand information or hearsay (unverified information, rumors or quotations from other sources or the reported opinions/experience of others).