We set off at eleven the next morning and drove right across the middle of England.
Actually it wasn’t quite like that. The idea had been to rise at about 6.30 or 7, have a substantial breakfast of kippers and toast - it must be something to do with Katrina’s Norwegian ancestry that herrings in one form or another seem to be the staple diet when you’re staying with Henry - and then load the car up with the bits and pieces and drive purposefully off in search of adventure.
What actually happened was that Henry suddenly burst into the downstairs room where I was dozing fitfully on my palliasse and snatched up the telephone. You know how it is when you’re sleeping. I suppose if it had gone on ringing for another five minutes or so I could have identified it as the phone and answered it myself. As it was, I had formed the perfectly reasonable impression that somebody was shearing a sheep over by the fireplace, so I didn’t think anything more about it.
Henry was in his pyjamas, or rather bulging out of them in all directions.
‘Hooizzit? Wassamatter?’ he said in his best switchboard manner. ‘Oh it’s you. Ye ... N ... I ... Of course we ... don’t be ridicul ... Well, if you want to do that for us of course we’d be very grateful, darling. Ra ... ther. We’re just finishing off. Give us - what, let’s say half an hour. No - forty minutes at the most. Aha ha ... No, my poppet, we were just out packing the car ... All right. Bye then. Bye.
‘Blast!’ he said, smashing the receiver down and whisking round. ‘It’s ten o’clock and the girls are coming over to clear up after we’ve gone. We’d better get our skates on.’
I did the kippers in a jug, while Henry and Fraser threw all the packages into the car. Then we gulped down the breakfast and zoomed off, leaving Fraser’s razor on the washbasin in the bathroom. Fraser said he wouldn’t buy another - he’d grow a beard instead.
The less said about the middle part of England the better - and I don’t mean that in the way you think I mean it. The good thing about splendid Midland towns like Market Harborough and Melton Mowbray is that people don’t really know they exist. They aren’t dramatic enough for them. British Rail has had a half-hearted go at giving them a tourist image by opening a Shires Restaurant in St. Pancras station, but since they never manage to lure any tourists to St. Pancras in the first place the gesture is largely ineffectual. The result is that these rolling pasture-laden counties, with their thick thorn hedges and their solid prosperous villages, have been left to themselves, and much better they are for it. So, whenever anybody says to me ‘Leicestershire - let me see now, that’s Birmingham way, isn’t it?’, I say ‘Yes’, and I utter a prayer that they will go off and tell their friends that Leicestershire is really part of Greater Birmingham, so they can dismiss it from their minds and carry on spending their holidays in the Lake District and the Norfolk broads.
We made an unscheduled stop at Lichfield. It was meant to be a five-minute stop, and it lasted an hour and a half.
What happened was this. Fraser, who was driving, said he was fed up with motorways and he wanted to take a quick look at Lichfield Cathedral.
Henry said he was fed up with motorways too, but he didn’t think Lichfield Cathedral was necessarily the cure.
Fraser said it was the birthplace of Dr Johnson, and Henry said ‘What, the Cathedral?’
So Fraser just turned off at Junction 10 and drove us straight into Lichfield and put the car in a multi-storey carpark and led us out through a side-door into the Cathedral close, with me looking alert and intelligent and Henry grumbling like an appendix.
We had just got as far as the porch and were adjusting the sanctimonious expressions on our faces when the South Door slid open, as if by its own accord, and a venerable prodnose stuck his head out. He had the look of a man who has an unpleasant duty to perform and intends to enjoy every minute of it. The following conversation ensued:
Venerable Prodnose (aggressively): ‘Yes?’
Fraser: ‘We want to look round the Cathedral.’
V. P.: ‘No visitors allowed now. It’s three o’clock.’
Fraser: ‘And what’s so special about three o’clock?’
V. P.: ‘Evensong, see. Cathedral’s closed for evensong.’
Fraser: ‘You mean - or should mean, I presume- the Cathedral’s open for evensong.’
(Venerable Prodnose pauses for about 20 seconds of mental constipation, then goes back to his script) V.P.: ‘Cathedral’s closed for evensong.’
We sized the figure up. No Verger or Sexton he. Just one of those mouldering lookers-on that one finds around museums and ecclesiastical architecture waiting for an opportunity to put their oar in.
Fraser tried reasoning with the man. He said that though no doubt it was normal for evensong to be sung to an empty nave it didn’t necessarily follow that it had to be so. Every now and then - perhaps once in an old pest’s lifetime - a party of people would turn up at a Cathedral door who were actually prepared to endure an evensong - might even get a morose sort of pleasure out of the thing.
This idea didn’t seem to tally with the man’s own experience. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there blinking reflectively in the most negative way he could muster, and then ducked inside and started to close the door.
He started to close the door, but he didn’t close it, because Henry slid forward and put his foot in it so it bounced back.
Prodnose’s head came out again.
Henry said: ‘Be a good chap and let us in.’ He added that we had come all the way from Essex just to go to evensong at Lichfield, and the authorities wouldn’t want us to come away disappointed, now, would they?
There’s something very persuasive about Henry at times. You wouldn’t expect it of a man who weighs in at over fifteen stone, but he can be so delicate and charming that people just seem to melt in front of him. I was particularly struck by the very human and vice-like way he clamped his hand on to the other’s own as it gripped the door handle. Then he gave a squeeze.
I’ve never seen such a transformation as appeared on that interfering busybody’s face. One minute he couldn’t see the thing from our point of view at all, the next sympathy and understanding dawned. He said that, since we mentioned it, there were one or two special pews just above the choir, and would we rather be on the Decani side or the Cantoris? He said he apologised for not seeing at a glance the sort of gentlemen we were, but so many people who came to the Cathedral nowadays just didn’t have the Christian spirit at all, and as far as he was concerned they could go away and boil their faces.
So we sat on the Cantoris side and we heard Stanford in G and a fine In Nomine by Thomas Tomkins, beautifully sung. After the anthem the officiating cleric tried his hand at some extempore prayer - so it wasn’t all roses - and then we slipped out as fast as we decently could behind the choir.
As we strolled back across the close to the carpark, Fraser said: ‘Extempore prayer in the C. of E. is rather like ordering a well-done steak in France.’ (Pause.) ‘Is it not well done, but one is surprised to find it done at all.’
Henry said that as jokes go it was lousy, but Fraser said it was a profound truth. ‘People should do what they can do best,’ he said, ‘not go around embarrassing everybody by trying their hand at other people’s specialities. Done properly, an extempore prayer is a rolling, magnificent thing, but it needs a Scotsman or a Methodist to handle it. Set an Anglican on and he will start off: “I have a photograph in my room O Lord...”.’ Fraser said he had once heard some junior chaplain somewhere launch into a prayer with this very opening, and he still broke out in a muck sweat whenever the memory of it came back to him.
The door to the multi-storey was one of those infuriating efforts which only open from the inside, so we had to go round to the front of the carpark to get back in. This was a very new multistorey, as multi-storeys go, and of course it was built with all the latest devices to prevent people finding their way back to their own cars. I used to think that they did this just to keep you parked for a bit longer so that you had to pay extra money, but I have come to realise that it’s more than that. It’s a matter of Civic Pride. Every now and then, as you know, the Mayor and Corporation of all aspiring boroughs let their hair down and relax. Tuesday afternoons, except bank-holidays, is the normal time for this sort of thing - and as they bask over their port and cigars they tick off on their fingers all their successes and triumphs since taking office to make sure they haven’t missed any out. You know the style. Water-rate increase of 300 per cent in the last year, a row of alms-houses demolished to make way for a nice unwanted by-pass, curfew and compulsory identity cards imposed on all old-age pensioners. ‘But,’ they say to themselves, ‘But. Let us not forget our greatest achievement. Market Postlethwaite - we say it with pride - Market Postlethwaite has now got the most incomprehensible multi-storey carpark in the whole of the South West.’
‘Going to put in a multi-storey carpark, are you?’ the City Architect says to the Borough Surveyor a month after the new administration has moved in. ‘I wondered when you were going to get round to that. What sort of thing do you want?’
‘I’ve got a budget of one million pounds,’ the Borough Surveyor replies. ‘More, if necessary. The Council wants the latest there is.’
‘Good. Well, there are three basic designs, you know. There’s the Coffin Lid, the Wormwood Scrubs and the Upturned Tank. They’re all of them pretty ugly in their own way.’
‘The ugliest will be good enough for us,’ says the Borough Surveyor.
‘Ah, then I recommend the Coffin Lid. It’s a real monstrosity, and it has the added advantage of being very flexible when it comes to the extras. Now, let me see, you wanted the exterior staircases exposed to the prevailing wind, I take it? Okay. And how about malfunctioning lifts - shall we say two of those? You can either have the straightforward type which is permanently stopped between floors, or there’s a new model out which makes a special whirring noise to deceive people into thinking it’s on the move.’
Then they get down to the finer points: whether to number the floors from the top downward, staring with 4B at ground level and throwing in a mezzanine for good measure, or whether it’s better to give no indication at all, so that people can wander round in an enormous corkscrew getting lost. They discuss the merits of putting up a series of notices saying Way Out and Shopping Precinct which ends up in a broom-cupboard on the roof; and they weigh the advantages of having Chinese language students on the check-out barrier, as opposed to automatic machines which will only accept £2.70 in 10p pieces.
Henry and Fraser and I have an established multi-storey procedure perfected on previous excursions. We take one floor each, and after every search we come back to the barrier and start again. In this way somebody finds the car eventually, and provided he leaves a trail of torn newspaper we can all make our way back to it and get on the road.
Henry said, as we left Lichfield, that he found it a depressing place. He said that that was no particular reflection of Lichfield - he felt like that about all Cathedral cities. They gave him the willies, and he never seemed to go to one without some dismal experience or other happening to him.
Henry said that a year or so back he had once had to spend a night in Gloucester during the Three Choirs Festival and in a weak moment he bought a ticket to go to a concert in the evening. If it had been left to him he wouldn’t have stayed in the town at all, but the firm he was helping out had booked him in there, so it seemed churlish to refuse. Besides, going to the concert, with perhaps a quick pint during the interval and a couple more when it was over, seemed such a harmless form of enjoyment that he couldn’t believe that anything could go wrong.
He turned up at the concert just a few minutes before the performance started, and he positioned himself quite deliberately close to the door. When the interval came he was first out on to the pavement and started off across the square in search of a pub. He was just half-way across when it suddenly began to pelt with rain and he had to dash to the far side and take shelter in a covered arcade, in company with a dozen or more other pedestrians who had been caught in the squall. One of his fellow refugees was a small man of military appearance who seemed to be on much the same errand as himself. Whenever Henry looked at his watch and peered out into the rain, he noticed that his companion did the same. The man had a pleasantly mottled face, and after a while they agreed between themselves to take turns at the job so as not to duplicate effort.
The upshot of all this was, of course, that Henry and the military man became quite friendly. Between their dashes to the front of the arcade Henry explained to him the principle of Gunther’s Theory of Averages, and the military man very decently gave him some tips on how to defend a hill-position against Burmese tribesmen in the monsoon season.
‘It’s beginning to ease off,’ the military man said at last, returning from his latest sortie. ‘What time do you make it?’
‘It’s just after nine,’ said Henry. ‘How long do you think we’ve got?’
‘Oh, there’s a good ten minutes yet,’ said his friend. ‘You’re looking for The Paradise I take it?’
Henry said he was. He told us that he remembered thinking at the time what a marvellous name for a pub The Paradise was. So much more factual than your ordinary run-of-the-mill Red Lion or Lamb and Flag. He also thought how mulish and narrow he’d been all those years running down Cathedral cities in his own mind without a shred of justification, and he promised himself he would tell the military man all about it when they got to the bar, and ask him if he could recommend a penance.
‘Right! Now, you stick close to me and I’ll have you there in a jiffy,’ said Henry’s friend. ‘It’s a fairly narrow entry and you can miss it altogether if you don’t know what you’re doing.’
They set off at a cracking pace and within a hundred yards or so they dived right off the square and into a narrow doorway beside a betting-shop. Henry’s tiny friend then sprang up a flight of stairs two at a time and threw the door open on to what seemed to be - and in fact was - a small committee room where five elderly ladies and three men were standing talking to each other. Henry still had the feeling at this stage that the room was some sort of drinking-club for the cognoscenti.
‘By Gad, it’s wet outside!’ exclaimed the military man vigorously. ‘We could do with something to warm us up. How about some coffee! Coffee all right for you?’ he asked Henry, in the rather peremptory way of a man who was used to being obeyed.
Henry heard himself saying Yes, coffee was just what he was looking for.
It transpired in the next five minutes that what Henry had innocently let himself in for was a recital from memory of books one to six of Paradise Lost given by a bearded man whose collar wasn’t frightfully clean. It took two and a quarter hours. During the whole of this time Henry sat listlessly by the window from where he could distinctly see the lights of a small and cheery tavern on the corner of a distant street. People seemed to go into it looking hopeful and come out looking contented.
As for the poem itself, Henry told us that he couldn’t remember a single complete line of what he had heard. The only short phrase which stuck irremovably in his mind was when the bearded man at one point laid his larynx back to the ceiling and with all the dramatic impact of a wasp trying to hum through a comb in a paper bag, let rip with ‘Hail, Holy Light!’ At that moment the pub across the street was promptly plunged into darkness, taking with it Henry’s last hope of getting a decent drink that evening.
The other members of the audience seemed to consider the ‘Paradise’ an enormous success, and they all stood around afterwards and laid daredevil plans to tackle books seven to twelve the following year. Henry was prepared by now to lie shamelessly in order to disentangle himself from the gathering, and he asked them to be sure to let him know the date so that he could hear what happened in the second half. In fact, as he splashed back to his hotel through the darkened streets, he took a solemn oath never to spend a night in a Cathedral city ever again. So Henry said he hoped Fraser and I hadn’t got any funny ideas about stopping off in Shrewsbury.
Shrewsbury is not a Cathedral city, and I said so. Henry said he was sure I was right, but you could never be too careful and would we think it too silly of him if he asked us not to stay there just in case, and I said Not at all, that was the least we could do for a friend. And Fraser said he was hoping to press on well beyond Shrewsbury so that he we could get started promptly on the Dyke tomorrow. He said he didn’t care for Shrewsbury in any case - and I said I didn’t care for it either.
It’s wonderful what a great bringer-together collective guilt is. I dare say if we had set off from Essex when we had meant to set off, and if we hadn’t spent ten times as long as we expected in
Lichfield, we would have got to Shrewsbury by the early afternoon and have strolled round exclaiming at the wonders of the place. But now, to hear us talk, you would think that Shrewsbury had been deliberately put in our way to cause trouble. We said the town had been wrongly sited centuries ago and this accounted for its stunted growth. We tried to remember whether it had produced any famous sons, and we couldn’t think of any and told each other we weren’t in the least surprised; and then we turned to its public buildings, and we couldn’t think of any of those either, except that Fraser said he thought the town gaol was supposed to be particularly fine, and Henry and I said that was logical.
Fraser got quite carried away after this and told us that he wanted to comment on the hotels, but Henry said No. He said that for over-pricing and bad service the town of B— had by far the worst hotels in the country and he was not prepared to hear his deepest convictions challenged by casual and uninformed abuse of anywhere else. If you stopped on the B— by-pass around dinner-time, Henry said, you could hear the grinding of tin-openers and the slitting of plastic bags from miles away as all the chefs in the town started preparing the evening meal. He said the sound was notorious, and doctors in the neighbourhood recommended it as a mild depressant to patients who were suffering from hyper-activity.
So we pressed on and went through Whittington and came to Gobowen. Fortune was with us, because the chances of one person let alone three finding a bed in a town like Gobowen at eight o’clock at night must be extremely thin. Fraser said the odds must be a thousand to one, but Henry said they weren’t as great as that. He couldn’t think what they actually were at the moment, but he would work it out later on while he was having a beer.
The place we stayed at was a boarding-house called The Balmoral. It had a nice welcoming sign outside which said ‘Vacancies’, and inside it was all brightness and flocked wallpaper. We washed and changed and strolled round to the Hart and Trumpet for a chicken in the basket and a pint of Border Ale.
Henry went quite quiet after his first pint and a half, and he settled down to calculate the odds on finding a room. Five minutes later Fraser and I realised that this was just an excuse for him to go to sleep. So we woke the fraud up and steered him across the road to The Balmoral and laid him out on his bed and took off his shoes.
‘I’ll get into bed in a minute,’ he told us as we shut the door.
And a minute later there were loud snores coming from Henry’s room, which, as I explained to Fraser, demonstrated beyond doubt that he either had got into bed or he hadn’t.