‘But once in my life … I did have a feeling that the world was a phantom. That was when I was in England.’
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, A Passage to England
The premise of this book is simple, or that is what it seemed when I started. I was going to travel around Britain in the footsteps of a succession of (mostly) famous writers, without leaving any gaps, and without straying from their recorded paths, passing from one to the next like a baton in a relay, or a snowball swelling as it rolls, picking up people and debris along the way. I was keen to take in as much of the country as I could, but I also decided, for no good reason, that the journey should unspool in one continuous loop.
My first idea was to organize the route chronologically. The earliest journey made here is by Gerald of Wales (1188) and the most recent is by Beryl Bainbridge, who smoked her way around England almost eight hundred years later. But then I thought it would be more interesting to move from childhood (Enid Blyton in the Isle of Purbeck) to death (Charles Dickens, whose corpse was shunted by train from his home in Gad’s Hill, Kent, to Westminster Abbey). The ghost of that second idea remains, faint traces of the Seven Ages of Man (there’s even a mid-life crisis), although we all know that the best journeys never go entirely to plan.
I was pleased I started with Enid Blyton. Her influence runs deep in all of us, I came to believe – or at least her idea of what Britain should be has proved surprisingly tenacious. I nosed around her life and Footnotes became an attempt to understand her, and the other writers, by looking at the places they had travelled through and written about. Enid is the only one who doesn’t actually go anywhere. That seems appropriate, but I was also happy to discover that she is a much more interesting person than we have been led to believe.
Footnotes also started as a rather grandiose attempt to bring modern Britain into focus by peering through the lens of past writers. I steeped myself in what they had seen and witnessed, tried to adapt to the different ways they thought, absorbed what mattered to them and the tenor of their times … and then stepped into the present. Sometimes it can take a shock, like getting off a train in a foreign land, to open our eyes and ears. Of course it was hopeless. ‘The diversity’, Orwell wrote, ‘the chaos!’ But one of the connecting threads of this book is an examination of what conservationists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, the disorientating idea that as every generation passes, our understanding of what is ‘normal’ moves, without us even realizing it. We can no longer remember, or we have no direct experience of what it was like, to live in a different world. In short, how do we know whether life is getting better, or worse? And not just for humanity. Especially not that. Because surely by now we have all got the message that our lives are not separate from everything that connects and supports us. We urgently need to lift our eyes and take the long view.
Anyway, I should quickly add that I also managed to have a lot of fun, following this opinionated band of writers around Britain. We live in a beautiful land. I indulged a lifetime’s obsession with old guidebooks. There is so much to enjoy, from the wilds of Skye and Snowdon to the big night out in Birmingham. And the people. They are so friendly and open. Until, just occasionally, they are not. Of course it is ludicrous to generalize, but even so I did find myself succumbing to a sneaking desire to say something about identity. Who are we? What do we want? They seemed like good questions to ask, in the company of some of our greatest writers, given these restless times.
Peter Fiennes, London, 2019