The minimum stay, 'Mrs Smegma went on,' is five nights at one pound a night, including full English breakfast.'
'Five nights?' I said in a small gasp. I'd only intended to stay the one. What on earth was I going to do with myself in Dover for five days? Mrs Smegma arched an eyebrow.' Were you hoping to stay longer?'
'No,' I said. 'No. As a matter of'
'Good, because we have a party of Scottish pensioners coming for the weekend and it would have been awkward. Actually, quite impossible.' She surveyed me critically, as she might a carpet stain, and considered if there was anything else she could do to make my life wretched. There was. 'I'm going out shortly, so may I ask that you vacate your room within quarter of an hour?'
I was confused again. 'I'm sorry, you want me to leave? I've just got here.'
'As per the house rules. You may return at four.' She made to depart but then turned back. 'Oh, and do be so good, would you, as to remove your counterpane each night. We've had some unfortunate occurrences with stains. If you do damage the counterpane, I will have to charge you. You do understand, of course?'
I nodded dumbly. And with that she was gone. I stood there, feeling lost and weary and far from home. I'd spent an hysterically uncomfortable night out of doors. My muscles ached, I was dented all over from sleeping on boltheads, and my skin was lightly oiled with the dirt and grit of two nations. I had sustained myself to this point with the thought that soon I would be immersed in a hot, soothing bath, followed by about fourteen hours of deep, peaceful, wallowing sleep, on plump pillows under a downy comforter.
As I stood there absorbing the realization that my nightmare, far from drawing to a close, was only just beginning, the door opened and Mrs Smegma was striding across the room to the strip light above the sink. She had shown me the correct method for turning it on ' There's no need to yank it. A gentle tug is sufficient' and evidently remembered that she had left it burning. She turned it off now with what seemed to me a sharp yank, then gave me and the room a final suspicious onceover, and departed again.
When I was sure she was quite gone, I quietly locked the door, drew shut the curtains and had a pee in the sink. I dug a book from my backpack, then stood for a long minute by the door surveying the tidy, unfamiliar contents of my lonely room.'And just what the fuck is a counterpane?' I wondered in a small, unhappy voice and quietly took my leave.
What a different place Britain was in the spring of 1973. The pound was worth $2.46. Average weekly takehome pay was .30.11. A packet of crisps was 5p, a soft drink 8p, lipstick 45p, chocolate biscuits 12p, an iron .4.50, an electric kettle .7, a blackandwhite TV .60, a colour TV .300, a radio .16, the average meal out .l. A scheduled airline ticket from New York to London cost .87.45 in winter, .124.95 in summer. You could have eight days in Tenerife on a Cook's Golden Wings Holiday for .65 or fifteen days from .93. I know all this because before this trip I looked up the issue of The Times for 20 March 1973, the day I arrived in Dover, and it contained a fullpage advertisement from the Government outlining how much most of these things cost and how they would be affected by a zippy new tax called VAT, which was to be introduced a week or so later. The gist of the advert was that while some things would go up in price with VAT, some things would also go down. (Ha!) I also recollect from my own dwindling cerebral resources that it cost 4p to send a postcard to America by air, 13p for a pint of beer, and 3 Op for the first Penguin book I ever bought (Billy Liar). Decimalization had just passed its second anniversary, but people were still converting in their heads ' Good lord, that's nearly six shillings!' and you had to know that a sixpence was really worth 2%p and that a guinea was .1.05.
A surprising number of headlines from that week could as easily appear today: 'French air traffic controllers strike', 'White Paper calls for Ulster power sharing', 'Nuclear research laboratory to be closed', 'Storms disrupt rail services' and that old standby of cricket reports, 'England collapse' (this time against Pakistan). But the most arresting thing about the headlines from that dimly remembered week in 1973 was how much industrial unrest there was about: 'Strike threat at British Gas Corporation', '2,000 Civil Servants strike', 'No London edition of Daily Mirror', '10,000 laid off after Chrysler men walk out', 'Unions plan crippling action for May Day', '12,000 pupils get day off as teachers strike' all this from a single week. This was to be the year of the OPEC crisis and the effective toppling of the Heath government (though there wouldn't be a general election until the following February). Before the year was out, there would be petrol rationing and milelong queues at garages all over the country. Inflation would spiral up to 28 per cent. There would be acute shortages of toilet paper, sugar, electricity and coal, among much else. Half the nation would be on strike and the rest would be on threeday weeks. People would shop for Christmas presents in department stores lit by candles and watch in dismay as their television screens went blank after News at Ten by order of the Government. It would be the year of the Sunningdale Agreement, the Summerland disaster on the Isle of Man, the controversy over Sikhs and motorcycle helmets, Martina Navratilova's debut at Wimbledon. It was the year that Britain entered the Common Market and it scarcely seems credible now went to war with Iceland over cod (albeit in a mercifully wimpy, putdownthosewhitefishorwemightjustshootacrossyourbow sort of way). It would be, in short, one of the most extraordinary years in modern British history. Of course, I didn't know this on that drizzly March morning in Dover. I didn't know anything really, which is a strangely wonderful position to be in. Everything that lay before me was new and mysterious and exciting in a way you can't imagine. England was full of words I'd never heard before streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, icecream cornet. I didn't know how to pronounce 'scone' or 'pasty' or 'Towcester' or 'Slough'. I had never heard of Tesco's, Perthshire or Denbighshire, council houses, Morecambe and Wise, railway cuttings, Christmas crackers, bank holidays, seaside rock, milk floats, trunk calls, Scotch eggs, Morris Minors and Poppy Day. For all I knew, when a car had an Lplate on the back of it, it indicated that it was being driven by a leper. I didn't have the faintest idea what GPO, LBW, GLC or OAP stood for. I was positively radiant with ignorance. The simplest transactions were a mystery to me. I saw a man in a newsagent's ask for 'twenty Number Six' and receive cigarettes, and presumed for a long time afterwards that everything was ordered by number in a newsagent's, like in a Chinese takeaway. I sat for half an hour in a pub before I realized that you had to fetch your own order, then tried the same thing in a tearoom and was told to sit down.
The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me. And everyone ate the way I did. This was truly exciting. For years I'd been the despair of my mother because as a lefthander I politely declined to eat the American way grasping the fork in your left hand to steady the food whilecutting, then transferring it to your right hand to lift the food to your mouth. It all seemed ridiculously cumbersome, and here suddenly was a whole country that ate the way I did. And they drove on the left! This was paradise. Before the day was half over, I knew that this was where I wanted to be. I spent a long day wandering aimlessly and happily along residential streets and shopping streets, eavesdropping on conversations at busstops and street corners, looking with interest in the windows of greengrocers and butchers and fishmongers, reading flyposters and planning applications, quietly absorbing. I climbed up to the castle to admire the view and watch the shuttling ferries, had a respectful look at the white cliffs and Old Town Gaol, and in the late afternoon on an impulse went to a movie, attracted by the prospect of warmth and by a poster depicting an array of scantily clad young ladies in seductive mood. 'Circle or stalls?' said the ticket lady.