Boar's Hill has some appealing big houses but I don't think I could happily settle there. I noted three driveways with signs saying 'No Turning'. Now tell me, just how petty do you have to be, how ludicrously possessive of your little piece of turf, to put up a sign like that? What harm can there possibly be in some lost or misdirected person turning a car round in the edge of your driveway? I always make a point of turning round in such driveways, whether I need to or not, and I urge you to join me in this practice. It is always a good idea to toot your horn two or three times to make sure that the owner sees you. Also, while I think of it, can I ask you to tear up your junk mail, particularly when that mail invites you to take on more debt, and return it to the sender in the postpaid envelope? It would make a far more effective gesture if there were thousands of us doing it.
I reached Abingdon by way of a back lane from Sunningwell. Abingdon had one of the bestkept council estates I think I've ever seen huge sweeps of lawn and neat houses and a handsome town hall built on stilts as if somebody was expecting a fortyday flood, but that's as much as I'm prepared to say for Abingdon. It has the most appalling shopping precinct, which I later learned had been created by sweeping away a raft of medieval houses, and a kind of dogged commitment to ugliness around its fringes. Sutton Courtenay seemed considerably further on than I recalled it from the map, but it was a pleasant walk with frequent views of the Thames. It is a charming place, with some fine homes, three agreeablelooking pubs, and a little green with a war memorial, beside which stands the churchyard where not only George Orwell lies, but also H.H. Asquith. Call me a perennial Iowa farmboy, but 1 never fail to be impressed by how densely packed with worthies is this little island. How remarkable it is that in a single village churchyard you find the graves of two men of global stature. We in Iowa would be proud of either one of them indeed, we would be proud of Trigger the Wonder Horse or the guy who invented traffic cones or pretty much anyone at all.
I walked into the graveyard and found Orwell's grave. It had three straggly rose bushes growing out of it and some artificial flowers in a glass jar, before a simple stone with a curiously terse inscription:
Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair Born June 25th 1903 • Died January 21st 1950
Not much sentiment there, what? Near by was the grave of Herbert Henry Asquith. It was one of those teacaddy tombs, and it was sinking into the ground in an alarming manner. His inscription too was mysteriously to the point. It said simply:
Earl of Oxford and Asquith Prime Minister of England April 1908 to December 1916
Born 12 September 1852
Died 15 February 1928
Notice anything odd there? I bet you did if you are Scottish or Welsh. The whole place was a bit strange. I mean to say, here was a cemetery containing the grave of a famous author that was made as anonymous as if he had been buried a pauper, and another of a man whose descendants had apparently forgotten exactly what he was Prime Minister of and which looked seriously in danger of being swallowed by the earth. Next to Asquith lay one Ruben Loveridge 'who fell asleep 29th April 1950' and near by was agrave shared by two men: 'Samuel Lewis 18811930' and 'Alan Slater 19241993'. What an intriguing little community this was a place where men are entombed together and they bury you if you fall asleep.
On second thought, I think we lowans would be content to let you keep Orwell and Asquith as long as we could have the guy who was buried alive.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I SUSPENDED MY PRINCIPLES AND HIRED A CAR FOR THREE DAYS. WELL, I had to. I wanted to see the Cotswolds and it doesn't take long to work out that you can't see the Cotswolds unless you have your own motive power. As long ago as 1933, J.B. Priestley was noting in English Journey that even then, in those golden preBeeching days, there was just one line through the Cotswolds. Now there isn't even that, except for one that runs uselessly along the edges.
So I hired a car in Oxford and set off with that giddying sense of unbounded possibility that comes when I find myself in charge of two tons of unfamiliar metal. My experience with hire cars is that generally they won't let you leave a city until they have had a chance to say goodbye to most of it. Mine took me on a long tour through Botley and Hinkley, on a nostalgic swing past the Rover works at Cowley and out through Blackbird Leys before conveying me twice around a roundabout and flinging me, like a spacecraft in planetary orbit, back towards town. I was powerless to do anything about this, largely because my attention was preoccupied with trying to turn off the back windscreen wiper, which seemed to have a mind of its own, and figuring out how to remove an opaque cloud of foamy washing fluid from the front windscreen, which shot out in great obscuring streams irrespective of which switch I pushed or stalk I waggled.
At least it gave me a chance to see the littleknown but intriguing Potato Marketing Board building at Cowley, into whose car park I pulled to turn around when I realized I was utterly lost. The building was a substantial 1960s edifice, four storeys high and largeenough, I would have guessed, to accommodate 400 or 500 workers. I got out to wipe the windscreen with some pages torn from an owner's manual I found in the glove box, but was soon staring at the arresting grandeur of the Potato Marketing Board HQ. The scale of it was quite astounding. How many people does it take to market potatoes, for goodness' sake? There must be doors in there marked 'Department of King Edwards' and 'Unusual Toppings Division', people in white shirts sitting around long tables while some guy with a flip chart is telling them about exciting plans for the autumn campaign for Pentland Squires. What a strange circumscribed universe they must live in. Imagine devoting the whole of your working life to edible tubers, losing sleep because somebody else was made No. 2 in Crisps and Reconstituteds or because the Maris Piper graph is in a tailspin. Imagine their cocktail parties. It doesn't bear thinking about.
I returned to the car and spent some time experimenting with the controls and thinking how much I hated these things. Some people are made for cars and some people aren't. It's as simple as that. I hate driving cars and I hate thinking about cars and I hate talking about cars. I especially hate it when you get a new car and go in the pub because somebody will always start quizzing you about it, which I dread because I don't even understand the questions.
'So you've got a new car, huh?' they'll say. 'How's it drive?'
You see, I'm lost already. 'Well, like a car. Why, have you never been in one?'
And then they start peppering you with questions. 'What sort of mileage you get? How many litres? What's the torque? Got twin overhead cams or doublebarrelled alternatorcumcarburettorwith a full pike and a doubletwist dismount?' I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to know all this shit about a machine. You don't take that kind of interest in anything else. I always want to say: 'Hey, I hear you've got a new refrigerator. How many gallons of freon does that baby hold? What's its BTU rating? How's it cool?'
This car had the usual array of switches and toggles, each illustrated with a symbol designed to confound. Really now, what is one to make of a switch labelled 101? How can anyone be expected to work out that a rectangle that looks like a television set with poor reception indicates the rear window heater? In the middle of this dashboard were two circular dials of equal size. One clearly indicated speed, but the other totally mystified me. It had two pointers on it, one of which advanced very slowly and the other of which didn't appear to move at all. I looked at it for ages before it finally dawned on me this is true that it was a clock.