'World of Birds is the colonel's favourite,' she said to me in a tone that went some distance past hate, and handed me a cup of tea with a hard whitish biscuit.
I mewed some pitiful apology.
'It was puffins tonight,' blurted the redfaced fellow, looking very pleased with himself.
Mrs Smegma stared at him for a moment as if surprised to find that he had the power of speech. 'Puffins!' she said and gave me a still more withering expression that asked how anyone could be so lacking in fundamental human decency. 'The colonel adores puffins. Don't you, Arthur?' She was definitely sleeping with him.
'I do rather,' said the colonel, biting unhappily into a chocolate bourbon.
In shame, I sipped my tea and nibbled at my biscuit. I had never had tea with milk in it before or a biscuit of such rocklike cheerlessness. It tasted like something you would give a budgie to strengthen its beak. After a minute the baldheaded guy leaned close to me and in a confiding whisper said, 'You mustn't mind the colonel. He hasn't been the same since he lost his leg.'
'Well, I hope for his sake he soon finds it,' I replied, hazarding a little sarcasm. The baldheaded guy guffawed at this and for one terrifying moment I thought he was going to share my little quip with the colonel and Mrs Smegma, but instead he thrust a meaty hand at me and introduced himself. I don't remember his name now, but it was one of those names that only English people have Colin Crapspray or Bertram Pantyshield or something similarlyimprobable. I gave a crooked smile, thinking he must be pulling my leg, and said, 'You're kidding.'
'Not at all,' he replied coldly. 'Why, do you find it amusing?'
'It's just that it's kind of ... unusual.'
'Well, you may think so,' he said and turned his attention to the colonel and Mrs Smegma, and I realized that I was now, and would doubtless forever remain, friendless in Dover.
Over the next two days, Mrs Smegma persecuted me mercilessly, while the others, I suspected, scouted evidence for her. She reproached me for not turning the light off in my room when I went out, for not putting the lid down in the toilet when I'd finished, for taking the colonel's hot water I'd no idea he had his own until he started rattling the doorknob and making aggrieved noises in the corridor for ordering the full English breakfast two days running and then leaving the fried tomato both times. 'I see you've left the fried tomato again,' she said on the second occasion. I didn't know quite what to say to this as it was incontestably true, so I simply furrowed my brow and joined her in staring at the offending item. I had actually been wondering for two days what it was. 'May I request,' she said in a voice heavy with pain and years of irritation, 'that in future if you don't require a fried tomato with your breakfast that you would be good enough to tell me.'
Abashed, I watched her go. 'I thought it was a blood clot!' I wanted to yell after her, but of course I said nothing and merely skulked from the room to the triumphant beams of my fellow residents.
After that, I stayed out of the house as much as I could. I went to the library and looked up 'counterpane' in a dictionary so that I might at least escape censure on that score. (I was astonished to find out what it was; for three days I'd been fiddling with the window.) Within the house, I tried to remain silent and inconspicuous. I even turned over quietly in my creaking bed. But no matter how hard I tried, I seemed fated to annoy. On the third afternoon as I crept in Mrs Smegma confronted me in the hallway with an empty cigarette packet, and demanded to know if it was I who had thrust it in the privet hedge. I began to understand why innocent people sign extravagant confessions in police stations. That evening, I forgot to turn off the water heater after a quick and stealthy bath and compounded the error by leaving strands of hair in the plughole. The next morning came the final humiliation. Mrs Smegma marched me wordlessly to the toilet and showed me a little turd that had not flushed away. We agreed that I should leave after breakfast. I caught a fast train to London, and had not been back to Dover since.
CHAPTER ONE
THERE ARE CERTAIN IDIOSYNCRATIC NOTIONS THAT YOU QUIETLY COME to accept when you live for a long time in Britain. One is that British summers used to be longer and sunnier. Another is that the England football team shouldn't have any trouble with Norway. A third is the idea that Britain is a big place. This last is easily the most intractable.
If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, 'Well, now that's a bit of a tall order,' and then they'll launch into a lively and protracted discussion of whether it's better to take the A30 to Stockbridge and then the A303 to Ilchester or the A361 to Glastonbury via Shepton Mallet. Within minutes the conversation will plunge off into a level of detail that leaves you, as a foreigner, swivelling your head in quiet wonderment.
'You know that layby outside Warminster, the one with the grit box with the broken handle?' one of them will say. 'You know, just past the turnoff for Little Puking but before the B6029 miniroundabout. By the dead sycamore.'
At this point, you find you are the only person in the group not nodding vigorously.
'Well, about a quarter of a mile past there, not the first left turning, but the second one, there's a lane between two hedgerows they're mostly hawthorn but with a little hazel mixed in. Well, if you follow that road past the reservoir and under the railway bridge, and take a sharp right at the Buggered Ploughman '
'Nice little pub,' somebody will interject usually, for some reason, a guy in a bulky cardigan. 'They do a decent pint of Old Toejam.'
'and follow the dirt track through the army firing range and round the back of the cement works, it drops down onto the B3689 Ram's Dropping bypass. It saves a good three or four minutes and cuts out the rail crossing at Great Shagging.'
'Unless, of course, you're coming from Crewkerne,' someone else will add eagerly. 'Now, if you're coming from Crewkerne. ..'
Give two or more men in a pub the names of any two places in Britain and they can happily fill hours. Wherever it is you want to go, the consensus is generally that it's just about possible as long as you scrupulously avoid Okehampton, the Hanger Lane gyratory system, central Oxford and the Severn Bridge westbound between the hours of 3 p.m. on Fridays and 10 a.m. on Mondays, except bank holidays when you shouldn't go anywhere at all. 'Me, I don't even walk to the corner shop on bank holidays,' some little guy on the margins will chirp up proudly, as if by staying at home in Staines he has for years cannily avoided a notorious bottleneck at Scotch Corner.
Eventually, when the intricacies of Broads, contraflow blackspots and good places to get a bacon sandwich have been discussed so thoroughly that your ears have begun to seep blood, one member of the party will turn to you and idly ask over a sip of beer when you were thinking of setting off. When this happens, you must never answer truthfully and say, in that kind of dopey way of yours, 'Oh, I don't know, about ten, I suppose,' because they'll all be off again.
'Ten o'clock?' one of them will say and try to back his head off his shoulders. 'As in ten o'clock a.m.?' He'll make a face like someone who's taken a cricket ball in the scrotum but doesn't want to appear wimpy because his girlfriend is watching. 'Well, it's entirely up to you, of course, but personally if / was planning to be in Cornwall by three o'clock tomorrow, I'd have left yesterday.'
'Yesterday?' someone else will say, chortling softly at this misplaced optimism. 'I think you're forgetting, Colin, that it's halfterm in North Wiltshire and West Somerset this week. It'll be murder between Swindon and Warminster. No, you want to have left a week last Tuesday.'