Near Sawrey is the home of Hilltop, the cottage where the inescapable Potter drew her sweet little watercolours and contrived her soppy stories. For most of the year, it is overrun with tourists from far and wide. Much of the village is given over to large (but discreetly sited) car parks and the tearoom even has a sign outfront advertising its fare in Japanese, egads. But the approaches to the village actually, it's just a hamlet (and do you know the difference, by the way, between 'village' and 'hamlet'? Surprisingly few people do, but it's quite simple really: one is a place where people live and the other is a play by Shakespeare) from every direction are exquisite and unspoiled: a meadowy green Eden laced with wandering slate walls, woodland clumps and low white farms against a backdrop of blue, beckoning hills. Even Near Sawrey itself has a beguiling, wellconcocted charm that belies the overwhelming hordes who come to shuffle through its most famous residence. Such indeed is Hilltop's alarming popularity that the National Trust doesn't even actively advertise it any more. Yet still the visitors come. Two coaches were disgorging chattering whitehaired occupants when I arrived and the main car park was already nearly full.
I had been to Hilltop the year before, so I wandered past it and up a littleknown track to a tarn on some high ground behind it. Old Mrs Potter used to come up to this tarn regularly to thrash about on it in a rowingboat whether for healthful exercise or as a kind of flagellation I don't know but it was very lovely and seemingly quite forgotten. I had the distinct feeling that I was the first visitor to venture up there for years. Across the way, a farmer was mending a stretch of fallen wall and I stood and watched him for a while from a discreet distance, because if there is one thing nearly as soothing to the spirit as mending a drystone wall it is watching someone else doing it. I remember once, not long after we moved to the Yorkshire Dales, going for a stroll and happening across a farmer I knew slightly rebuilding a wall on a remote hill. It was a rotten January day full of drifting fog and rain and the thing is there wasn't any discernible point in his rebuilding the wall. He owned the fields on either side and in any case there was a gate that stood permanently open between the two so it wasn't as if the wall had any real function. I stood and watched him awhile and finally asked him why he was standing out in a cold rain rebuilding the wall. He looked at me with that special pained look Yorkshire farmers save for onlookers and other morons and said: 'Because it's fallen down, of course.' From this I learned, first of all, never to ask a Yorkshire farmer any question that can't be answered with 'pint of Tetley's' and that one of the primary reasons so much of the British landscape is so unutterably lovely and timeless is that most farmers, for whatever reason, take the trouble to keep it that way.
It certainly has very little to do with money. Did you know that the Government spends less per person each year on national parks*"* than you spend on a single daily newspaper, that it gives more to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden than it does to all ten national parks together? The annual budget for the Lake District National Park, an area widely perceived as the most beautiful and environmentally sensitive in England, is .2.4 million, about the same as for a single large comprehensive school. From that sum the park authorities must manage the park, run ten information centres, pay 127 fulltime staff and forty parttime staff in summer, replace and maintain equipment and vehicles, fund improvements to the landscape, implement educational programmes and act as the local planning authority. That the Lakes are so generally wonderful, so scrupulously maintained, so seldom troubling to mind and spirit is a ringing testament to the people who work in them, the people who live in them and the people who use them. I recently read that more than half of Britons surveyed couldn't think of a single thing about their country to be proud of. Well, be proud of that.
I spent a happy few hours tramping about through the sumptuous and easygoing landscape between Windermere and Coniston Water, and would gladly have stayed longer except that it began to rain a steady, dispiriting rain that I foolishly had not allowed for in regard to my walking apparel and anyway I was growing hungry, so I made my way back to the ferry and Bowness.
Thus it was that I found myself an hour or so and an overpriced tuna sandwich later, back in the Old England, staring out at the wet lake through a large window and feeling bored and listless in that special way peculiar to wet afternoons spent in plush surroundings. To pass a halfhour, I went to the residents' lounge to see if I couldn't scare up a pot of coffee. The room was casually strewn with ageing colonels and their wives, sitting amid carelessly folded Daily Telegraphs. The colonels were all shortish, round men with tweedy jackets, wellslicked silvery hair, an outwardly gruff manner that concealed within a heart of flint, and, when they walked, a rakish limp. Their wives, lavishly rouged and powdered, looked as if they had just come from a coffin fitting. I felt seriously out of my element, and was surprised to find one of them a greyhaired lady who appeared to have put on her lipstick during an earth tremor addressing me in a friendly, conversational manner. It always takes me a moment to remember in these circumstances that I am now areasonably respectablelooking middleaged man and not a gangly young rube straight off the banana boat.
We began, in the customary fashion, with a few words about the beastliness of the weather, but when the woman discovered I was an American she went off on some elaborate tangent about a trip she and Arthur Arthur, I gathered, being the shyly smiling clot beside her had recently taken to visit friends in California, and this gradually turned into what appeared to be a wellworn rant about the shortcomings of Americans. I never understand what people are thinking when they do this. Do they think I'll appreciate their candour? Are they winding me up? Or have they simply forgotten that I am one of the species myself? The same thing often happens when people talk about immigration in front of me.
They're so forward, don't you think?' the lady sniffed and took a sip of tea. 'You've only to chat to a stranger for five minutes and they think you've become friends. I had some man in Encino a retired postal worker or some such thing asking my address and promising to call round next time he's in England. Can you imagine it? I'd never met the man in my life.' She took a sip of tea and grew momentarily thoughtful. 'He had the most extraordinary belt buckle. All silver and little gemstones.'
'It's the food that gets me,' said her husband, raising himself a little to embark on a soliloquy, but it quickly became evident that he was one of those men who never get to say anything beyond the first sentence of a story.
'Oh yes, the food!' cried his wife, seizing the point. 'They have the most extraordinary attitude to food.'
'What, because they like it tasty?' I enquired with a thin smile.
'No, my dear, the portions. The portions in America are positively obscene.''
'I had a steak one time,' the man began with a little chortle.
'And the things they do to the language! They simply cannot speak the Queen's English.'
Now wait a minute. Say what you will about American portions and friendly guys with colourful belt buckles, but mind what you say about American English. 'Why should they speak the Queen's English?' I asked a trifle frostily. 'She's not their queen, after all.'
'But the words they use. And their accents. What's that word you so dislike, Arthur?'
'Normalcy,' said Arthur. 'I met this one fellow.'
'But normalcy isn't an Americanism,' I said. 'It was coined in Britain.'
'Oh, I don't think so, dear,' said the woman with the certainty of stupidity and bestowed a condescending smile. 'No, I'm sure not.'