'In 1687,' I said, lying through my teeth. Well, I was right in the fundamentals normalcy is an anglicism. I just couldn't recall the details. 'Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders,' I added in a flash of inspiration. One of the things you get used to hearing when you are an American living in Britain is that America will be the death of English. It is a sentiment expressed to me surprisingly often, usually at dinner parties, usually by someone who has had a little too much to drink, but sometimes by a semidemented, overpowdered old crone like this one. There comes a time when you lose patience with this sort of thing. So I told her I told them both, for her husband looked as if he was about to utter another fraction of thought that whether they appreciated it or not British speech has been enlivened beyond measure by words created in America, words that they could not do without, and that one of these words was moron. I showed them my teeth, drained my coffee, and with a touch of hauteur excused myself. Then I went off to write another letter to the editor of The Times.
By eleven the next morning, when John Price and a very nice fellow named David Partridge rolled up at the hotel in Price's car, I was waiting for them by the door. I forbade them a coffee stop in Bowness on the grounds that I could stand it no longer, and made them drive to the hotel near Bassenthwaite where Price had booked us rooms. There we dumped our bags, had a coffee, acquired three packed lunches from the kitchen, accoutred ourselves in stylish fellware and set off for Great Langdale. Now this was more like it.
Despite threatening weather and the lateness of the year, the car parks and verges along the valley were crowded with cars. Everywhere people delved for equipment in boots or sat with car doors open pulling on warm socks and stout boots. We dressed our feet, then fell in with a straggly army of walkers, all with rucksacks and kneehigh woolly socks, and set off for a long, grassy humpback hill called the Band. We were headed for the fabled summit of Bow Fell, at 2,960 feet the sixth highest of the Lakeland hills. Walkers ahead of us formed wellspaced dots of slowmoving colour leading to an impossibly remote summit, lost in cloud. As ever, I was quietly astounded to find that so many people had beenseized with the notion that struggling up a mountainside on a damp Saturday on the winter end of October was fun.
We climbed through the grassy lower slopes into everbleaker terrain, picking our way over rocks and scree, until we were up among the ragged shreds of cloud that hung above the valley floor perhaps a thousand feet below. The views were sensational the jagged peaks of the Langdale Pikes rising opposite and crowding against the narrow and gratifyingly remote valley, laced with tiny, stonewalled fields, and off to the west a swelling sea of hefty brown hills disappearing in mist and low cloud.
As we pressed on the weather severely worsened. The air filled with swirling particles of ice that hit the skin like razor nicks. By the time we neared Three Tarns the weather was truly menacing, with thick fog joining the jagged sleet. Ferocious gusts of wind buffeted the hillside and reduced our progress to a creeping plod. The fog cut visibility to a few yards. Once or twice we briefly lost the path, which alarmed me as I didn't particularly want to die up here apart from anything else, I still had 4,700 unspent Profiles points on my Barclaycard. Out of the murk ahead of us emerged what looked disconcertingly like an orange snowman. It proved on closer inspection to be a hitech hiker's outfit. Somewhere inside it was a man.
'Bit fresh,' the bundle offered understatedly.
John and David asked him if he'd come far.
'Just from Blea Tarn.' Blea Tarn was ten miles away over taxing terrain.
'Bad over there?' John asked in what I had come to recognize was the abbreviated speech of fell walkers.
'Handsandknees job,' said the man.
They nodded knowingly.
'Be like that here soon.'
They nodded again.
'Well, best be off,' announced the man as if he couldn't spend the whole day jabbering, and trundled off into the white soup. I watched him go, then turned to suggest that perhaps we should think about retreating to the valley, to a warm hostelry with hot food and cold beer, only to find Price and Partridge dematerializing into the mists thirty feet ahead of me.
'Hey, wait for me!' I croaked and scrambled after.
We made it to the top without incident. I counted thirtythree people there ahead of us, huddled among the fogwhitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountain top in an ice storm and realized there was no way you could explain it. We trudged over to a rock, where a couple kindly moved their rucksacks and shrank their picnic space to make room for us. We sat and delved among our brown bags in the piercing wind, cracking open hardboiled eggs with numbed fingers, sipping warm pop, eating floppy cheeseandpickle sandwiches, and staring into an impenetrable murk that we had spent three hours climbing through to get here, and I thought, I seriously thought: God, I love this country.
CHAPTER TWENTYFOUR
I WAS HEADING FOR NEWCASTLE, BY WAY OF YORK, WHEN I DID another impetuous thing. I got off at Durham, intending to poke around the cathedral for an hour or so and fell in love with it instantly in a serious way. Why, it's wonderful a perfect little city and I kept thinking: 'Why did noone tell me about this?' I knew, of course, that it had a fine Norman cathedral but I had no idea that it was so splendid. I couldn't believe that not once in twenty years had anyone said to me, 'You've never been to Durham? Good God, man, you must go at once! Please take my car.' I had read countless travel pieces in Sunday papers about weekends away in York, Canterbury, Norwich, even Lincoln, but I couldn't remember reading a single one about Durham, and when I asked friends about it, I found hardly any who had ever been there. So let me say it now: if you have never been to Durham, go at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.
The cathedral, a mountain of reddishbrown stone standing high above a lazy green loop of the River Wear, is, of course, its glory. Everything about it was perfect not just its setting and execution but also, no less notably, the way it is run today. For a start there was no nagging for money, no 'voluntary' admission fee. Outside, there was simply a discreet sign announcing that it cost .700,000 a year to maintain the cathedral and that it was now engaged on a .400,000 renovation project on the east wing and that they would very much appreciate any spare money that visitors might give them. Inside, there were two modest collecting boxes and nothing else no clutter, no nagging notices, no irksome bulletin boards or stupid Eisenhower flags, nothing at all to detract from the unutterable soaring majesty of the interior. It was a perfect day to see it. Sun slanted lavishly through the stainedglass windows, highlighting the stout pillars with their sumptuously grooved patterns and spattering the floors with motes of colour. There were even wooden pews.
I'm no judge of these things, but the window at the choir end looked to me at least the equal of the more famous one at York, and this one at least you could see in all its splendour since it wasn't tucked away in a transept. And the stainedglass window at the other end was even finer. Well, I can't talk about this without babbling because it was just so wonderful. As I stood there, one of only a dozen or so visitors, a verger passed and issued a cheery hello. I was charmed by this show of friendliness and captivated to find myself amid such perfection, and I unhesitatingly gave Durham my vote for best cathedral on planet Earth.
When I had drunk my fill, I showered the collection pot with coins and wandered off for the most fleeting of looks at the old quarter of town, which was no less ancient and beguiling, and returned to the station feeling simultaneously impressed and desolate at just how much there was to see in this little country and what folly it had been to suppose that I might see anything more than a fraction of it in seven flying weeks.