Afterwards, I climbed up the steep slope to the castle grounds, which seemed oddly, almost spookily, familiar. I hadn't been here before, so I couldn't think why this should be, and then I realized that a regimental tattoo from Edinburgh Castle had been one of the features of This Is Cinerama back in Bradford. The castle precinct was just as it had been in the film, apart from a change of weather and a merciful absence of strutting Gordon Highlanders, but one other thing had changed mightily since 1951 the view of Princes Street from the terrace.
In 1951, Princes Street remained one of the world's great streets, a gracious thoroughfare lined along its northern side with solid, weighty Victorian and Edwardian edifices that bespoke confidence, greatness and empire the North British Mercantile Insurance Company, the sumptuous, classical New Club building, the old Waverley Hotel. And then, one by one, they were unaccountably torn down, and replaced for the most part with grey concrete bunkers. At the eastern end of the street the whole of St James' Square, an open green space surrounded by a crowd of eighteenthcentury tenements, was bulldozed to make way for one of the squattest, ugliest shopping centre/hotel complexes ever to spill from an architect's pen. Now about all that is left of Princes Street's age of confident grandeur are odd fragments like the Balmoral Hotel and the Scott Monument and part of the front of Jenners Department Store.
Later, when I was back home, I found in my AA Book of British Towns an artist's illustration of central Edinburgh as it might be seen from the air. It showed Princes Street lined from end to end with nothing but fine old buildings. The same was true of all the other artists' impressions of British cities Norwich and Oxford and Canterbury and Stratford. You can't do that, you know. You can't tear down fine old structures and pretend they are still there. But that is exactly what has happened in Britain in the past thirty years, and not just with buildings.
And on that sour note, I went off to try to find some real food.
CHAPTER TWENTYSIX
SO LET'S TALK ABOUT SOMETHING HEARTENING. LET'S TALK ABOUT John Fallows. One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a wouldbe robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to 'bugger off to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank emptyhanded and was arrested a short distance away.
I bring this up here to make the point that if there is one golden quality that characterizes the British it is an innate sense of good manners and you defy it at your peril. Deference and a quiet consideration for others are such a fundamental part of British life, in fact, that few conversations could even start without them. Almost any encounter with a stranger begins with the words 'I'm terribly sorry but' followed by a request of some sort ' could you tell me the way to Brighton,' 'help me find a shirt my size,' 'get your steamer trunk off my foot.' And when you've fulfilled their request, they invariably offer a hesitant, apologetic smile and say sorry again, begging forgiveness for taking up your time or carelessly leaving their foot where your steamer trunk clearly needed to go. I just love that.
As if to illustrate my point, when I checked out of the Caledonian late the next morning, I arrived to find a woman ahead of me wearing a helpless look and saying to the receptionist: 'I'm terribly sorry but I can't seem to get the television in my room to work.' She had come all the way downstairs, you understand, to apologize to them for their TV not working. My heart swelled with feelings of warmth and fondness for this strange and unfathomable country.
And it is all done so instinctively, that's the other thing. I remember when I was still new to the country arriving at a railway station one day to find that just two of the dozen or so ticket windows were open. (For the benefit of foreign readers, I should explain that as a rule in Britain no matter how many windows there are in a bank, post office or rail station, only two of them will be open, except at very busy times, when just one will be open.) Both ticket windows were occupied. Now, in other countries one of two things would have happened. Either there would be a crush of customers at each window, all demanding simultaneous attention, or else there would be two slowmoving lines, each full of gloomy people convinced that the other line was moving faster.
Here in Britain, however, the waiting customers had spontaneously come up with a much more sensible and ingenious arrangement. They had formed a single line a few feet back from both windows. When either position became vacant, the customer at the head of the line would step up to it and the rest of the line would shuffle forward a space. It was a wonderfully fair and democratic approach and the remarkable thing was that noone had commanded it or even suggested it. It just happened.
Much the same sort of thing occurred now, for when the lady with the recalcitrant TV set had finished with her apology (which the receptionist, I must say, accepted with uncommonly good grace, going so far as to hint that if anything else in the woman's room was found to be out of order, she wasn't to blame herself for a minute), the receptionist turned to me and another gentleman who was also waiting and said, 'Who's next?' and he and I went through an elaborate afteryou, noafteryou, butIinsist, wellthat'smostgraciousofyou routine, which made my heart swell further.
And so, on my second morning in Edinburgh, I stepped from the hotel in happy spirits, at one with the world, buoyed by this cheerful and civilized encounter, to find the sun shining and the city transformed yet again. On this day, George Street and Queen Street looked positively ravishing, their stone fronts burnished with sunlight, the damp, brooding darkness that had suffused them the day before banished utterly. The Firth of Forth gleamed in the distance and the little parks and squares seemed alive with green. I trudged UP The Mound to the Old Town terraces to take in the view andwas astonished to see how different the city looked. Princes Street was still a scar of architectural regrettabilities, but beyond it the hills were thronged with jaunty roofs and thrusting steeples that gave the city a character and graciousness that had entirely escaped me the day before.
I spent the morning doing touristy things I went to St Giles' Cathedral and had a look at Holyroodhouse, climbed to the top of Calton Hill and finally fetched my pack and returned to the station, happy to have made my peace with Edinburgh and pleased to be on the move again.
And what a fine thing a train journey is. I was instantly lulled by the motion of the train as we lumbered out through Edinburgh and its quiet suburbs and over the Forth Bridge. (And, gosh, what a mighty structure it is; suddenly I understood why the Scots are always on about it.) The train was mostly empty and rather splendidly posh. It was done up in restful blues and greys, which provided a sharp contrast to all the Sprinters I had been on in recent days and proved so deeply soothing that soon my eyelids were growing unsustainably heavy and my neck seemed to be turning to a rubbery material. In no time at all, my head was slumped on my chest and I was engaged in the quiet, steady manufacture of several gallons of saliva all of them, alas, spare.