St. Catherine's Chapel, Abbotsbury, Dorset
My next destination was Weymouth, where Mr. and Mrs. C. and their daughter Sally gave me a warm welcome. After the war Mr. C. had put his RAF experience to use as a pilot for Malayan Airways, which explains how our families had met in Singapore. When he retired from that, he and his family went back to England and bought a hotel to run. Their elder daughter, Gillian, was married and living in Somerset, but young Sally used to watch me put on my makeup in the mornings and then dash away to tell her mummy all about it. She was an engaging child in most ways, but she hated food. At meals she would gaze sadly at her plate. “I’ve gone off ham salad,” she would announce, or “I’ve gone off braised beef.” How she survived to adulthood is still something of a mystery.
Mr. C. owned a horse and served as chairman of the Footpath and Bridle Path Association. He and others wanted to preserve England’s byways for the enjoyment of country dwellers. Once he took me riding—he on Chanceview, his beautiful chestnut, me on a rented stable horse. We trotted up Cold Spring Harbour way on a cold, grey spring afternoon. After half an hour my English horse evidently decided it was teatime, so he wheeled around and bolted back to the stables.
“I am not going to be thrown from a horse and die when I’m barely twenty-one,” I thought, so I clung to the creature’s mane with the ferocity of an alligator holding onto its prey. When we clattered into the stable yard I was in a most undignified position. “Your bottom was sticking up in the air and you were riding on the horse’s neck,” Mr. C. told me later, barely able to suppress a grin. Although I loved horses and had secretly gloated over the way I looked in borrowed riding things in my bedroom mirror that morning, I decided to give riding a miss.
There were many agreeable features of English life, I discovered. For one thing, my friends always seemed to be eating. It would begin with early morning tea in bed (a habit I retain to this day), progress to breakfast, then to morning coffee and biscuits, and then to lunch at 12:30 p.m. Lunch was followed by tea and cakes at 4 p.m., dinner at 7, and finally, at 10 p.m., there were cocoa and biscuits. Every night Mrs. C. opened an enormous square tin of biscuits to reveal all the varieties I hadn’t seen since Singapore days—custard creams, jammy dodgers, bourbon creams, Jaffa cakes, and more.
Mr. and Mrs. C. and I had a wonderful time chatting about the friends we’d known in Singapore, and I filled them on my peripatetic family’s travels from Texas to Arkansas to Oklahoma. Two events stand out in my memory of my visit to them: the first was the day we attended the Badminton Horse Show in Gloucestershire. I remember Badminton not because of the presence of the Royal Family, who were looking on from a high wagon, but because of the tragedy we witnessed. We were watching a beautiful horse named Silver Toes doing what promised to be a perfect round when suddenly, after taking a jump, he collapsed. His frantic rider knelt in the sand beside him, sobbing, while the loudspeaker repeatedly requested the aid of any veterinarian who might be present, but it was no use. Silver Toes, that powerful, beautiful horse, had died of a heart attack.
The second highlight was when Mr. C. drove me to Abbotsbury to visit St. Catherine’s Chapel.
To me, the English spring shimmered with a silvery radiance: the uncertain sunlight, the fast-moving clouds, the hint of rain not far behind the wind, looked very different from the exuberant, sun-splashed springs of the American Southwest. “I wonder what your eyes, accustomed as they are to the flat brown vistas of Texas, would make of this sight,” I wrote to my cousin in Lubbock. “What would you think of these little round green hills, leapfrogging over each other down to a silver sea?”
That day in Abbotsbury Mr. C. led me to the chapel at the top of the hill and showed me round it. “Young girls used to climb this hill on their knees,” he said. “When they reached the chapel they would fold their hands and recite this prayer.” He then recited the following in a thick Dorset accent:
“Sint Cawtherine, Sint Cawtherine, O, lend me thine aid
And grant that I nivver may die an wold maid
A husband, Sint Cawtherine
A good ‘yun, Sint Cawtherine,
But arn-a-one better than narn-a-one, Sint Cawtherine
‘Andsome, Sint Cawtherine
Rich, Sint Cawtherine,
Soon, Sint Cawtherine!”
Mr. C., bless him, also took me to Cloud’s Hill in Dorset, to the little house where T.E. Lawrence lived at the time of his death. Cloud’s Hill is now a museum, so I spent a pleasurable hour looking at the memorabilia there.
Place names still linger in my memory from that visit to Dorset: Portland Bill, the Wishing Well at Upwey, the ruins of Corfe Castle, Chesil Beach (all pebbles), and Maiden Castle, which last was actually the remnant of a Celtic fort, not a “castle” in the commonly accepted sense.
After bidding my friends an affectionate farewell I climbed aboard another bus, this time to Tewkesbury. There I looked for the battlefield but couldn’t find it. When I reached Marlborough, however, I stayed a couple of days. For one thing, Justin had attended the public school of the same name; for another, my room cost only 18-and-6 a night and moreover, boasted a heater into which one could feed shillings. In those days the British pound was $2.80 in American dollars, and I had to be very careful with my money.
Leaving Marlborough, I traveled on by coach. Alas, I no longer remember the name of the little village that housed the church I explored. Going round it on a weekday morning I encountered a sexton, a dear little man in a long gown. We started chatting, he showed me the points of interest, and when we sat down on a bench to rest he asked me questions about English history. Delighted that an American could answer most of them correctly, he posed a final question that stumped me: Who was the daughter of a king, wife of a king, and mother of a king? Put on the spot, all the history I’d read flew right out of my head, although I would have got the answer if I’d had more time to think. The answer was Elizabeth of York—daughter of Edward IV, wife of Henry VII, mother of Henry VIII.
However, the sexton was so thrilled I’d been able to answer most of his questions, he accorded me a rare privilege. In the course of repairing the church, construction workers had been obliged to knock down a thick wall. Behind the wall was a disused chapel with frescoes in colors as bright and fresh as when they’d been painted in the twelfth century. I was thrilled to be allowed to feast my eyes on the Biblical scenes depicted on the walls.
Another journey by coach set me down in Amesbury. From the station I followed a trail that claimed to lead to Stonehenge. Annoyingly, every quarter-mile or so a stone marker to the left of the pavement would proclaim, “Stonehenge—2 mi.” During this walk other tourists joined me in ones and twos until finally we saw it, the massive henge set down in the middle of a vast plain. In those days Stonehenge stood unadorned, with none of the organized, regimented hoopla that surrounds it now. It was possible to walk right up to the stones and touch them. This place was ancient even in the eyes of the helmeted Roman legions marching past in their conquest of Britannia two thousand years ago.
A visit to the desolate ruin of Kenilworth was next, followed by a tour of Warwick Castle. The magnificence of the medieval weapons in the Armoury and the presence of the peacocks, screeching and strutting through the grounds, made an indelible impression.
And thence to Stratford, home town of my beloved Shakespeare. As I walked round it I noticed the locals had milked the local boy’s fame for all they were worth, from the “Judith Shakespeare Tea Rooms” to the house where the Bard had been born and the house he later bought, called New Place. In his birthplace I saw a 16th-century “baby minder,” consisting of a circle of wood attached to a pole in the middle of the floor. The idea was that the toddler was put inside the circle so he or she could run round and round the pole instead of wandering off. It was funny to think of Shakespeare as a toddler.
Of course I saw a couple of plays while there, “Love’s Labour Lost,” and, I seem to remember, “Twelfth Night,” starring Peter McEnery, then considered a heartthrob in the teenaged world. It was during my visit to Stratford that I encountered Australians for the first time. Tall, dressed in jeans, boots, and jackets, wearing backpacks and friendly smiles, they stood in the back of the theatre for the entire length of the play. Australians, I was to discover, didn’t simply leave home for a month; they left for an entire year, hitchhiking and hosteling their way around all the countries so very far from their Antipodean home.
Stratford-on-Avon also stands out in my memory as the place where I had that unforgettable meal. Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, gravy, and brussels sprouts, all for half a crown (35 cents American). Unlike many Americans, I liked British food. Still do. (I cook it myself in the winter.) People who moan about British cooking either haven’t visited the country lately or have not been as fortunate as I. The old Singapore friends I stayed with were excellent cooks. Just remembering the apple crumble with thick cream, the mousse Grand Marnier topped with fresh raspberries, the treacle pudding with custard, makes my mouth water.
Of course, while in Shakespeare’s home town, watching the swans glide down the green waters of the Avon, walking the mile to Shottery to see Anne Hathaway’s house, and looking at the innumerable souvenirs for sale, I thought constantly about Shakespeare’s influence on my life, as recounted here. At length, however, it was time to embark on my next adventure, a visit to “the dreaming spires of Oxford."
(End of Part II. Part III, the final part, will appear Saturday, 14 March)