England vacation part II:
After leaving our families and their Christmas cheer, I was treated to a return match for Batley, its Beck and its Zion Chapel: a visit to the places Stephen grew up. We stayed at Pendley Manor in Tring, Herts.
I’ve always wanted to revisit Tring. Its sheer commuter-beltiness has called to me ever since a trip in the early seventies. My parents had friends called Elsie and Somebody-or-other, who, on leaving the Peak-climbing, folk-singing clique Up North that my parents frequented, settled in Tring.
I was a kid, and didn’t remember any of the town. I did remember that it had a pub, and that in the evening, my parents prepared to vanish into it with Elsie and Somebody-or-other.
“Will you be okay by yourself?” Somebody-or-other asked me.
“Of course. I’ve found a book to read in your bookcase,” I
piped in my pre-teen voice.
“What have you got?” Elsie asked.
I showed her the cover. “The History of Bondage,” I replied.
Looks were exchanged, but no one took it off me, and by the
time they returned, pissed, I was fully up to speed on the history of bondage.
This was the same visit when Elsie put a tune on the
gramophone. “Air on a G String,” she declared.
“Hair on a G-string?” I inquired.
“Oh, you’ll never know what a funny thing you’ve just said,”
Somebody-or-other laughed.
I do though, and you’d think my picking "History of Bondage" for
an evening’s reading would have clued them in on that.
I’m more than fifty years older now, and on arriving in Tring found that there was little in the way of overt bondage, though Stephen did inform me that Hertfordshire was the English capital of wife-swapping. (I did notice more than one garden with pampas grass on the lawn, as it happens.) It was frightfully cold. We don't know how cold because the natives in England use a different set of units for measuring temperature. Pretty darn cold, though.
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| Pendley Manor |
Pendley
Manor is a redbrick manor house converted to a business retreat, and the
ghosts of PowerPoint Presentations Past were observed haunting the corridors
and trying to obtain massages at the spa. Apart from the businessman-shaped
voids which no doubt would be occupied again in the high season, the most interesting
part of Pendley Manor was the flock of peacocks. As well as hanging about on
the lawn showing off their tails, they sat on the wall overlooking the
kitchen/bar yard waiting for food scraps or perhaps for someone to spill a keg
of beer.
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| Pendley Manor Peacocks |
From the manor, we drove the tiny, paper-thin roads of Southern England to Tring Natural History Museum, which is world famous for its incredible collection of stuffed animals. And beetles, wasps, ants etc. which are not, I’m told, stuffed, just mounted as is. Collected by the sort of person earnest young women write sepia-covered paperbacks about, Walter Rothschild, it truly is an outstanding collection of things, from sharks to champion greyhounds to my favorite animal, the Greater Bilby.
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| A Greater Bilby (deceased) |
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| Stuffed Dodo, Natural History Museum, Tring |
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| Another view of a Dodo |
Then it was back on the road to visit Stephen’s childhood places in Chorleywood, Croxley Green, Watford and Rickmansworth, of which I had heard so much. We had breakfast at Watford's best breakfast point inside Oxhey activity park alongside the river Colne – a full English.
I don’t know why English people call English breakfasts an English Breakfast. It reminds me of a conversation I had with an American about the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Gerry and the Pacemakers und so weiter... I called them "British Invasion" bands and he said, "Do you really call it that in England?" I asked what else we'd call it and it transpired he thought they would just be "Invasion" bands. I understand why he thought that, but he was clearly no marketing genius.
At day’s end, we stayed at a hotel in Harrow-on-the-Hill, though neither of us could remember why we’d picked that one. I have no photos of Harrow-on-the-Hill and that wasn't an oversight on my part.
More vacation to come...
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