Ruth Doan MacDougall

Travelogue: The Doan Sisters Go to England

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The price of gasoline has got Penny and me reminiscing about the three weeks we spent in England in 1990, when gas there was already the British-pound equivalent of about four dollars a gallon and we tootled around in our rented little white Metro.

The first time we stopped for gas, in Lydney in the Forest of Dean, the woman attendant was confused by our New Hampshire accents and asked, “You’re Canadian?” Then she commented about the price, “It must be quite a bit higher than yours, though it’s just gone down four p to two pounds, thirty-five p a gallon.” Pumping the gas for us, she added, “We’re old-fashioned here. Usually it’s self-service.”

Penny and I discovered that some gas stations sold flowers. After Penny pumped our petrol at one such station, she bought a bouquet of freesias, yellow, lavender, pink.

Flowers were the reason for this trip. Gardens. Penny’s husband had died in May, and our father gave us the October trip in hopes of beginning to put the roses back in her cheeks. Penny is a landscape designer.

I hadn’t been in England since the 1960s. Penny had made several trips in the 1980s, mainly to study with garden designer John Brooks, concentrating on cottage gardens.

When we started planning this trip, I mentioned the problems of traveling without a permanent base and said wistfully, “I like to be able to make myself a cup of tea whenever I get the urge, and you can’t do that in a guesthouse or inn.” Penny agreed. She had once stayed in a rented cottage in Surrey, and she remembered the odd term the British use for this arrangement: self-catering. “There was a book,” she recalled, “listing places.” I rushed to the package of material I’d requested from the British Tourist Authority and dug out the catalogue of guidebooks offered by the British Travel Bookshop Ltd. From it I ordered Self-Catering Holiday Homes, England.

When the book arrived, we tried to restrain our imaginations and be objective and businesslike, reminding ourselves that although picturesqueness was great, we mustn’t forget little basics like central heat and linen. Reading the listings in the “Heart of England” section, for we’d already decided to concentrate our traveling in the Forest of Dean, which neither of us had visited, and the Cotswolds, which I’d never seen before and Penny had only seen driving through Chipping Campden en route to Hidcote Manor Garden, we realized we didn’t want any development of holiday homes. We desired the dream cottage of all the English childhood books and novels we’d ever read, quaint and cozy, set by itself in a garden riotous with flowers.

I said, “We’re going in October.”

Penny said, “Well, if the flowers have gone past, we can see the bones of the garden.”

Appropriately enough, we weeded. We discarded brochures until we found ourselves down to the three to which we’d kept returning.

“Rose Cottage,” Penny said, looking at the photograph. “In Purton. Who can resist a place called Rose Cottage?”

I said, “But it’s on the other side of the Severn, the Forest-of-Dean side. Don’t we want to be based in the Cotswolds and travel to the Forest of Dean? This one, Mill Cottage in Evesham, sounds secluded but it’s in town, a handy location.”

Penny picked up the third brochure. “Another Rose Cottage. In Chipping Campden. I know that’s a beautiful town. And even if this Rose Cottage is in a terrace and is really an English version of a condominium, it has more creature comforts than the others. It’s even got a dishwasher.”

“Oh,” I wailed, “how can we decide?”

Penny had a brainstorm. “We don’t have to! We could stay at all three of these, a different cottage each week!”

Phone calls were made to the owners, deposits sent.

And eventually we found ourselves flying out of the Portland, Maine, airport to Boston’s Logan and from there to England, landing at Heathrow on Tuesday, October 2, 1990, climbing aboard a bus, and zooming out of London—oh my God, on the left! We’d forgotten the Alice-in-Wonderland sensation of this. We were on backwards turnpikes, cars coming at us on the right! We got off at Cheltenham.

And here [in the sections listed below] are excerpts from my journal:

Part I: Rose Cottage, Purton
Part II: Mill Cottage, Evesham
Part III: Rose Cottage, Chipping Campden
Epilogue

The headline photo was taken at the Chipping Campden cottage. Ruth says, "Penny had set up her camera on a timer and dashed to stand beside me, and we're laughing like mad over this."

© 2008 Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved