Ruth Doan MacDougall

Travelogue: The Doan Sisters Go to England

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Part I: Rose Cottage, Purton
Tuesday, October 2, 1990

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As arranged, Penny phoned the Cheltenham Budget Rent-a-Car. A young man arrived at the bus stop to pick us up. He loaded our luggage, I slid into the backseat, and Penny started getting into the passenger’s seat—oops, the driver’s seat.

She said, “Wonder how many times I’ll do that.”

He drove us to the Opel-Vauxhall dealership that has the franchise, and we met our little white four-door Metro. This time Penny got in the driver’s seat, I the passenger’s. We listened to instructions—Red 4-Star Petrol only—and Penny tried out the gears with her left hand. Thank heavens she’s very ambidextrous. I sweated over maps. [Wonderful Penny did all the driving throughout our trip. I navigated, not so successfully.]

Madhouse hilarity getting out of the city. KEEP LEFT! Amid high-speed traffic we had to search for the A40-to-Gloucester signs that disappeared at crucial junctions, but Penny was heroic, shifting left-handed, charging into roundabout after roundabout on the left. Going clockwise instead of counter around a traffic circle is the scariest part of all. We bypassed Gloucester, drove across a river—by God, it’s the Severn!—and turned south on the A48.

Finally we were on quieter roads. In Blakeney, a small village near our destination, we stopped at a little grocery store and bought some preliminary supplies: coffee, loose tea (no tea bags available), bread, curried chicken soup—and sweets, lemon curd, shortbread, and chocolate biscuits.

We turned left onto the road to Purton. It narrowed between green hedges. We saw the River Severn. Then we came to some buildings. Mrs. A., our landlady, had said in her brochure that Purton consisted of only four, and we recognized the white stone cottage of the brochure photograph, Rose Cottage, with two yellow roses blooming behind the gate. Roses blooming in October!

The Self-Catering Holiday Homes guide had described Rose Cottage as a period cottage beside a manor house where Raleigh had lived. The Forest of Dean by Humphrey Phelps says that it’s a “local tradition” that Raleigh either used to stop at the manor house or lived there and that this was where the first potatoes in England were grown. We later learned from Mrs. A. that Purton means Pear Tree.

We drove a few yards on to the farm, Purton Manor. White stone house, beyond stone farm buildings and barnyard-dooryard. It was indeed a “working farm,” as the brochure had said; the smell of manure stunned. Mrs. A. later told us that they have over a hundred cows.

Two dogs greeted the car, one a border collie.

Mrs. A. briskly showed us the cottage. In the sitting room, dahlias in a bowl. White walls; beams. Patterned rug, floral. A three-piece suite: green velvety corduroy with floral antimacassars. A floral wing chair, floral drapes, floral lampshades. The “inglenook” fireplace held a woodstove and chunk logs.

The kitchen had floral wallpaper and wood-patterned linoleum. There was a yellow Aga stove for heating the room as well as cooking, plus an electric stove. The small fridge held a pint glass bottle of “raw unpasteurized milk” from the farm. On the red-and-white tablecloth was a vase of geraniums, red and white.

To the left off the kitchen was the sunroom, big enough for a long green-plastic-covered table in front of a series of windows with floral curtains.

Mrs. A. said we could also have eggs and potatoes from the farm, so we asked for a half-dozen eggs. She left. We unloaded luggage and Penny took the car to the parking area, i.e., the barnyard, then returned.

Joy! We made it!

We explored upstairs. More joy: a showerhead in the bathtub. This solved a mystery. During a phone call from New Hampshire to Purton, Penny had asked if the place had a shower, and Mrs. A. had said no, just on the wall. We now realized she meant this showerhead and had thought Penny meant a shower stall.

In the sitting room we had coffee and shortbread. The china was the pink-willow variety but with Constable scenes. I’d forgotten spoons are smaller.

Naps necessary. I dreamt of mooing—“Oh Mary, go and call the cattle home . . ./ Across the sands of Dee.” I awoke and looked out the window down at cows everywhere, the herd returning for milking.

I took a walk. The weather was windy but not cold; I expect that the mildness will continue to surprise, after the frosts of New England. The next house had a border collie. The other Purton building was the pub, now called a hotel. I walked around the corner the way we’d come and there was the Severn looking like the ocean with the tide out, a stretch of sand in the middle from which no one could call the cows home.

Back at Rose Cottage, I investigated the books on the sitting-room shelf and was much amused to find a paperback copy of Peyton Place. I dipped into the cottage copy of Humphrey Phelps’s Forest of Dean and then read the Visitors’ Book of comments by guests—English, a few Australians and New Zealanders. We can’t be the first Americans?

When Penny got up, we took a walk. The tide now covered the sand in the Severn. Then Penny made supper of curried chicken soup and lemon curd on bread—perfect. We watched some TV, then bed at nine.

Wednesday, October 3, 1990

Down in the kitchen I made coffee with the kettle on the Aga. I noticed that on the electric stove there was a convenient little broiler pan under a burner, a little tray-pan with a handle, such as Don and I had in the 1960s [when we lived in apartments in Brandon, Suffolk, England, spending one year in a converted laundry cottage in Brandon Park, a fictionalized version of which I used in A Lovely Time Was Had by All, the next year in a converted colonnade in Brandon Hall. My favorite thing to cook on the broiler was English cheddar on toast, absolutely meltingly delicious. And the pans were so easy to wash, compared with American stoves’ unwieldy big broilers].

It was still dark out. In the sunroom, I wrote in my journal while the cows were brought down from the pasture to be milked, the man using a flashlight, calling out now and then.

After breakfast, we went to the manor barnyard for our car. We got into it on the proper sides. Behind the steering wheel, Penny took her lipstick out of her pocketbook and drew an arrow pointing left on the windshield, for a constant KEEP LEFT reminder.

Off to Lydney, two miles down the A48. It was a gray workaday town. The Forest of Dean is divided into three regions, Cinderford, Coleford, and Lydney, which once had a “tin-plate works” and a harbor of some importance. It has a brass band and a rugby club.

Our first stop was a newsagent’s, where we got postcards, the Times, and a Forest of Dean guidebook. A customer brought his dog in, and it fell asleep on the floor. The English and their dogs.

We found the supermarket—the County Store. Entering, our first impression was of underwear. On the right were racks of women’s bras and underpants and teddies in various seductive hues. We were in the Textiles section. Other sections included Biscuit Barrel, Cold Store (freezers), Clean Sweep, Pets’ Corner. In the Cellar (wine and beer), I discovered bottles of perry, which I’d read about in guidebooks and heard about on the book tape of Geoffrey Household’s Forest of Dean novel, Summon the Bright Water. It seems to be a cider made from pears. We bought basics like paper towels and laundry detergent and delights like ginger crisps, bramble jelly, orange squash, Sharwood’s India Hot Vegetable Curry, and Anchor Mature Cheddar. We also bought double cream (have they even begun to hear about cholesterol in this country?).

When at last we pushed our cart up to a checkout counter, we both thought at first glance that the cashier was a dwarf, and then we realized she was sitting down and so were all the other cashiers. Very sensible; why don’t our supermarkets allow this?

English shops are much more free with bags now than I remembered, but you have to ask for one. The cashier, after ringing up each item (via a scanner or in some supermarkets the old-fashioned method), just moves it down the counter into a shopping cart, out of which you grab it to put in your own shopping bags. Thank God for the string bags Marjorie [our stepmother] gave us! We loaded ours up. A couple of days later we figured out, watching, that the system here was to wheel your shopping cart after checkout to a long shelf near the door, where you unload it into your shopping bags more leisurely. Also later I read a piece in an English magazine complaining about the inefficiency of English checkouts and marveling that in the U.S. they have people who bag your groceries and take them out to your car free. It didn’t mention that nowadays we’re trying to get people to bring their own shopping bags a la the Brits.

Leaving, Penny and I realized that we hadn’t yet heard a “Have a nice day.” And we never did. People instead said, “Thank you.”

Home to Purton, taking the back way in past other stone farms, the road only wide enough for one car. At the sunroom table we wrote postcards and had lunch of black cherry yogurt (Penny) and rhubarb yogurt (me). The yogurt was spelled yoghurt.

Then back down to Lydney we went, more familiar now with its streets and parking, and at the National Westminster Bank we cashed checks, the procedure lengthy probably because it’s a small town. According to the bank’s chart, the pound was still approximately $2.00, so we kept multiplying prices by two.

At the post office store we got stamps and browsed Forest of Dean souvenirs.

Antennae up, Penny had been searching for a bread/pastry shop and at last spotted one down a side street. We bought an uncut loaf (later learning that Granary and Stoneground were our favorites) and chose goodies for tea. Clerks in the other stores had taken an interest in our accents, and we were beginning to gather that American tourists weren’t all that common here, at least not off-season. The woman in the bakery asked, “You’re American?” and another long chat ensued, with advice about what to see.

At a little greengrocer’s we bought lettuce, tomatoes, an onion.

Then we set off up the A48 to Blakeney, turning off on the B4227 to Soudley for our first drive into the Forest of Dean, known to the Romans before it became a royal forest and so thoroughly logged and mined down through these ages that we wondered if we’d see only some scraggly woods and overgrown slag heaps. What we saw first were signs warning about sheep—and indeed they were everywhere, alongside the road and in it.

Then, forest! Tall trees, after all the patchwork-quilt scenes of fields.

Guidebooks had warned that the Forest towns aren’t exactly picturesque, and the town of Cinderford did need a fairy godmother. We drove out of the forest to Littledean, where we stopped at a small layby to get out and look at the view of the Severn loop below. Down to Newnham and back on the A48 south, where we saw the sign that had astonished and terrified us yesterday:

ONCOMING VEHICLES IN MIDDLE OF ROAD.

This was a warning about a low bridge, the height sign in the middle of the arch.

Back home in Rose Cottage, we had tea with some of the treats we’d bought: Congress Pies (little pies in little pie plates, individual-sized, like a doughy cookie with a dab of jam within); currant-sultana cake slices; jam tarts.

Then we took a walk up the road past fields and the views (the river, sheep in a pasture), climbing steeply until we could see the rooftops of Purton.

For supper, Penny heated up two little pork pies that were just as addictively awful as I remembered, and with them we had Crosse & Blackwell Branston Pickle, and salad.

Thursday, October 4, 1990

No wind this morning, and at six-fifteen when I came down to the sunroom after my shower, I saw a full moon over the pasture. When I went out the back door into the back dooryard, I heard the whistle of the dairyman with his flashlight. The cows clumped down the hill toward the barn. I thought it had begun raining, then realized it wasn’t “the proverbial cow on the flat rock,” as my father used to say about a downpour; it was a whole bunch of real cows pissing. The dairyman said to me, “Good morning, you’re up early,” and then said to the cows, “Come on, don’t you want to get milked?” The farm dogs didn’t seem to do any herding.

Later that morning, we drove into Lydney, did some errands, then drove down the river to Chepstow. A sign said:

Welcome to Wales.

Then up the Wye Valley we drove, and as I began mentally reciting Wordsworth on the subject of Tintern Abbey—oh hell, it was impossible not to, and not to reflect on the passage of years between my first trip to England and this—there it appeared. A sign warned:

Visitors Are Forbidden to Climb on the Walls.

We parked, prepared to be tourists, and in the gift shop we were, buying postcards and a guidebook. We paid the admittance fee and entered. Amongst the other tourists were groups of English schoolchildren in uniform; the boys, however, wore running shoes, and one girl wore a Walkman. We remembered our father’s heretical comment about Tintern Abbey’s being a pile of rocks, and we laughed and saw what he meant.

Onward we drove. In Monmouth we got on the A40 and a sign said:

Welcome to England.

In Ross-on-Wye we pulled into a parking spot on a main street and ate our cheese and cress sandwiches (I forgot to mention that yesterday we’d bought a little tray of cress to clip). As we drove out of town, Penny commented on the pampas grass in the gardens, a Victorian idea still in fashion, tall and towheaded and, Penny said disapprovingly, out-of-place.

Magpies in the road, scavenging, like black-and-white crows.

Acres of cabbages!

At the Hereford & Worcestershire Countryside Service—a park and arboretum, local nature reserve—we stopped at the cafe for coffee while people at the tables around us ate plates of eggs and chips. Over the fireplace were two shiny silvery shovels in a glass case. As we left we read the sign that told us one had been used by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip for planting two oaks in 1957, the other by the Queen Mother for planting an earlier oak in 1937.

In Leominster (sign: 1300 Years of History), at a newsagent’s we asked directions to Berrington Hall and Croft Castle and had to ask for a translation to make sure we knew what she meant when she said, “Over the level crossing.” She laughed and explained, “The railroad.” But when we reached both places we found them closed, with signs saying they were only open Saturdays and Sundays, contrary to the information in Penny’s gardens guide. Oh well. We didn’t get to see these gardens, but we’d seen many other sights, and heading back, we saw our first thatched roof.

Sign:

Goat’s Milk
Stud Billies.

We drove back through the Forest of Dean.

Sign:

Sheep for 7 Miles.

And all along the way from Cinderford to Soudley to Blakeney, there were sheep along the roadside, beyond them the high views down across quilted fields to the Severn valley.

On Lydney’s High Street, we stopped at a fish-and-chip shop. There were two queues inside; grease hung heavy. Instead of women at vats in front of you, their hair in white turbans, as I remembered from our 1960s fish-and-chip shops, the cooking here was done offstage, a guy bringing out trays to dump into warming ovens. Two clerks expertly wrapped packages—but they used white paper, not newspaper the way it used to be done. The menu offered cod, haddock, plaice, chicken, plus Battered Sausage, Minced Beef and Mushroom Pie, and other pies. They were out of plaice, which I remembered fondly from the past, so I ordered cod; Penny hates fish, so she ordered a chicken leg. And chips each.

Home, we unloaded, sliced a couple of tomatoes, and ate out of wrappers at the sunroom table.

Friday, October 5, 1990

When I got up at five, in the dark I heard rain lashing, wind gusting.

Mrs. A. had suggested we visit Symonds Yat, and we wanted to see a Victorian museum we’d read about in a brochure. After doing some errands in Lydney, we set off, between high banks with hedgerows. Sheep dotted pastures and munched along the road.

In St. Briavels, we stopped at the small castle. It’s a castle in use, with curtains in some of the windows and a pile of unstacked cordwood inside. A youth hostel.

More hedgerows, plowed fields, sheep, and then we were back in the Forest proper, reaching Coleford where a sign advised of a Scenic Route to Symonds Yat, which we took. It was so scenic that its narrowness demanded Passing Place pull-offs. There were camping sites, and hikers were hiking despite the rain.

We stopped at a parking lot beside the Wye and in our raincoats walked along past a hotel across the road from the river. Next came another Rose Cottage, this one a bed-and-breakfast with tables under a flowered awning, with geraniums. We read the menu outside; Apple-Parsnip Soup with Roll & Butter topped it, and when we sat down under the awning that’s what we ordered.

Sheets of rain billowed over the river, and mist rose atop the steep opposite bank where houses perched above the riverbank houses. Penny said it reminded her of the Rhineland and there should be vineyards up the hill. Swans swam past, with three gray-brown youngsters. When they semi-flew, their flapping sounded like applause. We split an order of cream-filled brandy snaps for dessert. It had been a dreamy, perfect lunch—in the rain, in our raincoats!

When we got back in the car, we inhaled Purton Manor. The barnyard aroma invaded the car during the night and we traveled around with it during the day.

As we left, the rain let up, and as we got on the M50 the weather began to clear. We came to the Newent exit and drove to the High Street to The Shambles, our destination. In this “Museum of Victorian Life,” we toured the rooms, consulting our guidebook: the kitchen with its wooden washing-up bowl and pump; the pantry with the “housemaid’s box” to carry cleaning equipment; upstairs, the dressing room and master bedroom and the luxury of a bathroom, its bathtub supplied with water heated on the kitchen range and lugged up in water cans; the nursery with a hoop amongst the toys; the nanny’s room next door with a string cot, babies’ “dusting powder,” and a feeding spoon; a sewing room with a collection of old machines and a table loom for weaving braid for cuffs and such; and at the top of the house the servants’ bedroom with its two double beds. Then we went down to the cellar and its exhibit of “washing day in 1890,” a chamber of horrors with a stove and flat irons and a combined mangle/washing machine on which a sign said

Have a Go at the Mangle If You Like, But Mind Your Fingers.

A definite Upstairs, Downstairs feel to it all.

When we returned Purton, after a supper of scrambled manor eggs we walked over to the manor to say good-bye to Mrs. A. She mentioned a unique way of catching salmon in the Severn, which I’d read of in T. A. Ryder’s Portrait of Gloucestershire. They use lave-nets, a triangular net on a yoke, its ash handle about four and a half feet long. With this huge Y-shaped weapon, the fisherman apparently chases a salmon through the water!

We packed our suitcases and watched TV, Geoff Hamilton’s Ornamental Kitchen Garden. Our last night in this Rose Cottage.

End, Part I

Photos: Penny at Rose Cottage, Purton; photo by Ruth Doan MacDougall

© 2008 Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved