Ruth Doan MacDougall

Travelogue: The Doan Sisters Go to England

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Part II: Mill Cottage, Evesham
Tuesday, October 2, 1990

Very windy, clearing. The Severn today looked definitely chocolate-colored, as Geoffrey Household described it in Summon the Bright Water.

Off we went to Gloucester and Cheltenham. Getting through Cheltenham following the A435 signs for Evesham took forever, with a brief circling when signs got confusing, but eventually we emerged at the Cheltenham Races and I remembered how I’d learned the correct pronunciation of Cheltenham (the “ham” more just an “m”) from a Dick Francis book tape.

In Bishop’s Cleeve, we noticed that the color of the houses had changed. So this was the famous Cotswold stone. The color is often described as “honey,” but what we were looking at seemed a very pale honey. Maybe, we wondered, Cotswold honey is paler than what we’re accustomed to. We’ll have to buy some and find out.

We stopped at a Hickory’s on a roundabout, an American Howard-Johnson-cum-McDonald’s establishment, part of the Road Chef chain. A sign in the lobby told us it had won a Clean Loo Award. I had my first cream tea here. Penny, having the same, showed me how to go about eating it, splitting a scone, spreading it with strawberry jam, topping it with whipped cream. Oh, bliss, even in a chain restaurant.

Onward, entering the County of Hereford and Worcestershire, into the Vale of Evesham, then into the suburbs of the medieval market town of Evesham. Our new landlord, Mr. P., had sent us a map of Evesham’s streets with Mill Cottage marked on it, an arrow pointing to Corn Mill Road off the A44; he’d written, “Single track between houses—sign for road not easy to see from this direction.”

Ha! It was impossible to see, and we drove right past, realized we had, then went on into Evesham, across the bridge over the Avon. We stopped at a newsagent’s for guidebooks and television guides, then walked along the street into a paved square, the Market Place, where stood a beautiful half-timbered building. As we gazed, admiring it, we saw it wasn’t a museum, it was the National Westminster Bank, and people were using the automatic teller in its half-timbering as casually as people use the aqua box at the Meredith Village Savings Bank at home.

Driving back, we spotted the sign for Corn Mill Road too late. It wasn’t easy to see from either direction. We turned around amid road construction and at last headed down the “single track between houses” that ran between fields of stubble and allotment gardens festooned with bottles to keep birds off.

Behind a gate, a white stone cottage. It was the Mill Cottage of the photo in the brochure. Sheep roamed free in front of it and along the River Isbourne, which here looked like a little millpond and stream. But how to get to Mill Cottage and to Mr. P.’s Mill House somewhere beyond? We climbed out of the car and fiddled with the gate. It opened. So we drove in, past the cottage, along a lane to the mill converted into a house. Nobody seemed to be here, nobody human, that is. We got out, and sheep clustered around us as we explored gingerly on tiptoe. We remarked that what with Rose Cottage’s cows and the sheep here, we should have packed our L. L. Bean boots. Then we decided, “Let’s be brash Americans,” and honked the car horn. Mr. P.’s daughter appeared, explained that her father was off in America, and went with us back to the cottage to show us its details.

The cottage is about a hundred and fifty years old. It had been “modernised” with a sort of American-Scandinavian decor. Off the living-dining-room area was the Breakfast Room, with a table and stools, a counter with a tray of tea things and a bread box with a rolltop-desk lid, and an under-the-counter fridge. Behind this was the kitchen, its inside white brick wall hung with brochures like a tourist information booth; on the outside wall was a long blue counter with a tiny sink, and a stove and a washing machine. Back off the living room was the “Cloak Room, Lobby, Bathroom” area with a WC and two clotheslines. Dutch doors opened onto the back garden where roses bloomed and another short clothesline was looped. (At Rose Cottage we’d been drying handwashes on a thick wooden rack in front of the Aga.)

Mr. P.’s daughter showed us the basics, like the 50p meters for electricity and the storage heaters (mysterious square chunky things). She said she could shut up the sheep if they bothered us. We bravely said no. After she left, we lugged our suitcases upstairs. From the windows of our front bedrooms, we had a lovely view of stream and pond.

The bathroom. No showerhead here. Large tub, with a spray attachment like a stethoscope for the faucets. Towels were stacked in the bedrooms, wonderful oversized types, but there was no towel rack in the bathroom. (We ended up hanging wet towels over the banister and over a rocker in the back bedroom, which I’d appropriated for my office because it had a long table in it.)

“Lunch!” Penny called while I was unpacking. Miraculously, she had got acquainted with the kitchen. She served up bowls of mulligatawny soup in the breakfast room and courageously did laundry in the front-loading machine.

We drove back into town, browsed along the High Street, and had tea and cake in the window of the Hebron Coffee and Tea Shop, watching the passing scene. No old-fashioned prams, but a baby in a stroller under plastic, a clear plastic cover that reminded me of the mosquito netting on baby-sister Penny’s baby carriage, but this cover was to keep off rain. Where, we wondered, was the ventilation? A boy went past wearing jeans with ripped knees like the style at home, then two boys carrying skateboards.

The waitress directed us to the Gateway Foodmart, a chain supermarket down a side street where we parked in a pay parking lot—”Pay and Display” say the signs in such places about the ticket you buy from a machine, so much for so many hours, 10p, 20p, etc. We went into the supermarket and stocked up on supplies, buying Cygnet Toilet Tissue in honor of the Swan of Avon. “Feather softness!” it bragged.

Home to sample the Dandelion & Burdock beverage we’d bought.

On the weather forecasts for tomorrow: “Sunny spells.” This is a change from the “sunny intervals” I remembered from English forecasts twenty-five years ago.

In the evening we did another load of laundry, read guidebooks, wrote notes, and watched TV.

Sunday, October 7, 1990

Sunny, wind gone.

In my office, I wrote in my journal. The view here as daylight came was over the rooftops of the cottage’s outbuildings down to the driveway at the gate. When I went downstairs, out the other windows were sheep. I never got used to the drifting movement outdoors and kept staring, daydreaming. What was it E. B. White said about his sheep—“They’re peaceful”?

Off we started for Stratford-upon-Avon. We drove through Evesham into fruitful vale country with its signs for Daff Bulbs, Pick-Your-Own places, nurseries. A sign soon said:

Welcome to Warwickshire, Shakespeare’s Country,

and thatched houses began to appear. I had resolved not to harp about the real Shakespeare’s being the 17th Earl of Oxford, but I did enter Stratford with an eyebrow raised at more than the commercialization that I’d scorned twenty-five years ago when Don and I visited Stratford.

Penny parked the Metro and we began walking. The sign at the Shakespeare Centre said that things didn’t open until ten, so we stopped in at a little half-timbered coffee house—white plaster, black beams, buntings of dried flowers. After studying the menu, we asked the waitress what the Logfire Pikelets were. She said, “Like a crumpet,” and we ordered them, “Two Hot Toasted Pikelets Soaked with Creamy Butter, 95p.” It seemed as if everything else on the menu was served with “lashings of cream.” Our coffees came in their own little brewing pots with a plunger, glass and chrome, the likes of which we’d never seen before. Imitating what the other customers did, we pushed down our plungers and poured.

Our mission, besides the garden at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, was the Elizabethan Knott Garden at the New Place, but at the Shakespeare Centre we bought tickets for the whole Shakespeare shebang. Two gift shops in the Centre lay in wait before we could get started. Then came a BBC Television Shakespeare Costume Exhibit complete with many codpieces, which of course got us giggling [a reaction I used years later for Bev in The Husband Bench]. We toured Shakespeare’s birthplace and Nash’s house (home of Shakespeare’s granddaughter). The Knott Garden was a replica of an enclosed Elizabethan garden, the intricacies of which Penny explained to me, annuals planted within knotted borders of herbs. The smell of a nearby Pizza Hut, set in a half-timbered building, floated over the place as we strolled. In the Great Garden of box and yew hedges, we rested on benches.

After lunch in another half-timbered shop (the Mistress Quickly, not the Pizza Hut), we drove out of downtown to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, parked, and walked past a French tour group into the garden and the famous sight. The thatch of the cottage, we realized, was covered with wire; so were most thatches we later saw. As we strolled in the garden, Penny automatically knelt and pulled a weed [as Bev does in The Husband Bench].

I discovered one change since Don and I were here: Instead of saying Ladies and Gents, the sign says Toilets. In the ladies’ room, on the white wall were flower drawings with Latin names. Penny remarked, “You could get a botany lesson in here.”

When we toured the cottage, the comments of the group of older Englishwomen in front of us were as interesting as the cottage—”Somebody has to do a lot of polishing,” about the shiny dark furniture; “That strainer hasn’t changed much,” about a large skimmer.

We ran a gauntlet of three gift shops (one disguised as “crafts”) before we were allowed to emerge.

Home to supper of canned potato-pea curry with a great kick to it, apple-mango chutney, salad. After, we took a short walk out through the gate, past the allotment gardens of brussel sprouts, leeks, some cole seedlings. We didn’t feel so safe here as in Purton, especially at dusk, so we headed back and picked our way through sheep droppings down to the millpond under a willow whose trunk was as thick as an oak’s.

Monday, October 8, 1990

A chilly night, which I spent under two duvets, taking one off the empty twin bed in my room.

Sunny, warming up.

After breakfast, we drove into town to do errands, which included:

At the Tourist Information Centre we chose some free brochures and a Cheltenham Street map. The man who waited on us said he too always got lost in Cheltenham.

Into the Westminster National Bank in the half-timbered Round House we went, to cash travelers’ checks amid ancient beams and plaster, glimpses of computers behind the counter.

At a flower shop, Penny chose an unfamiliar bouquet, Alstroemeria.

The women in the travel agency were wearing uniforms. All the brochures seemed to be of sunny climes; in America, Florida and California. We arranged for the bus-hotel package deal of a bus from Cheltenham to Heathrow and overnight at the Heathrow Park Hotel, October 20th, to be in time for the flight home on the 21st. The clerk, making the reservation in Penny’s name, asked, “Miss or Mrs.?” “Neither,” said Penny. “Oh, Ms. then,” said the clerk, writing.

Next we went into Boots Pharmacy, in some towns still called Boots the Dispensing Chemist. Browsing in the bath section, we saw an array of the hose attachments we were using in our tub, which conjured up an image of a nation’s bathing habits.

Along the streets we still saw no classic prams with huge wheels. We saw one baby carriage, and the rest were those strollers with plastic hoods, tucked back in this good weather.

As lunchtime came, we noticed a group of young men walking along eating chips (and maybe fish) out of off-white paper. No newspaper used here either.

We had our lunch at the Crown Court Coffee House; Penny, broccoli quiche; me, Cauliflower Cheese, which Barbara Pym so often mentions and which proved to be, as I’d guessed, a cauliflower-in-cheese-sauce casserole, in this case microwaved.

More window-shopping; more grocery-shopping at the Gateway, fun things like Stilton, streaky bacon, a little steak-and-kidney pie for me, a Cornish pasty for Penny, hazelnut yogurt, Fairy Liquid dishwashing detergent. The checkout clerk’s pin said Mrs. something-or-other.

That evening on TV we watched French Fields, which had been Fresh Fields when Penny had seen it before in England; the characters now lived in France. The TV guide described this episode as: “Sheep May Safely Graze. Hester wins a prize in a raffle, but when she collects her win it isn’t the leg of mutton she’s expecting.” It was a live sheep. Even on the telly, we remarked, we couldn’t get away from sheep.

Tuesday, October 9, 1990. Our 33rd wedding anniversary!

Cloudy.

Two pheasants appeared on the lawn at the millpond.

I turned on the TV for a look at breakfast telly and a weather report: “Mostly cloudy but dry.” A politician used the jargon “-friendly” like an American. Well, we were off to see the birthplace—and mainly the gardens—of a half-American politician.

At quarter of nine we left for Blenheim Palace, early enough to pass on the street a milk truck making its rounds, with glass bottles.

The village of Broadway, we’d read in a guidebook, “is probably the most visited village in the Cotswolds.” We parked on the long High Street and gaped. The color of the buildings looked like very pale honey to us and stretched in an elegant blur way up the wide street. We got out and walked. The swanky gift shops and clothing shops were still closed or just opening. We bought postcoards, knowing we’d stop here again en route home.

At Moreton-in-Marsh there was a market in full swing in the center of town. We stopped and browsed. We saw a woman in the crowd eating a hot dog, as in America, and soon we came to a booth whose sign advertised Quarter-Pounders as well.

On we drove, into Warwickshire.

Sign:

Angled Parking.

Translation: diagonal.

On into Oxfordshire. As we neared Woodstock, I began asking Penny more questions about Capability Brown, who tore up formal gardens to bring in Nature. He was uneducated, she said, and is reported to have remarked, “Knowledge hampers creativity.”

In Woodstock we followed the signs to Blenheim Palace but got lost in town and were redirected by a young woman who said, “Go back and turn left and continue and continue and continue and you’ll come to the gate.” We loved that “continue and continue and continue” and proceeded to use it whenever it applied. [We still do.]

We did come to the gate, paid about five pounds each, drove in, and were waved by an attendant to the end of a line of parked cars reaching onto a lawn, presumably Capability’s.

In the palace, after some rooms of Winston Churchill memorabilia, with his speeches piped in overhead, we joined a tour guided by a woman short enough to need a little stool to stand on to address us, directing our attention to ceilings, portraits, tapestries depicting John Churchill’s battles. Perhaps more vivid than anything else was her description of the housecleaning that would go on for months after the palace closed at the end of October. Everything would be “hoovered,” including the tapestries. How, we wondered; on scaffolding?

We emerged outdoors into the Water Gardens, designs of box around spouting fountains, built in the 1900s to restore some of the formality the place demands, which Capability had wiped out. Penny snapped pictures, commenting on the cobweb on a naked male statue.

We walked down to the lake that Capability built and agreed that Thane, Penny’s daughter the environmental lawyer, wouldn’t have allowed it. Then we strolled around to the Italian Garden, then rested in the cafeteria with egg-and-cress sandwiches. Out of curiosity about English cheesecake, we split a piece of cherry cheesecake—crumb-crust variety, its filling lighter than we’re accustomed to.

I said, “I don’t suppose the Golden Girls would turn up their noses at this.”

“No,” said Penny, “but they’d probably want some ice cream as well.”

We encountered four gift shops—or was it five?—before we reached the exit, and in one of them we discovered jars of Cotswold honey, which is paler than ours and more like the buildings in color.

The weather had gradually cleared: a sunny spell!

We headed back the way we’d come, noting the lack of hedges in this piece of England, trees bordering the road same as at home but ivy growing up some. Several of the trees were huge and gnarled like fairy-tale talking trees.

In Broadway, we parked in a pay lot behind High Street. The day had clouded up again, enough so we took our collapsible brollies. Strolling, window-shopping, souvenir-shopping. One shop had a sign on a plastic-shopping-bag-lined basket saying Please Put Wet Umbrellas Here. In a shop devoted to coffeepots and teapots in millions of shapes, we saw the cafetiere pots we’d been served in restaurants, and the veddy smooth shop owner explained how you put in ground coffee, hot water, wait, and push the plunger to press the grounds to the bottom. I’d been wondering if I had read about these pots in the Atlantic magazines’s series on coffee, and this began to ring a bell. French press?

At the Small Talk Tea Shop, in the four-o-clock-crowded room behind a pastry counter, at a little pink table we had cream teas. Heaven.

At Mill Cottage, we watched The Ornamental Kitchen Garden.

Wednesday, October 10, 1990

Cloudy, dry, sun peeking through.

Today’s destination: Rosemary Verey’s Barnsley House. Penny had read her gardening books and articles.

We left at about nine, driving past roadside signs advertising apples: Coxes, Bramleys, Worcesters. Also: Free Range Eggs. Trout. Bedding Plants. The views down into the vale needed a scenic layby so you could stop and admire, but there were none and the morning traffic kept us going on past flocks of sheep, green fields, big Cotswold-stone barns. The stone walls here are built of flat stones and topped with a crimping of upright stones.

We saw a mini fire truck and realized we hadn’t yet seen a pickup truck here. We also hadn’t seen any joggers, except maybe one when we were coming out of London on the bus; the people on roads were simply walking their dogs. We’d brought our jogging gear but we couldn’t get up the courage to don it and be crazy Americans.

Stow-on-the-Wold! A wonderful name made real as we drove into town. “Wold” means “a treeless, rolling plain, especially a high one,” according to an English dictionary; according to a guidebook, it means “rolling hills.” And “Stow-on-the-Wold where the winds blow cold” is a local saying. We parked in front of the stocks on a green. The Old Stocks Hotel stood behind. The winds may blow cold here, but the day remained mild as we strolled the market square that a guidebook called “the best of any Cotswold town.”

On to Burford, entering Oxfordshire, driving through more farm country. The signs refused to tell us how to get to Barnsley via the A433, which the road atlas said should exist, but we found a smaller road to Bibury, which was on the way to Barnsley so we took it, encountering a powerful smell of manure, more pig than cow. I recalled how the pig-farm part of Brandon Hall could permeate the atmosphere when the wind shifted.

The Cotswolds guidebook calls Bibury “one of the Cotswolds’ prettiest and most visited villages.” It is. But although there were plenty of people with cameras, it wasn’t so commercial as Broadway. Instead of capitalizing on tourists, it seemed, as Penny said, mainly to be putting up with them.

We parked beside the water meadow, where cloth used to be hung to dry before being fulled at the mill, according to the guidebook. It’s nowadays a National Trust preserve for water fowl, and swans were cruising, being photographed.

We walked along this water meadow, then crossed to the Jenny Wren Restaurant and Tea Rooms, late for our morning coffee. Two English couples at the other tables in the little room talked in hushed voices. With our coffee, Penny had a Congress tart more almondy than the Lydney’s pastry shop’s, and I could not resist a slice of treacle tart, which came with clotted cream, my first clotted cream—like butter!

Treacle tart . . . As Penny and I had observed, it’s like children’s play and food from storybooks, but the English haven’t realized you’re supposed to grow out of it.

Revived, we walked up Arlington Row, “the most famous group of cottages in the Cotswolds,” trying to look beyond the beauty of honeyed stone cottages and curved stone walls to the harsh lives of the weavers who’d lived in them. Remember chamber pots, I would exhort myself at such moments.

Back in the car, we drove a few miles on and reached Barnsley House, a seventeenth-century Cotswold stone house set back from the narrow main road. At the parking area, a sign requested,

Please Park Tidily.

I said, “Since she’s a gardener, Rosemary Verey wants us in rows.”

There was an informal make-your-own-change table for admittance, and another for postcards, amid flats of plants and an aura of hard work. As we went into the main garden behind the house, we saw a white-haired woman talking to two young men who were planting tubs. We said hello, and after she’d gone on I asked Penny if that was Rosemary, and Penny said she thought so.

While Penny walked and looked and took notes, I absorbed an amateur’s general impression. My lesson in these gardens is how informality and formality are combined. The allee of lime trees especially appealed. Penny said they were “pleached,” meaning branches woven together from one tree to another. When we came to the vegetable garden, I at last could identify what I was looking at, mainly cabbages and leeks, garlic chives, miniature corn, lettuce (a Napa Valley variety), all arranged in patterns of small plots edged with box. A horse grazed nearby. In the outbuildings, a cow mooed.

Eventually we left and drove on to Bourton-on-the-Water. We parked in a parking lot amid coaches and tours. We gathered that these tourists were English as we followed them along the footpath, listening to their accents. We emerged near the main street at the Cotswold-stone Dial House Hotel and went in.The host escorted us into the dining room where, seated on tapestry chairs, we had Celery-Stilton Soup, rolls, then coffee in the cafetiere pots that we now knew exactly how to work, pushing plungers.

The people at the two other occupied tables contradicted our observations about reserved English whispering in restaurants. These were loud and convivial, maybe thanks to the hotel’s bar. One foursome did an elaborate conferring about desserts, one man forlornly having fruit salad (“He doesn’t really want it,” said his wife), another having profiteroles, which we hadn’t the foggiest about and resolved to look up in a cookbook at home [my Mrs. Beeton didn’t have it but Joy of Cooking did, cream-puff shells filled with Creme Chantilly or ice cream and covered with chocolate sauce or filled with whipped cream and served with a strawberry sauce]. One woman chose the creme brulee, and the other woman told our host, “I’ll have the cheese—if it’s exciting.”

All this cost us only six pounds.

The water in Bourton-on-the-Water is the River Windrush, a lovely name but we expected something a bit grander than the stream that runs through the town. It is, however, very pretty, arched with bridges. No railings; how many kids fall in? Lots of retired folk strolled along, and there was almost a European atmosphere because of all the tables and chairs set outside, defying English weather.

Indeed, I later saw in a guidebook that the village is sometimes called “the Venice of the Cotswolds.”

We walked around, spotting our first pickup truck, a very battered Ford. We came to the Cotswold Perfumery across the middle bridge. There was a perfume museum beside it, and one man said to another man embarrassedly, “Let’s go there,” while the wives dived into the shop exclaiming, “Ooh, smell it!” The place was crowded and close with scents that you could sniff at on a counter of glass wands, placards describing ingredients. The Doan sisters, English roses that we are, liked best the English Rose scent, not so cloying as some rose perfumes.

As we walked back along the footpath to the parking lot, three older women in support stockings ahead of us talked and laughed about their outing, “I spent all me pocket money! I’ll have to see me bank manager tomorrow!” Much merriment.

Driving back toward Stow, we detoured to see beautiful Lower Slaughter and Lower Swell. We were getting punchy from all this Cotswold-honey beauty. As Penny said, the trouble with these picturesque villages is that you can’t believe you’re seeing the real thing; you think you’re still looking at photographs in a book.

Back at Mill Cottage, we felt familiar enough now with the area to take a longer walk after supper. It turned out longer than we planned, through a housing development next to our fields and allotments, around to the Cheltenham Road to Corn Mill Road. As usual, I lost all sense of direction and without Penny would still be roaming somewhere in Evesham. It grew dusk-dark, and we began to get a feeling of danger, although Penny had brought along a plastic bottle of window-cleaner for a weapon against dogs or men (we hadn’t dared bring our mace guns from home for fear of disrupting airport security). On Corn Mill Road a young man who was walking a dog let the dog get too close but we didn’t have to attack with Windex and returned to Mill Cottage safely.

That evening on TV we watched Bookmark on BBC 2. The subject was how various writers, including Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, and Philip Larkin, tried to control what happened to their work after they died. The guests were Kingsley Amis and Mary Wesley. She was more serious than Kingsley, who was inclined to be flippantly devious but did say that son Martin would handle things. We learned from Kingsley that Philip Larkin could imitate cats so well that you began to wonder what the cats thought he was saying to them.

Thursday, October 11, 1990

Cloudy, sprinkles, sunny spells.

We’d seen mail left with elastic on the gatepost, and at eight-thirty this morning from my desk I spotted the arrival of the Royal Mail, the mailman getting out of his red van to deliver it to the gatepost.

Today was designated “a free day,” as they say on tours. We did errands in Evesham. Our friend Mal Kibling had told us that the Tourist Information Centres are “truly the best friend of the traveler in Britain.” How right she was. We asked at three travel agencies about day tours to Oxford and got no help, but at the Tourist Information Centre we were advised that it would be easiest to drive to Oxford, instead of take a bus or train, and park at the Park & Ride on the outskirts. “That’s what I do,” said the helpful woman. We also inquired about boat rides on the Avon here, but the season was over.

Then we drove to see more picturesque villages. In Stanton, we walked up and down a street of impossible beauty, which a vanload of art students was sketching. In Stanway, a man was seated at an easel. Onward we drove, avoiding pheasants crossing the road, past sheep, plowed fields, to Snowshill and more Cotswold-honey buildings.

That evening, we watched a sitcom called Birds of a Feather. It wasn’t too funny, but it was interesting because of the class problems involved: Tracey and Sharon, sisters, are lower class with accents from somewhere that we had trouble understanding; a middle-class neighbor is worried that they’re ruining the tone of the neighborhood.

Tired out from a free day, to bed.

Friday, October 12, 1990

On breakfast telly, the weather report was dry and mainly sunny, and, if we gathered correctly from centigrade numbers, warm.

We also saw a traffic report that apparently covered tie-ups, potential and happening, in the whole country or a good part of it.

We left at eight-thirty, driving through Broadway, Moreton-on-Marsh; in Chipping Norton we got on the A34 and drove past fields in sunny mist to Woodstock. Onward, traffic increasing, around roundabouts, closer and closer to Oxford until we saw a Park & Ride sign. We parked in the Pear Tree Car Park’s huge parking lot, walked to the bus stop, and climbed aboard a waiting Oxford Bus Company bus, whose driver was busy rolling a cigarette.

Into Oxford we went, down the Woodstock Road, with me trying to orient myself between my map and the sights, trying to get my summer-of-1965 bearings. [We’d spent most of that summer in an Oxford bed-and-breakfast while Don earned some master’s-degree credits taking an English poetry course at the summer school.]

Penny and I got off the bus at St. Aldate’s, figured out where we were, and saw a tour bus across the street at the Tourist Information Centre. It billed itself as “The Oxford Open Top Double Decker Bus Tours with Green and Cream Buses Every 15 minutes.”

We were nearly the first to climb aboard, and we climbed on up to the open top. The guide, a woman named Mary, asked us and the other woman up there where we were from. The other woman was from California; we had to explain to Mary where New England is, for she thought it north of California. A few more people climbed up, and we set off.

Mary proved to be a comic, with a love of words, and her spiel was very entertaining. We did the whole hour tour, Mary pointing out hideous architecture as well as beautiful. “There I go,” she said after commenting on a cement monstrosity, “breaking the first rule of tour guides, giving a personal opinion.” She said that her son “is ashamed of my job; he can’t tell anyone his mother is working topless in the streets of Oxford.”

The route led out Park End Street near the railroad station and back along Hythe Bridge Street, so I saw some of the route Don and I had walked from our bed-and-breakfast to the center of town. From that bridge we’d watched a nursery of ducklings grow up day by day.

Penny and I had told Mary that we wanted to go to the Botanic Garden, and she alerted us to the nearest stop and we hopped off onto High Street, a.k.a. the High.

At the Garden we walked around and sat for a while on a bench in summery sunshine. Some people were picnicking there, basking too.

We window-shopped and gawked at buildings back along the High and went into Betjeman’s Tea Rooms in the cellar of a shop that sold tea cozies and such. A sign said that the building dated from 1270. There we had a lunch of baked potatoes, Penny’s with cheese and tomato filling, mine with beef and tomato.

Then we walked to Carfax, along Cornmarket and Broad Street, old haunts from the summer of ’65, now with the additions of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. We went into a Body Shop, but the array of cosmetics, etc., was overwhelming.

A bus took us back to our car. As we drove home, we concluded that the smoothness of our expedition was proof of what good public transportation can do.

That evening our landlord, Mr. P., stopped by, home from America. He was coping with jet-leg and told us, “I was all right until four p.m., then I had to have a toes-up.”

During TV, I looked through the Evesham newspaper and found the exciting news that “lavatories in Evesham and Broadway are in the running for the 1990 Loo of the Year Award.” And on the latest episode of Ornamental Kitchen Garden, I learned a new word from host Geoff and from Penny: tilth.

Our last night in Mill Cottage.

Photos: Mill Cottage, photo by Penelope Doan; Penny carrying packages to their Metro in Evesham and Penny at Rosemary Verey's Barnsley Garden, both photos by Ruth Doan MacDougall