Ruth Doan MacDougall

Travelogue: The Doan Sisters Go to England

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Part III: Rose Cottage, Chipping Campden
Saturday, October 13, 1990

Sunny and again amazingly warm.

Packing, I thought I heard gunshots and decided it must be something else. But when we left Mill Cottage and drove into the countryside, we noticed in a plowed field some men in shooting jackets with retriever-type dogs. So it must be hunting season and I had heard gunshots.

Onto the B4081 we turned, driving past sheep-filled pastures, arriving at some thatched cottages and Cotswold-stone cottages. We were in Chipping Campden, which The Cotswolds guidebook says is the most beautiful and best-preserved Cotswold market town and the historic center of the area’s wool trade.

We reached Sheep Street, which leads into the High Street. Royal Oak Terrace on Sheep Street was our destination, a terrace of Cotswold stone divided into the apartments the English call cottages. We parked opposite along the narrow street and climbed up the walk between the terrace and a strip of flowers—yes, there were roses. In front of #3, Rose Cottage, a man in maybe his late thirties was washing windows. It was Mr. S., our landlord, who smiled and said, “You must be our tenants,” and apologized for wet hands during introductions and handshakes. He asked if we could come back in half an hour because they hadn’t yet quite finished cleaning, and we said certainly, we knew we were early. We had gathered during correspondence that Mr. and Mrs. S. lived in Birmingham. Rose Cottage must be an investment, for their holidays and to rent.

So we walked along past (under the edge of) a thatched cottage in Sheep Street’s row of cottages and shops that opened directly onto the sidewalk, a used-books store, a bakery, a fish-and-chip shop down an alley behind a grillwork sidewalk door. On the beautiful wide High Street we strolled along with other tourists, looking. We bought some groceries at the Eight Till Late store and at Dillons: Newsagent, Off License, General Store. At the Sheep Street bakery, we bought stoneground bread.

Upon our return to Rose Cottage we were greeted by Mr. and Mrs. S. and their little boy and girl. As they showed us around, Penny and I were charmed with this tiny shiny-clean two-story slot in the terrace and its careful decor. (The next morning Penny discovered in the magazine rack a Laura Ashley catalogue that explained it all.)

The snug living room had exposed beams, with bunches of dried flowers hanging from them. There were two-and-a-half stone walls, a fireplace in one of them, a white plastered wall; two fringed green velvety wing chairs; a small sofa with squishy cushions, slipcovered in a pattern that matched the throw pillow, the lampshade, and the drapes. A copper warming pan hung near the fireplace.

The dining area of the kitchen was bright white, with parquet tiles, a crocheted tablecloth on the dark round table, a tea-towel rack on the radiator, and a wooden white sheep kitchen clock that was so cunning that Penny and I couldn’t help searching for a duplicate in shops but we never found one. Beyond a formica breakfast bar with two stools were toy appliances, a dishwasher, a modern “electric cooker.”

Mrs. S. said, “There are some little pastries for you,” indicating a two-tiered china cake stand covered with paper towels.

“Thank you,” we said, and I added, “We’ve been having a grand time here with all the pastries, which we can’t get like this at home.”

Looking shocked, Mrs. S. said, “You can’t?”

Out the back door there was a cement patio, with a little white plastic table and two white plastic chairs, from which you could look at a strip of garden rising up the hillside, between the other cottages’ strips, to a potting shed.

Upstairs were two bedrooms, one mainly pink, the other gold, with a lot of matching of fabric and wallpaper. The toilet, avocado, was in a separate little room beside the bathroom, both wallpapered in a rust-and-avocado print on white, the tub and washbasin avocado. There was a showerhead!

While we all were up here, chatting about the gardens that Penny and I have been visiting, I happened to mention that Penny is a landscape designer. Mr. S. immediately rushed her to the nearest window to ask what to do with their back garden. “It’s such an awkward shape,” he said, eyeing his neighbor’s garden to the right and adding wistfully that so-and-so was doing a good job with his.

After Mr. and Mrs. S. and the kids left, Penny and I went back upstairs and chose bedrooms. Penny decided on the front bedroom so she could keep an eye on the street like Miss Marple. I had the pink bedroom. We unpacked and got acquainted with our last bedrooms in England.

Then, skipping lunch, we had an early tea on the patio, with teapot and tea cozy and cake stand, listening to English whispers in the patio of #2 beside us behind the wall, modulating our giggles and controlling the impulse to discuss something unsuitable in loud American voices. Sunny, warm, blissful.

Penny took a nap, and I took a stroll up to the top of our garden for a view of the village and of our neighbors’ patios. #1’s and #2’s were glassed in against the English weather. Then I read a murder mystery on the patio, eavesdropping on our #2 male neighbor who was building something in whispers but finally said in a normal exasperated voice to his wife, “I don’t know what happens to my tools—people borrow them.” A universal complaint.

For a curry supper, a can of chick pea dhal, with chutney, tomatoes, and stoneground bread.

Sunday, October 14, 2008

Sunny and warm again.

After a week of the Mill Cottage tub, a shower! But it was a puzzling shower; the shower head was the removable hand-held type, okay, but small, and the water coming out was only a trickle. Another English mystery.

Off to Hidcote Manor Garden, past fields, one planted with cabbages where sheep were grazing. We hoped they were supposed to be in there. At Hidcote, when we bought our tickets we encountered a very aggressive National Trust woman, but we held our ground, so to speak, and didn’t join. Penny had during an earlier trip when there were many National Trust places on her itinerary.

With our gardens map, we walked into the gardens past heliotrope, which I learned smells like baby powder, then past a stage with hedges for wings, and on into garden “room” after “room.” I liked the Stilt Garden of pleached hornbeam trees, as I had the pleached row of lime trees in Rosemary Verey’s garden; both quite formal. Why should I like formality?

A pheasant poked amongst the plants.

At a “terminal vista” we gazed out at the vale and sheep.

Lunchtime. The restaurant’s rooms were busy so the seats in windows were taken, but we were content at our table, with chicken-vegetable soup-of-the-day and rolls. On the blackboard, the Hot Dishes of the day included Jugged Hare.

The garden exit led through the gift shop.

We drove home, rested, regrouped on the patio, and set forth to another National Trust garden, Snowshill Manor near Broadway, taking a different route from our previous Stanton-Snowshill tour.

Snowshill Manor, packed with tourists, contained a crazy collection of crafts and God knows what else, the owner, Charles Wade, having got the collecting bug at the age of seven, according to the guidebook. The most memorable to me were the tiny delicate carvings done by “French prisoners of war during the Napoleonic Wars,” using animal bones from their rations.

Outdoors, we strolled the gardens, sat on a bench, admired the dovecote, watched the sheep in the distance.

We drove back to Broadway and had cream teas at the Broadway Hotel’s outdoor tables with blue and white umbrellas saying Martini and green and white umbrellas saying Carlsberg. We watched the passersby on the High Street, a Continental sidewalk-cafe sensation in this Cotswold setting.

Back home, we walked to the High Street and picked up a few groceries at Dillons General Store. For supper Penny made a Ploughman’s Lunch of Wensleydale cheese we’d bought in Broadway, the first I’d had since I was last in England, bread, Branston pickle, tomato and cress.

On a TV program that evening, a woman regretted the passing of proper prams, saying of present-day strollers that “babies are pushed around in plastic prisons; they look like they’re in intensive care.”

Monday, October 15, 1990

Today’s mission: a long drive down to Chawton in Hampshire. We were making our pilgrimage to Jane Austen’s house.

At eight-thirty on another mild day, with a hazy sky through which shafts of pale sun shone now and then, we set forth, driving through Stow-on-the-Wold to Burford, down onto a road new to us to Lechlade. A sign advertised Organic Lamb.

Traffic getting heavier, on to Swindon’s bypass to the madhouse of the M4 on a Monday morning (or anytime?). Penny drove masterfully. We eventually pulled off into a service area where the restaurant chain was the Happy Eater, one of which Penny had gone to for a strange hamburger during an earlier visit. Along with our coffee we had our first toasted tea cakes, larger than English muffins, with currants, split and butttered.

Back onto the zoomer to the exit to Newbury. The traffic eased, but roundabouts were frequent and exciting. Down the A339 into Hampshire we went, the towns red brick now. Rain began, acting serious, splotchy drops becoming steady. On the horizon stood cows.

More roundabouts got us through Basingstoke, which, we commented, sounded like a P. G. Wodehouse name, but then so did almost every other town name. The countryside looked more like home, with trees if not woods, no hedges, hayfields down to the road.

Sign:

Car Boot Sale This Sunday.

We reached Alton at ten minutes of eleven. It was a good-sized town; Jane Austen would have come here from the village of Chawton to shop. Strolling along the High Street under Penny’s brolly, we stopped in at a bookstore where there was a supply of Jane Austens in the classics section. Amongst the Penguin fiction I found two Penelope Livelys that our library hadn’t been able to track down for me—maybe not published in the U.S.—and I bought them, thinking it somehow appropriate.

Then we ducked into Philbean’s, where we had soup and crusty rolls and looked out the window at the street where Jane Austen had walked.

Coming into Alton, we’d seen the sign for Chawton, so we backtracked to the A31 southwest. Signs began to say Jane Austen’s House as we drove the few miles into the brick village, past a thatched house, to a small general parking lot where we parked, got out, wondering where the hell Jane’s house was. We read a posted tourist-information brochure about it—and then we turned and saw Jane’s house behind us, sitting right on the road that had been the main road to Winchester when she lived here with her sister and mother from 1809 until her death at age forty-one in 1817. We’d missed its own parking lot around the back near the bakehouse.

Her Chawton home is an L-shaped brick house, the left-hand part in a big garden that provides the privacy the front lacks. I hate houses that have what I call “no hiding place,” so although this is smack on the road, there’s plenty of room to hide out back. And there was an attempt to make the house itself more private; the front has an odd appearance because Jane’s brother Edward, who gave the womenfolk this house on the Chawton estate he’d inherited from a relative, had had one large window overlooking the road blocked up. Blocked windows aren’t an uncommon sight in England, for a window tax at one stage in the past caused a lot of homeowners to choose darkness, but this one is big and disconcerting. Although a broad wink doesn’t suit Jane, too blatant, her house seems to be doing just that.

You enter at the side into a room where you first see postcards, books, tea towels, and then after you pay your one-pound fee and buy a guidebook for 70p you realize this is also the Drawing Room, with artifacts around the edges, and for the first time you see Jane’s handwriting flowing very neatly as if on lined paper, her letter discussing Emma.

According to the guidebook, this room is where Jane and her sister, Cassandra, and their mother and their friend Martha Lloyd would sit in the evening after an early dinner about four or five o’clock in the afternoon. They sewed and talked, Cassandra sometimes painted, and sometimes they read aloud “from the latest gothic horror novel.” Like the other rooms, it seems cramped quarters. The house feels smaller within than it looks from without, especially when you imagine the skirts the women were wearing.

The place wasn’t busy, and this was a relief after other tourist meccas even in off-season. There were maybe a half-dozen people during our stay, voices hushed.

We continued on into the Vestibule, where more artifacts were displayed and a copy of Cassandra’s 1810 portrait of Jane hangs above the fireplace. We were getting the impression, strengthened room by room, that the museum/house curators (or whatever) had struggled to flesh out a shadow, using anything connected with Jane they could find, also using facsimiles, filling gaps the best they could, family stuff if not specifically Jane’s. Because she was a woman, an unmarried woman, she didn’t leave much stuff. There isn’t even a real portrait of her, just Cassandra’s, to tell us what she looked like.

And, as Penny said, the curator notes in the rooms are extra-reverent.

This idolatry, added to the shock of actually being here, had overwhelmed me. Then as we moved on into the Dining Parlour, I realized its wallpaper was the same Laura Ashley as our bathroom’s at Rose Cottage! This got Penny and me laughing and eased the emotions of seeing the tiny round table at which Jane wrote. It was bare, but it looked hardly big enough to hold two pieces of paper and pen-and-ink equipment.

The guidebook told us that the Austens ate in this room “where the lack of privacy was not so very important.” A man driving past in a coach said that he saw them “looking comfortable at breakfast.” Jane made the breakfasts, putting the kettle on the hob in the fireplace. Then after breakfast, when the others left the room, she wrote at this little table. The guidebook said that after Jane died, her mother had this table moved to a cottage she was furnishing for an elderly servant. Thank heavens, the importance of the table was recognized years later and it came back to the Austens.

How interesting, I thought, that Jane chose this least-private room to write in. But maybe she had no choice—or, like many of the rest of us writers, maybe she welcomed any distraction out a window.

On the dining table was displayed a set of china, with a typed transcript of a description of it from a letter to Cassandra from Jane. Fun to compare the pattern with the way she described it: “. . . the pattern is a small lozenge in purple, between lines of narrow Gold;—and it is to have the Crest.” She’d gone with her brother Edward and niece Fanny, while in London, to Wedgwood’s where he bought it.

There was a copy of Jane’s “personal estate” on the wall. Without her books, she wouldn’t have had anything to leave. She had 561 pounds, 2 shillings, and left it all to Cassandra except for fifty pounds to her brother Henry’s housekeeper who had lost her money when Henry’s bank failed, an event that had distressed Jane terribly and may, it’s speculated, have helped lead to her death.

The famous creaking door, which alerted Jane to visitors so she could hide her manuscript, is labeled that. A man said, coming down the stairs as we started up, “With these floorboards she hardly needed a creaking door.”

There were more artifacts in the staircase area and a transcript of a letter written by her father to announce the birth of his seventh child (of an eventual eight): “We now have another girl, a present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion.”

Because a couple of people were in Jane’s bedroom, we went first into Mrs. Austen’s, where there were display cases of family odds and ends plus a petition for the protection of donkeys, which Jane loved. We signed.

Then the bedroom. Jane and Cassandra shared it. No bed now, but a patchwork quilt under gauze hung on the wall. The quilt was made at Chawton by Jane and Cassandra and their mother, and there was a transcript of a note in which Jane asked Cassandra to be on the lookout for materials while away, because they’d run out.

The original fireplace was here, with an armchair beside it and a description of how niece Caroline last saw Jane sitting there, too ill to be visited long. And about that illness there was a framed newspaper clipping from a medical journal in the 1960s in which the doctor-reporter played detective with clues from Jane’s letters to discover just what killed her. The answer: Addison’s Disease. He praised her for the first recorded description of symptoms by a sufferer. She seemed especially bothered by the discoloration in her face, aside of course from the pain and discomfort.

Even without the bed in it, the room seemed small. Penny and I, who’d never had to share a bedroom and who had made a point of choosing self-catering cottages that had two, looked and pondered.

In a vase on the mantel Penny noted a bouquet of yellow calendula, dianthus.

On one wall were testimonials to Jane’s talent, Sir Walter Scott’s comment about he can do his big “Bow-wow” writing but admires Jane’s exquisiteness, and Sir Winston Churchill’s description in The Second World War about how he relaxed reading Jane’s novels. These seemed an odd choice of items to hang in this bedroom where you’d except only the most personal.

In the corridor were illustrations from Pride and Prejudice.

The Admirals’ Room was devoted to Jane’s sailor brothers, Frank Austen, Admiral of the Fleet knighted by Queen Victoria, and Charles Austen, Rear Admiral. They had plenty of stuff, including portraits of their ships as well as themselves.

The costume room was closed for repairs, but you could peep in at mannequins wearing the fashions of the time.

“Juvenilia,” at the end of the corridor, consisted of copies of Jane’s childhood manuscripts illustrated by Cassandra: “The History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian.”

Residences Room was a little back bedroom with a display of pictures of the places Jane lived or visited. The guidebook didn’t say, but Penny and I guessed it was probably the servant’s (or servants’?) room.

As we went back downstairs after another look into Jane and Cassandra’s room, I thought of all the letters they’d written each other. I’d read how difficult it was for biographers to cope with the Jane Austen correspondence, and now I had seen the squeezed-for-space technique of tiny writing, lines crisscrossed. The writing paper had been folded to become an envelope, and addressed.

Back down in the gift-shop Drawing Room, we bought postcards and note cards, and when we asked for the tea towels, of which there were only three on the table, the woman in charge of the room leaned down to a big long-haired white and black cat and said, “You’ll have to move, James,” and lifted him off the box of tea towels.

Outdoors, the rain had let up, the day was clearing. We walked around the garden, smaller now than in Jane’s time, according to the guidebook, when there had been an orchard, a vegetable garden, “shrubbery large enough to take walks in,” and a field for two donkeys. Mrs. Austen and Cassandra liked to garden more than Jane did. The guidebook said that Jane wrote to Cassandra about the fate of some saplings she’d planted: “I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.”

When I read that aloud in the garden, Penny and I laughed and laughed. What a familiar ring those words had, concerning my own gardening and houseplants!

In the Bakehouse were the depressing objects of household labor, a big stone oven, washtub, a container for soaking hams in brine. Jane’s donkey carriage was stored here, with a sign saying Edward couldn’t afford a horse for his mother and sisters. Penny and I each raised an eyebrow at Edward.

Then we walked down the street to a little gift shop of general goods, not Austen souvenirs. After browsing, we walked back to the tea shop/gift shop across from the house. It was called Cassandra’s Cup. Two women were having a late lunch at the only occupied table, and when we sat down at another after a quick look around the gift shop, the older woman got up, took our order, and brought us sparkling mineral water and chocolate cake. We sat looking across the street at the house, and the sun came out.

I thought of Jane over there, revising Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, having them published, writing and publishing Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasian. And an image of Jane as Aunt Jane also remained vividly with me, thanks to the cup-and-ball toy in a display case. Apparently she was a whiz at it and entertained her nephews and nieces with her skill, tossing the ball up and catching it in the cup as often as a hundred times.

We left the village and retraced our route home, arriving at Rose Cottage at five-thirty. We relaxed on the patio until the smell of a neighbor’s supper made us realize we were ready for ours. So we walked to the High Street to Greenstock’s, which we’d overheard recommended in a tea shop. We sat at a round table on an upholstered banquette beside a fireplace. Music in the background was a Beatles medley. There were other diners, muted voices. Penny had Uncle Greenstow’s Beef Goulash and I had Mignons of Beef Topped with a Mustard and Garlic Crust. They came with a dish of vegetables—broccoli, carrots, rutabaga strips, courgettes—and a dish of Dauphinoise Potatoes (scalloped). For our “pudding,” we split an order of Three Tartlets Filled with Cream Cheese and Blackcurrants. This with a big cafetiere of decaf was a grand finale to an indelible day.

Tuesday, October 16, 1990

A “free day,”chillier than it has been lately, but sunny and warming up.

Notes:

On the back of the door of the WC, there’s a toilet-paper holder the likes of which we’d never seen before: a double strip of cloth, white with little blue squares of embroidered flowers, stitched into four sections that hold four rolls. [Penny later secretly spotted one in a gift shop, bought it, and that Christmas she gave it to me, lacy with pink bows.]

In the bathroom, the faucets are backward, hot on the right. And why in Britain have we yet to encounter a single faucet for hot and cold, except in the shower here?

Garbage pail liners are called bin liners, of course, since garbage pails are called dustbins here.

Video stores rare. Do VCRs cost too much?

No drive-through car washes yet seen, in which to wash our Metro still sporting mud from the Purton barnyard.

Women wear kilts a lot still, with knitted “jumpers,” i.e., sweaters.

We went off to the the High Street to browse the shops in relative weekday peace (but American accents overheard). For lunch we chose Joel’s, in the section in the middle of the street past the Market Hall (now owned by the National Trust), because it had outside tables. The soup of the day was Tomato-Orange, garnished with orange peel, served with hot slices of French bread. Observing the proprietor (or we assumed that’s what he was) and the waitress, Penny said, “People seem to work their jobs in around their lives instead of the opposite in the U.S.”

I’d bought a walking guide to Chipping Campden at a bookstore, Chipping Campden Town Trail. With this in hand, we explored, first getting sidetracked by a shop full of tea cozies in various shapes from rabbits to Queen Elizabeth I. Then on we went to see the oldest house in Campden, then a church, and as I paused to read the guidebook, a voice behind us said, “Have you lost your way or are you just looking?” We turned and saw a thin older man pushing a bicycle. We said we were admiring, and he launched into a history of the church and Sir Baptist Hicks’s Campden House ahead around a curve, telling how it had been burned down during the Civil War “which,” he went on, “was a bit earlier than yours and maybe worse, because yours was concentrated in one part of the country, wasn’t it, while ours divided everybody.” We thought we saw what he meant, and I didn’t mention any “brother-against-brother” history. We were beginning to guess that he was a teacher, and he confirmed that he had been, was now retired. He went on to give us a fascinating lecture about the town. When he bade us good-bye and wheeled his bicycle away, Penny and I laughed over this fine experience. We had been thinking that a problem with travel is you tend only to meet salesclerks and waiters and such and don’t get to know people—and then this had happened.

We followed the trail on past the Almshouses, built in 1612 and still in use by pensioners. As we left the trail to revive with tea, we passed a High Street house that had a sign saying its garden was open, for Autistic Society donations. We went in and walked through to the back into an amazing garden about two hundred feet long, Penny estimated, where other people strolled. There were plants, apple trees, and serenity here behind the High Street hubbub that must be a madhouse in summer.

At the Old Bake House we had tea and a “cream slice” and a scone with strawberry jam. Penny glimpsed a sign out back and wished she could steal it for Don:

It’s a Great Day.
Watch Some Bastard Spoil It.

We followed the trail up Sheep Street past our cottage and began meeting Americans. One woman asked us wearily, “It is this way, isn’t it?” and we assured her it was, assuming she meant the High Street. More couples with cameras came toward us, and finally we saw a tour bus parked in a side street.

We had walked past the Westington Old Farm, now a private house, and Shepherd’s Close, formerly farm cottages, but we couldn’t spot a 1273 dovecote the guidebook mentioned.

Walking home, we paused for Penny to take a photo of a picturesque house, and a man came up behind us and waited until she’d finished. He was wearing a blue one-piece worksuit and Wellies, with a knapsack-bag hung over his shoulder. When we apologized for being in the way, he pointed to a small pale thatch, partly braided, over the window of a thatched cottage across the street. We marveled, and he said it was new, done this year. Then he walked on but turned back to say something we had to ask him to repeat because of his accent: “You won’t see any brick around here, it’s all Cotswold stone.” Local pride. He crossed the street and began climbing up a side street toward, presumably, home.

That evening on BBC 2 we watched the Booker Prize event, a banquet being held in the Guild Hall in London. This fiction award was telecast like the Oscars! Well, not absolutely like it and its red-carpet razzamatazz, but we were amazed to see so much TV time devoted to novels. At first there were shots of the short-listed writers at dinner, talking or listening, it seemed, not eating. No appetite? A previously-filmed interview with each was shown, and an excerpt from each novel read while the scene was acted out (like the old Hit Parade show, we thought). Then a woman moderator conducted a discussion of the books with three writers/critics, Germaine Greer, who was as usual funny, scathing, surprising, and two people whose names we didn’t get, a nicer woman more kindly about everything, and a snotty man, the Mikey-Who-Hates-Everything Type. The moderator kept their comments as brief as possible by reminding them that the authors are “now in the middle of their rack of lamb en croute” and “now they’ve reached their forest fruits and liqueurs.”

Then the show returned to the Guild Hall, tension mounting during mild jokes by the presenter. The winner was A. S. Byatt’s Possession, the biggest book, one that the writers/critics had said during their discussion was only good to give as a gift. Greer’s reaction to this win was: “Congratulations; next time write a short one.”

Wednesday, October 17, 1990

The weather forecast was for “outbreaks of rain,” but the morning was only cloudy as we got off to an early start to Warwick Castle, going by way of Stratford into Warwick.

In front of some black plastic hanging on a fence, a man sat on the grass eating his breakfast. We guessed he’d slept under the plastic. Our first homeless person in England?

There was a traffic jam on the Warwick roundabout. While we waited, we turned on the car radio and got, after world news headlines, details of some splendid cricket match that had been won because of a broken lawnmower—“The grass was ten feet high!”

In Warwick, we stopped at Elizabeth the Chef’s Coffee Room and Bakery for coffee. An older couple who came in after us both ordered hot chocolate, and the woman ordered toasted tea cakes and the man ordered toast and jam. The waitress, also an older woman, asked him, “White or brown bread?” The man deliberated, then said, “Toast? White.” “Yes,”agreed the waitress, “I like brown bread for sandwiches but white for toast.”

During all this, Penny and I were trying to control a giggling fit over these grown-ups with children’s food.

We drove through town to a sign for Warwick Castle, and drove in. A sign warned:

Sharp Bends
Peacock Crossing

Sure, we said, like the Moose Crossing signs for tourists at home—and then two peacocks appeared along the roadside. They, and the other peacocks we later saw here, seemed to be molting, almost tail-less, lacking glory, looking more like beautifully-colored turkeys.

The castle loomed. It’s so perfect, it’s unreal, medieval cardboard, seen in a thousand movies. We paid our five pounds each and bought a guidebook for two pounds. We decided it would be best to see the gardens first, while we were fresh, so we went into the Victorian Rose Garden, a “recently recreated Rose Garden” that Princess Diana had opened in 1986. The smell of roses wafted. I still can’t get over roses blooming in October.

Paths led us to the part of the castle where the rooms are peopled with Madame Tussard’s waxworks portraying A Royal Weekend Party, 1898. There were no guides, just women sitting in rooms, reading, waiting to answer questions, and we heard one explaining how cramped the castle is for space: “The curator is always grumbling—I know it sounds impossible, but with the service staff, restaurants, gift shops . . .”

We came out into the courtyard, and a sign directed us into the Watergate (Ghost) Tower, where in a study with a desk a ghostly taped voice overhead told us of the murder in London of Sir Fulke Greville by his manservant. Supposedly the study is haunted by his ghost.

Needing air after this, we walked through Capability-Brown landscaped grounds to a bridge over the Avon, where ducks and a swan swam.

Speaking of water, we wondered if the castle had ever had a moat. No, said the guidebook, just a dry one, a “ditch.”

We walked back to the Peacock Garden, past scruffy peacocks lying on the grass or standing around. After we’d sat on a bench and admired the vista, we walked over to see a gardener at work digging inside an encircling hedge—nope, closer we realized there were two gardeners, the second sitting down reading a newspaper.

After touring the Great Hall (armor) and state rooms, we decided to be brave and climb a tower, so we did, Clarence Tower if my reading of the map was correct, winding up and up on scooped shallow stairs, crossing along the railed battlement to the taller Guy’s Tower (128 feet), up and up and up. Then we looked out from the crenellated top at the courtyard and countryside below and thought of, as the guidebook described, men dropping heavy stones and quicklime onto attackers.

Back on terra firma, in the restaurant Penny and I rewarded ourselves with lunch, then realized belatedly realized that maybe we should have waited until after we’d visited the dungeon to eat. Should we skip the dungeon? We’d just fought the fear of heights; we went ahead and descended more narrow dark stairs into claustrophobia, a terrible cave with an oubliette and torture devices. Then we escaped to the gift shops, two here that you had to get through before the exit.

Back home in Rose Cottage, that evening while we watched TV I read more of the cottage’s Laura Ashley catalogue and learned that the official name of the “stencil-like” wallpaper in our bathroom and Jane Austen’s Dining Parlour was “Tulips. Multi-Stone,” terracotta and green. Then I leafed through the cottage’s copy of the May 1990 Good Housekeeping and came across an article about “Heart Disease: The Killer We Could Control” that asked why Britain led the world in deaths from coronary heart disease. In America, it said, you could ask any New York taxi driver about his cholesterol and he’d give you the numbers and a lecture, whereas in Britain people weren’t even sure what cholesterol was. I read this to Penny, and we thought of the cholesterol binge we’d been having and laughed. All too soon, however, we’d be returning to America.

Thursday, October 18, 1990

Weather: drizzle. The TV weatherman said there’d be “a bit of sun in a few places” but generally “dull, damp, quiet.”

So it was in misty English weather that we set off to Laurie Lee country, via Stow-on-the-Wold, past Bourton-on-the-Water, to Cirencester (pronounced Sirensester). It was appropriate weather for Laurie Lee, even though I’d first fallen in love with him when he was writing about springtime in “April Rise.” [When I was fifteen I had come across an anthology titled One Hundred Modern Poems in an unlikely place, on the paperback rack of Guyer’s Market, the little grocery store on Gilford Avenue that Penny and I walked past to and from school every day. I’d bought the anthology. I still have it; the price was thirty-five cents. (My weekly allowance at that stage was a dollar fifty.) In it I discovered Laurie Lee’s “April Rise,” with its rapturous green misty images.]

We reached Stroud at eleven, talking about Laurie Lee’s descriptions of Stroud in his Cider with Rosie memoir. It had been an industrial town since the Middle Ages, its specialty the making of cloth. A guidebook mentioned Stroud’s “quaint steep streets,” and we drove up steep Cornhill to a Pay-and-Display lot where there was a view of brick buildings, chimney pots, fields above houses on the opposite green hills in the mist, while in the foreground stood one of the deplored modern cement buildings.

We thought of Laurie Lee’s sisters leaving the cottage in his nearby Slad to go to work and how he described all the workers hurrying down to Stroud, the girls “running to shops and looms, with sleep in their eyes and eggy cheeks, and in their ears night voices fading.”

Stroud was a welcome antidote to the rarefied atmosphere of Chipping Campden and all the too-beautiful picture-book villages, especially those with swanky shops. Down and down Cornhill we walked, had coffee at the brick-and-ivy London Hotel, then up we climbed back to our car. Rain began, and we drove downhill past people waiting for the bus in the wet. We took a narrow street out of Stroud, into rolling green hills, partly wooded, that reminded us of Vermont.

Sign:

Please Drive Carefully Through Village.

And here was Slad, Laurie Lee’s village, described in such detail in Cider with Rosie. Rain still came down, and the stone farm buildings seemed a paler honey than we’d become accustomed to. Cows on the hillside were a reminder of Laurie Lee’s description of cattle on the slopes “brilliant as painted china.” An approach through a green tunnel.

The only indication that we could see of a village center was a church and a pub. No shops, no souvenir stalls selling postcards, although The Cotswolds guidebook said that Slad is famous for being the setting of Cider with Rosie. We parked at the pub, the Woolpack. After putting on raincoats and opening an umbrella, we walked along past the church and down a lower street behind houses, wondering where Laurie Lee’s was. Had the weather been better, we would have done some asking and searching. Instead, we literally soaked up the atmosphere, as from beneath the brolly we admired the misty green village and the pale cottages.

Then we walked back to our car and drove on until we came to Birdlip, whose name had fascinated us ever since we first saw it on the map. The guidebook mentioned an Iron Age burial site but didn’t explain the name. At the Kingshead House Restaurant with Rooms, the owner, in sport jacket, showed us in. We imagined that he had retired early from something-or-other to run an inn in the Cotswolds. Beams, cream walls, small tables, an electric coal fire glowing in the stone fireplace. We asked him what the soup of the day was, and he replied “Celeriac.” We hadn’t seen celeriac except in seed catalogues or on Victory Garden shows; neither of us had ever grown it. Penny recalled that it had a larger bulb than regular celery. The soup tasted milder than the usual cream-of-celery, and we felt warm and snug.

When we emerged, the weather had become foggy, cars using headlights.

We’d decided to go home via Cheltenham so we could practice on it, with a street map, in preparation for returning the Metro to the Budge Rent-a-Car place Saturday morning. We promptly got lost there, then glimpsed the Inner Ring Road and finally found ourselves on Albion Street and located Budget.

We’d joked that Broadway was too posh for a plebian grocery store, but this afternoon we spotted one, perhaps the tiniest yet, and stopped for supper supplies. Back in Chipping Campden at the Royal Oak Terrace, we had a severe attack of giggles as we tried to unload the car in the rain, cars splashing past, and to find the house keys without dropping everything.

In the cottage, we unwound with reading, while on TV the Newmarket Races went on despite the “torrential” rain. Then we watched a program that featured “a look at some of the top sportswomen of the 1920s,” with old newsreels and present-day interviews. One woman recalled being nearly drowned when swimming the English Channel: “We didn’t have anything, no instruments, you just pointed your head toward the coast and swam.” Another, a runner or some sort of field-event contestant, recalled that her mother wouldn’t let her do it bare-legged but finally permitted “flesh-colored stockings.” Another recalled black knitted leggings sans feet. Another held up the voluminous bloomers she’d worn.

For supper, Penny made Baxter’s Cock-a-Leekie-Soup with bread and cheese and salad.

In the evening, reading one of the cottage’s home-beautiful magazines, I saw in an article about bathrooms a picture that showed a “telephone-style hand shower” like ours here at Rose Cottage, and Penny and I learned that it was supposed to be only for rinsing after a bath.

Friday, October 19, 1990

I wrote in my journal, the dark early morning not brightening, wet and misty. When we turned on breakfast telly, the weatherman pointed to clouds on the weather map and said, “We’re under there somewhere,” predicting a “dark and dank” day.

As I went out the front door into this dankness, a royal mailman was delivering mail to #1 and #2, his bicycle propped against the wall. I crossed the street to our Metro and tidied it, sadly cleaning the lipsticked arrow off the windshield, an acknowledgment that the adventure was ending.

We listed our purchases for customs, and we packed. Then we took a walk to the High Street for a few groceries, stopping at the Sheep Street backery on the way back, getting sausage rolls and cream cakes for a farewell lunch. Visons of my return to real life were wavering before me: rice cakes and tofu and an apple for a sweet.

After lunch, we took a drive out of town to Dovers Hill. As we’d feared, the famous view was blank behind fog.

“Well,” Penny said, thinking of another famous view we hadn’t yet got to, “maybe we ought to climb Broadway Tower today too.”

Instead, we drove via back roads past sheep through Weston Sub-Edge and Willersey, where there was a duck-crossing symbol on a road sign near a village pond.The rain became steady, then faded to mist. When we drove back the way we’d come, in Willersey we saw the group of ducks the sign had warned of.

In Chipping Campden Penny filled the car for the last time, at the Citroen Elf gas station, where the price was two pounds, 33p a gallon.

Photos: Rose Cottage, Chipping Campden and Ruth outside Jane Austen's House; photos by Penelope Doan


© 2008 Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved