The Road to Little Dribbling (6 page)

I was also interested to discover that the Seven Sisters—which are, namely, Haven Brow, Short Brow, Rough Brow, Brass Point, Flat Hill, Bailey’s Hill, and Went Hill—don’t include Belle Tout or Beachy Head, two of the mightiest eminences of all along this stretch of coast, which meant that I was in the process of climbing nine hills, not seven. No wonder I was tired. Sobered by this thought, I fortified myself with a posh sandwich and bottle of organic soda pop at the National Trust café, then returned to the long, lonesome trail.

Not long after Birling Gap, the path arrives at a sweeping prospect across the downs that strikes nearly every British visitor as familiar whether they have ever walked this way or not. It is a view that was immortalized in a Second World War poster by an artist named Frank Newbould. The poster shows a shepherd guiding a flock of sheep across the downs. Below, in the middle distance, is an attractive farmhouse. At the top of a facing hill is the iconic Belle Tout lighthouse. The sea is just visible as a line across a distant valley. The caption says: “Your Britain—fight for it now.” I have always thought it interesting that of all the possible things worth dying for in 1939, it was the countryside that was selected. I wonder how many people would feel that way now. Newbould took a few small liberties in the work—he improved the shape of the hills, tidied up the farmstead, altered the course of the path slightly—but not so much as to render the view fictitious. It is a testament to the British nation that more than seventy years after Newbould painted this expansive prospect, it is as fine now as it was then.

Taking the English countryside for granted, assuming that it will always be like this, is almost certainly its greatest threat. The sad irony is that the things that make the landscape of Britain comely and distinctive are almost entirely no longer needed. Hedgerows, country churches, stone barns, verges full of nodding wildflowers and birdsong, sheep roaming over windswept fells, village shops and post offices, and much more can only rarely now be justified on economic grounds, and for most people in power those are the only grounds that matter. Looked at economically, we don’t even need farmers. Farming accounts for just 0.7 percent of GDP, so if all farming in Britain ceased tomorrow the economy would barely notice. Successive governments have done almost nothing to preserve most of these things. There is a strange, blind, foolish inclination to suppose that the features that make the British countryside are somehow infinitely self-sustaining, that they will always be there, adding grace and beauty. Don’t count on it.

Belle Tout lighthouse itself nearly didn’t survive. It was decommissioned in the early 1900s and became derelict. Canadian soldiers used it for target practice during the Second World War, though mercifully failed to destroy it. After the war it was restored, but by the late twentieth century it was in danger of falling into the sea, so some good soul paid a fortune to have it mounted on rails and moved a safe distance back from the cliff edge. So now it is safe for another few decades until the crumbling cliffs sneak up on it again.

After Belle Tout comes a long descent almost to sea level, then a steady climb toward the summit of Beachy Head. It’s a long haul up a broad grassy strip, rather like walking on a golf fairway, but worth it for the payoff at the top where you get the most sensational views of the famous Beachy Head lighthouse with its jaunty red and white stripes, standing in the sea at the base of the cliffs.

At the top of the hill, where it flattens out, is a parking area where busloads of schoolchildren can get off and scatter a little litter around—it’s a tradition, I guess; school groups come from all over to put their potato chip bags and candy bar wrappers in the gorse and bracken, bless their sweet, undersupervised little hearts—but I am pleased to say that this was the only place along the entire walk that I encountered litter.

After the summit at Beachy Head, there comes a broad, parklike expanse of land with a selection of paths plunging downhill to the old resort town of Eastbourne. The views over the town’s sweeping seafront with its golden beach and scallops of advancing waves are very fine, too, though marred by a single high-rise apartment house called South Cliff Tower, which stands distractingly in the foreground. It’s a charmless building that should never have been allowed, but there you are. The world is full of shitty things that should never have happened. Look at Sean Hannity.

In nearly all other respects, however, Eastbourne is a good place. The promenade is well kept, with big houses and smart hotels on one side and broad beaches on the other—all leading to a good old-fashioned pier, one of the few truly classic piers still standing. Just after my visit, the pier was badly damaged in a fire—seaside piers in England seem to be amazingly combustible; I don’t know why—but according to press reports it will be lovingly restored. I most emphatically hope so. It would be a tragedy to see it go.

The charm of Eastbourne is that it is so comfortably old-fashioned, and nowhere is that better encapsulated than in a café where I always stop called Favo’loso. It is the most wonderful establishment. It is like stepping into a 1950s movie called
Summer Milkshake
or
Ice Cream Holiday
or something. Favo’loso is spotless and polished and shiny; it basks in a retro gleam. The food is decent, the servers efficient and friendly, the prices reasonable. What more could you ask? It is my favorite place in East Sussex, if not on the entire south coast. Two days before I left on this trip, I googled “Favo’loso Cafe” to check the address and was led, all but inevitably, to TripAdvisor, where I was appalled to discover that most people didn’t view it very favorably at all. One recent visitor pronounced himself “Dissapointted” with the experience. Well, here is a new rule: If you are too stupid to spell “disappointed” even approximately correctly, you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level.

Trawling through the reviews, I found that hardly anybody spoke warmly of Favo’loso’s carefully preserved atmosphere. In fact, most were critical of the decor, calling it old-fashioned and in need of an update. I do despair. We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can’t spell even common words get to decide what survives. That can’t be right, surely. I was, as a TripAdvisor correspondent might put it, deply trubbled.

Chapter 3

Dover

N
OW HERE IS A
question that is harder to answer than you might think: Is Britain a big country or a little one?

Looked at one way, it is self-evidently small, a modest chunk of land floating in chilly waters off the northwestern edge of Europe. Of the total surface area of Earth, Great Britain occupies just 0.0174069 percent. (I should note that I can’t absolutely vouch for that number. It was calculated for me by my son some years ago for a newspaper article I was writing. He was only about thirteen years old at the time, but he had a calculator with over 200 buttons on it and he seemed to know what he was doing.)

By other measures, however, Britain is incontestably substantial. Amazingly, it is the thirteenth-largest land mass on the planet and that includes four continents—Australia, Antarctica, America, and Eurasia-Africa (which geographers, being anally retentive and unimaginative, classify as a single mass). Only eight islands on Earth are bigger: Greenland, New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar, Baffin, Sumatra, Honshu, and Victoria. By population, Britain is the fourth largest island state, behind only Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines. By wealth, it is second. Measured by decent music, old stony buildings, variety of boiled sweets, and reasons for not going to work because of the weather, it is number one by a very large margin. Yet it is only seven hundred miles from top to bottom and so slender in profile that no one in the country is ever more than seventy miles from one of its edges.

Taken all in all, it has long seemed to me that Britain is just about the perfect size for a country—small enough to be cozy and embraceable, but large enough to maintain a lively and independent culture. If the rest of the world vanished tomorrow and all that was left was the United Kingdom, there would still be good books and theater and standup comedy and universities and competent surgeons and so on. (Plus England would get to win the World Cup every time and Scotland would always qualify.) This cannot be said of many other nations. If Canada were the only country to survive, the world would be a nicer, politer place, but there would be way too much ice hockey. If it were Switzerland you would have glorious scenery, precision watches, reliable trains, and, well, that’s it.

Interestingly, the thing that made me realize that Britain is an optimal size was the rarely discussed subject of cow attacks. This is a topic that we don’t pay as much attention to as perhaps we ought. I first heard about cow attacks some years ago while walking on the South Downs Way with a reporter from a walking magazine. I had just become president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, a venerable conservation organization, and he was interviewing me about the countryside. At some point—we were crossing a field in the vicinity of the Devil’s Dyke, near Brighton, if I recall correctly—he mentioned that we should proceed cautiously because there was a bull in our field.

“You’re kidding,” I squeaked, but sure enough, watching us lugubriously from about fifty feet away, was a great rectangular block of beef.

“Just walk normally,” my companion instructed in a taut whisper, “or you’ll attract his attention.”

“But we’re on a national footpath,” I protested, my sense of unfairness momentarily outweighing my instinct to flee. “Surely a farmer can’t put a bull in a field with a footpath through it,” I added. I turned to see what my companion had to say about this and discovered that he was now about seventy yards ahead of me and running like hell. I waddled briskly behind him, casting whimpering glances over my shoulder, but the bull stayed rooted to his spot.

When we were both safely on the other side of the field wall, I repeated my complaint that surely it was not legal to put bulls in fields with public trails through them.

“Actually it is,” my companion told me. “The rule is that bulls can be placed in fields with footpaths as long as they are with beef cows and not dairy cows.”

I was of course bewildered by this. “Why one and not the other?” I asked.

“No idea. But the real danger,” he went on, “is cows. Cows kill a lot more people than bulls.”

Whatever is the next level beyond pained incredulity is the level I reached now. For years I had been striding boldly through herds of cows in the belief that they were the one group of animals larger than a chicken that I could intimidate with the shake of a stick, and now this was being taken away from me.

“You’re kidding,” I said again.

“Afraid not,” he responded in the solemn tone of someone with experience in the matter. “Cows attack a
lot
.”

The next day I did the one thing you should obviously never do. I looked for more information on the Internet. My informant was right. Walkers in Britain, it seems, are killed by cows all the time. Four people were fatally trampled in one eight-week period in 2009 alone. One of these unfortunates was a veterinarian out walking her dogs on the Pennine Way, another long-distance trail, in Yorkshire. This was a woman who understood animals and liked them, probably had treats for cows in her pocket—and they still trampled her. More recently, a retired university lecturer named Mike Porter was trampled to death by an angry herd—yes, angry—in a field near the Kennet and Avon Canal in Wiltshire, a place where I had been walking only the year before. “It looked like they wanted to kill him,” one eyewitness breathlessly told the
Daily Telegraph
. It was the fourth serious attack on walkers in five years just by this one herd.

Now what, you may reasonably wonder, does this have to do with Britain being the right size for a country? Well, stick with me, please. A couple of weeks later I was in Colorado, visiting my son Sam who works in Vail, when I happened to read an article in the
Denver Post
about a man named Dexter Lewis who had been convicted of going into a bar called Fero’s just before closing time, ordering the bartender and four remaining customers to lie down, and then killing them in cold blood as part of a robbery. Now if anyone did anything like that in England, it would be front-page news across the nation. But in America a gruesome murder in Denver is not guaranteed to be news in Memphis or Detroit or anywhere outside Colorado. Those places have murders of their own to be preoccupied with. It wasn’t a particularly big article even in the
Denver Post
.

This is when it occurred to me that the issue here is not how often bad things happen, but how often they are reported, which is quite a different matter, of course. In America, a cow trampling would never make the national news other than in highly exceptional circumstances. If, let’s say, Dick Cheney was trampled to death by cows (and we can always dream), that would be national news. But if it was just some guy walking his dog in Sodom, Indiana, no one outside Indiana—probably no one outside Sodom County—would hear about it. There could be a national epidemic of cow tramplings and no one would know it because the news wouldn’t travel far enough for trends to become apparent. But in Britain if a single cow tramples a walker anywhere in the country, it will almost certainly make headlines. The story of the veterinarian killed in Yorkshire was reported in all the national newspapers except the
Daily Star,
and I am guessing that that was only because the people at the
Star
couldn’t spell “veterinarian.”