(This the tenth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

The day after my birthday, Sue and Wendy had appointments in Wells but I opted to stay home.  I was intent on finding a footpath, if I was lucky, to Street.  Or barring that, just a footpath to walk.  They are everywhere in England but so far I had mostly only been down The Drain. I only got as far as a little short one off the Drain.  It took me onto the main highway -two narrow lanes, no shoulders, fast cars.  Across the road was a break in a hedgerow where I glimpsed sheep.

I’d been trying to get close to some sheep for two weeks.  They had mostly been whizzed past me from the train or the car.  I ran back home for my camera.  Five minutes later and the sheep had gone.  I tried to peer around the hedgerow.  I wondered, how do sheep disappear in five minutes?

I carried on to the Post Office Shop where I knew that Sally, the baker of my birthday cakes, was working the morning shift and I wanted to thank her.  I picked up Sue’s bread order and bought a Daily Telegraph.  Back home I hunted high and low for the tin I knew the birthday cakes were in and finally found it in Sue’s bathroom.

I cut two thick slices of coffee walnut cake and put them on the Union Jack napkins that had been part of neighbor’s Marian and David’s Happy Birthday in England package.  I put on the apron they had given me and went next door with the cake.  I expected this would get me an invitation to tea and I wasn’t disappointed.  We had a fun conversation; they both made me laugh.  David said he would run me up to Castle Cary to the train when I left in two days’ time and I felt relieved to think I wouldn’t have to rely on the Nippy bus.

I wrote down their address so I could write to them and in the process I found that I had been muddling the Butleigh postal code for, I don’t know, ten years!  I had always written BA6855 when it was BA68SS.  Those European fives look like ss’s to me!

I got to go to Nether Stowey after all.  Sue had to work in the afternoon but Wendy and I could do some touring.  Sue read a description of the Coleridge Cottage out of her National Trust guide: “award winning former home of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  .  .light refreshments in the tea room–”

“Tea room?” Wendy popped her head out of the kitchen.

“Tea room?” I said from the couch where I was teasing Tabsy. “Let’s go to Nether Stowey.

Sue put her National Trust card on the table by my purse. “You can use this, but you probably should say as little as possible until you get past the door because the cards aren’t transferable.”

It was a beautiful drive into the Quantock Hills.  At the door I stayed behind Wendy, the headmistress, and let her do the talking.  I handed over my card with my lips tightly closed.  Since the ticket taker then became our guide, I was afraid to open my mouth.  I could lie in my own world but not in an English one.

Coleridge Cottage, Nether Stowey

It turned out to be a magical experience for me. Here was the room where Coleridge wrote “Frost at Midnight” with his baby in a cradle next to him  .  .  .  probably.  And in the garden was a lime tree bower.  Not The Lime Tree Bower and not in the exact spot, but close enough for my imagination to go wild.  In case you have no idea what I am on about, “The Lime Tree Bower My Prison” is one of my favorite Coleridge poems.  It’s a poem only an English major can love but worth a look.

‘Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.  .   .

No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

The Lime Tree Bower

The National Trust is tending to create hands on exhibits, which I think are marvelous.  We were encouraged to touch everything, sit on chairs, and try on clothes.  The only thing we weren’t allowed to do is break the glass cases and play with the authentic artifacts.

They made much of the fact that Coleridge had in a letter described the cottage as “mouse infested.”  There were fabric mice, knitted mice and plastic mice in every room of the house.  I began counting them for fun but stopped at 17 by the time I hit the second parlour.  Children (of all ages) would love it.  That’s the thinking behind the trend: to get younger people interested in the National Trust properties.

Wendy and I stopped in Glastonbury to see Pam and take her some birthday cake.  This was the most lucid I had seen her.  She had complete sentences and she clearly connected me with photos of Seattle and of my house.

She drank from a cup for the first time since her stroke. She held on to the cup, raised it to her mouth, sipped, and set it down shakily onto the tray-table.  She did it again.  The second time it was executed much more steadily.  By the fourth sip, she was executing the movement and hitting the targets smoothly.  It was fascinating: witnessing a brain connection leading to a new skill.   I’ve gotten to see Pam four times since I’ve been here and I am so glad it worked out that way.

Wendy and Pam

Sunday morning–the next day– was a wet one and it began for me when I walked up the path to see if the sheep were visible.  They were.  As I stood watching them the church bells began to peal.  They rang and clanged and did that falling down a ladder thing they do.  I stood in the wet with the sheep and the bells and thought, “Could anything be more English?!”

“You thought you were in the middle of a John Betjeman poem,” Sue said when I told her.  Sue gave me the best birthday gift I could have gotten when she said, “Elena, you have an English soul.”

Sheep of my English soul

The three of us set off at noon for the coast of Dorset, destination West Bay and Lyme Regis.  The rain wasn’t supposed to have started until 7:00 in the evening but it rained and fogged up the windows right from the start.  I opined that it might be clear on the coast.  Sue looked at me piteously and said, “Bless.”

When we got to West Bay, Wendy asked, “Do you want to drive through the town or get out?”

I knew in my heart what the correct answer was but I said, “Oh I want to get out.  I want to see the big rock.”

The “big rock” is the Golden Cap made famous in the mini-series Broadchurch.  We parked, put on our rain coats and hoods and made our way through the puddles to the harbor.  The wind was fierce.  I could hardly believe how good natured Sue and Wendy were.  As we picked our way along Sue bumped up against me.

“You don’t have to shove me into a puddle,” I said. “It’s raining. I get it.”

The beach is made up of tiny smooth pebbles, which stings on bare feet.  But the pebbles get into shoes and hurt in a different way.  I went barefoot because I wanted to paddle or as Americans say, wade.   My feet sank six inches into the pebbles, making movement forward a struggle.  I struggled to the water’s edge.

Sue and I took photos and laughed at each other while Wendy waited at the top of the hill.  Back at the car park, Sue and I made for the toilets.  “I can always cock an eye–or a leg– for a place to wee,” Sue said.

At West Bay, Dorset

We drove the ten miles west to Lyme Regis, a Georgian town often visited by Jane Austen, her characters, and Sue and Wendy.  They come down for a day away quite often to go round the shops and walk the footpaths and have tea in a Wendy approved tearoom.  On this Sunday it was raining so the best we could do was a restaurant called “By the Bay” with a view of the Cobb featured in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Sue, West Bay, Dorset

Back home I said a difficult goodbye to Wendy before she set off to Burnham for the night and work as usual in the morning.  Sue and I stayed up talking books and literature. Tomorrow I was going to London for three days and my trip was nearing its end.

(This is 9th in a series that begin with A Night in Steerage.)

After my experience in Wells, I wasn’t eager to try new bus adventures.  I wanted to go to Nether Stowey to see the Coleridge Cottage.  Sue looked into it for me and said that the bus would only get me to within 20 miles of the cottage and the rest of the journey would involve a taxi and some very careful planning if I was going to make that all important last bus of the day. The internet makes it sound like a bus drops you off at the front door of the Coleridge Cottage twice an hour.

Instead I stayed in town and went to Holy Communion at St Andrews.  I don’t know why I like doing this.  To me it’s not a religious experience so much as I feel like I’m in  Masterpiece Theater.  The service was from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which both attracted and repelled me with its cannibalistic imagery and masochistic sentiments.

What I found moving was the parade of old age pensioners who limped, wheeled and stumped with canes and sticks to the altar.  Bent with scoliosis, osteoporosis and arthritis, they come every Thursday morning for this.  The elements were taken down to an old nun who sat silent and sour in a pew.  A man in the back was trying to hack up such a plug that I hoped he didn’t get in line ahead of me. There’s something wonderful about a ritual that brings people into meaningful connection with each other regardless of whether I or anyone else happens to believe the liturgy.

The smell of coffee wafted through the hall.  I took mine to the sour old nun who brightened into a beautiful smile. I said hello.

“Who am I speaking to?” she asked.  “I’m blind, you see.”

“Are you completely blind?” I asked. “Or can you see shapes?”

“No, completely blind, only impressions of light and shade.”

We talked for quite a while.  Her name was Sister Ruth and her order was in Portsmouth but she lived in Burnham in a home for the blind.  Calm contentment emanated from her. I was glad I had come if for no other reason than to sit for a few minutes and have coffee with her. When I left I put my arm around her and she leaned into me with a force more powerful than a bear hug.

It had been trying to rain all day but the when the sun finally won out, I elected to go for a walk on Burnham’s fine beach. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot for miles out past the lighthouse, repeating the poem that had been in my head during the communion service.  It has become a prayer and a mantra to me when I travel alone.  It’s part of a canto from Louis MacNeice’s “Autumn Sequel:”

A cloud of witnesses. To who? To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless.
To all the things that will not notice when we die,
Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

On the steps below the esplanade I cleaned my feet and encouraged the seagulls with the end of a loaf of bread. They are so used to being fed, they come very close.  I got them hovering, flapping and fighting and took photo after photo, hoping to get some good action shots.

I came back through the shops on the High Street and bought a Guardian at the Post Office Shop.  I’ve been buying a different paper every day: The London Times, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian.  Back home I curled up on the couch, tried to understand Brexit and fell asleep.

A cat came to visit: a sleek Siamese. He appeared and was watching me when I spotted his face.  He didn’t respond when I schmoozed and after a while went on with his ablutions.  “To all the things that will not notice when we die, yet lend the passing moment words and wings.”

According to The Guardian, after holding a taste test, the best tea is

1) Marks and Spencer Luxury Gold
2) Clippers organic
3)Morrison’s English Breakfast
4)Co-op Loved By Us 99 blend.

Good to know.  And if you are in the market for an electric teakettle, get a Russell Hobbs.  It’s so efficient, all you do is look at it in the morning, say “Tea” and it fills itself up and boils in 30 seconds.

On June 17, it took me a while to remember it was my 62^nd birthday.  I was up at 5:30, looking out over Mervyn’s dear old garden, now overgrown and unkempt, but still beautiful to me.  I’d been watching all week for foxes because I’d been told they have a den somewhere at the bottom of the garden. So far only the Siamese cat had shown up.  And birds: chickadees, sparrows, the great whacking pigeons, magpies, gulls, crows and an assortment of other black colored birds: blackbirds, I guess.  I liked the way the crows held their own with the seagulls.

I did laundry and tried to clear up and put the house back the way I had found it.  I had taken it over: I dressed in one room, slept in another.  I bathed in the big tub in the downstairs bathroom and made all my other ablutions in the upstairs one. I wrote in the breakfast nook and read and ate in the conservatory because it opened into the garden where the birds, squirrels one cat, and no foxes come.

Janet took me for shepherd’s pie and lemon posset at Saunders Garden Center.  Back at her house, I fed Penny the last of the dog biscuits and happened to notice that Janet had some of my china pattern that I inherited from my Aunt Ann.  Mason’s Regency. Impossible to get any longer, Janet gave me a small dish that would pack easily, a birthday surprise.

Wendy fetched me when her school day ended.  On the way back to Butleigh, we stopped in Glastonbury to see Pam.  I told Wendy that talking to Pam was like standing in front of a locked door with hundreds of keys, trying out one after another to see which would unlock it.

It was nice to be back in Butleigh.  Sue and Wendy had asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday and I said that principally I wanted to be with them.  And I wanted cake.  That was enough. There were two kinds of cake: the gluten free coffee walnut one I had requested and a lemon cake because neither of them fancied coffee walnut.  I had a slice of both.

David and Marian (neighbors) had put together a birthday package of Things British, including a candle for the Queen’s 90^th. Sue and Wendy gave me a gift certificate, light and easy to pack.  Eight hours later came the Facebook blizzard of greetings, making me feeling like I had had two birthdays but only got one year older.  Sue and I stayed up talking books and literature. It was one of the happiest birthdays I’ve ever had.

Happy English Birthday (photo by Sue Cooke)

Coffee Walnut (photo by Sue Cooke)

(This is 8^th in a series that begin with A Night in Steerage.)

On my way to the Old Pier to catch the bus to Wells I chatted with a man who ascertained for what felt like the hundredth time which side of the street I wanted.  It’s funny: there aren’t that many buses in and out of Burnham and there are only two sides of the street; I don’t know why it’s so difficult.

Directions in general are difficult. I wish I had a pound for every time someone who gave me directions ended with “You can’t miss it.” As in: “Right. You carry on down to the bottom of the High Street, veer off onto the wonky road and turn right at the sign for Community Toilet Scheme.  You can’t miss it.”  As in: “Yes, I can.”

When I got on the Bakers Dolphin 67, I asked the bus driver, “How much is a Wells return?”

“It’s free.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it won’t cost you anything.”

“Why is that?”

There followed an explanation that referred to the Webber bus that I had expected to catch, the phrases “belly-up overnight” and “keep the route going” and traffic commissioner.  I didn’t quite understand because his accent was hard to follow and I was fascinated with the way three of his lower teeth stuck out like a gangplank.

My free ride to Wells was an hour of sheep, cows, villages and people walking their dogs.  A Cathedral Lady got on: beautiful face, her grey hair pinned back in a top-knot with wispy curls around the forehead and neck.  She wore a printed skirt, blue jacket and sensible shoes.  When we got to Wells, she and I both made for the bus station toilets, in which a recording of a cathedral choir plays while you wee.

I hoofed it all the way past the front of the cathedral to the Tourist Information to find out where the library was because I wanted to e-mail a Happy Birthday to someone.  Naturally the library was back the way I came and I found it tucked away in Union Street.  That errand called for a cup of tea.  I always try to channel Wendy when I am looking for a tea place as she has a sixth sense for the best ones.  I ended up at the Swan Hotel, certainly not a place Wendy would choose, but quiet and empty was good enough.  I had my cup and surreptitiously nibbled a gluten free coffee walnut muffin I had bought at Burns the Bread.

Wells Cathedral

When I felt ready to go on, I entered the cathedral.  This would be my third visit to Wells so when I saw that it was ten minutes of twelve, I knew to beetle over to the clock for its biggest performance of the day.  On the hour, the knights of this medieval clock come out and joust before the bell tolls.  I joined the elderly sitting on benches in back of the hordes of school children sitting on the floor.

Wells Cathedral Clock

The cathedral is really an enchanted place.  The nave takes my breath away and this time I got tears when I entered the Quire.  It’s a wondrous thing to have such a majestic and magical place feel familiar!

I was actually intent on finding a different kind of majesty:  The Cathedral Cat.  Since I was here last, a cat named Louis has made this his home.  I had gone up past the Quire, idly looking for the Jesse Window.  When I didn’t spot it up in the front (or is it the bottom, which means the end?) When I turned to go back, I saw a cat asleep on a chair. He endured being awakened, turned around the other way and fell back asleep.  This turned out to be Pangur, Louis’ competition.  The cathedral was apparently crawling with cats, much like Sue and Wendy’s cottage.  I never did see Louis.

Cathedral Cat: Pangur, the competition to Louis

Neither did two other Louis Spotters who photographed Pangur and went with me to find the Jesse Window, which had been in the Quire all along.

“Cracked that one!” the man said.

“By jove!” I said.

I went to the Bishop’s Palace to see if I could find Maisie, the Bishop’s Palace cat I met seven years ago. I spotted her across the croquet lawn while I was eating my pea and charel soup at the Bishop’s Table café.  I kept an eye on her until I finished my lunch and could go over and say hello. She wasn’t nearly as friendly as the day seven years ago when she shared my tea with me.  She grabbed my hands with her paws and bit. But then she posed so I could take a photo.

Maisie, 2009

I walked across the drawbridge onto the grounds of the Bishop’s Palace, surely the epicenter of the enchantment.  If I lived here, I would have a membership and visit once a month to restore myself. I love the rampart walk where you can see the countryside and feel safe and protected and be enveloped by the quiet.

Maisie, 2016

As I walked around the wells, the sky darkened and I heard thunder. I hurried to see the reflection of the cathedral in the wells before the rain came.  Which it did and I finally needed the raincoat I had been lugging around for a week and a half.  “Thundery showers” is what they call these weather conditions.

There was an open air market outside the cathedral at the top of the High Street.  I stayed under its canopies as I walked toward the bus. In the process I bought a hat and a carpet bag.  When I lost the protection of the canopies, I looked for a place to have tea.  There is a wide gutter between the sidewalk and the High Street in Wells and it was already nearly overflowing.

I ducked into Coffee #1, another place Wendy would have passed up.  They had The Most Luscious orange cake I have ever eaten—gluten free. I wrote for an hour, keeping my eye on the rain and a big school clock.  I needed to pee and to pick up a loaf of bread I had bought earlier at Burns the Bread before catching the bus home.

The 3:40 bus I meant to take was sitting in its dock with a sign saying “Not in Service.” I joined the people milling around.  Information began to trickle in: the bus wouldn’t start, there were only two buses running this route, the drivers were Romanian and ours didn’t understand English very well, he also seemed frightened and not sure what to do, they were sending a relief bus in ten minutes, they were sending a relief bus within the hour, the 3:40 wouldn’t run at all, the only bus left that day was the 5:40.

A small woman in her early seventies hitched up beside me on the misericords they give you to sit on at the bus stops. When she heard my voice, she asked me where I was from.

“Seattle.”

“Oh, Seattle.  Frasier.  I love Niles. He’s a pantomime with words.”

This exchange made us instant mates.

“Would you like a doughnut, love?” she asked pulling two long packages out of her bag.

“Oh, no thanks,” I said. “I just had a piece of cake.”

She offered the doughnuts to the rest of the people at the stop.

“Here,” she said. “I’ve got custard and raspberry.  Which would you like?”

“Why did you buy so many?” I asked.

“I couldn’t decide which I wanted so I got both but I was only ever going to eat one of each.”

Chris led the charge for us all to sit in the broken bus while we waited for Bakers Dolphin to rescue us.

“Sit with me, love,” she said, patting the seat next to her.

We were joined by a young man who looked like a young Alec Baldwin and I told him so.

“Ooh, I didn’t like him when he was young,” Chris said. “But now that he’s old and fat and gray, he’s lovely!”

Our companion was named Sam. It turned out that both he and Chris were out-of-work actors.  They talked about Equity and I decided it was Rupert Graves that he looked like. Then we moved on to Brexit.

“It’s already over,” Sam said. “The politicians are just making noise now.  We all know how it’s going to come out.”

“How is that?” I asked

“Remain,” said Chris.

“Leave,” said Sam at the same time.

The second Bakers Dolphin 67 showed up at 4:40 and the three of us boarded it even though it wasn’t due to head toward Burnham until 5:40.  Here’s what I learned about the 67 route lately run by Webber bus and now by Bakers Dolphin: For every trip it makes from Wells to Burnham-on-Sea, it makes two trips to Wookey Village and back to Wells and two trips to Wookey Hole and back to Wells. The last time it goes back to Wells it becomes the 5:40 to Burnham-on-Sea.  And not before.  No matter that they hadn’t run the scheduled 3:40.  The bus driver was beside himself trying to explain this to us.

It was pouring rain.  Our options were to stand in the rain and wait until 5:40 or go back into town and sit somewhere dry. No one wanted to get out of sight of the bus station just in case a relief bus showed up. So we rode back and forth from the two Wookeys to Wells for two hours having a grand old time.

Finally we were headed home.  Chris got off a few villages before Burnham at East Huntspill.

“I’m going to give our driver a doughnut,” she said as she packed up.

“Whether he wants one or not,” I said.

“Whether he wants one or not,” she laughed.

We kissed goodbye and I watched her insist the driver take a dough-nut.

“There’s raspberry and custard.  Which do you want? No, take one. They’re lovely.  Here. Here’s a raspberry one, sweetheart!”

She got off the bus, leaving the driver with a drippy dough-nut and waved to me until I could see her no more. I walked in the door of the house on Love Lane at 7:00 and went straight for the Talisker.

Entrance to the Quire

Chapter House steps, worn with use

Entrance to the Bishop’s Palace

View from the Ramparts Walk

(This is 7th in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage)

Burnham-on-Sea is a small resort town on Bridgewater Bay, which is itself a dip in the Bristol Channel.  I was here in 2009 when Mervyn was alive and Pam was herself.  I stayed with them in their semi-detached house on Love Lane.  From my big upstairs bedroom I could look out onto the garden and see Mervyn pottering around overseen by what he called the “whacking great pigeons.”  The pigeons are still there. Pam and Mervyn were only there by association and imagination this time.

Mervyn in the garden from my bedroom window, 2009

My first order of business after a lazy morning was to go around the corner to Tesco and get something with fat in it.  I can’t bear this semi-skimmed milk and faux butter spread Sue and Wendy use.  I got some “single cream,” which turned out to be like our whipping cream (yum) and real British butter.

I pushed the cart backwards around the store wondering why it was so difficult to maneuver.   It was funny how everything was the same as what I was used to but just slightly different enough to throw me off.  There was no earthly explanation for why a cart shaped the way that one was should be pushed from the other side. I couldn’t figure out the stove or the dishwasher.  Showers were hand held.  Keys in doors didn’t turn the way I expected them to.  Once I tried to get into the house next door because it looked like Pam’s house.

I spent a long time in Tesco trying to find some hand cream.  I hadn’t brought nearly enough. I expected Pam would have dozens of bottles and tubs of cream falling out of cupboards.  The elderly always do. The only bottle of cream she had was ancient and when I squeezed it, the bottom exploded and old, runny stuff came out all over me.  I wanted something I couldn’t get at home.  I settled on a big tub of something called Astral.

Later I showed it to Sue. “What can you tell me about this?”

“Astral? Oh, my mother used to use that.”

“Oh, great. I’ve bought Ponds cold cream.”

“Joanna Lumley uses it and she looks fabulous.”

Sue and I looked at each other, a beat went by and we said simultaneously, “Absolutely fabulous!”

I walked the half a mile into town and made for the esplanade and the beach. The tide was out so I walked on the beach all the way down to the Old Pier on the far side of town. There used to be a train station across the street but it’s gone now.  So is Jackie Welch’s tea shop.  Most of the shops are thrift shops and 99p shops (Dollar stores).  The Home Hardware and DIY is still there and the proprietor I chatted with seven years’ ago was as jolly as ever.  When I was here before we talked about different meanings of the word “solicitor.”  This time we talked about Brexit and Donald Trump.

Welch’s Tea Room on the High Street, 2009

Back on the beach, I walked along looking toward the funny little lighthouse and thinking, “I’m really here.  I never thought I’d be here again.”

It’s a funny little place, really.  It’s small and middle-class and not posh at all, which is one of the things I like about it.  There’s not much to do and I like that, too.  There’s a sign on the esplanade that points to a “Community Toilet Scheme” that sounds a little alarming.

Funny little lighthouse of Burnam-on-Sea, otherwise called “iconic.”

The next day I went to meet my friend Janet.  When I was here before, I went to services at St Andrews Church because there were bells.  They actually rang the bells fifteen minutes before the service started so you’d know it was time to join the stream of people issuing from the their homes. There I met Janet, an older woman who clearly was one of the energizing members of the church.  She took charge of me, took me to the coffee, bought me a biscuit, and introduced me to everyone.  We have been exchanging Christmas cards ever since.

St Andrew’s Church, Burnam-on-Sea

Last fall I wrote to tell her I was coming in June.  In her Christmas card, she acknowledged my visit.  I wrote again in the spring to tell her the exact dates I would be in Burnham and where I would be staying.  No response.

Once when I was staying in Rye in Sussex I met a couple who told me they lived down the road from Charles Darwin’s house and that I should go see it and then come knock on their door.  I asked Mervyn if he thought they meant what they said.  Because when you say something like that to an American, they’ll take you at your word.

“I think if you knocked on their door, they’d be shocked,” he said.

When I didn’t hear from Janet, I began to doubt the existence of seven years of Christmas letters.  But the night Wendy and Sue left me at the house I found that Wendy and Joy (sister) had stocked the place with fruit and vegetables, Mary Beary dressing and a sampling of every gluten free cake, cracker and biscuit in Tesco.  In the midst of this plenty was a note in Janet’s familiar handwriting.  She suggested I pop into the church the next morning because she would be there and we could make some plans.

At 11:00 the next morning I popped.  I was greeted by Penny, the Schnauzer, and the newest member of Janet’s household.  I was ready for her with dog treats.  Janet and three other women were seated around a table.  They were there to pray and Janet invited me to stay.  I was horrified.  But it turned out to be very C. of E., that is to say civilized and short.

Penny

I went home with Janet, saw her garden, and her house, Field’s End, overflowing with correspondence and church business affairs and knickknacks in an owl motif.  The bags of woolies in the living room will be given to a teen shelter in Weston Super Mare, but the paper clutter and the 10,000 owls are, I fear, there to stay.

We made a lunch together and ate in what Janet called her conservatory and I called a sunroom.  Then she took me to Church Field, the school where Wendy is the headmistress, in the town of Highbridge, two miles from Burnham.

It was a good day to visit.  Wendy and her deputy head were touring all the classrooms to help judge the best poster, card and crown made in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s 90^th birthday.  My favorite card was one a boy had made from a box.  Open the lid, and it said “Dear Queen, Happy Birthday.”  Wendy calls this “teaching British values” with more than a raised eyebrow of irony.

Janet picked me up later for supper at a pub called The Dunstan Arms. We had fish and chips and a blackcurrant sorbet so sweetly tart it made my eyes water. Later, feeling very full, I went round to the Tescos to see what they had to say for themselves in the way of spirits.  I found a bottle of Talisker just the right size to last me the rest of my stay in England and I went to bed happy.

The next day was set aside to go to one of my favorite places: Wells.

signpost, Burnam-on-Sea

Old Pier, Burnam-on-Sea

(The is the sixth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

First of all, Beaulieu is pronounced “Bew-ly.”  Again I had been saying it as though I was in French class.  Sue said “Bew-ly” from the start.

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“That’s just the way we’d say it.”

“You mean the English?”

“It would have a Norman pronunciation.”

Beaulieu is a lot of things: a stately home, gardens, an abbey, and a motor museum among them.  But I wanted to go for the spy museum.  One of the houses on the estate was the “finishing school” and last port of call for the agents of the Special Operation Executive before they were dropped into occupied Europe during the Second World War.  I’ve been more or less obsessed with this subject for several years and I wanted to go to Beaulieu so badly that I tried to figure out how I could do it in a day from London.  It would have involved a train, a bus, and either $80 for a taxi or a seven mile bicycle ride through the New Forest on a hired bicycle. I was thrilled when Wendy and Sue said they would take me.

We looked up Beaulieu in the guide book.

“I’m not interested in the spy museum,” Wendy said.

“I’m not interested in either the spy or motor museum,” Sue said.

“I’m not interested in the motor museum,” I said.

There is something for everyone at Beaulieu. And as it turned out we all enjoyed the motor museum.

It’s a large estate and they provide a little toy monorail to get you from one end to the other.  It’s a perfectly walk-able area but you don’t realize that when you look at the map.  We queued up for the train and waited while six tiny cars emptied themselves of their passengers and took on about a third of the people standing in the queue.  We didn’t make the cut and there was to be a fifteen minute wait.  I am so amazed at the patience of the British.  I was ready to walk.  I was so close to the spies I could hardly stand it.

I stayed with Sue and Wendy.  We were next to a family of five that included an unhappy and unapologetic whiner (or whinger) of a five year old.  It was classic whining at the precise pitch of maximum irritation.

“We’re not getting in their car,” Sue said darkly.

We waited.  The child whined. And waited. The child whinged. We talked about childhood games we played to pass the time in car trips.

“I spy with my little eye,” I said. “Something that begins with ‘b.’”

Sue looked around, bored. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Brat.”

We got the giggles.

“I’m used to it,” Wendy, the headmistress, said as she placidly read her guidebook.

Amongst her other splendid qualities, Wendy also has what Sue called “teacher’s bladder.”  Sue and I need to pee (or wee) every couple hours.

The monorail came round again.  It squeaked and rocked and inched us along through the top of the motor museum.  This operated on me like a well-targeted commercial.  The motor museum might be fun after all.

Wendy and Sue on the toy monorail

At the far end we separated and I went to see the SOE exhibit.  “I’ve got my gas mask right here,” I said indicating the beige colored raincoat bag that was slung over my shoulder.

Earlier when I was waxing large about the significance of the spies on this very estate, Sue had had a glazed look in her eyes.  Now Wendy smiled benevolently.

I thought, “Oh god, I’m acting like someone who talks non-stop about the insides of a car or a computer or about how apps work, not noticing that the other person doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.”

The Special Operations Executive museum, Beaulieu

I decided to thrill to my private obsessive experience but to shut up about it. It was a very small exhibit but it was satisfying.  All day as I walked around Beaulieu, I thought, “They were here. Christine Granville, Francis Cammaerts, Nancy Wake, Odette Sansome.  They all trained here and they all left from here.  In the Abbey cloisters is a plaque that reads:

“Remember before God those men and women of the European Resistance Movement who were secretly trained in Beaulieu to fight their lonely battle against Hitler’s Germany and who before entering Nazi-occupied territory here found some measure of the peace for which they fought.”

The Abbey was peaceful. There was some sort of presence there. That wasn’t just my imagination because Wendy felt it, too.

On the Abbey wall, Beaulieu

Wendy at Beaulieu.

We had lunch at the Brabazon Café.  It was one of those confusing buffet lines where I need to jump the queue to see everything before I can make up my mind and then I have to go back and start over.  Wendy and Sue got lasagna with heaps of greens on the side, which they gave to me because though I ordered the 3-salad special, there was nothing green in any of them.  There was a tasteless beetroot salad, a potato salad with mustard seeds all over the potatoes and coleslaw, which had enough dressing to give the beetroot and potatoes some flavor. Sue’s lasagna was all dried up. Wendy placidly ate her juicier lasagna, Sue kvetched about hers and I tried to imagine the machine that would shred beetroot so thin. The last mark against the Brabazon was that if they had had any decaffeinated hot drinks, we would have had to drink them in paper cups.

When we left, we headed for Burnham-on-Sea where I would trade places with Wendy.  She could go home to her bed and I would stay in Pamela’s house for the next 5 days. Near Longleat, another stately home with benefits, we got stuck in a congestion of creeping cars. We inched along for over an hour. Signs along the road read: “Elton John Concert. Turn off your Sat Navs and follow directions.” (Satellite Navigators are what we call Global Positioning Systems.  Much more fun to say “Sat Nav” than “GPS.”)

“What’s he doing at Longleat?” Sue asked. “This area can’t manage this kind of traffic.”

The concert had started at 6:00. At 7:30 we were still crawling.  Again I was amazed at how patient Wendy was.  “It’s all part of the rich tapestry of life,” she said. She says this a lot. I think it’s a coping mechanism. Sue is more like me: we complain. I would have joined her in this case but I was acutely aware that they were taking me 40 minutes out of their way home where five annoyed cats were waiting for their tea.

Wendy was finally able to turn away from the stream of cars and take a different route, one that went through Cheddar Gorge.  I was delighted to see it again and to come through the whole of it. It brought back good memories of being here when Mervyn was alive and Pamela was herself and they had been so good to me.

Cottages at Cheddar Gorge

I woke up the next morning in my old room at the house on Love Lane ready for the second week of my trip.

Motor Museum, Beaulieu

Motor museum, Beaulieu

(This is the fifth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

Saturday, June 11 arrived.  This was the day I had planned my entire trip around.  The day of the St Leonard’s Church village fete.  We’ve all seen fetes on PBS mini-series: the big hats, the tea tent, local musicians, crying children, a murder or two.

Nobody slept well the night before. It was a muggy night and I was tired from the day in Bristol.  I went up to the church in the morning to have a look at the set up and to meet Raquel, the fete organizer, who had given me a job selling raffle tickets.  She showed me the ticket booth and several people came over to get a look at this specimen of humanity who had enthusiastically volunteered to help.

I went home and fell asleep for two hours, waking to find Sue in her bed with a migraine and three cats.  She said she would come up at 3:00 and do her bit at the book stall.  I left her in bed and went down the drain to the village fete.  (It’s pronounced “fate.”  I’ve been pronouncing it as though I was in French class and have been putting the ostentatious circumflex over the first “e” at great expense to my computer skills.)

Raquel suggested I hit up people in the refreshment tent because they were sitting ducks.  I sat at table after table chatting with people.  Everyone cheerfully bought one, two, ten tickets at a pound each.  Everyone asked me what the big attraction the village fete was to me.

“Was this what you expected?”

“Actually it is although I hadn’t expected the rain”

“It wouldn’t be a proper English fete without rain.”

It wouldn’t be a proper English anything without someone making reference to “a proper” something.

Over and over I explained that we do much the same thing in the States but it’s usually just a bake sale or a book sale or a rummage sale.  We don’t have “tombola.”  I had never heard of a “bottle stall” but I thought it was a brilliant idea: people clean out their cupboards and donate bottles of what they want to get rid of, anything as long as it’s in a bottle: spirits, wine, vinegar, fizzy water.  It has to be at least two thirds full.

Bottle stall

The coconut shy

Then there was the “coconut shy.”  There had been a flap on at the shop earlier because the coconuts hadn’t arrived until the last minute.

We don’t have clay pigeon shooting that I know of.  And we certainly don’t have tours of the church’s 300 year old bell tower.

In the bell tower

I climbed all the way to the top of the tower spurred on by two men who said appreciatively, “Ooh it’s nice to see a woman up here.” They encouraged me to climb right into the bell scaffolding where I took a photo, then promptly dropped my camera.  The battery case flew open and one of the batteries dropped through a bell hole onto the level below.

“Why, it’s a battery,” I heard someone say.

“It’s mine,” I cried in my crass American accent.  “I’m just coming.”  As though I thought someone would pounce on it and not give it back.

I was more or less on the run from my appointed duties because I had muddled the tickets and thought a break was in order.  I’d sold all my tickets and was set to go back for more when I realized I had a book of blank stubs that should have had someone’s name and phone number on it. And I had a set of five coupons that someone else should have had on their person.

“They’re going to fire me,” I moaned to the couple I had been sitting with.

“Oh no, let’s just get this sorted,” the woman—Marilyn—said.

We lined up the numbers on the coupons and I scanned the tent for people who looked familiar.

“I guess I’ll have to go around and try to find people,” I said

Marilyn’s husband waved his hand. “Oh don’t bother,” he said philosophically. “They weren’t going to win anyway!”

That made me laugh.  When I told Wendy and Sue later, Wendy said that whoever didn’t win would probably want to thank me as the first prize was a chance to go glamping five miles down the road.

So I was up in the bell tower in shameful retreat. When I got my camera sorted, I climbed down and went back to the fete in time to hear the village choir. It could have been The OK Chorale at a farmer’s market except they were all women and they had memorized their music.  I enjoyed watching the director.  I knew how she was feeling and what she was thinking.

The all important director

Butleigh women’s choir

Sue and Wendy were there when I got home.  Sue was feeling better and the three of us met Wendy’s sister Joy in Street for a meal at Pizza Express.  It wasn’t what I expected.  When it comes to pizza I am still back in the 70s when pizzas were three inches of  mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and oregano.  I got a Caesar salad but when I saw the pizzas, I wish I had gotten one of them instead: thin crust heaped with good looking vegetables.

I have to say something about the food: it’s fabulous.  Vegetables and fruits are fresh and taste like what they are.  Carrots taste like carrots, not like cardboard with a layer of pesticide the way they often do in the States, even the organic ones.  Gluten free is everywhere.  And I can’t say enough about the cakes.  The British really know how to make a cake. Another thing they know how to do is grow strawberries.  I am eating peas from Zimbabwe, tomatoes from Poland and grapes from Egypt. This seems exotic to me.  As well they are all tasty.  But the strawberries are British and there isn’t a dud among them.  Sweet strawberry-tasting strawberries.  I could eat them all day.

On our way back to the car park in Street, Sue and I both got cash from the cash machine in the High street. There were a bunch of noisy males in the street when I was typing in my pin. It rattled me because I hadn’t gotten a fix on why they were being noisy.

“It made me nervous to be getting money with hooligans behind me,” I said as we walked to the car.

“We weren’t going to hurt you,” Sue said wickedly.

Sue and I stayed up talking about British and American holidays and food.   Tomorrow we were driving to Beaulieu in the New Forest in Hampshire.  It’s going to be another big day so get some sleep.

(This is the fourth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

One of the features of the day I spent in Bristol was that I didn’t have to know anything.  I didn’t have to look at timetables or figure out where stops and stations were.  I didn’t even have to know what time it was.  Sue did it all.

Neighbors David and Marian gave Sue and me a ride to Wells, knocking hours off our travel time.  From Wells we traveled up green hill and down atop a bus to Bristol Temple Meads station.  We followed signposts to a ferry dock for the ferries that run back and forth through the Floating Harbor, a diversion of the River Avon that runs through Bristol. We had just missed a ferry and had a 40 minute wait for the next one, a situation that called for tea.  Feeling peckish, Sue had a snack and I had a meal.

Then we boarded the Matilda ferry and drifted calmly past the city.  It was overcast, warm and muggy but with a cooling breeze.  There was no loud music, no guide yakking at us. We could have been floating on a cloud.  It was heavenly.

Bristol Floating Harbor ferry boat

We disembarked at the SS Great Britain, a 19^th century vessel that sailed all over the world as a passenger and then a cargo ship.  It was built by a man with the unlikely name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Sue and I wandered through the ship trying to keep ahead of a class of school children.  Neither of us likes to read and inspect everything so we travel well together.  Sue is a photographer; she took photos. I did all the interactive stuff for children.

It really is a beautiful museum with lively information and unusual features such as the rats in the kitchen.  I saw them running back and forth behind a screen and jumped back in alarm.  I stared for a long time trying to fix whether they were actually real.  Even when I saw and heard the mechanical cat poised to catch one, I wasn’t convinced.

“They even have rats in the kitchen,” I said to Sue.

“Well, they would do, wouldn’t they?”

Another snack (me) and meal (Sue) at the SS Great Britain café and we were back on the ferry, this time the Independence, which wasn’t as nice as the Matilda. One of the operators, standing upwind, had quite ripe armpits. Sue called them pongy.

We were both highly entertained by an older woman sitting with her very English-looking husband.  I can’t explain what I mean by that other than to say he looked like someone out of P.G. Wodehouse.  He wore a hearing aide, which I imagine he turns off quite a lot.

“Warehouse apartments,” the woman read off the side of a building. “Now I wonder what that can mean.  I know what warehouses are and I know what apartments are but I wonder what warehouse apartments are.”

I looked idly at the sign.  It did indeed advertise Warehouse Apartments. I closed my eyes and breathed in the freshwater smell.  Like a lake in summer.  A flock of seagulls had congregated over something (probably) disgusting in the water ahead of us.  When our boat interrupted them, they whooshed up and filled the sky over our heads.  I watched their paths as they swirled above us like giant noisy snowflakes.

A small voice interrupted my reverie.

“I don’t imagine I’d want to live in one.  I expect they’re quite small and very expensive.  But how could they be warehouses?  That’s the part I don’t understand.”

I looked at the husband.  He seemed in his own world.  The ferry made a stop.  New people got on.  I asked Sue where we were.  The armpit moved away.  The boat carried on.

“You store things in warehouses.  How would you get an apartment out of that?  I’m sure they’re expensive whatever else they are.”

When we got to Temple Meads, Sue whispered to not let the pongy armpit hand us out of the boat. “We should go to the chemists and get him some deodorant,” she added.

“Give it to him in lieu of a tip.”

Sue asked, “Do you think people find our conversation as boring as that woman who kept going on about the warehouse apartments?”

“Did you hear her, too?” I asked. “First of all, no. I think people find our conversation scintillating.”

“Yes, we raise it to the level of armpits.

“But seriously, what was that about anyway, the business with the warehouse apartments?”

“She obviously couldn’t get her mind around anything other than they were going to be expensive.  Maybe she thought they’d still be full of cartons and boxes!”

“Wherever would she put her teapot?”

We both got the giggles and the warehouse apartments became the joke of the day. As we waited for the bus home, another verbal wanderer was having trouble getting her mind around a sign with the words Expats on the side of a bus.

“If they’re Australians, they can all go home, I says.”

“Ask her if she has a sister,” I whispered to Sue.

Snort.

We missed the last bus home from Street.  Whereas other people might need to call a taxi, we had Wendy who always stops to see Pamela in Glastonbury before she comes home.  We took the bus to Glastonbury.  This contingency plan had been arranged ahead of time and I didn’t have to know anything or be responsible for anything.  It was lovely.

Sue and I went down the road between the two cafes to the Glastonbury Care Home.  Pam had gotten her hair cut the day before and she looked adorable.  When she saw us, she grabbed our hands and wouldn’t let go.

Again her sentences began in English and petered out into something only Pam could understand and even that might be locked away from her. She was fixed on something about England and Monday.  Then Margaret showed up in the verbiage.  Nobody knows who Margaret is.

“It was beautiful!” she enthused.  “And if hick mere mean England she alt pore Monday for Margaret.”

When there was a break, I leaned in and said slowly, “Pam, what’s a warehouse apartment?”

The long day ended when Wendy showed up and we all went to Wirral Plaice for fish and chips.

Warehouse Apartments

(This is the third in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

Glastonbury is a mere 3 ½ miles from Butleigh but it takes two buses to get there. The main road is too dangerous to walk and even if one were to brave it, it would be unpleasant what with cars whizzing around corners and one having to throw oneself into the hedgerows because there is really only one lane and no shoulders.  I needed more than a few days to find the circuitous route of footpaths that might make it possible to walk.  I never got over the frustration of this and as I recall never let go of mentioning it.

So getting to Glastonbury without a car entailed taking a Nippy Bus from Butleigh and changing at Street, which was two miles away.  There are only a few buses that go in and out of Butleigh every day. Prominently on the bus time table is information about the last bus out of Street, critical if one wants to get home the same day.  Sue was much more interested in my making it home by the last bus than she was in finding the footpath scheme to Glastonbury.

So I caught my Nippy bus on Thursday morning and five minutes later I was in Street.  (Before you ask, nobody could explain to me why a town was called Street.) I could have immediately hopped a bus to Glastonbury but I was side-tracked by a county market that was going on at Crispin Hall.  I had to have a wander through and look at everything: jam, vegetables, crafts.

Then I had to wait a good half hour for the next bus. I spent a lot of time staring across the High Street at a bakery called Burns the Bread, thinking how clever the name was and what a shame I didn’t eat wheat.  I chatted with a young mother who deftly changed a diaper and organized formula with one arm holding the baby. I listened to a loquacious woman going on and on about her “hiatus hernia” to a smiling old guy who responded with “Yesyesyesyesyes” just like Trevor Peacock in The Vicar of Dibley.

Finally I was in Glastonbury and I set off with the excellent directions Sue and Wendy had given me to see Pamela in the Glastonbury Care Home.  Get off the bus at the Abbey, turn around, walk down the road between the two cafes.  (Halfway down the road I stopped at the Tea and Chi for a restorative cup.)  Turn right on Garvens Road, cross a highway, turn left on Drum Ave, wind through a little housing estate ending at Pikes Close and there is the care home.

I found Pam.  I was prepared to be shocked but I wasn’t. She has shrunk to about 100 pounds and she’s bed-ridden because her body isn’t cooperating after the stroke. But her energy and her essence are sparkling.  She was astonished to see me, then delighted and affectionate. She grabbed my hand and her grip was strong.

There’s been brain damage but she is slowly making brain connections and getting language back.  We had comical exchanges.  Pam tended to begin every sentence in English and to end in some other language.

“Hi Pamela.  It’s Elena. From America.”

“We went to France and iffen da shento.”

“Yes, you and Mervyn came to Seattle.  The Space Needle. The ferry.”

“The war. My grandmother is foken da hoosh.”

“Yes, there was a war. Tell me about the war.”

“Margaret my grandmother whoosh saken chee.”

“Pamela, remember when I came and we went to Looe?”

“I remember.  I remember what fee ashen.”

The only really lucid thing she said –and she said it three times while clutching my arm—was, “Can you stay all day?” It nearly broke my heart.  I stayed for an hour, promising to come back.

On the walk back into town I stepped into the Glastonbury Music Shop and met the proprietor, Hywel Jenkins. In our first exchange we became mates.

“I’m a music teacher from America and wanted to see what a British music store was like.”

“Where do you live in America?”

“Seattle.”

“Frasier Crane Country.”

We chatted for a long time about teaching music.  It’s a little known fact that the English don’t have quarter notes, half notes and whole notes.  They have crochets, minims and breves. Wouldn’t they just? But it doesn’t end there.  The eighth note is a quaver, a 16^th is a semi-quaver, a 32^nd is a semi-hemi quaver and a 64^th is a semi-hemi-demi-quaver.  I am not making this up.

The conservatories have begun introducing the American terminology because as Hywel said, the English terms may be more imaginative but the American ones actually identify the notes mathematically.   I was sorry to hear that.  I bought a couple of books and Hywel gave me the teacher discount.

I walked to Magdalene Street and found the shop Earth Fare.  I had been charged with buying gluten free pasta if I expected to eat dinner that night.  Later I learned that the English are all over the gluten free thing and there are aisles in chain supermarkets with rows of GF food.  The cakes are especially good; I did an exhaustive study.  Sue bought me a loaf of the best GF bread I’ve ever had; it came from Burns the Bread.

I visited the Abbey ruins. I took my shoes off and walked on the grass.  I was here once before, in 1980.  I have a photo I took of the grave of Arthur.  Glastonbury is one of the many, many places King Arthur is buried in the United Kingdom.

Glastonbury Abbey ruins. The chained area near the center is Arthur’s grave

I got a tarot reading from Katie Player of the Goddess Temple. Tarot readings usually leave me feeling depressed or scared but this was centering and inspiring.   I left feeling glad I had seen Katie but also thinking, “Goodness, money does slip through my fingers.”

I had tea in the Abbey Tea Rooms where Pam, Mervyn, Sue, Wendy and I had a meal last time I was in England.  It was Wendy’s choice.  She has a nose for the best tea rooms. I remember there had been some rowdy football players there and Sue said they were probably “from the north.”  As I was paying I saw my bus pull up across the street and I rushed out, avoided being hit by a car and ran across the street to hop on.

Abbey Tea Rooms

Glastonbury is a tourist’s town.  It draws a lot of wanderers in every sense of the word: drifters, but also seekers.  I think there are posers as well as sincere spiritual pilgrims there.  It’s a maze to negotiate the real from the fake and who even knows where that line is? Street is a regular people’s town.  You can find a laundry, a florist, a chemists, supermarkets, and outlet stores.  Still it was in Glastonbury that I found the music store and visited my cousin in a nursing home.

Both towns really ought to have a clearly marked footpath to Butleigh.

(This is the second in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

Butleigh is a small village in Somerset, a county west of London, north of Cornwall.  In previous trips to England I have spent most of my time in Cornwall because that is where I, in a sense, came from.  My great grandfather emigrated from Cornwall and ended up in Walla Walla, Washington where my father was eventually born.

My connection with the now distant relations from Cornwall began for me when my great aunt Ann died in the mid-seventies and I got a hold of her address book.  I found someone called Hazel White who lived in Harrowbarrow, Cornwall.  I wrote to Hazel, then in her mid-70s.  We had been corresponding for several years when I went to visit in 1980 and stayed with her in the little made-over miners’ cottages she had lived in all her life.

During that first visit I met Hazel’s niece Pamela, Pamela’s husband, Mervyn, and their youngest daughter, Wendy, then 16, who lived next door. Fast forward ten years, everyone was still alive and I spent Christmas with them. By the time I visited again twelve years’ later, Hazel had died, Wendy was deputy head of a school and I stayed with Pamela and Mervyn.   Next visit Pamela and Mervyn had moved to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset near Wendy’s school.  When I stayed with them in Somerset I got a better acquainted with Wendy and her longtime chum, Sue. The three of us in this younger generation began to correspond, principally Sue and I.  Mervyn died unexpectedly a few years’ later: Bittersweet.  After all the plans for my trip were settled, Pamela had a stroke and is now ensconced in a nursing home in Glastonbury a few miles from Butleigh.

And then there were three (plus five cats.) But there were only two bedrooms in Butleigh.  The unbelievably gracious arrangement that Sue and Wendy made was for Wendy to sleep at Pamela’s house in Burnham, five minutes from her school, but forty minutes away from her home while I slept in her bedroom in Butleigh.  Sue and Wendy picked me up at the train station at Castle Cary and I slept-walked through that first evening, slept nearly 12 hours that night and awoke to birdsong, tea, and five cats.

Let me get all the introductions out of the way.  Three black cats are Lizzy, Izzy and Seamus.  Tabsy is a tabby and Misty is a long-haired black and white cat.  Seamus remained cautious of me for the duration, Lizzy not quite so much.  Izzy was fearless when she was around at all. Misty got comfortable enough with me to nap on my bed and Tabsy was my great pal probably because he knew I was always good for a salmon cat treat.

That first morning Sue took me on a tour of the village beginning with “going down the drain.”  My expression.  The Drain is the name given to a footpath that gets Sue from the cottage to her job at the village shop.  So down the drain, past the tree on the triangle, turn right, village green and bus stop on the right, Post Office shop on the left.

Going down the Drain

Butleigh Post Office Shop

Carrying on up the street and there’s St Leonard’s, the parish church.  Currently there is a sign on the heavy hardwood studded door that says to keep the door shut because baby birds are nesting in the portico and they might fly into the church and get into mischief.  Actually I added that last bit.

St. Leonard’s Church, Butleigh

Inside the church smells damp (they all do) and is cool and dark (they all are.)  The pews are martyr friendly with their short seats and straight backs.  The seats in the choir stall are more comfortable, which is ironic because singers would sing better with the martyr’s posture.  The pipe organ has been replaced with a loo. I’m a bit torn about that.

Outside the church Sue and I ran into a woman called Jane who was lugging bags of books destined for the book stall at the upcoming fete. She halloed Sue.  Everyone knows Sue except the movie folk who weekend in the manor house up the road and don’t mix with the village.

Jane looked at me but addressed Sue.  “Who’s this then?”

There was a pause. I wasn’t sure if I or Sue was meant to fill it.

Sue said, “You know Wendy who you always call Barbara? This is her relation from America.”

Jane looked at me. “Do you like Alice Munro?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I read her stories and then I can’t remember any of them.”

“Oh.”

And she went on her way.

Sue looked at me. “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?”

I went to work with Sue at noon.  There had been a big delivery the night before (Tuesday) and I flatter myself that I helped unpack it.  I stacked frozen chips and Kelly’s clotted cream ice cream.  I collapsed boxes and put on price stamps.  I mugged behind the register. I bought 35 of the single postcard of Butleigh and 35 stamps. Everyone will get the same card.  It saves me looking through the racks. I discovered Princess brand marshmallows and really wish I hadn’t.  I like the pink ones best.

Sue working at the shop

Elena posing at the shop

When I got hungry, I bought some Mary Beary salad dressing (it’s the best dressing I have ever tasted) and went home to make a salad.  Tabsy was mauling a huge worm next to the rabbit hitch as I unlocked the outer and then the inner door with skeleton keys.   The rabbit hutch used to be used for rabbits but now it’s a little sunroom for storing wood and garden supplies and for drying clothes, much like my own sun room except now I have rabbit hutch envy.

The rabbit hutch

The next morning (Thursday)Seamus scratched relentlessly on my door beginning around 4:00.  I almost got up to let him in. It felt like home.

“He may have jumped into bed with you,” Sue said later. “Or he may have had a pad around and weed on something so it’s just as well you didn’t let him in.”

“A pad around.”  “Weed.” There is something so charming about the way the English use the language.  I am utterly infatuated.

Tabsy had not been mauling a worm, rather a type of lizard called a slow worm.  It looks like a garter snake and it can shed its tail to escape a predator and grow another one. Tabsy had pretty much shipped this slow worm south. When I left for the bus stop on Thursday morning, Lizzy was throwing the head of the now stiff slow worm around the garden.

Next stop, Glastonbury.

Izzy (photo by Sue Cooke)

Lizzy (photo by Sue Cooke)

Misty

Seamus

Tabsy (photo by Sue Cooke)

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I just returned from three weeks in England.  The plan was never to write blog posts while I was there because it takes me four hours to do a decent one and quite frankly I was too busy having fun.  But here is the first installment with many more to come as I attempt to make a wonderful trip last even longer:

The plane from Seattle to London was a dreadful nine hours. What used to be coach is now business class and they have obviously added a lower class called steerage.  That’s where I was.  It was impossible to get comfortable.  I wanted to throw everything I owned off the plane just to make a little room to move.  Every time I reached down to get something–my water, my book, a tissue– it seemed as though some indeterminate bulk of possessions shifted in such a way as to make it impossible to just return to my position without more or less repacking everything.

My back ached the entire nine hours.  There was no pillow propping that helped.  Gwen had loaned me a blow-up foot ottoman and Nancy had loaned me a roll up and scrunch head pillow.  They conspired against me in ruthless ways.

On the plus side I sat next to a dead ringer for Jean Marsh who was just as uncomfortable as I and who expressed her discomfort in her understated British way.  I watched two movies because my pillows would not let me get my book once I had dropped it on the floor.  I only slept three hours because I had forgotten to pack Xanax in my flight bag.  So I had a Scotch.

I was spit though passport control and finally was walking down a corridor.  I passed a currency exchange counter with two idle tellers and a cash machine.  When I put my debit card into the machine, a dial pad of numbers appeared.  I only knew my pin in letters.  I asked the woman at the currency exchange if she could help me but she was decidedly uninterested. It was apparently too much trouble for her to even raise her head and meet my eyes.

Someone who looked American stepped up to the cash machine.  When he got his cash, I asked him if he could help.  Together we figured out what my pin was in letters.  I got my cash and wish I had yelled “THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR HELP” to the currency exchange woman who was picking her nose behind the counter.  I had only just arrived and my sassiness didn’t fully activate until I had been around my friend Sue for 24 hours.

I found my way to the Heathrow Express and got to Paddington station where I took advantage of my first class rail pass to collapse in the first class lounge and get a decent cup of tea.  That lounge has been my first and last port of call to England the last four trips and I appreciate it more and more as I get older.  It’s comfortable and provides water, juices, coffee, tea, fruit, and whatever nibbles the British regard as appropriate to the time of day.  By mid afternoon the choice was between two enormous cakes under glass domes to be cut with a silver cake slicer.

Mike, the attendant to the nobs, was a lovely man who helped me figure out that the train I was planning to take to Castle Cary would not actually get me to Castle Cary.  He found me an earlier one. It was the same train an elderly woman was taking.  Her daughter had brought her to the station and was fussing all over her.  She was worried her mother would get on the wrong train, obviously out of a sense of guilt that she wouldn’t be staying to put her on the correct one.

When we found I was to be on the mother’s train, I said I’d make sure she got the correct train since by now I was reasonably certain I knew what I was doing.  Mike put us both on a buggy and I got a ride to the train platform.  It turned out that Mum needed absolutely no help from anyone and could have done without her daughter treating her like she was a half wit.  She was cheerful about sharing her tumbril with me, though.

“This is really the way to go,” she twinkled.

As soon as I got off the train in Castle Cary, I smelled Cow.  I was in Somerset.  The station master–David–let me use his cell phone to call my cousin Wendy and her longtime friend, Sue who I also think of as my cousin.

“Is it a local call?” he asked.

“I assume so,” I said.  “It’s to Butleigh.”

“That sounds like one of ours,” he said.

I settled in to wait.  So should you.

Great Western Railway Train at Castle Cary