Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Doing England

" Doing England "England is agarden. "-R. W. Emerson h, I say, it's the Americans! The Americans are here!" The little , ruddy-faced guy named jerry opened the door of the Thistledown, a B & B on a side street in Windermere, and swooshed us in. "I've been expecting you. james, from down the street, said you were coming and here you are." He takes a breath. "When he called, Ijust said to the japs, I said, 'Go on, now,. go on,. there's no room for you here,. I have Americans coming.' "See them? They're just down the street there. The japs, you know, are impossible. They poke under the mattresses, they look at everything, they haggle about the prices. Give me Americans any day." 31 Giant Country 32 In the tiny living room Elvis was playing on the record player, and there was a boy, Jerry's friend, lounging languidly on the sofa. Betsy gave me a look that said, "Does this guy remind you of L.A. or what?" At breakfast the next morning-an English breakfast with scrambled eggs unredeemable by any measure of salt, some stewed tomatoes (beloved of all Englishmen and good for Vitamin C), and a pink, meat-like substance said to be bacon, curling with fat-Elvis was still playing-the late, gross years of"l Did It My Way"-andJerry, who made a point of serving the men first, was still on the subject of the Japs, which led us, the girl from Liverpool who sounded just like John Lennon, and the English woman with her family, to talk about stereotypes. We asked them what they thought of when they thought of Americans, and the girl who sounded like John Lennon didn't really know, but the very stereotypical English woman with the family replied, "Well, you know, we say that Americans come to a car park, get out of the bus, spend forty-five minutes at the castle, gather up all the brochures and pile them on their coffee tables when they get back to America. "They 'do' England," she concluded. Guilty as charged. We had been doing England for a couple of weeks now, and we'd trooped around the Tower of London, we'd been to the Roman baths at Bath, we'd seen our share of abbeys, ruins, and memorial gardens, and we were absolutely daft about England. But Windermere was a little disappointing. Too much traffic, too many tourists. Wordsworth had seen it coming long ago, at midpoint of the previous century. He'd deplored the advent of the railroad to Windermere in 1847 and fought, successfulIy, to keep the trains from reaching his cherished Grasmere, eight miles away. Wordsworth, who by then had become very conservative (he lived nearly forever) worried that if workers were able to leave their humble cottages and go on sight-seeing trips they would disrupt the pastoral quietude of his native country and ruin their own morals to boot. He was right Doing England about the first, anyway, and he might have been right about the second . At the pubs in Windermere we wondered how Wordsworth would have felt about the state of yeomanry a century and a half later. The Queens menu was pretty typical: "pizza marguerita" suggested a new if uncertain eclecticism. (Most pubs now serve lasagna, and most have something they call "chili con carne," which is served with rice.) The Queens had a small pool table. Pool tables, like plumbing, are something that the British haven't mastered. The tables have the thinnest of felt surfaces, the balls are tiny, the openings to the pockets minuscule. One game can last a whole afternoon. On the wall above the table, a series of framed photographs of dogs shooting pool looked down upon the players. On another wall, a calendar from a lorry firm showed a young woman displaying the full glory of her abundant chest. In all of England we saw such art only in the Lake District. The lake at Windermere was disappointing too. It looked like a tourist-developed lake anywhere; it could have been in the Poconos. Lots of carny-type hustle, signs for boat tours, lots of ducks, and very little quiet. The English are crazy about the Lake District. "It's the most beautiful part of England," they kept telling us. A fascination with lakes must be the explanation because there...