When I returned to the ward, I discovered that several of the patients had returned in my absence. Most of them were slumped in chairs in the day room, sleeping off the exertions of a morning spent leaning on a rake or counting Rawlplugs into boxes, except for one dapper and wellspoken fellow in tweeds who was watching a test match on the television. He Invited me to join him and, upon discovering that I was an American, enthusiastically explained to me this most bewildering of sports. I took him to be a member of staff, possibly the mysterious Mr Jolly's afternoon replacement, possibly a visiting psychiatrist, until he turned to me, in the midst of a detailed explication of the intricacies of spin bowling, and said suddenly and conversationally: 'I have atomic balls, you know.'
'Excuse me?' I replied, my mind still on the other type of balls.
'Porton Down. 1947. Government experiments. All very hushhush. You mustn't tell a soul.'
'Ah . .. no, of course.'
'I'm wanted by the Russians.'
'Oh ... ah?'
'That's why I'm here. Incognito.' He tapped his nose significantly and cast an appraising glance at the dozing figures around us. 'Not a bad place really. Full of madmen, of course. Positively teeming with lunatics, poor souls. But they do a lovely jam rolypoly on Wednesdays. Now this is Geoff Boycott coming up. Lovely touch. He'll have no trouble with Benson's delivery, just you see.'
Most of the patients on Tuke Ward were like that when you got to know them superficially lucid, but, underneath, crazy as an overheated dog. It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain.
And so my first permanent days in Britain passed. At night I went to the pub and by day I presided over a mostly empty ward. Each afternoon about four o'clock a Spanish lady in a pink coverall would appear with a clattering tea trolley and the patients would stir to life to get a cup of tea and a slice of yellow cake, and from time to time the elusive Mr Jolly dropped by to dispense medicines or reorder biscuits, but otherwise things were very quiet. I developed a passable understanding of cricket and my skidding came on a treat.
The hospital, I came to discover, was its own little universe, virtually complete unto itself. It had its own joinery shop and electricians, plumbers and painters, its own coach and coach driver. It had a snooker room, a badminton court and swimmingpool, a tuck shop and a chapel, a cricket pitch and social club, a podiatrist and hairdresser, kitchens, sewing room and laundry. Once a week they showed movies in a kind of ballroom. It even had its ownmortuary. The patients did all the gardening that didn't involve sharp tools and kept the grounds immaculate. It was a bit like a country club for crazy people. I liked it very much.
One day, during one of Mr Jolly's periodic visits 1 never did discover what he did during his absences I was despatched to a neighbouring ward called Florence Nightingale to borrow a bottle of thorazine to keep the patients docile. Flo, as it was known to the staff, was a strange and gloomy place, full of much more seriously demented people who wandered about or rocked ceaselessly in highbacked chairs. While the sister went off with jangling keys to sort out the thorazine I stared at the jabbering masses and gave thanks that I had given up hard drugs. At the far end of the room, there moved a pretty young nurse of clear and radiant goodness, caring for these helpless wrecks with boundless reserves of energy and compassion guiding them to a chair, brightening their day with chatter, wiping dribble from their chins and I thought: This is fust the sort of person I need.
We were married sixteen months later in the local church, which I passed now as I made my way down Christchurch Road, shuffling along through papery leaves, under a tunnel of lofty boughs, humming the last eight bars of 'Nell Gwynne'. The big houses along Christchurch Road were unchanged, except for the addition on each of a security box and floodlights of the sort that come on for no reason late at night.
Virginia Water is an interesting place. It was built mostly in the Twenties and Thirties, with two small parades of shops and, surrounding them, a dense network of private roads winding through and around the famous Wentworth Golf Course. Scattered among the trees are rambling houses, often occupied by celebrities and built in a style that might be called Ostentatious English Vernacular or perhaps Game Stab at Lutyens, with busy rooflines crowded with gables and fussy chimneypots, spacious and multiple verandas, oddsized windows, at least one emphatic chimney breast and acres of trailing roses over a trim little porch. It felt, when I first saw it, rather like walking into the pages of a 1937 House and Garden.
But what lent Virginia Water a particular charm back then, and I mean this quite seriously, was that it was full of wandering lunatics. Because most of the patients had been resident at the sanatorium for years, and often decades, no matter how addled their thoughts or hesitant their gait, no matter how much they mumbled and muttered, adopted sudden postures of submission or demonstrated any of a hundred other indications of someone comfortably out to lunch, most of them could be trusted to wander down to the village and find their way back again. Each day you could count on finding a refreshing sprinkling of lunatics buying fags or sweets, having a cup of tea or just quietly remonstrating with thin air. The result was one of the most extraordinary communities in England, one in which wealthy people and lunatics mingled on equal terms. The shopkeepers and locals were quite wonderful about it, and didn't act as if anything was odd because a man with wild hair wearing a pyjama jacket was standing in a corner of the baker's declaiming to a spot on the wall or sitting at a corner table of the Tudor Rose with swivelling eyes and the makings of a smile, dropping sugar cubes into his minestrone. It was, and I'm still serious, a thoroughly heartwarming sight.
Among the five hundred or so patients at the sanatorium was a remarkable idiot savant named Harry. Harry had the mind of a small, preoccupied child, but you could name any date, present or future, and he would instantly tell you what day of the week it was. We used to test him with a perpetual calendar and he was never wrong. You could ask him the date of the third Saturday of December 1935 or the second Wednesday of July 2017 and he would tell you faster than any computer could. Even more extraordinary, though it merely seemed tiresome at the time, was that several times a day he would approach members of the staff and ask them in a strange, bleating voice if the hospital was going to close in 1980. According to his copious medical notes, he had been obsessed with this question since his arrival as a young man in about 1950. The thing is, Holloway was a big, important institution, and there were never any plans to close it. Indeed there were none right up until the stormy night in early 1980 when Harry was put to bed in a state of uncharacteristic agitation he had been asking his question with increasing persistence for several weeks and a bolt of lightning struck a back gable, causing a devastating fire that swept through the attics and several of the wards, rendering the entire structure suddenly uninhabitable.
It would make an even better story if poor Harry had been strapped to his bed and perished in the blaze. Unfortunately for purposes of exciting narrative all the patients were safely evacuated into the stormy night, though I like to imagine Harry with his lips contorted in a rapturous smile as he stood on the lawn, a blanketround his shoulders, his face lit by dancing flames, and watched the conflagration that he had so patiently awaited for thirty years.
The inmates were transferred to a special wing of a general hospital down the road at Chertsey, where they were soon deprived of their liberty on account of their unfortunate inclination to cause havoc in the wards and alarm the sane. In the meantime, the sanatorium had quietly mouldered away, its windows boarded or broken, its grand entrance from Stroude Road blocked by a heavyduty metal gate topped with razor wire. I lived in Virginia Water for five years in the early Eighties when I was working in London and occasionally stopped to peer over the wall at the neglected grounds and general desolation. A series of development companies had taken it over with ambitious plans to turn the site into an office park or conference centre or compound of executive homes. They had set up some Portakabins and stern signs warning that the site was patrolled by guard dogs, which, if the illustration was to be believed, were barely under control, but nothing more positive than this was ever done. For well over a decade this fine old hospital, probably one of the dozen finest Victorian structures still standing, had just sat, crumbling and forlorn, and I had expected it to be much the same indeed, was rehearsing an obsequious request to the watchman to be allowed to go up the drive for a quick peek since the building itself couldn't much be seen from the road.
So imagine my surprise when I crested a gentle slope and found a spanking new entrance knocked into the perimeter wall, a big sign welcoming me to Virginia Park and, flanking a previously unknown vista of the sanatorium building, a generous clutch of smart new executive homes behind. With mouth agape, I stumbled up a freshly asphalted road lined with houses so new that there were still stickers on the windows and the yards were seas of mud. One of the houses had been done up as a show home and, as it was a Sunday, it was busy with people having a look. Inside, I found a glossy brochure full of architects' drawings of happy, slender people strolling around among handsome houses, listening to a chamber orchestra in the room where I formerly watched movies in the company of twitching lunatics, or swimming in an indoor pool sunk into the floor of the great Gothic hall where I had once played badminton and falteringly asked the young nurse from Florence Nightingale for a date, with a distant view, if she could possibly spare the time, of marrying me. According to the rather sumptuous accompanying prose, residents of Virginia Park could choose between several dozen detached executive homes, a scattering of townhouses and flats, or one of twentythree grand apartments carved out of the restored san, now mysteriously renamed Crosland House. The map of the site was dotted with strange names Connolly Mews, Chapel Square, The Piazza that owed little to its previous existence. How much more appropriate, I thought, if they had given them names like Lobotomy Square and Electroconvulsive Court. Prices started at .350,000.
I went back outside to see what I could get for my .350,000. The answer was a smallish but ornate home on a modest plot with an interesting view of a nineteenthcentury mental hospital. I can't say that it was what I had always dreamed of. All the houses were built of red brick, with oldfashioned chimney pots, gingerbread trim and other small nods to the Victorian age. One model, rather mundanely known as House Type D, even had a decorative tower. The result was that they looked as if they had somehow been pupped by the sanatorium. You could almost imagine them, given sufficient time, growing into sanatoria themselves. Insofar as such a thing can work at all, it worked surprisingly well. The new houses didn't jar against the backdrop of the old sanatorium and at least something that surely wouldn't have happened a dozen years ago that great old heap of a building, with all its happy memories for me and generations of the interestingly insane, had been saved. I doffed my hat to the developers and took my leave. I had intended to stroll up to my old house, but it was a mile off and my feet were sore. Instead, I headed down Stroude Road, past the site of the old hospital social club, now replaced by a dwelling of considerable ugliness, and the scattered buildings that had once been hostels for nursing and domestic staff, and bet myself .100 that the next time I passed this way they would be gone and replaced by big houses with double garages.
I walked the two miles to Egham, and called at the house of a delightful lady named Mrs Billen who is, among her many other selfless kindnesses, my motherinlaw. While she bustled off to the kitchen in that charming flutter with which all English ladies of a certain age receive sudden guests, I warmed my toes by the fire and reflected (for such was my state of mind these days) that this was the first English house I had ever been in, other than as a paying guest. My wife had brought me here as her young swain one Sunday afternoon many years before and we had sat, she and I and her family, tightly squeezed into this snug and wellheated loungewatching Eullseye and The Generation Game and other televisual offerings that seemed to me interestingly lacking in advanced entertainment value. This was a new experience for me. I hadn't seen my own family in what might be called a social setting since about 1958, apart from a few awkward hours at Christmases, s.o there was a certain cosy novelty in finding myself in the midst of so much familial warmth. It is something that I still very much admire in the British, though I confess a certain passing exultation when I learned that they were taking Bullseye off the air.
My motherinlaw Mum appeared with a tray of food such as made me wonder for a moment if she had mistaken me for a party of lumberjacks. As I greedily tucked into a delicious, steaming heap that brought to mind the Cairngorms recreated in comestible form, and afterwards sat slumped with coffee and a happily distended stomach, we chattered away about this and that the children, our impending move to the States, my work, her recent widowhood. Late in the evening late, that is, for a couple of oldtimers like us she went into bustling mode again and after making a great deal of industrioussounding noises from every quarter of the house, announced that the guest room was ready. I found a neatly turneddown bed complete with hotwater bottle and, after the most cursory of ablutions, crawled gratefully into it, wondering why it is that the beds in the houses of grandparents and inlaws are always so deliciously comfortable. I was asleep in moments.
AND SO TO BOURNEMOUTH. I ARRIVED AT FIVETHIRTY IN THE EVENING in a driving rain. Night had fallen heavily and the streets were full of swishing cars, their headlights sweeping through bullets of shiny rain. I'd lived in Bournemouth for two years and thought I knew it reasonably well, but the area around the station had been extensively rebuilt, with new roads and office blocks and one of those befuddling networks of pedestrian subways that compel you to surface every few minutes like a gopher to see where you are.
By the time I reached the East Cliff, a neighbourhood of mediumsized hotels perched high above a black sea, I was soaked through and muttering. The one thing to be said for Bournemouth is that you are certainly spoiled for choice with hotels. Among the many gleaming palaces of comfort that lined every street for blocks around, I selected an establishment on a sidestreet for no reason other than that I rather liked its sign: neat capitals in pink neon glowing beckoningly through the slicing rain. I stepped inside, shedding water, and could see at a glance it was a good choice clean, nicely oldfashioned, attractively priced at .26 B & B according to a notice on the wall, and with the kind of smothering warmth that makes your glasses steam and brings on sneezing fits. I decanted several ounces of water from my sleeve and asked for a single room for two nights.
'Is it raining out?' the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm.
'No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.''Oh, yes?' she went on in a manner that made me suspect she was not attending my words closely. 'And will you be dining with us tonight, Mr ' she glanced at my watersmeared card 'Mr Brylcreem?' I considered the alternative a long slog through stairrods of rain and felt inclined to stay in. Besides, between her cheerily beansized brain and my smeared scrawl, there was every chance they would charge the meal to another room. I said I'd eat in, accepted a key and drippingly found my way to my room.
Among the many hundreds of things that have come a long way in Britain since 1973, and if you stop to think about it for even a moment you'll see that the list is impressively long, few have come further than the average English hostelry. Nowadays you get a colour TV, coffeemaking tray with a little packet of modestly tasty biscuits, a private bath with fluffy towels, a little basket of cottonwool balls in rainbow colours, and an array of sachets or little plastic bottles of shampoo, bath gel and moisturizing lotion. My room even had an adequate bedside light and two soft pillows. I was very happy. I ran a deep bath, emptied into it all the gels and moisturizing creams (don't be alarmed; I've studied this closely and can assure you that they are all the same substance), and, as a fiesta of airy bubbles began their slow ascent towards a position some three feet above the top of the bath, returned to the room and slipped easily into the selfabsorbed habits of the lone traveller, unpacking my rucksack with deliberative care, draping wet clothes over the radiator, laying out clean ones on the bed with as much fastidiousness as if I were about to go to my first highschool prom, arranging a travel clock and reading, material with exacting precision on the bedside table, adjusting the lighting to a level of considered cosiness, and finally retiring, in perky spirits and with a good book, for a long wallow in the sort of luxuriant foam seldom seen outside of Joan Collins movies.
Afterwards, freshly attired and smelling bewitchingly of attar of roses, I presented myself in the spacious and empty dining salon and was shown to a table where the array of accoutrements a wineglass containing a red paper napkin shaped into a floret, stainlesssteel salt and pepper shakers resting in a little stainlesssteel boat, a dish containing wheels of butter carefully shaped like cogs, a smallnecked vase bearing a sprig of artificial lilies instantly informed me that the food would be mediocre but presented with a certain wellpractised flourish. I covered my eyes, counted to four and extended my right hand knowing it would alight on a basket of bread rolls proffered by a hovering waiter a mastery of timing that impressed him considerably, if I may say so, and left him in no doubt that he was dealing with a traveller who knew his way around creamy green soups, vegetables served with nested spoons and circlets of toughened rawhide parading under the name medallions of pork.
Three other diners arrived a rotund mother and father and an even larger teenaged son whom the waiter thoughtfully seated in a place where I could watch them without having to crane my neck or reposition my chair. It is always interesting to watch people eat, but nothing provides more interest than the sight of a tableful of fat people tucking into their chow. It is a curious thing but even the greediest and most rapacious fat people and the trio before me could clearly have won championships for rapacity never look as if they are enjoying themselves. It is as if they are merely fulfilling some kind of longstanding obligation to maintain their bulk. When there is food before them they lower their heads and hoover it up, and in between times they sit with crossed arms staring uneasily at the room and acting as if they have never been introduced to the people sitting with them. But roll up a sweet trolley and everything changes. They begin to make rapturous cooing noises and suddenly their little corner of the room is full of happy conversation. Thus it was tonight. Such was the speed with which my dining partners consumed the provends set before them that they beat me by half a course and, to my frank horror, between them consumed the last of the profiteroles and Black Forest gateau from the sweet trolley. The boy, I noticed, had a double heap of both, the greedy fat pig. I was left to choose between a watery dribble of trifle, a meringue confection that I knew would explode like a party popper as soon as I touched a spoon to it, or any of about a dozen modest cuplets of butterscotch pudding, each with a desultory nubbin of crusty yellow cream on top. In dim spirits, I chose a butterscotch pudding, and as the tubby trio waddled past my table, their chins glistening with chocolate, I answered their polite, wellfed smiles with a flinty hard look that told them not to try anything like that with me ever again. I think they got the message. The next morning at breakfast they took a table well out of my line of vision and gave me a wide berth at the juice trolley.
Bournemouth is a very fine place in a lot of ways. For one thing it has the sea, which will be handy if global warming ever reaches itsfull potential, though I can't see much use for it at present, and there are the sinuous parks, collectively known as the Pleasure Gardens, that neatly divide the two halves of the town centre and provide shoppers with a tranquil green place to rest on their long slog from one side of the centre to the other though, of course, if it weren't for the parks there wouldn't be the long slog. Such is life.
The parks used to be described on maps as the Upper Pleasure Gardens and Lower Pleasure Gardens, but some councillor or other force for good realized the profound and unhealthy implications of placing Lower and Pleasure in such immediate proximity and successfully lobbied to have Lower removed from the title, so now you have the Upper Pleasure Gardens and the mere Pleasure Gardens, and lexical perverts have been banished to the beaches where they must find such gratification as they can by rubbing themselves on the groynes. Anyway, that's the kind of place Bournemouth is genteel to a fault and proud of it.
Knowing already of the town's carefully nurtured reputation for gentility, I moved there in 1977 with the idea that this was going to be a kind of English answer to Bad Ems or BadenBaden manicured parks, palm courts with orchestras, swank hotels where men in white gloves kept the brass gleaming, bosomy elderly ladies in mink coats walking those little dogs you ache to kick (not out of cruelty, you understand, but from a simple, honest desire to see how far you can make them fly). Sadly, I have to report that almost none of this awaited me. The parks were very fine, but instead of opulent casinos and handsome kursaals, they offered a small bandstand occupied on occasional Sundays by brass bands of mixed talent dressed like bus conductors, and small wooden erections if you will excuse the term in the context of the Lower Pleasure Gardens bedecked with coloured glass pots with a candle inside, which I was assured were sometimes lit on calm summer evenings and thus were transformed into glowing depictions of butterflies, fairies and other magical visions guaranteed to provide hours of healthy nocturnal enjoyment. I couldn't say because I never saw them lit, and in any case, a shortage of funds and the unconscionable tendency of youths to yank the pots from their frames and smash them at each other's feet for purposes of amusement meant that the structures were soon dismantled and taken away.
I strolled through the (Lower) Pleasure Gardens and on to the tourist information centre on Westover Road to see what alternative entertainments were on offer, and couldn't find out on account of you now had to pay for every piece of printed information that wasn't nailed to the wall. I laughed in their faces, of course.
At first glance, the town centre looked largely unchanged, but in fact progress and the borough council had been at work everywhere. Christchurch Road, the main thoroughfare through the centre, had been extensively pedestrianized and decorated with a curious glass and tubular steel edifice that looked like a bus shelter for giants. Two of the shopping arcades had been nicely tarted up and there was now a McDonald's, a Waterstone's and a Dillons, as well as one or two other establishments less directly connected to my personal requirements. Mostly, however, things had been subtracted. Beale's department store had closed its excellent book department, Dingle's had intemperately got rid of its food hall, and Bealeson's, yet another department store, had gone altogether. The International Store had likewise vanished, as had, more distressingly, an elegant little bakery, taking the world's best sugar doughnuts with it, alas, alas. On the plus side, there wasn't a scrap of litter to be found, whereas in my day Christchurch Road was an openair litter bin.
Around the corner from the old vanished bakery on Richmond Hill were the splendid, vaguely art deco offices of the Bournemouth Evening Echo, where I worked for two years as a subeditor in a room borrowed from a Dickens novel untidy stacks of paper, gloomy lighting, two rows of hunched figures sitting at desks, and all of it bathed in a portentous, exhausting silence, the only noises the fretful scratchings of pencils and a soft but echoing tunk sound each time the minute hand on the wall clock clicked forward a notch. From across the road, I peered up at my old office windows now and shivered slightly.
After our marriage, my wife and I had gone back to the States for two years while I finished college, so my job at the Echo was not only my first real job in Britain, but my first real grownup job, and throughout the two years I worked there I never ceased to feel like a fourteenyearold masquerading as an adult, doubtless because nearly all my fellow subeditors were old enough to be my father, except for a couple of cadaverous figures at the far end who were old enough to be their fathers.
I sat next to a pair of kindly and learned men named Jack Straight and Austin Brooks, who spent two years patientlyexplaining to me the meaning of sub judice and the important distinction in English law between taking a car and stealing a car. For my own safety, I was mostly entrusted with the job of editing the Townswomen's Guild and Women's Institute reports. We received stacks and stacks of these daily, all seemingly written in the same florid hand and all saying the same numbing things: 'A most fascinating demonstration was given by Mr Arthur Smoat of Pokesdown on the Art of Making Animal Shadows', 'Mrs Evelyn Stubbs honoured the assembled guests with a most fascinating and amusing talk on her recent hysterectomy', 'Mrs Throop was unable to give her planned talk on dog management because of her recent tragic mauling by her. mastiff, Prince, but Mrs Smethwick gamely stepped into the breach with an hilarious account of her experiences as a freelance funeral organist.' Every one of them went on and on with page after page of votes of thanks, appeals for funds, longwinded accounts of successful jumble sales and coffee mornings, and detailed lists of who had supplied which refreshments and how delightful they all were. I have never experienced longer days.
The windows, I recall, could only be opened by means of a long pole. About ten minutes after we arrived each morning, one subeditor so old he could barely hold a pencil would begin scraping his chair about in an effort to get some clearance from his desk. It would take him about an hour to get out of his chair and another hour to shuffle the few feet to the window and finagle it open with the pole and another hour to lean the pole against the wall and shuffle back to his desk. The instant he was reseated, the man who sat opposite him would bob up, stride over, shut the window with the pole and return to his seat with a challenging look on his face, at which point the old boy would silently and stoically begin the chairscraping process all over again. This went on every day for two years through all seasons.
I never saw either one of them do a lick of work. The older fellow couldn't, of course, because he spent all but a few moments each day travelling to or from the window. The other guy mostly sat sucking on an unlit pipe and staring at me with a kind of smirk. Every time our gazes locked he would ask me some mystifying question to do with America. Tell me,' he would say, 'is it true that Mickey Rooney never consummated his marriage with Ava Gardner, as I've read?' or 'I've often wondered, and perhaps you can tell me, why is it that the nuanua bird of Hawaii subsists only on pinkshelled molluscs when whiteshelled molluscs are more numerous and of equal nutritive value, or so I've read.'
I would look at him, my mind fogged with Townswomen's Guild and Women's Institute reports, and say, 'What?'
'You have heard of the nuanua bird, I take it?'
'Er, no.'
He would cock an eye. 'Really? How extraordinary.' And then he'd suck his pipe.
It was altogether a strange place. The editor was a recluse who had his meals brought to his chamber by his secretary and seldom ventured out. I only saw him twice in all the time I was there, once when he interviewed me, a meeting that lasted three minutes and seemed to cause him considerable discomfort, and once when he opened the door that connected his room to ours, an event so unusual that we all looked up. Even the old boy paused in his endless shuffle to the window. The editor stared at us in a kind of frozen astonishment, clearly dumbfounded to find a roomful of subeditors on the other side of one of his office doors, looked for a moment as if he might speak, then wordlessly retreated, shutting the door behind him. It was the last I ever saw of him. Six weeks later, I took a job in London.
Something else that had changed in Bournemouth was that all the little coffee bars had gone. There used to be one every three or four doors, with their gasping espresso machines and sticky tables. I don't know where holidaymakers go for coffee nowadays yes I do: the Costa del Sol but I had to walk nearly all the way to the Triangle, a distant point where local buses go to rest between engagements, before I was able to have a modest and refreshing cup.
Afterwards, fancying a bit of an outing, I caught a bus to Christchurch with a view to walking back. I got a seat at the top front of a yellow doubledecker. There is something awfully exhilarating about riding on the top of a doubledecker. You can see into upstairs windows and peer down on the tops of people's heads at busstops (and when they come up the stairs a moment later you can look at them with a knowing look that says: 'I've just seen the top of your head') and there's the frisson of excitement that comes with careering round a corner or roundabout on the brink of catastrophe. You get an entirely fresh perspective on the world. Towns generally look more handsome from the top deck of a bus, but nowhere more so than Bournemouth. At street level, it'sf essentially like any other English town lots of building society offices and chain stores, all with big plateglass windows but upstairs you suddenly realize that you are in one of Britain's great Victorian communities. Bournemouth didn't even exist before about 1850 it was just a couple of farms between Christchurch and Poole and then it positively boomed, throwing up piers and promenades and miles of ornate brick offices and plump, stately homes, most of them with elaborate corner towers and other busy embellishments that are generally now evident only to bus riders and window cleaners.
What a shame it is that so little of this Victorian glory actually reaches the ground. . But then, of course, if you took out all that plate glass and made the ground floors of the buildings look as if they belonged to the floors above, we might not be able to see right into every Sketchley's and Boots and Leeds Permanent Building Society and what a sad loss that would be. Imagine passing a Sketchley's and not being able to see racks of garments in plastic bags and an assortment of battered carpet shampooers and a lady at the counter idly cleaning her teeth with a paperclip, and think how dreary life would be. Why, it's unthinkable.
I rode the bus to the end of the line, the car park of a big new Sainsbury's at the New Forest end of Christchurch, and found my way through a network of pedestrian flyovers to the Highcliffe road. About a halfmile further on, down a little sideroad, stood Highcliffe Castle, formerly the home of Gordon Selfridge, the department store magnate, and now a ruin.
Selfridge was an interesting fellow who provides a salutary moral lesson for us all. An American, he devoted his productive years to building Selfridges into Europe's finest shopping emporium, in the process turning Oxford Street into London's main shopping venue. He led a life of stern rectitude, early bedtimes and tireless work. He drank lots of milk and never fooled around. But in 1918 his wife died and the sudden release from marital bounds rather went to his head. He took up with a pair of HungarianAmerican cuties known in musichall circles as the Dolly Sisters, and fell into rakish ways. With a Dolly on each arm, he took to roaming the casinos of Europe, gambling and losing lavishly. He dined out every night, invested foolish sums in racehorses and motorcars, bought Highcliffe Castle and laid plans to build a 250room estate at Hengistbury Head near by. In ten years he raced through $8 million, lost control of Selfridges, lost his castle and London home, his racehorses and his RollsRoyces, and eventually ended up living alone in a small flat in Putney and travelling by bus. He died penniless and virtually forgotten on 8 May 1947. But of course he had had the inestimable pleasure of bonking twin sisters, which is the main thing.
Today Highcliffe's stately Gothic shell stands crowded by bungalows, an incongruous sight, except at the back where the grounds run down to the sea through a public car park. I'd like to have known how the house had come to be in such a parlous and neglected state, but there was noone around its brooding eminence and there were no cars in the car park. I followed some rickety wooden steps down to the beach. The rain had stopped in the night, but the sky was threatening and there was a stiff breeze that made my hair and clothes boogie and had the sea in a frenzy of froth. I couldn't hear anything but the pounding of waves. Leaning steeply into the wind, I trudged along the beach in the posture of someone shouldering a car up a hill, passing in front of a long crescent of beach huts, all of identical design but painted in varying bright hues. Most were shut up for the winter, but about threequarters of the way along one stood open, rather in the manner of a magician's box, with a little porch on which sat a man and a woman in garden chairs, huddled in arctic clothing with lap blankets, buffeted by wind that seemed constantly to threaten to tip them over backwards. The man was trying to read a newspaper, but the wind kept wrapping it around his face.