Britain? Beware of the natives!
As a magical Mail series earlier this month showed, no one’s captured our many eccentricities as wittily as Bill Bryson. You loved it so much, we’re now bringing you his equally joyous sequel
TWO decades after his first humorous and affectionate book about Britain became a bestseller, Bill Bryson embarked once again on a journey round the island he has made his home. The result is The Road To Little Dribbling, which brilliantly captures our national quirks. Today, in the first extract of a serialisation guaranteed to make you smile, it’s Bognor’s turn to come under his waspish scrutiny . .. o NE OF the things that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself.
Recently, in France, I was hit square on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I don’t think I could have managed in my younger, more alert years. There are really only two ways to get hit on the head by a parking barrier. One is to stand underneath a raised barrier and purposely allow it to fall on you. That is the easy way, obviously.
The other method — and this is where a little diminished mental capacity can go a long way — is to forget the barrier you have just seen rise, step into the space it has vacated and stand with lips pursed while considering your next move, then be taken by surprise as it slams down on your head like a sledgehammer on a spike. That is the method I went for.
Let me say right now that this was a serious barrier — like a scaffolding pole with momentum — and it didn’t so much fall as crash back into its cradle. The venue for this adventure in cranial trauma was an open-air car park in a pleasant coastal resort in Normandy called Etretat, not far from Deauville, where my wife and I had gone for a few days.
I was alone at this point, however, trying to find my way to a clifftop path at the far side of the car park, but the way was blocked by the barrier, which was too low for a man of my dimensions to duck under and much too high to vault. As I stood hesitating, a car pulled up, the driver took a ticket, the barrier rose and the driver drove on through. This was the moment that I chose to step forward and to stand considering my next move, little realising that it would be mostly downwards.
Well, I have never been hit so startlingly and hard. Suddenly, I was both the most bewildered and relaxed person in France. My legs buckled and folded beneath me and my arms grew so independently lively that I managed to smack myself in the face with my elbows. For the next several minutes my walking was, for the most part, involuntarily sideways.
A kindly lady helped me to a bench and gave me a square of chocolate, which I found I was still clutching the next morning. As I sat there, another car passed through and the barrier fell back into place with a reverberating clang. It seemed impossible I could have survived such a violent blow.
But then, because I am given to private histrionics, I became convinced I had, in fact, sustained grave internal injuries, which had not yet revealed themselves. Blood was pooling inside my head, like a slowly filling bath, and at some point soon my eyes would roll upwards, I would issue a dull groan and quietly tip over, never to rise again.
The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life left to you. I spent most of the following three days gazing appreciatively at Deauville, going for long walks or just sitting and watching the rolling sea and blue sky.
Deauville is a very fine town. There are far worse places to tip over.
One afternoon as my wife and I sat on a bench facing the Channel, I said to her, in my new reflective mood: ‘I bet whatever seaside town is directly opposite on the English side will be depressed and struggling, while Deauville remains well off and lovely. Why is that, do you suppose?’
‘No idea,’ my wife said. She was reading a novel and didn’t accept that I was about to die. ‘What is opposite us?’ I asked. ‘No idea,’ she said and turned a page. ‘Weymouth?’ ‘No idea.’ ‘Hove maybe?’ ‘Which part of “no idea” are you struggling to get on top of?’ I looked on her smartphone. (I’m not allowed one of my own because I would lose it.) I don’t know how accurate her maps are — they often urge us to go to Michigan or California when we are looking for some place in Worcestershire — but the name that came up on the screen was Bognor Regis.
BEFORE I went there for the first time, all I knew about Bognor Regis, beyond how to spell it, was that some British monarch, at some uncertain point in the past, in a moment of deathbed acerbity, called out the words ‘Bugger Bognor!’ just before expiring, though which monarch it was and why his parting wish on earth was to see a medium-sized English coastal resort sodomised are questions I could not answer.
The monarch, I have since learned, was George V, and the story is that in 1929 he travelled to Bognor on the advice of his physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, who proposed that a spell of fresh sea air might help him recover from a serious lung complaint.
That Dawson could think of no better treatment than a change of scene is perhaps a reflection of his most outstanding characteristic as a doctor: incompetence. Dawson was, in fact, so celebrated for medical ineptitude that a ditty was composed in his honour. It went: Lord Dawson of Penn Has killed lots of men. So that’s why we sing God save the King. The King chose Bognor not because he held any special affection for it, but because a rich chum of his named Sir Arthur du Cros had a mansion there called Craigweil House, which he offered to the King for his private use.
Craigweil was by all accounts an ugly and uncomfortable retreat, and the King liked nothing about it, but the sea air did do him good and after a few months he was well enough to return to London. If he left with any fond memories of Bognor, he didn’t relate them.
Six years later, when the King relapsed and lay dying, Dawson blandly assured him that soon he would be well enough to return to Bognor for another holiday.
‘Bugger Bognor!’ the King reportedly said and thereupon died.
The story is nearly always dismissed as fiction, but one of George V’s biographers, Kenneth Rose, maintains it could be true and that it certainly would not have been out of character.
Because of the King’s short residency, Bognor petitioned to have the word Regis added to its title, and in 1929 this was granted, so that interestingly its supreme elevation and onset of terminal decline date from almost precisely the same moment.
Like so much of coastal Britain, Bognor has seen better days. Once upon a time, happy, well-dressed throngs flocked to the town for carefree weekends.
Bognor had a Theatre Royal, a grand Pavilion with what was said to be the finest dance floor in the South of England and a much esteemed, if not very accurately named, Kursaal, where no one was cured of anything but patrons could roller-skate to the music of a resident orchestra and afterwards dine beneath giant palms. All that is distant history now. The pier at Bognor survives, but barely.
Once it was 1,000 ft long, but various owners took to lopping lengths off it following fires or storm damage, so that today it is just a stub 300ft long that doesn’t quite reach the sea.
For years Bognor had an annual birdman competition, in which competitors tried to get airborne from the pier end using various homemade contraptions — bicycles with rockets strapped to the sides and that sort of thing.
Invariably, the competitors would travel an amusingly short distance and splash into the water, to the delight of the watching crowds, but eventually the shortened pier meant that they were crash-landing on sand and shingle in a way that was more alarming than amusing.
The competition was cancelled in 2014 and appears to have moved permanently a few miles down the coast to Worthing, where the prizes are bigger and the pier actually stands over water.
In an effort to reverse Bognor’s long, gentle decline, in 2005 Arun District Council formed the Bognor Regis Regeneration Task Force with the goal of bringing £500million of investment to the town.
As it became clear that nothing on that scale would ever be forthcoming, the target was quietly reduced first to £100million and then to £25 million. These also proved too ambitious.
Eventually it was decided that a more realistic target was a sum of
The town ticks over like a patient on life support
I smiled at the balcony people. They looked away
about zero. When it was realised that goal had already been reached, the task force was wound up, its work completed.
Now, as far as I could tell, all the authorities are doing for Bognor is just keeping it ticking over, like a patient on life support.
But for all that, Bognor isn’t such a bad place. It has a long beach with a curving concrete promenade and a town centre that is compact and tidy, if not thriving.
Just inland from the sea is a sylvan retreat called Hotham Park, with winding paths, a small boating pond and toy railway. But that, it must be said, is about it. If you do a web search for things to do in Bognor, Hotham Park is the first thing that comes up. The second suggested attraction is a shop selling mobility scooters.
I walked down to the seafront. A good number of people were ambling along, enjoying the sunshine. We were about to have a lovely summer and even now at 10.30 in the morning you could see this day was going to be, by English standards, a scorcher.
My original plan was to stroll west along the front to Craigweil, to see where the King had stayed, but that hope was dashed when I learned that Craigweil was torn down in 1939 and that today the site is lost somewhere beneath a housing estate.
So instead I walked east along the promenade towards Felpham because that was the direction nearly all the other strollers were going in and I assumed they knew what they were doing.
On one side stood the beach and a bright, glittering sea, and on the other was a line of smart modern homes, all with high walls to preserve their privacy from us on the promenade. The owners, however, had not solved the obvious problem that a wall designed to keep passers-by from peering in also keeps those on the inside from seeing out.
If the occupants of these smart houses wanted to look at the sea, they had to go upstairs and sit on a balcony, but that meant exposing themselves to our gaze.
We could see everything about them — whether they were tanned or pale, having a cold drink or a hot one, were tabloid readers or Telegraph readers.
The people on the balconies pretended not to be bothered about this, but you could tell they were.
It was a lot to ask, after all. They had to pretend first of all that their balconies somehow made them invisible to us and then additionally they had to pretend that we were in any case such an incidental part of the panorama that they had never actually noticed us down there looking up at them. That was a lot of pretending to have to do.
As a test, I tried to make eye contact with the people on the balconies. I smiled as if to say ‘Hello there, I see you!’, but they always looked quickly away or affected not to see me at all, but rather were absorbed by something far off on the horizon, in the general vicinity of Dieppe or possibly Deauville.
Sometimes I think it must be a little exhausting to be English. At all events, it seemed obvious to me that we on the promenade had much the better deal since we could see the sea at all times without having to go to a higher elevation and we never had to pretend that no one could see us.
Best of all, at the end of the day we could get in our cars and drive home to somewhere that wasn’t Bognor Regis.
My plan, after Bognor, was to take a bus along the coast to Brighton. I was hungry, but had only 20 minutes before the next bus, so I went into a McDonald’s for the sake of haste.
I should have known better. I have a little personal history with McDonald’s, you see. Once a few years ago after a big family day out, we stopped at a McDonald’s in response to cries from a back-seat-ful of grandchildren pleading for an unhealthy meal.
I was put in charge of placing the order. I carefully interviewed everyone in the party — about ten of us, in two cars — collated the order on to the back of an old envelope and approached the counter.
‘OK,’ I said decisively to the youthful attendant when my turn came. ‘I’d like five Big Macs, four quarter-pounder cheeseburgers, two chocolate milkshakes . . .’
At this point someone stepped up to tell me that one of the children wanted chicken nuggets instead of a Big Mac.
‘Sorry,’ I said and then resumed. ‘Make that four Big Macs, four quarter-pounder cheeseburgers, two chocolate milkshakes . . .’
At this point, some small person tugging on my sleeve informed me that he wanted a strawberry milkshake, not a chocolate one. ‘Right,’ I said, returning to the young attendant. ‘Make that four Big Macs, four quarter-pounder cheeseburgers, one chocolate milkshake, one strawberry milkshake, three chicken nuggets . . .’
And so it went on as I worked my way through and from time to time adjusted the group’s long and complicated order.
When the food came, the young
man produced 11 trays with 30 or 40 bags of food on them. ‘What’s this?’ I said.
‘Your order,’ he replied and read my order back to me off the till: ‘Thirty-four Big Macs, 20 quarter-pounder cheeseburgers, 12 chocolate milkshakes . . .’
It turned out that instead of adjusting my order each time I restarted, he had just added to it.
‘I didn’t ask for 20 quarterpounder cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pounder cheeseburgers five times.’ ‘Same thing,’ he said. ‘It’s not the same thing at all. You can’t be this stupid.’
Two of the people waiting behind me in the queue sided with the young attendant. ‘You did ask for all that stuff,’ one of them said.
The duty manager came over and looked at the till. ‘It says 20 quarter-pounder cheeseburgers here,’ he said, as if it were a gun with my fingerprints on it.
‘I know what it says there, but that isn’t what I asked for,’ I replied.
One of my grown children came over to find out what was going on. I explained to him what had happened and he weighed the matter judiciously and decided that, taken all in all, it was my fault. ‘I can’t believe you are all this stupid,’ I said to an audience that consisted of about 16 people, some of them newly arrived, but already taking against me.
Eventually my wife came over and led me away by the elbow, the way I used to watch her lead jabbering psychiatric patients to a quiet room.
She sorted the mess out amicably with the manager and attendant, brought two trays of food to the table in about 30 seconds and informed me that I was never again to venture into McDonald’s whether alone or under supervision. And now here I was in McDonald’s again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald’s is just too much for me.
I ordered a chicken sandwich and Diet Coke.
‘Do you want fries with that?’ asked the young man who was serving me.
I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said: ‘No. That’s why I didn’t ask for fries, you see.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he said.
‘When I want fries, generally I say something like: “I would like some fries, too, please.” That’s the system I use.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he repeated.
‘Do you need to know the other things I don’t want? It is quite a long list. In fact, it is everything you serve except for the two things I asked for.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he repeated yet again, but in a darker voice, and deposited my two items on a tray and urged me, without the least hint of sincerity, to have a nice day.
I realised that I probably wasn’t quite ready for McDonald’s yet.