Bodnant was also someone’s dream, but only of a house and large garden. We glanced at the upright Tudor mansion, perkier than most, with many pointed dormers and crisp white paint between the beams. The sublime first impression of wide terraces above the river Conwy and views of mountains only began the extravagant delights of Bodnant. We thought we were late for roses, but in July they were blooming, especially the pinks. Many were new to me: Octavia Hill’s flopping pale clusters; Ann Aberconway, a satin beauty; Rose Gaujard, white with rosy edges; the glorious many-petaled, open-faced Prima Ballerina and, nearby, the similar Picadilly; and the cupped Superstar, exactly the color of watermelon. Another big spender was the splendid yellow rose with the unlikely name of Grandpa Dickson. Boule de Neige, a white miracle with yellow center, changed my opinion of white roses with its delicacy. I’ve always associated white roses with Mother’s Day in the Methodist church of my childhood. Wearing a white rose symbolized that the mother was dead. The rest of us wore red. This particular ball of snow looks distinctly felicitous, not at all sad. Another rose I immediately envisioned planting in my own garden was Glenfiddich, named for the amber Scotch whiskey or the place it’s bottled, I suppose, but reminding me of a decadent, burnished yellow-silk slip my mother wore. The veined petals looked bloodshot—like the eyes of someone who drank too much Glenfiddich. I will have to tell my friends Susan and Bernice about City Girl, a saucy little social climber of apricot and pink blooming in bouquets like Sally Holmes.
Although vast, the garden felt totally scaled for enjoyment. Usually gardens are most interesting around the house. When I take outlying paths into woods and dales, my attention is not held. But following Bodnant’s woodland paths seems like stepping into a “Sleeping Beauty” landscape. The hydrangeas, lining the banks of the languid little river Hiraethlyn, mimicked the flow of water. Blurry blue reflections doubled the dreaminess. The woods were silent, except for sparkling river sounds. Any minute Peter Pan might have popped out from behind a rock. We might step inside a fairy ring.
“We’re in the presence of these trees,” I said. Thanks, Henry Duncan. He took over this garden in 1902, continuing the tradition of his grandfather, who began planting trees in 1792. Enchanting, the sun-dappled ferns, the dark-leaved rhododendrons, and the circuitous walk over streams and through glades of straw-colored light.
At the end we came to a long pergola of laburnum. The sun shone through the filigree of leaves, and we dawdled there, imagining the dazzling gold arch in full bloom.
“Isn’t that what Rebecca took a fatal dose of—laburnum? In high school I always wondered what it was. Now I know.”
“Who? Oh, Daphne du Maurier? I never read
Rebecca
.” Ed bought a postcard in the gift shop of the tunnel of bright yellow. “This must be one of the most outstanding accomplishments of any garden in the world. Imagine the bees and butterflies it draws.”
“And tourists. Any one of whom could nibble the little black seeds and croak on the spot.” We’d enjoyed Bodnant with only a few others that day.
“Let’s come back. When the laburnum is blooming, you must feel like you’re sleepwalking under here. Or like you’re standing in a shower of gold. Are you sure it wasn’t laudanum she swallowed?”
Back at the house, we took a last walk along the water. The tide was out. A man out in the mud hauled in the edible seaweed we saw for sale in Bath. The late sunlight seemed liquid, a faded watercolor with pastels smearing the sky into the water already rushing back into the channel from the sea. “Ready to take off?” Ed asked.
“Yes, let’s go. Try to exit by eight tomorrow.”
Aiming
vaguely for the Cotswolds, we drove through Loughborough, the town where my great-great-grandparents and my great-grandparents were born. My grandfather was born in nearby Leicester. We passed a large cemetery with ancient trees. “Maybe some of the Mayeses are in there. Stop! Let’s look.” We combed the cemetery but found no family name. We were startled to come upon three men lying in the grass. Were they waiting for burial? But one rose on his elbow and said they were caretakers, having a nap after lunch. I was surprised because the cemetery had a forlorn appearance, with tipped and collapsed graves, caved in so that if you lifted a few stones, you might see a femur or jawbone. Not a posy in the place. I’d never seen such an abandoned graveyard, except in San Miguel de Allende once, where small boys played soccer with a skull, and I picked up one myself, a child’s, and have it still. The sleepy one told us he had no record of burials but to call Nelly Callahan at the registry office in town. We finished combing the other half. I half-hoped no ancestor lay there and half-hoped that the next Elizabeth I saw—Elizabeth must have been in the top-ten names in the 1800s—would be my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Repton Mayes. But she lies elsewhere. I wish I’d asked more genealogy questions before my relatives died. Such a small clutch of stories, ending with my grandfather at nine sailing alone to America to join his father and his new wife. Elizabeth Repton, his mother, had died, leaving him and a sister, Lily. I never knew why she stayed behind when the nine-year-old Jack set off with a bag of apples and a small suitcase. Loughborough seems oddly like an American town. Short on charm, it was at least thriving and rather pleasant. I wonder about those Mayeses—what they did, where they lived. When we stopped in a pub, I asked the waitress if I could see a telephone book. I find Mayes at least sixty times. In San Francisco there are five.
Mrs. Callahan
called me back after an hour of searching and said no Mayes is buried in a municipal cemetery. She directed me to the Leicester Historical Society and to local parish churches. Ed looked alarmed. The Mayes clan’s graves will have to wait for their armfuls of roses.
By
late afternoon we’d checked into a country house in Hambleton, a hamlet with a church and graveyard that could have been a model for Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” where those whose hearts were “once pregnant with celestial fire” slept in their narrow cells. After the drive from Wales, we walked to unkink. Thatched, calendar-perfect homes with bountiful gardens of yellow hollyhocks and roses lined the road. This was the day for churchyards. Among Hambleton’s leaning stones and majestic trees, mourning doves cooed in iambics, and I thought of Gray’s “moping owl.” The poem seemed dreary and sentimental to me when I read it in college. Later, I saw some of the hard perceptions which his soft decasyllables perhaps glossed. The homiletic inscriptions on the gravestones, he wrote, “teach the rustic moralist to die.” At the end of one verse, Gray asks if anything can salvage you:
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
The answer is a resounding, nihilistic
no
, despite the poem’s reputation for romanticism.
Death has a whole different construct here than in Italy, where photo- and flower-bedecked graves keep a continuum with life. The Cortona cemetery, just below the town, replicates the walled town. The graves are lighted at night by votives. You can imagine the dead rising as though from siesta to converse with their friends. These hallowed English stones go solemn immediately and provide no comfort of denial. Even recent burials blend quickly with the most ancient dead.
Like the priory where we spent the first night in England, the hotel where we sought refuge was a manor. We were guests of the lord, paying guests. In the bar, luxuriating in the tempting menu while we had a drink, the owner joined us. He was happy to see Americans. The terrorist scare had kept them at home. “The field is thinning,” he said. “There just are not rich Americans driving up with their chauffeurs anymore.” Having driven there in a rented car of the anonymous sort, we simply smiled and nodded. A man and woman at the bar discussed a rally in London in support of fox hunting. “Does four hundred years of tradition mean nothing?” I heard her say. “They’re the ones who are barbaric,” he scoffed. Scotland recently banned hunting with dogs, and passage of the same law was imminent in England. The House of Commons voted 253–0 in favor of abolishing hunting foxes with dogs—then the bill mired in committee regulations. The foxes feel frisky; soon they’ll be free. The woman, middle-aged with fluffy blondish hair, wore a bright flowered dress with big sleeves, belt, and gathered skirt. “Where did she get that dress?” I wondered to Ed. “I haven’t seen a dress like that since the one I wore to the junior-senior prom. I loved that dress. I like hers! It’s so anti-chic. Mine was white organdy, floor length and strapless, printed with violets.”
“She got it out of the same closet where he got that rusty vintage jacket. He looks like the Duke of Windsor. You know they send people out to fill the foxholes the night before a hunt? That doesn’t seem sporting.” The waiter refilled our champagne glasses. “What do you think of the fox-hunting law?” Ed asked him.
The waiter smiled. “I’m from Romania. Foxes are vermin there.”
Ed raised his glass to me. “Tally-ho.” He looked at the couple. “Do you think his jacket reminds him of being ‘in the pink’?”
“That dress reminds me of all the gardens here, all splashy and glazed after a rain. Maybe the English just love their gardens so much they want to
wear
them. Ah! Come to think of it, maybe all the flowered chintz sofas and chairs and beds come from the same impulse—to bring the garden inside the house. A counter to the rainy weather.”
“I’m happy. I’m happy that we don’t have to have an opinion on fox hunting. I’m happy to have, at least, passed over the ground of my ancestors.” The waiter brought a plate of delicate morsels—sliced zucchini with a dab of ratatouille on each, a twist of pastry with duck inside, potato puffs, kebabs of chicken and cucumber, and silver spoons filled with tomato mousse.
Soon we moved to the dining room, Ed quoting Oscar Wilde on fox hunting as we walk down the hall: “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”
This pastoral landscape and the Rutland Waters, a large man-made reservoir that looks like a piece of the Lake District, turned out to be so lovely that we decided to come back for a week someday. From here I could make the journey to Leicester to check out the family tree.
We explored nearby towns, walked twice a day, and read in our big bedroom decorated with a raj motif. When we found nearby Stamford, we wondered if could live happily ever after there. A dignified, intact town full of its own life, Stamford has kept pure its inheritance of gray stone. Narrow streets, like Italian
vicoli
, cutting between larger streets, add medieval shadows. I liked the tiny shops, where from the middle desk a person could reach almost anything. Right in the center of town we came upon a cemetery, which doubled as a small park right across from the library and the bank. In most places on the globe, that cemetery would have been dozed long ago. A man read his paper on a bench just beside William Hare, who departed this life aged twelve and had been resting there calmly since 1797. We stopped for nut and ginger biscuits with tea, passing up a variety of traybakes—chocolate, tipsy, apricot almond, and sultana. “What is a traybake?” I asked the lady at the cash register.
“Oh, just something baked on a tray. Like that.” She had a voice like a bicycle bell. She pointed to the pans in the window. “Trays.” Another one of those little differences between English English and American English. She was pointing to what was essentially a small cookie sheet with slightly higher sides. English desserts—all that voluptuous cream and ripe fruit. Even the names imply that you will be comforted and cosseted by a plate of sticky tealoaf, sticky toffee pudding, oatmeal biscuits, or jam roly-poly.
Oakham, too, was a town of character. We bought a sturdy plaid market basket, had lunch, and meandered. In the pharmacy, while Ed bought Band-Aids, I looked at the baby food. Since Willie joined our family, I’ve liked looking at the foods for infants for sale in different countries, a microview of the country’s cuisine. Here I find pea and parsnip, carrot and parsnip, peachy porridge, creamed porridge, oats and prunes, banana, and cream fool. In Italy, it’s prosciutto and peas, pasta, pigeon, veal, even minced horsemeat. What cultural message does the baby absorb? Perhaps the English baby is lulled by mild flavors, while the bambino gets the message early on that the world tastes savory and varied. That might change with a little Winston’s first taste of bangers and mash or bubble and squeak. Even during his first months, Willie was treated by Ed to aroma training. He held espresso, shrimp, ribs, and toast under Willie’s nose. He looked consistently startled and interested.
A speciality of this area, pork pie is baked in a crust made with hot water. Such a sturdy pie won’t break if carried in a saddlebag, I read. Local pigs are especially succulent because they’re raised on the whey left over from the Stilton-making process. When we bought a fluted pork pie to taste, it was lardy and dense—maybe good to eat after filling in foxholes, but not appealing on a warm July day.
A gardener famous on British TV opened his garden called Barnsdale a few years ago. Early in the morning we had it to ourselves except for a couple of workers who were rendered catatonic by their hoes’ rhythmic chopping of weeds. This was a teaching garden, divided into areas such as cottage garden, typical suburban backyard, kitchen garden. We found several ideas for our own plots. In the orchard CDs on strings twinkled from the branches and bamboo poles, keeping birds from eating the fruit. They looked rather magical. Asparagus, planted in an ornamental bed of flowers, looked soft and ferny. Recycled plastic water bottles had been halved, and the top part, with cap off, placed over new plants like the glass cloches in French gardens. This protects them from slugs while keeping in moisture and warmth and allowing them to breathe. I’m going to try this next spring when I plant tomatoes from seed. Crisp white bee boxes were used as focal points in divided gardens, instead of the usual nymph or shepherdess. Ed admired a compost box about five by twelve feet divided into three parts, one side of which had boards that slid up for removal of soil. We watched several voles darting from border to border, adorable and probably the reason for the recycled water bottles. I stood eye to eye with swaying yellow hollyhocks everywhere, sunny and cheerful. I wished I were in my own garden, fertilizing the lemons and training the morning glories up the pergola. I love how the British gardens all have so many places to sit, so many arbors, armillaries, arches—how
furnished
they are. I photographed an urn dripping with lantana, fuchsia, petunias, impatiens—who would think to combine those? Then I realize that in my two climates, you couldn’t. Lantana and petunias like sun, while the unprotected fuchsia and impatiens would shrivel in one day in the heat of Italy or California. The cool and rainy English climate seems to encourage strange bedfellows.