Kitabı oku: «The Automobilist Abroad», sayfa 12

Chapter II
The South Coast

The south coast of England is ever dear to the Londoner who spends his week's end out of town. Here he finds the nearest whiff of salt-water breeze that he can call his own. He may go down the Thames on a Palace steamer to Southend, and he will have to content himself most of the way with a succession of mud-flats and eat winkles with a brassy pin when he gets there; he may even go on to Margate and find a fresh east wind which will blow the London fog out of his brain; but, until he rounds the Foreland, he will find nothing that will remind him in the least of his beloved Eastbourne, Brighton, and Worthing.

The most popular south coast automobile run from London is to Brighton, fifty-two miles, via Croyden, Redhill, and Crawley. Many "weekenders" make this trip nearly every Saturday to Monday in the year, and get to know every rut and stone in the roadway and every degenerate policeman of the rapacious crew who hide in hedges and lie in wait for poor unfortunate automobilists who may have slipped down a sloping bit of clear roadway at a speed of twenty and one-tenth miles per hour (instead of nineteen and nine-tenths), all figured out by rule of thumb and with the aid of a thirty-shilling stop-watch.

"Ils sont terribles, ces bétes des gendarmes on trouve en Angleterre," said a terror-stricken French friend of ours who had been held up beyond Crawley for a "technical offence." Nothing was said against a drunken drayman who backed his wagon up against our friend's mudguard ten miles back, and smashed it beyond repair. Justice, thy name is not in the vocabulary of the English policeman sent out by his sergeant to keep watch on automobilists!

Our road to the sea was by Rochester, Canterbury, and Dover, in the first instance, following much the itinerary of Chaucer's pilgrims.

Southwark's Tabard Inn exists to-day, in name if not in spirit, and it was easy enough to take it for our starting-point. Getting out of London to the southeast is not as bad as by the northwest, but in all conscience it is bad enough, through Deptford and its docks, and Greenwich and Woolwich, and over the Plumstead marshes. There are variants of this itinerary, we were told, but all are equally smelly and sooty, and it was only well after we had passed Gravesend that we felt that we had really left town behind, and even then we could see the vermilion stacks of great steamships making their way up London's river to the left, and the mouse-brown sails of the barges going round the coast to Ipswich and Yarmouth.

At last a stretch of green unsmoked and unspoiled country, that via Stroud to Rochester, came into view.

Rochester on the Medway, with its memories of Mr. Pickwick and the Bull Inn (still remaining), the cathedral and Gad's Hill, Dickens's home near by, is a literary shrine of the first importance. We stopped en route and did our duty, but were soon on our way again through the encumbered main street of Chatham and up the long hill to Sittingbourne, itself a dull, respectable market-town with a boiled mutton and grilled kipper inn which offers no inducements to a gormand to stop for lunch.

We kept on to Canterbury and didn't do much better at a hotel which shall be nameless. The hotels are all bad at Canterbury, according to Continental standards, and there is little choice between them.

It is said that the oldest inn in England is "The Fountain" at Canterbury. "The Fountain" claims to have housed the wife of Earl Godwin when she came to meet her husband on his return from Denmark in the year 1029, and to have been the temporary residence of Archbishop Lanfranc whilst his palace was being rebuilt in 1070. There is a legend, too, that the four knights who murdered Thomas à Becket made this house their rendezvous. Moreover, "The Fountain" can boast of a testimonial to its excellence as an inn written six hundred years ago, for, when the marriage of Edward the First to his second queen, Margaret of France, was solemnized at Canterbury Cathedral on September 12, 1299, the ambassador of the Emperor of Germany, who was among the distinguished guests, wrote thus to his master: "The inns in England are the best in Europe, those of Canterbury are the best in England, and 'The Fountain,' wherein I am now lodged as handsomely as I were in the king's palace, the best in Canterbury." Times have changed since the days of Edward I.!

Canterbury is a very dangerous town to drive through. Its streets are narrow and badly paved, and there are unexpected turnings which bring up a lump in one's throat when he is driving at his most careful gait and is suddenly confronted with a governess's cart full of children, a perambulator, and a bath-chair, all in the middle of the road, where, surely, the two latter have no right to be.

The grand old shrine of Thomas à Becket, the choir built by Lanfranc's monks, and the general ensemble of the cathedral close are worth all the risk one goes through to get to them. The cathedral impresses one as the most thoroughly French of all the Gothic churches of Britain, and because of this its rank is high among the ecclesiastical architectural treasures of the world. Its history is known to all who know that of England, of the church, and of architecture, and the edifice tells the story well.

The distant view from the road, as one approaches the city, is one that can only be described as grand. The fabric of the great cathedral, the rooftops of the houses, the sloping hills rising from the water's edge, and again falling lightly down to the town, form a grandly imposing view, the equal of which one seldom sees on the main travelled roads of England.

Between Canterbury and Winchester ran one of the oldest roads in England, the "Pilgrim's Way." Many parts of it still exist, and it is believed by many to be the oldest monument of human work in these islands. About two-thirds of the length of the road is known with certainty, and to some extent the old itinerary forms the modern highway. Its earliest route seems to have been from Stonehenge to Canterbury, but later the part from Stonehenge to Alton was abandoned in favour of that from Winchester to Alton. Guildford and Dorking were places that it touched, though it was impossible to say with certainty where it crossed the Medway.

Margate, Ramsgate, and the Isle of Thanet lay to the left of us, but we struck boldly across the downs to Dover's Bay, under the shadow of the Shakespeare Cliff, made famous in the scenic accessories of The Tempest.

Dover, seventy-two miles by road from London, has a good hotel, almost reaching the Continental standard, though it is not an automobile hotel and you must house your machine elsewhere. It is called the Lord Warden Hotel, and is just off the admiralty pier head. It suited us very well in spite of the fact that the old-school Englishman contemptuously refers to it as a place for brides and for seasick Frenchmen waiting the prospect of a fair crossing by the Calais packet.

The descent into Dover's lower town from the downs above is fraught with considerable danger for the automobilist. It is steep, winding, and narrow, and one climbs out of it again the next morning by an equally steep, though less narrow, road up over the Shakespeare Cliff and down again abruptly into Folkestone.

Dover is not fashionable as a resort, and its one pretentious sea-front hotel is not a lovely thing – most sea-front hotels are not. In spite of this there is vastly more of interest going on, with the coming and going of the great liners and the cross-channel boats of the harbour, than is to be found in a mere watering-place, where band concerts, parade-walks, "nigger minstrels," tea fights, and excursions in the neighbourhood are the chief attractions which are advertised, and are fondly believed by the authorities to be sufficient to draw the money-spending crowds.

Dover is a very interesting place; the Shakespeare Cliff dominates it on one side and the old castle ruin on the other, to-day as they did when the first of the Cinq-Ports held England's destiny in the hollow of her hand. Sir Walter Raleigh prayed his patron Elizabeth to strengthen her fortifications here and formulate plans for a great port. Much was done by her, but a fitting realization of Dover's importance as a deep-water port has only just come to pass, and then only because of a significant hint from the German emperor.

Shakespeare's, or Lear's, Cliff at Dover is one of the first things to which the transatlantic up-channel traveller's attention is called. Blind old Gloster has thus described it:

 
"There is a cliff whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully into the confined deep."
 

The English War Department of today, it is rumoured, would erase this landmark, because the cliff obstructs the range of heavy guns, thus jeopardizing the defence of Dover; but there are those who, knowing that chalk is valuable, suggest that commercialism is at the foundation of the scheme for destroying the cliff. The Dover corporation has accordingly passed a resolution of remonstrance against the destruction of what they claim "would rob the English port of one of its most thrilling attractions."

Folkestone is more sadly respectable than Dover; more homeopathic, one might say. The town is equally difficult for an automobile to make its way through, but as one approaches the water's edge things somewhat improve. Wampach's Hotel at Folkestone is not bad, but B. B. B., as the "Automobile Club's Hand Book" puts it (bed, bath, and breakfast), costs eight shillings and sixpence a day. This is too much for what you get.

We followed the shore road to Hythe, Dymchurch, New Romney, and Rye, perhaps thirteen miles all told, along a pebble-strewn roadway with here and there a glimpse of the shining sea and the smoke from a passing steamer.

To our right was Romney Marsh, calling up memories of the smuggling days of old, when pipes of port and bales of tobacco mysteriously found their way inland without paying import duties.

Rye is by no means a resort; it is simply a dull, sleepy, red-roofed little seaside town, with, at sunset, a riot of blazing colour reflected from the limpid pools left by the retreating waters of the Channel, which now lies five miles away across a mud-flat plain, although coastwise shipping once came to Rye's very door-step.

The entrance to the town, by an old mediæval gateway, is easily enough made by a careful driver, but an abrupt turn near the top of the slight rise cost us a mud-guard, it having been ripped off by an unexpected and most dangerous hitching-post. This may be now removed; it certainly is if the local policeman did his duty and reported our really atrocious language to the authorities. Of all imbecilic and unneedful obstructions to traffic, Rye's half-hidden hitching-post is one of the most notable seen in an automobile tour comprising seven countries and several hundreds, perhaps thousands, of large and small towns.

The chief curiosities of Rye are its quaint hilltop church, the town walls, and the Ypres tower, all quite foreign in motive and aspect from anything else in England.

Those interested in literary shrines may well bow their heads before the door of the dignified Georgian house near the church, in which resides the enigmatic Henry James. There may be other literary lights who shed a glow over Rye, but we did not learn of them, and surely none could be more worthy of the attention of literary lion-hunters than the American who has become "more English" than the English themselves.

We left Rye by a toll-gate road over the marshes, bound for Winchelsea, and, passing through the ivy-clad tower which spans the roadway, stopped abruptly, like all hero or heroine worshippers, before the dainty home of Ellen Terry. The creeper-clung little brick cottage is a reminiscence of old-world peace and quiet which must be quite refreshing after an active life on the stage.

Hastings saw us for the night. Hastings and St. Leonards, twin sea-front towns, are what, for a better description, might be called snug and smug. They are simply the most depressing, unlovely resorts of sea-front and villas that one will see in a round of all the English resorts.

As a pompous, bustling, self-sufficient little city, Hastings, with its fisher men and women, its fish-market and the ruined castle-crowned height, has some quaintness and character; but as a resort where the chief amusements are scrappy, tuneless hurdy-gurdies, blatant brass bands, living picture shows, or third-rate repetitious of a last year's London theatrical successes, it is about the rankest boring proposition which ever drew the unwary visitor.

We had our "B. B. B." that night at the Queen's Hotel, a vast barracks of a place near the end of the Parade. The best thing about it was the view from the windows of our sleeping-rooms, and the fact that we could stable our automobile under the same roof.

We made a little run inland from Hastings the next morning to view old Battle Abbey. The battlement-crowned gateway is still one of the architectural marvels of England. It took us a dozen miles out of our way, but always among the rolling downs which dip down to the sea, chalk-faced and grass-grown in a manner characteristic only of the south coast of England.

We came to Eastbourne through Pevensey, famed for its old ruined castle and much history. A low-lying marsh-grown fishing-port of olden times, Pevensey was the landing-place of the Conqueror when he came to lay the foundation-stones of England's greatness. It is a shrine that Britons should bow down before, and reverently.

Eastbourne is a vast improvement, as a resort, over any south coast town we had yet seen. It is not gay, it is rather sedate, and certainly eminently respectable and dignified. Giant wheels, hurdy-gurdies, and quack photographers are banished from its beach and esplanade, and one may stroll undisturbed by anything but perambulators and bath-chairs. Its sea-front walk of a couple of miles or more is as fine as any that can be found from the Foreland to the Lizard.

Most energetically we climbed to the top of Beachy Head, gossiped with the coast-guard, stole a peep through the telescope by which Lloyd's observer at the signal-station picks out passing ships, and got down the great hill again in time for lunch at the Burlington Hotel. We lunched in more or less stately fashion, well, if not luxuriously, in a great dining-room whose sole occupant, besides ourselves, was England's laureate.

He is herein endorsed as possessing a good taste in seaside hotels, whatever one may think of the qualities of his verse. The Burlington seemed to us the best conducted and most satisfactory hotel on all the south coast, except perhaps the Lord Warden at Dover.

It was a more or less rugged climb, by a badly made road, up over the downs from Eastbourne, only to drop down again as quickly through Eastdean to Newhaven, a short ten miles, but a trying one.

Newhaven is a sickly burg sheltered well to the west of Beachy Head. Its only excitements are the comings and goings of the Dieppe steamers and a few fishing-boats. It is one of the best ports for shipping one's automobile to France, and one of the cheapest. In no other respect is Newhaven worth a glance of the eye, and English travelers themselves have no good word for the abominable tea and coffee served to limp, half-famished travellers as they get off the Dieppe boat. This well-worn and well-deserved reputation was no inducement for us to stop, so we made speed for Brighton via Rottingdean.

Rottingdean will be famous in most minds as being the rival of Brattleboro, Vt., as the home of Rudyard Kipling. Sightseers came from Brighton in droves and stared the author out of countenance, as they did at Brattleboro, and he removed to the still less known, and a great deal less accessible, village of Burwash in Kent. Thus passed the fame of Rottingdean.

Brighton has been called London-on-Sea, and with some truth, but as the sun shines here with frequency it differs from London in that respect.

Brighton is a brick and iron built town, exceedingly unlovely, but habitable. Its two great towering sea-front hotels look American, but they are a great deal more substantially built. There are two rivals for popular favour, the Grand and the Metropole. They are much alike in all their appointments, but there are fewer tea-drinkers and after-dinner sleepers (and snorers) at the Metropole. There is also a famous old coaching house, the Ship Hotel (most curiously named), which caters particularly for automobilists.

Brighton is the typical seaside resort of Britain. It is like nothing on the Continent; it is not even as attractive a place as most Continental resorts; but it is the best thing in Britain.

Brighton and Hove have a sea-front of perhaps three miles. Houses and hotels line the promenade on one side, a pebbly beach and the sea on the other.

The attractions of Brighton are conventional and an imitation of those in London. In addition one bathes, in summer, in the lapping waves, and in winter sits in a glass shelter which breaks the wind, and gazes seaward.

There are theatrical attractions and operas in the theatre, and vocal and instrumental concerts on the pier, all through the year. There are also various sorts of functions which go on in the turnip-topped Royal Pavilion of the Georges, which once seen will ever afterward be avoided.

It is not always bright and sunny at Brighton. We were storm-bound at the Metropole for two days, and the Channel waves dashed up over the pier and promenade and drowned out the strollers who sought to take their constitutional abroad.

We sat tight in the hotel and listened to Sousa marches, "Hiawatha," and "The Belle of New York" strummed out by a none too competent band. A genial fat-faced old lady of uncertain age tried to inveigle us into a game of bridge, but that was not what we came for, so we strenuously refused.

The flood-tide of holiday trippers at Brighton is in August. This is the month when, at certain periods of the day, the mile length of roadway from railway station to sea is a closely packed crowd of excursionists; when the long expanse of sea-front and sand presents its most animated spectacle of holiday-keeping people; when the steamers plying along the Sussex coast, or to France, the white-sailed yachts, the rowing-boats, and motor-boats are the most numerous; and when the hundred and one entertainers and providers of all kinds do their busiest trade.

There is a public bathing-station at the eastern end of the sea-front. A large marquee is provided, and a worthy lady, the incarnation of the British matron, sees to it that the curtains are properly drawn and that inquisitive small boys keep their distance. But it is rather a long walk from the marquee to the water when the tide is low, and one often hears the camera click on the irresistible charms of some swan-like creature ambling down to deep water. The authorities have promised to put a stop to such liberties. Can they?

We left Brighton with a very good idea indeed of what it was like. It has a place to fill and it fills it very well, but the marvel is that the Britisher submits to it, when he can spend his weekends, or his holiday, at Boulogne or Dieppe for practically the same expenditure of time and money, and get real genuine relaxation and a gaiety which is not forced. So much for Brighton.

The Brighton police authorities have heeded the words of admonition of the tradesmen and hotel-keepers, and the automobilist has an easy time of it. It is an example which it is to be hoped will be far-reaching in its effects.

The road by the coast runs along by New Shoreham to Worthing, where the automobilist is catered for in really satisfactory fashion at Warne's Hotel, which possesses what is called a motor dépôt, a name which describes its functions in an obvious manner. It is a good place to lunch and a good place to obtain gasoline and oil. What more does the touring automobilist want? Not much but good roads and ever varying scenery.

Worthing has a population of twenty-five thousand conservative souls, and a mild climate. Its popularity is only beginning, but it boasts 1,748 hours of sunshine, an exceedingly liberal allowance for an English resort. It has also a "school of cookery;" this may account for the fare being as excellent as it is at "Warne's," though the proprietors are silent on this point.

Littlehampton came next in our itinerary. It almost equals Rye as one of the picture spots of England's south coast. It may develop some day into an artist's sketching ground which will rival the Cornish coast. It has a tidal river with old boats and barges lying picturesquely about, and it permits "mixed bathing," a rarity in England. In spite of this there appears to be no falling off in morals, and when other English seaside resorts adopt the same procedure they will be falling out of the conservatism which is keeping many of them from developing at the rate of Littlehampton.

We left the coast here to visit Arundel and its castle, the seat of the Duke of Norfolk. It was a Friday and the keep and park were open to the public.

Arundel is an ancient town which sleeps its life away and lives up to the traditions of mediævalism in truly conservative fashion. The Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland makes no recommendation as to the hotels of Arundel, and presumably the Norfolk Arms cares nothing for the automobile traffic. We did not stop at any hotel, but left our machine outside the castle gate, enjoyed the conventional stroll about inside the walls and in an hour were on the way to Chichester.

Sussex is a county which, according to some traditions possesses four particular delicacies. Izaak Walton, in 1653, named them as follows: a Selsea cockle, a Chichester lobster, an Arundel mullet, and an Amberley trout. Another authority, Ray, adds to these three more: a Pulborough eel, a Rye herring, and a Bourn wheatear, which, he says, "are the best in their kind, understand it, of those that are taken in this country."

Chichester is a cathedral town not usually included in the itinerary of stranger-tourists. Its proud old cathedral and its detached bell-tower are remarkable for many things, but the strangeness of the belfry, entirely unconnected with the church fabric itself, will strike the natives of the land of skyscrapers most of all.

Chichester is conservative in all things, and social affairs, said a public-house habitué, are entirely dominated by the cathedral clique. He may have been a bad authority, this doddering old septuagenarian, mouthing his pint of beer, but he entertained us during the half-hour of a passing shower with many plain-spoken opinions about many things, including subjects as wide apart as clericalism and submarines.

Our route from Chichester was to Portsmouth and Southsea, neither of which interested us to any extent. The former is warlike in every turn of its crooked streets and the latter is full of retired colonels and majors, who keep always to the middle of the footpath across Southsea Common, and will not turn the least bit to one side, for courtesy or any other reason. Too much curry on their rice or port after dinner probably accounts for it.

We stopped at the George at Portsmouth. It offers no accommodation for automobiles, but a garage is near by. The halo of sentiment and romance hung over the more or less dingy old hotel, dingy but clean, and possessed of a parlour filled with a collection of old furniture which would make the connoisseur want to carry it all away with him.

This was the terminus of old-time travel from London to Portsmouth. The Portsmouth road, in coaching days as in automobile days, ran through England's fairest counties down to her emporium of ships. Its beginnings go back to the foundations of England's naval power.

Edward IV. made Portsmouth a strong place of defence, but the road from town only became well travelled in later centuries.

Along the old Portsmouth road were, and are still, any number of nautically named inns. At Liphook is the Anchor – where Pepys put up when on his way to England's chief naval town – and the Ship; there is another Anchor at Ripley; at Petersfield stands the Dolphin, and near Guildford is the Jovial Sailor. All these, and other signs of a like nature, suffice to tell the observant wayfarer that he is on the road which hordes of seamen have trod on their way to and from London, and that it was formerly deemed well worth while to hang out invitations to them.

In 1703 Prince George of Denmark made nine miles in six hours on this road, an indication that the good roads movement had not begun. In 1751 Doctor Burton suggested that all the animals in Sussex, including the women, were long-legged because of "the difficulty of pulling their feet out of the mud which covers the roads hereabouts."

A hundred or more years ago Nelson came by post by this road to Portsmouth to hoist his flag upon the Victory. He arrived at the George, the same which was sheltering our humble selves, at six in the morning, as the records tell, having travelled all night. The rest is history, but the old Victory still swings at her moorings in Portsmouth harbour, a shrine before which all lovers of the sea and its tales may worship. Portsmouth is the great storehouse of Britain's battleships, and the Solent from Spithead to Stokes Bay is a vast pool where float all manner of warlike craft.

The Isle of Wight was the immediate attraction for us at Portsmouth. One makes the passage by boat in thirty minutes, and when one gets there he finds leafy lanes and well-kept roads that will put many mainland counties to shame. The writer does not know the length of the roadways of the Isle of Wight, but there are enough to give one a good three days of excursions and promenades.

We made our headquarters at Ryde and sallied out after breakfast and after lunch each day, invariably returning for the night.

The beauties of the Isle of Wight are many and varied, with all the charms of sea and shore. For a literary shrine it has Tennyson's Freshwater and the Tennyson Beacon high up on the crest of the downs overlooking the Needles, Freshwater Bay, and the busy traffic of the English Channel, where the ships make landward to signal the observers at St. Catherine's Point.

Cowes and "Cowes week" are preeminent annual events in society's periodical swing around the circle.

The real development of Cowes, the home of the Royal Yacht Squadron, has been the evolution of week-end yachting in the summer months. City men, and jaded legislators, held to town by the Parliamentary duties of a long summer session, rush down to Southampton every Saturday and each steps off his train or motor-car on to the deck of his yacht, and then, after a spin westward to the Needles or eastward to the Nab or Warner Lightship, soothed by the lapping of the waters, and refreshed by the pure sea air, returns on the Monday to face again the terrors of London heat and "fag."

Taken all in all, we found the Isle of Wight the most enjoyable region of its area in all England. It is quite worth the trouble of crossing from the mainland with one's automobile in order to do it thoroughly; for what one wants is green fields and pastures new and a breadth of sea and sky.