Our first port of call on these trips is usually Bury St. Edmunds. This charming little market town allows us to stop for lunch and get a bit of shopping. It is home to a large abbey, wherein St. Edmund lies buried. The fact that the abbey is in the centre gives the town an old-fashioned, rustic feel. A very large and impressive gatehouse survives amid the ruins and there is a beautiful town-centre garden. Charles Dickens stayed regularly in Bury St. Edmunds, lodging at the Angel Hotel, an imposing ivy-covered building that sits opposite the Abbey and dominates the town square. Next door is the Athenaeum, where several authors gave readings in the 19th Century, among them, Charles Kingsley, William Makepeace Thackeray and Dickens himself, who read excerpts from The Pickwick Papers here in 1859. He returned in 1861 to read from David Copperfield.

A little way North of Bury is the tiny village of Great Livermere. In the Rectory, in 1862, was born one of the writers whose work evokes the remoteness and mysteriousness of the East Anglian countryside. M.R. James was the definitive writer of Victorian ghost stories, in which innocent outsiders pay a price for meddling in a past they little understand. James portrays the countryside as mysterious, misty and wet: the landscapes are indistinct, with mist partially clearing to reveal shadowy figures:

The light was obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter evening, and slight cold rain. On this bleak stage at first no actor was visible. Then, in the distance, a bobbing black object appeared...

M.R. James, ‘O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad‘

Great Livermere Rectory is not really visible from the road. I caught only a glimpse through the thick hedge surrounding it. The church is accessible and is appropriately unusual, with its squat tower, surmounted with a wooden belfry. Inside, it is very light and the clear glass windows seem particularly large. There is some beautiful carving, particularly the rood screen. In the chancel, there is a slate grey plaque to the great man himself, acknowledging some of his many achievements (he was a successful academic, holding prestigious posts at Eton and Cambridge). His stories remain popular today: they are frequently filmed and new adaptations of his books provide a highpoint to Christmas telly schedules; ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You‘, ‘The Tractate Middoth‘ and ‘A Warning to the Curious‘ have all had recent airings on TV.

Mrs. P and I were actually staying in Norfolk, at Blo’ Norton Hall. The Hall, and the village it inhabits, sit on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, which is defined here by the Little Ouse, which flows back towards Cambridgeshire and the Wash. It was to this hall that, in 1906, a young Virginia Woolf (then Stephen) came on holiday. She spent her days cycling around the lanes around Thetford and Diss and worked on a short story while she was here. There are some very pleasant converted barns, of varying sizes, which are let for holidays. It was well-equipped and comfortable, with an enormous kitchen and all the comforts of home. I had brought a copy of ‘Memoirs of a Novelist‘ to read while I was here. This collection contains ‘The Journal of Miss Joan Martyn‘, the story she wrote while staying here.

Diss is a very pretty market town. There is a tiny museum, with a wealth of agricultural history, along with a display about the R34 airship. The dirigible set out from Diss on the first ever return trip across the Atlantic. The church is large and robust with a Victorian interior, though parts of the building date from the 15th Century. The rector here in 1504 was John Skelton. He was a poet, whose work was widely praised in his own time: he had been poet to Henry VIII. His most famous poem, Ware the Hawke, tells the story of a rector’s attempts to rid the church of an infestation of pigeons by introducing a hawk. Today, you are asked, via a hand-written note on the door, to ensure the door is kept shut to deter the birds.

John Betjeman fell in love with Diss when he visited in 1964, to film a programme about the town for the BBC (still widely available online). He was friends with the poet, Mary Wilson, wife of Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. She had grown up in the town; his ‘Mind’s Journey to Diss’, describes a train journey, with her, from London. In it, he describes the changing landscape as they approach the town. Betjeaman described Diss as “the perfect small English town.” He became instrumental in the preservation of the town and was awarded presidency of the Diss Society; an accolade he is said to have valued more than the laureateship!

Mrs. P and I spent a pleasant couple of days touring the Norfolk/Suffolk borderlands: looking in old churches and stopping for drinks at wayside inns. We even had an ice-cream on the prom at Great Yarmouth. There are many Dickens connections in this part of the country, as he was staying in the area whilst writing David Copperfield. He is supposed to have discovered a family living rough on Great Yarmouth beach in an upturned boat and based the Peggotys’ house on these unique lodgings. David Copperfield is born and raised in Blunderstone, which is based on the village of Blundeston:

There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones.

Charles Dickens, ‘David Copperfield‘

We discovered, at St. Mary’s Ditchingham, the grave of Henry Rider Haggard, author of Victorian tales of high adventure and white supremacy. In ‘King Solomon’s Mines‘ he created the action hero, Allan Quatermain, portrayed on screen by Sean Connery and Patrick Swayze, among others. Haggard has the honour of being one of the earliest authors to be adapted for the screen: ‘She‘ was filmed by Georges Méliès in 1899. He was born in Bradenham in Norfolk in 1856 and was packed off to Africa at a young age by his father, who didn’t believe he would amount to much. He had a reasonable career in the Foreign Office and became an officer in the High Court in Natal. He started to write in order to record the important events he had witnessed. Returning to England in 1879, he married Marianna Margitson and moved into her home: Ditchingham Hall. His daughter, Lilias, also became an author and is buried in the churchyard.

Towards the end of the week, Emma, along with her boyfriend, Matt, joined us for a couple of days. They are a lovely couple and Mrs. P and I adore their company. Emma had agreed to help me out with a bit of research for a day or two and, in return, we put them up and fed them. We started by taking them to lunch at the Butt and Oyster in Pin Mill, quite a drive from where we were staying but definitely worth it. It’s a lovely pub: sprawling, with many rooms traditionally furnished: lots of polished wood and tiled floors and a definite nautical feel. The pub is at the waterside, so close that the river Orwell must come lapping up the walls at high tide. We had an Adnams or two – an advantage of having a driver for the day – and a very good seafood platter. It was very popular: packed out with sailing people and, when a prime spot became available in a bay window, we dived for it and bagged it.

The river Orwell is a magnet for sailing enthusiasts, as it is, according to Sailing Today, “one of the prettiest rivers on the east coast“. Arthur Ransome, yachtsman and author of children’s sailing stories, used to visit the Butt and Oyster to watch the boats. In fact, his own boat, the Nancy Blackett, is kept nearby, owned by a preservation trust and makes appearances as sailing galas and local events. It is even available to charter, if you fancy a historic sail of your own. Next door to the pub, a little art gallery has a collection of photographs of Ransome and his next boat Selina King. The Orwell Estuary features in two of his novels, We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea (1938) and Secret Water (1939).

We decided, over a lunchtime conversation, to visit Aldeburgh that afternoon. Mrs. P and I have been to Aldeburgh many times before but we were happy to see it again, it being a delightful little seaside town. After parking near the seafront, we wandered up the hill to the large, elegant parish church to take a look inside. Within, is a memorial to George Crabbe, a poet who was born in the town in 1754. He is probably best known for The Village, a poem about a seafaring community on the East coast, parts of which were used as the basis for the opera Peter Grimes (1945) by fellow Alderburgh resident Benjamin Britten.

We walked back into Aldeburgh via a very good and well-stocked little bookshop on the high street. Personally, I was aching for the fish and chip shop and gazed at it longingly as we passed but a very large lunch had not yet receded far enough into to justify an afternoon snack. Instead, we got ice cream and wandered down to the beach, spending a very happy hour or two wandering along the shingle and looking for interesting stones, one of Mrs. P’s favourite activities. We stayed until evening, when we returned to Blo’ Norton and spent the evening drinking and chatting late into the night.

Our week was over too quickly and we headed for home the next day. On our way back, we stopped first at Melford Hall. This 16th Century Manor house was the home of the Hyde Parker family. Beatrix Potter was related to them and frequently stayed. There are a number of her possessions on display in her room: her dressing table and bed have been preserved as she would have left them. The adjoining tower room has been turned into an exhibition about Potter and her connection to the hall, complete with some of her own sketches and stuffed animals she brought for the children. The hall has a fascinating history, having been used as officer accommodation during the second world war. Thankfully, the servicemen were respectful of their historic environment and only burned down one wing during their stay.

A little further south, we broke our journey again at the little Suffolk town of Sudbury. Famous as the birthplace of Thomas Gainsborough, the wide market square is dominated by St. Peter’s church, now an arts and exhibition centre. Opposite are the town council offices, in which, a little museum tells the story of the town. There are displays about many aspects of the town and surrounding area, including Charles Dickens, who based part of The Pickwick Papers in Sudbury, and Dodie Smith, who lived nearby and set part of her most famous book, the 101 Dalmatians here. The local museum has a display dedicated to her. Her typewriter is here, complete with one of her last notes: a heartbreaking admission of her failing abilities. Alongside these are some books and model dalmatians, created to promote the book and the much-loved film it inspired. There is also a memorial fountain by the railings of St. Peter’s and, if you look carefully at the bollards around here, you may just find one with a brass dalmatian head.

I don’t think Matt realised quite how much driving he would be doing over the couple of days he spent with us but he took it all on without complaint. In fact, he embraced his task with enthusiasm. We parted company at Sudbury, promising to meet again soon and headed for home.

Sunday lunch in Highgate on a lovely spring morning seemed like a good idea to me. I would be able to travel down on a quiet, peaceful train, reading throughout my journey, have a walk around the lovely little village and have lunch in one of the nicest pubs in London. I was slightly dismayed, therefore, on reaching the station to find the platforms packed with an enormous number of people: families with children, chatting noisily and excitedly. Well, there goes my chance of a quiet journey. The main reason I sought work outside of the capital was that the trains had become too noisy for reading. I started work in London in the late nineties and was able to enjoy two uninterrupted reading hours every day. It was wonderful; I actually used to look forward to the journey. By the time I left my job in 2009, trains had become unpleasant, noisy places; mobile communication had advanced in twelve years and it had become extremely rare to pass a journey without having to listen to an inane conversation. I overheard some extremely amusing things, of course, but nothing can replace spending a journey wrapped in a good story.

So I was a little disappointed to find the train, not just crowded, but heaving! I found myself a seat and tried to read, without much success. I gleaned from the conversations around me that the London Marathon was on that day. Supportive relatives were travelling into town to cheer on foolish but well-meaning relatives. The London Marathon is an annual event in which people challenge themselves to run 26 miles around the streets of the capital, getting sponsorship for various charitable causes. It’s quite a high-profile event, broadcast live on the BBC and raising millions of pounds for charity. Every year it attracts about 750,000 supporters to the heart of London. So how many extra trains had been laid on to cater for this demand? That’s right, dear reader, not one. At every stop on the journey, more and more people attempted to squeeze themselves into an already overloaded train. Still, the crowd was happy and good-natured and I spent a pleasant journey listening to the excited chatter of children and gazing out of the window at the scenery.

The crowds thinned out at King’s Cross, most of them heading south towards the Thames. I took the tube to Archway and walked up the hill. Highgate Hill is quite a steep climb, rising over 60m from Archway Station. You should get a magnificent view of London from here but, somehow, trees seem to conspire to block a view that constantly looks as if it is just about to reveal itself. There are some interesting landmarks along the way. A statue of Dick Whittington’s cat sits within a ring of protective iron railings. It was on Highgate Hill that Whittington, London’s first Lord Mayor, heard the bells calling him back to his destiny. The cat is depicted looking back over its shoulder towards the city. A little further up the hill, on the wall of Waterlow Park, a plaque reads that a cottage belonging to the poet Andrew Marvell stood on the site, the remains of which, the plaque states, lie just beneath the pavement.

By now, you will be breathing hard and wondering why the heck you decided to climb the hill instead of going one further stop on the tube and getting the lift. It comes as some relief, therefore, when the road flattens out into a pleasant high street of boutiques, restaurants and artisan bakeries. Just around the corner is one of the foremost independent schools in the country. Highgate School has taught many of our great literary figures, among them Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Betjeman, who was taught here by T.S. Eliot. Like most schools, it has expanded as new buildings have been added to accommodate its changing needs: there are Victorian school buildings, modern blocks and a gothic chapel, which dominates the hilltop, all in the same red brick and sandstone. If you cross the road you should find Byron Cottage. This little house was rented by the poet A.E. Housman and it was here that he wrote his masterpiece: A Shropshire Lad.

There are some very pleasant houses around here and the area is very leafy and green. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, even for a Sunday, and an air of quiet peace pervaded. I walked along back streets towards the Green and the house where Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent his last days. He had moved to Highgate to live under the supervision of his doctor, who insisted that Coleridge stop using laudanum. On the hill you can find the shop which, a mere 200 years ago, was a pharmacy, Dunn’s of Townsend Yard, to which Sam would sometimes sneak to buy the forbidden treat. It is now an estate agent and I stopped here to look in the window and assure myself that I would never be able to afford to live around here.

Coleridge was not a very healthy person. He had been what was known as a ‘sickly’ child; a number of childhood disorders had left him weak and prone to illness. He suffered from anxiety and periods of depression and had been treated for this with laudanum: really bad idea. By 1816, when he moved to Highgate, he had been addicted to opium for most of his life and had lost his wife and family during his attempts to manage his addiction. His doctor, James Gillman, took personal responsibility for his patient, and had some success at keeping the worst of his addiction under control. Coleridge moved into Gillman’s house, at 3 The Grove, at which address he was to die in 1834. The house stands in a delightfully peaceful little road just off of Highgate Green. It’s a lovely village setting, with old houses, church and pub clustered around a green. And it’s quiet. Hard to believe that this is now an inner suburb of London. It’s also worth noting that, as the plaque confirms, J.B. Priestley lived in the same house, possibly attracted by the building’s literary provenance.

On the opposite side of the road stands the church of St. Michael, in which Coleridge is interred. I love churches. I love the echoey silence, the musty smell and the cool, shady interiors. I particularly like the click of an ancient iron latch and the creak of a heavy oak door echoing through the building. It was now twelve o’clock on a Sunday, however, and the service was in full swing. I wasn’t sure they would appreciate a tourist bursting in and demanding to see their sacred memorials. This was far from dry and dusty; the door was glass, not oak, and didn’t creak when I pushed it. In fact, it swung open effortlessly and deposited me in the midst of the Sunday service. Rather than being scowled at, however, I was beckoned in by a very smiley woman. After muttering my apologies I stood at the back and watched. It was rather different from the church services I remember as a child, where I sat in rigid silence, listening to a sombre organ being played slightly off key.

There was a real sense of community here: hymns were accompanied by a guitar and children played in the aisles. The congregation was diverse and people were smiling. No one hushed the kids, even though the vicar was struggling to make his voice heard above the noise. Everyone was enjoying themselves. One little girl, about four or five years old, very politely asked me if I would mind moving as she had been planning to run around in circles and I was blocking her route. I complied with her request and even asked if I could join her for a circuit or two. It was all rather lovely: people singing, children playing and friends chatting together.

The service finished, the congregation stayed to continue their conversations. I ventured further into the aisle in order to find Coleridge’s grave. I found it easily enough. It is right in the middle of the church, marked with a grey slab. He was first laid to rest in the chapel of Highgate School. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the chapel crypt was in danger of flooding, that his remains were moved to their present location. On the north wall of the church is a more elaborate memorial to the poet, recording that he lived “the last nineteen years of his life in this hamlet” and listing some of his achievements. I paused to read it, and to marvel at the stained glass behind the altar (by Evie Hone) and left the church, which was still as vibrant and full of chatter as it had been when I entered it. I headed for the Flask, where I was to meet Martin.

The Flask is quite a famous pub. Apart from being Coleridge’s local, some great literary figures have had a drink here, among them Byron, Shelley and Keats. It is supposedly where Byron “swore on the horns” - a strange ceremony, in which one must foreswear bad bread and ale over a set of ram’s horns. Apparently, certain societies still carry out the ceremony to this day. I arrived at 12.30 and it was already full. I found the only remaining table, perched atop a little stool and did some writing while I waited for my companion. He is young and, therefore, always late. The pub was hugely convivial, with that warm, cosy feeling that can only be found in old pubs. There was the sound of pleasant chatter and music played at a reasonable volume. The beer was good and cool and, but for the prices, I could have been in any village in the country, rather than the heart of a sprawling city. Martin arrived and we spent a very pleasant lunchtime. I had roast beef and it was very good. The plate loaded with mounds of vegetables and Yorkshire puddings. We had several more beers and chatted into the afternoon, when we left to have a look around the nearby cemetery.

Highgate Cemetery was opened to help manage the Victorian expansion of the capital, when the heaving churchyards of the city could no longer cope with the rapidly growing population. A number of cemeteries were built on the outskirts of London. As well as Highgate there’s one at Kensal Green, at Brompton and West Norwood, amongst others. There were even special train services to take deceased and mourners alike out to leafy suburbs and peaceful resting places. Highgate retains its peaceful, bucolic air and has become a place of recreation for history enthusiasts as a number of famous people have ended up here. By far the most famous is the political philosopher Karl Marx. His monument had a throng of people around it and is certainly an awe-inspiring sight: a huge effigy of the great man surmounts a plinth on which is written “Workers of all lands unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Nearby, the great Victorian novelist George Eliot is interred beneath a stone monolith. I also found Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia and Vanessa, the central figures of the Bloomsbury Group. I was particularly keen on seeing Douglas Adams. On his grave visitors leave cheap plastic biros as a mark of respect (he always wondered what happened to the many he lost). I had a biro in my pocket so left it for him, while uttering a quiet thanks for many hours of entertainment he had brought in my teenage years, and for being one of the people who had first interested me in the written word.

We left the cemetery in search of tea, for which we walked towards West Hill through quiet streets lined with cherry trees and filled with large and expensive-looking houses. There was no traffic noise at all here, no noise of any sort in fact. It was eerily quiet. We walked down Highgate West Hill, past the house where John Betjeman had spent his childhood, and back to the bustle of London.

“At that hill’s foot did London then begin,
With yellow horse-drawn trams clopping past the planes.”
John Betjeman, Highgate

NB. Some of the buildings I have written about are private property. Please respect the owners’ privacy and admire them from a distance.

Elyot: I met her on a house party in Norfolk.
Amanda: Very flat, Norfolk.
Elyot: There’s no need to be unpleasant.

Noel Coward, Private Lives

It isn’t flat. Not really. You can’t call it hilly but it’s not exactly flat. The cliffs at Overstrand reach up to 80m. Further west, there are examples of drumlins: mounds of glacial debris left by a retreating ice sheet, which give a nice ‘bumpy’ feel to the landscape. Much of the coast is low-lying and in some places, there is no firm dividing line between land and sea. Wide stretches of salt marsh stretch up to sea walls, where the mighty North Sea is held back. This allows some of the land to be farmed and creates a unique habitat for wildlife. Birdlife, in particular, thrives here and enthusiasts will travel from throughout the country to stare out across the marshes in hope of finding something rare or exotic. As a child, I remember walking for miles across these marshes to the wind-battered shore and across heathland, where I was told to be wary of snakes. I was also told of Black Shuck, the enormous black dog who wanders the coast road looking for his lost master. It means certain death for anyone who catches the dog’s eye. The dog is said to reside under Beeston Hump, a hill on the coast near Sheringham. Arthur Conan Doyle also used to holiday in the area and it seems he may have been influenced by this story to write his own tale of a huge, horrific black dog.

One story that definitely was inspired by the Norfolk coast is The Adventure of the Dancing Men, the tale of a secret organisation that communicates using a code composed of stick figures. Conan Doyle came up with the idea whilst staying at the Hill House Hotel in Happisburgh, and this was the first stop on my recent journey along the Norfolk coast. The village of Happisburgh was once home to Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, and writer of the Raffles stories, E.W. Hornung. When Doyle came to visit in 1903, he stayed at Hill House. It seems that the landlord’s son had invented his own code, in which pictures of little dancing figures stood in for letters. Doyle was fascinated, of course, and created a story in which the great detective has to decipher just such a code.

The Hill House is now a delightfully cosy little pub, packed to the gills with interesting objects and artworks. As well as a large bookcase by the front door, there are artefacts from ships that have foundered on the coast, paintings of the area and a ‘Sherlock Holmes’ corner, celebrating the world’s greatest consulting detective’s close links to the building. Sitting at the bar was a gentleman sporting a magnificent white beard, who, on hearing me enquire about Conan Doyle, struck up a conversation. He was one of those wonderful people you sometimes find in pubs who are knowledgeable about all things. David was knowledgeable about the history of the pub, the village and the surrounding area. We chatted for a while over a pint or two of their excellent ale and then I joined Mrs. P by the fireside.

When Doyle stayed at the Hill House in 1903, North Norfolk was thriving: the holiday locale of choice for the London middle classes. Its story as a genteel holiday destination begins in the 19th Century, when businessmen in Norwich had made enough money to afford apartments and cottages in seaside towns like Cromer. The sea at Cromer was well known for its rejuvenating properties and was popular among the well to-do: Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen both used it to denote an elegant, if bracing, seaside town. It increased in popularity when Clement Scott, the Daily Telegraph theatre critic, travelled to Overstrand in 1883 and wrote a series of articles describing it, dubbing the area ‘Poppyland’. Scott stayed at Mill House in Overstrand, a house that later the same year accommodated Algernon Swinburne on his journey to Norfolk. By 1883, Swinburne was suffering the effects of lifelong alcoholism and was regularly taken to the coast for his health. This particular trip must have made an impression on him as it inspired a book of poetry A Midsummer Holiday, published in 1884.

Mill House is a charming little B&B. A picturebook cottage of red brick, rather than the local flint, it is set back from the road and nestles in its own beautiful garden, slightly bare on this early spring evening but spots of colour were visible among the shrubs that were bursting into flower. Mrs. P and I were booked to spend the night here and we found it after a small amount of searching (good luck with a phone signal out on the coast!) and were greeted at the door by Denise, our friendly and welcoming host. She showed us up steep, narrow stairs to our rooms, telling us in which ones the famous guests had stayed (our bathroom had been installed in part of Scott’s room).

That evening, attracted by the prospect of fish and chips on the seafront at Cromer, we drove into town, stopping on the way to look at the Clement Scott memorial on the roadside. Once in Cromer, it became apparent that Mrs. P has a bit of a gambling problem. Attracted by the flashing lights, she was drawn, zombie-like into the amusement arcade. I left her there, feeding coin after coin into the penny shove as I went out to explore the town. I walked past the Hotel de Paris, a reminder of Cromer’s affluent past, now giving the town a feel of slight neglect. It was here that Oscar Wilde stayed in 1892, having come to Norfolk for the good of his health. He later retreated to a cottage inland to write A Woman of No Importance. Stephen Fry also has close links with the hotel, as he worked his Sixth Form summers here as a waiter. He writes about the experience in Moab is my Washpot. Incidentally, I was listening to Mr Fry read Conan Doyle’s Adventure of the Dancing Men, during my trip. He has, as one might expect, the most superb Norfolk accent. It is gentle and lyrical and was the soundtrack to my week.

I walked down the cliff to the esplanade and discovered, by the pier, a memorial to local lifeboat crews. It lists some of the wrecks they have attended over the years, each name pointing to a distant location far out to sea. The sun was setting now and, good God, it was cold! A freezing, biting wind blowing straight off the North Sea, which, as my father often pointed out, met no landfall between here and the pole. It brought home to me just how terrifyingly, miserably, painfully cold it must be and how grateful I am that people will volunteer to go out in these pitiful conditions to rescue those that get into difficulty. The sea around here is known for wrecks and Defoe spent some time travelling this coast before he wrote Robinson Crusoe (he said of Cromer that there was nothing of note except the lobsters).

Elsewhere on the esplanade, on stones set into the walkway, are quotations from literary figures who have visited Cromer over the years. Oscar Wilde is here, and Swinburne, Elizabeth Gaskell and even a young Winston Churchill. Jane Austen also visited Cromer in its heyday but I couldn’t find a quotation from her (she mentions the town in ‘Emma’). This was once a fashionable and sophisticated resort, as the Hotel de Paris testifies. It has become a little run down and grubby in recent years: amusement arcades and caffs and charity shops but there are a few trendy bars and restaurants opening up, so it looks like the place is on the up. So was I. I climbed back up the, ridiculously steep, cliff steps to find Mrs. P. wide-eyed and vacant, staring into the flashing lights of the penny shove. She had no coins left (having frittered away close to £2!) but was clutching a coin purse in the shape of a Japanese cartoon kitten and was smiling with victory as she held her prize aloft. It was now dark and later than we had planned to eat. We went in search of a chippy and found one just before it closed. We carried warm paper packages back to the car and ate there, huddled together, looking at the lights far out to sea.

The next morning, we had a fine breakfast at the Mill House: sausages, bacon, eggs, proper tea from a proper pot and toast and marmalade. Lovely. We bade farewell to Denise and Philly the Labradoodle, and set out to Holt, a lovely little market town about a mile inland and home to a range of craft shops and delicatessens, which are the natural habitat of the Mrs. P, and to which she is inexorably drawn. She dropped me Just outside the town at Gresham’s public school, as I wanted to see the theatre they have there. I tend not to write much about schools but this one is rather a special case, in that it has educated an astounding number of famous people and two legendary literary figures.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907. The son of a doctor, he enjoyed a reasonably privileged upbringing. He went to Gresham’s at the age of thirteen. He would, of course, go on to be one of the defining poets of the twentieth century, writing a huge range of verse in a variety of styles. He relates personal to political experience, in a way that is sometimes funny, sometimes unfathomable and sometimes heartbreakingly sad. One of his poems (Funeral Blues, or ‘Stop all the clocks...’) is one of the most recited at funerals. Whilst at Gresham’s he met Stephen Spender, who was to become a lifelong friend and collaborator. Spender was a local lad: he had grown up in Sheringham, a few miles along the coast. Spender was a shy and withdrawn child, who liked music and long country walks. Unlike Auden, who thrived at Gresham’s, Spender was unsuited for life at school and it made him utterly miserable. Auden and Spender, along with the writers they associated with: Isherwood, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, are characterised by a strong anti-fascist sentiment. Growing up with the rise of fascism in Europe politicised them. Spender, being half Jewish and influenced by Brecht’s socialist poetry, wrote poetry that expressed his own socialist opinions. Auden joined the International Brigade and fought against fascism in Spain.

The school has honoured W.H. Auden by dedicating a theatre to his memory. This is not just for the students, but is also available to the local community and is used for the literary festival, held in Holt every summer. The staff at Gresham’s were very welcoming and amiable, as I arrived without an appointment and asked if I could take some photographs. It was the school holidays, so there was little activity on the site but the staff that were left behind were doing their best to catch up on all the little jobs that need doing during the holidays. I was extremely grateful that Mr. Gabriel, the caretaker, took half an hour out of his busy day to show me around. There is a memorial to Auden on the lawn outside the theatre, and another to Benjamin Britten. Another ex-student after whom the concert hall is named. Mr. Gabriel told me a great deal about the theatre, the school and all the famous alumni: Benjamin Britten, Stephen Frears, Olivia Coleman. “There’s always one they leave off” he told me, “Jeremy Bamber, remember him?” Indeed I did, he was a Norfolk lad who had taken a shotgun to various members of his family. I had no idea he was at Gresham’s! In fact, their list of alumni is so impressive that “I had no idea he was at Gresham’s!” was a phrase I uttered frequently that day.

Having looked around the theatre and thanked the school staff for their hospitality, I walked the mile or so into Holt where I met Mrs. P in the Adnams shop: always a welcome sight in an East Anglian town. It was fast approaching lunchtime now, so we drove back out to the coast road and through a series of tiny, coastal hamlets: Kelling, Salthouse, Cley - where London poet Stevie Smith had spent some of her summers. We wound our way along coastal roads between farmland and seemingly endless marshes, stretching to where the shingle bank keeps the sea at bay. We at last arrived at Blakeney, squeezing down narrow lanes between tightly packed flint houses, to the tiny harbour on the creek, where excited children dangled bright orange crab lines into the water.

Jack Higgins, author of The Eagle Has Landed, based much of his description of the Norfolk landscape on the local area. The landscape plays an important role in the story, about a plot to kidnap Churchill, who is staying in a remote Norfolk village during the Second World War. Higgins describes it as:

a strange alien world, of sea creeks and mudflats and great pale barriers of reed higher than a man’s head, inhabited only by the birds, curlew and redshank and brent geese, coming south from Siberia to winter on the mud flats.

Jack Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed

He stayed at the large, rambling Blakeney Hotel, when he was writing his novel. We headed there now and had a rather good lunch. Mrs. P opted for the crab sandwich, a local speciality, served on rustic wholemeal bread, whilst I went for a seafood platter, washed down with a pint of the local ale. We went for a walk around Blakeney harbour after that. From here, you can walk out to the point: a finger of land that stretches four miles out into the sea. It is home to a lighthouse and a colony of seals, which play around passing boats for the amusement of onlookers. We weren’t in the mood for such a mammoth walk this afternoon, so headed back to the car and spent the rest of the day meandering along the coast road, stopping briefly at Stiffkey to see the little farmhouse where Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, was inspired by Oswald Mosley to take up farming and ‘do his bit’ for the forthcoming fascist utopia. Thankfully, neither of them succeeded.

As we drove west, we were able to catch glimpses of the sea, beyond marshes, behind dunes and through pine woods. As the road headed further inland, it receded into the distance, until finally being lost for good.

If you are interested in discovering more of the literature of Norfolk and the famous writers associated with the county, I thoroughly recommend visiting the Literary Norfolk website.

An enormous area of wetlands to the east of Norwich, The Broads were formed when ancient peat workings were flooded by rising sea levels. This created 125 miles of navigable waterways that attract about 7½ million visitors every year. This rural idyll has attracted some great literary figures too. Arthur Ransome came to Broadland for the sailing in his yacht, the Nancy Blackett, and John Betjeman spent much of his childhood in Broadland. He writes affectionately about the happy times he spent aboard his father’s yacht, The Queen of the Broads.

Agatha Christie was attracted to Norfolk, not by the sailing, but by her close friends, The McLeods, who lived in North Walsham. Christie first met Peter and Margaret McLeod in Baghdad, where she was accompanying her husband, Max Mallowan, on an archaeological dig. They hit it off immediately. The McLeods were both doctors and shared a love of poisons with Agatha. They would spend many happy hours discussing various chemicals and their effect on the human body. Christie took long holidays with them in Norfolk, spending her days writing in their summerhouse and her evenings happily discussing poisons with the McLeods. Peter and Margaret would both proofread Christie’s novels and give advice about the actions of chemicals on the human body and the tell-tale signs that poison had been used to despatch an unwanted individual. Christie dedicated one of her novels, Sad Cypress, to the McLeods.

The house in which they lived is now The Beechwood Hotel. Mrs. P and I began our journey around Broadland with a night here. It is a charming and comfortable hotel, decorated in 1920s style with many photographs of Christie adorning the walls. There are also framed letters and postcards from her to the McLeods. I lingered for a while exploring all they had to offer about the Queen of Crime, including a full set of her novels for guests to borrow. The staff were all approachable and lovely, particularly Beth, who checked us in, showed us to our room and told us all about Christie’s time at the Beechwood, including which room she slept in. Our room was, perhaps, a little small but we were only staying for a single night. We forewent the dining room that evening, fine dining is not really our thing: far too formal for us; food should be unfussy and relaxed. We walked into the lovely little market town of North Walsham and found a friendly little bistro – ‘The Shambles’, it was called – where we had a magnificent (and enormous) meal.

The following morning, after a magnificent breakfast, we set out to discover the literary heritage of this beautiful part of the country. I needed to walk off the B&E so we made our way to the village of Buxton. Here is Dudwick House, the ancestral home of the Sewell family. They were Quakers and reinvested much of their wealth in the local community. They built a reading room and a school in the village, as well as a jail. It was into this family, in 1820, that Anna Sewell was born. She would find fame as the author of Black Beauty, a book that is still popular today among horse-loving children. The novel is narrated in the first person by the horse, who, in the course of his adventures, encounters hardships and cruelty before eventually finding peace. The novel did much to highlight the plight of working animals in the Victorian era. Sewell actually lived in Catton, near Norwich, but Dudwick House is important in her story as it was here, as a child, that Anna learned to ride. The original house has long gone and the one you can see now was built in 1937, when the estate passed to another family.

Dudwick Park is a beautiful open space, well used by the villagers. There were many dog walkers, happily admiring each other’s pets and some small boys, who left off trying to shoot each other to ask me what I was photographing. They hadn’t heard of Anna Sewell, and I suppose this is no surprise. The books do seem a bit old fashioned now, particularly to young children brought up on the high-energy rude humour of David Walliams. My daughter read Black Beauty but, then, my daughter was horse mad. The two boys lost interest in my stories about the park and went back to trying to kill each other with their imaginary weapons. I continued my walk through the park. There is a little stream running through the estate, which eventually joins the River Bure. I would be encountering the Bure several more times on my journey today.

Across the river from Buxton is Lamas, where, in the garden of a Quaker chapel, Anna Sewell was interred in 1878. This is now part of a private house and her gravestone, along with those of some of her family, has been moved to the roadside, set into the garden wall. Her grave, under a line of magnificent yew trees, can still clearly be seen from the road. Opposite, in a meadow by the Bure, a horse was munching happily. He wasn’t quite the sleek black stallion that Sewell wrote about, more of a dirty brown carthorse. I still thought his presence was rather poignant, so I went and talked to him for a while before making my way to the next destination.

The village of Horning the “Heart of the Norfolk Broads” centres, as you might expect, around the Broads. It has to be said that some Broadland towns can be a bit touristy, a few too many cheap gift shops and seedy caffs but Horning manages to get the balance about right. There are many, many tourists here; as many to watch the boats as sail, and Horning probably has more river traffic than road traffic but it still retains its rural, Norfolk charm. The high street has a good range of shops. There is a nice little Art Gallery and post office and general store, which also sells a few books. A pleasant little café and deli too and, yes, they do sell gifts but they are few and tasteful. There is also an enormous pub here – The Swan – around which little boats nestle: boats and pubs seem to go hand-in-hand. Some of the boats are lovely little yachts and motor launches, with varnished wood and fresh, clean paint; some, it has to be said, are monstrous looking things.

Arthur Ransome stayed in Horning while writing some of his hugely popular Swallows and Amazons stories. After exploring the town, I took a seat in the very charming little café, ordered a coffee and dipped into my copy of Big Six, one of Ransome’s books set on the Broads.

‘Everyone knows the staithe, where boats tie up when calling at Horning. Everyone knows the inn at the bend of the river above it, and the boatbuilders’ sheds below it, and the bit of grass beside it, and the pump by the old brick wall, and the road with the shops on the further side of it.

Arthur Ransome, Big Six

Horning also features in Coot Club, Ransome’s other Broads book, in which he mentions the Swan by name. It’s nice to see that much of what he describes remains largely unchanged. We had planned to lunch at the Swan but, even though it was now well past lunchtime, we were still processing the enormous breakfast we had at the Beechwood Hotel. We looked in at the Swan, though and it seemed pleasant enough. It was large and cavernous: a big, bright central room with bare brick walls and stone tiled floor. Mrs. P and I prefer small, quiet, cosy little nooks. We decided to skip lunch today and we headed to Belaugh.

Belaugh is a very short drive from Horning. A tiny little village, it is achingly picturesque but without the services, the facilities or the crowds of Horning. The river Bure makes a sharp turn here and briefly runs parallel to the road. There are moorings here and I can’t imagine a lovelier spot to spend an evening, under the trees opposite a reedy bank. The village is dominated by the Church of St. Peter, which sits atop a hill in the middle of the settlement. It was this church, particularly the view of it from the river, that inspired John Betjeman’s love of architecture and churches. I walked up the steep path that winds around the churchyard and took a look inside. They have a nice little display about the church and the local area and Betjeman features heavily within it. There are memories of him from local people, his thoughts on St. Peter’s and pictures of the church tower from the river.

Betjeman’s poetry about Norfolk is nostalgic and dreamy: a slightly sad look back at lost childhood from an adult perspective. Read ‘Norfolk’ and you’ll see what I mean. His ‘East Anglian Bathe’ is also full of sensitive reminiscences, this time of Horsey Mere, a large lake on the eastern side of the broads, near to the coast. Betjeman sailed Horsey Mere with his father on their boat, in The Queen of the Broads. We headed there on what was now a clear, bright but slightly chilly afternoon. It was much quieter out here. There were a few boats moored up but Horsey had none of the bustle of the other towns we had visited today. Here it was sleepy and quiet and reminiscent of the Broadland that Betjeman evokes in his poetry.

There after supper lit by lantern light
Warm in the cabin I could lie secure
And hear against the polished sides at night
The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure,
A whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.

from ‘Norfolk‘, John Betjeman

Horsey has a magnificent windpump, maintained by the National Trust. I went for a look around after my walk around the lake. Norfolk has a large number of windmills; the flat landscape makes this power source particularly efficient. Some families wandered about, with excited children squeezing up tiny ladders to the higher levels of the ancient building. I noticed one or two pushchairs parked outside too. In the little café and gift shop, I stopped for tea and to read up on the mere and the local area. The tea was served in a paper cup but it hit the spot. A rather harassed looking young couple came in with three young children. The man ordered several cups of hot chocolate while his partner policed the children as they rifled through every item for sale: fluffy seals, branded stationery, tiny plastic... things and so on. Each one grabbed along with a request to keep; each request answered with an emphatic “no!” One of the children then tried the same entreaties on his father, pulling at the man’s coat as he stoically tried to exit the shop with some dignity while hot chocolate ran up his sleeves. I chuckled to myself: I’ve been through it all, you see; done my tour of duty. My children are grown up now: a daughter who works for an Arts charity and a son who ... something to do with computers, I think.

I was brought back to my senses by the arrival of an older couple, who went through a similar experience with what must have been their grandchildren. Only they looked, if anything, even more exhausted. It struck me then that, far from being free of it all, I am enjoying a brief moment of freedom before there is a new generation to entertain, teach, take on days out and visits. It won’t be long before I am back to beaches, playgrounds and theme parks and trying to balance eight cups of hot chocolate while being entreated for another pocketful of plastic crap. And then there is my dear friend Emma. The way that she and her boyfriend make moony faces at each other, it surely won’t be long before our literary research trips include pushchairs and changing bags and car seats and a ton of other equipment essential for the wellbeing of a tiny person.

So I was slightly chastened, a bit more thoughtful and perhaps a little less smug as I found my way back to the car and to Mrs. P, who had resisted the pull of the gift shop to spend an hour sitting in the sun. We left Horsey and made our way to our next overnight stop. We would be travelling along the coast tomorrow, in search of Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle, Swinburne and Auden and more. But that is a story for another time.

If you are interested in discovering more of the literature of Norfolk and the famous writers associated with the county, I thoroughly recommend visiting the Literary Norfolk website.

William Morris is primarily remembered as a designer and craftsman. Morris designs ‘rocked’ the Victorian age. They brought interior design out of grand mansions and into the middle-class villas of the expanding suburbs. They dragged Victorian interior design from the dark wood and heavy drapes of the morose mid-Victorian era and created light, beautiful spaces. So enthusiastic were the Victorians for these designs that they have become part of our design environment and reproductions of them are still popular today. You may not know who designed them or what they are called, but if you see ‘Chrysanthemum’ or ‘Snakeshead’, ‘Sweetbriar’ or ‘Willow’, I guarantee that you will recognise it immediately and, probably, remember a house from your childhood that was decorated with it.

Morris was born, in 1834, at Marsh House, Walthamstow, where the gallery is now housed. He was sent to Oxford to train for the clergy. Whilst there, two life changing events befell him. Firstly, he met Edward Burne-Jones, who was to become his lifelong friend and collaborator and, secondly, he became disillusioned with the church and its teaching. William and Edward left Oxford for London, where Morris began training as an architect. He soon discovered a talent for design and, eventually, he set up his own company. He was inspired by John Ruskin’s revolutionary ideas about art and tried to produce beautiful, hand-made furnishings for the people, not just the better off. Morris was driven by a dislike for Victorian manufacturing processes, which he saw as soulless and exploitative. He was a committed socialist and a founder member of the Socialist league. His home in Hammersmith hosted lectures on social reform from some of the foremost thinkers of the age, among them George Bernard Shaw.

Morris was also well-known for his contribution to literature and was a prolific author, poet and translator. Some of his poems are built around his socialist beliefs in the dignity of labour and the need for social reform:

“For that which the worker winneth
shall then be his indeed,
Nor shall half be reaped for nothing
by him that sowed no seed.”

The Day is Coming

Others reflect his love of ancient myth and legend, particularly Icelandic sagas, with which he had a lifelong fascination. He was also a prolific writer of fantasy fiction, such as The Sundering Flood, The Well at the World’s End and The Wood beyond the World, which had a profound influence on a new generation of fantasy writers, among them JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.

I had agreed to meet my friend Mr Scott in Walthamstow on a summer afternoon last year. He was in the area helping his brother to move house so, after first making clear that I would, under no circumstances, offer any help lifting heavy boxes (there are two things I don’t do: one is lift heavy boxes and the other is help) I availed myself of the opportunity to visit the museum before meeting an old friend for lunch. I made my way from Walthamstow Central to Forest Road, through the rich and vibrant suburb, where art galleries and artisan bakeries rub shoulders with the usual collection of takeaways and London boozers, along with more barbers’ shops than I would have thought a town of this size could support. The museum sits in Lloyd park, just off the Forest Road, and is a stately sight from the busy London thoroughfare.

The exhibition is cleverly laid out, featuring separate galleries devoted to a different aspect of Morris’s life: there is an introduction to his life and work, the story of his initial forays into design and setting up his company and workshops. There is even a replica of the Morris & Co. shop on Oxford Street. I found the story fascinating and the designs intricate and beautiful. What I was really here for, however, was on the first floor, where the story of the Kelmscott Press was presented.

Morris set up the Kelmscott Press in 1891. He believed that Victorian books were poorly made and mass-produced and representative of all that was wrong with Victorian manufacture. He wanted to bring his ideas of affordable, beautiful design and traditional craftsmanship to the publishing industry. Morris’s idea was that a book should be a cohesive, beautiful object, with design, decoration and typeface all complementing each other. And they are certainly beautiful objects. In the gallery I was able to see examples of Morris’s own works, alongside his beautiful Canterbury Tales and the title page of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, and many other wonderful, beautiful books.

The whole gallery was wonderful and I was sorry to leave but, despite the fan doing its best, the house was extremely hot. Too hot for tea even. There is a tea shop in the gallery, and quite a nice little bookshop and I did visit the latter before I left. I met Mr Scott just a short walk from the museum, in the Bell: a lovely, friendly, lively pub, that the young, trendy people in there would probably call ‘buzzing’. We took a seat in the small courtyard garden, enjoying the blazing heat of the English summer. We sat and drank throughout the afternoon, moving into shade when seats became available and, as with all lunches with Mr Scott, the afternoon ended in a haze. I had a pleasant enough journey home, reading the books I had bought from the gallery on the train. That was the plan, anyway. I got home later that evening but I cannot for the life of me remember how.

The first thing to do was to formulate a plan for the day’s events, so, having deposited Mrs. P. near some shops, I made my way to a local pub to gather my energy for the coming afternoon. On visiting Stratford in the past, I have always made straight for The Dirty Duck: one of my favourite pubs. This year, I thought, I shall diversify. There are many pubs in Stratford and, as a dedicated author of literary guides, it is my duty to try a variety of them, that my loyal readers can make an informed choice when planning their own excursion. I resolved to try a couple of others, have a pint in one, maybe something to eat in another and give a fair and objective review of each of them. First stop was the Rose and Crown. As I entered, a couple approached the door, the lady struggling on a pair of crutches. I stepped aside politely and held the door for them, smiling as they approached. They didn’t thank me, in fact, they scowled at me. How dare I open the door for them and smile! The nerve! I entered a vast open space with piped music and the flashing lights of fruit machines. I stopped and took stock for a moment or two. This was not going to be the place for a quiet lunch and a bit of a read. I abandoned my plan and headed for the Duck.

The Dirty Duck, being very close to the RSC, is popular with the acting community. You always run the risk of standing at the bar with someone who has recently performed at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Or been on Midsomer Murders. There was someone at the bar as I entered that I definitely, definitely recognised but could not place. This was confirmed by the fact that he smiled at me in that knowing way adopted by people who don’t want to be recognised but are secretly annoyed when they aren’t. I nodded in my “I know who you are and I appreciate your work but I’m just having a quiet pint” way. He nodded back; he understood the code. I still have no idea who he was but he was someone; I am sure of it.

One of the things I love about the Duck is the signed photos of personalities who have graced the establishment over the years. I took a seat by Jonathan Pryce and looked over at Colin Firth, sharing a wall with Charles Dance. Near them, John Lithgow looked back from next to Richard Burton, who had, quite rightly, been given a prominent position next to the bar. Frances de la Tour sat alongside them. I noticed the dogs for the first time. They have a corner of their own: Yogi, Molly, Larry and the others. Only one has been given a credit (Toto, in 2014). The others, I supposed, were various ‘Crabs’ from over the years. Crab, the dog belonging to Launce, the Servant, always steals the show in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It’s nice to know that canine performers are taken for a drink after the show, and are recognised by this Stratford institution. I bought a second pint just as the waiter brought my fish finger sandwich and very nice it was too. I’m rather partial to a fish finger sandwich, the mainstay of student cuisine, which I used to make with white bread and tomato ketchup. This one was freshly fried battered goujons served on a crusty sourdough with a homemade tartare sauce. It was served piping hot and was delicious. After lunch I left the Duck and walked alongside the river towards the church, past The Dell: the little open air theatre where the RSC hosts amateur and student groups, who perform some of the Bard’s ‘greatest hits’ – completely free – on summer afternoons.

The church was pleasantly cool as I entered from the hot summer afternoon. There is some magnificent stained glass and, in the chancel, some beautiful carved misericords (tiny little seats on which one is permitted to lean during long services). There is a small charge to view the Shakespeare family graves and the memorial and I willingly paid it. £2, I think it was; not much to ask for such an important historic site. The likeness of the Shakespeare memorial is unlike the portraits we have of a dashing young writer and presents him rather as a prosperous middle-aged businessman. Perhaps that’s how the people of Stratford saw him after his retirement here. His grave is beneath the memorial; he lies alongside his wife, his daughter, Susanna and her husband, Dr John Hall. There is also Thomas Nash, the husband of Elizabeth, Shakespeare’s granddaughter and last surviving member of the Shakespeare family. The church records of Will’s baptism and burial can be seen here and there is also a magnificent chained bible, along with the font, which is (probably) the one in which Shakespeare was baptised.

From the Church, I headed North towards Church Street. At the end of Church Street is the Shakespeare Institute: part of the University of Birmingham dedicated to Shakespeare studies. A plaque on the wall declares that this was once the home of Marie Corelli. Although this novelist has largely been forgotten, she was hugely popular in her time, outselling HG Wells and Conan Doyle, she was reputedly a favourite of Queen Victoria but, generally, the literary world very much looked down their noses at her. She was considered vulgar and melodramatic. The Spectator called her “a woman of deplorable talent who considers herself a genius”. Her books, mostly romantic fiction, are full of mystical motifs and ancient magic, along with detailed descriptions of beautiful young women. She lived with Bertha Vyver, who had been her father’s housekeeper and they are buried together in Stratford, where they lived from 1901 until Marie’s death in 1924. It was while living in the town that she began to take a close interest in ancient and historic buildings, campaigning for their preservation. She is responsible for restoring many of the half-timbered buildings you can see nearby. Her writing is not that bad but it is inconsistent: sometimes showing moments of romantic exuberance; sometimes just clichéd and overblown. You can find some examples, along with an article about her, here.

Shakespeare’s Schoolroom museum preserves the room in which Shakespeare is supposed to have been educated. It is still part of the Edward VI grammar school and is still used for teaching in term-time but is open to the public during the holidays. On entering the museum, a video tells the story of the building and of artefacts that have been discovered here, including some beautiful wall paintings, whitewashed over during the Reformation. On the first floor are two schoolrooms, one of which dates from Shakespeare’s time. Here, the story of the Elizabethan schoolroom is told, speculating on the influence that school life could have had for an impressionable young writer. The second room dates from the Victorian era and has a much more familiar layout. Here were various activities for visitors to try. I had a go at writing with a quill pen. I was brilliant at it! Sometimes Elizabethan lessons are re-enacted for the benefit of schoolchildren, and there are costumed staff, all of them friendly and ready to share their enthusiasm with visitors. There is an ancient school desk here, labelled “possibly Shakespeare’s” and I asked someone if there was any evidence that it was his. “Well” he replied, thoughtfully “there’s no evidence that it wasn’t!” It was a lovely little museum; atmospheric as well as informative, with lovely, chatty staff and a nice little gift shop. On leaving here, I walked past New Place and back down to the Bancroft Gardens, where I greeted Mrs. P. with an ice cream cone. She was very pleased.

We had booked in at the Opposition, an intimate little bistro on Sheep Street, for a pre-theatre meal. It was excellent: the menu was great; the food good and plentiful and the service friendly and efficient. I was very happy to have found such a lovely little restaurant and will be going there again. We weren’t able to linger here as we had tickets for The Merry Wives of Windsor. This isn’t my favourite play but I did enjoy seeing the imaginative way in which it was interpreted to be entertaining, fun and relatable to a modern audience. It is always a pleasure to see the RSC in their headquarters, which is a very fine theatre, and they are extremely good at what they do. Mrs. P loved it. She loves a raucous comedy, does Mrs. P.

The following morning, after getting outside some B&E, as Bertie Wooster might say, I took a walk over to the nearby village of Shottery. There is a very well-signposted pathway through the outskirts of the town that takes you on the route that young Will Shakespeare might have taken when courting Anne Hathaway. What was once a path through fields and meadows now takes you through modern housing estates and across a playing field but is a pleasant walk nonetheless and, on this beautiful summer morning, with the sunshine and the birdsong, it was actually rather wonderful. It’s the best way to approach the cottage, which appears, side-on through a little copse as you cross a bridge over a stream. The cottage is set among some beautiful gardens: there is an enormous orchard (with plums and apples largely going uneaten, apart from the ones I pinched); a lovely area of woodland, featuring a winding trail; a cottage garden with marigolds and thistles; poppies and hollyhocks; fragrant herbs and old-fashioned roses. The cottage itself is an achingly beautiful English thatched cottage, famed from jigsaw puzzles, chocolate boxes and biscuit tins through the ages. There were surprisingly few people wandering about the garden as I approached: nowhere near the huge crowds I had been expecting.

I’m not a big fan of guided tours. I like to wander around a house or a museum, moving at my own pace and doing my own thing. Here, they have the balance about right: a short introductory talk about the house and the family that occupied it (it remained in the Hathaway family for hundreds of years) before we were left to wander about on our own. The upstairs rooms of the house have each been restored to a different period, showing how the house has altered through the years. Much of the furniture belonged to the family and had been here for years. Unfortunately, there is rather a lot of the “probably sat in by Shakespeare” thing going on here but it is a lovely cottage, beautifully restored, well cared for and offering a fascinating insight into the lives of our ancestors, one of whom may have been a literary genius.

Of course the story of Will and Anne’s courtship has been hugely over-romanticised and, of course, the cottage looks very different now from the way it did four hundred years ago but It is truly a lovely place to spend a summer afternoon.

We parked the car in the middle of the city centre, buying a four-hour ticket for what we would have paid for four minutes in Cambridge, and wandered off to discover the city. The area we were in was dominated by the sort of shopping mall that could place one in the heart of any city in the country: the same shops, the same decor, the same music piped in to make our retail experience more pleasant. Mrs P’s eyes lit up, of course, and she scurried off in search of bargains. I, on the other hand, attempted an escape. It isn’t always easy to locate the exit in a shopping mall, but, as soon as I was free, I discovered quite a nice Georgian town. Stately buildings stood aloof over broad thoroughfares and office workers sat in sunny corners enjoying a brief lunchtime repast. There are many influences on the buildings: here and there a Victorian edifice; a piece of medieval wall; a modern office block. The stately façades of Georgian houses, built with the proceeds of commerce, rub shoulders with the products of Victorian industry, within the original medieval town, complete with castle, next to modern shops and offices. It all feels closely packed together - pushed into the valley of the Tyne. It is easy to tell that this has been a very rich city in the past.

I headed West, towards the ancient part of the city. Here, in a little strip of parkland, you can see what remains of the medieval wall. It runs behind a street of Asian restaurants and I followed its course past open doors through which I could see kitchens recovering from the lunchtime onslaught; chefs sat in the street outside, enjoying end-of-shift smokes and gazing at mobile ‘phone screens. Halfway along this back street stands the Morden Tower. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there was a very famous poetry club here. Apparently, the circular room inside the building has the perfect acoustics for poetry and many of the world’s greatest writers have read here: Allen Ginsberg, Nell Dunn, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Adrian Henry, Roger McGough, Adrian Mitchell, Hugh MacDiarmid, Stevie Smith, Fleur Adcock, Simon Armitage, Angela Carter, Jackie Kay, Carol Anne Duffy, Carol Rumens, Lemn Sissay and John Hegley have all performed here and this is a tiny, tiny proportion of the huge variety of voices that have been heard in the tower. Today, it was locked up and deserted. It looked as if it had been abandoned for years although, apparently, there are still occasional readings here.

A short walk from here, I stopped at the Literary and Philosophical Society: The Society was founded in 1793 as a library and debating society. It remains the largest independent library in the country outside London and has 160,000 titles along with a CD and record library. It remains a private subscription library and also holds public events and exhibitions.

I was admiring the building from the street, when I became aware of a young woman smiling and waving at me from the doorway. I have reached an age when it has become rare for a young woman to beckon me from the street and so I willingly followed her into the building. She told me a little bit about the society and the building it occupies, as well as their summer exhibition: The Imaginary Museum of the North, in which exhibits from museums in the region are shown throughout the library, along with items created by local schoolchildren. I was shown a replica of Joseph Swan’s light bulb, the original of which was first demonstrated at the society, as was George Stephenson’s safety lamp.

The great thing about this place is that it welcomes young readers in to explore. Being a big kid, I had a good look around, climbing up to the galleries and discovering hidden reading rooms, all of which had exhibits to entertain curious young people. They have a variety of displays and trails for kids to follow while discovering the place. I am pleased to say that all the children who were looking around the library did so calmly and quietly, respecting the many readers who were poring over books and newspapers. This is more than I can say for the adult visitors, who spoke at full volume and clanked up and down the iron staircases seemingly oblivious to their surroundings. I lost track of time while navigating the collection, as I tried to find familiar or interesting titles. I wished I had more time to spend wandering about but I had a whole city to explore.

I walked across the High Level Bridge to Gateshead. Daniel Defoe had once lived on the south side of the river, a plaque marks the approximate site of his dwelling, which I found now with a little help from the very friendly people at St. Mary’s Heritage centre. Defoe was one of the first proponents of the novel form. He wrote a huge amount, mainly political pamphlets. He also wrote the Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain which, compiled between 1724 and 1727, gives an account of the country before industrialisation changed the landscape forever. Defoe lodged in Gateshead and began work on what was to be his best remembered novel, Robinson Crusoe. He was probably hiding out here from his creditors (he spent rather a lot of time hiding from his creditors). He died, in debt, in 1731.

I walked down to the river, past the magnificent Baltic Art Gallery and back to the north side via the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. From here I admired the view upriver of bridges upon bridges. I think I counted seven in all but I’m not completely sure. It’s rather difficult to distinguish the bridges as they all tumble over each other before the ones in the distance become lost in the mist. The ‘winking eye’ is a rather lovely bridge: two metal walkways and a cycleway, with seating all the way along, from which to admire the views, and the whole thing lifts up to allow river traffic to pass.

From here I travelled east, towards the Ouseburn, a tributary of the Tyne that separates the city from the residential areas of Heaton and Byker. The landscape here tells of a more recent industrial past, with warehouses and railway viaducts, yards and industrial buildings. Much of it graffiti clad and overgrown as nature begins to reclaim what was taken from her. There was a distinct sense of regrowth, however: a distinct smell of sawdust in the air and trucks ferrying scaffolding and timber. The area is being reborn as a cultural quarter and is home to creative industries, galleries and old pubs being reopened as music venues. There is a growing student population in the area who are helping to support these businesses. It is easy to forget, when walking through the metal and glass heart of the city centre, that traditional industry was run down here throughout the 20th Century, culminating with the destruction of mining and shipbuilding in the 1980s. What was once known as a city of unemployment and decay has been undergoing a process of regeneration. One can only hope that this regrowth continues through our close and uncertain future.

Seven Stories is a museum dedicated to children’s literature and I had planned to find out more about it. I had no intention of looking around as it is particularly geared towards children but the immensely friendly and welcoming staff in reception ushered me in and invited me to look around. Inside, were seven floors, each one focusing on a different aspect of stories and storytelling. There are some exhibits, such as manuscripts, notebooks and original drawings by children’s authors but most of the space is dedicated to activities: there are story tellings, craft workshops and hundreds of events to occupy the children. They all seemed happy and their parents relieved. They also have an archive in Gateshead to visit if you are serious about studying the art of children’s writing. Ventures such as this are so important in introducing children to the many pleasures they can gain from books and stories. I was happy to see that the exhibits featured some of the stories I read to my own children (Go to Sleep, Little Bear and the Mog stories). It was such a pleasure to revisit some of their favourite stories and illustrations.

I wished I could’ve stayed longer but I had a long journey home and Mrs. P would be waiting. It took me about half an hour to walk back to the city centre. On my way, I stopped at the Nelson Street Music Hall. There is, of course, no music hall here today. The place where Dickens entertained eager audiences is now a trendy wine bar and I stopped in for a drink. Mrs. P said of Newcastle that it feels as if people look out for each other: there’s a sense of community which is often lacking in other towns. The cities of the North East are vibrant and diverse and the people friendly and welcoming. Parts of them are grimy, of course, but parts of all cities are grimy. I met Mrs. P by the Grey’s Monument: a 130 foot column dedicated to the man who gave his name to Earl Grey tea. He was also a reformer and advocate of abolition. I should have raised a cup in his honour but, alas, it was sausage rolls in the car for us. We had a long journey home.

From Seaham, it’s only a short drive into Sunderland. I wanted to visit the city as I had recently read about the Walrus statue in Mowbray Park.

Lewis Carroll’s sister, Mary, lived in Sunderland. He frequently visited her, and her husband, the Reverend Charles Collingwood, at Holy Trinity Rectory in Southwick. The Rev. Charles is supposed to have had a stuffed walrus, which Carroll admired greatly. It was even said to have been the inspiration for one of his best-loved poems, The Walrus and the Carpenter. This statue has been created, by sculptor Andrew Burton, to celebrate Carroll’s connection with the city. We found the statue in a beautiful setting across the lake from the Winter Gardens. The park itself is the most charming relic of Victorian urban planning, complete with formal gardens, bandstand, statues to the great and good of the city and memorials to significant events in Sunderland history. The walrus is clearly beloved of the local birds, many of whom have left their mark on it, and many more occupy the park. A group of young men were spending a pleasant afternoon with an enormous cloud of pigeons wheeling around them. They had their hands outstretched and the pigeons clustered at their feet were eyeing them suspiciously and cooing loudly. There was a huge sack of bird seed on the ground next to them and, as well as feeding hundreds of birds, they were inviting people to take handfuls of seed and join the feeding frenzy. I happily sat with them in the park with birds jumping onto my outstretched hands and stuffing themselves.

Leaving pigeons and walruses behind us, we continued our journey north to Alnwick to (eventually) find the home of Brycchan and Rosie. Brycchan was standing outside his front gate and beckoning enthusiastically. They are delightful people and have a beautiful home. Both university lecturers, they are extraordinarily well-read and intelligent company. We were instantly made to feel at home, being offered a large glass of wine on crossing the threshold. Truth be told, we had far too many of these over the next few days. We spent our week drinking wine, eating excellent food, walking, driving through the achingly beautiful Northumbrian landscape, laughing, talking about literature and watching episodes of Whistle Test from the 1970s. It was fabulous and I had a brilliant time.

On our first day we wandered around Alnwick. taking in the local ‘atmos’ and visiting shops. It is a charming market town, hiding in the shadow of its enormous castle, which dominates the local landscape. The town is a little larger than I was expecting. As well as a castle, it has a museum, a theatre, art galleries and numerous shops. One of them, Barter Books, is one of the most delightful bookshops I have ever visited. One of the largest second-hand bookshops in the country, it is housed in a former railway station and sustains the railway theme throughout. There is a model railway running along the tops of the bookshelves and a station buffet if you want a drink or even a more substantial meal. Throughout the store there are comfy chairs on which to sit and read. It is vast. I could easily have spent a day browsing and could easily have picked up dozens of books. In the end, I rationed myself to one.

Alnwick Castle is probably most famous as a location for various films and TV shows, among them Blackadder and the Harry Potter films, where parts of it featured as Hogwarts. We walked there now, stopping at various antique shops on the way. I contented myself with enjoying it from the outside as the cost of entry was pretty steep. If you want the whole package (tour of the castle and access to the gardens) it will cost you £22. I must confess, it does look like a good family day out, with a range of activities to keep everyone occupied and happy.

There is a medieval poem called ‘The Ballad of Chevy Chase’. It tells the story of The Battle of Otterburn, in which the entourage of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (’Hostspur’ of Shakespeare’s Henry IV), set out from Alnwick castle on a hunting trip on the Cheviot hills, met the army of the Earl of Douglas and all hell breaks loose. We were treated to a reading of the poem that evening by Brycchan, who does a pretty decent Middle English; just one of his startling array of accents, regional and historical. The Cheviot hills themselves dominate the local landscape, rising above the moorland on which we saw buzzards and kestrels.

The distinctive dome of the Cheviot remained an ever-present landmark throughout the week, as we traversed the National Park, discovering the coast and countryside of this achingly beautiful part of the world. We meandered around slowly, visiting a castle here (including Norham, which features in Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion), an antique shop there, sometimes stopping at a pleasant view, historic location or nice looking pub. Mrs. P was very happy as we were able to identify several of the locations used in the TV show Vera. She loves a murder mystery, does Mrs. P.

I particularly enjoyed Bamburgh, a picturesque little town with a huge castle and a charming little museum dedicated to Grace Darling, who at twenty-four, rowed with her father to collect the survivors of a shipwreck. Having brought half of them to safety, they rowed out again for the other half. It’s a stirring tale of heroism I distinctly remember from Blue Peter in the 1970s. The museum, as well as the boat in which she performed the rescue, has some of her clothing, books and letters. Opposite, is the church in which she is buried. Bamburgh Castle, which we viewed from the serene surroundings of a pub garden, is the home of Uhtred of Bebbanburg in The Saxon Stories by Bernard Cornwell. You may know this (as I did) from the Netflix adaptation. From the coast along here, the Farne Islands were clearly visible and we watched puffins, terns and shags, which, whilst I suppress childish giggles, always put me in mind of Christopher Isherwood’s poem:

The common cormorant or shag,
Lays its eggs in a paper bag,
You follow the idea, no doubt?
It’s to keep the lightning out.

But what these unobservant birds
Have never thought of, is that herds
Of wandering bears might come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.

We had a fantastic few days and were sorry to leave. There was a long journey back south in front of us, so we decided to break it with a couple of hours in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a city rich in history and literary heritage. But that’s another story for another day

Take a closer look and you will see that the distribution is not uniform. To the west of the city, plaques and memorials jostle for space amid the crowded streets. Frequently, writers’ houses are open for your perusal and reflection; there are pubs with literary clientele on every street corner and major places of worship provide sanctuary at the end of a long hard life. East of the city ... very little: a pub or two, a few plaques and a couple of memorials. How can this be? The population in this part of the city is denser than the west: how did it produce so few writers? It’s poorer, for one. Downstream of the Thames the water becomes slow, deep and wide. With easier access to the sea it makes sense to construct docks there. With docks come factories, warehouses and railways. Add to this the fact that the downwind, downstream side of major cities tends to be a bit dirtier, a bit shabbier, than the brighter, greener and more spacious upriver areas. Most of the writers I deal with in these essays tend to be successful. They’ve worked hard and made a few bob; why settle in the grimier areas of town?

Plenty of writers have made their home in the East End. Mary Wollstonecraft, proto-feminist and founder of a literary dynasty was born in Bethnal Green in 1759; Daniel Defoe, primarily known for Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, was a major literary figure of his age and helped to establish the novel as a literary form. He was born in Cripplegate in 1660 and educated in Stoke Newington; Arthur Morrison, a Victorian novelist who used the East End as an atmospheric backdrop to his literary oeuvre, was born in Poplar in 1863 and leaves no trace within the city and very little without. Anna Barbauld, one of the most important poets of her age: pioneer of the Romantic movement and influential to Wordsworth and Coleridge, moved to Stoke Newington in 1802 but has no monument in the area aside from one street name. Some East Enders merit plaques or memorials: Israel Zangwill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Olaudah Equiano and Cecil Day Lewis all have plaques in east London but, generally, memento literati are noticeable by their absence.

One of the reasons for this becomes apparent when travelling through the area. Take the Docklands Light Railway: a remarkable transport system which is fast, clean and reliable and has the added advantage of gliding over the town on an elevated trackway. From this vantage point you can see that there are very few buildings from before the 20th century. There are plenty of 1960s housing projects: three-storey balconied buildings clustered around a central recreational space; a few 70s concrete tower blocks. There are newer steel-and-glass luxury apartments, built to attract the more affluent house buyer during the redevelopment of docklands in the 90s and 00s. In between these are little oases of older settlements: some medieval churches, the odd Victorian terrace, an old East End boozer standing alone in what was once a thriving thoroughfare. The whole area, from 9th September 1940 onwards, was subject to the most vicious and concentrated bombing campaign in human history. That any of it remains at all is remarkable: a testament to the dedication of those that protected, fought fires, cleared bomb sites and rebuilt after the Blitz. It is difficult to imagine, from our relatively safe perspective, the scale of such devastation.

I visited the East End recently to visit an ex-student. I have taught a number of people who have gone on to gain a great deal of success in various fields. I like to keep in touch with them. Not because I am particularly concerned about their progress but because there is a chance that they will, one day, become rich and want to reward me for the support and guidance I gave them in their formative years. One such case is Martin. He was my student about eight years ago before I packed him off to Cambridge and is now building a promising career in journalism. Martin contacted me recently and offered to meet me and keep me updated on his progress. I feigned interest, thinking there may be a free lunch in the offing. He lives in Greenwich, a small town to the east of London, on the south bank of the Thames.

I suggested we meet at The Prospect of Whitby. A pub on the water’s edge in Wapping, taking its name from a coal ship that was once permanently moored outside. Being close to execution dock, it did a fine trade in the 1700s, when crowds would flock to watch those charged with piracy take the drop nearby. There is a noose hanging on the deck outside the bar as a reminder of this grisly past. Inside, there is a pewter topped bar: a rare Victorian artefact, and a great deal of timber. There is a fine vista of the Thames from the large windows, which I found reminiscent of those on a sailing ship. It certainly has a distinctly Victorian feel. Dickens was familiar with ‘The Prospect’ and would visit it during his nighttime walks through the grimier parts of the capital. He had an uncle that lived in Limehouse, just a short walk from here, and would frequently visit The Grapes, which was our next port of call.

The areas we walked through now, though they once had the reputation of being unsafe and dirty, were pleasant and green. There was a cosmopolitan feel about the place. People from nearby communities, along with tourists and city workers, played and took the air: running after children and exercising dogs; cycling and jogging. I heard a variety of accents spoken as people chatted and walked. There was a low autumn sun casting long golden shadows and it was a lovely place for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. We walked along the side of the river, marvelling at the scale of development of Docklands. Sometimes, the path would dive away from the bank and head inland, taking us through a little park or green space in the midst of the grey and brown urban landscape. The path eventually spat us onto Narrow Street, which we followed to where it crossed the entrance to the canal basin, where we paused to have a look at the boats.

This is where the Grand Union Canal joins the river Thames, bringing the goods produced in the industrial heartlands of the Midlands to the docks, to be carried throughout the Empire. Canals were originally built when an entrepreneurial duke realised that the goods he was shipping by river were reaching their destinations faster than those he sent by road. Waterways saw a lucrative trade in the late 18th century, providing a livelihood for many families but, like Betamax videos and fax machines, their window of usefulness was short. Railways came to provide a faster alternative and they became used only for the most fragile of goods. They quickly fell into disrepair. Now, as well as a picturesque part of our countryside, providing peaceful places for walkers, anglers and boaters, they are fast becoming a useful resource for property investors. A boat with a mooring in central London now costs almost as much as a small house. This is making it very difficult for people who embrace life on the canals as a useful and cheap alternative to the rat race and I think this is very sad.

Just beyond the canal bridge is The Grapes. Well known by Dickens, he used it as the basis for The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, in Our Mutual Friend.

“A tavern of dropsical appearance, long settled into a state of hale infirmity. It had outlasted many a sprucer public house, indeed the whole house impended over the water but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver, who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.”

It does seem to hover on the river bank. It is a lovely, welcoming little pub. Owned by Sir Ian McKellen, the bar is equipped with a complete collection of Dickens novels and portraits of the great man abound throughout. Martin and I sat in the back bar, next to a display cabinet of old volumes of Dickens with a lovely view of the Thames. It was cosy and snug and we enjoyed a lovely pint and they did a cracking Sunday roast too: plates piled high with roast beef and all the trimmings. There is a little decked area overlooking the Thames. We moved out there to admire the view and it was so agreeable that I could quite easily have drifted off for my usual Sunday afternoon snooze.

We wandered back up to the DLR and took the train to Greenwich. It had turned into a warm afternoon, and throngs of people crowded the little town: there were buskers and ice cream sellers and the pubs were spilling their customers onto the surrounding pavements. It had a lovely, holiday atmosphere. Martin and I crossed Deptford Creek and wound through some modern and expensive-looking housing to St. Nicholas’s Church. It is a brick building dating from about 1700, rebuilt after bombing in the Second World War. This replaces an earlier, medieval structure, the tower of which remains. On one quiet, lonely wall is a simple plaque stating that this was the final resting place of Christopher Marlowe, although the exact location of his grave is unknown.

I have written extensively about Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre and Stratford-upon-Avon and the mini industry that has grown up around our national poet. That Marlowe’s grave is not even marked is remarkable as, in his own time at least, he was considered the better writer. Born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare, in Canterbury, Marlowe came from similar beginnings: Shakespeare was a glover’s son; Marlowe a shoemaker’s. Marlowe, unlike Shakespeare, went to university. Shortly after leaving Cambridge, Marlowe seems to have been inducted into Francis Walsingham’s secret service, and worked as a spy for the Elizabethan court. For someone supposed to be working covertly, Marlowe attracted a lot of attention. He was outspoken in his opinions, professed atheism and was indiscreet in his attraction towards young men.

“All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.”
– attributed to Christopher Marlowe

The details of Marlowe’s death are uncertain: he went drinking at an alehouse by Deptford Creek and, when it was time to pay the bill, there was an argument. One of his companions, Ingram Frizer, stabbed him in the head, killing him instantly. Several theories have grown up around this event, including that his death was faked and that he continued to write, using Shakespeare as a proxy for his work. Whatever the circumstances of his death, he was quietly taken to the nearest churchyard and unceremoniously thrown into an unmarked grave. He leaves six plays, one of which, Doctor Faustus, is a fine example of Elizabethan drama and is still frequently studied and performed. Mr. C and I wandered back into Greenwich, where we chatted over a further pint, before I embarked on the journey home.

East London has always been home to communities from throughout the world, enriching our stale culture with new colours, flavours, sounds and, of course, writing.Emanuel Litvinoff, who was born in Bethnal Green in 1915, wrote novels depicting life within the Jewish ghettos of the East End. Sajid Zaheer, whose ‘London ki Ek Raat’, depicts anti-colonial sentiment in London, was published in 1938. Now, new generations of people are growing up in east London. Among them, Journalist and novelist Kia Abdullah, born in Tower Hamlets in 1982 and political writer Ed Hussain was born in Mile End in 1974. Monica Ali, whose masterpiece, Brick Lane, set among London’s Bangladeshi community, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003. Although a large part of our heritage was destroyed during the Blitz, the London that has grown from the ashes, is richer and more diverse than before.

When Christopher Wren began work on St. Paul’s Cathedral after the great fire of London, he picked up an old tombstone to mark the centre of his new building. On it was written a single word, which became a motto for the cathedral and the city. ‘Resurgam’: I shall rise again.

Our first stop was the Brocket Arms: a picture book country inn dating from the 14th Century with low ceilings, wooden beams and open fireplaces. The pub is named after the Brocket family: the Elizabethan owners of nearby Brocket Hall. More recently this has had a succession of notorious owners: the 2nd Baron Brocket was interned during the Second World War for holding Nazi sympathies and the 3rd Baron was detained for insurance fraud, after which he enjoyed a brief celebrity career. A previous famous occupant was Victorian Prime Minister, William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, who was in Downing Street from 1835 to 1841. His wife, Lady Caroline, had a rather torrid affair with Byron, most famously bestowing him with the epithet “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” It seems that the Lambs had enjoyed a blissfully happy marriage for a number of years. Lady Caroline then met Byron and all hell broke loose.

Brocket Hall hosted some pretty wild parties. At one of Byron’s birthdays, Lady Caroline hid herself, naked, inside a massive soup tureen, which was placed before the dissolute lord. When she and Byron later parted, Caroline did nothing to hide her broken heart. This was the last straw for her husband and Melbourne had her taken away to Ireland to escape the scandal at home, where she continued to try to communicate with the poet. When she finally returned to Hertfordshire, she made a bonfire of all the gifts and letters she had received from him on the lawn in front of the hall and attempted to erase him from her life. She later, by chance, witnessed his funeral cortege as it passed by the hall en route to Nottingham. Lady Caroline has earned her own place in literary history through writing a number of gothic novels, the best known of which, Glenarvon, satirises her relationship with Byron, giving the world its first ‘Byronic’ hero in the process.

Brocket Hall is (unfortunately) not generally open to the public. It is available for corporate events and weddings and there is a golf course or two and a restaurant on the grounds, along with somewhere to park your helicopter. They do open once a month for afternoon tea but, at around forty quid each, it’s still a bit on the steep side for most of us. The Brocket Arms is not only open and freely accessible to the public but is also extremely welcoming and cosy. E and I ordered up a freshener or two, and got around some lunch. They do a decent pint and an excellent sandwich but don’t order one expecting a light lunch: great wedges of rustic bread on a plate piled high with salad and chips. It was excellent value and we needed the short walk to Shaw’s Corner to work it off.

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food”

Shaw’s Corner is run by the National Trust so you know what to expect: well informed and friendly staff (perhaps a little pushy if you’re not a member) and an inexpensive and informative guidebook. I usually do without a guidebook, preferring to take in the building and wander around freely. If I have a book, I find I have my nose wedged in that instead of taking in the house. On this occasion, however, I forked out the couple of quid to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of this engaging and genial man. The house itself is not the most attractive: built of red brick with green-painted woodwork, it looks as if it would be more at home in the suburbs, rather than a sleepy, country village. In fact, neither George nor Charlotte were particularly enamoured of it when they first saw it but chose location and practicality over design.

Inside, the house is decorated in the Arts and Crafts style and features fabrics and wall-coverings with intricate floral designs. The house also features a wonderful array of art, including works by Laura Knight and Aubrey Beardsley, as well as a bust of Shaw by Rodin. I particularly liked the portrait of Shaw by Augustus John and the portrait of Charlotte Payne-Townshend (later Mrs. Shaw) by Sartorio. Emma, an artist herself, was particularly impressed with the quality and range of artwork on display.

Upstairs, alongside Shaw’s bedroom, complete with his trademark tweed suits hanging in the wardrobe, there is a small exhibition space, in which you can see his Nobel prize and the Oscar he won for the screenplay of Pygmalion. Until very recently, he was the only recipient of both awards. (If you want to know who the second was, the answer is blowin’ in the wind). There is also a beautifully preserved little bathroom, complete with a large Victorian bathtub in which Shaw bathed daily, this being the first house he ever owned with its own bathroom.

Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, to a middle-class household but his father, also George, was an alcoholic. They had little income and lived in “shabby-genteel poverty.” His mother, Elizabeth, started to resent her husband’s drunken behaviour and sought solace through music. She engaged a music teacher, George Lee, for her and her children, though she enjoyed a particularly close relationship with him. As it was the name of both his absent father and his mother’s lover, GBS came to despise the name ‘George’, and preferred to be called Bernard. He never forgot his humble beginnings and kept a photograph of his birthplace on his desk throughout his life. You can still see it on his mantelpiece. There are also a number of photographs of his acquaintances and those he admired. J.M. Barrie, William Morris and W.B. Yeats are here, as well as political figures: Lenin, Stalin and Gandhi. It is worth remembering that, however much we admire his sentiments about social reform and changing the lives of poor people, in later life he came to admire the great European Dictators as ‘men of action’.

The family moved to London in 1876 and GBS got a job writing musical reviews for a newspaper. While in London, he became a member of the British Library and spent most of his days there reading and writing: it was there that he began to write drama. Although he wanted his plays to address the inequalities in society, he realised that the English would only accept criticism if it was presented with humour. His work perfectly presents a serious message with satire and subtle humour. A good example of this is Pygmalion, in which a poor member of society is treated abominably by her social superiors. It is by far the best known of Shaw’s plays (even if that is through Lerner and Loewe’s musical version, My Fair Lady). Shaw’s plays scandalised Victorian audiences, constantly challenging them to reexamine society, their place within it and their ability to change it.

“The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she’s treated”

Shaw was an activist as well as a radical writer. A founding member of the Labour party, he established the New Statesman and espoused vegetarianism, feminism and naturism. At this time, his behaviour would have been considered wildly extreme. Despite his unusual ways, he fitted in well with village life, presenting prizes to local schools and opening village fetes. Local children liked to spy on Shaw as he chopped wood in the garden, dressed in tweeds and tin miner’s helmet. He enjoyed the practical aspects of working outdoors but didn’t much care for gardening and left most of the planning to his gardener. The garden is beautiful. It contains a mixture of planting and wild flowers, and sculpture. On summer evenings, performances of Shaw plays are held on the lawn. On the day we visited, a company was rehearsing Fanny’s First Play for a performance that weekend. It must be a wonderful experience to see one of Shaw’s plays performed in his own garden and one which I hope we’ll enjoy in future.

“The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there”

At the bottom of his garden, a path winds through woodland and it is here that you will find Shaw’s writing shed. It sits on top of a turntable, which he used to track the sun during its daily journey in order to make the most of the light. His desk, and one of his typewriters, is here but it was as much refuge as workshop; for such a witty, sparkling and gregarious man, he enjoyed his own company and solitude. He nicknamed his shed ‘London’ so that, if any callers came by asking if George was at home, the servants could quite honestly reply “he’s in London” and they would leave him in peace. The whole house feels hidden away and I suppose that’s why GBS bought it: close enough to London to be able to travel up for the theatres; far enough away to be left in peace.

After the house we went for a walk through the pleasant, cool woodland that surrounds the village. We were seeking an avenue of limes, along which GBS would walk when visiting his friend, the wonderfully named arctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard at the nearby Lamer Hall. Cherry-Garrard was a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition. Encouraged by Shaw, he wrote an account, ‘The Worst Journey in the World‘ which has become a classic of travel writing and been praised for its depiction of human suffering under extreme conditions.

Today, conditions were far from arctic: glorious sunshine and exceedingly hot. We walked through sun-dappled woodland discussing Shaw and Forster and other Hertfordshire writers. It was not far to Lamer Hall: a pleasant distance for an afternoon stroll. Back to the village for a quick freshener at the Brocket Arms (too hot for tea) but Emma was keen to get going. Her boyfriend lives in Cambridge and she was going to stay with him for a couple of days. So we drove back through leafy Hertfordshire lanes to the hustle and bustle of modern life.

I dropped Emma at her house and, as I watched her walk away, remembered what it was like to be young and in love. Cambridge, I thought to myself; now, there’s an idea....

We ventured into the Lincolnshire countryside. Firstly on A-roads, among the choking exhausts of heavy lorries and farm traffic, through a flat agricultural landscape, with crops turning yellow and gold in the late summer sun. Eventually, we turned off the main road and took roads less travelled by and it made all the difference. The landscape gave way to gentle rolling hills with little villages nestling in wooded hillsides. This was the Lincolnshire Wolds: a beautiful landscape of rolling, chalk hills that covers a large part of Lincolnshire and is designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. After some searching (My car pre-dates Sat Nav and I refuse to invest in a portable unit, believing that they take all the fun out of driving) we arrived at the little village of Bag Enderby.

A tiny, sleepy village of a farm and few buildings clustered around a little church. There was no-one around, save for a small group of ramblers by the church, who were gathering for a hike. The wolds are perfect walking country: a haven for a myriad of wildlife and full of gentle climbs that can give fantastic views, from the cathedral to the sea. I have a great deal of respect for ramblers but they’re a bit ‘hard core’ for me: all rucksacks and proper footwear. I have one pair of shoes and these serve me for all purposes: work, gardening, walking, beach, formal occasions. I see the purchase of a proper pair of walking boots as the top of a slippery slope.

After bidding each other cheery ‘good mornings’, I pushed open the heavy door, complete with Viking shield boss decoration, and ventured inside. I love churches. As an atheist, they hold very little religious significance for me, but I can appreciate them as places for quiet contemplation and reflection. They also tend to be full of history and often hide some spectacular glass and carving. This was one of two local churches where George Clayton Tennyson, the poet’s father, was rector, and there was a nice display, telling the story of the Laureate and his connection with the area. There were also a few leaflets and postcards available: one of them detailing a short walk to the village of Somersby, where Tennyson was born.

I embarked upon this now. It was a beautiful summer’s day as I crossed the field towards Somersby. I could see the rectory, white against the trees, and could even make out the gothic wing, added by the reverend Tennyson to accommodate his growing family. There was a number of bulls in the field that the path traversed, staring at me intently. I strode purposefully through their territory, pretending not to be frightened by the enormous, angry looking beasts. Apparently, they respect this behaviour and will not attack. Unscathed, I crossed a stile and onto a farm track to enter the village of Somersby.

Tennyson’s birthplace, once the village rectory, is now a private home and not accessible to the public. A pleasant, white painted house; quite large but then, there were eleven children and the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson extended the house to accommodate all the little Tennysons. Their childhood in Somersby seems to have been a happy one, despite the occasional rage of their father. They would play in the brook and the woods around their home. Alfred remembers it fondly in his verse and was certainly happier than he was at the grammar school in Louth, where he was bullied and utterly miserable. His father conducted a large part of his education at home. This was sporadic, however, as the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson suffered from epilepsy and frequently succumbed to bouts of violent depression. He alleviated these with alcohol, to which he became addicted.

The church - the other one his father presided over - is larger than Bag Enderby. It is built of the same green sandstone, which allows it to blend in with its woody surroundings. Inside is a bust of Tennyson by Thomas Woolner and a small display cabinet featuring some photographs of the family and some of the poet’s personal possessions. There are also some souvenirs for sale: postcards, tea towels, pens and so on. They even had a nice little volume of poetry for a couple of quid, which is more than can be said for anywhere in Lincoln. For all of these items, there is an ‘honesty box’ where a customer can leave the correct change. I am always gladdened by these arrangements in local museums and country churches, relying on the honesty of people to take only what they pay for and not to abuse the system; it restores one’s faith in the honesty and inherent goodness of people. I helped myself to a couple of items and continued on my journey.

I returned to Bag Enderby via the leafy lanes that the family used to walk between the two villages. Near the church is an ancient tree stump where the children would play, swinging on its low branches while waiting for their father to conclude his business at the church. There is another local story that John Bunyan used to preach by this tree. I have travelled extensively through Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire and many villages in the region claim to have a house, or a tree or a woodland clearing where Bunyan once preached. A bit like the pubs where Dickens once stopped by for a drink. I’m sure some of them must be correct. Mrs P (who had opted not to join me on being told there would be no shops) was waiting at the car and we both agreed, despite the enormous breakfast we had consumed, that it was now lunchtime. We drove to the nearby village of Tetford, where there is a pub that Tennyson would visit, his favourite oak settle being preserved there. We would sit there and have a sandwich and a pint or something.

Another sleepy wolds village; no sounds but birdsong and the distant hum of a tractor in the fields. I pushed the door expecting it to swing open to a warm welcome and hubbub of village conversation. Probably a roaring fire, despite this being mid-July during the hottest summer in a millennium. Nothing. The door didn’t budge and, peering through a window, the whole place was in darkness. I was rather disappointed. To miss out on a significant location – and a pub at that – would leave a sizeable gap in my research. I dejectedly walked towards the car, where I was approached by a large, bearded man.

“We’re closed, I’m afraid” he said, apologetically.

“Will you be open this evening?” I asked “I’m researching Tennyson, you see, and I’d like to see the settle.”

“Wait there” he replied before disappearing inside. A moment later a bolt was shifted and the front door was opened by one of the friendliest looking women I have ever seen.

I had a pint and chatted to Nikki, the landlady of the White Hart, while Mrs P played with a small fluffy thing, roughly the size and shape of a terrier. Nikki told me that it wasn’t worth them opening at lunchtimes as, most of the time, the pub was empty and they had to provide heat and light that weren’t being used. It is sad that our village institutions are flagging: the churches and the pubs were once the centre of village life and would not just hold a weekly worship or an evening pint, but were the heart of the social life of the community. The churches are struggling to reinvent themselves for decreasingly religious generations and local pubs are struggling against rising prices and aggressive pub chains and ‘hospitality outlets’. This is true for towns as well as rural areas; they must be saved for, without them, whole communities will be shattered.

From the towns all Inns have been driven: from the villages most.... Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.

Hilaire Belloc

The Tennysons had a cottage in Mablethorpe and I had hoped to drive out to see it in the afternoon. It was a private home, however, and I had no idea if it could even be seen from the road. So we drove to a nearby beach, which, like Mablethorpe, had wide, reedy dunes sloping gently down to the cold North Sea but which, unlike Mablethorpe, had no amusement arcades, rock shops, tattoo studios and nightclubs. Alfred and Charles Tennyson came to Mablethorpe in 1827 to celebrate the publication of their first volume of poetry: ‘Poems by Two Brothers’. Charles and Alfred went to the beach and declaimed their poems to the sea. I didn’t declaim any poems to the sea but I did spend a very pleasant couple of hours up to my knees in the North Sea (which was surprisingly warm; even for July) contemplating the horizon while Mrs P wandered along the beach looking for interesting stones and shells (she loves a bit of beachcombing, does Mrs P). It was a great way to spend a hot summer afternoon and we stayed until the light was fading and most other people had packed up and gone. We don’t need fine white sand, Mrs P and I; we care not for palm trees and beach bars and crystal clear tropical waters. Give us a stony beach and a cold, weedy sea and we’ll be happy. As long as we have a book, we’ll be happy.

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield

We had a lovely summer, Mrs. P and I. Rather than take a long holiday, we took a series of short breaks: we motored around the country, visiting friends in various far-flung locations, staying for one or two nights in guest houses. We weren’t tied to an itinerary but meandered around, stopping where the fancy took us. It’s the only way to travel and allows the literary traveller to take their time and discover a few literary gems. Mrs. P could discover some interesting and unusual shops. One of the best places we have found for both activities was Lincoln. Lincoln is a fine city. The Cathedral sits atop a hill that dominates the low-lying East Anglian landscape for miles around. The top of the hill is an oasis for the literary traveller: teashops and pubs abound and there is a distinctly medieval flavour. Stone buildings hug the hillside in winding, narrow streets. There is a castle, a Cathedral and some of the most ancient buildings in the country.

Lincolnshire is where Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born and the city is home to the largest collection of Tennyson texts in the country. The Tennyson Research Centre is located within the county archives and most of the documents under their care are available for you to research if you give them a couple of days’ notice. I had reserved some of them for closer inspection: a couple of early drafts of the The Charge of the Light Brigade with annotations and corrections, along with some letters and photographs. I just wanted to hold some of his work in my hands and see a great writer’s handwriting close up. They did not disappoint! The early drafts of Light Brigade were fascinating as I was able to see how Tennyson had adjusted the rhythm and emphasis. I was witnessing the poet’s craft in action and it was a breathtaking experience. I wondered why, with all these marvellous, historically important texts, do the archives not open a permanent exhibition? “It’s all a question of money,” the extremely helpful archivist informed me. “There are constant requests for funding to put some of the artefacts on display but there are so many demands on the council’s funds.” It would be wonderful if there could be displays. Not just at the Tennyson Research Centre but at county archives throughout the country. These places hold a bewildering collection of historically important documents, all filed away to rarely see the light of day. It’s a real shame because they deserve to be seen and studied and enjoyed; I’m sure they would be welcome additions to local heritage. They do have some artefacts on display in the foyer and I was able to view the poet’s famous hat and cloak while I waited my turn.

Local heritage is something at which Lincoln excels: there is a very good archaeological museum, mapping the history of the region through displays and reconstructions. I wandered around it now. My attention was caught by a display about the significance of place names (they are mostly Viking in Lincolnshire, apparently). Elsewhere in the exhibition were reconstructions of local scenes through the ages and fossils collected from the fens and wolds. I love local museums: they remind me of childhood days out and I always try to seek them out when I travel. There is a very good Art Gallery on the same site, featuring Lincolnshire artists past and present and there are many views of the city (about a hundred scenes featuring Lincoln Cathedral appearing from various densities of mist). The collection goes right up to the present day, and there are some really clever modern installations by local artists working today. I loved it and, were it not teatime, would have stayed longer. I had promised to meet Mrs. P for tea and so I set off to find her now.

If anyone ever tells you that Eastern England is flat, get them to walk up Lincoln high street. It’s ridiculously steep (the name, ‘Steep Hill’ is a bit of a giveaway). I had to stop for a breather halfway up (the council has installed a lot of public seating and railings for leaning against!). On reaching the upper slopes of the south face I met Mrs. P, who had set up camp before the final assault on the summit. She told me that she had seen a nice dress in a vintage clothes shop down the hill and could I go and see it? I could, and I agreed that it was very nice and bought it for her. I now faced the hill for the second time that afternoon but tea was beckoning so I pushed on, stopping halfway up for a breather. Mrs. P then left me to review her purchases in front of the TV in the hotel room so I ventured out alone. I had an hour or two to kill, and here’s what I decided to do. I would go to a lovely little second-hand bookshop I had seen earlier, located in the Jews House: an ancient building dating from 1150. I would see if they had a collected works of Tennyson, find a nice quiet pub and sit and read and drink for a while before dinner. Good plan? I thought so. They didn’t have a Tennyson. So... I would walk down the hill, find Waterstones and get one there. Back down the hill I went, thinking how I would shortly have to climb up the bloody thing again for the third time today! I was unsuccessful in my quest for Waterstones but I found a WHSmith’s but - guess what - they had no Tennyson. Neither did the Tourist Information office. I climbed back up the hill, stopping for a breather half way, found a pub and ordered a Bateman’s. I had picked up a few leaflets and flicked through those and made a few notes but... not quite what I had in mind.

I had come on this trip expressly to find out about Tennyson who is part of the history of a city which really appreciates its history. Lincoln should do more to celebrate him: bookshops could keep a couple of editions of his poems; I am sure that some tourists would buy a copy. I know he has fallen out of favour and is a little Victorian and sentimental for our modern, sophisticated tastes but he is still much loved, was used to illustrate Olympic ideals at the 2012 games and is on the GCSE curriculum. Surely the tourist information office could keep a couple of cheap editions of his work? Or even a leaflet, “Visit the Lincolnshire Wolds: birthplace of Queen Victoria’s poet laureate”? I know such a thing exists because I have one. I picked it up in the Lincolnshire Wolds, when I was already there and didn’t need it! He’s an historically and culturally important figure. Lincoln, you need to celebrate him more.

I had planned to spend some time looking around the Cathedral but on discovering that they charge you eight quid to get in, I decided to give it a miss. I visited a few years ago so felt no pressing need to see the church. I suppose it’s not that expensive when you consider what you get for the price: a locally famous stone carving of a demon, known as the Lincoln Imp; some wonderful glass; beautiful architecture; the Magna Carta and a Bede manuscript. And to be fair to the Cathedral, they do open for free once a week for the benefit of people who can’t afford the usual entrance fee. I had no need of these entertainments, however. As I looked up at the magnificent double towers, I was happy to see the resident peregrines wheeling around. Regular readers will know that I am no bird expert but a pair of peregrines, flying and swooping around their adopted urban cliff face, is a magnificent sight, so I stopped for a minute to watch them. They were making their presence felt and squeaking and squawking and generally expressing how happy they were about being peregrines.

I reluctantly left them to their peregrinations and I returned to mine, making my way to the Cathedral east green, where there is a large bronze statue of Tennyson by George Frederick Watts. It depicts the poet, with faithful dog, Karenina, at his side, closely examining a tiny flower in his hand. Although unveiled in 1905 (the year after Watts’s death), it is a fittingly Victorian scene: the intellectual gentleman mulling over the intricacies of nature. I rather liked it and was particularly impressed, not only by the imposing size, but also by the loving gaze of his faithful companion. I was now suitably intellectually refreshed and went to collect Mrs. P. for dinner. There is a great restaurant in Lincoln we first visited about 30 years ago (yes, I was little more than a child then!)

Mrs. Brown’s Pie Shop, as you could probably guess from the name, specialises in pies. They have every kind of pie you can imagine and quite a few that you can’t and they are served with all the trimmings and good ale and a smile: I had lamb and rosemary; Mrs. P went for the traditional Steak and Kidney. It is friendly and welcoming and inexpensive and, I imagine, it is immensely popular among the city’s student population. The reason I had chosen to visit this particular venue is that it was once the home of T.E. Lawrence: friend of George Bernard Shaw, author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and popularly remembered as Lawrence of Arabia. He was stationed nearby while serving with the RAF. There is a plaque to him outside the restaurant and, inside, pies, ale and the promise of a sticky pud with custard, probably. Unfortunately, we never got that far. We were so stuffed by the pie course that we left for a walk, promising ourselves we would return, but never did. We walked around the castle and some of the streets that trace the top of the hill. There are some pleasant pubs throughout Lincoln and the town was buzzing with happy drinkers. On street corners and by old buildings there are plaques offering you further information and the whole place just seethes with history. We love Lincoln, Mrs. P and I. Whether the bookshops stock Tennyson or not, it really is a lovely city.

“The chief glory of every people arises from its authors: whether I shall add any thing by my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.”

I first encountered Samuel Johnson at university, where I read Journey to the Western Isles: an account of his famous tour with James Boswell. I have to admit that I rather liked him. I was expecting pomposity but what I found was someone witty and extremely skilled with language. He must have seemed rather an odd figure: he was tall and heavy, childhood scrofula had left him hard of hearing and blind in one eye, as well as giving him obvious scarring (scrofula is an infection of the lymph nodes that results in large, purple swellings on the head and neck). He was clumsy, displayed strange gestures and hand movements, and suffered from extreme facial and vocal tics, which, some now believe, are indicative of Tourette’s syndrome. Rather than being part of a literary establishment, he was an outsider: a misfit who produced one of the most important books ever written in the English language. After visiting his house, I like him even more. He liked pubs and cats and tea; he was fiercely opposed to slavery and entertained a variety of other misfits at his home in Gough Square.

In 1746, a group of publishers approached Johnson with the aim of creating a dictionary of the English language. The task went on to occupy him for the next decade. He hired a team of amanuenses, set them to work in the attic of his house in Gough Square, and estimated he would have the Dictionary ready for publication in three years. But the task he had given himself was close to impossible. Johnson was writing during The Enlightenment: a time of rapid progress in science and industry. Through the creation of his ‘laws’ in 1725, Newton had rationalised and ordered the universe. Johnson, likewise, attempted to rationalise and order the language, with his dictionary. He soon came to realise, however, that this couldn’t be done; the best that he could hope to do was to record the way in which English was used and had been used in literature. English defies categorisation. Think about the verb ‘to take’ for example. How many meanings can you think of? steal, obtain, extract, possess, overthrow, capture, occupy, use, agree, buy, make, remove .... Then there are phrasal verbs: take on, take over, take up, take down, take ill ... once you start to think about it, the meanings seem to be endless. Johnson found 134 different meanings for the verb ‘to take’. The work began to overwhelm him, and he started to suffer from frequent bouts of depression. This not only prevented him from working but also stopped him from socialising, which meant he was not involved in the conversation and discussion that had previously inspired him. On top of all this, in 1750, his wife became ill and needed a full-time nurse. Johnson was unable to continue paying his amanuenses, and had to continue to work on the dictionary on his own. Then, in 1752, after a long illness she had been treating with alcohol and opiates, Johnson’s wife, Hetty, died.

Life in Gough Square then took a strange turn. The house began to fill up with strange and wonderful people: a 15-year-old freed slave named Francis Barber became Johnson’s servant. Johnson had always been a vociferous and outspoken opponent of slavery and he seems to have treated Francis more like a son than an employee. He made him the major beneficiary in his will, leaving him the sum of £750. Anna Williams, a blind poet, Robert Levet, a ‘doctor’ who ‘learned’ medicine by eavesdropping conversations at a medical school in Paris, and Mrs. Johnson’s nurse, who continued to live in the house and, according to some sources, became Johnson’s lover. This newly vibrant household seems to have reinvigorated Johnson; he started to socialise, become known in the taverns and coffee shops of Fleet Street and to recommence work on his dictionary. He completed most of it in two years, finally publishing it in 1755, nine years after work had begun.

I had long been aware of the little museum in Gough Square, nestled away behind Fleet Street; I’d passed it hundreds of times, each time thinking “I really must go and visit that someday.” I worked in Holborn for 12 years, and never took the time to go round this small, friendly little house. Sir John Soane’s Museum, I must have visited ten or twelve times; The British Museum, I went to every couple of weeks or so; Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, frequently. I mentioned this to the young woman who ushered me in. “Lots of people say that,” she replied “We’re tucked away so nobody knows we’re here.” There were very few people there on the day I visited: 3 or 4 different parties at most, which makes it a pleasure to wander around. To appreciate the house (or any museum for that matter) at its best, one needs quiet and space to move and time to think. You should be able to hear ticking clocks and creaking floorboards. The house feels cosy and personal: a real lived-in home rather than an exhibit. There are few personal effects, most of the original furniture being long lost, but you can still feel Doctor Johnson’s presence in every room. I particularly enjoyed the library, with its small collection of books; the dining room, complete with David Garrick’s costume chest and a number of Reynolds portraits, including one of Francis Barber.

I had enjoyed half of the museum in blissful, contemplative silence and was midway through the first floor, looking in wonder at the ingenious arrangement of moveable walls, allowing for the space to be changed from a large entertaining space into smaller private rooms, when my assigned annoying person arrived. As the museum-goers amongst you will know, on entering a museum, library or stately home, you are assigned an annoying person, or family, who will accompany you throughout your visit. No matter what speed you go round, what route you take or how many rooms you miss out, they will always be with you and have some ingenious way of pissing you off. This couple, for example, consisted of two females, an older and a younger. The older woman would read from the information leaflet in each room in a loud authoritative voice, as if she were recalling it all from memory; the younger, in response, would ask questions, which foxed her companion completely. I was first alerted to their presence as they ascended the stairs to the first floor, complaining about how steep they were. I slipped away and went up to the attic, figuring that they wouldn’t be tackling any more stairs just yet.

The attic was sparsely furnished and served more as an exhibition space than a recreation of Johnson’s home. The house was heavily bombed during the Second World War and Johnson’s original garret was more or less obliterated. There were some facsimile copies of the dictionary here, which visitors were invited to leaf through, and I spent a happy few minutes, looking up some of Johnson’s definitions, until I heard some familiar voices on the stairs, saying something like: “Ah yes! Unusually, Johnson chose to have his attic located at the top of the house” and “it’s very steep, why did he have stairs?” At which point, I decided it was time to leave. Besides, I had a luncheon appointment.

I had arranged to meet an old friend at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, in order to continue the Johnson theme of the day. On my way to the pub, I paused to have a look at the statue of Hodge. Johnson was extremely fond of cats and had several throughout his life. The statue depicts the cat, sitting on a copy of the Dictionary, surrounded by oyster shells. Hodge was, apparently, particularly fond of oysters. It was a weekday lunchtime when I visited and the square was well used. Office workers and labourers sat by the statue to contemplate it and enjoy their lunch. I always love seeing people enjoying art in the open air; it means they are not inside the pubs and museums I want to visit

I made my way into Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, pausing a while in the doorway to allow my eyes to become accustomed to the dark. The pub is cosy and dimly lit and has the most astounding literary heritage, being in the heart of the journalistic and publishing quarter of the city, it has attracted a huge array of literary customers. I have previously written about some of them in a short pub guide, which you can read here. Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith both used the tavern. in a later age, it became popular among Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and Charles Dickens. Mark Twain dined here during his frequent visits to London. The Rhymers Club, a group of poets founded by WB Yeats had their meetings here & PG Wodehouse writes about favouring the pub over the more formal, stuffier Gentlemen’s clubs. Trollope uses it as a setting in his novels, as does RL Stevenson, and it features in A Tale of Two Cities: Sidney Carton brings Charles Darnay here to celebrate the latter’s release. Hercule Poirot meets a new client here in Agatha Christie’s short story The Million Dollar Bond Robbery.

Today, I made my way down to the labyrinthine basement, where there are several rooms. The passageways between them lead to a large food servery, where one can order traditional pub fare. Now, I very much enjoy meeting Mr. Scott: a plain-speaking, down-to-earth sort of chap, in the way that people from his home city of Liverpool tend to be. We enjoyed our lunch, and the associated conversation over a pint of Sam Smith’s, so much so that we ordered more drinks. We enjoyed the second even more than the first and so ordered a few more and, before I knew where I was, the afternoon had bled into evening and it was well past time to go.

By the time I left the Cheshire Cheese, I was somewhat pie-eyed. I had wanted to pop into Twinings on the Strand for fresh tea supplies but this never happened. If any other tea lovers out there have not visited Twinings, I strongly suggest you get yourselves down there right away. They have an astounding variety of tea and coffee available and offer tastings and tuition. They also have a vast array of all the paraphernalia required for a proper brew (teapots, caddies, tea strainers, etc). The smell is heavenly! There is a statue of Johnson opposite, in a little courtyard outside St. Clement Danes church, where he was a worshipper. To finish off a day visiting his part of the city, it’s worth remembering that he described himself as:

“a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant …who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.”

Forster and his Mother, recently widowed, moved to Stevenage in 1883. He was four years old and the house, the surrounding countryside and some of the local characters were to influence his writing in years to come. The house was Rook’s Nest: a moderately large red brick house on the very outskirts of the town, on the road that leads to the village of Weston. Today, Rook’s Nest is a private house with no plaque to mark its previous occupants; no indication that this was home to one of the greatest figures in English Literature.

“I took it to my heart and hoped . . . that I would live and die there.”

Forster’s reminiscences of Stevenage make fascinating reading. they are written with such affection for the house and the surrounding countryside; it was clearly hugely important to him. So much so that, during the 1960s and the rapid expansion of the new town, Forster, along with other leading literary figures of the age, campaigned for the area to be saved from the bulldozer. The area is still under threat of development. There is a society, The friends of Forster Country, who tirelessly campaign for the preservation of this area that is such an important part of our literary and natural history.

Rook’s Nest House was a direct model for the idyllic cottage in Howards End: the house beloved by the Schlegel family and closely guarded by the Wilcoxes. Margaret Schlegel’s first visit to the house is a significant moment in the novel. In Chapter 33, Forster writes:

“Walking straight up from the station, she crossed the village green and entered the long chestnut avenue that connects it with the church... At the church the scenery changed. The chestnut avenue opened into a road, smooth but narrow, which led into the untouched country. She followed it for over a mile. Its little hesitations pleased her. Having no urgent destiny, it strolled downhill or up as it wished, taking no trouble about the gradients, or about the view, which nevertheless expanded. The great estates that throttle the south of Hertfordshire were less obtrusive here, and the appearance of the land was neither aristocratic nor suburban. To define it was difficult, but Margaret knew what it was not: it was not snobbish. Though its contours were slight, there was a touch of freedom in their sweep to which Surrey will never attain, and the distant brow of the Chilterns towered like a mountain.”

It is possible to retrace Margaret’s walk from Stevenage: no railway station now, it has moved south to the new town and stands astride the East coast Main Line, creating a bridge between a leisure centre and a retail park. The village green is still there, as is the chestnut avenue, though it now includes a concrete footbridge over a dual carriageway. It does, however, still open out into a road by the church. What Margaret says of the countryside is also true, though perhaps for ‘great estates’ we should read ‘housing estates’, because it is difficult to imagine that such a large town is so close: only the pylons and the large, concrete mass of the Lister Hospital give you any clue.

The church is typical Norman, with a flint tower dating from about 1100. Tucked away in the northwest corner, surrounded by ivy and against a chain-link fence, is a memorial to EM Forster. It bears the legend: “Only Connect“, the epigraph of Howards End and an exhortation for people to connect to one another, regardless of race, faith or class. The memorial is dedicated jointly to Forster and to the composer, Elizabeth Poston, whose family moved into Rook’s Nest in 1914. The Postons were friends of the Forsters, allowing Edward to continue visiting the house that he continued to cherish throughout his life.

From here, you can walk out into Forster Country: the fields and woods that Forster knew as a child. Forster, in his reminiscences, writes:

“I was brought up as a boy in a district which I still think the loveliest in England. Hedges full of clematis, primroses, bluebells, dog roses and nuts.”

It was too late in the year for bluebells; it was a blisteringly hot July morning, but there were dog roses and the hazelnuts were ripening in the hedgerows. At once I was plunged into open countryside. Rook’s Nest is visible from the path, nestling in its wooded grounds and occasionally giving a glimpse of a chimney, a window or a gable. I was following a route provided by the Friends of Forster Country, and it was a really pleasant little walk. I took the shortest route and it took me about an hour to get back to the church, having trod the ways young Forster would have wandered, on his childhood ramblings through the county. The route is quite well-defined and so easy to follow that I only got lost once (quite an achievement for me, as regular readers will know). I was largely alone throughout my trek: I saw two dog walkers (and two dogs, obviously). I was left to myself to enjoy the countryside and reflect on Forster and his writing.

Howards End is a masterpiece of Modernist literature, reasserting the importance of nature in the face of incessant progress. At the close of the novel, Helen Schlegel looks out over the fields from Howards End and, prophetically, sees the progress of industrialisation encroaching upon their rural idyll:

“She pointed over the meadow—over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust.

“You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now,” she continued. “I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I’m afraid. Life’s going to be melted down, all over the world.”

Even now, we live in an age when our heritage is under constant threat of development and to be part of what has become known as the heritage ‘industry’ is to be prepared to constantly fight. Developers are given priority, not conservationists.

And places such as this are so important. Every year, I take a bunch of students up here, to see the idyllic countryside on their doorstep and to try to see one of the authors they study as something more than a name on a page. Some of them have lived in Stevenage all their lives and never knew Forster country existed and this is an internationally acclaimed author, not a local oddity. Dickens’s houses are sites of worldwide pilgrimage, as are Austen’s and the Brontes’. There is money to be made from our literary heritage but it requires care, conservation and investment. In our society, only the opportunity to make money quickly from the sale of assets or land for development is considered worthy of our governments’ support. We must do whatever we can to protect our rural heritage and areas of local interest because one day they will be gone and people will be poorer for it.

The epigraph of Howards End is ‘only connect’, describing the need for individuals to find some sense of connection to one another. Forster believed there was a need for us to find balance in all things: progress and conservation; rural and urban; town and country. The Schlegels represent the artistic; the Wilcoxes soulless business. When Margaret and Henry marry, the two sides come together in a brief accord and this is what the house represents: the point of balance between these two worlds. We need to find a balance between the necessity of progress, housing and development and the need to connect with our history and environment.

Arriving at King’s Cross Station, the first thing you will notice is the Harry Potter ‘Platform 9¾’ exhibit. You will notice it by the throngs of people queuing to have their photograph taken next to a bisected luggage trolley bolted to the wall. The effect of this is to make it appear to be entering a portal into the magical world of Hogwarts. I ignored the queues but took a photograph or two of the exhibit, complete with happy, smiling people trying on scarves and clinging to the trolley as if about to be transported into fantasy land. There is a Harry Potter gift shop here too, selling various memorabilia: wands, scarves and the like. This owes more to the film franchise than to the books but the queues outside the store at least show how effective this series has been in getting people, particularly young people, excited about fiction. Some of them will find a lifelong love of reading through the Harry Potter books; many of my students began their literary journey reading about the boy wizard. These books, along with the film and theatre franchises they have spawned, have had an enormous impact on our culture and on the reading habits of the younger generation.

Walk north of the Station and you will find St. Pancras Churchyard. Really well worth visting for some of the notable people with memorials there, chief among these is the joint tomb of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, political philosopher and advocate of women’s rights. Their bodies were moved to the family vault in Bournemouth but the memorial is still there, covered with remembrances of admirers. Other notable burials include John Polidori, author of one of the first Vampire novels, and Johann Christian Bach, son of Johann Sebastian.

There is also the Hardy Tree. When the railway was built, the churchyard had to be cleared to make way for the new line. A young apprentice architect was put in charge and he had the removed gravestones leant against an ash tree. The stones stayed and the tree grew around them until they became embedded in the trunk. It’s a really interesting and unusual sight and well worth the short detour to view it. The architect’s name was Thomas Hardy and he went on to become one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century.

In St. Pancras station is a wonderful statue of Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman by Martin Jennings. Betjeman had a great love of public architecture: churches and railway buildings in particular. In the post-war years, when there was a zeal for development; for clearing away the past, he could see that much of it was worth saving for future generations. He was instrumental in the campaign to save St. Pancras station in the 1960s and so has been immortalised here, gazing up at Sir Gilbert Scott’s magnificent pointed arch. Unfortunately, I had little time to contemplate the statue, or the quotations from Betjeman’s poetry that surround it. I was meeting Emma for a little stroll through Bloomsbury. We’d planned an aimless wander through the squares: browsing in museums and second-hand bookshops, stopping somewhere for tea, and generally reflecting on our rich cultural heritage. When I suggested the trip, the vision in my head was of a brisk but bright spring day. This was London, however, and, by the time I met her train, it was absolutely chucking it down.

We took refuge first in the British Library: the national Library of the United Kingdom. It moved to its present site, next to St. Pancras Station, from the British Museum in 1998 and now has a gallery, completely free to view, containing the foremost books and manuscripts of our culture: Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s first folio; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Faraday, Ada Lovelace and Charles Darwin are here, as are Handel, Beethoven and the Beatles. Simply to wander through a room containing these documents is a breath-taking experience; to stand at one short remove from the literature that changed the world. Literature like Virginia Woolf’s hand-written text of her groundbreaking novel, Mrs Dalloway.

The Stephen family came to Bloomsbury following the death of the literary critic and biographer Leslie Stephen, moving to Gordon Square in 1904. His daughters, Virginia and Vanessa, were largely educated at home; although women did attend university at the time, it wasn’t normal practice for a middle-class family to send their daughters there. The sons, Adrian and Thoby, however, went to Cambridge and mixed with some of the brightest intellectuals of the age: Lytton Strachey, a biographer; EM Forster, novelist and literary critic; Leonard Woolf, essayist; Maynard Keynes, economist; Roger Fry, painter and Clive Bell, art critic. After university, they settled in the squares of Bloomsbury and continued to meet to discuss their ideas as they had done at university. Now, however, Virginia and Vanessa would join in and quickly became pivotal members of the group. This was the origin of one of the major intellectual flowerings of the modern age.

They began to see, not just what the problems were in society, as Victorian writers had done, but how things could change. They looked forward to a new age: new ways of writing and artistic expression were a part of this. Virginia herself found a new way of writing, in which the thoughts and feelings of characters were presented to the reader in an uninterrupted flow; the so called ‘stream of consciousness’. There was much intrigue within this group and they caused a great deal of scandal, with outrageous pranks, affairs and fluid sexuality. Eventually, Virginia married Leonard Woolf and the two of them moved out of Bloomsbury, first to Richmond, where they set up the Hogarth Press, and then to Sussex.

Virginia had a number of residences and you will find many plaques as you wander around. As well as Gordon Square, Virginia lived in Fitzroy Square (in a house previously occupied by George Bernard Shaw) and Brunswick Square. She and Leonard temporarily returned to London from Sussex, taking houses in Tavistock Square and Mecklenburg Square. There are plaques and memorials to a number of other literary folk too: Shelley shared a flat with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (daughter of the aforementioned Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin) in Marchmont Street (they had previously met in secret in St. Pancras churchyard as Shelley was married to someone else at the time). Mary is, of course, well known for writing Frankenstein, one of the archetypal gothic novels. Charles Dickens once lived in Tavistock House, the site of which is now occupied by the British Medical Association, and Christina Rossetti was living in Torrington Square at the time of her death. Yeats, George Du Maurier and Jerome K. Jerome also made their homes in the area. There is a statue of Virginia in Tavistock Square and I stopped to take a photograph of it. On a spring or summer’s day, the squares of Bloomsbury are extremely pleasant places to be. Most of them are now parks and serve as recreation spaces for workers and students as well as residents. They are, however, not quite as nice on a rainy afternoon in January and I soon became aware of Emma scowling from beneath the umbrella she had been bidden to hold while I happily snapped away at statues, plaques, squares and buildings. I thought it mete to find shelter and we made our way to the British Museum.

The museum, located in the heart of Bloomsbury, was home to the British Library before its move to St. Pancras, which gives this walk a nice sense of circularity. The Reading Room was an attractive prospect for writers, mainly as a warm place to read and write. George Bernard Shaw came here when he couldn’t afford to heat his flat. EM Forster and Virginia Woolf were both frequent visitors. It was famously where Karl Marx would come to work on his political manifestos. Oscar Wilde used the reading room, as did Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Today, you will find a large open space at the heart of the building with a fantastic glass roof. Leading off from the central courtyard is The Enlightenment Gallery. This recalls the early days of museums, when people would travel throughout the world and bring back interesting things with them. They encompass an array of curious objects: cabinets contain stuffed animals, coins and architectural drawings; medieval artefacts jostle for space with fossils and porcelain; classical statues vie for floorspace with scientific instruments. Although the gallery has been arranged thematically, there is still a sense of the haphazard way that the objects would have been arranged in the early museum.

Elsewhere in the museum are many items of interest to the literary traveller or casual observer. It is one of my favourite places in the world. When working in London I would visit it about once a week, discovering something new every time. Today, there isn’t time to see any more. It is well past four o’clock and Emma and I must leave in search of tea. We are both big tea fans, Emma and I. We don’t always see eye-to-eye: she favours Earl Grey while I go for Ceylon but what we do agree on is the absolute necessity of stopping for a cuppa mid-afternoon. In London, this is no easy task. You are well-served by pubs and a lunchtime pint and sandwich is easy to find but there are very few teashops in the capital and none at all in Bloomsbury, as far as I’m aware. The Museum itself has the courtyard café, which is very well reviewed but it is always too busy and - at least in my opinion - hideously overpriced. We went to a well-known coffee chain that I frequent, not because I particularly like it but because it’s named after a literary character. We had a coffee and a sandwich and it was absolutely fine, just not really what I was looking for at the end of an afternoon out. As we left the café and and faced the long walk back to King’s Cross and home, it had stopped raining. It was turning into quite a pleasant evening.

I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War. An ugly, lovely town, or so it was and is to me. Crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore...

Dylan Thomas described his town in his Reminiscences of Childhood, written in 1937, before the town as he knew it was devastated by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War. He witnessed the bombing, watching with Caitlin and his old friend Bert Trick, but wasn’t able to write about the experience until 1947. Return Journey to Swansea is a masterpiece: Dylan returns to his hometown and tries to find his younger selves, asking the characters he meets if they knew where he might find ‘Young Thomas’. His writing about childhood is beautiful and imbued with a nostalgic longing, a sense of loss.

It’s an attractive town, Swansea, with the usual collection of shops and a plethora of bars and restaurants. It has a very ‘studenty’ feel, being home to the third largest university in the country. It grew around a harbour and docks, now largely given over to leisure use, and by the maritime quarter and the marina you will find the Swansea Museum and the National Maritime Museum, along with an Art Gallery and theatre. Dylan Thomas Square sits at the heart of this quarter, with cafés and bars; it’s a fitting place to begin your Dylan Thomas tour of the city. A statue of the Man himself sits at the centre of the square. To his left, the marina, complete with a statue of old, blind Captain Cat from Under Milkwood, who rings his bell to wake the town.

To his right is the Dylan Thomas Theatre. Inside, a display commemorates Dylan’s time as an actor with the Swansea Little Theatre, which was based in Mumbles, a little seaside town a short drive (or tram ride, in Dylan’s time) along the splendid curving shore. Dylan eventually fell out of favour with the theatre group: his pre-rehearsal drinking session increased in length until it blended into his post-rehearsal drinking session. In his time he was, by all reports, a fine actor. The theatre has now moved to its permanent home in Swansea and is a thriving community theatre, with regular performances including plays, musicals and concerts. Their display has photographs of Dylan’s performances as well as reminiscences of his time with the company.

Leaving the theatre, I walked back towards the town, past the Queen’s Hotel, where Dylan drank frequently during his time as a journalist, and on to the Dylan Thomas Centre, a permanent exhibition dedicated to the town’s greatest son. The Centre is housed in an old art gallery, has exhibition spaces, a shop and café and is an essential visit for the Thomas devotee; at least as necessary as a trip to Laugharne. The permanent exhibition has a bewildering range of Thomas artefacts on display: notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, belongings... even the original door from Dylan’s writing shed, rescued from a skip in the 1970s. The exhibition is magnificent: it is child-friendly and has interactive displays and audio and video recordings of poems and performances. Throughout the exhibition, there were children actively engaging with the exhibits, parents desperately trying to provide context or patiently waiting for their charges to finish playing so that they could move on to the next display. It gave the whole thing a family feel which I liked: it is not stuffy or overly formal. I particularly liked the video of a performance of Under Milkwood in New York, in which Dylan exhorted his actors to “love the words” (hence the name of the exhibition). They have education outreach events, creative writing workshops and tours of the city and are doing everything they can to engage people, particularly young people, with Dylan’s work and to appreciate the extent to which he could manipulate language and the effects he could achieve. This is exactly how literature should work: children love words and word games and we too often mystify poetry which is, after all, ‘playing’ with language. Love the words.

I bought a couple of guides (Uplands trail and Swansea town trail) in the gift shop and these have proved invaluable in my research. I had a really nice conversation with the young woman behind the till, who had a genuine enthusiasm for Dylan and was charming and friendly. In fact, everyone I met during my trip to Wales was charming and friendly. I reluctantly left the museum (and its café; it was now well past midday) walked reluctantly past the Queen’s Hotel and back into the town where I walked reluctantly past the No Sign Wine Bar (another of Dylan’s favourites where they, apparently, serve a really good lunch) and met Mrs. P by the leaf sculpture - a beautiful glass and steel sculpture, depicting a leaf floating on a stream - in Castle Square at the heart of the city. Mrs. P had had an exhausting morning’s shopping and was herself ready for lunch.

We decided to drive to Uplands in search of lunch. A slightly tentative drive across the city (I knew it was more or less northwest) and we were there in no time. Uplands is very close to the university and, consequently, has a young, cosmopolitan feel. We had just finished lunch in a very pleasant vegetarian café when Mrs. P suddenly realised that she hadn’t set foot in a shop for almost half an hour; she left me to continue my journey alone. The Uplands Tavern, where Dylan used to come and drink while living at the family home, is a live music venue now but they have preserved a snug as Dylan would have known it. It is comfortable and nicely decorated with poems and photographs and I spent a very pleasant hour or so in there before walking up the hill to Cwmdonkin Drive and Dylan’s birthplace.

5 Cwmdonkin Drive is a fair sized, comfortable suburban villa. It was a student house and in a fairly pitiful state in 2003, when it was bought by a local businessman who set out to restore and preserve it in Dylan’s honour. It has been lovingly restored, at the owner’s own expense, to reflect the way in which it would have been decorated when Dylan grew up there. There are some remarkable rooms: the front bedroom in which Dylan was born in 1914, the little bedroom, complete with the desk on which he had already written about two thirds of his poetry when he moved out at the age of 19; the front parlour, recognisable from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”:

“Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlours; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms’ length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.”

It is charming and atmospheric but there is something a little uncomfortable about it: as if you are intruding in a family home and the occupants will arrive at any moment to express their outrage at your trespassing. Perhaps we should have called in advance for a tour (as they advise on their website). They have regular guided tours of the property. Occasionally they will have a talk or a book signing and it is possible to rent it out on a daily or even weekly basis; that would be quite an experience! There are details on their website, along with loads of information and photographs about Dylan and the restoration.

We wandered back to Uplands via Cwmdonkin Park, where Dylan used to play as a child and with which many people are familiar from the poem “The Hunchback in the Park”. The park is a large and well-used recreational space; it was the Easter holidays when we visited. A warm, spring afternoon: children were playing, young women with overladen pushchairs met for a chat while older folk rested in the café over tea and ice cream. Alongside beautiful, exotic plants, reminders of an age when explorers were sending back newly discovered flora from far-flung parts of the world, are the streams and rockeries from Dylan’s poem:

from “The Hunchback in the Park”

Eating bread from a newspaper

Drinking water from the chained cup

That the children filled with gravel

In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship

Slept at night in a dog kennel

But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early

Like the water he sat down

And Mister they called Hey mister

The truant boys from the town

Running when he had heard them clearly

On out of sound.

Past lake and rockery

Laughing when he shook his paper

Hunchbacked in mockery

Through the loud zoo of the willow groves

Dodging the park keeper

With his stick that picked up leaves.

Dylan’s family spoke no Welsh: his father was head of English Literature at Swansea Grammar School and Thomas Jnr had grown up on a diet of English poetry. His poetry, however, as well as displaying a deep connection with the Welsh landscape, reflects the lyrical cadences of the Welsh language. The Welsh eschew English poetic devices of rhythm and rhyme and rely instead on ‘cynghanedd’. As I understand it (I do ask forgiveness from my Welsh readers but it is a difficult thing to get your head around and I only have a basic grasp of it) Welsh poetry should ‘harmonise’, rather than rhyme. The important words in Welsh poetry are the stressed syllables and there is a great deal of alliteration and assonance. So a line such as “To begin at the beginning” displays cynghanedd because the two ‘g’ sounds are stressed and harmonise (now I know how my students feel when trying to understand iambs and trochees). This explains why his poetry is so beautiful and lyrical and the richness of his imagery. It doesn’t always rhyme but it alliterates and harmonises. Consider Fern Hill, another reminiscence of childhood, this time at his aunt’s farm in Carmarthenshire, and possibly the most beautiful poem ever written:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

When the Luftwaffe obliterated Swansea in 1941, Dylan Thomas, turned to his friend and said “Our Swansea has died.” But the grand suburban villa in which he grew up and spent his remembered Christmases is still here; the park in which he played and ran from hunchbacks is still here; the pub where he had his first drink is still here, as are the No Sign and the Queen’s Hotel. And Dylan is still here, in the epigrams on the statues and the monuments in the city centre and the marina; in the exhibits in the museum dedicated to him; in the minds of the children who play games with his poems and look at his photo and wonder who he was. He is still in the hearts of those of us who laugh at his stories and are moved by his poetry and love his words.

Reading has always been a solitary activity for me: a way to escape from the world. Besides, I was rather an odd child. The writers that stand out in my memory from this time are Dickens, Steinbeck, Hemingway and Dylan Thomas. I loved Thomas’s stories then and love them still: Holiday Memory, Quite Early One Morning and, particularly, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I have since added Under Milk Wood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog to my list of favourites. A visit to his home town is always a special event for me.

Brown’s Hotel was Dylan’s favourite pub and he would spend most afternoons here, drinking and sitting in the bay window, watching passersby: an endless source of fascination for a poet who loved to create unique characters. Brown’s has recently reopened as a boutique hotel. I was reading about this online recently when I noticed that they were doing a special midweek offer: two nights for £145. As a teacher, money is tight at the best of times but no Dylan Thomas fan could resist a deal this good: to stay at his favourite pub in his home.

I booked and quite early one morning, Mrs P and I took the journey across country to the far west. Brown’s is a fine little pub that serves a decent local ale and has a selection of comfortable and well-decorated rooms with excellent facilities, including a small collection of decent books. The corridors are decorated with artwork depicting the town and inspired by its favourite inhabitant and the rooms are all named after inspirational places for Dylan: Fern Hill, Talacharn, Uplands etc. We stayed in ‘Llareggub’ and were very pleased to do so.

Laugharne (pronounced ‘Larn’) was described by Dylan as “the strangest town in Wales” after his first visit there. It is a beautiful place and (at least midweek in April) it is quiet, peaceful and friendly. On our first evening there, Mrs P and I eschewed the restaurant and went for a wander. There were very few people about but those we did see smiled and nodded. A group of small boys played with a rugby ball outside the Castle View chip shop. Coming from the South-East of England, I am used to seeing small boys kicking footballs about; it’s part of our national landscape but rugby balls? Never. In the warm spring twilight with the distant sound of the sea, this struck me as the most ‘Welsh’ scene I had ever witnessed. We ate fish and chips on a picnic bench beneath the castle walls in the chilly twilight: we know how to live, Mrs P and I. We watched the light fade over the Taf estuary while starlings swarmed (’murmurated’?) above us. The occasional dog walker passed but we were mostly alone. There is a path alongside the estuary that leads towards the boathouse, and we walked along it, looking at the houses on the cliff above us and watching the lights come on in little villages across the river.

In the morning, following my excellent, home-cooked full Welsh breakfast (very similar to a full English but includes cockles and laverbread, which I tried because I was feeling particularly brave that morning), I went for a wander up the hill to the church while Mrs P. stayed at the hotel. It was raining quite steadily as I set out but I wasn’t far into my journey when it relaxed into a light drizzle. I don’t mind walking in drizzle and no one wants to visit a churchyard in bright sunshine anyway. It is one of the most atmospheric churchyards I have ever walked around: mossy pathways snake through the hillside and a bewildering array of lichens cling to the crumbling tombstones.

To reach Dylan and Caitlin’s grave, you must cross a footbridge into a ‘new’ cemetery, where graves are arranged in ordered rows. Dylan’s grave stands out among them as it is a simple, plain white cross. He was brought here in 1953 after his untimely death in New York. The legend is that he dropped dead in the Chelsea Hotel after a particularly heavy drinking bout, uttering the famous words: “I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskies; I think that’s a record!” The truth, as with many legends that grow around great people, is quite different. It seems he was being incorrectly medicated and, having been advised not to drink, fell into a coma from which he never recovered, finally dying of a brain haemorrhage. Caitlin also died abroad in 1994, having lived in Italy for most of her life since Dylan, unable to stand living in Laugharne without him. Their relationship was a tempestuous one, marked by infidelity and jealousy; alcoholism and violence. They were kindred spirits: both bohemian and artistic, neither of them could keep the other grounded and the result was a passion born of both love and hate. She requested in her will to be buried alongside him in Laugharne.

Dylan first settled in Laugharne after his marriage to Caitlin Macnamara in 1938. He first met her at the Wheatsheaf pub in London. she was with her ‘bf’, the artist Augustus John. Dylan wooed her away from him and they embarked on a relationship that would last until his death just 15 years later. They rented a small cottage (called ‘Eros’) before moving into Sea View, a three storey Georgian townhouse. They were always poor. Dylan lived off the proceeds of his poetry and what little income he could earn from radio broadcasts. The lecture tours of America (he did three of them) helped to supplement his income but, for most of the time, the Thomases relied on handouts and lived in debt. It was partly to escape this debt that they fled Laugharne in 1940.

Dylan’s presence is everywhere in Laugharne but he is treated with reverence, not exploited for tourist money. There are no Dylan Thomas tearooms or Milkwood gift shops. The tea room where I met Mrs P for a morning coffee was a very pleasant one. Called the Owl and the Pussycat, it is adorned with owl and cat pictures and ornaments, does a wonderful coffee and has a huge range of home-made cakes on offer. We finished our morning repast and went next door to the craft shop. Dylan has asserted his presence here but the wares on offer are tasteful and genuine. And I liked the owner very much: she was friendly and chatty and laughed at all of my jokes, which is a rare experience for me and I was quite taken aback. Mrs. P and I spent an hour or two walking along the shore: chatting, spotting wildlife and looking for interesting stones. By now, the rain had stopped completely, the sky was clearing and the sun was beginning to break through, turning the picturesque little town into an achingly beautiful one, basking in the golden spring sun.

The laverbread was still providing me with a persistent reminder of breakfast, so I forwent lunch and walked instead along the heavily wooded cliff-top path that leads to the boathouse. “My sea shaken house, on a breakneck of rocks”, the boathouse hugs the bottom of the cliff by the estuary. Inside is a nice, quiet little museum. The house itself is tiny for the home of an internationally famous writer. The parlour on the ground floor has been restored to how it would have looked when Dylan was living there. It is cosy and comfortable and a radio plays selections from Dylan’s readings. You are invited to sit and listen and contemplate your surroundings, which I did. There was a fair stream of visitors coming through, considering the town itself was all but deserted. The upper floor has two rooms, one of which has an exhibition room, with books and letters and other documents in Dylan’s hand, and an art gallery, featuring works inspired by Dylan’s poetry; in the other room a documentary film about his life and work plays on a continuous loop.

The ground floor has a small tea room, where I had hoped to get tea and Welsh Cakes and read my newly bought books (they have a little bookshop here too). There were no tables available however, as it was crowded for their lunchtime service and it was too cold to sit outside, so I walked back along the path to have a look at the writing shed, where the poet would retreat to escape the distractions of family and work amid stunning views of the peaceful estuary. The shed has also been restored so Dylan would recognise it, and has his desk, in disarray with open books, screwed-up papers and coffee mug, as if he has just got up and left.

I had a quick look around the castle then. A dramatic, 13th Century fortress, guarding the once bustling port that brought to West Wales goods from throughout the world. The ramparts make the best viewing platform for the town and from here you can see the streets laid out beneath you. It is supposed that the town of Llareggub in Under Milkwood was based on Laugharne but, personally I can’t see it. There are some features you can recognise from the play: the town square and the wood on the hill in the distance but I think Llareggub more closely resembles the little fishing villages further to the west. New Quay fits the bill and Dylan did live there for a short time. The castle also has a summer house, in which Dylan used while he was staying at Castle House with Richard Hughes. He wrote ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog’ there.

I met Mrs P back at the café, where we had tea before returning to Brown’s and I finally got to read my guidebooks. I sat in Dylan’s window seat but it was particularly uncomfortable, so I found a more conducive corner in which to peruse my purchases, which I did over a pint or two of Brown’s ale. We ate at Brown’s that evening too: it was unfussy but good, simple food and I finished it off with a Penderyn Welsh whisky: an astoundingly good one that can hold its head high among many Scottish single malts. They sell it by the bottle ... so I was able to pick up another souvenir.

We left the following morning for Swansea to continue our Dylan pilgrimage. I was sorry to leave lovely, friendly little Laugharne. It could well be my favourite town. It certainly makes top three, along with Stratford-upon-Avon and Haworth, and it is more intimate; one feels at home here. It certainly is a strange town but its isolation and atmosphere call to mind Dylan’s later epithet, written 5 days before he died: “a timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town.”

“Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?”

I am writing this on a snow day: one of the unexpected holidays beloved of schoolchildren, hated by Daily Mail readers and one of the few perks of being a teacher. As I look out of the window here at Literary Britain HQ, a robin is happily gorging itself on the crumbs I left out for him and the cats seem quite interested in the show, too. It’s a beautiful, Christmassy scene and seems a long way away from the bright, warm August day when I visited the picturesque village of Grantchester in Cambridgeshire.

Grantchester is known for its associations with three literary figures and has been visited by many more as a result. Its proximity to Cambridge means that it is just a short stroll from the city, and many writers, as teachers or students, took the short walk through the meadows to leave the city behind and spend a few hours in the lovely Cambridgeshire countryside.

George Gordon Byron has become literary folklore. He lived the romantic, rogering, roistering, celebrity lifestyle of an eighteenth-century poet and the ‘Byronic hero’ has been a literary archetype ever since. It was during his time at Cambridge (he was a student at Trinity between 1805 and 1807) that his legend was born. A local story has it that, on being told he would not be allowed to keep a dog in his rooms, he returned with a bear. He overspent, became involved in scandalous behaviour and published his first volume of poetry.

His athletic prowess is often alluded to, and he is known to have been a proficient swimmer. He swam across the Dardanelles in 1810 and, while living in Portovenere, would swim across the ‘Bay of Poets’ to visit Shelley in San Terenzo, a distance of about 4km. He is supposed to have come to Grantchester to swim in the pools of the Granta, (The river here is the Granta, hence the name of the village; it becomes the Cam as it flows through Cambridge).

Byron’s Pool is a densely wooded area of water meadows, with beech, ash, wych elm, pendunculate oak and field maple (according to the leaflet). It makes for a really pleasant walk on a hot day. It is also home to a great deal of wildlife, including woodpeckers, chaffinches and kingfishers. The wildlife most evident during my visit, however, was dogs, as it is a popular recreation area for locals and has been designated a Local Nature Reserve by Cambridge City Council.

Mrs. P and I spent a very pleasant afternoon wandering through the woodland and enjoying an hour of bucolic peace and quiet. We picked blackberries from the hedgerows as we made our way back to the village and the Orchard Tea Garden for afternoon refreshment. The Orchard has been a popular location among students since 1897, when Orchard House was a favoured lodging for students wishing to escape the hectic social whirl of Cambridge. Rupert Brooke came to stay here in 1909 and, due to his popularity, attracted a succession of friends and visitors.

They included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and E.M. Forster and, since then, many others have been attracted to this charming little garden. Its list of visitors includes an astounding number of scientists, philosophers, actors and other public figures, along with some of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent many afternoons walking through the meadows to Grantchester with the sole aim of taking tea at the Orchard.

You can still enjoy a decent cup of tea and a piece of cake here beneath the apple, pear and medlar trees. They produce a little guidebook detailing the Orchard’s literary links. It even contains the full text of Brooke’s most popular poem and is well worth the couple of quid they charge for it.

Rupert Brooke, born in 1887, became friends with the Bloomsbury Group (Woolf, Forster and Strachey) whilst at Cambridge. He later fell out with them following an ‘emotional crisis’ during which he blamed Lytton Strachey for destroying his relationship with Katherine Cox. It’s likely that he had discovered his bisexuality. Following his breakdown, Brooke travelled to the US, publishing his travelogues in the Westminster Gazette. He travelled home via New Zealand and Tahiti, where he settled for a short time with a Tahitian named Taatamata.

On returning to Grantchester and finding that his rooms at the Old Orchard had been let, he moved into the Old Vicarage, next door to Orchard House, where he continued to live his bohemian lifestyle and entertain his literary friends. He first came the public’s attention following the publication of ‘1914 and Other Poems’, the collection that contains his most famous poem, ‘The Soldier’, written during the First World War. As most of his poetry was written early in the war, it tends to be more optimistic and less satirical than that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; it is highly patriotic and full of hope.

In 1915, he was sent to Gallipoli. He suffered a mosquito bite, which became infected, and he developed septicaemia. He died on 23rd April and is buried on the Greek island of Skyros.

Brooke’s poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, celebrates the English countryside and does so with sentimentality and humour. It has the wistful longing of a young man a long way from home (it was written in Berlin in 1912), filling the English landscape with literary allusion and natural imagery. It pokes gentle fun at the rivalry that exists between neighbouring villages and celebrates the countryside where Brooke walked barefoot, foraged in the hedgerows, travelled by punt into Cambridge and (allegedly) swam naked with Virginia Woolf in Byron’s Pool.

The Old Vicarage is now the home of politician and novelist Jeffrey Archer. I must confess to never having read one of Archer’s novels; they’re not really my thing. He may be very good, for all I know, and he remains quite popular. At least he has acknowledged an earlier and greater inhabitant of his house through the statue that stands on his lawn.

...And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.

And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As You Like It, II.7