USA and UK travel writing; Journeys 1993+
1- ACROSS THE TRACKS
In the 1990s, I made a couple of mammoth rail journeys across the United States of America. Surely, these should have provided an abundance of writing material, and yet nothing seeped down from these expeditions into my tales. I just wasn’t chomping at the bit on my return to commit pen to paper, with there seeming to be a lack of incident around which to base a story.
Unlike, say, India or Egypt, or even remote parts of the UK, it didn’t seem each morning as I ventured out, that I was walking into the middle of a tapestry, with people living out their lives in a manner, which to the uninitiated, was most quirky; and that, whether I was willing to or not, I would get drawn into the middle of this detail rich painting, with all kind of humanity demanding to know my business.
Well of course, the scope for this happening, whilst on board a train for days and nights was far more limited. There were no murders on board, say, the Starlight Express, as we crossed our way from east to west; I didn’t find myself drawn into elaborate scams; it didn’t feel like I needed eyes in the back of my head at every turn; nobody spun me an absorbing life story. Rather what has always stayed with me has been the stunning topography along some of the journeys – our slow train rides, for example, through the upper and lower Rockies, and along the Pacific coastline. I also recall in the vicinity of Alabama, seeing an overturned freight train, that had plunged some day’s previous down a steep ravine – Just months earlier the worst multiple-fatality accident in Amtrak’s history had also occurred in this region.
It felt so different to start a journey one afternoon in, say, blizzard hit Denver with railway workers trudging along platforms, inches of snow resting on top of their peaked caps. Then, as we pulled into Las Vegas, the next morning, enroute to Los Angeles, most of the train decanted onto a sun kissed platform. Many of those waiting to board were dressed in loud tea shirts, all set to bask on the glowing beaches of California.
In contrast, back in England, I could have set out from London one frosty morning, wearing several layers of clothing, make my way via four trains to a far northern outpost in Scotland, where the only change of climate meant that I now had to hold onto my hat.
Watching these climatic changes across North America against a background of inspiring scenery, helped compensate for a lack of anecdotes. And yet, when I think back to these treks, it isn’t the terrain that comes rushing back into my mind, it is the tale of a girl from the north country, whose acquaintance I made, and this is what my tale is really about. Humour me. We will get there.
In the interest of protecting her privacy, you will understand, that I can’t divulge any details that might help identify this lady. All I can say is that her name was Peggy Sue and she worked at the central youth hostel in Seattle. There, that’s done it!
2- EXPLORING SAN FRANCISCO
But before I start on Peggy, I will step back a few days, to the beginning of my odyssey, as I touch down in San Francisco.
Sirens and hobos
I spent the first few nights sleeping in China Town, although there wasn’t much sleeping done. Wailing police sirens seemed to blare out constantly, the sound of which felt far more menacing than the gentler warbling of emergency vehicles that I was used to back home. It seemed that the San Francisco sirens were more designed for a range of really serious criminals, who were probably running around on the street just outside my room window, as I lay horizontal in bed, my heart pounding away with worry.
A few hours earlier on my first night, I sauntered past the Fox Warfield Theatre, which regularly played host to musical icons. Crowds milled around outside waiting for the doors to open. I recall a feeling of opulence, with fur coats and jewellery on show, so quite possibly it was opera night.
A couple of seedy characters suddenly blocked my way and mentioned something about money. I was on the verge of throwing my arms up and shouting, “Help police, I am being mugged.” Instead, I conveyed to these hobos that I really would prefer not to give them any of my hard-earned cash, and they just said, “Oh that’s fine. Sorry to bother you.” and stepped out my way. They then moved onto a smartly dressed couple, who also politely declined, but told them to take care.
Such courteous human interaction would take some getting used to, I thought. But by the end of my American adventure, who knows, with the showing of some respect and a bit of benevolence towards these homeless people, I might just earn enough Brownie points to enter the kingdom of heaven.
The Golden Gate
The following morning, following precious little sleep, I made my way over to the start of the Golden Gate Bridge. I had expected to see it rising up before me, in glowing red paint, made even more dazzling by radiant sunlight bouncing off its steel girders. But the reality was somewhat different, with most of its magnificent structure shrouded in a thin veil of fog. I dragged myself over the bridge, alongside six lanes of traffic. After forty minutes, I approached the last few steps and drew level with a pay phone. The opportunity was too good to pass up, so I whipped an international calling card out of my pocket and dialled a chum back in England. Amidst the drone of the bridge’s traffic flow, the call went something like this.
“Hi Dave, it’s me. I am standing at one end of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“The Golden Gate what? Is it a pub? Speak up. It sounds like you have a lot of traffic there.”
“The Golden Gate Bridge. It’s in San Fran…”
“Yes, I know where it fucking is. But we had an arrangement for curry tonight. How are you going to get back in time for that one? Ring me you arsehole, when you get back.”
Well at least I had cancelled my milk delivery, before I had set off on my impromptu travels. He couldn’t expect me to remember everything.
On the Road, with Jack Kerouac
I turned around and walked the mile back across the bridge. Couldn’t I have found a less demanding activity in my exhausted state – like ordering some noddle soup in China Town, and then falling asleep with my head in it? And so, this is what I did – Not so much the falling asleep, as letting the piping hot dish revitalise me, as I considered my next move.
Around the corner from what had become my default restaurant, in China Town, was Vesuvio’s Bar. Here, from the 1950s and beyond, leading lights of the Beat generation hung out, reading poetry and looking for inspiration, as they set about living their lives in what they perceived to be a most new-age manner. Their memory is still very much alive here, with the bar decorated out in homage to them.
I called in and sat in the corner where Jack Kerouac regularly saturated his brain with alcohol, whilst formulating in his mind the rambling structure of On the Road. This cult semi-autobiographical novel was a Pan-American travel odyssey, steeped in jazz clubs and drug taking. Its prose poured out of Kerouac’s mind, like a lava flow, as he bashed the book out on his typewriter, sellotaping one sheet of completed paper to the next, in a manner that came to resemble the dead sea scrolls.
I had packed my own copy of On the Road with me, which I had started reading several years ago. The intention was never to end up in Vesuvio’s with the book that day. Still, I managed to turn up there with it in my bag. I sat down in Jack’s seat and started at page one again.
I glanced up and saw the bartender smiling at me, and then, realised that they probably got several visitors a day sitting in Jack’s seat, retrieving On the Road from their backpack, all thinking that they were the first person to have paid their tribute in this way. I put the book away and left shortly after. The bar prices were rather steep anyway, driven up in no small part I am sure by Jack’s notoriety as literary genius and serious drinker, a past time which eventually killed him at a tender forty-seven years.
Destination anywhere
I felt drained of all energy and couldn’t muster the strength to retrieve a guidebook tome from my shoulder bag. Instead, I decided to leave it all to my feet. They could do the talking
They led me to a tram terminus. Well, I had spent a couple of days climbing the very steep streets of San Francisco and so I just wanted to sit on one of these ornate contraptions- preferably, one that kept going round San Francisco Bay in a loop, without me needing to get off, until I was ordered to do so
I strolled over to a ticket kiosk at the terminus. The seat on the other side of the counter was vacant. A policeman said, “It’s OK. The guy has probably just gone to the John.”
“The John?”, I asked, still unfamiliar with all the American slang that was to come my way over the next month. If this had been today, I would have already been debriefed on the matter by my kids, who in turn derive their Americanised education from Netflix. But this was still in an analogue era.
“Yes, the John,” replied the cop, “I mean the rest room.”
“The restroom?”, I asked. Visions of a dormitory lined with beds, where city transport staff could go for a siesta at specified times each day crept into my mind.
I was proving to be hard work. A man was stood behind me, waiting impatiently to speak to the policeman.
“He just means that the guy has gone for a quick piss, that’s all,” said the man.
Well, there was nothing quick about it and I gave up waiting after ten-minutes.
I walked on and arrived at a bus stop, from which a range of services departed. The plan was to take potluck and get on the next bus that arrived, it made no difference to me – I was going into the situation blindfolded.
A lady came and stood beside me.
“Hey, which bus are you waiting for?”, she asked.
“Well, any of them, I guess.”
“But what’s your destination?”
“Destination anywhere.”
“East or West?”
“I don’t care.”
And it started to feel like a duet
I hadn’t shaved for several days and probably looked a bit tardy, because she then responded, “Oh, I see. You haven’t a home.”
“Well, I do have a home,” I replied, “but it’s in England. All I really want to do right now is curl up on the back seat of a bus, go to sleep for quite a while and wake up in a place of beauty, far removed from this big city.”
She rooted in her handbag. I thought she was getting her small change out for me, because I looked like I was in need of a financial donation. Instead, she retrieved a bus timetable for an idyllic sounding outpost called Half-Moon Bay, which she assured me was oh so quaint and too good to miss. And as she was relaying this to me, the bus for Half-Moon Bay pulled up. Actually, from the standard of the upholstery, the air conditioning and the onboard TV, it resembled a luxury coach and the fare for the one-hour ride was a pittance.
I fell asleep and woke up, as the coach started to trace an arc along a coastal inlet whose shape did indeed resemble a half-moon. Overhead a range of light aircraft hovered, as they landed and took off from a small aerodrome that sat at the bay’s edge – all part of the town’s annual air show. I peered through small town window displays of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, before entering an overpriced supermarket, where they refused to let me purchase a tin of beer, not because I looked homeless, but because I couldn’t prove I was twenty-one – actually, I was thirty-three. I returned to the big city.
The Untouchables
On my final morning in San Fran, I had time to kill before catching an afternoon flight to Seattle. I found myself sat on a waterfront wall, by a ferry point, staring out across a stretch of very choppy, and if rumours were to be believed, shark infested water. A couple of miles in the distance, on a small island, was the outline of a stolid building, devoid of any aesthetics. It was the long since defunct Alcatraz jail.
I was tempted to catch the boat across, but knowing my luck, I would land there and spot a miniscule footnote in the timetable, stating that once every five years on this particular day, ferries would cease to operate for five hours between 10 am and 3 pm. Instead, I would find myself sheltering from the elements, clinging onto cell window bars, gazing out across the Bay of San Francisco, whilst overhead my flight made its merry way to Seattle.
Perhaps though, what really influenced my decision to stay put was the visitor information for Alcatraz, which waxed lyrical about its audio guided tours. Having to listen to a mind-numbing monologue about minutiae would drive me crazy. I could just anticipate it – the number of bricks in the walls, the dates different wings of the building were completed, the weight of reinforced steel used, the average salary of prison guards, the breeding habits of those sharks.
No doubt that somewhere in the middle of this tedium, there might be juicy snippits. I was quite confident that this would include a big chunk which elevated one of its more famous inmates to the status of cult hero. Yes, Al Capone probably did more for maintaining a steady stream of ticket sales to the prison, than the rest of all its previous residents put together.
And let’s face it, any guy who was able to maintain the flow of alcohol and other illicit pleasures during prohibition and a time of austerity just had to be thoroughly likeable.
But then I thought back to a particular cinematic scene in The Untouchables, which I had seen upon its release, a few years previous. Capone, played by Robert de Niro, was delivering an animated after dinner speech to members of his clan around a grand round table, when quite nonchalantly and without warning, he picked up a large baseball bat, and brought it crashing down several times on a treacherous neighbouring diner, splitting his skull. The victim slumped onto the table. Pools of blood seeped onto the virgin white tablecloth.
And with this scene in mind, I thought that maybe Capone wasn’t such a nice guy after all. I focused instead on getting to the airport.
3- SEATTLE
Arriving in Seattle
I boarded a two-hour flight to Seattle. The older couple sat next to me liked my Englishness and an invite to dinner, and maybe even lodgings, ensued – I didn’t take either up. Maybe they just viewed it as the polite thing to do – helping a stranger, lost in a strange place. Perhaps, if I had accepted their offer, the fate that was Peggy Sue would never have befallen me.
It was wet and windy, when I stumbled into the state of the art youth hostel in downtown Seattle. The city’s reputation for having more rain than Manchester, felt fully justified.
The next morning, I spent time exploring the rambling farmer’s Pike Market and the large fish market that adjoined it – Here stall holders held up absolute whoppers for me to photograph. And continuing with this marine theme, I caught the ferry to the largest settlement, Bainbridge, on the archipelago of islands that comprises the Puget Sound. Here it wasn’t so much exploring these Seattle outposts that was the primary draw, as the crossing itself and in particular any dusk return journey. It is a visual assault on the senses, seeing the distant Seattle skyline lit up in a sea of flickering futuristic neon – and at the heart of it all, the dazzling construction that is the Space Needle, towering above all else, pointing and lighting its way to the heavens.
A rock ‘n roll classic made flesh
At lunchtime, I set off on a walking tour of Seattle with other like-minded hostellers. I was still trying to catch up on a lot of missed sleep, since leaving England, and was struggling to keep up. Half an hour into the ramble, our tour guide dropped back and introduced herself – She was in her late thirties, not on the slender side and swung her copper-coloured hair in a rather coquettish manner.
“Hi,” she said, offering her hand, “My name is Peggy Sue.”
Well, this made me smile – it wasn’t a name I was likely to forget in a hurry.
“Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, Peggy Sue, Oh, my Peggy, my Peggy Sue,” I sang to my inner self.
Peggy then gave me a hard stare and clenched her fist.
“Go on then, sing it out loud, I dare you,” she said.
Well, she was definitely on the stocky side and so I decided not to risk it.
We chatted for a few minutes, making polite conversation.
Then she announced that she would be coming to England next month.
“Oh, you will have a great time,” I said, not really having a clue where exactly in old Blighty she would be exploring or having the inclination to find out.
There was a pregnant pause. Maybe this was meant to be a cue for me to follow up with a reciprocal offer similar to the one I had received on the flight up to Seattle i.e. dinner, plus lodgings, all in a deep appreciation of Peggy’s Americanness. Instead, I just muttered, “Right, ok. Where are we heading to next? Hadn’t we better catch up with the others?”
I really liked Peggy Sue. There was just something about the tours she offered. The official tourist information bureau would I am sure have spent an inordinate amount of time looking around the City Hall, bombarding me with dates and counting the number of windows and levels in Seattle’s tallest buildings, stressing how swell everything was. But Peggy’s tours were very different. She probably spent weeks researching the more unusual aspects of Seattle life, particularly its underbelly. And, as I was later to discover this very much fitted in with her own persona.
A third of a century on, I now struggle to recall all the sights that she had lined up for us – these probably varied from day to day – but, if I were to say that I wouldn’t be surprised if Peggy had taken us around the city’s sewers, revealing the foundation work of the original metropolis, when it first sprung up out of the gold rush, you should get some idea of the nature of things.
Interlude
I moved on from Seattle after three nights. Following a sojourn in Vancouver City, and a couple of nights in Victoria, Vancouver Island, I then caught the Empire Builder for a two day and two-night rail ride to Chicago, immersing myself in its thriving blues music scene, checking out bars where some of the original greats had burst upon the scene.
My US venture resembled a loop, as a month later, I came back up the California’s Pacific coast, to arrive back at Seattle for my last two nights in the US, before flying back home.
Peggy’s second tour
The next morning, I signed up for another of Peggy’s tours. We strolled along, chatting about the places I had visited during my four weeks away from Seattle. Then she reminded me of her trip to England in a few days’ time, rather forwardly asking if I could put her up, until she was ready to move on, and could she have my details?
Well, I wasn’t strong minded enough to say, “You must be friggin’ joking! Just because I have been on a couple of your tours, doesn’t mean I want you to move in with me.”, but this is what I must have thought.
Instead, I just chuckled, as though this was all part of her humour, and looked down at the ground.
Just how small did Peggy think old Blighty was? – She seemed to assume that where she was flying into could only be a short hop away from my own abode.
“For my first week there”, she said, “I am staying at a friend’s address. I have his details in my address book, I will show you later.”
“No, it’s alright,” I replied, “There is no need.”
As I have said, maybe this was just part of her Americanness, if that isn’t generalising too much. Or was my own insular English conservatism creeping in too much.
“Hell,” she might have replied, “You really shouldn’t view a request for shelter, as me wanting a quick shag. You do need to get out a bit more!”
Well I did start to wonder, and maybe she would have been right.
Ballard
We caught up with the rest of the tour group and boarded a bus to Peggy’s own snake like residential high street. This was at the heart of a well to do suburb called Ballard and was lined with all manner of small businesses and eateries.
Our posse include four Kiwis who looked like they did their rugby training with the All Blacks.
Peggy took us to an Indian restaurant that did an unusually good job at combining tasty cuisine with an ‘as much as you can eat’ buffet format.
As we entered the restaurant our gathering threw a giant dark shadow over the place, and the manager looked very worried at our potential appetites. I know that if I had been staying in this district, instead of the youth hostel, I would have put them out of business within a week.
My recollections of the rest of the day are very hazy now, but two episodes are very clear.
The Projects
We were on another bus and found ourselves, in the early evening darkness making our way through what looked like a very deprived neighbourhood. It resembled the end of the world and could, to coin an American term, have enjoyed the status of a projects area.
The bus was crowded with residents and commuters who kept boarding and decanting, although I certainly wouldn’t have fancied getting off here by myself, a complete stranger.
A US national was in our tour group, John, goatee beard, mid-twenties. I think he had only just been allowed out by his parents for the first time beyond his village in some well to do conservative village the other side of the US. He was on his own odyssey. And what a revelation it was proving to be for him. Unfortunately, he had difficulties controlling his loudness and was most unsubtle with his utterances. We were sat at the back, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if even the driver could pick up John’s proclamations.
Passing through a housing estate, which was in serious need of some gentrification, John exclaimed, “Oh my, just look at that housing block. Why would people choose to live there?”
Maybe he thought that this was one of Peggy’s featured sights. I was beginning to think along the same lines.
A moment later the bus came to a stop outside a series of boarded up shops. The pavement was strewn with litter. At the centre of the stretch, only one shop seemed to be open. There was in the darkness a silhouette of a group of people lurking outside the entrance. Some sort of altercation was in progress.
“Oh my god”, John stated, in a loud excited manner, “I would so hate to live here.”
Two stocky men had been sat on the seat in front of us for the whole journey. I was anticipating that at any moment they would rise from their seats and escort John to a place of his execution. I might even have been wishing it, just as long as they didn’t get the wrong chap.
A drubbing from the stocky men, or indeed from any other group on the bus who might now be taking offence, could only just be around the corner.
Maybe the Kiwis were about to put John in a neck lock and read him his short future. But there was just silence from their corner.
John then scrutinised a couple of vandalised vehicles, that the driver was circumnavigating. He started up with another loud observation.
“Oh my,” he shouted, “I have never seen a place as ……”
Well, I had had enough. I was about to lean over, prod him in the chest with a series of staccato like jabs and say, “Look will you just shut the fuck up, at least until we get off the bus.”
But Peggy beat me to it, with a more eloquent response.
She placed a hand on his knee and said, “Hey, sorry I can’t remember your name, but I should have told you at the start that we always keep quiet when on our bus rides. We just like to sit peacefully and watch the world go by.”
And with that he fell silent.
The view from the 45th
An hour later we were stood outside one of Peggy’s favourite refreshment spots and it soon became apparent why.
Unsuitably dressed in mufti, we entered the foyer of the Hilton International hotel.
We caught the lift up to a cafeteria area and took our seats by a window that looked down onto the streets below. Now, this wasn’t something as low lying as say the fifth floor. It was more like the forty-fifth. The views across the Seattle skyline, with all its futuristic illuminations was truly spectacular. It was the daddy of all views, gazing down onto just about every other building in the city and out across the straits of the Puget Sound. Our tour was reaching its end and we had the most impressive seats in the metropolis.
“Oh, the best is yet to come,” Peggy said. Although, I couldn’t see how it could get any more spectacular than this. Then we heard a distant roar. Our jaws dropped as she pointed out of our window at a locally manufactured Boeing Jumbo Jet, as it passed by on its descent to the airport.
It wasn’t so much the aerial view that our window afforded of this mechanical beast, as its proximity to our seats.
It felt like it was less than a hundred feet away, although in reality, it must have been a lot more. If we had a pair of high-powered binoculars, we could probably identify the newspapers that passengers still had on their laps. And of course, being a major conurbation, we didn’t have to wait too long for the next plane to coast along on its ascent or descent.
Our views of this air show were exhilarating, spectacular and of course, to the uninitiated, quite scary. With all that was to come in New York eight years later, are people still brave enough to travel up to the forty-fifth floor to do a bit of plane spotting? Indeed, do the Jumbo Jets still use the same flight path?
Chitchat on the 45th
Eventually, we came back down to earth again and focussed on our refreshments. More chitchat ensured. The Kiwi contingent were now in full flow, with their own brand of repertoire. I think they were getting warmed up for their lad’s night out, which was due to commence very shortly.
They pressed Peggy for details about her pending trip to the UK. What about accommodation they asked?
“Well,”, she replied, “I was hoping that Damian here would put me up for a while, but he hasn’t given me his contact details yet.”
The Kiwis were perplexed by this.
“Hey man”, they said, “why can’t you just give her your address?”
Well, I thought, you’ve got nothing to lose. She is hardly likely to travel up to remote Leicestershire, where the most interesting thing might involve sheep, wellington boots and Friday fight night at The Crown.
I jotted my address and phone number onto a hotel business card and passed it over. She tucked it away safely into her shoulder bag. And with that we made our way back to journey’s end, the hostel.
I turned down the offer of a night on the town with the Kiwis. I wasn’t after a life in the fast lane, but something decidedly more tranquil.
An invitation
I retired to the hostel café and was joined shortly after by Peggy Sue, who sat putting some finishing touches to paperwork relating to our day out.
There was a long pause, and then she asked, “I am going out for some beers down my local bar in Ballard later. Would you like to join me? If you are up for it, we could leave in say half an hour to catch the bus back to my place.”
More beer and the prospect of further explorations around her gentrified neighbourhood certainly appealed and of course the prospect of more conversation with Ms Sue did have a certain attraction.
“Yes, that sounds like a great idea,” I said, “I will go get changed and see you back here shortly.”
“Well actually,” she replied, “Do you mind if we meet at the bus stop just around the corner from here instead. Some of the staff are real gossips and if they see the two of us walking out together…“
I expected her to follow this up with more detail, but she wasn’t forthcoming. Instead, she left the sentence hanging in the air.
So, I just said, “Yes, sure that’s fine. I will see you at the bus stop soon.”
An unfortunate coincidence
The bus pulled out. Peggy spent a few minutes pointing out the window at a range of aspects in the downtown area, that had remained oblivious to me.
Then, I made the mistake of asking about her pending visit to the UK. From her shoulder bag she retrieved my contact details and proceeded to study them.
She then said, “Why, this is amazing. This is where Fred lives, the other guy who I will also be staying with.”
A shiver went down my spine.
“It’s probably just another county, that has a similar spelling,” I said. Although, right there and then, I couldn’t recall anything that was remotely similar.
Then, as I glanced at Peggy’s address book, I did indeed notice that Fred and I shared the same county. Holy shit, I muttered.
My position of employment at the time necessitated having a good understanding of the demographic composition and deprivation levels of the large city of Leicester, that was at the heart of the county. This requirement also extended to the county’s numerous distant villages.
Many of its quaint isolated small settlements would not have been out of place in a ‘Murder at the Vicarage’ Agatha Christie novel – thus adding up to quite a lot of murders. And their names were ever so whimsical. Barton in the Beans was my favourite, closely followed by Newtown Unthank and Oaks in Charnwood. Through work I knew them all.
So, on that bus with Peggy, I quickly regained my composure, recalling what a rural spread-out county I lived in.
The key point here is that it could take a week to travel by public transport, to get from one side of the county to another. It would most likely involve a number of changes and if you missed your connection, you might be stuffed until the next day, at best.
A car was essential, and unless Fred was going to put himself out to drive Peggy all around this isolated rural part of England, then she was just going to have to stay in Barton on the Beans, population two hundred and fifty, or wherever, for the time she chose to take up residence here.
But then, I noticed the finer details of Fred’s address. Far from being on the other side of the county, it was but three villages away from my home. With a taxi or a lift from Fred, she could be on my doorstep in less than thirty-minutes. And quite possibly, by then, he wouldn’t be able to drive her over quick enough.
Peggy saw my face flash and turn crimson.
“Oh my”, she said, “Is it really that close to you? Isn’t that amazing? How awesome!”
And I could see for once, that coincidences really did happen.
Peggy’s room
We got off the bus, outside Peggy’s abode. It looked like a traditional two-story house. As we walked up her path, a man emerged with a backpack. She introduced me to her lodger, as he headed off for the weekend. “See you next week, sweetie, “she said. And then there were just the two of us.
I sat in the lounge, whilst Peggy went off to her bedroom to get changed. Shortly after, I heard her calling me from somewhere on the ground floor.
Perhaps she was in the kitchen, so I wandered over in that direction. But as I approached the threshold, I found an open door, beyond which were a steep set of uneven brick steps that led down to a cellar. I couldn’t see what kind of area this then turned onto beyond the bottom step. But its rickety approach gave off the aura of not being a bad place to store a body.
There was an amber glow emanating from the bottom step. I certainly was not in a hurry for another of her subterranean tours – and who knew what kind of alternative lifestyle she led, certainly not me. She called out again in an alluring tone, “Come on now sweetie, take a look, my bedroom is down here. Don’t be shy now, everything is going to be just fine.”
I should also say that not many weeks previous, I was resting in Coimbra, Portugal, with its twisting cobbled streets, lined with Pensiones and, yes, many of these also had cellars. Whilst lodging in one of these places, I went to the cinema to watch Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, act out their gruesome roles in The Silence of the Lambs.
And now here I was stood at the top of Peggy Sue’s cellar steps, with fact starting to blend with celluloid fiction.
“Don’t be shy now,” she called up again, “You will be amazed when you see it down here.”
Well, no fucking way, I thought. As images of her dressed in just black suspender stockings started to come to the fore. There were also, I was sure, chains, that dangled from red brick cellar walls, with handcuffs at the end.
“Please”, I might have been on the verge of shouting down to her rather nervously, “Can you just put that whip down?”
Instead, I stammered, “It’s OK, I’ll just stay up here. I am in the middle of perusing your bookcase.”
Silence, then she called up, “Oh really? Have you found anything of interest?” And then she bounded up her cellar steps and back onto ground level looking oh so conventional, with not a trace of any bondage gear in sight.
We sauntered down to Peggy’s neighbourhood Bar, where live folk music was on offer. We might even have had a dance. Over drinks, she introduced me to a young lady, who in the not-too-distant past Barbara had fostered.
I wasn’t sure how rigorous the safeguarding procedures of the local authority’s children’s services were but assumed that some kind of key worker would have needed to make a site visit to Peggy’s place to check the lay of the land. Did he look down in her cellar? Perhaps he was still there.
Peggy’s book case
After a fair amount of alcohol, we made it back to her abode; quite what was on the agenda I struggle to recall. In fact, I very much doubt if I knew at the time either.
I remember us being sat close together on Peggy’s settee and her getting up to retrieve some items of interest. At this point, our tale really does move from the kitsch to the downright weird.
And this is the bit that has always stayed with me, far more than epic journeys through boulder strewn rocky mountain ranges, blizzard swept scenes in Montana or the lapping sea against the Pacific coastline. Mention epic travels across the USA to me and I immediately think of Peggy Sue striding back from her bookcase with a couple of sizeable hard back books.
The core content of these publications was based around photos relating to pretty large monkeys, or more specifically their sex lives. I remember close up shots of genetillia. When, I think about it now, the more it feels like such a photo opportunity might have only been marginally less rare than a corresponding shoot of Ching Ching and Chia Chia, the giant pandas whose procreational progress was the focus of media attention not that many years previous. And yet this is what sticks strongly in my mind – You will find no degree of artistic license in these pages.
“Don’t you think that these pictures are amazing?” Peggy asked. “I just love studying the lives of monkeys.”
I wasn’t sure how to react. It is quite safe to say that any remote prospects of a trouser arousal experience had been killed dead by this conversation stopper.
So boldly on view were the books though, that it didn’t feel like they were part of a bestiality porno-collection. And after all, what would her seemingly respectable lodger have made of this? Rather, they seemed to be more like National Geographic publications for the broad minded.
And yet, she had not mentioned zoology as a side-line. As far as I can recall, she was just conservative plain old Peggy Sue – a girl who fitted in well with traditional views of youth hostelling, and who got by with her imaginatively designed tours of the Seattle region. Still, I felt distinctively uncomfortable – although I recall, a few moments after her gorilla revelations, lying across the couch with my head in her lap, as she stroked my hair.
Time had marched on, and it was now into the early hours – I had so much to cram in during the next half a day, not least getting back to base, gathering my gear together and making my way to the airport for a trans-Atlantic flight back home to England.
Well, I couldn’t just stay there with her caressing my locks and I certainly wasn’t going to set a single foot down those cellar steps.
The bus service that ran past her house had now stopped operating until day light. I sat up and asked if there was any chance of her ordering me a taxi back to the hostel.
“Well, I guess you are not staying the night then,” she stated.
A few minutes later a cab drew up. The ride seemed to cost a small fortune but felt like it was worth every cent.
UK bound
Six hours later, I was packed and ready for the journey that would take me back to the UK. I stepped out of my room, and there she was stood outside the door, Peggy Sue, all bright eyed and bushy tailed.
“Well, you just don’t know how wise a decision that was last night to come back to my place, rather than going out with the Kiwis,” she said.
I was struggling to make sense of this piece of rationale, wondering how it could possibly be so.
“It was?”, I asked. “Really?”
“I have just been in their room,” she replied, “giving them some tender loving care. They look like they have been beaten black and blue. The got into an awful fight in some bar, not long after we left them.”
And, so I had to agree with her. A night out with Peggy Sue certainly had its talking points and was more preferable to having ten shades of shit knocked out of me – although, it was a close thing.
If fate had decreed that I went bar hopping with the Kiwis, I would not have been in any state to make that flight back home. Hell, Peggy might have had me transported back to her cellar, where I would have spent the next month recuperating, with the heavy door at the top of those rickety steps bolted and padlocked. She would have got a nurses uniform out of her wardrobe. I would have been laid on the bed, whilst she spent time gently mopping my brow with warm water. She would be taking me page by page through her gorilla books, whispering gently into my ear, “So looks like you will be staying a few more nights after all. Yes, there is no escape for you, young man.”
The prospect suddenly brought me back down to earth with a jolt.
“Well ok,” I said, “I need to get going now. It was great meeting you.”
I gave her a hug and started to move away.
“Hey not so fast. I will be in touch next month,” she said, far too adamantly. “Don’t stray far from home now.”
4- A LEICESTERSHIRE LIFE
Laying in wait
Back home, by my own fireside, I spent several days ruminating about the implications of Peggy Sue just turning up on my doorstep in a few days’ time, with her bags.
Two of Peggy’s tours, then a night out with her, and look where it had got me.
And just what impact might her bags being dropped over my threshold have on me?
Well, it would throw my own work routines and sleep patterns into turmoil, that was for sure. I could arrive in another continent at the dead of night, with nowhere to stay, and wouldn’t bat an eye lid – in fact this often felt like the norm. But back home, challenge my equilibrium, and it just knocked me all over the place.
I realised that I needed to try to draw a line under the matter.
I wrote Peggy a letter saying that, workwise, I had to suddenly disappear at short notice for a month, and very sorry and all that. A transparent lie, but still, I posted it. However, I was only fifty percent confident that she would receive it in time, before leaving Seattle.
She still might show up waving my note in her hand, barging her way in, telling me exactly what she thought of my letter and of my feeble attempts to get out of an ‘agreed’ arrangement.
And so, with a considerable amount of trepidation, on the weekend of her anticipated arrival, I awaited that phone call or knock at the door. I was very jumpy. At one point, as the phone rang, I nearly dropped my cup of tea in fright, I was so highly strung. I picked the receiver up convinced I was about to hear Peggy’s drawl.
Instead, a representative of a tin pot landline phone company, informed me that despite reminders sent, I had omitted to pay an outstanding bill. And so, unless I was able to settle up that instant, they would cut me off, but not before they had sent their favoured firm of bailiffs round, who would work me over and walk off with my esteemed music collection, or something like that.
Oh relief! Of course, I was very attached to my music collection and didn’t fancy having any of my limbs removed, but the mere fact that it wasn’t Peggy ringing from just a few miles down the road, made me come over all joyful. The caller sensed this.
“Look he said, you are not meant to sound happy, we are after all a bunch of debt collectors.”
But it was no good trying to explain, I just cheerfully paid up.
Anstey – a portrait
I am about to peel the lid off my then village, allowing you to get a feel for its character, not all of it good. And then you tell me how enamoured Ms Sue might be with the place. If she turned up, would she stay for a night or much, much longer? – These were the concerns that occupied my innermost self at the time.
I had stepped off a bus for the first time in Anstey, for this was indeed my Leicestershire village, in 1986. I was reconnoitring it for accommodation, in order to take up a new position of employment close by.
It was a balmy autumnal evening. There was a faded charm to the place. At its heart was a 14th century Norman church. An abundance of Edwardian redbrick buildings glowed in the early evening sun. Houses with thatched roofs were dotted here and there. Buildings that were originally built at the start of the century to house, for example, the village cinema and brewery were now used for other purposes, but still displayed their original faded signage.
Anstey had a relatively small population of seven- thousand, yet it had four pubs and three social clubs of various affiliations. There were two fish & chip shops, and in years to come an Indian takeaway would open up, which put the place on an entirely different footing in my eyes.
The village had its own identity, being geographically separated by a green belt area from the big city of Leicester, four miles down the road. In years past, people were born in Anstey and never left its small boundaries for days, if not weeks, at a time. For many, textile factories in the village provided employment. Others, like me, arrived by chance in the village and hung around for decades. The place just seemed to cater for all our needs. It verged on the edge of rural utopia being, for example, just a few minutes’ drive to fox hunting country.
I knew I was onto a good thing with Anstey and was destined to buy my first house there. Yes, the village was very insular, but why would I ever want to leave the place? Even after I had moved far away, I still kept hold of my little palace as a second residence for a further eight years.
Bradgate Park
With a slight stretch of the legs, things got even better. Moving just beyond the village boundary, I could leave my front door, walk through a passageway that took me onto farmland, hike across four fields and then find myself at the heart of the county treasure that was the sprawling Bradgate Park. Here, deer roamed around at will and historical buildings and a reservoir dotted the landscape. Looking down on this expanse from on high was a tankard shaped folly called Old John. This provided breath taking views in all directions across a rural landscape. From up there, I could see all of my existence mapped out – my village, my place of work, the rolling hills I cycled out to, the vibrant city of Leicester, and on a clear day, a series of distant hamlets. I didn’t need a cell phone app to provide a virtual overview of all these places.
Regular sunset jaunts across these fields and up to the top of Old John was a source of therapy, which helped clear and focus my mind in a very mysterious and powerful way.
Kids in an analogue world
Years later, I found irrefutable proof of Bradgate Park’s magnetism.
I journeyed across the West to East Midlands of England with my adolescent son and daughter. We then took the bus out from Leicester to Anstey, crossing the fields from my former house to Bradgate Park. We were on a tour of my old playgrounds.
Getting them this far, without too much of a kerfuffle was an achievement. I was expecting them, halfway across the fields, to sit on a stile. They would gang up on me and say, “We refuse to walk another step on your crazy outing, until you double our phone data allowance – like this instant.”
But instead, they kept walking. Then as we arrived in the heart of the park, things got more bizarre. Instead of pushing and shoving each other, and shouting, “I hate you! Drop dead!”, they proceeded to share piggyback rides around the perimeter fences of historical buildings, even stopping occasionally to studiously read the information displays. This revelatory like behaviour then continued as they walked for half an hour along a park trail holding hands, singing and conducting conversations in a manner most polite.
There was definitely some kind of supernatural atmospheric force at work here in this beautiful expanse that was causing them to modify their behaviour.
Possibly the ghost of Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England for nine days before her execution in 1554, who was born and grew up in the park, was looking kindly down on them.
I made sure to take plenty of pictures of this amazing transformation, to show my wife, as otherwise she would just assume I was making it all up.
Yes, if you ever received unwelcome newcomers in Anstey, Bradgate Park was probably the last place you would want to reveal unto them, lest it persuaded them to stick around for a long time.
We exited by the park’s main entrance and then as we started to get further away from its boundaries, my son’s and daughter’s behaviour became more familiar, with demands directed at their father like, “Give me that tenner you owe me for doing all that extra reading last month,” and “Well, if you give her that tenner, you had better give me £20 for hanging out those four tea towels last week.”
And then they would both form a pact, shouting, “Yes, give us our thirty pound now, you old age pensioner, before we bury you in this ditch and leave you.”
A wandering soul
But I was always a wandering soul, and putting one foot in front of the other, in search of new places was really my kama. Every day in Anstey was just a stop gap, during which I planned my next adventure, or just got up one morning and said fuck it, I am off somewhere else – another land or place, that can provide food for thought, capturing my mind and making me feel all animated and wanting to get my pad and pen out. At the same time, I always knew how lucky I was, to have a place like this, where I could throw my hat down for as long as I wanted, before picking it up again and setting off into the blue yonder.
But why?
And so why am I telling you this, relating to you a tale of my everyday existence in a small Leicestershire settlement called Anstey.
Well, hopefully, it should provide you with some kind of measurement system, enabling you to gauge what Ms Sue would make, if she should turn up at my abode.
I was sure she would be thoroughly enamoured with the village, My house and its secrets (Click). There would be no desire to move on. She would deeply immerse herself, like so many newcomers, in the village’s culture, convinced that she had not so much found somewhere that was quintessentially English, as the very beating heart of England itself, and the longer she stayed, the more evidence she would assemble in support of this.
Indeed, was there anything about the village that might dissuade her from hanging around – most definitely not.
The disappearance of charm
However, if it had been a few years further on, a dark shadow that was cast over Anstey might have persuaded Peggy to return home quite quickly, with the beating heart of England being forced to move onto a more peaceful locale. This rural idyll now started to resemble Midsomer.
So how did the place suddenly lose its charm? What were the serious crimes to which I refer? Well, over a six-year period, there were three brutal slayings emanating from Anstey, the finer details of which I have outlined in The Village Murders.
5- ACHIEVING UTOPIA
Had all this degeneracy in personal safety occurred a few years earlier, I am sure I wouldn’t have hesitated to make Peggy Sue fully aware of what she might be letting herself in for. It was after all cast iron evidence that the village could now give her project neighbourhoods a run for their money.
But, as you may have assumed by now, our paths never crossed again. That knock at the door, for whatever reason, never came.
Maybe Ms. Sue still designs imaginative tours of Seattle or perhaps she fell deeply in love with Fred, from three hamlets away, acquiring dual nationality in the process and still lives there.
Possibly, on a clear evening, they travel out to Bradgate Park, climb their way up to Old John, pausing for breath halfway along this steep ascent, stopping alongside children who are flying kites at these elevated heights.
On reaching the top, they would spend half an hour there, as an orange-coloured sun was setting on the horizon, its shimmering light casting a glow over Cropston Reservoir and the roof tops of Anstey a mile in the distance.
They would take in the uninterrupted 360-degree rural views, reflecting how much calmer this vista felt, compared to the one on the forty-fifth floor in Seattle.
They would then breathe in deeply and exhale from their inner selves all of that day’s trials and tribulations.
Of course, this is just my dream, but if there is any remote truth to it, then, just like so many who climbed up there before them, a state of lasting nirvana would have been attained – at least lasting, that is, until the start of work the next day.
Damian Rainford, 2023
Further information
Footnotes
(I know I said above that you won’t find any artistic license in these pages. Well, sorry, but I lied. Peggy Sue wasn’t called Peggy Sue at all. Upon finalising my story, I decided that I really should anonymous her name. However, there is a musical continuity here, as her real name was also that of a traditional American folk song, with which I was well familiar. So familiar in fact, that I knew I would never forget it – not even thirty years on.)
(All images are author’s, except: header image [Seattle skyline] and ‘On the road’ manuscript, both courtesy of PixelsFree; featured image [1930s Anstey bus scene – anonymous]; and fox hunt scene [anonymous])
(Peggy Sue song lyrics by Jerry Allison and Norman Petty, 1957)
