In Search of Culture
We boarded the coach at Russell Square, outside the building where my wife Erna’s (BA Hons) Literature group meets. We were bound for Bateman’s, a National Trust House in Burwash, near Tunbridge Wells; its sole claim to fame being that it was the place where Rudyard Kipling lived from 1902 until his death in 1936.
My wife had said, ‘The coach fare is only -twenty-five pounds.’
‘Twenty-five pounds?’ I exploded. ‘You can get to Barcelona or Venice for that.’
(My attitude to money has been conditioned by my early life: brought up in London’s East End in a poor immigrant family, my parents had to watch every penny.)
There were seventeen of us on the coach; a combination of the cost, distance and time spent in travel had contributed to much-reduced numbers.
We battled out way through the traffic-clogged suburbs of south London. Our driver, an attractive blonde woman, unerringly chose the longest, most time-consuming route. Between Russell Square and Burwash there are 1,191 traffic lights and we hit them all at red.
Our group was mainly composed of women; they gave me the frozen mitt; no social intercourse took place.
I started noting the prices of petrol whenever we passed a petrol station – 83.9, 85.9 a litre, 84.9 per litre. I soon tired of this and errant thoughts crept in: a woman in front of me at Sainsbury’s check-out – she was packing the groceries in bags, speaking on her mobile phone, paying with her credit card, and tending her baby all at the same time. And have you noticed that when you go into your bank or post office, the person ahead of you always has a problem, or else the person behind the counter is giving marriage guidance. All you want is a book of stamps and you wait forever.
As we neared Burwash the outing organiser announced there would be a five pound entry charge to the house. This was a crushing blow to my already sunken spirits. And so we finally reached Bateman’s, which consists of lavatories, café, gift shop, and Kipling’s house.
The café wasn’t bad and then Kipling’s house – the dining room, study, morning room and bedrooms, each manned by volunteers ready to fill you in on details of Kipling’s life – letters sent and received during Britain’s Imperial days; press cuttings and memorabilia; the Nobel Prize; paintings and artwork that Kipling had brought back from his travels which looked like they had come from a charity shop.
At the end I concluded that to do full justice to the house with its interesting contents one would need to spend some twenty minutes there.
At 4.30 we boarded the return coach. The trip home was a repetition of the outward one – the longest, slowest and most tortuous route – and our blonde driver saved numerous lives by her fierce braking. I soon got bored with the price of lead-free petrol and thought of a TV film that I had watched recently which proved that Tutankhamun had definitely been murdered. A good touch would have been to have the police interviewing the two suspects at Paddington Green police station.
And so eventually we reached Russell Square. As we descended from the coach I asked our blonde driver where she would go now.
‘I’m going back to Watford.’
‘Perhaps you can drop us at Golders Green?’
‘Where’s that?’
We compromised, and she dropped us at Baker Street, where we hopped straight on to an 82 bus and, hey presto, home.
The first thing I noticed on entering the house was the cat; she was seated in her favourite chair and glared daggers at me – after all, she had been left alone for over twelve hours.
It had been a long lousy wasted day, best summed up by Erna who, quoting Kipling from his poem ‘The Last of the Light Brigade’, observed, ‘Someone has blundered.’
