The Gran Tour Read online

  I want to head inland but pause for a moment outside the Sloop Inn to watch the action on the beach. A boy in blue is sat atop a large pile of sand – purportedly a castle, but I’m not convinced. His friends, who are in yellow and green, are caught in the castle’s moat. Blue isn’t sympathetic about the plight of Green and Yellow, that much is obvious. Indeed, when Blue tells Green and Yellow that he is the cherry on the cake and they are the crumbs, and flings some sand down at them as if to illustrate his point, you’d be forgiven for thinking Blue was taking pleasure from the suffering of his peers. It would appear that Blue will soon get his comeuppance, however. He’s presently attempting to increase the height of his castle by transferring the sand between his legs onto the summit (berk), allowing his foes to approach from behind undetected. It would seem that those with the tenacity to achieve power aren’t always blessed with the wit to retain it.

  The names of the properties behind the Sloop Inn give you a clue as to their purpose. You’re not called Serendipity Cottage if you mean to accommodate students or deckhands. What’s more, a lot of the properties advertise websites in their front windows. I don’t know what percentage of the properties around the harbour in St Ives are second homes or holiday rentals and the like, but I shouldn’t be surprised if it was all of them, which is okay if you’re a landlord or a holiday maker or a QC in London or Oxford who fancies a pad by the sea, but pretty rotten if you’re a local and need somewhere to live that doesn’t cost a million quid.

  I cut through a cemetery and then walk the length of Clodgy View West to Alexandra Road, where things start to get a bit normal; there are signs of residency like washing lines and pebbledash, garages and recycling. None of the houses have sweet names with Dove or Honey or Eden in them. None are named after virtues or gods. These are first homes, full-time homes. Here, the bins go out on a Tuesday, and the washing on a Monday.

  The best piece of evidence that this is a down-to-earth part of town is a handwritten notice attached to a garden fence. It asks that people ‘stop putting their full poo bags in my hedge’. The underlining of ‘full’ hints that if the bags weren’t full then there wouldn’t be a problem. The notice goes on to say that both the police and the council have been informed about what’s going on, before making clear that whosoever happens to be reading the notice is being watched. I’d be surprised if this intervention hasn’t knocked the problem on the head.

  I continue west towards the sun, across training pitches, empty fields, hoping there might be a way through the thicket and foliage to an edge, the coast, a cliff. It would be good, I presume, to see the sun come down on the sea and reflect on the passage of time. But in the event, there’s no way through, or not from here anyway, and so I reverse and pick up a narrow footpath round the back of the rugby club. It runs behind gardens. In one, an older person is saying to a younger person, ‘If you don’t like it then you can do it yourself.’ It would have been nice if the sentiment had been different, but there you have it.

  I cross a main road and then continue eastward until I reach an industrial park. A menu at the entrance lists its contents. The St Ives MOT Test Centre is here, along with Celtic Fish & Game, and the office of a local accountant – perhaps that bloke up to his neck on the beach. I don’t know why I find all this ordinariness pleasing. Surely, the discovery of an industrial park shouldn’t be satisfying unless you require one. I guess I was craving a break from the coach holiday’s pleasant structure, its softly hedonistic agenda, its sweet reliability. I needed a few doses – a few hours – of unknowing and chance. When I go away I’m used to tramping about where I’m not wanted, having a nose, turning stones. I’m not used to bingo and penguins, followed by tea and trifle. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, and it’s doing me some favours. But if I’m in any way an adventurer, then it’s of the urban, pedestrian kind, who seeks out normal things that are momentarily lit or framed or tainted so as to seem abnormal. I find the ordinariness of roads and shops and parks somehow reassuring. I find a back garden vignette – ‘If you don’t like it then you can do it yourself’ – as pleasing and moving and provoking as any pack of lions, any range of mountains, any amount of bingo and penguins. So yeah, I guess I just wanted an adventure.

  At the end of St Ives I turn down a side lane and chance upon a man and his dog. He is Bill, and he doesn’t mind telling me how to proceed, not at all. After taking his direction, I ask if it’s a shame how the natives have been pushed to the top of town. Surprisingly for someone of his advanced age, he’s not in two minds about it. ‘Oh yes! Great shame! It’s like the suburbs of Disney World up here, where all the workers live, all those who dress up as mice so the emmets [visitors] can have a nice time of it. It should be the other way round. That would be the correct order of things. Then I wouldn’t have to walk so far to the pub.’

  I walk between a pair of fields to a large car park, which offers a panoramic view of the town, the terraced homes like teeth, leaning seaward. They look strictly grey from here, but I know there’s more to them than that because I’ve seen them up close. The sun is only catching the top of the parish church and the chapel on the island.

  The car park pertains to a leisure centre, whose swimmers shriek and squawk like gulls. I hear less of them as I pass through the car park towards a flight of stone steps that will lower me, by turns, to the town centre. At the top of those steps a young girl is having her laces tied by her mother. The young girl hasn’t been very successful at getting something across, because her mother is saying, ‘I’m afraid you are going to have to explain yourself better, darling.’ To this, the girl replies, ‘Or maybe you are going to have to understand myself better, mummy.’

  When I get back to the hotel, I sit on the wall opposite and watch awhile. Through the basement windows, I can see the waiting staff warming up for dinner, bracing themselves for service, savouring their final moments of freedom before going over the top to face the droves of elderly emmets who want cheese but no biscuits, curry but no rice, steak but well done, cake but no custard. Victor’s there, and Nikolett, and Gemma Aitken (no relation as far as we know) grabbing some extra bottles for the bar. Above them, in the lounge, I can see Debra with a glass of wine and a faraway look, and Kieran at the bar making Gemma Aitken laugh, with Imelda pulling on his sleeve, telling him not to forget her orange juice. Tonight’s entertainment is erecting his address system. Michelle the driver is enjoying a pint. Mick’s in his shorts with a bag of nuts and the paper. And here comes Megan. She’s got her sketchbook under her arm and some pencils. It looks like she’s washed her hair, or brushed it, or done something to it. Or perhaps it’s the same but you just see things differently from a distance. It looks nice anyway. She’s put herself in a corner, at one remove, the better to weigh up the lounge, to get it down on paper. She might draw herself into the scene, and me as well. She likes to do that, I’ve noticed. And if she’s in a playful mood she’ll give me Prince Philip’s cane and Kieran’s belly; and she’ll have herself on the dance floor in Chris’s shoes and one of Imelda’s tops, dancing around the handbags while the others make a start on their soup. She turns and looks out the window. It seems she’s looking right at me, but she can’t be, because I’m waving and she’s not waving back.

  Part 3

  Llandudno, Wales

  9

  Just eat your bread roll and don’t touch me

  The evening before I was due to go on a coach holiday with my nan to Wales, I spent eleven hours in the company of an Argentinian friend with a broken heart, who was adamant the best way to deal with said heart was a combination of lager, whisky and Chesterfield cigarettes. I regret to say we displayed zero originality in the face of an emotional crisis.

  I took the last train from London Waterloo to Portsmouth. I got into bed about 2.30am, still thoroughly poached. I was on all fours groaning into my pillow until about 4am, cursing Argentina, cursing love, cursing the brokenness of all things. I was woken up two hours later by my nan, yodelling throu
gh the letterbox. I thought it was a nightmare.

  ‘Hello! Yoo-hoo!’

  Oh Jesus flipping fishing hell.

  ‘Benjamin! Yoo-hoo!’

  Flipping fat sugar pants.

  I move downstairs without grace. I open the door.

  ‘You’d better get dressed, darling. Grandad’s waiting.’

  I get dressed. I pack a bag. I brush my teeth subconsciously. I ask Nan if I can make a coffee and bring it with me in a mug. She says I can’t. We get in the car.

  ‘Hello Ben,’ says Grandad.

  ‘Hello Grandad,’ I say.

  ‘Everything alright?’

  ‘Yeah. Peachy.’

  Then silence. Well, Radio 3. All the way to the pick-up point in Queen Street by the dockyard. They both know what’s gone on. My nan would have phoned my dad last night asking if I was in yet. She’s not daft. You don’t teach her to suck eggs. Oh well. What can I do? She’s a bit cross with me but it will pass. Over my lifetime, I’ve probably spent about two months in my nan’s bad books, made up of roughly 30 two-day sentences. You might think from this that my nan’s bad books are relatively easy to get out of, but believe me, it doesn’t always feel that way. She’s not a hard woman, or a strict one, but she has a set of lines and if you cross one, she’ll be sure to let you know about it. It’s effective governance, in my book. A sort of benign dictatorship. If it weren’t for my nan’s lines, and my mum’s for that matter, I’d probably be in a correction facility right now, instead of this car.

  Grandad struggles to park. He always struggles to park. He has to weigh up every option before committing to one. In the end he parks in a bus stop.

  ‘Alright, see you on Friday,’ he says.

  ‘Alright, see you on Friday,’ she says.

  We watch him drive off. Nan looks happy. ‘Do you think he’ll be alright?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ she says, smiling and waving.

  The steps onto the coach are a bit of a nuisance for Nan. They’re quite steep. I turn my back and force her in as if she were a fridge freezer. She’s not a big woman, nor is she unwieldy; but now and again, she’s partial to a bit of anti-gravitational force. I hadn’t noticed the steepness of these steps before. So it goes.

  Nan’s one of those. Cheerful. She says hello to the driver, to those sat at the front, in the middle, at the back. Morning, morning, morning! Ordinarily this would warm my heart, but today my heart is dumb to cheer, to warmth, to goodness. Were I to witness the most astounding act of kindness, altruism, bravery, wit or sacrifice, it would stir me not. Such is the diminishing, degrading, disheartening impact of a hangover.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m hungover, Nan.’

  ‘Yes, well. Your dad said he spoke to you last night, and couldn’t figure out what you were trying to say. Something about Argentina.’

  At Petersfield, she says that my uncle lives in a flat behind the school we just went past. I ask what Uncle Matthew was like as a boy. ‘Oh, he was naughty,’ she says. ‘He once invited the local vicar round for dinner without me knowing. When the vicar turned up he said Matthew had invited him for dinner, but I told him we’d already had the dinner and there wasn’t anything that could be done to bring it back, not even by a vicar.’ I tell her I’ve not heard the story before. ‘Well, we’ve not been this way together before,’ she says.

  When we step into the waiting lounge at the interchange, which is packed as usual, Nan says, ‘So this is where they all are.’ She finds us a spot where she can keep an eye on everything, and I go and buy a pair of coffees, several bananas and a litre of water. On my return, I ask Nan what she knows about Wales.

  ‘Not very much. Harry Secombe was Welsh. So was Tommy Cooper. And there’s laverbread of course.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of such bread,’ I say.

  ‘Oh no it’s not a bread. It’s seaweed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s seaweed.’

  ‘What are you talking about, woman?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘So why do they call it bread?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you want me to Google it?’17

  I know a few things about Wales, but not many. I know that Dylan Thomas line, the one about not going gently into the night, which I take to mean we’re to make a fuss about dropping off. I know the Welsh have a thing for leeks, and that Edward I of England built lots of castles in Wales to keep the locals in check. And I know the England and Wales Cricket Board pick a team made up of players from England and Wales and yet the team is called England. That’s about it really. Again, I’ve packed light.

  I ask Nan if she can remember where she went for her first holiday. ‘It was Somerset,’ she says. ‘I was three and a half. I went there as an evacuee because our house got bombed. We were lucky, really. We went up the shops and when we got back our house wasn’t there anymore. My sister started crying, but apparently I thought it was funny.’

  When we drive past the Amazon warehouse in Bedfordshire, Nan points to it and says, ‘They’ll have my book in there one day.’ She’s working on a history of her life and her family. It will be called The Daisy Chain. She’s been working on it for years. She’s writing it all out by hand. I said years ago that I would transcribe her pages onto a computer as she went. I did a few hours one evening, and haven’t done anymore since. God knows what I’ve been doing that I consider to be more important. Anyway, one thing I remember transcribing was the story of Nan’s great-grandmother, who spent her final days in a workhouse with her four children. Nan has a copy of the parish records. The family were registered – in no uncertain terms – as paupers. One of the children, George Pitt Pidsley, became an insurance agent and settled in Portsmouth, where he met Nellie Eliza Tharle and got down to business. This was in 1874, which is where I got up to with my transcribing. Perhaps I felt I didn’t have another 150 years in me.

  I never met my nan’s dad, Wilfred Parsons, but I did meet my nan’s mum, Olive Parsons. She died when I was about eight. I didn’t think much of her to be honest. I mean that literally. I didn’t give her much thought. I wish I’d had the maturity and curiosity to pay Olive more attention, to show her more love, to wonder about her life, but I was eight at the time and my world revolved around Sonic the Hedgehog and firing foam bullets at my brother. The only thing I can do to atone for my indifference to Olive, perhaps, is to make sure that any eight year olds I come to acquire know everything there is to know about their great-grandparents, whether they like it or not.

  I ask about Wilfred Parsons, my great-grandfather. Nan says that he wasn’t called up to fight at the start of the Second World War because his present employment – the building of undercarriages – was vital to the war effort, but then his luck changed and he was sent out to Africa to lay roads. ‘And it was during his time in Africa,’ says Nan, ‘that Olive took up with an old flame. The old flame was a Catholic, and Olive was a Protestant, but that didn’t appear to bother them. The Catholic came around to the house a few times, but my sister and I didn’t like it so it didn’t happen anymore. I dare say they found somewhere else to meet though. She knew what she enjoyed, my mother.’

  It’s funny when people talk about the past. How they move from one thing to another, how they leap across decades, at odd angles. Because now Nan says, ‘When Olive was dying, when she was right at the end, I went to the nursing home with your mum, and we sat on either side of the bed, talking to her, saying that we loved her, things like that. She obviously didn’t think much of what we were saying because she did that thing with her hand [the gesture that approximates a mouth opening and closing, to indicate that someone’s going on and on …]. We had to laugh. All she wanted was a fizzy drink. That was her dying wish. I read her favourite psalm. “The Lord is my Shepherd”. And then I told her it’s okay, she can go now. And she did. Mr Kelly, the director of the nursing home, brought a bottle of red wine in. He raised a toast. “To Olive. Who now knows what we don’t.” And then she suddenly shot up! It was all the
gases in her body. All that fizzy drink. Apparently it happens. Your mum spilt her wine.’

  It’s also funny what people ask, what they want to know. Having been told of my deceased great-grandmother shooting up in bed, my question is: ‘Did you like Olive?’ My nan doesn’t remember being asked that before. She says, ‘I loved her. But I didn’t always like her.’ I ask why that was. ‘She didn’t seem to care. I was five years old and it was two miles to school. “Off you go,” she said. And then when I was a bit older, eight or nine, I’d go off with my friend Molly into the fields. We’d pack jam sandwiches and be gone for hours. When I’d get home she wouldn’t say a word. She wouldn’t have even noticed. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the freedom, but I wish she hadn’t been so hard. Her mother – my grandmother – was very different. She was a real softie. I remember one time she swallowed her own teeth.’18

  After each stop at a service station, Nan returns to the coach with new gossip. She seems to be a very effective gatherer of the stuff. So-and-so has twenty grandchildren. So-and-so will only drink loose leaf tea because she reckons she can taste the bag. So-and-so has the same Kindle as me but doesn’t appear to know how to operate it. On each occasion – at each services – she is only out of my sight a couple of minutes, and according to her, only spending a penny, and yet her gossip haul is reliably large. Had she not trained as a nurse before getting into cleaning big houses, she might have served her country well as a stool pigeon or double agent or whatever. I dare say she’d still be an effective spy now. Indeed, she might even be a more effective spy now, seeing as she’s unlikely to attract much attention by straining to hear.