En Angleterre...

We have just returned from five days in the north of England, the Leeds-Manchester-Liverpool area, not your typical tourist destination. What lured us there was our youngest son, Alex, who wanted to spend part of his spring vacation visiting a close friend at the University of Leeds, and who was willing, also, to spend a few days touring around with his parents. 

We had been trying, without success, to get either of our children interested in spending some time in France with us. This looked like the closest we would come, so we packed our bags on Wednesday morning, flew to Manchester, rented a car and drove south to the Peaks District, where we had managed with some difficulty (this being Easter week, as we belatedly discovered) to get two nights in a bed-and-breakfast “family room.” 

...View from our bedroom window

Rushop Hall is a working farm in the middle of rolling moorland, a cluster of dun-colored stone buildings like something out of Wuthering Heights. The weather played the same part: high winds, freezing cold, and wet.  As we parked in the drive and opened the car doors, a cat that looked much like our Oz came running across the stableyard and hopped right into the car to settle down, purring, in my arms. I was still happily cuddling him when we met our host, Neil, who told me regretfully that the cat (unlike their three boisterous dogs!) was not allowed in the house.

Steve and I spent the first evening exploring the farm, meeting the pigs, sheep, horses, and alpaca, which I had never seen before. Everyone, especially the pigs, came crowding up to the stone walls to greet us; I did not realize it was feeding time and kept marveling at how “friendly” all the animals were! 

Neil and Jan had bought the derelict farm six years ago, bringing with them two young daughters and three alpaca. (They told us their daughters burst into tears when they first saw their new home.) It took two years to get the place renovated and up-and-running as a B&B. In the meantime, someone gave them a “gift” of a rare breed of semi-wild sheep that has proven impossible to herd or otherwise manage (though perhaps this is not the forte of their Jack Russell Terriers!). Neil has been trying, without success, to regift them, but the sheep still have the run of the pastureland, looking as if they haven’t been shorn since they arrived. The alpaca are much more docile, as you can perhaps tell by their expressions…

On Thursday morning, after a breakfast of home-produced sausage, eggs, bacon, jam, yogurt, fruit, bread, etc. etc., our hosts gave us directions to Leeds and lent us their maps. We’d hoped to go for a morning hike before setting out, but one step outside changed our minds. The wind was so strong you could hardly stand, the animals were huddling in the lee of the stone walls, and the few people we did see were donning slickers, kneehigh boots, and rainpants.

After a couple of hours on the road and getting lost a few times, we finally met up with Alex in the Leeds train station as planned. He was bundled up in the few winter clothes he (as an LA college student) owns and was flanked by his high school friend Jeff and new English friend James, both of whom laughed as Alex peeled me off his neck. They all said their goodbyes, Jeff and James declined a ride back to their dorm, and we headed south again while Alex related some of his adventures in Leeds -- most notably, a visit to a nightclub which bans unironed shirts and shoes with laces! Easygoing Alex just shrugged and bought himself a new pair of shoes, while Jeff ironed his shirt for him. (Raised by me, Alex naturally regards irons as artifacts, like typewriters.)

As we drove we also revamped our activity plans, searching for indoor things to do. This led us to Eyam, the so-called Plague Village, which caught my eye on the map because Steve and I had recently read Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks, a novel based on real events in an English village that had voluntarily quarantined itself during a plague outbreak in the 17th century. It seemed amazing that we could have just stumbled upon the same place she’d written about, but we had.  Alex, who had never read about or heard of this place, was fascinated by the gory plague details, and we happily whiled away an hour and a half in the tiny museum that told the whole story over again.  Since the novel’s events were still so vivid in my mind, I would have liked to explore the village further, but the frigid rain and gale force winds forced us back to the car (after chatting a bit in the gift shop and discovering, to our relief, that even the locals considered this terrible weather).

Too early still to hit the pubs, we next sought shelter at one of the many caves which offer tours in the area. This one, Speedwell, was a combination 18th century lead mine and natural cavern with underground river and lake. We donned hardhats, descended 100 steps into the dripping earth, piled into a boat with benches, and bumped our way along a claustrophobic tunnel of water, listening to the guide relate tales of what it must have been like to be a miner (even a child miner) in the late 1700s. The boat had no steering and ricocheted off the walls; the roof was about three feet above the gunwhales. We traveled doubled over, our hands in our laps to keep them from being crushed between the boat and the rock walls, until we reached the “Bottomless Pit,” a ledge high above a natural waterfall and underground lake where we could get out and walk around. It wasn’t beautiful like some caves, but it was impressively creepy and sobering.  And, as Steve pointed out, almost cozy compared with conditions above ground.

Rushop Hall, despite its Heathcliffish appearance, welcomed us back warmly that night. We were supposed to be piled, the three of us, into one room with rollaway bed, but instead Jan and Neil gave Alex his own room at no extra charge, since it was unbooked for that night. Imagine the luxury, after spending five nights on a dorm room floor with no mattress!  Before turning in, we had dinner in a local pub (The Bull’s Head in Foolow) where Alex delighted in buying us all pints of beer (drinking age is 18!), trading jokes at the bar, sampling steak and ale pie, and telling us more stories of Leeds.

This is the last shot I managed to get before my camera died on me...

The next morning was sunshine! From the breakfast room we could see the alpaca wandering close to the house.   Jan said that since last night’s weather had been so awful and a few of them were pregnant, she’d tried to herd them all up to the barn.  Most had just looked at her and wouldn’t budge. They are used to the Andes, after all.

After another incredible breakfast (I wouldn’t eat again till 8 pm), we took Alex out to show him the animals. Another cat, an orange one this time, came trotting out from the barn, mewing as if we were his long-lost friends. Cat-starved as I am, I carried him purring over the muddy pastures as we talked to the alpaca and crazy wild sheep. Then it was time to pack up and move on, as Easter was approaching, Rushop’s busiest time of the year, and we had to book our last two nights elsewhere.

Taking advantage of the morning sun, we walked around Castleton, named after its ruins, then took a long drive to Chesterfield to tour a larger castle, Bolsover, built by William Cavendish in the 17th century.  I was under the mistaken belief that this would be an indoor activity.  By the time we got there, the sun was gone and the winds had picked up; the castle turned out to be mostly ruins with a small, impressively restored section, thus we were exposed to the weather again for a couple of rough hours but did finally manage to warm ourselves over space heaters in the “Little Castle.” There was not enough information provided about William Cavendish himself, who seems an intriguing character -- I shall have to look him up on Wikipedia.

From Bolsover we made our way back to a Manchester hotel which would be our base for that night and the next. A definite comedown from Rushop, our room throbbed with party noise from the bar below and nothing worked in it – I even got stuck in the bathroom because the door jammed and Steve had to free me.  God knows what would have happened if I'd been there alone.  We escaped for a couple of hours to a nearby pub for supper, then came back and complained to the management, who switched us to two separate, fairly quiet rooms instead of the one uproarious triple. These new rooms had sulky toilets, tricky showers, and one nonworking bed light, but Alex was happy to have his own room again, and we just laughed and started calling the place “Fawlty Towers.” (If you’re ever in Alderly Edge near Manchester, avoid “The Merlin.”)

Saturday, our last full day with Alex, was appropriately devoted to the Beatles, the first time in family history that we've been able to organize a day of museum-and-house-touring around Alex’s main interests. There is a good museum in Liverpool, The Beatles Story, which is definitely worth the couple of hours it takes to do the audiotour. The wait to get in is lightened by Beatles’ music, getting you definitely in the mood and reminding you all over again of the sheer quantity of wonderful songs.  And by the end -- aside from some peculiar gaps, like virtually any mention of their wives or of John’s murder -- you come away feeling as if you’ve relived (or, in Alex's case, lived for the first time) that whole era.

From there it was on to a tour of the houses where John and Paul grew up, now National Trust properties. We were leery at first, because you can only tour them in guided groups, but the groups were small and the bus driver was a chatty Liverpudlian who’d grown up during the era and was full of his own stories, which of course he regaled us with. Mendips, the home John shared with his aunt, uncle, and numerous lodgers, is cozy and quaint, a bit like an Arts and Crafts bungalow and filled now with memorabilia. He lived there from age five to twenty-three, separated from his mother for reasons that are not entirely clear.  She visited him frequently and, when he was seventeen, was killed crossing the road near the front of the house.

Aunt Mimi did not approve of rock music, so she banished John and Paul's rehearsals to a tiny glassed-in front porch, supposedly developing their habit of singing nose-to-nose over a microphone. When the “lads” became famous, Aunt Mimi apparently changed her tune and even did her best to keep up with the fan mail, till she began to find girls breaking in, fainting on the floor of her living room, and stealing her belongings. John bought her a new place to live, and Mendips passed to other owners until Yoko Ono bought it and donated it to the National Trust, which restored and opened it to the public in 2003.

20 Forthlin Road, Paul’s home, was markedly poorer, part of a governmental housing project that is still very much in use.  Unlike Aunt Mimi, Jim McCartney (a jazz musician himself) encouraged his son.  It was here that John and Paul wrote and rehearsed most of their early music, photographed by Paul’s younger brother Michael, a kid with a passion for cameras. The walls are lined with these amazing photos dating from the 50s. The house’s custodian and tour guide bears an uncanny resemblance to Paul himself, which seems to be his main qualification for the job, and I slipped away from his tedious monologue to stand in Paul’s tiny, upstairs bedroom and gaze out the window at the same bleak view of other council houses that he probably looked at thousands of times himself. It was an eerie feeling. I turned and found Alex behind me with the same shivery expression on his face. There was something so real about it all: the drab, finger-smudged paint, cracked linoleum, worn chenille bedspreads – no attempt made to pretty it up at all. The custodian let us know that once or twice a decade, without warning, Paul himself will turn up on the doorstep for a visit.

We spent our last evening together in another pub over pints of Guinness, discussing “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” listening to Alex explain these and other songs in musical theory terms. We were having such a good time it was hard to return to our own Fawlty Towers, but we finally did, and woke up on Easter morning to an inch and a half of snow on the ground -- our first ever "White Easter."  Before putting Alex on the plane, we gave him a chocolate bell -- the French version of the Easter Bunny.  (Don't even ask ...)