I finally had time in my busy schedule to go for a walk today. It was nice and quiet, and I noticed as I headed up the hill that there appear to be some rather affluent people living up here. Part way up the road, I began to hear the strains of a live jazz band down the hill. I also heard kids laughing, and discovered a pack of little kids riding a rope swing. The jazz music could be heard loud and clear from below. A fancy fete? A wedding perhaps? Who knows?
Haslemere is everything I imagined the English Countryside would be, based on my voracious childhood reading of the Bronte sisters and Frances Hodgson Burnett. The homes do not have street numbers, but rather names, often reminiscint of the place names dreamed up by Edward Gorey. There really are places with names that sound like “Stodgy Pudding,” or what have you. On my Sunday stroll, I discovered one whole cluster of houses that were all named Gray something or other. Since there was a large mansion of a house among them, I gathered they had all been part of one estate at one time. It reminded me of visting friends in Denmark who lived on a property that belonged to a castle. The only vestige of its feudal past was the requirement in their lease to join with the rest of the tentants of the fiefdom in cleaning the castle once a year (I don’t recall, but I think the date was Christmas Eve.) No-one had ever really done it, but it was just some contractual thing left over from the Middle Ages somehow.
Being a California girl, it always boggles my mind the ubiquitous sense of history. All around are houses that have been lived in for literally hundreds of years, crazy walls that bound the roads medieval merchants and, I imagine, soldiers onced traversed. It also amazes me that even though people have been around here so long, they have managed to maintain some semblance of countryside. Southern California is just a giant real estate development. People came there a hundred years ago because it was so beautiful, and then they stripped it of most of its beauty. Here, there is some innate appreciation for the landscape that has managed to prevail for centuries, perhaps sustained by a certain noblesse oblige.
Noblesse oblige notwithstanding, in my little jaunt up the hill, I actually encountered my first-ever example of the British version of what my sister calls “wheel estate.” Also known as “trailer trash.” Hmmm…I wonder what the British term would be—“road rubbish?” Well anyway, the term was particularly apt for this little specimen, which was completely crammed with it (rubbish I mean.) It was parked across the street from a house which I gathered to be that of the “eccentrics on the block,” since the grounds was equally strewn will all manner of detritis, including a few appliances—washers and such.
Given that I spend so much time in London, I find Haslemere to be somewhat disconcertingly monotonous, and by that I mean literally mono-tone, e.g., white (as opposed to dull.) Unlike London, which is a veritable melting pot of a post-colonial crazy salad (sorry about the mixed metaphors), Haslemere is just so English. I suppose that’s part of it’s charm. And with my naturally pale complexion and carrot top I just blend right in. But being as I’ve spent about a quarter of my life in New York and the rest in Los Angeles, I tend to get uncomfortable if everyone around is the same color as me.
Well I don’t have to fret too much about that, since I’m heading home tomorrow via Heathrow, which is about the most colorful place you can imagine.
I'll end with my favorite picture from this afternoon's stroll, which somehow captures two of my favorite things about Britain—the English sense of humor, and an obsession with instructional signage: