Summer's End in England

The last day of the friends and family tour in England. We visit Salisbury Cathedral (making the trifecta of Durham, Winchester and Salisbury on this trip), enjoy cream teas at the Cathedral Tea Room and drive incurably small roads back to our friends’ house. (Cathedral tea rooms are the secret of England; tucked away in ancient lairs, inexpensive and good food sweetly served.)

It is four in the afternoon on a beautiful English day. Someone puts the kettle on. It is hard to say goodbye but we are happy to be heading home. Our flight is not until a little after nine, or so we think, but the rental car must be back much sooner. We sit for a bit outside, drinking tea and smearing jam onto scones, honey bees swarming us. But we have to go.

Water gate in Cambridge on the Cam

The trip has been a true tour. Manchester (family), kidnap Mum and drive to Northumberland to see the North Sea and castles, cross into Edinburgh for a flash of the fringe, return to Manchester, fly to London and tour that modern city-state, north to Cambridge, all the way to Kent, off to Winchester and Salisbury.

The cathedrals have been nice resting points during the trip. Durham, which has stood over that somber northern town for a thousand years, is dark and cool and serious. The list of bishops runs continuously back to about the year 900, when the powerful had only one name, like leaders from Middle Earth. In the times of the Tudors, Thomas Wolsey served as Bishop, just before Henry changed everything.

Winchester Cathedral feels modern to Durham’s musty and dark interior, even thought it too is nearly a thousand years old. The wealth and power has not faded. It is bright and shiny inside. Still, I expect to see vassals and serfs.

The highlight of Winchester is Jane Austen, resting under a slab of stone on the floor. A quiet story, the one about Jane's death. She wrote a ton for eight years and then died, at 41, a soft rain falling, her head resting on her sister’s knee, unaware of what she would become. She was buried in the floor of that grand cathedral, surrounded only by close family and friends, unknown to the world, the funeral done before ten so as not to push the regular mass.

Salisbury Cathedral is new in comparison (begun in 1220). It has an aspirational spire and also exudes wealth and power. Not a Northern redoubt this. The cathedral is littered with tombs of powerful dynasties long gone. One knight – official title written on the placard by his tomb “Henchman” – worked for Richard III. Tough duty that. 

Reading the histories of those buried in Salisbury is like reading a storyboard for a mediaeval take on “House of Cards.” Nothing changes.

The cathedrals are behind us now as we drive toward Heathrow. There’s heavy traffic on the M 3 toward London. Everything moves slowly but it moves. There’s a reason for that. British motorways are socrowded they must be organized, and if the British know anything they know how to organize.

Variable speed limits based on volume; cameras and complex tracking systems cover the drivers so well the NSA is green with envy; exits, I mean junctions, are so well marked and sign posted if you miss one there is no one to blame but yourself, and we do, each time; jumbotrons give information about traffic on roads you are not even on.

The language is better on the highways of England. Traffic ‘thickens.’ Drivers ‘queue.’ They use the article. You are not heading north, you are heading to The North (and that’s political but a different story). The exits, I mean junctions, don’t dump you onto ramps but move you onto well-marked slip roads.

The drivers are better. People pass in the – wait for it – passing lanes and drive in the travel lanes. If you do need to change lanes you signal. Other drivers gesture ‘please be our guest and move on in.’ So, even when the traffic thickens, it flows, like it is for us just now. We crawl along, but that is okay because, we think, we have time.

The highlight of the trip was walking inNorthumberland, on the coast. We started in the North Sea fishing village called Craster. At first there were massive gray clouds and some rain but then a strong wind blew them off. We walked for hours along the coastal moor past the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle to a long, wide beach, the Embleton Sands. Later we ate kippers and drank beer in a pub in Bamburgh. Pretty good day. But that’s now in the past.

We move viscously toward the airport and arrive at rental car village. Misunderstood we needed to fill the tank so back out into the world we go, finding a petrol station, taking our time in our last go round roundabouts. We finally arrive at Terminal 5. 

More people pass through Terminal 5 at Heathrow in a day than live in Burlington, Vermont, near where we live. But that’s okay. Check in is fast. Security a breeze (although the random pat down search was more of a massage). We have time.

We flow through the terminal like water through a drainpipe. Dulcet English voices pipe through the air to announce to be wary of untended bags. We stroll. It is seven o’clock. Plenty of time. We decide to have one last dinner, civilized. We order and wait, relaxed.

Just after we order, our son decides, for no good reason, to look at his boarding pass. He notices our flight is about to close. Our flight is not leaving ‘a little after nine'; it is leaving a little after seven. Like now.

The lovely Polish staff at the restaurant (and that's political too) helpfully box our dinners. We fly through the vast terminal, which feels bigger than Texas. We just make the gate as the dulcet toned announcer lets us know the flight is closing. 

We pass through. The doors close. Summer ends.

END

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2015 David Rocchio