The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson [Bryson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780385539289
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

East Anglia

I

ON A LOVELY BRIGHT summer’s morning, I was walking the Norfolk coast path between Holkham and Blakeney when I came around a bend and found the way temporarily blocked by a woman and her dog. I stood with the woman and we watched together as the dog dolefully extruded three soft lozenges onto the path.

“Don’t you think that’s a little disgusting, right on the path and all?” I asked in a tone of genuine inquiry.

“I’m local,” she said as if that explained everything. She was well spoken.

“And that gives you the right to let your dog shit on the paths?”

“I’m going to cover it,” she said irritably, as if I were needlessly belaboring the point. “Look,” she said, and scuffed some leaf litter over it, converting the dog’s deposit from a conspicuous hazard into a kind of fecal landmine. “There,” she said, and looked at me with satisfaction, as if this had solved everything.

I stared at her for a long moment, with something like awe, then raised my walking stick high into the air and calmly beat her to death. When she was quite still, I rolled her ample, Barbour-clad body off the path and into the marshy reeds where it sank with a satisfying glug. Then I checked my map and resumed my walk, wondering if there was any place in Blakeney where I could get a cup of tea at this hour.

I like Norfolk. I lived there for ten years until 2013 and have grown convinced that there is nothing wrong with it that a few hills and a little genetic variability wouldn’t fix. For the benefit of the foreign reader, I should perhaps explain that Norfolk has a long-standing reputation for inbreeding. As my son Sam used to say: “Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames.” I am not for a moment suggesting that the rumors are entirely true, but I will say that when the police do DNA checks after crimes they sometimes have to arrest as many as twelve thousand people.

The other thing for which Norfolk is famed, incontestably, is flatness. Much of it makes tabletops look varied and interesting. But if none of Norfolk is exactly spectacular, parts of it are at least very fine and nowhere is that more true than along the north Norfolk coast. For the ten miles or so between Wells-next-the-Sea (and how pretty a name is that?) and Cley it is buffered on the seaward side by great expanses of salt marsh. These are intercut with channels, some quite deep, that fill with water remarkably swiftly when the tide comes in. It is very easy to lose your way in the chill and wispy fogs that sweep in off the North Sea and to find yourself stranded on a steadily shrinking island of marsh.

North Norfolk is popular with well-to-do second homeowners from London; it is often called Chelsea-on-Sea. But it was blessedly quiet after the West Country. The coast here has the best and most intelligent rural bus service I know.

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