My Shan-gri-la

Carol, Peak District National Park, England Photo Jim W. 1975

While internet surfing the other day I found a story about the village of Bonsall, one of the UFO centers of Britain.  Wow!  I’ve been to Bonsall, in its pre-UFO days.  Memories of that visit flood back...

My all time favorite car was  an orange 1970 Volkswagen station wagon we owned in England, dubbed the Orange Freeze, after my favorite Steak & Shake milkshake.  It had the most tactile knobs of almost cartoon proportions.  For the most part it was a steadfast car for motoring about England in Germanic simplicity. 

The Orange Freeze’s only breakdown was a memorable one.  We were returning from visiting Jim’s sister in Leicester, to our home near Stockport, south of Manchester in 1975.

Peak District (Derbyshire) National Park

We left Leicester later than planned that Monday afternoon, June 2. The most dramatic part of our drive was through the  Peak District National Park, an almost treeless region of uncultivated heath of heather, gorse, coarse grasses; we passed Chatsworth House (where the 2005 Pride and Prejudice was filmed) and had tea in Bakewell, home of the famous culinary tart.  Upon reaching Buxton it was snowing!  Jim marveled that the Lancashire-Derbyshire cricket game was still in progress, even with snow on the pitch.*

Cat and Fiddle, altitude 1690 ft.    photo: Wiki

A full moon rose, casting a blanket of silvery light on the snow dusted moorland, making for well-lit driving, a good thing as long as the roads stayed ice free.  A mile past the Cat and the Fiddle something clanged in the innards of the Orange Freeze and we came to a resolute stop. Jim bundled up for the walk back to the Pub.
The pub was still open. Jim called emergency road service.  About half an hour after he got back to the car we spotted a small van’s lights weaving toward us from the east on the A537.  Our mechanic.

For the next two hours Lewis Hart and Jim tried to start O.F. while Anna and I sat in his van, snuggling up for shared body warmth. The fuel pump was busted. Lewis drove us home to Cheadle Hulme, arriving at dawn (about 4:15 in June). We invited him in for tea.  We had cups of piping hot milky tea, bacon, eggs and big slabs of toast peppered with jolly stories about Lewis’ life on the moors. Drawing a map before he left, we agreed to collect the O.F. on Wednesday after work. Then Jim left for work.  At 8 a.m. his mum called relieved we’d not sailed off a cliff. She was up half the night worrying when we didn’t answer the phone, after seeing the weather report on the news. 

Jim couldn’t get off work early Wednesday so I asked a friend and her husband Neil to take a picturesque afternoon drive to Derbyshire now that the forecast was sun, sun, sun. We left Cheadle Hulme about 3 p.m., passing the outer Manchester suburbs, then the edge of the Cheshire Plain before rising to the more rugged Peaks. 

Bonsall, Derbyshire    photo: Wiki

Turning onto narrower and narrower roads we were in different country -- where if we asked for directions the dialect would be as difficult to translate as Urdu.  We slowed for a herd of milk cows then later became deluged by a flock of newly shorn sheep.  The road climbed and wound, dry stone walls the primary landscape feature.  As my enchantment grew Neil’s lessened.  He’d agreed to make a straight zip to point B and I’d dragged him back to the 18th century.

About 6 p.m. we drove slowly into the village of Bonsall, behind a farmer’s truck laden with live chickens.  Bonsall looked--magically--more Italian village than English, sans marble, with first a fountain then a thirteen-step obelisk topped with a diminutive cross--the market square, and at last the garage!

We leaped out of Neil’s car to the welcome of Lewis’ wife Edwina’s kitchen garden riches.  I bought us fresh eggs, salad greens, clotted cream.  After settling up with Lewis he invited us to share tea and fresh scones.  I began to burble a delighted yes when Neil said, in a tone that was either class consciousness or rural fatigue, “Impossible. Carol’s following us home in case there’s another breakdown.”  Ugh. Caught between two accidentally generous souls, world’s apart.

We never saw Lewis, Edwina or Bonsall again.  By week’s end Jim left for a scientific meeting in Italy and Anna and I flew to St. Louis, our first visit home in over three years.  When we returned Jim accepted a position in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  We forgot our Derbyshire adventure in the moving flurry. 

Had this happened in 2009 we’d have exchanged email and website addresses but not then.  Then we were ships passing in the night.  The internet changes that.  Knowing where to look you can tease back the onion skin layers of the past.  In our case the Orange Freeze’s Derbyshire Caper.

Derbyshire 1975      photo: Carol

Postscript:
Right before our return to the USA we sold the Orange Freeze to a prosperous looking couple needing a second car for the wife.  They arrived in their Rover on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  We exchanged paperwork, a check then keys. Cautioning them about our tricky driveway I offered to back O.F. out but the husband said no problem.  He proceeded to accidentally ram the passenger side door into the fence post, denting our poor Orange Freeze.  O.F. no doubt started missing us too.

*Parts of northern England also had a taste of winter yesterday. ... The most significant June snowfall in memory came on June 2, 1975, when sleet and ... More famously, the match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton was called off. .... After rain, sleet, snow, ice and even a full moon

Summer 2016

                               The earth laughs in flower  
                                   -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peter Rabbit and Friends

Peter Rabbit was a big part of our children’s literary lives.  We’ve often read all but one* of the 23 stories to our 3 daughters and grandchildren. (*The Tale of Little Pig Robinson is too long & the last published, 1930.)  Potter’s characters use large vocabularies.  They have fun names such as Babbity Bumble, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle, Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise, Mrs. Tittlemouse, etc. They often get into scrapes but live to tell the tale, although Squirrel Nutkin lost his, tail that is.

Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) first tried to establish herself as a mycologist--the study of fungi.  In her 20s she was the first to observe the symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae.  Her uncle presented her paper to the Linnean Society as women were barred from attending.  She was also rejected as a student to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.  The Linnean Society issued an official apology in 1997, acknowledging her contributions mycology.

These closed doors led to the opening of others, however.  Sixty-seven years after her death Beatrix Potter’s 23 illustrated children’s books are still in print world-wide. The start of her success was the publication of an illustrated letter Potter sent to her ex-governess’ son, Noel Moore, as he recovered from an illness. The Tale of Peter Rabbit is about a rambunctious bunny who can’t resist poaching veggies from Mr. & Mrs. McGregor’s impressive cottage garden, barely escaping the fate of his father, who ended up in a pie there.                                                           
Potter created a bevy of Peter’s relatives and fellow woodland inhabitants in 22 other diminutive books published by Frederick Warne.  Although her finely drawn hedgehogs, rabbits and fox strut about in human clothes their animal nature is always near the surface.

“Thank goodness my education was neglected.  I was never sent to school.  it would have rubbed off some of the originality,” Potter said of her childhood.  Governesses and nannies were the norm in her upper class London home. Although haphazard, her education was finer than most moderns. 

Growing up in the world’s richest city exposed her to great opportunity.  She was keenly aware of other women artists; knowledgeable about publishing and art movements.  By attempting to join one of world’s scientific epicenters illustrates how fast her society was changing.  The quest to categorize the plant species of the world was the prequel to the Human Genome Project today.

As a child Potter developed an intense interest in the wildlife of Kensington.  One can only presume her mother was as laissez faire with her domestic help as her daughter’s education for frogs, newts, ferrets, a pet bat and two rabbits lived at various times in their Kensington home.  She was a keen observer, sketching her charges so enthusiastically that by her 10th birthday her favorite present was the book, Birds Drawn from Nature by Jemima Blackburn.

In her early 30s her life changed when several of her illustrated letters were accepted by Norman Warne, publisher.  The instant success of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was Potter’s path to financial independence, She later planned to marry Norman, despite objections from her parents because they saw him as lower in status. He developed pernicious anemia and died before the wedding. 

Also against her parents objections, she used her income to buy Hill Top Farm in the village of Sawrey, the Lake District in then Lancashire, now Cumbria. The farm’s old stone farm house appears in many of her stories. Potter established herself as a respected farmer, sheep breeder and conservationist. In her 40s she married William Heelis, a local solicitor.  She bequeathed her beloved 4000 acre Hill Top Farm to the National Trust upon her death.

 

    

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