This is England two…
Wednesday - Day 6
“Kiss me Hardy”
The title of today’s adventure comes from a quote, spoken by Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson to Captain Thomas HARDY after the British fleet had won the battle of Trafalgar. Lord Nelson had been mortally wounded by a musket shot from the French and had been unable to see how the battle progressed. You can see the HMS Victory at the historic dockyards in Portsmouth, along with the Mary Rose, the HMS Warrior and a whole lot of navy boys.
When you arrive at the historic dockyards, you are greeted at the gates by a policeman with a really big automatic weapon. The reason for this is that the Royal Naval School is on the same site. There are no security checks and you just pay your money and walk on through to the boats.
Although the Victory is the star attraction, I started at the Mary Rose. A Tudor warship built by Henry VIII that sunk off the English coast in 14somethingorrather. It was found and raised to the surface by a group of archaelogists in the 1980s. Half of it had disappeared but they were trying to make the ship fit for viewing by a pretty cool sciency thing.
The Mary Rose was in a large glass sided swimming pool. You couldn’t see through the windows that well because they were covered in condensation. This is because the ship is being sprayed 24 hours a day 7 days a week with a conserving agent called PEG (poly ethalene glycol). It had been sprayed by this for 10 or so years and isn’t due to be completed until sometime next year. Think about that nearly ten years to conserve a ship so that people like me can gawk at it. Still I get really excited when I see science being used like this… It’s makes it cool.
So to the Victory. Well okay it’s one of the most famous ships ever. And unlike the other ships it’s not on the bottom of the ocean. You can walk on it, see the canons, where Nelson had his rooms and died. It really was great. Except for the groups of French school children I was really enjoying myself. Until…
As I was standing on the deck, a police car drove up and I heard the bobby say that they found a “suspicious package” - namely a black bag. They ushered us all off the deck saying that we needed to clear the area. They let us continue around the boat though, just below decks. Once you finished on the boat, you were coralled into a area and locked in while they wanted for the bomb squad.
I didn’t know that we were supposed to stay there so I went back round the front, hoping to continue looking around. Well we were blocked in there too and indeed there was a policeman with a really big gun so I thought I’d better not test whether I could sneak out. With nothing better to do I went back to the area and heard one of the guides say to another couple that “in high season this happens seven times a week but it usually turns out to be a false alarm.”
What the???? So they call the bomb squad seven times a week for a false alarm!!!! That must really pee them off. I’m sure they have way better things to do. And it begs the question… Why don’t they have better security checks in the first place, so when some dumbarse kid leaves their bag they don’t think it’s a bomb and accidently blow up their lunchbox!!!! Seriously odd.
After that excitement the rest of the day went without incident and was pretty good. The Mary Rose Museum had heaps of stuff they’d got off the ship, which was interesting and the boat trip around the harbour was okay. (Some people just shouldn’t do commentary).
Thursday - Day 7
When William meet Harald
On October 14 1066, two armies of roughly equal size meet in a field in a township that became known by what happened there… Battle.
The invaders, led by William Duke of Normandy claimed that the English crown now being worn by Harald had been promised to him and he’d come to take it.
The English had the best position up on top of the hill. They fought with two-bladed axes, swords and on foot. The Normans on the low position had archers and knights on horseback. On paper they were the stronger force.
A few volleys of bows are fired, it’s just the prelude to the battle. A few English not protected behind the shield wall fall. There is a pause, when there is much gritting of teeth and revving up. The Normans cry out and begin charging up the hill. The battle for England starts.
It goes on for some time without pause. Swords clashing, hacking and slashing. There are bodies and blood everywhere. There are deaths on both sides and no one gains the upper hand. Suddenly the left flank of the Normans break and run down the hill. There is a rumour that William is dead.
Seeing this from the middle of the battle, William reigns his house and gallops towards those troops, as he’s doing so he raises his vsor and says “I’m not dead, now get back in there you cowards” (okay he didn’t actually say that and he would have said it in French but you get the idea).
But the English have misjudged what’s happening and chase after the Normans, the knights following William, round the English cutting them off from their line. There is no escape for those soilders and they are slaughtered.
It’s now noon and there no break. Both sides are exhausted but they can’t give up the field. The French keep charging and the English keep defending. It goes on for another three hours before William realises that he needs to change tactics.
He instructs some of his troops to break the line, hoping that the English will follow as they did previously. The English fall for it, those troops are killed and their line is thinned but not enough to be desicive. He needs to do something else. He brings up his archers - they fire volley after volley after volley. The English line is so tightly packed that those that are hit don’t even fall. The Normans charge again.
There is a cry from the English side. Harald, brave and valiant King Harald has fallen. He’s dead from either an arrow through the eye or being hacked to death by four knights on horses. More than likely both of these things happened.
In Harald’s death the English side are defeated, William has won the day, the crown and the country. He is crowned in Westminster Abbey on 25 December 1066. In defeating the English, he ended the Saxon culture of England and changed the world forever.
A few or so years later, he built an Abbey on the spot of the battle. Both to commerate his victory and at the Pope’s insistence, as a penance for the loss of life. Although, the first really cancels out the later. Now it’s just a ruin but a ruin that IS the beginning of history as we know it.
I always feel a bit funny when I walk on battle fields or other sights where thousands of people died (the Normans didn’t believe in taking prisoners, so they finished off the English). I can never view these sights as just a field. No they are a field where (a thousand) someones died. I felt the same at Culloden and at Dachau. It’s unnerving to look at something so plain as a field and think that nearly a 1000 years ago, 7000 or so people lay dead on it. It’s a number that would cause outrage today, I suppose it did then to for the mothers, wives and children who never saw there brothers, fathers, sons or husbands again.
Day 8
Travelling…
Not much to tell you today. I travelled from Brighton to Penzance, which took about 8 hours. Although there are a few more Brighton details to tell you about. After my visit to Battle. I went back to Brighton for a walk along the pebble covered beach. It was actually really hard work to get along there. The pebbles are all different colours in the range of brown, white to dark grey. They are also in various sizes with the smallest one’s being closest to the sea and the largest one’s up top.
My hostel in Brighton was probably the oddest one I’ve been in. You had to make your own bed, which wasn’t a bad thing. The duvet cover I was given had pirates on it. The rooms also didn’t have locks on the doors, which meant you put your locks on your bags and hoped that they’d be there when you get back.
One night in the hostel I slept with the lights on. There was this older French guy in the hostel who seemed a little odd. How did I know this? He started a conversation with me, asking whether I knew if they have ravoli in a can in England (seriously). Mind you he did have great taste in music but he was someone who I was keen to avoid. I think Val wouldn’t let him stay anymore after that night.
I think the French were trying to invade from Brighton. There were French people everywhere. In fact I heard more French, than English in the three days I spent there. There were French groups of school children. Lots of French people in the hostel. Including one youth group that pretty much involved a soon to be French music star and as far as I could tell his groupies. I suppose it’s one of those French things to kiss each other on both cheeks in the morning.
So that was Brighton - noisy, full of French people and lots of really drunk people that called out from the street in the middle of the night.
Day 9
There are no pirates in Penzance
It was much to my disappointment that I found out that Pirates of Penzance is actually a play or something and there really are no pirates in Penzance. So buying the eye-patch and the parrot really just made me look silly.
I was going to be all outdoorsy and do the walk from Penzance to Lands End. It’s only 9 miles and according to everything I read before I left home, an easy walk. The guy managing told me that it was ambitious of me to want to try the walk and it would take something like 7 hours, minimum to do it. So I decided to see the Minack Theatre and walk to Lands End from there (about 4 miles).
The Minack theatre, is amazing. It has been carved out of the cliffs and looks something like a Roman ampitheatre but will the sea crashing behind it. It would be so good to see something there. I was giving a bit of Shakespeare a go myself. I thought the St Crispin’s day speech from Henry V, would go very nicely. Although anything that had some level of violence (ie no lovey dovey Romeo and Juliet) would go well in that amazingly dramatic arena.
So then I began the walk. Let’s just say it was one of my more stupid ideas. I got about half way there and started thinking about what would happen if I fell over or hurt myself. There were not that many people around so If something happened I could be lying there for ages with no one knowing. You were supposed to follow some path makers with acorns but I went the wrong way and ended up added about half a mile extra to the trip and walking really close to the cliffs.
Eventually after 2 hours and forty minutes of extremely hard work, I got to Lands End only to find everything (including the bloody Dr Who exhibition - the only reason I wanted to walk there in the first place) was closed. Except of course for icecream and the guys trying to scam a photo of you under the sign for some obscene amount of money. So really all that effort was for nothing. And with nothing to really do except look out at the stuff I’d been staring at, when I was worried about falling down a crevice, for the past two hours, I went to the bus stop and went back to Penzance. Frankly the whole thing was disappointing. And as much as I could rev myself up about doing it, really I was just kind of knackered and annoyed.
Day 10
The Causeway to St Michael’s
Today was supposed to be a quieter day. I went to see this thing called St Michael’s mount, which is literally a rocky outcrop off Penzance that one day in about 800 a fisherman saw a vision of St Michael near. And thus they built a church (as they did in those days).
At high tide you cross by boat. You walk up a steep hill (never seems to a shortage of those or stairs around), have a look around the castle and the church and wait for low tide so you can walk over the causeway back to the shore.
So that’s what I did. It was pretty cool and a little bit scary as there were no barriers and you could (being a un-co spack like me) have ended up in the drink. But I made it safely to land.
The highlight of today though was the Beef and Stilton pasty I had. It was amazing. The pastry was flaky but wholemeal shortcrust. There was lots of beef and Stilton in it too. I had another pasty of the same flavour made somewhere else and it was no where near as good.
The lowlight was the nuff nuff guy at the hostel. Another person who gave me the heebie geebies. He was Zimbabwean and he obviously had to immigrate because of the problems there. He said that he really didn’t like England that much.
Anyway he said two things (in seperate conversations) that alone mean nothing but together paint an unsavoury picture. He told me how in Zimbabwae the trains have to go really slowly through the National Parks because if they hit anything edible all the Africans jump out of the train and fight each other over the meat. I almost said, well you would too if you were poor and starving. (Also if he’s Zimbabwean isn’t he African too?).
The second conversation disturbed me more. He started talking about what had happened in his homeland. He didn’t say much and he stopped because he said he was getting upset. Although he did add this little end to it… “I hope someone kills the black bastard”. Okay so I didn’t say hey that offends me, because he knows way more about Africian politics than I ever could. But I found the whole thing really awful actually. I started to wondered about the whole “colonial mentality” in the way some people view their own homeland. In my thinking Mugabe is a bad man because he’s a bad man not because he’s black or white or yellow for the matter. He’s just bad. So what does it say about you if you bring his colour into it? I’m sure I can’t draw to many conclusions from one rather odd person’s view about such things but I did make me wonder.
Day 11
As I was going to St Ives…
I went on a flying two hour visit to St Ives today, I really liked it. It reminder of somewhere in Italy, with it’s blue water and white houses.
Things take much longer in Cornwall. It took me two hours to go 20 or so kms up the round to Newquay, where I was staying.
I arrived in Newquay and round it to be kind of weird. It was all about the party and the beach. The beaches looked quite nice but the pokies they have there are no more appealing then they are in Australia.
There’s nothing much to tell about today really except that where I was staying had four beds in a room that should have only had one. Seriously if four people had of been in there with their bags, there’s no way you could swing a cat or eat a cheese sandwich on the floor (like I did).
