In 1995 Bill Bryson wrote Notes from a Small Island about his wander through the UK. I believe I read it, though I don’t remember it. This was written 20 years later, describing visits throughout the island with a big dollop of grumpiness on display. The word “stupid” makes too many appearances in this text. My favorite book of his, In a Sunburned Country, is quite funny, and is filled with great admiration for Australia and the people there, as well as his complaints about the number of lethal animals.
Despite growing weary hearing of the disappointments the author experienced with frontline service people, I found listening to this book worthwhile. One gem in the book relates to his visit to Bournemouth, a seaside town on the south coast where he worked shortly after he married. He rode a bus to work each morning from the nearby town where he lived. His walk from the bus stop to his workplace involved a shortcut through wooded cemetery and one morning he discovered the grave of Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein and widow of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was in Bournemouth once to visit her son and expressed the wish to be buried there, along with her long-dead parents, Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist, and her father William Godwin. Percy Bysshe Shelley had been dead for 30 years, but his heart was moved to the grave too. Only one of these four people buried in Bournemouth had ever been in the town.
Another story I want to remember is that of the discovery of the Sutton Hoo treasure. In the 1930s Edith Pretty hired an untrained archaeologist named Basil Brown to explore the mounds on her property near Woodridge in Suffolk. He uncovered a burial ship from the seventh century that was filled with treasure. First, who would be important enough to be buried in a ship with a treasure a mile from the sea? And then there’s the name of the location: Sutton is from the old English word meaning settlement and hoo means “hill shaped like a heel spur,” according to Wikipedia. The Anglo-Saxon treasure is in the British Museum and their website has lots of information and pictures of this medieval ship. Bill Bryson said the visitor center displays at the site near Woodridge are interesting and informative and give a good impression of what the burial site would have looked like when it was new and again when it was found centuries later. He feels required, however, to mention the dry and expensive sandwich he ate there.
Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling, Doubleday/Penguin, 2015, 380 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.