Weekly Dispatch #8In Which I Visit The Queen’s Home Whilst Beth Travels Underground To Collect Friends & Then We All Travel To Newmarket To Watch The Horses Run & Meet Great People
Prior to our field trip last Friday, the Modern Britain course instructor gave the American students a writing assignment: What does Windsor Castle say about the monarchy? Although I was not required to write on the topic, it was certainly in my thoughts as we boarded the coach that morning and prepared to visit Queen Elizabeth’s “weekend home.” We had already sampled some of the excesses of royalty at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and at Leeds Castle, so I had some idea of the grandeur I could expect, but the question seemed to suggest we should be trying to come away with something more than a guided tour through high-ceilinged rooms furnished in gilt and purple.

Beth did not make this trip; she was off on an adventure of own—to be related shortly—so when I climbed on the bus, I did not have a seatmate. The students had all settled in and were either with a buddy or had their backpacks next to them, and I have to admit I felt a little like I did in junior high when my family moved to a new town and I got on the morning bus the first day not knowing anyone and had to find a place to sit. Luckily, on this trip, the driver apparently sensed my confusion—or maybe I looked a little lost—because he offered me the seat upfront—the co-pilot’s seat, if you will—which provided great views and allowed me to see the correct way to maneuver through traffic (something I will need to do this coming weekend when, it has been decided, I will again be behind the wheel).

During the two-plus hour journey, I learned quite a bit about the British highway system from the driver, along with his own history as a coach driver in Europe and his dream of being Great Britain’s Minister of Traffic one day. I don’t know what qualifications one needs for that position, but he certainly had given a lot of thought to what could be changed to make travel easier and safer, and he told it to me in such great detail that I’m convinced he’s the man for the job. Interestingly, he was also an assistant dockyard manager in the port city of Ramsgate where, instead of bad drivers, he had to contend with poor sailors, and expressed an equal frustration with both.

As we approached Windsor Castle, the first thing that surprised me—and the students, too—is that the castle is not situated in the midst of a large estate but, instead, sits just off the High Street in the town of Windsor. We learned that the castle had first been a wooden fortress built by William the Conqueror on a high point above the Thames River to guard the western route into London, which not only explained its geographic position but also why the city had grown up around it; it afforded protection for the townspeople who could, in case of an attack, quickly get inside the castle gates and out of harm’s way. Now, the city benefits in other ways from the castle’s presence, evidenced by the dozens of souvenir shops, taverns and restaurants visitors pass through on their way to and from the gates.

Our tour took us through those gates and on into the castle. Compared to Leeds, which is surrounded by expansive grounds, Windsor is very modest. In fact, the only green to be found on the public side of the castle is in the old moat. Now that it no longer is needed for protection, the moat has been drained and turned into a very attractive garden that visitors can look at from above but not walk through. Rising above the moat is the oldest part of the castle, The Round Tower, built to replace the wooden tower in the 11th century and, from which, when we arrived, the Union Jack was flying. The path into the State Apartments, the public portion of the castle, follows the castle wall and provides a panoramic view of the countryside—especially attractive at this time of the year because the trees are now turning. Before entering the Apartments, visitors pass through a room that houses Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, an amazingly accurate and precise model of a palace, complete with working electric lights, functional plumbing, miniature paintings and books, a wine cellar containing genuine vintage wine, and a tiny reproduction of the Crown Jewels. As I looked at it, I was reminded of the dollhouse in the Science and Industry Museum in Chicago, but this one is more delicate and refined.

From that room, I passed through one chamber after another and was, admittedly, more overwhelmed by the amount of stuff. There were, of course, the perfectly crafted pieces of furniture—including a solid silver table and matching mirror—and remarkable paintings in every room. But there were also glass cases filled with crowns and scepters and robes and jewels—spoils gathered when the British Empire stretched around the globe—and magnificent displays of weapons. In one room, for example, wheels of flintlock pistols and herringbone arrangements of muskets climbed one wall of the room while a hundred crossed sabers hung on the opposite wall; massive suits of armor guarded doorways or sat astride full-sized, equally well-armored, wooden horses. In the hallways were floor-to-ceiling cabinets filled with the finest china in the world—only a few of the more than 100 sets belonging to the Queen—and hanging overhead in every room was a crystal chandelier. In another portion of the apartments is the Royal Collection, an assemblage of art that rivals the best galleries anywhere, including hundreds of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci.

After an hour or so of admiring all of these things, I needed to get outside, so I went back to the moat and watched rock pigeons flapping around. As my eyes lifted with one of the birds, I saw that the flag flying over the Round Tower had changed. Instead of the Union Jack, flying from the pole now was the Royal Standard which meant that at some time between my entering and exiting the Apartments, Queen Elizabeth II had arrived at Windsor Castle!

My first instinct was to tell everyone who walked past that “The Queen is here!” and point up at the flag. My enthusiasm, while understandable, was not well-received, so I stopped the pointing and announcing. Instead, I found a couple of students and suggested we try to go find her. I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to slip past the armed guards marching around the place and toss a few pebbles at a window in her part of the castle. Again, my enthusiasm went unappreciated, and I settled for taking a photo of the flag, instead.

I’m not sure what the students will have to say about Windsor Castle and the monarchy, but what I came away with, I think, is a little clearer understanding of how the royal family and England work together. It is very easy to condemn the notion of a monarchy and the kind of tax-supported lifestyle put on display at Windsor and elsewhere, especially in a country where pensioners have a hard time making ends meet and young people are looking to emigrate because there are limited opportunities for careers. It’s equally easy to find fault in the almost obsessive observance of tradition and of glorifying Britain’s golden days when theirs was the greatest empire in the world. And, indeed, there are discussions here about the need to be seen as a nation focusing on the future instead of the past, along with discussions about abolishing the monarchy itself.

On the other hand, England has the most recognizable monarch in the world in Queen Elizabeth II, and it has built an industry around her and her family. If the monarchy were no more, the number of tourists visiting would be certain to drop dramatically, and there would be less allure about coming to this island rather than going to Paris or Prague or anywhere else in Europe. The sense of tradition, too, while it can be seen as stodgy and outdated, has kept the nation’s courage intact, most recently during two world wars, and anchored the country in countless other conflicts. England’s is the longest continuous monarchy in the world, which says something about the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, and for all of its flaws, the system will probably continue for many years to come.

This same day, as I was waxing rhapsodic about the Queen, Beth was on her way to pick up two of our friends, Terri and Gary Sible, from Heathrow Airport. To get there on time, she had to leave Canterbury at 6:45 a.m., take the train into London, then take the Underground to a distant station where she would pick up another line that would take her out to airport. Of course, her journey did not go as smoothly as she had hoped, despite her having meticulously planned it all. There was again that moment of realization that things had gone awry—this time, Beth believed the sign which said that the line to Heathrow left from a particular station when she knew (and was right) that it departed from a different one. She ended up somewhere just shy of the Welsh border—at least she said it felt that she had gone that far—and had to take a taxi back to the airport.

As Beth was zipping along in the tube, Gary and Terri were getting a little concerned because she had not arrived at the appointed time. But they finally talked on the phone during Beth’s cab ride, and after meeting up at last, the three of them headed back to Canterbury. The trip back was happily uneventful, but an overheard conversation gave them (and me, when they told the story) a good laugh.

Seated nearby on the train was a young woman of 19 or 20 who was traveling with her grandmother. At one point, they were talking about Christmas presents, and the girl was asked if she had gotten anything for her father yet.

“Oh, yes, Gran,” she said. “I got him a razor and a box of shoes.”

As we have done with our previous visitors, we kept Terri and Gary awake until 9 p.m., which seems to be the magic hour for defeating jet lag. And like our other guests, they were wobbly-headed and cranky when we finally told them they could go to bed, but, when they woke the next morning at 6 a.m. so we could catch an early train, they were refreshed and did not have a jet lag hangover.

The early train we caught on Saturday was going to take us—via London and Cambridge—to Newmarket, home of English horse racing. We had decided to go there because we go to the track a few times in the summer at home with Terri and Gary, and we were all curious about racing here. As it turned out, Saturday was the final day of the racing season, which made us wonder if, perhaps, this was a lucky omen and that we would all come home big winners.

Newmarket’s train station is not really a station at all. It’s just a couple of rail lines and a shelter—like those you find at bus stops—and a map of the city. We checked the map and saw that we had quite a hike ahead of us to the track, but, deciding we had no option, we walked down the platform and around a hedge toward the street. Again, lady luck was on our side; waiting for us behind the hedge was a motor coach offering free rides to the track.

Newmarket is the home of English horse racing and, in fact, the first recorded horse race took place there in 1622. Charles II, the only British king to have ridden a winner, was so enthusiastic about racing that he brought his whole court to Newmarket every summer. The whole city, in fact, is dedicated to the horse. Along the High Street are shops that sell feed and tack and equestrian clothing and offices for international equine businesses. Horse transport vans are parked on side streets and, every morning of the week except Sunday, the heaths (large open grassy expanses) surrounding the city—and known as “the gallops”—may be filled with the sound of the pounding hooves of as many as 2,500 horses in training. Here, the horses have their own traffic lights and their own sidewalks, and people are, we were told, second-class citizens.

Unlike Arlington Park, which is surrounded by a suburban landscape, the Newmarket courses—there are actually two tracks—are situated on hundreds of acres of green, away from any buildings. The July Course, which is only open during the summer months, is the larger and more elegant of the courses. The Rowley Mile, where we were, was still an impressive place, with a large grandstand and paddock area. Though it looked a little different from the track we are used to, there was still something familiar about it. Once we got inside the grandstand enclosure, however, that all changed.

The first thing we noticed was “bookies row,” a cluster of thirty or so stands with electric tote boards giving odds for the upcoming race. The track itself has betting windows, so we asked a security guard why anyone would go to a bookie rather than to a window. He told us that the odds were usually better at the bookie stands—that is, you stood to win more if you picked the right horse—but that you were more likely to lose there, too. We decided we wanted to wager a little bit, so we went inside the clubhouse to the more familiar windows and, after a quick lesson in British betting, picked our horses.

Back outside, the second most distinguishing feature of British racing became apparent. While American racing takes place most often on clay or dirt oval tracks, most British races are held on a turf (grass) straightaway, one that is not planed flat like those at home, but one that may rise and fall with the land. The Rowley Mile track, for example, had a couple of swells along its length. Every race track in Great Britain, we were told, is different, and the tracks that do feature turns may have the horses run either clockwise or—as they say here—anti-clockwise. All races in the States are anti-clockwise. So we found a place as close to the rail as we could and looked off down the track where, a mile away, the horses were being loaded into the gates. There is no trumpet fanfare at the beginning of a British race and no ringing of a bell. At least not that can be heard from the grandstand. Rather, you keep an eye on the giant television screen and wait for the announcer to say, “And they’re off.”

We watched the horses on the screen for most of the race because it’s difficult to make out what’s happening in the pack from that far away, but as they got closer, we turned our attention to the track just in time to catch the horses and jockeys flying past in an indistinguishable blur, and the race was over. We weren’t sure who had won, so we had to wait for the results to appear on an electronic board before we found that none of us—despite the feeling that it was our lucky day—were a winner. We were just about to turn away from the track when I heard a horse galloping and looked toward the track. The others looked, too, and we all watched as the horse Beth had picked to win—Touch of Pep—ran toward the finish line nearly a full minute after the race had ended. That was the last bet she placed all afternoon.

Luck might not have been with us at the track that day, but a couple of other things that happened made us all feel very fortunate to have come to Newmarket. Our original plan was to come for the races only and then to take the train back that evening. But after figuring out that doing so would mean about eight hours on the train, we opted to stay overnight. Beth is very good at bargain-hunting, and she was able to get us us a half-price stay at the Bedford Lodge, a four-star place on beautiful grounds, set back off the road far enough that there was no traffic noise. After a taxi dropped us off in front of the place, and as we walked up to the desk with our backpacks and Terri and Gary’s tiny rolling suitcase, we thought they might not deem us worthy to stay there, but we apparently passed the test and were given keys to two very, very nice rooms. The Sibles had two white terry cloth robes hanging on the door of their bathroom, but we only had one; somehow the hotel had forgotten to provide one for Beth. After leaving our “luggage,” such as it was, we walked back into the city centre—at first along the horse sidewalk but then, after dodging the numerous and large droppings there, on the people sidewalk.

Since breakfast that morning, we had only eaten only a half a croissant apiece, so we looked around for a pub where we might get some lunch. We stopped at a place called the Bushel on a winding side street and were told that their kitchen, like all pub kitchens, closed at 3 p.m.—it was a little after 4 p.m.—but would open again at 6 p.m. Because the young woman had been so apologetic and cordial, we decided to go back for dinner and wandered the streets for awhile longer, trying to talk ourselves out of being hungry. We finally gave up, went back around 5:30, ordered an ale and waited.

Again, luck was with us, this time in the form of Martin Jarred, owner of The Bushel and one of the nicest people we have met here or anywhere else. When he was told by the young woman we had spoken to earlier that we were there and were hungry, he came down from the apartment he and his wife share above the pub, introduced himself to us and said, “I understand you’d like a meal.” As meals go, the one we had that not was not spectacular, but for the two hours we were Martin’s guests, he entertained us with stories about himself—he and his wife had run nightclubs in London until their children were grown, then they moved to Newmarket and bought the pub—and about the pub itself. He told us that there was a tunnel that ran from the pub to the Rutland Arms hotel on High Street for romantic liaisons between courtiers in Charles II’s court and that toward the front of the pub, in a spot occupied now by a large round table, there had been a pit used for cockfighting. He gave us a photocopied article about the pub, autographed a postcard of the place, gave us a pitcher of Pims and had his picture taken with Gary and me. We were having such good time that it was hard to leave, and when we finally did, Martin was in the kitchen, but he came running outside as we walked away to say thanks and goodbye.

Sunday morning, after a belt-busting full English breakfast (eggs, sausage, black pudding, bacon, stewed tomatoes, mushrooms, toast), we checked out of our hotel. I discovered as we were leaving that I wasn’t supposed to take the robe from the room and would have to give it back. Fortunately, I was fully dressed under the robe, so I was saved that embarrassment. Back in the city centre, we visited the National Horseracing Museum, where one of the docents took us under his wing and gave us an almost-guided tour of the exhibits. The hour-plus that we were in the museum was time well-spent and we might have stayed longer, but we weren’t sure when the train to London came through, so we headed back to the station. Along the way, we passed Tattersalls, an auction house where, over the weekend just ending, more than 1600 horses had been up for sale.

At the train station, we discovered the next train to London wouldn’t be arriving for an hour, so we hung around the platform and talked to a couple of other Americans who, like us, had come to Newmarket the day before for the races. Chris is an English professor at NYU spending a year with American students in London, and Clyde is a jockey/trainer from Philadelphia. They own a horse farm outside of Philadelphia and are waiting for their first foals to be born in the spring. When the train finally arrived, we hurried to get on and didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye to them, which we regretted because we had had such a nice time passing the time with them.

I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail about the difficulties we had getting back to Canterbury because travel woes are becoming a bit redundant, I think. Let me simply say that seven of the Underground lines in London were closed for “scheduled engineering work,” and that getting from King’s Cross to the station where we finally caught the train home was akin to a scavenger hunt, in which each stop revealed a tiny piece of information, but only that. As a result, we spent an hour or more underneath the great city, going this way and that, first on this line and then that line until, at last, just when we were sure the wheels were going to fall off the suitcase Gary was dragging around and that we were going to have to go up to the street to find a taxi, we got the last snippet of information we needed, found the right station and the right train and headed home.

Despite the nightmare beneath London, the weekend had been great. We all were in agreement that the races and the sights around Newmarket had been enjoyable, but it was meeting Martin on Saturday night and Chris and Clyde on Sunday morning that had been the highlights of the trip. We may not have won anything, but we had been very lucky, indeed.

Cheers!