1936 On the Continent

and change their tone as the waters of the Wash sweep in from the North Sea.
For Parents
    If you own up frankly that you are no naturalist, and not very interested in the country, but want to see the universities and perhaps plot out a future for someone who is coming home later—then go to Cambridge, Oxford, Aberdeen, or to the university town of your desire, and travel from there.
    Of course, you may be one of those specialist Englishmen who only deign to call a few square miles home—you may be a man of Kent, in which case you come of age two years earlier than anyone else, and have all sorts of special privileges, or you may be just a Kentishman,which allows you to wander in the hop-fields and drink Kentish ale, though history states you once disgraced yourselves by pinning fish tails on to St. Augustine.
    Anyway, if you come from Kent or Surrey, Sussex, you shall be sent on a Canterbury Pilgrimage.
    If your people came from Oxfordshire, then you’re lucky, for you shall see the beautiful golden Cotswold villages; because they are so perfectly English, you must see them in any case, for there are some things every visitor to England should find. So come along then, the open ways await you. Along these routes, detour left or right, be always ready to stop for the note of a blackbird or laugh at a little woolly stilt-legged lambkin.
    Do not be content with the highways and hotels, but leave them, whenever you can, and make small journeys afoot to meet the simple English people, hidden in the quiet places.
Make Your Choice of Joys!
    So make a list of your joys, for the route you decide on.
    Will you hear the sheep bells on the downs?
    Will you tread a wet bird-haunted English lawn?
    Will you live history in Old Castles, and feel the reverence of centuries in some Cathedral crypt? Or tread the wild wet Western mountains? Or wind-swept sand-dunes? Or hear the water running musically through the limestone crags?
    See rocky glens and Highland cattle? Huge Lincoln sheep, or Devon kine, or the horses of the Shires?
    Will you dance with Wordsworth’s daffodils in the Lake District? Or woo Ann Hathaway, in Warwick?
    Do you prefer to eat Yorkshire beef, then you shall go where they will make you real Yorkshire pudding. Or Welsh mutton—you shall have it—and Welsh cheese.
    Will you have Melton Mowbray Pork Pie and Stilton cheese? Or York Ham, Parkin, and Lancashire oat-cake?
    Leave room for the Devonshire splits and Cornish cream, and you might be in time for the elver cake of Somerset, Aylesbury ducklings and fresh green peas.
    Come along—England is a tiny island—let us help you to do all you can
thoroughly
in your time! But you must decide beforehand, so that you do not waste a precious visit trying to do too much.
ROUTE I—TO THE EAST
If there is an R in the Month
    Now, if you are a Saxon, and have decided to follow your Saxon heritage and the Land of Hereward the Wake in the East, you shall start out through Epping Forest in Essex. You may start past Waltham Abbey, the road is pleasant, winding right through the Forest, and on and through North Weald. Through B ASSETT (that’s a good name, isn’t it?) to C HELMSFORD .
    If it’s springtime, you will not want to hurry, because the fruit blossom will be out, and you may detour round by Tiptree (where they make jam) and on to C OLCHESTER , where they eat oysters. If there’s an “R” in the month, pause for lunch. (Since Julius Caesar’s time the Oyster has always been News in England. In September, the first oyster and the mayor always have their photograph in the press together, the mayor wearing a chain of office to distinguish him.)
    Now you go to Harwich; Dovercourt on the south is a seaside place now, it used to be famous for beetles, not the insect ones, but the huge wooden mallets you drive wedges with—they were made of old ships’ timbers, as far back as the fifteenth century. Harwich is the other end of nowhere, unless you’re sailing; but you can get a ferry across to Shotley and come meandering back along the Orwell, or, if the ferry isn’t handy, wander back the same side of the river and over Cattawade Bridges on to Manningtree.
Boats and History Books
    If you are an historian, you know of one Thomas Tusser, who farmed about Brantham (about 1571). You should read his queer diaries, because they give a remarkably good picture of farming in that curious part of the world. These borderlands between Essex and Suffolk are yachting