Free The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson Page B

quite lovely. You can’t beat that.
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    My two dear, pregnant daughters live in separate parts of London—Putney and Thames Ditton—about ten miles apart, and I decided one day to walk from one to the other after I realized that you can do so almost entirely through parkland. West London is extraordinarily well endowed with open spaces. Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common cover 1,430 acres between them. Richmond Park has 2,500 acres more, Bushy Park 1,100 acres, Hampton Court Park 750 acres, Ham Common 120 acres, Kew Gardens 300 more. Looked at from above, west London isn’t so much a city as a forest with buildings.
    I had never been on Putney Heath or Wimbledon Common—they run seamlessly together—and they were splendid. They were not at all like the manicured parks I had grown used to in London, but were untended and rather wild, and all the more agreeable for that. I walked for some time over heath and through woods, never very sure where I was despite having an Ordnance Survey map. The farther I walked, the more isolated things felt.

    At one point it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen anybody for about half an hour, couldn’t hear traffic, had no idea where I would be when I next saw civilization. I had set off with the vague thought of walking past the site of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s home during the Second World War, which I had by chance recently discovered lay more or less along the route I was taking today. I had read at the library about Eisenhower’s domestic arrangements during the war. He could have had a stately home like Syon House or Cliveden, but instead he chose to live alone without servants in a simple dwelling called Telegraph Cottage on the edge of Wimbledon Common. The house was up a long driveway, the entrance guarded by a single soldier standing beside a pole barrier. That was all the security the Supreme Allied Commander enjoyed. German assassins could have parachuted onto Wimbledon Common, entered Eisenhower’s property from the rear, and killed him in his bed. I think that’s rather wonderful—not that Germans could have done that, of course, but that they didn’t.
    Although the Germans missed their chance to assassinate Eisenhower, they might easily have bombed him. Unbeknownst to Eisenhower or evidently anyone else on the Allied side, it seems, civil defense forces had erected a dummy anti-aircraft gun in a clearing just the other side of a hedge from Eisenhower’s cottage. Dummy guns were put up all around London in an effort to fool German reconnaissance and trick their planes into wasting bombs. Fortunately for Eisenhower, the Luftwaffe seem to have overlooked this one.
    Bearing in mind that I was largely lost, you may imagine my delight when I emerged from the common through the grounds of a rugby club, and discovered that I had more or less blundered onto the site of Eisenhower’s cottage, though there is no telling the exact spot anymore. Telegraph Cottage burned down some years ago, and today the site is covered with houses, but I had a good stroll around and continued on to Thames Ditton satisfied that I had more or less hit my target, which is more than the Germans managed to do, thank goodness.

    Buoyed up by my discovery, I carried on to Thames Ditton by way of Richmond Park and a long walk along the Thames. It was a very nice day. I had two weeks of very nice days and got to pretend it was work. That’s why I do this for a living.
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    Of course not everything is ideal in London. About twenty years ago, my wife and I bought a small flat in South Kensington. At the time it seemed the wildest extravagance, but now after two decades of property price inflation we look like financial geniuses. But the neighborhood has changed. The gutters are permanently adrift in litter, some of it dragged there by foxes that scavenge through garbage left out overnight, most of it left by people who have neither brains nor pride (nor any fear of punishment). Workmen for some years