Free Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Page B

privilege, then surely you have to take what comes your way no matter how ponderous the poor fellow may be or how curious his taste in mistresses.
My own views on the matter are neatly encapsulated in a song of my own composition called 'I'm the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son of the Guy Who Fucked Nell Gwynne', which I should be happy to send under separate cover upon receipt of £3.50 + 50p post and packaging.
In the meantime, you will have to imagine me humming this cheery ditty as I stepped smartly through the roar of traffic along the A30 and made my way down Christchurch Road to the sedate and leafy village of Virginia Water.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   FIVE
MY FIRST SIGHT OF VIRGINIA WATER WAS ON AN UNUSUALLY SULTRY
afternoon at the very end of August 1973, some five months after my arrival in Dover. I had spent the summer travelling around in the company of one Stephen Katz, who had joined me in Paris in April and whom I had gratefully seen off from Istanbul some ten days before. I was tired and road-weary, but very glad to be back in England. I stepped from a London train and was captivated instantly. The village of Virginia Water looked tidy and beckoning. It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived from an arid clime. Beyond the station rose the Gothic tower of Holloway Sanatorium, a monumental heap of bricks and gables in parklike grounds just beyond the station.
Two girls I knew from my home town worked as student nurses at the sanatorium and had offered me sleeping space on their floor and the opportunity to ring their bath with five months of accumulated muck. My intention was to catch a flight home from Heathrow the next day; I was due to resume my listless university studies in two weeks. But over many beers in a cheery pub called the Rose and Crown, it was intimated to me that the hospital was always looking for menial staff and that I, as a native speaker of English, was a shoo-in. The next day, with a muzzy head and without benefit of reflection, I found myself filling in forms and being told to present myself to the charge nurse on Tuke Ward at 7 a.m. the following morning. A kindly little man with the intelligence of a child was summoned to take me to stores to collect a weighty set
of keys and a teetering mountain of neatly folded hospital clothing - two grey suits, shirts, a tie, several white lab coats (what did they have in mind for me?) - and to deliver me to Male Hostel B across the road, where a crone with white hair showed me to a spartan room and, in a manner reminiscent of my old friend Mrs Smegma, issued a volley of instructions concerning the weekly exchange of soiled sheets for clean, the hours of hot water, the operation of the radiator, and other matters much too numerous and swiftly presented to take in, though I was rather proud to catch a passing reference to counterpanes. Been there, I thought.
I composed a letter to my parents telling them not to wait supper; passed a happy few hours trying on my new clothes and posing before the mirror; arranged my modest selection of paperback books on the window-sill; popped out to the post office and had a look around the village; dined at a little place called the Tudor Rose; then called in at a pub called the Trottesworth, where I found the ambience so agreeable and the alternative forms of amusement so non-existent that I drank, I confess, an intemperate amount of beer; and returned to my new quarters by way of several shrubs and one memorably unyielding lamppost.
In the morning I awoke fifteen minutes late and found my way blearily to the hospital. Amid the melee of a shift change, I asked the way to Tuke Ward and arrived, hair askew and weaving slightly, ten minutes late. The charge nurse, a friendly fellow of early middle years, welcomed me warmly, told me where I'd find tea and biscuits and cleared off. I