As I escaped London and headed north in the rain to Norwich near the North Sea, I could not help noticing England’s lack of trees and forests. It was May, 1972. Everything was green; the fields were freshly harrowed awaiting better weather under a bleak sky. Ravens, rabbits, and pheasants abounded in the marginal land along the fences and railroad tracks and, in the distance, I saw my first nuclear cooling towers silhouetted gray on the horizon. The terrain became increasingly low and turned to occasional marsh as the train neared Norwich.
To get to the main part of town below a Norman castle, one has to pass over a canal harboring small craft of all descriptions including, oddly enough, a small gun boat. I stopped in a café for tea and listened to Cracklin' Rosie by Neil Diamond and walked down to the main part of town. I could not help being impressed at the miniature front yards and gardens that are common here and throughout most of Britain. Everything is meticulously cared for and not an inch is wasted. I came upon a church that I will never forget; it was more memorable to me than Notre Dame du Paris, Amiens, or Cologne Cathedral. It was a one-story miniature rock cathedral with buttresses and stained glass windows set in a park-like scene of grass and trees which blossomed soft purple over the gravestones of its faithful. It was a monument to peaceful enduring beauty and tranquility.
Traveling northwest from Norwich was pleasant until I stumbled on the Lincoln Rock Festival, the biggest in Britain. The train terminal was packed with hippies of all descriptions. Many carried bottles, backpacks, and other assorted baggage or none at all. They had money! Joe Cocker, the Andrews Sisters, and the Beach Boys sang on the rain soaked and wind swept slopes of a meadow. I actually got a room at the youth hostel, probably because I was a foreigner. Many of the thousands of Hippies slept on gravestones in the cemetery. At 7:00 P.M. May 28th the radio announced that the Duke of Windsor had died.
I got out of Lincoln as fast as I could because of the Norwich crowd and headed for Newcastle upon the Tyne. I traveled past scattered coal bins and across the largest trestle bridge I had ever seen. Since it was a holiday, I ended up staying in the Mariners Hotel of the British Sailors' Society. The desk clerk turned me away at first, but he changed his mind, perhaps because darkness was approaching. Who hasn’t been in that predicament? He was very kind and I was fortunate because there wasn’t any other place to stay and even if I had the address of one, I probably could not have found it; the English have a bad habit of locating street signs on buildings, not on corner poles. It’s ironic that I would go on to spend 21 years in the U.S. Navy.
