Shropshire Lad

When my English relatives, really German Jews, began touring me about in my early years in London, much of what I saw left me unimpressed.  Imagine, an entire village intact in the Kent countryside and open to inspection by tourists like me.  Just imagine.  I tried hard to imagine, but I was mostly imagining what it would have been like to be not only physically intact, but emotionally so, confident, open and able to enjoy the weekends on my own.  Instead of driving about the Home Counties with people my parents' age.  As for the villages, churches, pubs, museums and other touristic manifestations, all I could be was polite.  I could not really tell the difference between a village restored by the National Trust and one constructed on the hard clay of Anaheim by Walt Disney. 

Let's have some tea, I would generally suggest.  Tea meant cakes and cream.  It also meant the tea itself, caffeine being welcome to a depressed person, not to mention diuretic.  Thus, tea meant looking for toilets, a task undertaken briskly and aggressively by Wilhelm, married to my father's cousin.  Toilets were usually found in pubs where astonished publicans found Wilhelm at their door clearing the path for me with the helpful observation that there was a cripple in his car.  In short, there was a lot of emotional drama, mostly internalized, attached to my first impressions of Britain.

Which makes it so pleasant to travel around Shropshire, where Marlou has recently gone searching for ancestors.  The beauty of England is more muted and subtle than, say, Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.  It is also ideal for a quadriplegic, a person whose world is naturally small, whose journeys are short and confines are narrow.  It did my heart good to see a railway station functioning in one particular Shropshire village.  Buxton.  One of Marlou's 19th century forebears hung out here at one point, and I was prepared to do the same.  The rise of gentle hills, the village nestling in a valley, a short and, doubtless, empty train making its diesel way once or twice a day to the station by the pub...I could get used to this.  No one commutes to London from Shropshire, at least not this part, for the distance is too great.  People live here.  I don't know how they make a living, but it's someone's world.  And I could imagine it as mine.  The surrounding slopes are forested, and traveling by car the trees appear and disappear just as quickly.  But traveling around Buxton, Shropshire, by wheelchair, nothing would disappear.  Except the sun, of course.  But if one can live with that...and in four years of English weather I discovered that I could...the rest isn't a problem.  In Buxton, I could stare out the window on cold days, sit in the shade of the churchyard on hot ones and, when desperation got the better of me, go to the railway station and watch a train rumble by.  England is a small place full of small pleasures, and so is quadriplegia.  We spent less than half an hour in Buxton, such was our itinerary.  But I got the idea.

England's army was in ruins after the Battle of Agincourt, but it didn't matter with young Henry on the throne.  Which is why one shouldn't worry about the Royal Shakespeare Company, now lying in ruins beside the River Avon.  While the troupe's new theater is under construction, plays run on a temporary stage nearby.  'Temporary' doesn't do the new venue justice.  It's a tiered, thrust stage auditorium that will look much like the new permanent version.  In any case, Henry V roared to life upon it, with all the flair and articulation that makes the company justifiably famous.  This one wasn't a modern staging, that is to say, not a production in modern dress.  But that's not really the point.  The Royal Shakespeare Company always teases the modern meaning out of its works.

How chilling to watch the heroic British slitting the throats of their captured French prisoners.  It's only a moment in an epic plot, but there's no avoiding it.  Shakespeare wrote in an era when power and its privileges, war and its necessities, life itself, were all regarded with a different set of values.  The play made me think of my own unheroic life.  I seem to do everything with maximum caution.  In Henry's world, there is little room for caution and even less time.  No one ruminates, everyone knows what they have to do, and fate falls as it falls.  I don't want to fall myself, particularly on my cousin's stairs.  Which is why I pick my quadriplegic way through life gingerly.  This does, I suppose, make it possible for me to travel across several countries, navigate the upstairs of my cousin's Gloucestershire home and generally burn through thousands of tourist dollars without incident.  As for heroics, mine is a different world and, upon consideration, maybe I need a different definition.