Bill Bryson

On a walk through the countryside, Bill Bryson tells Kate Weinberg why he was glad to leave Iowa and how his traveller’s quest has ended in Britain

Bill Bryson is an adopted national treasure after his travel book Notes from a Small IslandPhoto: ANDREW CROWLEY

Bill Bryson is waiting under the departure screens at Paddington, looking very much like a big garden gnome on a day out. With his gingery-white beard, thick glasses, round tummy and a baseball cap, he has kitted himself out for the walk in the countryside near Henley-on-Thames with a backpack and a long walking stick. When I introduce myself, a wide smile swallows up most of his face, including his eyes which disappear into small half moons and a road-map of laughter lines. I tell him that I have brought coffees, but struggled with whether to get him an Americano or a cappuccino.

His smile widens even more as he tells me — I sense, untruthfully — that the cappuccino was a great choice. This is not so much because the Anglophile from Iowa is devoutly Old World rather than New World, even in his choice of coffee. It’s just that: “You get to see me with a foam moustache and beard.”

Bryson is possibly the nicest person in the world to spend a day with getting lost around the Chiltern Hills. The best-selling author of numerous travel, science and language books became an adopted national treasure after the publication of Notes from a Small Island in which he pottered around Britain, observing the country and its characteristics with far more fondness and hilarity than the way in which we Brits view ourselves.

Now he is president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Chancellor of Durham University (a fact advertised by his “Durham University” baseball cap) and still rolling out best-selling books, for which he has received an honorary OBE. In his backpack, he has the American proofs for his latest, At Home, which was recently launched in Britain — a history of domestic life told via a walk around the rooms in Bryson’s house.

But the anecdotal narrator of many of his books’ affectionately savage ripostes bears little resemblance to the polite, mild-mannered, middle-aged man who accompanies me on the train to Reading, a rural ramble, and then lunch in a country pub.

“I often feel I’m a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty and I’m not at all. I think it’s true of a lot of comic writers. They tend to be solitary and if they are funny it’s in a slow-motion, reflective way.” Or, as Bryson likes to put it, “I’m not funny in person”. Which is well-observed and, of course, rather funny.

Our taxi drops us outside the village shop in Stoke Row. As a man known for spending much of his time discovering countries on foot, I ask if he is any good at reading maps. “Not as good as I should be,” he says, leaving me, rather unwisely, to be the navigator.

We strike out at a reasonably fast pace, Bryson determined if a little wheezy with his walking stick, and remarking regularly on the beauty of the bluebell woods or the open fields. “Look at this, it’s just gorgeous,” he says as we emerge over a stile into a large grassy field. “And this isn’t even famous, it’s just another magical corner of Britain. Because you’ve had this for a very long time, there’s a tendency to regard it as permanent and fixed, but it’s not. You don’t want it to get diminished in any way.”

Having grown up in Middle America, Bryson is an unlikely standard-bearer for the British countryside. On the other hand, he seems more alive to Britain and Britishness than most people here, and has lived in England for most of his adult life. He once went back to the States with his family for eight years but describes the experience as “like moving back in with your parents when you are middle-aged. America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.”

Bryson says he is a foreigner in both countries, a fact he relishes. With the World Cup coming up, for Bryson it’s a great position to be in: if England triumphs, he will revel in the celebrations; if England loses, he will stand back and think “these people, they can’t play football”. As he says, it also suits him from a professional perspective, “because it’s always better as a writer to be something of an outsider”.

He is, therefore, ambivalent about applying for British citizenship. At some point he will: he has no doubt that he wants to live and die here. And yet, he has turned being a foreigner into a career. You get the sense he is in no hurry to give that up. And, anyway, he is a little queasy about the possibility of failing the citizenship test. “Apparently it’s really hard. Questions like: 'To the closest five, how many members of Parliament are there?’ It would be much better if they asked: 'Who are Morecambe and Wise?’

Walking across a village green, Bryson stops, mutters something and picks up a small piece of wrapping from where it has been discarded a few feet from a bin. His appointment as CPRE president came about when he suggested an anti-litter campaign to them, and it is evident that this is something he is passionate about.

“It’s not just about not trashing the countryside. I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour,” he explains. “One end of it is this minor thing like litter and small bits of graffiti, and the other end is kicking somebody’s head in.

“But it’s not just yobbos in white vans,” he says, recounting a story of a woman in a smart Barbour coat walking her dog near the flat he keeps in London. She had chucked her dog’s droppings, in a tissue, under a car on the street. “I sidled up to her and said, 'Where is your dog poo, ma’am?’” I ask if his country concerns extend to other matters, like fox-hunting. He approaches his answer with his usual delicacy. “If you were going to present to me a type of human being that I wouldn’t particularly instantly warm to, probably one of the best things you could do is put him in a snug red coat and on top of a horse.”

Bryson’s appreciation of natural beauty seems to have stemmed from growing up in countryside that he deems ugly. Iowa is famous for its long low hills, fields the size of small English counties growing industrial quantities of wheat, corn and sorghum and dotted with towering grain silos. If you’re driving across America, it’s the state that you sleep through.

“I never thought of landscape as anything other than having an economic purpose. Then I came to this place — not just Britain but the whole of Europe — where you think, 'Ha, this is so beautiful.’ I wouldn’t be the way I am about the countryside if I didn’t grow up in Iowa.” Bryson was born in 1951. “I come from Des Moines. Someone had to,” as he puts it in the first line of The Lost Continent. He talks about his upbringing with both nostalgia and claustrophobia. In The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid he recounts an idyllic scene of provincial naivety and slow-motion living, where everyone’s car is always newly washed, and people gather around a dead cow because it’s something to do. But although his memoir provides a vivid almanac of the “consumer paradise” of 1950s America and bursts with funny anecdotes about his childhood and the community, it is strikingly absent of internal feelings. “That’s absolutely right. In all of my books I’m basically telling you the truth, but only a portion of the truth. You don’t really get to know me.”

The two-dimensional portraits of his parents (his mother, forgetful; his father, stingy) are written for effect but also betray the lack of closeness he felt to them and his two older siblings. “We had a fairly amicable relationship but essentially lived separately in the same house.”

His relationship with his mother was “not close”, a woman he describes as “never having a bad word to say about anyone, who was 100 per cent devoted to my father”. Mrs Bryson senior is now 97 and living in a care home in Des Moines where she is “happy all the time, with almost no memory left”.

His late father, who was a sports journalist for the Des Moines Register, evidently had the opposite temperament. “My dad was a kind of difficult person in that he was very self-absorbed and rather stiff and formal — he would always shake hands rather than embrace me. Although he ate meals with us, he always went back to his room to read.”

Later, Bryson goes a little further, admitting his father was a “selfish man, and a depressive — the reason he was in his room a lot was because he was normally in some kind of funk. I feel a lot of what I am is a reaction to him. But there are big parts of me I can also see are like him. I am very much like my father except for my moods, in which I am more like my mother.”

I wonder what is similar about Bryson and this unappealing-sounding man? “Compassion is not my strongest quality,” he replies, surprisingly. “But then I tell myself that if I was more understanding and sympathetic I wouldn’t have made fun of all these people and written the books that have made me successful.”

It’s as if Bryson’s oddly detached home life has resulted in him being a little removed from the world. Certainly his mother and father’s hazy idea of parenting led to the young “Billy” becoming a fantasist. “I lived in an imaginary world. I loved playing roles. I would construct quite elaborate parallel lives for myself. When I joked in the book about using X-ray vision to eradicate people, I still do it.”

When not consigning people to oblivion, the young Bryson’s first love was movies, a medium that he could lose himself in and which also provoked his wanderlust.

“I grew up as a voracious watcher of movies, all of those Hollywood movies from the Fifties and Forties, like Jimmy Stewart’s It’s a Wonderful Life, where the towns were always so attractive and the community so perfect. I had this conviction that if I looked into the wider world I would find that place. I think a big part of me has always been looking for that. I guess when I go travelling, that’s what I’m looking for.”

Back in the woodlands, it’s becoming increasingly less clear what we are looking for. For a while now, I have been struggling with the difference between the map and the landmarks we have come up against. Bryson has been relaxed and reassuring, but as we reach a signed footpath for Stoke Row that we have clearly passed about half an hour earlier, he has to admit that we have gone in a circle. As we retrace our footsteps, I ask about his routine at home, an old rectory in Norfolk where he lives with his wife, Cynthia. “We get up really early, sometimes ridiculously early, like 4.15am, which usually means by 10am I’ve already done a full day’s work.” Most of the rest of the day he spends gardening with his wife. “We have a big garden of four acres which we do ourselves. It’s very fulfilling but it’s a sort of overwhelming obligation.”

Bryson has been married to Cynthia for 35 years and they have two sons and two daughters. His youngest son is now at university. He met his wife on his first visit to England, when he took up work in a psychiatric hospital in Virginia Water. Cynthia was a nurse, and they met “making beds”. Bryson talks about his desire to slow down and spend as much time with his wife as possible. He feels he has spent the past 20 years going to exciting places while his wife stayed at home, being a full-time mother.

Last year, they rented a cottage on the north Norfolk coast, no more than 25 miles from their house and spent the day walking, reading and talking. Bryson’s burning desire to search for the flawless small town in 1940s Technicolor seems to have died out. “The idea of just wanting to be alone with my wife is something that you don’t expect to happen after 35 years of marriage.”

In this context, the subject of his latest book makes sense — Bryson has come to discover quite how much he likes being “at home”. But there is a strong sense of wanting to slow down time. “I’ve got a year and a half before I’m 60. In the last year or so I’ve begun to realise that this really is finite. In the sense that there are only so many more books I can write before I die. And also, how many more years can we keep doing the gardening?… Oh look, there’s the pub.” We have reached our destination.

On the train back he talks about the people from Norfolk who are “very nice, very considerate, very old fashioned”. Then he sits back in his seat, the wandering garden gnome who has found his way home. I remark tentatively that his description of the community and the flatness of the landscape make it sound a little bit like where he came from. “Yes,” agrees Bryson with cheerful resignation. “It’s exactly like Iowa.”

CV

Name: William McGuire “Bill” Bryson

Age: 58

Job: Author of 15 books. President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Chancellor of Durham University.

Education: Read “International Relations” at Drake University, Iowa.

Career: 10 years of journalism, including sub-editor on The Times, and a deputy national news editor on the Independent until 1987 when he became a full-time author.

Interesting fact: If he had been a British citizen, he would have voted Conservative in the election.

Is he British? Analysing the Anglophile from Iowa

Baseball or cricket? Baseball. Cricket I respect, but I still have never really connected with it. Baseball is one of the only things I really miss about America. It’s in my blood.

Marmite or peanut butter?

That’s not fair. Marmite isn’t edible. So . . . peanut butter.

Village fête or State Fair?

Village fête, though I do have a residual fondness for the Iowa state fair.

Favourite biscuit?

Obviously, McVitie’s chocolate digestive.

Edward Elgar or Aaron Copeland?

Elgar. Although I’m not musical at all.

Lake District or Grand Canyon?

Lake District.

Ha-ha or picket fence?

Ha-ha. As long as I know it’s there.

Written constitution or unwritten constitution?

Unwritten. There’s something adorable about having one that doesn’t actually exist.

Abbott and Costello or Morecambe and Wise?

Morecambe and Wise.

Duke Ellington or Duke of Westminster?

I’d have to say neither.