For part one of my trip to England, go here.
We left London on a drizzling silver morning, and drove west toward the Cotswolds. I had seen a small part of the English countryside before, on a sightseeing tour to Oxford and Stratford-Upon-Avon. But that tour had only lasted a day. Now I was about to spend the better part of two weeks visiting various landmarks in and around rural southern England.
We first stopped at a pretty market town named Stow-On-The-Wold. It was around midmorning, and still a while before lunch, so I purchased a Chelsea bun from one of the bakeries. It was sticky and warm, and heavily spiced with cinnamon. As I left the bakery, it began to rain again. It was little more than a feathery drizzle, so I kept walking with my mother and grandmother through the town streets, and we peeked into a multitude of shops. The wares were varied—garden ornaments, used books, glittering scarves, even art supplies.
I lingered in front of a candy shop to finish my Chelsea bun, and thought about how this town was a part of England (and the English experience as a whole) that I had never seen before. (Not in person, at least, though it certainly brought to mind scenes from movies and books I’ve loved for years!)
Then my mother stopped in at one shop to buy a jacket for my father, and I wandered off toward the church, a smallish structure I’d seen earlier during our walk. It lay beyond a tall gate, and was bordered by long stretches of grass. Tombstones jutted out at intervals, many of them worn almost blank. The door of the church stood open, despite the soft chill in the air. I shivered, not from cold or the presence of graves but a feeling of familiarity, of resonance.
I had written about a small church in the English countryside before—a place one of the characters in my novels called home. It’s strangely rewarding, to seek out the sort of places that you once could only imagine inside your head, and experience them as real, solid beneath your feet.
It was far from the last time I would have that experience on my tour.
