We've just got back from a day trip to Surrey. Ten hours and forty minutes it took us. We took the train, thinking it would be more relaxing than queuing for the Dartford tunnel and doing battle with the A12 and the M25. It was, but boy, was it slow, what with the Sunday timetables, and allowing time for the trains to be delayed, plus the bus that was supposed to come in nine minutes, and easily took fifteen. We were due at a christening at half past two, and leaving the house at ten arrived with half an hour to spare, while leaving our hosts at ten to five we reached home at twenty to nine. With timing like that I can see why the fact that we'd come by train provoked a certain amount of incredulity among the other guests.
I have always found Surrey vaguely disturbing. On childhood visits to my uncle and aunt there was something about the dripping birch trees, and the pines, and the golf courses, and the little groups of detached houses up private roads lined with rhododendrons, that unsettled me, the neatness of the place, the women with intimidatingly done hair and skin. It was a land of bridge parties, wives who didn't go out to work, mysterious rituals of female grooming I was never going to get to grips with, solid Tory blue. My aunt and uncle were as nice to me as they could possibly be, but Surrey felt like an alien land to a scruffy child of academia. At home in the west country rush matting and book shelves made out of planks and bricks were considered normal. In Surrey they had parquet.
The village where my cousin lives, for it was he who was having his daughter christened, goes back to the middle ages, but was not much of a village at all until the coming of the railway. Up to that point there were a few hundred people, mostly engaged in raising pigs according to a notice board we found in the village centre. It's all heath land, and I'd wager that the original settlement was scattered and non-nucleated. When the railway came in 1885 smart villas started going up, substantial houses for the better class of people. Surrey was where the stock brokers lived, while the stock jobbers and the clerks went for Essex. We walked past some of the original commuter houses on the way to my cousin's, and it's a long time since I saw so many electric security gates on private dwellings. Some of them would definitely have counted as Mansions.
The high street wasn't very big, but contained a tile shop and two bathroom suppliers. Have you noticed how whoever it is who dictates fashion in bathrooms (who exactly does? It certainly changes, but what drives it?) has decreed that stand alone baths are now the thing to have. That's raising the bar, since they require a reasonable sized bathroom if they are not to look silly, and for you to be able to clean all the way around them, not to mention separate provision for a shower. The church was built in the early twentieth century, to provide for the spiritual needs of the growing population. Up to that point there hadn't been one, the place was so tiny and insignificant. There was presumably no manor house, and the church lacked the series of memorials to the local squire's family that you get in older rural churches. It was a nice building, though, plain, elegant and well built.
My cousin's daughter behaved impeccably, smiling and waving throughout the christening and the tea party that followed, cheerfully consenting to sit on a series of laps, and succeeding in modelling the family christening gown which is now on its fourth generation of babies for a remarkably long time without incident, before reappearing in a little pink dress, the heirloom safely taken off again without disaster. I have very little experience of babies, and people know this, and tend not to trust me with them, thinking presumably that I won't know what to do and might not like them very much. In fact well behaved babies are fine, for a bit. I rubbed my second cousin's feet along the base of her toes and stroked her on the back, as if she'd been the cat, and she seemed to enjoy it much as the cat does. I think that what she'd really have liked to do was chew my British Museum string of agates and quartz, but it was too short for her to get a convenient loop into her mouth.
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