Customer Reviews

In Search Of England

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What a great travel writer H.V. Morton is! He reminds me of Joseph Mitchell ("Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories"), who wrote of similar experiences in and around New York City for the New Yorker magazine in the 1930's, 40's and 50's.

This book chronicles a solitary road trip that Morton took around England in the late 1920's. It tells the story of his experiences with local people and gives fascinating historical commentary about some of the sights. As such, it's got human interest, glimpses of life in rural England nearly 80 years ago as well as snippets of life in England over the centuries. Morton's writing style is simple, sincere and insightful. He makes you believe he loves what he's writing about.

He sets off from London and heads west/southwest along the coast of the English Channel to Land's End. From there he goes northeast along the Bristol Channel and then straight north to Gretna Green just over the border into Scotland ("This story has no right in this book and I apologize for writing it" he writes), along Hadrian's Wall and finally zig zags southward back to London.

In Cornwall ("There is a strangeness in Cornwall. You feel it as soon as you cross Tor Ferry.") he spent the night in a tiny bedroom of a cottage in St. Anthony-in-Roseland. "...I came here because I like the name." Prepared for the worst, he finally came across "a rosy middle-aged woman, wearing a print apron...standing at the door of a pink cottage looking at my car as though it were an unnatural phenomenon." Asking her where he might stay the night, she replied " `I've got nothing for dinner, sir, but eggs and cream, because we have no shops, and everything is brought us from Gerrans in motor car-or else I'd gladly give you my spare room.' I told her that eggs and cream were the only things I would dream of eating in St. Anthony-in-Roseland." He goes on to recreate the evening he shared with this woman, her husband and some neighbors, talking and listening to music from the ballroom in London's Savoy Hotel on the wireless.

In another adventure, Morton arrived at Wells Cathedral just before noon and saw "a crowd whispering, standing about, sitting on stone seats, leaning against pillars and tombs,...There were charabanc (sight seeing motor coach) parties, American families, market women, farmers and their wives... `What are they doing?' I asked a verger. `Waiting to see the clock strike twelve!' he replied. Then I remembered that in Wells Cathedral is one of the most exciting clocks in England; in fact, with the exception of the clock in Strasburg Cathedral, probably one of the most exciting clocks in the world. It is 600 years old, and it was invented by a monk of Glastonbury called Peter Lightfoot." He goes on to vividly describe the clock and what happened as it struck twelve.

I love discovering great writers, and I put HV Morton in this category. In addition to "In Search of England" he wrote about London, Spain, Italy, Rome, St. Paul (the person), and more. I look forward to reading all his books and am grateful for DaCapo Press (and my husband who bought this book) for making this discovery possible.

"... there rose up in my mind the picture of a village street at dusk with a smell of wood smoke lying in the still air and, here and there, little red blinds shining in the dusk under the thatch. I remembered how the church bells ring at home, and how, at that time of year, the sun leaves a dull red bar low down in the west, and against it the elms grow blacker minute by minute. Then the bats start to flicker like little bits of burnt paper and you hear the slow jingle of a team coming home from the fields ... When you think like this, sitting alone in a foreign country, you know all there is to learn about heartache."
- H.V. Morton, homesick for England

First published in 1927, IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND bears testimony to Henry Morton's love affair with his homeland. For those of us that are citizens of elsewhere who are otherwise lovers of England and everything English, the volume joins Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island and the trilogy by Susan Allen Toth (My Love Affair with England, England as You Like It, and England for All Seasons) as absolutely required reading. All five books are declarations of love.

Having traveled all over England myself, as well as Wales and Scotland, during multiple visits, I could immediately relate to Morton's experiences at a number of unforgettable places: Salisbury, Winchester, St. Just-in-Roseland, Tintagel, Clovelly, Glastonbury, the Lake District, Hadrian's Wall, Durham, York, Lincoln, and Norwich. (I'm only perplexed that he apparently failed to visit so many others that I could name!)

The fact that Morton made his clockwise circuit of the kingdom eighty-three years ago is only evident by his reference to charabancs, the addition of water to his car's radiator, and an evening's entertainment with some isolated locals in the far reaches of Cornwall - listening to a broadcast from London's Savoy on the wireless. Otherwise, his experiences might just as well be contemporary.

At times, the author's prose approaches the sublime, as this entry from Shrewsbury:

"When I drew back the (hotel) bedroom's curtains, the moonlight printed itself green on the floor. It ran over the bed and lay slantwise upon a grim wardrobe that stood in the shadow of the ancient oak-beamed room. A proper Puckish night, with the green wash over hill and field, a night for elfin horns and mushroom rings and strange scurryings in thicket and copse. Somewhere near, a dog, unable to sleep and not knowing why - poor little lost wolf - whimpered restlessly."

California has been my home state for 58 years. Yet, even during my two lengthy residencies away - 12 months in Illinois and 15 months in Mississippi, I wouldn't have been able to write such an affectionate tribute to the Golden State as Morton delivers for his birthplace. The fact that I myself could perhaps pen one about Great Britain, and England in particular, is indicative of my devotion to the place. On my occasional returns to the island, my feeling on the aircraft's final approach to Heathrow or Gatwick is one of returning home. IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND is a reminder why my affection runs so deep. Sitting here at my computer in Glendale, CA, I miss that green and pleasant land so very, very much.

In the Lion's Mouth: Gisi Fleischmann & the Jewish Fight for SurvivalIsn't This Glorious!: The 15th, 19th, And 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiments at Gettysburg's Copse of Trees
Here is how travel writer H.V. Morton decribes an English market town, in the years between the two great world wars of the 20th century:
"Romsey, in the magic county of Hampshire, is the ideal small market town. Lord Palmerston, with hair turned green by years of rain, stands importantly on a plinth in the market place; a policeman in an easier attitude stands near him; there is a full cake shop opposite;...now and then a man and a cow cross the square..."
This small but vivid description from the book "In Search Of England" gives us just a "smatch" of Morton's colorful and evocative prose. Copyrighted in the 1930s and a best seller in its time, "In Search Of England" gives us something more: a look at an England that can no longer be visited, except through Morton's magical prose. What intervened was, of course, the Second World War, greater and more tragic than its predecessor. And its predecessor was so great that this book and his "In Search Of Scotland" are full of images and tales of people still trying to recover and rebuild.
So you can't read "In Search Of England" without wondering how much of what Morton wrote about here has been lost forever. He experienced that loss personally, and perhaps it explains why, late in life, he moved his family to South Africa. There, he seems to have built a close replica of the English home he had known.
But in a sense, in writing about lost England, he has helped immortalized it. I urge you to read this book, not only for the castles and cathedrals, many of which are still standing; but also for the lost ways of life and the people who led them: the craftsmen, the nobility, and even the pensioners of St. Cross. These aged gentlemen were supported in their old age--food, drink, shelter, clothing--through the benevolence of a churchman who had lived many centuries before, the medieval Bishop Henry of Blois. I hope their descendants are still there, but I dread checking out the present state of affairs.
If you love travel, history, the human heritage, you should read this book.

A website devoted to H.V. Morton and his works describes "In Search of England" as "the best-loved travel book of the 20th century." I'm not sure on what they base that judgment, but I for one am inclined to go along with it. I've read and reviewed a number of Morton's books, written both before and after this one, and while I enjoyed them all none of them were quite as entertaining, enlightening, and enthralling (a word I don't think I've ever used in an Amazon.com review before) as this one.

Following an almost crushing bout of homesickness in the Holy Land, Morton (who was 34 when he wrote this, incidentally) asked himself why, when Englishmen abroad think of England they -- even city-dwellers like himself -- picture green villages, hedge-lined roads, and other icons of rural life. Returning home, Morton sets out on a light-hearted and impulsive driving tour of villages, countryside, and cathedral and market towns. While the "In Search Of..." title might later become a conceit or even a cliché, in this, the first of his books to employ that phrase, he is literally in search this semi-mythical "England," if it still exists.

Morton's tour is a remarkable one, and along the way he meets practitioners of dying arts like bowl-turners and flint-chippers, all sorts of interesting people from nobility to tramps and "wayfarers," and a surprising number of American tourists (whose habits and slangy lingo I hope Morton is exaggerating, to save us a good deal of embarrassment). Morton's descriptions of architecture and landscape are excellent, but it's his ability to capture personalities and draw word-portraits that really shines. It's this aspect, as well as his clear love for his subject, that really drew me in. I read "In Search of England" cover to cover during the long Presidents' Day weekend, and got so into it I admit to actually being a little surprised to raise my head after the last page and discover (to paraphrase a famous movie line) "Seattle ... [expletive], I'm still only in Seattle."

I happened to read a third-printing of this book published in 1930, but I've also seen the contemporary Da Capo Press edition, and I have to say that if there's one thing "In Search of England" could use these days, it's an annotated version. Morton makes many references, comments, and asides that while understandable to readers in 1927 are largely lost to those in 2008. And then, of course, there's the question that kept haunting me as I read this, "How much of this survived the war and the subsequent half-century?" I read this book with an open Internet connection by my side for just such impulsive searches, and plan on someday going back through my copy and adding some notations of that sort myself, to the extent I can.

That issue aside, "In Search of England" is a remarkable book about a remarkable journey. You don't need to be a nostalgia-ridden Anglophile to get a lot out of it or appreciate the author's observant eye and skilled pen. But in my case, it helped.

H.V. Morton was a great travel writer. The first books I read by this author were about Italy, because I read everything I can about Italy. Morton wrote during the early 20th century, so there is a definite feeling of not just travelling, but travelling to another time. This is even more noticeable in the books about England and London. "In Search of England" takes the reader back to England of a few generations past. Morton is fascinated by the England of HIS past, and he speaks with English country folk who were old-fashioned even to his generation. There was a man who chipped flint into tools, for example. For readers like me who were fascinated by books like Rudyard Kipling's "Puck of Pook's Hill" and "Rewards and Fairies", Patricia Wright's "I am England", and the more recent "Sarum", this book will be a great source on England as it was in the last century. Very charming.

I highly recommend In Search of England. I wish it were available on Kindle so I could flip it open, any page will do, whenever I find a free minute. It reminds me of the James Harriott books that transport you to a time not so long ago through stories worth reading over and over...just for the sheer joy it brings. Whether you have visited England or not, you will love, and wish to know, the people you meet in these pages.

If you are an Anglophile, you will appreciate the rich, buttery smoothness of Henry Morton's words in In Search of England. Like tea with shortbread cookies, this compilation of travel thoughts and experiences is timeless, even though it is technically out-of-date. This is the point of Morton's work, though, that there are many things about the "Old England" which the traveler, or the British citizen, can not find today, except through searching over an interesting hill, down a mysterious lane, or in conversation with a stranger. Today's reader can appreciate how many things about England have passed out of fashion, but are still loved. It makes for a visit to a time and place where there was a lot to learn from this sceptered isle.