There were only a few bikes by Ryka’s the café at the bottom of the hill. Ryka’s for bikers. I directed Mum up the approach to the Zigzag. The curves are sharp even for four-wheeled transport, vehicles you don’t have to balance. They’ve put speed bumps down since 1981. Ray lived and died before traffic calming measures. He lived and died before car alarms that get skittish in windy weather and scream the place down. I wonder what he’d have made of those. I can imagine him riding close to parked cars — close but still safe — just to set them off.
We stopped at the top of the hill, by the servery and the shop and the information centre. Mum didn’t have to pay to park, thanks to being a member of the National Trust, but I noticed there was no reduction for motorbikes. They have to pay the full £1.50 to Pay and Display, which seems steep, steep as the hill itself. I gave the parking attendant a bit of a grilling about that. What he said was, We don’t discriminate, which I thought was a bit dishonest. Is it discrimination to let kids under five ride my Tube for free? Discriminating is just what they’re doing by making out that two different things are the same. But I kept my mouth shut. The attendant pointed out a bit defensively that there’s a special grassy area for bikes, so they don’t have to take their chances on loose gravel.
All very well, but it’s clear what’s really going on. The Trust doesn’t like the ruffians who gather lower down the Hill. The Trust will do all it can to keep riff-raff away from the Information Centre and Shop. In the pamphlets they sell at the Shop they’ll tell you about the several protected species of bat that have colonised the underground chambers of the fort near the Centre, but nothing about the bikers who have colonised the place above ground. They lower the tone. That’s what the pamphlet really means, when it says that ‘special care is needed to protect the natural beauty of the hill’. Bikers push off.
Mum sat down at a picnic table while I queued for my tea and Mum’s coffee. I had a chat with the lady who was working in the Servery. I came clean about my biker past. She told me that these days the approach to the hill, the A24 from Givons Grove roundabout, is heavily policed on a Sunday, to prevent racing. There used to be a lot of racing on that stretch, a lot of boy racer and speed merchant activity. Not only do they patrol heavily, but Surrey County Council recently voted on a motion to ban bikes from the hill altogether. Box Hill without the bikers on Sunday, it’s impossible to imagine. The motion was voted down, but the anti-bike forces are sure to try again. I wonder how Ryka’s Caff will deal with the threat to its livelihood. I can’t see them taking it lying down.
Mum left half her coffee. She’s particular about coffee. The Servery at Box Hill won the Trust’s 1997 award for most hygienic food preparation environment. Now, according to Mum, all they have to do is make their hygienically prepared coffee taste of something nice.
I suggested we drive a bit further on, to see if there was another place that would do a better cup. We kept on going, past the panorama, where people have looked down from the Downs for hundreds of years. Mum asked if I wanted to get out for a look — she’d stay in the car — but I said no. That wasn’t the kind of perspective I was hoping to get from this day.
I could have looked for the actual tree that Ray had been leaning against all those years ago, but that wasn’t something I needed either. Ray might have had his ashes scattered at the foot of that very tree, and I would never know it. I have to make my own peace. The leaves of the box are ovate, entire, smooth, thick, coriaceous and dark green, ovate meaning egg-shaped. Entire meaning undivided. Coriaceous meaning leather-like. I looked that one up. Leaves that look or feel like leather.
I’m forced back on the only theory that makes sense, that explains why I had to lose Ray so completely when he died. He was the son of a great family. He lived his life in defiance of his station, but he couldn’t stop the suffocating world he’d rejected from taking him back when he died, to the grand tomb of his ancestors. Tomb or vault. Grave with a low railing, whatever.
To the right of the road, past the panorama, we saw a pub that offered cream teas in an annexe. Mum knows I like a cream tea, and she pulled in. The pub was called Boxhills. There was a sign fixed to the fence by where we parked, announcing it as the highest tavern in Surrey.
While we waited for our order to be brought, I tried to work out why I didn’t remember this pub from 1975, although I did seem to remember the sign on the fence. My memory is fairly reliable, and it bothered me that I couldn’t make the sum add up. Then I realised that this wasn’t a pub at all back then. Back then this was a Wimpy Bar. This was the Wimpy Bar where I ate my burger after leaving Ted to booze, all those years ago, just before I met Ray.
And there was a reason for me to remember the Surrey’s Highest Tavern sign, hanging in a place I didn’t recognise. It didn’t used to be here. It used to be displayed outside the Hand in Hand down the road, where Ted did his boozing that day. Of course there’s not much point in keeping the sign when you’ve lost the title — though there can only be a few inches in it. I wonder if there was a bitter wrangle between the rival landlords in the middle of Box Hill Road, or maybe a tipsy little procession and a mock-earnest ceremony of handing over the sign and the title.
You wouldn’t think people would care about the height above sea level of a pub, one way or the other. It’s hard to imagine someone saying, ‘Let’s have a jar in the Hand in Hand’, and his mate saying, ‘No, let’s go to Boxhills, it’s higher — it’s the highest tavern in Surrey.’ But people can care about anything.