Back to Mother's country

By PETER CALDER

My friends told me I was mad. Travelling around the world, they said, is challenging enough without including an octogenarian mother in your baggage.

And I admit that it was with some sense of foreboding that I rode out to the airport on the first stage of a journey that already seemed more epic than Marco Polo's.

I had long been urging Mum to take a late-life trip to explore her roots - her father hailed from Yorkshire and our forebears on her mother's side boarded the barque Westminster at the Mayflower Steps in Plymouth in the 1840s.

It slowly became clear that her unwillingness was apprehensiveness in disguise. She had left the country only three times in her life, and only for Australia. The Northern Hemisphere must have seemed like another planet.

Gradually I realised that she wouldn't do it alone and that her trip was my trip too - a duty, even, of a baby boomer to a child of the Great Depression. I needed to take charge as she once did when I was scared of the world outside my window.

It was then that I learned what magic resides in the words "wheelchair service". At the risk of offending the legitimately disabled, I have to say that, used in a tourist attraction, this device is a boon to the able-bodied person attached to its handles: crowds part before it, queues shuffle to one side, guides and officials give special treatment to its occupant and driver.

My moderately mobile mother was happy to walk when the need arose, but grateful for the chairs when they showed up.

Boarding the plane in Auckland was a breeze but we were glad to be met in the madness that is LAX. There the wheelchair came attached to an ancient Filipino called Nicolas who was unflappable as he shepherded us through immigration and security checkpoints and delivered us to the club lounge.

He even managed a tired smile when I admitted I had no American currency to tip him. I assume he got a shock when he exchanged the Kiwi $5 note which was all I had in my wallet.

The decision to book Mum in business class had caused initial consternation in a woman accustomed to scrimp and save, but it was money well spent. The extra comfort means a lot to an elderly flier and the cabin staff-to-passenger ratio allowed for a level of attention which set the novice traveller's mind at ease.

And as Mum's economy-class travelling companion I got access to the business class lounge at LAX, which meant I boarded for the leg to Heathrow feeling more than half-human after a shower and a change of clothes.

I would have cause to be grateful for other wheelchairs in the fortnight that followed - in Westminster Abbey, at St Paul's, even through the twisting corridors of the War Cabinet Rooms deep underground behind Whitehall, where Churchill outsmarted the Nazis.

The Tower of London, whose builders were plainly unfamiliar with the notion of wheelchair access, was more of a challenge.

But out on the street we were happy to walk, even through a London sweltering in the very high 20s. When the going got tough, it was never far to a bus stop.

One of those iconic double-decker Routemasters would be along in a moment and they are easily accessible, even to those who are no longer nimble. There, on the back step, a (usually West Indian) conductor holds sway, dispensing tickets and reliable advice in detached monotones.

We avoided the crowded, jostling riot of the Tube because I wasn't sure which stations had long staircases rather than escalators.

We saved taxis for emergencies - when we were footsore at the end of the day, for example - but it was good to know when we collapsed into their roomy interiors that the drivers were knowledgeable and wouldn't take the longer and more lucrative route.

The choice of an apartment rather than a hotel was a good one. Self-catering may lack the luxury of hotel accommodation but it was easy to create a home-away-from-home environment.

It also keeps costs down: New Zealand dollars don't go far in London and a slap-up, home-cooked meal with a bottle of French red (or even a New Zealand sauvignon blanc) from the local Sainsbury's or Marks & Spencer's is cheaper than a cup of tea and a sandwich at many cafes.

It's easy, too, to fill a thermos and pack a lunch to be enjoyed in Kensington Gardens or Hyde Park.

Our real business, though, lay further to the south. My ancestors had travelled the road from Penzance to Plymouth full of apprehension, barely four years after the Tory, the first settler ship, had hoisted sail for the empire's newest and farthest-flung colony.

Our trip was more comfortable, cocooned in a rental car and flicking through the presets on the radio, but as we drove past St Michaels Mount and across the moorland to the port city it was easy to imagine the uneasy blend of fear and defiant hope that must have gripped the emigrants as they headed for the Westminster's moorage.

The south-west - or as they call it there, the West Country - was a breeding ground of many early Kiwi immigrants and is in the ancestral blood of many Pakeha. It's an eerie sensation to feel at home in such a distant place.

The landscape even manages a welcome Cordyline australis, which we call the cabbage tree. It does well in the comparatively winterless climate of Devon and Cornwall.

We hit the coast at Sidmouth, near Lyme Regis - where the tormented French lieutenant's woman in the John Fowles novel stared longingly out to sea - and enjoyed watching the English at the beach as a naturalist might study rare mammals in their native habitat.

This is a stretch of coast they call the English Riviera, but the road signs which announce you've arrived are a lot more English than Riviera. They are adorned not with a palm tree but with a crude line drawing of that great symbol of English summer - an icecream.

It doesn't take long to see how the English preserve their lily-white skin, which pales beside the leathery hides of their ozone-deprived, southern descendants: holidaymakers from the summerless north stroll fully clothed - some men wearing ties and jackets - along the promenade, eating fish and vinegar-drenched chips from cones of newsprint.

At Beer, a picture-book fishing village to the east, where the steep beach is crowded with grimy fishing boats, the sunseekers fan out across the fat pebbles, their arms full of kids' inflatable boats, picnic baskets and - incredibly, in the absence of sand - buckets and spades. But nowhere, even in the warm sunlight, is a patch of skin uncovered.

On Dartmoor a day later, it feels like winter. A sudden mist descends just as HM Prison, home of the nastiest lifers, comes into view, glowering across the neat fields.

At the church flower festival in Holne, a pillar of the parish in a floral frock serves us tea and cake for 70 pence and swears she has a good friend in New Zealand. When we ask her where, she rolls her eyes: "Good Lord, dear," she wails, "I've no idea." But she recommends lunch at a pub which is not on the map.

We find it later, the Warren House Inn, where, beneath a low-beamed ceiling, we lunch on duck pate, Stilton and freshly baked bread as we sit by a fire which has not gone out for 157 years.

The two southwest counties are laced with country lanes too narrow to let two cars pass and motoring is punctuated with frenzied bursts of reversing into passing bays no larger than a parking space.

Wing mirrors are carefully folded in during particularly close encounters and patient drivers shrug and smile at each other.

There are high-speed dual carriageways everywhere but, never far away, will be a village at the end of a dozen, stone-walled lanes where the world doesn't look - or even feel - as if it's changed since our family was last here.

Here we have no need of a wheelchair: we wander through the yards of churches where distant relatives were christened or married and undertake the sober task of contemplating the distance we have come.

For Mum it seemed a sort of homecoming. Perhaps for her, too, it's given a different, deeper sense of what it is to be a New Zealander. That's what happens when you come face to face with the descendants of those who stayed behind.

* Peter Calder visited Britain courtesy of Air New Zealand, with the assistance of the British Tourist Authority.

Contact: the British Tourist Authority on (09) 303 1446, email bta.nz@bta.org.uk

Case notes

Getting there

Air New Zealand flies daily to London via Los Angeles. Economy-class fares range from $2549 to $2879 (excluding taxes).

Getting around

Britain has an extensive integrated public transport system. In London there's no shortage of transport options.

Accommodation

There's accommodation to meet every budget, from cosy guest houses to top hotels. Peter Calder was a guest at Soho Square apartments while in London. A one-bedroom apartment sleeps 2-3 people for $2615 to $2830 a week. A two-bedroom apartment sleeps 4-5 $3260 to $3475 a week. Ph (09) 413 7479.

Air NZ

Visit Britain

UK-Europe self-catering