TRAVELS WITH THE WNP
 

IN SEARCH OF HEROES: Part I: The Once-Upon-Forever City of Bath

by Delle Jacobs

Wet Noodle Posse | Delle Jacobs

For years, I've dreamed up heroes and heroines in English settings. I researched through hundreds of books, thousands of pictures and old engravings, and joined several groups devoted to writing about Regency or Historical England. But I wanted to see for myself where my heroes lived, walk where they walked, listen for the echo of their voices. Finally, last September, joined by my good friend Margo and my son Andy, I launched on the quest I called my Search for Heroes. We made a strange alliance. Neither Margo nor Andy knew anything about England, which meant they were following a lost leader. But we had in common curiosity and adaptability. A good thing about both.

Let's skip over the getting-there part and just say, after finally plopping down on our B&B beds in Bath and taking a very long nap, we were beginning to forgive each other.

Pulteney Bridge

This photo of the Pulteney Bridge shows a gorgeous day, utterly belying the mix-ups and disasters that had made all three of us consider hopping the next plane back home. But that night, we had dinner in a marvelous restaurant located in a basement near the North Parade. This would have been the kitchen of the old Georgian townhouse, and I was fascinated to discover it had a vaulted undercroft like a cathedral.

"What's a vaulted undercroft?" asked Margo. "Yeah," said Andy.

And I discovered, gleefully, I had the perfect audience for all the tidbits and trivia I had been collecting for years. That marked the true beginning of a fabulous trip. And in the morning, after a terrific English breakfast, we stepped out into the rain, in search of heroes. For Bath is the setting for my book, Aphrodite's Brew.

The Pulteney Bridge and weir

The day my hero, Val, and heroine, Sylvia, walked along the Avon had been spectacularly bright. But the dreariness we encountered brought to mind the storm the day before their walk, that had caught them at a flooded ford, nearly sweeping Val to his death. We stopped where they would have stopped and looked down at the weir. I put my hand on the stone balustrade.

"I thought you were going to die." She choked on the words. "So did I." He gripped her gloved hand where it rested on the stone balustrade. Their gazes locked together, sharing again the terror.

I took a deep breath. I had shared the terror with them, too.

We crossed the bridge, with its tiny shops lining both sides, so that it looked to be no more than another street. I spotted a map shop and wanted to stop. But Bath is full of little shops like this, and beyond the bridge was Laura Place, my goal.

Val's house

There is Val's house, the substantial Georgian house on the left. Directly across is a pleasant Georgian townhouse where Sylvia visited her friend. My mind stripped away Ford Focuses and Mini-Coopers and took the tarmac down to the old cobblestones. Val's caned whiskey with its matched bays drove up and halted. Both of them soaked to the bone, he handed Sylvia down and they skulked up to the door, hoping nobody in Bath had noticed just how long they had been gone.

My gaze shifted, and I saw them at an earlier time, walking down Great Pulteney Street, straight ahead in the photo, to Sydney Gardens, where they strolled, got lost in the maze, and danced all alone on a dark path, to music so far away it almost couldn't be heard.

"This must be why the waltz is so scandalous," she said, her words almost whispered. "It is so close. A hair's breadth away from an embrace." "Or a kiss," he said.

I let out a sigh. Surely Margo and Andy thought - ah, well, they've both read my books. We wound back through a dizzying array of streets jutting at all angles, through Milsom Street and Old Bond Street. There, too, I found the places to stick the shops I had invented: a print shop, a milliner's and a dressmaker's, and the little tea shop where they ate plum tarts. Down by the river at the lower end of the city, the water gate where they took a pleasure boat downstream, is now gone.

If Margo and Andy thought I knew a lot of stuff about Bath, when we met my friend Sally from Somerset, she left them gasping. Unlike me, Sally is a real expert on Bath and Regency England. We took a short walking tour, then visited the Pump Room where ladies and gentlemen would have "taken the waters". Today it's a sumptuous tea room. We splurged with tea and dessert, and I learned why the English aren't so fond of coffee. They make it as thin as tea. The lovely chandelier in this room was the model for the cover of The Mudlark, and was the centerpiece of a scene where the hero and heroine dance in a crowded ballroom, so enchanted with each other that they feel it is just the two of them.

The jolly fellow in this photo is one of many over the centuries who has doled out glasses of spa water to patrons. In the 18th Century, this was a thriving concession, for medicine was still largely ignorant about diseases and cures. For many, Bath was a place of desperation, the last chance for a cure, although many others came for social connections. But our be-wigged, rosy-cheeked fellow is not as authentic as he seems. His visible shirtsleeves would have been shocking, for the shirt was considered an undergarment in those days. Behind him, the curved window views the medieval King's Bath, below. We'll get the reverse view in a minute.

Next door to the Pump Room are the ancient Roman baths that were unknown to my hero and heroine, forgotten centuries before the medieval baths were built around the 12th Century. Recent

excavations

have revealed the ancient baths were not just the majestic one unearthed in Victorian times. Once, a huge dome had covered this bath, and it was only a part of an enormous complex of baths and temples to the ancient gods. How had something so huge just been

forgotten? How had the ruins become ruined? The baths probably lasted for some time after the Romans pulled out, but without resources to maintain them, eventually the huge dome and other parts became unstable. So the Bath inhabitants knocked it down, filled it in around the rubble, and built on top of it. Much of the stonework was salvaged for new buildings, too, for already cut stone blocks beat chiseling out new ones any day.

But the ancient spring still existed and was channeled into the new baths, which then dominated Medieval Bath. In this photo, the medieval King's Bath, looks up to that same round bay window where our jolly-faced friend dispenses mineral water. But wait, what about that green sludgy looking water? Would you want to drink it? Fortunately, it's not quite the same. Sally says the spring became contaminated with really nasty bacteria a number of years back, and people are urged not to even stick their hands in it. But the spa water is now so heavily treated that it even lacks that yucky taste for which it was so famous over the centuries. Fine with me.

I didn't take you to Bath Abbey, the Assembly Rooms, Jane Austen Museum, the Royal Crescent, or many other marvelous places in Bath. And I didn't tell you about the Bizarre Bath night tour, which is lovely fun, if you just remember the comedian taking you about doesn't care a fig about historical accuracy. I hope you'll find all these places on your own.

Modern Bath is still a warren of twisty, medieval streets, and it is not wise to drive there. Whatever map you have, the one-way streets are sure to have changed since it was printed. It must be a rule that, wherever you want to go, you can't get there from where you are. But of all the places in England I loved, Bath is the one I must see again. I know I will put my heroes there again, to walk the streets of the Once-Upon-Forever City of Bath.

Next, in Part II (coming in May), we'll explore the abandoned ruin that changed a hero: Haddon Hall.

To read last month's Travel article, click here

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