The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

it. When Broughton died, his widow, an American, gave it to the nation. So one of Britain’s most historic sites remains pristine today because of the generosity of an American lady.
    And with that patriotic thought in mind, I adjusted my pack and headed to Windsor.

Chapter 6
    A Great Park

    I N 1971, A SMALL, improbable chain of events was set in motion when the Department of Health in Britain sent posters to American institutions of higher learning that read: “Would you like to train to be a psychiatric nurse in England?”
    Since the answer to that question was “Obviously no,” the posters didn’t attract much attention. Most, I suspect, were discarded upon receipt. But one somehow made it onto a crowded bulletin board in a dormitory at the University of Iowa, where two friends of mine from Des Moines, Elsbeth “Buff” Walton and Rhea Tegerstrom, saw it and, remarkably, very possibly uniquely, decided to respond. And so a few weeks later they were, rather startlingly, three thousand miles from home and proudly dressed in the sky blue uniforms and starched white caps of student nurses at Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey.
    Large parts of my life are the result of decisive actions taken by others, but I have never been more indebted to anyone than to Buff and Rhea for their bold leap across the ocean, for it changed my life completely, too. If not for them, I would never have settled in England or met my wife and this book would probably be called My Forty Years in Peoria . God bless them both.
    I was drawn into Buff and Rhea’s happy, eccentric orbit the following year when I stopped to see them at the end of a summer of hitchhiking around Europe. I was supposed to be on my way home to Des Moines, but during the course of an outstandingly convivial evening in the Barley Mow pub in Englefield Green, on the eastern edge of Windsor Great Park, they suggested that I should get a job at the hospital, too. Mental hospitals were always desperate for staff, they assured me. So the next day, I impetuously applied and to my mild astonishment was immediately accepted. It was rather like joining the army. I was sent to a basement storeroom where I was given two charcoal-gray suits, one thin black tie, two white shirts, three neatly folded white lab coats, some sheets and pillowcases, a set of keys, and enough other items to form a stack in my arms that I could not see over. I was assigned a room in the male staff quarters and told to report to Tuke Ward. I was now an employee of the National Health Service, a resident of England, a sort of grownup, and a full-time foreigner—four things I hadn’t expected to be just twenty-four hours before. Not long after that I met a jolly decent student nurse named Cynthia, and found myself falling for her and falling for England simultaneously. Forty years later, I am still with them both.

    So this was the part of the world where my English life began. I hadn’t been back to the area for some years, and was eager to spend a day strolling through my former life. So, early on yet another bright summery morning—the weather was being most un-Englishly kind—I set off from my hotel in Windsor and found my way through the still-quiet streets of the town to the broad, processional way known as the Long Walk, leading from the town into Windsor Great Park and to the world of my past just beyond.
    Windsor Great Park is a remnant of the ancient Windsor Forest and part of the royal estate. It is a little land of enchantment, like the set of a fairy tale, a rolling, timeless realm of woods and farms and the picturesque cottages of estate workers, charmingly threaded with wandering lanes that are largely free of traffic. (Only those with business on the estate are allowed to use them.) It has a lake, enormous lawns for polo, scattered statues and other ornaments, herds of grazing deer, and occasional walled enclosures beyond which are royal retreats, like the Royal Lodge, where the