Percy Stop #4 — Woking, Surrey, UK

Penguin in a palm tree in England? Multiple layers of incongruity!

Welcome to Woking, Surrey, UK, —  home to the oldest mosque in Britain, and the third oldest church door; the setting for the most famous Martian invasion in history; surrounded by land rich with open heathland and Bronze Age hill barrows. 

“Woking is a medium-sized town just outside London,” writes Alison, veterinarian, wife, and mother of two. “One of its main characteristics is the ease with which one can get away from it – fast trains take twenty crowded minutes to reach central London; it’s twenty minutes by road to Heathrow Airport, and just an hour by car to the English Channel.”

Alison and her husband John moved to Woking nearly 20 years ago. “For fifteen years we lived in a little Victorian cottage down a bumpy lane, with a grey slate roof and an air raid shelter in the garden. Recently we moved to a modern house with a bit more room. I suppose it says something about Woking that we are still here when we could have moved elsewhere at some stage.” 

(*Please note, all captions were written by Alison.)

 

Alison’s daughter Jenny is 15.  “At the moment she’d like to be a child psychologist or to work for Vogue magazine,” writes Alison.  Daughter Ellen is 11; she wants to be a psychiatrist.  “What is it with my children and people’s heads? Does this say something about our family?”

As Alison is a veterinarian, it is no suprise that her household also includes many pets.

Ellen and Flutter on the left, Jenny and Saffron on the right. Jenny is wishing I had let her put more makeup on and not photographed her in school uniform. Flutter and Saffron are both getting bored because this is by no means the first photograph.

“During Percy’s visit, Saffron was nursing three puppies, which rival Percy himself in cuteness,” says Alison.

Percy wouldn’t be waving his wing in that carefree way if the poodles had got teeth already…

 ”We also have three ferrets (Snape, Narcissa and Luna) and some chickens, which I bought as eggs on eBay and which hatched the very day we moved into our new house this summer.”

American penguin: English chickens. They may be cousins, but somehow I just don’t think there’s much of a connection forming here.

“The stereotype of Woking is certainly that it’s dull and boring,” writes Alison.  “Trendy media types often use Woking as a shortcut to mean unimaginative and conventional small-minded surburban tedium.  There are also areas of real social deprivation and decay.  Even in the day the town centre is pretty ugly, with soulless modern office blocks and shabby Victorian buildings housing lots of chain stores, estate agents and betting shops; there are no elegant streets or scenic views.”

Woking isn’t fancy or picturesque, Alison writes, but it is a functional home to a diversity of communities.  It has its own beauty and charm and reasons to be proud to call it home.

One of them, Alison writes, is the unspoiled  Horsell Common, where she took Percy for an amble.  If you’re interested, this map will show the locations along Percy’s walk.

 

 The pine forest was used as a location for a children’s science fiction television series, “PrimEvil” in which the protagonists travel back in time to a prehistoric forest and are pursued by dinosaurs. The film team let all us dogwalkers stand around and watch the filming, but the dogs were a bit worried by the cages full of dinosaurs.

 

 

Small penguin, big area of heathland. Lowland heath like this is an endangered habitat, which is why Horsell Common is a Site of Special Scientific Interest – lots of rare birds and plants, a few snakes, etc. Volunteers uproot tree seedlings to stop them taking over the heather – the open areas have been open since man cut the trees down for fuel back in the Bronze Age. Sometimes they graze cattle on the common to do the same thing, but not just at the moment.

I love this little deer track coming down from the top of the hill barrow through the heather. I don’t suppose it’s really thousands of years old, but it looks as if it could be. Yes, Percy is in this picture.

I have never seen another living soul at the hill barrow during the day (as you can see on the map, it’s right at the edge of Horsell Common, away from the main leisure bit), but at night clearly things are different. I think Percy is at a funny angle because he was shocked by the large number of empty beer bottles and cans, not to mention the burnt out bonfire. John and I walked back across the common after a party one Saturday night last summer, and there were flames leaping up from the hill barrow and people dancing round them in what looked like some sort of neopagan ritual. Lots of different subcultures there are, in Woking.

 

“The population of Woking divides roughly into three groups” writes Alison.  “ - Professional incomers like us, who have moved here mostly because of the ease of access to London, the ‘native’ population, born and bred here, and recent international immigrants. Woking is quite racially diverse: there are long established Pakistani and Italian communities, and the more recent waves of immigration to the UK mean that now there are people from almost everywhere – I know Poles, Filipinos, people from Zimbabwe, South Africa and Iran.”

This is the window of the (very good) butcher’s we use; Percy is sitting on the basket of the traditional delivery boy’s bike, which is the sort of thing my mum can remember from the 1930s (“I’ll ring up the butcher and get him to send half a dozen chops round”) but just a decoration now. I am not sure if this is a subtle and arty photo, with all the reflections in the window, or a confusing mess. You can be the judge. (*DaMomma voted super-arty and made the image huge so folks could see)

“ All things considered, there’s not too much racial tension, and the ethnic mix means I can buy Parma ham, cheap herbs and spices, henna, halva and preserved lemons, all within a mile or so or home, which is great.  Because the town’s not that big, those who feel inclined can cycle anywhere.”

Percy was with Alison’s family on November 11 — Veteran’s Day in the U.S.,  Rememberance Day in the U.K..

 

 

 Many people in the UK wear a poppy in the days leading up to Remembrance Day. The poppies, which are made of paper and plastic, used to be assembled by disabled veterans – my step grandfather was one of them.   All four of my children’s great-grandfathers served in World War II.

 

Just before 11 am – veterans, town officials and the public gather round the War Memorial in Woking Town Square in preparation for the two minute silence. Pretty much every town and village in England has a war memorial with the names of soldiers from that place who died in either of the two World Wars.

 

 

And what’s this about War of the Worlds?  –Author H.G. Wells was a Woking native, and set his famous Martian landing here.

 

The Martian Fighting Machine, true to the H.G. Wells story that was set here in Woking.   But where’s Percy?

Percy, ready to welcome the invaders in his tin foil hat.

 

Moments after this picture was taken, the wind suddenly became much stronger, and every time I tried to pose him for another picture he fell over. Suddenly a gust of wind blew him – and his hat – right down the street. A passer-by stopped the hat for me by treading on it – which flattened it completely, of course. I don’t know what he thought I was doing.  I was on my own, because the children are too old and cool to come, so he probably thought I was slightly deranged, but he just handed it back to me without a word. Goes to show how useless a tin foil hat is, anyway. I reconstructed it and tried again, but the wind was getting even stronger, and then it started to rain…

 

Here it is, the famous Woking Martian, which was built about 15 years ago, and is faithful to H.G.Wells’ description. You can see from the blurry person behind it that it’s Very Big.

Another interesting feature of Woking is that it is the home of McLaren, the Formula One racing group.  Alison took Percy for a visit there.

 

 

Showing off here, I reckon.

Here’s Percy with the McLaren test driver Pedro dela Rosa, who’s Portuguese. I love his expression – friendly yet wary with just a hint of fear – what is this crazy English guy going to get him to do next? (His sweater matches Percy PERFECTLY!! –DM

This is the car in which Lewis Hamilton won the F1 world championship last year. On the six degrees of separation thing, Percy is now one degree away from all sorts of famous racing drivers!

Big bright sign, small dark penguin. He is in the picture, honest!

 

Although Woking is something of a commuter town (what Americans would call a “bedroom community”) it is not without its history. 

From the Industrial Revolution until the age of the railway, when they quickly became obsolete, an extensive network of manmade canals was built across England to transport heavy goods such as coal. The Basingstoke Canal runs right through the middle of Woking, so we all drive over it multiple times a day. The towpath (where the horses who pulled the barges would have walked) is much used by walkers and cyclists. Some people live on narrowboats and use them as houseboats; others have holidays on hired narrowboats and travel along the canal (but not in November, unless they are really keen).

Percy works a lock. Or nearly. Actually I think he may get his toes jammed in the mechanism, if he’s not careful.

 

 

Percy was wedged tightly against the lock gate handle – I really, really didn’t want him to fall in! (*And DaMomma thanks you for that.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s true that my friends are mostly parents with kids, holding down jobs, rather than free spirits blowing where the wind takes them, but that doesn’t make them dull so much as responsible, I reckon,” writes Alison.  “I know plenty of Woking people who are anything but boring – gifted musicians, wacky New Age types, nutty dog breeders – we have them all…”

As it is for most of us, at the end of the day it is home life that is most important to Alison.  She included Percy in her family tradition of Sunday dinner.

 

 

Christmas pudding is made from dried fruits and spices, which you mix up and leave to infuse overnight, then boil for 8 hours the next day, then leave to mature for several weeks (ideally longer than this one will have, but at least I got there). Traditionally everyone in the family, starting with the youngest, gets to stir the pudding mixture and make a (secret) wish, so this year Percy got first stir.

 

 

 

In his dictionary of things there aren’t any words for yet,  Douglas Adams  uses the name “Woking” to describe what happens when you walk into the kitchen and forget why. 

It is this sense of ordinariness and the mundane that Alison challenges when she talks about her home town.

When I asked Alison what she would like for Percy to take from Woking into the rest of his adventures around the world, she wrote:

“I suppose Woking is an example of a place with hidden depths – a commonplace town, not a beauty spot or tourist centre — (but a place of) history, variety and … quite a strong sense of identity. So I’d like to send Percy with the thought that you don’t have to be flashy to be valuable, that just getting the job done and doing what’s needed, day after day, is worthwhile.”

And with that, Percy hops back into his bag, into his box with his stack of envelopes and heads … northward.