By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      The stratagem was a boon to anyone making up simple rhymes:

       Bye, baby bunting. Daddy’s gone hunting.

       Doesn’t work.

       Bye, baby bunting. Daddy’s gone a-hunting.

      Works.

      So, ‘A-hunting we will go…’, ‘Here we come a-wassailing…’– and ‘an aged, aged man, a-sitting on a gate’.

      That day in June 2005, as I passed by, they were preserving the bridge again, but totally ignoring Carroll’s advice, for there was no wine in sight. They were three months into the painstaking task of stripping off the old paint down to the bare metal and repainting. It would take them several months to finish, and in the meantime one side of the bridge was covered with scaffolding. Only one lane of the bridge was open. In the morning it took the traffic across from Anglesey to the mainland, and then at 2 p.m. the flow reversed. Hard luck if you arrived at the Anglesey side at one minute past two. You had to find another way – or wait a day, of course.

      Fortunately, there is another way. Just a few years after Telford’s bridge was opened, plans were drawn up by Robert Stephenson for a bridge to carry the London–Holyhead railway across the Straits. To take the weight of a train, he designed a bridge consisting of two rectangular wrought-iron tubes, ten feet apart, one of which enclosed the up-line and the other the down-line. A protective wooden roof was added, covered with hessian and coated with tar, along the whole length of the bridge. There was a gap of a couple of feet between the roof and the top of the tubes.

      The tubes were 150 feet above the water, supported by five tall masonry towers, again using Penmon limestone. Each tower was surmounted by a stone structure, which gave the bridge a distinctive fort-like silhouette. Four limestone lions, about thirteen feet in height, guarded the bridge, two at each end. They were carved by John Thomas, who had previously worked at the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.

      Would the tubes take the weight of a train? To be on the safe side, Stephenson allowed for suspension chains in his design, and put slots into the top of the arches above the bridge. But it proved to be an unnecessary precaution. A model of the bridge was built and tested, and the tubular construction went ahead without chains. The bridge was opened on 5 March 1850, and trains passed comfortably to and fro for 120 years. The slots now look rather ominous as you approach them – like pairs of beady eyes.

      I remember travelling by steam train through the bridge in the 1950s, to and from Holyhead. If the window of your compartment was open – and as a child you tried to make sure it was – you would soon be covered with wonderful smoke and ash, and your ears would ring with the whistle of the engine as it entered the tunnel and the deafening noise of the train in the confined space.

      Then, on the evening of Saturday, 23 May 1970, the bridge burned down. A group of local teenagers had gone into the tunnel on the Caernarfonshire side to see what it was like, and lit some paper for illumination a few yards inside. They dropped it accidentally, and other rubbish alongside the track caught fire. The mixture of wood, hessian, and tar, and the draught tunnel formed by the roof space, did the rest.

      The problem for the fire brigade was that the entrance to the tubes was difficult to access – they had to negotiate three-quarters of a mile of rough track. There were no pressure water supplies in the area, and the nearest static water was the Menai Straits, 450 yards away down a one-in-three gradient.

      By the time they got some water onto it, the fire had taken hold. One of the red-hot girders even snapped in half when water was sprayed upon it. It was a raging inferno inside the roof space – though curiously, because of the enclosed nature of the bridge, for some time no fire could be seen from the outside. But once it broke through, the line of flames extending across the Straits was as spectacular as it was horrific. You can see a video clip, and an interview with one of the teenagers, at a BBC Wales website.

      One estimate of the damage was over £1 million, but as the bridge cost over £600,000 to build in 1850, that was surely a low guess. The railway was out of action for four years. Irish ferries to and from Holyhead had to be diverted to Morecambe. The economy of the area took years to recover.

      A new single-track railway bridge was back in action in 1974, supported by arches, and they put a road on top of it in 1980. It’s now the main link between Anglesey and the mainland, carrying the A55. Three of the imposing towers are still there, and the road passes underneath them, right on top of the railway line.

      You can’t see the lions from the road, but they’re still there too, beside the railway. You can visit the two on the Anglesey side if you take a path by the Carreg Bran Hotel. A small section of the original tubular bridge is also displayed on the Bangor side. You can see it from the train.

      I was planning to head south into mid-Wales, where I had my next appointment with Welsh accents, so I took the Britannia Bridge out of Anglesey, and turned towards Caernarfon past the thousand-acre Vaynol estate. The Old Hall there dates back to Elizabethan times, and maybe earlier. These days they hold major cultural events in the park. Local boy Bryn Terfel started a glittering annual music festival there in 2000, and regularly performs there. They say that when he’s singing you can hear him in Cardiff. Only when the wind’s in the right direction, mind.

      If you look carefully at the wall near the entrance, you can still see the faded image of a piece of anonymous biblical graffiti text, whose original white-paint impact has long been erased. I photographed it when it first appeared. It reads: ALL SHALL BE WELL!

      All was well, and it was a fine sunny day when I stopped to eat a sandwich at the top of a hill overlooking the Straits. A lovely view back across Anglesey, and plenty of opportunity to observe bees – and wasps – out in force, and especially interested in my sandwich.

      Dylan Thomas got it right about wasps. In his short story ‘Conversation about Christmas’ he tells a small boy about his childhood Christmas presents. Some of them were books, he says, ‘that told me everything about the wasp, except why’.

      A bee meandered into view. It must have been the general impression of bees flying directly to their food or to the hive which led to the emergence of that phrase, making a beeline. In fact, radar – or for that matter, common observation – shows that there’s nothing particularly straight about the flight-path at all. Bees wobble about a lot. Nor do they have the sense of urgency or rapid movement that is usually intended when someone is said to ‘make a beeline’ for something.

      The earliest recorded usage of the phrase is 1830, but it must still have felt very new a decade later. When Edgar Allen Poe used it in one of his short stories, ‘The Gold Bug’, published in 1843, he felt he had to explain it. His character Legrand describes how he worked out where some pirate treasure was hidden. What he did, he says, was draw ‘a bee-line, or, in other words, a straight line’ from one point to another. That’s a sure indication that a usage is recent. People don’t bother explaining the sense of a word if it’s well established.

      It’s hardly ever possible to say when a word first comes into a language. Who knows when king was first used, or eggshell, or inconsequential? Or by hook and by crook?

      Just occasionally we can be in on a word-birth.

      One such moment was in New York in 1907 at a publishing trade

      association dinner. Huebsch had just published a successful book by the American humorist Gelett СКАЧАТЬ