The Newbury Bypass
- A Letter to my Father -

So the bypass opened quietly, in the middle of the night: two o’clock or so, they said on the radio. I suppose they just kicked the last cones aside, and a couple of policemen would have waved any cars through onto the new road. Just like that. Speeding quietly through the night, and suddenly over the vanished line and onto the new path carved out of those rolling hills. By the rush hour it must all have been flowing nicely: damp wheels rippling swiftly over the fresh tar, fleeting past the spots where Swampy and his friends made their environmental last stand. Newbury was like a ghost town, they said that morning, as the hedges of Highclere and round about heard their first breath of irresistible traffic.

Me? I was on the road to London as usual, eyes drooping, glued to the bumper of the car in front as the reflections of the yellow motorway lights flicked across its back window. It was a Tuesday; I was somewhere near High Wycombe, and they said it’s open at last! All was moving well, they said, while I kept one sleepy eye on that car ahead and the other on my speedometer. A shame, they said, that the A34 was blocked by roadworks both north and south of Newbury, and again west of Oxford, but nonetheless it was well and truly open. The Newbury Bypass.

No, it couldn’t have been ten years ago you made that remark. You snorted at the latest report from Newbury, that it would be a good ten years before there was a bypass. Fat lot of good that was to you and I as we slogged our way up and down through those queues. I had concluded that we simply couldn’t travel to see you on a Friday evening, because of Newbury. Stop-start for four miles to the first lights: then lights, roundabout, roundabout, roundabout, roundabout and slog-behind-a-truck for another four miles to the dual carriageway - to you, sir, one hour if you’re lucky. You commiserated, and found the same problem coming the other way. They finally sorted out that Winchester bit, but Newbury... You and I told each other what an easy journey we should have, but for the idiot who decided to build Newbury’s relief road through the middle of the town. Ever that bit shy of each other, at your end or mine, we would greet each other with tales of what-was-it-like-in-Newbury? Unbelievable: there was a truck broken down just short of that roundabout at the top of the hill, you know the one, and you’d not believe what this bloke in a Mazda did there! Another ten years’ wait for a proper bypass? Hopeless. You didn’t think that would be much use to you, you said.

Amazing, wasn’t it, when the news began to mention bypass work at Newbury? Yes, we noticed fences and diggers appearing, and we told each other so when we met, you and I. It looks as if the old D.N.S. railway is going to go for a burton, I said, but I suppose it’s the obvious route to the west of the town. I remember from years and years ago when you would drive us all from Newbury to Andover on our way to the west, we would pass between the high walls of the severed bridge that had carried the trains through Highclere, and I would try to conjure in my mind the journey they would have made through that gentle country from Enborne towards Whitchurch. But anyway, it looks as if that will be the route of the bypass south and west of Newbury, said I, up to where it crosses the road at the end of the bottleneck. That’s where they’ve fenced it off, anyway.

Try going cross-country through Hungerford, I said. But you were calmer than me about those jams! Besides, it was easier for you than for me to avoid those ghastly Fridays. How was Newbury this trip? Very easy, thank you, there was a bit of a queue coming up to the M4, but the town centre was pretty clear. I noticed the diggers are really getting to work at the north end of the bypass. Really?

Didn’t know what to make of the protesters, the environmental warriors, did we? It’s very lovely out to the west of the town, down along the Andover road. A shame to stick a damn great dual carriageway through the middle of it, not to mention the poor old Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway vanishing under all that mud and tar. Yes, some sympathy for those campaigners, Swampy and friends. But wouldn’t it be great when it opened! The end of the bottleneck between you and us.

Of course, we said when we met, you know what will happen. The traffic jams will just move north to that junction with the M4. Still, if nothing else, it will make Newbury a better place. Hope they appreciate it. You remembered when that dreadful Winchester bypass was the last word in Progress! Yes, that other bottleneck they finally dispensed with, and buried so deep you’d hardly know it had ever been there. Yes, they buried it under the spoil from poor old Twyford Down, of course, which was ripped apart for the M3 extension, shame, but it’s great now it’s open, isn’t it?

Expecting you, before the Newbury Bypass opened, I would think of you steadily forging north, slowing for Winchester, and then just for Newbury. Your car polished, your left and right hands firm on the wheel, your path straight and foursquare through the traffic. No fuss, no noise, the sun glinting on the badge on the radiator, the badge that spoke of Experience and Courtesy. Experience and Courtesy. There they would be, your friends on that journey as on all the others, and I could almost see them with you as you wended your way through Newbury towards us. Your car would come to a stand outside our house with unstated battle honours: I’ve come through dreadful Newbury today without fear or flinching; poised, courteous and experienced like my driver. And then, no problem with starting our conversation: how was Newbury today?

Last time, you remember, you got here before I was home, and I arrived later in the afternoon. I needed something from the garage, something for mending and fixing up. You came out with me, you, the arch mender-and-fixer, and don’t tell me you didn’t notice the state of my tools and bits. Paint brushes in jars of spirit; saws lying beside the offcuts of their last job; screwdrivers and screws and broken odds and ends and rags and missing bits off things other than the other things there with bits missing... Chaos. Embarrassed? Me? There with the man who arranged his garage with such precision that he removed the knobs from an old drawer to fit the car in snugly - and even knew where he had stored the knobs. We began to talk, my discomfort at the state of the place almost covering that initial reserve we’d felt whenever we met in recent years. We yarned away, probably about the Newbury Bypass and its slow progress, and about all the other weighty matters of our world (except the weightiest, the most private, of course) while I swept up hammers and dolls’ heads and nails and oilcans and shoved them back into place. And you told me not to be doing this on your account: so tell me, did you know how I loved having you there to myself? Hadn’t you noticed? Of course you had. And maybe I was noticing a few things too.

I’m not the complete fool I take myself for. I never forgot that remark of yours about the use a Newbury Bypass would be to you. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could let pass lightly. It seemed ironic back in the spring, when you were told that what you needed was a bypass. Not a Newbury Bypass: we both needed that. A triple bypass, with surgery for a coronary aneurism thrown in. A bit of a wait while they had a go at your blood pressure and found you a bed, and then off for a bypass or three. My God, that sounded very real, and yet there you were in my garage, large as life and so gently laughing at me. And was there nothing, nothing at all that I wouldn’t have done to cover your tiredness from us both? And yet what had you just done but cut the grass for me! As for the other jobs you did on that trip, only later did I discover just how significant they were. As it happened, a toilet seat was to be the last fix you did for me, and I passed you the soap and towel afterwards. And off you went, off towards Newbury, off towards the long muddy scar that would be the bypass, and I hope it won’t be too sticky there - the traffic - in Newbury - safe journey.

It was looking good by now, from what you and I could see. Flyovers and what-have-you at the junctions at either end, and long strips of tar flattened across the greensward of Berkshire. We could go over it on bridges, through the muddiness at each end, weaving through cones and speed limits and extra traffic lights. And still in the middle there sat Newbury. Lights, lights, roundabout, roundabout, roundabout, roundabout. Queue, queue, queue, queue, queue. Ghastly. But not long now. So what did you do?

Bullous pemphigoid.

What?? A rash. A bloody awful, vicious, streaming, all-over rash. The internet had some intelligent observations to make, but all you got was the district nurse, bless her, and mountains of dressings. The University of Iowa’s website said attacks would be three months or so, and the only treatment was high-dosage steroids, and you got the lot. Oh dear; oh dear God. How are you, I asked on the phone, and you resorted to such oddly vehement strong language: fed up. You were fed up.

Newbury waited as the summer dragged damply onward, and each time on the ‘phone I heard how you were doing. Still getting worse... maybe a little better... off to hospital for a biopsy... negative: no cancer. And as August powered into September and the raw verges around Newbury started to grass over, so your rash began to ease. Should we be heading through that clogged town to see you? No, better not; the children couldn’t sit on your lap, or not just yet. Still, I said behind your back, if I’m needed, remember I can be there in a couple of hours.

Oh yes, you were nicely on the mend and the bypass would open almost any day, but when I got that first message it wasn’t Newbury that lay between us, but the London suburbs. Stay calm: that was the thing that afternoon, and after the wide-eyed panic of that moment that’s what I did. Stopped near Heathrow later on I spoke to the hospital: to go home to the wrong side of those endless jams, or to head straightaway towards you now? Well, by the next call I was back on the wrong side of Newbury, and it was in Newbury that I found myself a half-hour later, in the dark, no queues, no breath in my mouth, no sound in my ears but blurred music.

It was a long, long drive that night. Nothing in my way; nothing but a clear sweeping road and a sudden jumble of roundabouts and lights I scarcely noticed - although now I seem to recall every inch of my progress. Too much time to think, to wonder at the horrible lottery of it, of the fifty-fifty chance that lay before me. The note of the engine: soft, almost alluringly reassuring, and then the metronome thoughts that hit me silently each dark mile.

“I’m afraid he’s died,” said the nurse.

So you were right. By what? Five weeks or so? I think that on that night you were still hanging in there as I slipped through Newbury, not yet finished by the steroids that should have helped you. You probably couldn’t have known of my desperate, eccentric prayer as I weaved through the cones at Tot Hill, that you could pull through to ride the bypass just once. Just one trip around the Newbury Bypass, I begged, just once. Let that comment blow away on the breeze; that throwaway remark that’s haunted me for how many years? That thought of yours that has re-run in my head whenever the bypass hit the news, whenever you and I mentioned Newbury, too often. Please, let him be wrong. Let it be rubbish.

The other day I came home from the south, and turned the radio up as the sound under my wheels changed at Tot Hill. Strange how one can fold the world in and just stay aware of the hundred yards of asphalt ahead, and somehow be benumbed by the next seven miles of road. And yet there’s this message, this speaking by each cat’s-eye and fencepost, this chorus from that long diversion that I don’t want and can’t escape. What’s being said? Something terribly intimate about time and tide, perhaps, or then again maybe just the two words my brother spoke that night: “Too late.” The world forgets the Newbury bottleneck, yet it never somehow loomed as large as it does now.

Why did you have to be right?

The background map shows the area around Newbury, Berkshire, and comes from a "Road Map of Southern Counties" published some time after 1910 by W & A Bates of Leicester, "manufacturers of the Bates Tyre."