The south coast of England is ever dear to the Londoner who spends his week's end out of town. Here he finds the nearest whiff of salt-water breeze that he can call his own. He may go down the Thames on a Palace steamer to Southend, and he will have to content himself most of the way with a succession of mud-flats and eat winkles with a brassy pin when he gets there; he may even go on to Margate and find a fresh east wind which will blow the London fog out of his brain; but, until he rounds the Foreland, he will find nothing that will remind him in the least of his beloved Eastbourne, Brighton, and Worthing.
The most popular south coast automobile run from London is to Brighton, fifty-two miles, via Croyden, Redhill, and Crawley. Many "weekenders" make this trip nearly every Saturday to Monday in the year, and get to know every rut and stone in the roadway and every degenerate policeman of the rapacious crew who hide in hedges and lie in wait for poor unfortunate automobilists who may have slipped down a sloping bit of clear roadway at a speed of twenty and one-tenth miles per hour (instead of nineteen and nine-tenths), all figured out by rule of thumb and with the aid of a thirty-shilling stop-watch.
"Ils sont terribles, ces bétes des gendarmes on trouve en Angleterre," said a terror-stricken French friend of ours who had been held up beyond Crawley for a "technical offence." Nothing was said against a drunken drayman who backed his wagon up against our friend's mudguard ten miles back, and smashed it beyond repair. Justice, thy name is not in the vocabulary of the English policeman sent out by his sergeant to keep watch on automobilists!
Our road to the sea was by Rochester, Canterbury, and Dover, in the first instance, following much the itinerary of Chaucer's pilgrims.
Southwark's Tabard Inn exists to-day, in name if not in spirit, and it was easy enough to take it for our starting-point. Getting out of London to the southeast is not as bad as by the northwest, but in all conscience it is bad enough, through Deptford and its docks, and Greenwich and Woolwich, and over the Plumstead marshes. There are variants of this itinerary, we were told, but all are equally smelly and sooty, and it was only well after we had passed Gravesend that we felt that we had really left town behind, and even then we could see the vermilion stacks of great steamships making their way up London's river to the left, and the mouse-brown sails of the barges going round the coast to Ipswich and Yarmouth.
At last a stretch of green unsmoked and unspoiled country, that via Stroud to Rochester, came into view.
Rochester on the Medway, with its memories of Mr. Pickwick and the Bull Inn (still remaining), the cathedral and Gad's Hill, Dickens's home near by, is a literary shrine of the first importance. We stopped en route and did our duty, but were soon on our way again through the encumbered main street of Chatham and up the long hill to Sittingbourne, itself a dull, respectable market-town with a boiled mutton and grilled kipper inn which offers no inducements to a gormand to stop for lunch.
We kept on to Canterbury and didn't do much better at a hotel which shall be nameless. The hotels are all bad at Canterbury, according to Continental standards, and there is little choice between them.
It is said that the oldest inn in England is "The Fountain" at Canterbury. "The Fountain" claims to have housed the wife of Earl Godwin when she came to meet her husband on his return from Denmark in the year 1029, and to have been the temporary residence of Archbishop Lanfranc whilst his palace was being rebuilt in 1070. There is a legend, too, that the four knights who murdered Thomas à Becket made this house their rendezvous. Moreover, "The Fountain" can boast of a testimonial to its excellence as an inn written six hundred years ago, for, when the marriage of Edward the First to his second queen, Margaret of France, was solemnized at Canterbury Cathedral on September 12, 1299, the ambassador of the Emperor of Germany, who was among the distinguished guests, wrote thus to his master: "The inns in England are the best in Europe, those of Canterbury are the best in England, and 'The Fountain,' wherein I am now lodged as handsomely as I were in the king's palace, the best in Canterbury." Times have changed since the days of Edward I.!