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Before the pandemic we had been planning a holiday to the USA on a music cities tour. We had been looking at a brochure and at possible dates but hadn't got as far as booking anything when the first lockdown in the UK was announced. Then last autumn I started to think of what we could do in this country as we still didn't feel like travelling abroad. So I booked us onto a songwriting retreat which we went on in February this year in rural south west England which we both enjoyed. I thought I would be great to go somewhere else in the UK during the summer and I thought of the village where Nick Drake, a singer-songwriter that we both admire, lived and grew up - he died at the young age of 26. I thought I would publish this blog post to mark the anniversary of his death on 25 November 1974.
Tanworth in Arden is just outside Birmingham in the West Midlands, and as Steve my husband didn't want a long drive we went by train. We set out in the first week of July. I had booked a hotel online and as we drew closer to our destination I noticed that I had missed a call from the hotel. On arriving at the station we had a long climb up steps from the platform and then there was a long path to the main road. I kept trying to call the hotel but got no reply. There was a pub a few minutes' walk from the station where we refreshed ourselves with a welcome drink and phoned for a taxi to the hotel. We were both puzzled by the lack of response from the hotel.
We arrived at the village and I was intrigued to see that the local church, where our hero's grave is, was directly opposite the hotel. We knocked on the hotel front door and were greeted by the owner, a guy named Ashley, who said that he had tried to contact us a few times to tell us that the hotel was closed on Mondays (the day we arrived was a Monday) and only served food from Wednesdays onwards. He was happy to honour the booking and had prepared our room. It turned out that he had been out walking the dogs when I returned the phone call earlier!
Following the misunderstanding over the booking, Ashley was happy to give us a lift to the pub near the station for us to get a meal the following day, and suggested ordering a takeaway from a local restaurant for the Monday evening. It turned out to be no longer in business so we made do with some of the cereal we'd been given for breakfast the following morning and items of food that I had brought along. I went to bed feeling somewhat hungry.
But the holiday proved to be restful and peaceful. There were no shops in the village, which I thought I would miss but it was a welcome release from the commercialism of the modern world. We found Nick Drake's grave in the cemetery of the church, where his parents are also buried - it is quite humble with a simple inscription of one of his lyrics "Now we rise and we are everywhere". We found a bench at the end of the cemetery which overlooks some fields and sat with our guitars playing songs to each other in the afternoon and early evening. On one occasion, however, we were disturbed by the noise of a lawnmower which got louder as it approached where we were sitting. The gardener apologised for disturbing us when he came by to discard the grass cuttings!
I also found Nick Drake's family home, which is within 10 minutes' walk of the hotel (Steve gave up as he we got beyond the rows of houses and further into the countryside - it turned out that we had walked straight past it. The gate looked different to the one I had seen on photos of it). I proudly took a selfie with the blue plaque on the house in the background. Ashley also told us about an annual gathering for Nick Drake which we would miss as it was happening the following week - the participants usually camp on land at a children's farm just outside the village and perform Nick's songs at the church. So that may well be a future trip.