Why I Don't Write Children's Literature by Gary Soto Page A

white blanketing of the streets, only frost on parked cars.
    In Bath we visited the usual sites: the spa, the church, and the costume museum. We saw a play by Alan Bennett about an MP who is having an affair — imagine that, such unexpected behavior from an elected official. I recall one historical home at the end of the Royal Crescent. It was dedicated to middle-class life around Jane Austen’s time (Austen having lived in Bath). And if this house was any indication, life for the middle class had been comfortable. There were ornate plates and cups patterned with Chinese characters, fine cutlery, paintings of the gentry, dainty cordials, and so on.
    In the kitchen was a wooden-wheeled contraption that turned the fireplace spit with the power of a feisty dog. More detail: when a roast was impaled on the spit, a small dog — perhaps a Jack Russell — would be placed in the wheel and made to jog, thus turning the spit. If the dog slowed — or dared to stop — the kitchen help would spank its rump. The dog would be rewarded for this circular trot with scraps from the roast and a warm place to sleep.
    After three days in Bath, we ventured out by a regional bus to Salisbury, an even lovelier town, with its celestial cathedral, and then to Wells, which also has a cathedral that could make believers out of nonbelievers. In Wells, we enjoyed English tea in a little shop that sold playful teapots resembling pigs or chickens or small cathedrals — touristy stuff, things you pick up and put back down. However, my wife bought a teapot shaped like an antique sewing machine — silly but cute. After tea, my wife went off to an actual antique shop, also cute, and I had nothing to do but sit on a bench, hands in my pockets from the cold, and watch the activity of a vegetable market, which was nearing its day’s end. Because very little was happening, I got up and bought two apples, my contribution to the town’s economy.
    My wife came out of the antique shop and pointed to the adjacent store — at least a half hour there, I figured. Hands in my coat pockets, I ambled along the cobblestone streets. (Later I would learn that I was wrong about the stones. The streets were paced with setts , Belgian blocks that are rectangular, not roundish.) I meandered like a lost sheep, then stopped to read a sign that announced a choral concert that evening; another sign explained that Wells had been named after three wells dedicated to Saint Andrew. This had been around AD 704, when Saxons were in control, and King Ine of Wessex was the law. I did my best to input that data into the machinery of my frontal lobe, then returned to find my wife exiting the store with a small package. “Thimbles,” she told me, she had bought thimbles. Thimbles I could remember.
    Wells is a pretty town, an historical town, and a friendly town — the townspeople smile and stop to chat with one another, just as they do on the BBC television programs we’ve watched over the years. We discovered the Vicars’ Close, reportedly the oldest residential street in Europe, harking back to the mid-fourteenth century. And by “residential” we mean houses lined up and facing other houses, thus creating a neighborhood, a block or, their word, a close . We walked with our purchases (teapot and thimbles) up this street, which is neither long nor wide but, like the town’s other streets, paved with setts .
    A girl with blond locks came out onto her porch to look at us, the first tourists of an early spring. Perhaps she had mistaken our steps for those of her mother, or a friend, or possibly a boy. Her eyes followed us briefly before she went back inside, disappointed that it was just us , a couple seeing what there was to see. But we didn’t fret over our tag: tourists . We walked up the street twice because we knew we would not return again.
    We ate our apples on the bus ride home, apples that tasted of another kind