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Driving in England is a sport best left for the man grown jaded with the old, worn-out things of this world and is ready to taste the golden apples of Paradise. Or more to the point: Who would have thought that a brief excursion to the United Kingdom for the purpose of finding out who REALLY wrote all those marvelous Shakespearean plays would prove to be, instead, a dangerous and embarrassing primer in British highway etiquette. For anyone who has only driven in America and who has furthermore tended to regard the fashions of the Mother Country with a certain air of condescension, a first-time sortie onto one of Great Britain\'s M-Roads can be a mortifying experience even if he manages to persuade himself that he has not bought a one-way ticket to perdition itself! To put it more simply: Motoring about the British countryside is an experience best left for a stranger imbued with the feeling that it is somehow romantic to die in a foreign land, among the grandly preserved monuments of another age. As for me, I had other ideas. I simply was not quite ready to summon the undertaker on the day I rented my economy sized Ford at Gatwick Airport. Or maybe I just didn\'t know it yet. Anyway, after we were actually underway, wife Mary Ellen and I, there was little romance in it at all: only unmitigated terror and curses and wild palpitations that forced me to use up all my tranquilizers at a rate three times faster than the doctor had prescribed. I had listened only vaguely and with the air of one who knows everything as the girl at the rental desk asked if I had driven in England before and explained that there was a right way and a wrong way to negotiate the island\'s "roundabouts." We roared out of the airport, off to the Cotswolds, of which we had read so much, thinking of the great cathedrals, the Old Norman castles, the medieval villages, the Roman ruins. I don\'t know what happened exactly. But long before I ever even got to the highway I was had run smack up against a fence that said "No admittance," unable to turn around or even to figure out how to manipulate the gears and in imminent peril of being run over by a transport truck when a pleasant fellow of about forty came jogging up behind. "Ah yes," he said, laughing. "You\'re American, aren\'t you?" I confessed the awful truth. I also realized I hadn\'t even got out of the airport yet. The new chap was quite a friendly sort. He showed us how to manipulate the gear-I think it was a sort of a secret button or something-and again laughed pleasantly as we swung about and headed off toward the nearest Roman ruin. I hoped it would be well marked. In the rear view mirror I could see him waving us on, still laughing. Sometimes I have the feeling that he may be laughing still. I figured it would be OK once I got onto the motorway. The only thing I knew for sure about driving in Britain, the most important thing, was that you must stay on the wrong side of the road at all costs (I know Britons hate to hear a damned colonist put it like that) nor must you fall into the fatal trap of believing that the speed limit signs actually mean what they say, as they occasionally do in America. I did not come by that insight suddenly. But I had my first glimmer of it when we finally made onto the M-Road, heading north to Stratford, prepared to prove to the curators there, with evidence that would brook no argument, that William Shakespeare did not actually write the works of Shakespeare after all. I was breezing along at eighty-five kilometers or so (whatever that is in American English) when all at once another motorist came roaring up behind me madly honking his horn. What had gone wrong this time? Had I lost something? Had I been mistaken for somebody else? Was the fellow drunk? Angry? Looking for trouble? "Oh, my god!" Mary Ellen suggested, pressing forward with all her might-hands jammed against the glass, feet jammed against the floorboard-to hold back oncoming objects. "Get in the other lane!" She tried to explain that I wasn\'t allowing enough space between our car and the center line. "YOU AREN\'T USED TO IT! DON\'T YOU SEE THAT! DON\'T YOU SEE!" Well, I got on over into the other lane after I finally figured out which was my left hand and which my right, and promptly learned my first lesson of highway etiquette in Britain. The fellow wanting to get by shot on past not at eight-five or ninety but at a speed I reckoned at maybe one hundred twenty or one hundred twenty-five. Was that all he wanted? For me to pull into the slow lane and stop holding up traffic? Perhaps. As he zipped past he politely tipped his hat as though to say: "A jolly good day to you, old chap." So I learned that much anyway: Life in the fast lane. For Britons only. Wanta compete? You\'d better get it up to one hundred twenty five and keep in there. So I knew my place now. I crept along at a discreet eighty-five or ninety, a speed reserved, I suppose, for the sightseeing British public - what we call Sunday afternoon rubber-neckers in the good old U. S. of A. I\'m not sure what happened in Oxford either. I took maybe half a dozen trial runs around the city before actually entering the place. We decided to halt at a roadside inn to talk it over. That\'s something else I learned in a big hurry. Make sure you\'ve got plenty of shoulder-room before you leave the road. Pull off for a moment to swallow another tranquilizer and steady your nerves and you\'ll find yourself in grass up to your head and maybe in a drainage ditch knee-deep in rainwater. Roads in Britain are made for driving, not for parking or amour rapide necking on the shoulders. At any rate, we decided we had to get into Oxford and somehow get out again if only for the sport of it. That was when I saw my first roundabout. What had the girl at the rental counter said about roundabouts? I desperately tried to remember. Then I realized it wasn\'t a roundabout. It was just another intersection, crowded now with cars waiting to turn in every direction, busiest intersection in all of Oxford, perhaps in all of England, with a lady Bobbie holding up a frantic hand that said: "Stop!" I couldn\'t stop. Suddenly I didn\'t know where the brakes were. I didn\'t know where anything was. I figured I must be in some kind of roundabout after all, and the only thing I could remember was what the girl at the rental counter said, when warning me against roundabouts: "Hesitate and you\'re lost!" "It\'s not a roundabout!" Mary Ellen said. "Are you crazy? What do you think it is then?" "An ordinary intersection exactly like you would find in our own
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