Billy Connolly - Billy Connollys Route 66

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-748-12995-9

Copyright 2011 by Billy Connolly

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

It was a moment Ill remember for the rest of my life. Id been travelling along Route 66 for a few days, and I couldnt resist a quick detour to Arthur, a small community nearly two hundred miles south of Chicago. Population 800, it said on the sign at the edge of town. Beside it, another sign warned drivers that the roads might be busy with horse-drawn carriages. And with good reason: this was Amish country.

I didnt know what to expect. Id always quite liked Amish folk; although, to be honest, I knew very little about them. It was just something about the look the horse-drawn carriages, the hats, the plain, modest clothing, the way they carried themselves that always led me to think they were really rather nice people.

I parked my trike outside a simple house that backed on to a large workshop. Waiting inside was a furniture-maker with the best haircut Id ever seen like Rowan Atkinsons pudding bowl in the first series of Blackadder . Beneath the mop of hair was Mervin, a man with a thick beard, no moustache and a slow, soft grin.

Mervin makes the most outstandingly great furniture: the kind of stuff that will last for ever; the antiques of tomorrow. He showed me around his workshop, then we stood in his office while he answered every question I asked with total honesty. I could tell immediately that this delightful, decent man was being absolutely straight with me. He had nothing to hide. Men like Mervin have a ring of truth about them.

Why do you all grow beards and you dont grow moustaches? I said.

Well, I wouldnt want to grow a moustache when everybody just had a beard and no moustache, said Mervin. We like to be the same and share and be equal.

How humane. In this age of individualism, what a delight to find a community of people who strive for equality and lead their lives according to whatever is best for everyone. We talked some more and Mervin explained the rules of the community, although the way he told it, those rules didnt seem like restrictions but simple guidelines for a better, more harmonious way of living. With no sign of frustration about what he wasnt allowed to do, Mervin totally accepted the boundaries of his life. Then he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride on his buggy.

You know those black Amish buggies? Id always fancied a ride on one of them, but first we had to get Mervins horse out of the stable and hitch it to the front of the wagon. Now, Im a wee bit frightened of horses not terrified, just a wee bit wary. So I lurked behind Mervin until hed got the beast out of the stable, then I led it to the buggy and Mervin showed me how to hitch it up. We climbed into the buggy and off we went. After about two minutes Mervin said, Here and handed me the reins. I was in charge. I was in seventh heaven. Riding along in an Amish buggy, with an Amish guy, waving to Amish people. It was a wonderful moment. It might sound ludicrously inconsequential and I suppose it was but it pleased me so, so much.

Once wed ridden in the buggy for a while, Mervin invited me and the whole film crew back to his farm for something to eat. And were not talking a bag of crisps here. An amazing meal was prepared by Mervins wife and mother, dressed in traditional long dresses, while a group of little girls, so beautiful in their bonnets, sang wee songs to themselves, completely oblivious to us.

Not everything that I experienced with Mervin was quite so idyllic, though. While we were in the buggy, he told me about a family tragedy that was so distressing it took my breath away. Ill not tell you any more about it until we come to that part of the story. All Ill say now is that it broke my heart. Yet Mervin had a stoicism about him that had kept him sane in the face of a terrible event. If something similar had happened to me, it would have haunted me for the rest of my life, and it might have changed me for the worse. But Mervin had an acceptance that allowed him to remain a lovely, honest, happy man.

Without any doubt, the time I spent with Mervin was one of the highlights of my life. Ill remember that afternoon clip-clopping through Arthur, Illinois, for ever. There wasnt much to it, but I think of my life as a series of moments and Ive found that the great moments often dont have too much to them. Theyre not huge, complicated events; theyre just magical wee moments when somebody says I love you or Youre really good at what you do or simply Youre a good person. I had one that day with Mervin, the Amish furniture-maker.

The peace and simplicity of Mervins little community stood in stark contrast to what Id seen over the past few days along Route 66 that mythical highway forever associated with rocknroll, classic Americana and the great open road. Most people, including me, would think of wisecracking waitresses and surly short-order cooks in classic fifties diners. Grease monkeys with dirty rags and tyre wrenches. Gas-pump jockeys and highway patrolmen. Oklahoma hillbillies in overalls and work boots. Stetson-wearing Texan ranch owners and cowboys at a rodeo. Idealistic hitch-hikers following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac. Eccentric owners of Route 66-themed tourist haunts. Native Americans in the Navajo and Apache reservations of New Mexico and Arizona. Maybe even a few surfers, hippies or internet entrepreneurs in California.

Id already met a few of them, but when Id set out from Chicago a few days earlier, my greatest hope had been to make a connection with someone just like Mervin. Id thought back to similar trips Id made in the past, like my tour of Britain and my journey across Australia. Every journey had involved visits to historic sites, explorations of beautiful landscapes, and planned meetings with locals and various dignitaries. The itinerary had always been tightly scheduled, as it has to be when shooting a television series. But in every case the best moments had resulted from an unexpected encounter with an interesting character like the time ten years earlier when Id made a television series called Billy Connollys World Tour of England, Ireland and Wales .

I met dozens of fascinating people and visited scores of locations between Dublin and Plymouth, but the highlight came when I visited the grave of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein , at the parish church of St Peter in Bournemouth. I suppose you could say Im a bit freaky, because Ive always been fond of graveyards. Many people think of them as morbid, sad places, but to me theyre monuments to great lives lived and they provide a connection to our ancestors and heritage. Theyre full of stories about people. And the story of Mary and her fantastically talented husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, is as good as they come. Which was why, one sunny day, I was standing beside her grave with a television camera and a furry microphone pointing at me.

Just as I was telling the tragic story of how Percy Shelley drowned in Italy, a stooped figure appeared in the graveyard. Dressed in black, clutching a can of strong cider, and with a dirty green sleeping bag draped around his shoulders, he approached us with an admirable disdain for the conventions of television productions. Oblivious of the tramps approach, I continued to talk to the camera, relating the story of Shelleys cremation on a beach. Id just mentioned that Shelleys friend Edward John Trelawny snatched the poets heart from the funeral pyre and passed it on to Mary, who then kept it in a velvet bag around her neck for thirty years, when the old fella stopped beside me and pointed at the grave.