At the beginning of this century a Mrs Sears decided to take the land on which the house stood and establish a museum. The museum really is three completely separate parts: the Bronson house which has been refurnished according to the period; another building dedicated to Native American artifacts; and, moved from elsewhere in the town (which is called Harvard, but must not be confused with the University which is actually in Cambridge, Massachussetts) a house that was formerly part of a Shaker commune. The Shakers were a religious community given to celibacy who, as events go, died out.

The great advantage of these American museums, and all around New England there are many, is that they have lots of volunteers who are all very keen to tell you about the place. In each of the buildings at the Fruitlands Museum there was a volunteer:- a little old lady.

On a hot, sunny morning the first building I entered was the American Indian Museum, where a very schoolma'amly lady, and I suppose not really old - she was a mature woman and obviously had a lot of experience of teaching, who every so often as I walked around the building in silence, would say (and we were the only two people in there) 'Would you like me to tell you about anything?'

'Yes', I would reply, hurriedly having to invent questions.

Later, I went down to the Bronson Alcott house, and there there were two little old ladies, one taking over the from the other. I walked in, into the hallway, introduced myself in some general way and the lady made me welcome. She pointed out various things and I walked around the room and into the back study, and then again into the long kitchen. Fourteen people had lived in the house, and it had three rooms downstairs. You could go upstairs and there were three reasonable bedrooms and up again where there was a long attic. Downstairs in the living room there was a display with pages of Louisa May Alcott's diary from the age of ten, of her days of living in the commune. It described her getting up, her cold baths, her reading, her schoolwork and her going out to do the chores. The way things were going in the commune her chores probably consisted of her doing half of all the farmwork; the hired man who stole the cow's milk was probably doing the other half. Bronson and the other adult founder were probably off describing to the world the charms of communal living. In the back room was the study and the library. Unfortunately, while the house had been re-equipped and refurnished according to period, as I pointed out to the little old lady there was a slight historical inaccuracy: the page of Louisa May's diary that was open described her reading the latest issue of Oliver Twist. On the shelves in the backroom there was no Dickens' Oliver Twist. (No Dickens at all, as I recall).

Outside, in the hot sunlight I walked back up the hillside. I went into the Shaker house. I saw the Shaker drawing and had an interesting conversation about it with the lady who got out her folder and showed me her list of the symbols and their meanings to be found therein. I checked the list against the painting standing at the head of the stairs and walked about the upstairs, then tried to leave as the lady greeted some new arrivals, handing back the folder with a 'Thank You'; but she grabbed me with 'Did you see the crib in the main bedroom'.

Either I had not noticed it in the fine bedroom, or it had slipped my mind in the time it took to come downstairs, because I lied and knew it when I said 'Yes'.

'Now, the Shakers didn't have children. That would have been for one of the old ones when they couldn't help themselves.'

The sun was hotter still when I stepped outside.

Finally, I walked across to the art gallery whose existence I have not bothered to mention before, just as I have not mentioned the ticket building with its photographs of Mrs Sears or the tearooms where I was warned that if I asked for tea, what I would get would be a herbal infusion. The gallery door was closed as all the other doors had been closed. I opened the door, and I opened the inner door. There was a little old lady - waiting for me, even littler, even older than the little old ladies waiting for me in the other houses. 'Hello', she said. 'You're the first person today. I'm sorry about the doors, but since we got air conditioning last year we have to keep them closed. I saw you going down the hill earlier. You've been here a good time. '

'Yes', I said. 'There's so much to see.' (As I think there is. It does help, of course, to know about Bronson Alcott and the Transcendentalists and the tendency for all those people to be keen on communal living and living the natural life and not paying their taxes as they tended not to. Or to know a little about the Shakers, but I had the advantage of having gone to a Shaker village in a previous visit).

And finally I walked around one gallery and the next in the building. There was a third but I didn't get there because, in a hallway at the back, the little old lady came up and started a conversation. 'Is there anything you'd like to know?' she asked.

I said 'Well, I'm not sure. But aren't some of these paintings realistic? Don't the people in them look modern, unlike a lot of paintings I've seen from the nineteenth century where the people look different?'

'Yes', she said.

'There's one of a girl', I said, and we walked back into the room.

'Is it this one,' she said.

'Yes,' and we both recognised it. It looked as if it had been painted recently. Not, say, a Hockney but with something of a modern photographic style that looked like a modern person, as so many photographs even of that period look different, the people look Victorian, they have a different facial structure, a different bodily structure. But that painting and others around the room looked as if they could have been modern people. We walked around the room a little more. I seem to recall there was something about the hands that both of us agreed was slightly strange - perhaps it was the appearance of wedding rings or the non-appearance of wedding rings. And the lady told me about her daughter who was a painter, and her difficulty painting hands.

And as we stood there she said 'I guess from your accent that you must be British.'

'Yes', I said. 'This is my last day. I'm going home this afternoon.'

'Do you know', she said, 'My husband and I - I've been ill,' she said. 'You know this is my first week back. I've been ill through the summer. I've been really bad,' she said. 'But now, um, now we didn't do it yesterday because we had chapel, but every evening when we can, my husband and I never miss watching Are You Being Served? on Channel Two.'

'I saw it was on,' I said. 'I managed to flick through the channels another evening. Yes, that was made a few years ago'.

'Yes,' she said, 'And my husband we loved the new series where they run a hotel, too.'

'Oh,' I said. 'I know that was made but I never saw it.' And I tried to tell her about some of the other work I knew the authors of that series had made but she wasn't so familiar.

We had a chat about English farce and what made Are You Being Served? with its English London department store setting so funny, and I tried to tell her that Wendy Richard was now a plump star of a big soap opera and that nearly everybody else in there was probably dead and finally I talked about the shopping I'd done. And I used that shopping as an excuse because I said that I wanted to get over to a town nearby called Framingham and go and buy a jacket before I left. And I looked at my watch and said 'I'll still be able to do it and get back in time for my taxi if I leave now.' So I left the third gallery in the art gallery unvisited and through the hot sun walked back to the car and left Fruitlands Museum.

I think if I had a friend with me I'd go back and I'd probably find more to discover. In fact, I'd recommend anyone else to go there because, in their way, those little old ladies had a lot to tell me.

Commentary: How I Wrote "A Fruitful Visit"

This piece also ties in with these works in its original medium, in that it was dictated and then transcribed (and then corrected), just as I have heard both of Bryson's books read on the radio by Kerry Shale, and one of Theroux's read by William Hurt. In transcribing and then editing the piece I have attempted to keep the simplicity of speech. I was fortunate in that I narrated in sentences, and there are now only two places where there may be the confusions of grammar to be found in speech, and one of those (the art gallery lady's recollection of her period of illness) is intentional as an accurate transcription of her speech. The other is the description of the first schoolma'amly lady, where I can think of no better way of including a description of her into the introduction to the way I was lead into conversation with her. That I can think of no better way does not mean that I think it is the best way, and I recognise that it is clumsy.

This is clearly intended to be a lighthearted work, and as such depends on what it includes as much as what it excludes. Some facts have been excluded (such as the vine covered building attached to the Alcott house which housed a history of the Millerites, interesting though those crazies may have been as well as some sort influence on him at some time - the detail was a little hazy, and the kitchen brought from elsewhere and attached to the Alcott house for want of anywhere better so far as I could gather), and others have been included with a haphazardness admitted in the text (the later change in the count of buildings) to emphasize the lighthearted intention. Equally I began telling the story almost as soon as I left the museum, so that its medium has not changed much: my hostess and her friend were at home (with the Bryson on the table) when I began to talk about the gallery and Are You Being Served?. My hostess had never heard of the programme, but her friend said that she or her husband never missed it, confirming something that I had read before I left England, that Are You Being Served? is the most popular British-made television programme in the USA.. The order of events is as I described it, but again there are ellipses in the narration: the young woman at the ticket desk on my arrival, who recognised that I was British, mentioned that she had lived in Britain, and gave me the warning about infusions passing as tea is the most obvious.

The structure of the work depends on the number of buildings, and progresses through the succession of attendants, with each one emphasising their unusual qualities, and attempting to make each one slightly more odd in their pedagogy than the last. There is, thus, a ladder of increasing oddness as a plot element leading the reader on. However, given the reassuring nature - the helpful ways of these ladies - the text depends upon, not the alien-ness of these people, but culminating in the art gallery lady's familiarity with British TV, their familiarity. Equally, the presence of a young woman in the ticket bureau has to be glossed over to leave the emphasis on the "little old ladies".

Something I have taken from Bryson more than Theroux, who seems to be harder to me, is the edge, the cynical humour. This comes in the references to the inevitable collapse of the commune, with the implication that the motives of the founders were questionable, at least in their incompetence; the references to the celibate Shakers dying out; and then suggests that the liberal Transcendentalists were rather like George Bush in wanting 'No new taxes'. Although he is not mentioned in the text, the reference could well be understood to be Henry Thoreau's imprisonment when he failed to pay the poll tax raised for the Mexican War. Thoreau was a visitor to Fruitlands - a room in the Alcott house is given over to him, and both the Indian relics he collected and his drawings of them from his diaries are on show. However, to emphasise Thoreau would have been to change the centre of interest - it would cease to be obviously the series of little old ladies, with the tensions of discovering their next peculiarity, and become more a list of points in the museum. So instead there is a more general sneering reference to tax avoidance.

The piece takes about ten or fifteen minutes to read aloud, and listening to it on audio tape seems to me to progress naturally through the elements I have listed above - each building and its familiar, its little old lady, building on the one before. If I have only so many points to which I can refer comically, the length of the text has to be restricted - the travelogue or descriptive elements threaten to become more than meat on the bones of the plot, they threaten to become fat hiding the essential outline and reason for the story, so they have to be cut back.

What this piece does not include is many of the facts that I learned, even though they must be partly a reason for the existence of the museum in the first place, and probably a large part of the motivation of some of the curators (as in the Native American building). For instance, there is almost no description of the steep hillside on which the museum stands with, on that hot sunny September day, views across the long valley to Mount Wachussets. There are no descriptions of the dioramas inside the first building showing how the aborigines would have lived on that spot before European colonisation, or the more ghastly diorama of plains Indians impaled as they performed the Sun Dance, or the Pueblo pottery, whose manufacture was described to me in great and illustrated detail.

Equally, although the piece states the areas of which I had knowledge, it does not refer outwards. For instance, from Alcott and the Transcendentalists out (or rather in, going closer to Boston) to Concord and Walden, ten miles away; or in the case of the Shaker house, to the complete Hancock Shaker Village in Connecticut. So there is no sort of travel information along the lines of 'If this interests you, then also of interest will be ... '.

The centre of the piece is not the information, but the experience of the place, and in large part it is the experience of an Englishman being surprised (as so many of us apparently are) by another aspect of America, and that I suppose is partly a continuing experience of what it is to be English.