The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

12. The 20:20 to Llandudno Junction

"I LOVE STEAM, don't you?" Stan Wigbeth said to me on the Ffestiniog Railway, and then he leaned out the window. He was not interested in my answer, which was "Up to a point." Mr. Wigbeth smiled and ground his teeth in pleasure when the whistle blew. He said there was nothing to him more beautiful than a steam "loco." He told me they were efficient and brilliantly made; but engine drivers had described to me how uncomfortable they could be, and how horrible on winter nights, because it was impossible to drive most steam engines without sticking your face out the side window every few minutes.

I wanted Mr. Wigbeth to admit that they were outdated and ox-like, dramatic-looking but hell to drive; they were the choo-choo fantasies of lonely children; they were fun but filthy. Our train was pulled through the Welsh mountains by a Fairlie, known to the buffs as a "double engine" — two boilers—"the most uncomfortable engine I've ever driven," a railwayman once told me. It was very hot for the driver, because of the position of the boilers. The footplate of the Fairlie was like an Oriental oven for poaching ducks in their own sweat. Mr. Wigbeth did not agree with any of this. Like many other railway buffs, he detested our century.

This had originally been a tram line, he told me; all the way from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog — horse trams, hauling slate from the mountain quarries. Then it was named the Narrow Gauge Railway and opened to passengers in 1869. It was closed in 1946 and eventually reopened in stages. The line was now — this month — completely open.

"We're lucky to be here," Mr. Wigbeth said, and checked his watch — a pocket watch, of course: the railway buffs timepiece. He was delighted by what he saw. "Right on time!"

It was a beautiful trip to Blaenau, on the hairpin curves of the steep Snowdonia hills and through the thick evening green of the Dwyryd Valley. To the southeast, amid the lovely mountains, was the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station, three or four gigantic gray slabs. An English architect, noted for his restrained taste, had been hired in 1959 to make it prettier, or at least bearable, but he had failed. Perhaps he should have planted vines. Yet this monstrosity emphasized the glory of these valleys. I found the ride restful, even with the talkative Mr. Wigbeth beside me. Then he was silenced by a mile-long tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel was Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the head of the valley.

"Where are you off to, then?" Mr. Wigbeth asked.

"I'm catching the next train to Llandudno Junction."

"It's a diesel," he said, and made a sour face.

"So what?"

"I don't call that a train," he said. "I call that a tin box!"

He was disgusted and angry. He put on his engine driver's cap and his jacket with the railway lapel pins, and after a last look at his conductor-type pocket watch, he got into his little Ford Cortina and drove twenty-seven stop-and-go miles back to Bangor.

I walked around Blaenau. I had thought of spending the night there, but it seemed a dull place and I felt negligent, being away from the coast. It was still like a bright afternoon when I took the 20:20 to Llandudno Junction, but moments after leaving Blaenau Station we plunged into a tunnel two miles long. When we emerged I began looking for the peak of Snowdon on the west, and imagined that I saw it at Dolwyddelan. The castle ("In 1281 Llewelyn the Last was here…") was solitary and high and looked like a bad molar. At Bettws-y-Coed I searched for Ugly House ("once an overnight stop for Irish drovers"), but could not see it. The village was pretty but overcrowded this hot evening, and I had a happy, hooky-playing feeling as I left on the empty train rolling north through the Vale of Conway, stopping at Llanrwst and Dolgarrog. Now the light was golden, and the motion of the little train lulled me as we traveled along the river under the peaceful hills to the coast.

***

I was not frightened at the hotel in Llandudno until I was taken upstairs by the pockmarked clerk; and then I sat in the dusty room alone and listened. The only sound was my breathing, from having climbed the four flights of stairs. The room was small; there were no lights in the passageway; the wallpaper had rust stains that could have been spatters of blood. The ceiling was high, the room narrow: it was like sitting at the bottom of a well. I went downstairs.

The clerk was watching television in the lounge — he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching "Hill Street Blues," a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before — that I was the only guest in this big dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, "I'm not happy here — I'm checking out," but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.

I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, "This is my bird-watching gear. I'll be right back—" The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in the nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.

I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played "If You Were the Only Girl in the World." I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.

Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses — naked people saying gloatingly, "We shouldn't be doing this!" In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.

It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass and iron canopies of the shopfronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer ("Excursions to the Isle of Man") moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments— Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. "We're going to have a loovely boom competition," a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge — by touching them — which one's bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy — one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men's bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.

I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.

"It's a nice moon," Miss Maltby said.

"Aye," Miss Thorn said. "It is."

"But that's not what we saw earlier this evening."

"No. That was the sun."

Miss Maltby said, "You told me it was the moon."

"It was all that mist, you see," Miss Thorn said. "But I know now it was the sun."

The town was dominated by two silver-gray headlands of swollen limestone, Great and Little Orme. From Llandudno's pier head on a clear day it was possible to see the Lancashire coast, and from West Parade on the other side (where Lewis Carroll stayed with the Liddell family and wrote part of Alice), Bangor and the shore of Anglesey were greenishly apparent across Conway Bay.

***

There were two Indians in my railway compartment, trying to open a briefcase. It had a combination lock, and they had the combination, but still they could not open it. They quarreled a little, taking turns sighing at the stubborn lock, and then one said, "You would be so kind?" I took the briefcase into my lap and spanked it and it popped open. It contained some combs, a bottle of hair oil, a blue diary, a Bengali movie magazine, and a plastic pouch that was zippered shut. While one Indian removed a comb from the briefcase, the other Indian picked up a valise and left the train, muttering.

The remaining Indian combed his hair and said he had never seen the muttering one before in his life. They had met over the briefcase.

This Indian, Mr. Amin, said, "I am in catering business." He smiled and added, "That is to say, catering and restaurantooring."

He owned a curry shop in Bangor.

"I like Bangor and I am liking Vales," he said. "And the Vellish I am speaking as vell."

"Say something in Welsh," I suggested.

"I can say some few words for you," Mr. Amin said. "You are helping me with my briefcase and making me so happy. I am thinking, and that other man, too, perhaps ve are not unlocking my case! And — vhat you vanted?"

"Welsh," I said.

He straightened his head and in a clacking voice said, "Bore da. Good marning. Croeso. Velcome. Diolch yn fawr. Oh, thank you very much. Nos da. Good evening. Cymru am byth. Vales forever."

I said, "Are you going to stay in Bangor forever?"

"Who knows about forever?"

"Let's say five years."

He said, "Yes."

"How many Bangladeshis are there in Bangor?"

"Not more than eight."

"Do you have a mosque?"

"No," he said. "But sometimes ve use a certain floor in the Student Union building."

"Do you have a mullah?"

He said, "Ven five or six pray, vun can be mullah."

I asked, "How many children do you have?"

"Questions! Questions!" He seemed short of breath; his face was a tight fit; he probably took me for the tax man.

"Sorry, Mr. Amin. I have two children. Boys."

He relaxed and looked envious. "You are lucky. I have three girls, and then I try again, and then I just get a boy last year."

We entered a tunnel — silence — and then emerged, and Bangor lay before us, big and gray. Mr. Amin gathered his briefcase and paper bags and made ready to get off the train.

I said, "You could have settled anywhere in Britain, Mr. Amin. Why did you choose to settle in Bangor?"

He said, "Because it reminds me of my town in Bangladesh. Bangor is just very like Sylhet."

Was Sylhet severe and monotonous like this? Perhaps so. In any case, Indians had often told me how Cheltenham reminded them of certain towns in the Punjab, and Scotland was reminiscent of Simla, and after the Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown he took himself to Eastbourne, claiming that it somewhat resembled his fragrant but decrepit sultanate in the Indian Ocean.

I stayed on the train and crossed the Menai Strait to Anglesey. The island was flat, as if it had detached itself from the mainland and become waterlogged. Its meadows were no more than gentle swells, and small houses and broken cottages lay scattered at great distances. It possessed the haunted look that Cornwall had, its rocks like ruins, its stillness like suspense. It had been the Druids' last outpost, and it looked it. In such a flat grassy place it was possible to see that there was nothing threatening, and yet this apparent openness was itself eerie and suggested invisible dangers. It was the sound of the wind, the pale light, the flat shadows on the low ground.

The first station was the famous but unsayable Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch ("St. Mary's Church in a hollow by the white hazel close to the rapid whirlpool by the red cave of St. Tysilio"). It is usually called Llanfair P.G., but the full name appeared on the station signboard, which was fifteen feet long. There was nothing else of interest at the station or in the town, and indeed it was indistinguishable from the other twenty-two places called Llanfair (St. Mary's) in Wales. I was told that the long name had been concocted by the village tailor a century ago so that the place would seem singular, much as Cross Keys, Pennsylvania, had been officially renamed Intercourse.

The stations and villages along the route to Holyhead looked worn down and depressing. It was as if all the millions of lonely Irish people who traveled this way — this was the principal route to Ireland — had devoured the landscape with their eyes, looked upon it with such hunger that there was little of it left to take hold of and examine. It sometimes seemed that way to me in Britain, in the busiest places, as if a castle's ramparts or a hillside or a village — supposedly so picturesque — had been eroded by two thousand years of admiring scrutiny, the penetration of people's eyes. No wonder they now stood on the shore and looked out to sea.

Bodorgan Station was empty, and nearby was an empty hotel; Ty Croes was one ruined cottage; and then the land grew stonier and harsher and looked the sort of place where only Druids could be happy — wind-flattened grass and pitted rocks, a few throaty crows and flocks of barking seagulls.

After the village of Valley there was a causeway to Holy Island. We passed a large factory, Anglesey Aluminium, and slowed as we approached the town of Holyhead.

Holyhead was one of a number of British towns that seemed to be dying — blackening like an extremity with gangrene. It was too far, too barren, too still. It had gone to sleep and would die without waking. The ferry business — boats to the Irish port of Dun Laoghaire — was so bad, they were advertising free liters of whiskey for anyone who made the trip. But the ferries remained empty: no one had any money here. In Anglesey, where the local accent was not Welsh but rather a jaw-twisting Birmingham neigh, I was told that the unemployment rate was 30 percent. It was a meaningless statistic — most statistics struck me as sounding frivolous and hastily invented — but the fact remained that people in Holyhead were visibly idle. They did not work, nor did they do much else but sit and stare. The tennis courts and football fields were empty, the bowling greens were empty — no sports. There was little drinking, because no one could afford it; no movies.

"I sleep late and watch TV," a man named Gower told me. He had been on the dole for five years and was only thirty-two.

The streets were empty. I walked through the town and felt a sense of despair, because I could not imagine that things would ever improve here. No one I met believed that the future would be any brighter, and a number of them said casually that they had thought of emigrating. Whenever British people spoke of emigration, they mentioned North America first — Europe was just as bad as Britain, they said, and Australia was too far.

The younger ones had some hope. I deliberately sought out youths in Anglesey and asked them what their plans were. One thirteen-year-old told me he wanted to be a plasterer — I guessed that his father was a plasterer, but I was wrong. A fourteen-year-old told me he wanted to join the Royal Navy, and another's ambition was to be a carpenter. They hated school, and perhaps they were right to hate it; what job would school prepare them for? A sixteen-year-old told me that he was about to take an exam, and then he wanted to go to college. What would he study?

"Catering," he said. His name was Brian Craster.

I asked him if he meant cooking — being a chef.

"Yeah," he said in his neighing accent, "it's a two-year course."

"Then you get a job."

"If there's one going. There's not much work around here. Just British Rail or the Tinto factory" — Rio Tinto Zinc ran Anglesey Aluminium—"but they've started to lay people off."

"Do you do any cooking now, Brian?"

"A bit," he said. "I can make cakes. Shepherd's pie and that."

"Where do you want to be a chef?"

"Maybe London. Maybe get a job at the Savoy."

None of the youths I met in Holyhead had ever been to London. Brian Craster wanted to go, but he seemed a little fearful, and that made him sound defiant.

It was all Council flats and uncut grass, barking dogs and broken stone walls. I felt sorry for the children, kicking tin cans, their hands in their pockets and their hair blowing, dreaming of being plasterers.

I walked through most of the western part of Holy Island, around South Stack, and then back to the harbor. In a bus shelter overlooking New Harbour I saw a poem written in black ink.

Now it is 1984.

Knock-knock at your front door

It's the suede denim secret police

They have come for your uncool niece

Come quickly to the camp

You'll look nice as a drawstring lamp

Don't worry — it's only a shower

For your clothes — here's a pretty flower

DIE

on organic poison gas

Serpent's egg already hatched

You will croak you little clown

When you mess with President Brown!

As I stood copying this into my small notebook, a middle-aged couple approached the bus shelter. They were Owen and Esther Smallbone from the Council estate just west of Holyhead. They had a small flat, for which they paid £16 a week. Owen Smallbone had been an accounts clerk at the harbor and had taken a leave of absence for medical reasons — a bad back — but when he recovered sufficiently to return to his job, there was no job, and he had been on the dole ever since — four years. Esther sometimes earned a little money looking after the children of working mothers — the Smallbones had no children of their own — but there was not much child-minding these days, because the mothers were being laid off, weren't they? They were always the first to go. Recently, Owen's back had begun again to bother him, which was why they were taking the bus. They were on the way to the General Post Office on Boston Street to purchase a Television Broadcast Receiving Licence (Including Colour)—"apparatus for wireless telegraphy." They rented a Sony Trinitron eighteen inch for £12 a month. The license for watching it would cost £46.

They were very suspicious of me. I wondered why, and then I saw the reason. I had put my notebook away, but I was still holding my pen. So I had probably written that crazy poem, or if not the poem, then perhaps I had drawn the picture of the penis, or else set down my telephone number with the message Ring Roger for a good time, guys, or — and this was the most likely — I was the one going around Holyhead scribbling FREE WALES and FWA, one of the arsonists. My knapsack told a story.

The Smallbones glanced at my pen. They were very annoyed — they were decent people, but even decent people could not find work these days. They were law-abiding — masses of people never bothered to buy a TV license and didn't give a tinker's curse when the television-detector van parked in Mostyn Close and trained its radar on the flats, fully aware that people inside the flats were watching "Championship Darts" or "The Dukes of Hazzard" without a license. And the Smallbones respected public property: they hated graffiti, and these on the wall of the bus shelter had been written by perverts, lunatics, and fanatics. Sometimes it made them ashamed to be Welsh. Sometimes they felt like just jacking it in and going to Nova Scotia like the Davises, but that was years ago, and who wanted to hire a man with a bad back?

Ten minutes passed. The bus did not come. I waited a few more minutes and then decided to walk. The Smallbones were still waiting, and after I had gone they examined the walls of the bus shelter, trying to determine which scribbles were mine.

I returned to Llandudno Junction for the third time and then to Llandudno. Now I noticed that there were seagulls on the platform of Llandudno Station, thirty or forty of them, waiting the way pigeons waited at Waterloo.

At last I decided to leave Wales. I took another train to Llandudno Junction. Today was Friday, and the train was full of people returning to their homes in industrial Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Some had been farther afield than Rhos-on-Sea and Colwyn Bay.

"The people crowded round us," Janet Hosegood said. She was a librarian in Runcorn. She loved to travel. She had spent last year's Easter vacation on a group tour of three Chinese cities, Canton, Suchow, and Shanghai, as she was telling old Mr. Bolus, who had never been east of Mablethorpe.

Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"

"They'd never seen eyes like ours," Miss Hosegood said. She was fifty-one and loved country walks. Spinster, she wrote when marital status was asked for. She hated the abbreviation "Ms." — "Miss!" she usually said, showing her teeth.

Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"

"In Channah," Miss Hosegood said.

"Ee?"

"People's Repooblic," Miss Hosegood said.

"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.

"'cause their eyes are slanty-like," Miss Hosegood said.

"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.

"Six 'oondred and fifty pound it cost us, all in," Miss Hosegood said.

But Mr. Bolus had been distracted from this talk of China by the bulldozers outside Colwyn Bay, preparing to build something. It can only be something awful, he thought, for here there was mile after mile of shallys and villas and caravans and tents, facing the Irish Sea.

At last Mr. Bolus looked away and said, "Ee?"

Although it was a pleasant, rattly two-car train, it was rather full of people and belongings. But what was especially annoying to the others was the appearance of Roland Painter-Betty and his dog, Ollie, the pair of them pushing down the aisle and then taking the only empty seat — seats, rather, because Roland snagged the window and the dirty great Alsatian leaped onto the seat next to him.

"Wonder if he paid full fare?" a man named Garside muttered.

Janet Hosegood said, "That dog should be on the flipping floor."

And they also hated the sight of Roland Painter-Betty's earring and chunky bracelet and Liberty scarf and the kind of puce-colored shoes no normal man would wear.

It was all caravans here, from Abergele east, places with names like Golden Sands, just tin boxes, miles of them, on flat stretches of sand — no trees.

We crossed the River Clwyd and came to Rhyl, which was stained with soot and looked punished. Its fun fair and amusement park were silent, and it looked truly terrible.

Verna and Doreen, neighbors from Wallasey, had turned away from Rhyl. This was the last day of their holiday and they didn't want it spoiled — Verna explained that the sight of grotty places could leave a bad taste in your mouth. They talked about a mutual friend, Rose, who had recently moved into Stanley Road.

"How's she getting on, then?" Verna asked.

"Talks to everyone. She's got a word for everyone," Doreen said.

"She's a Londoner."

"Well, this is it, isn't it. Your Londoners are a very outgoing people, aren't they."

Some of the caravans were on marshland, sinking badly, some of them broken-backed on Morfa Rhuddlan ("where in 759 the Welsh under Caradoc were routed by Offa of Mercia").

No one said a word to Roland Painter-Betty or to Ollie, stinking and slavering on the seat next to him. Everyone knew Roland was getting away with murder. But strangers were not addressed on British trains: they might be maniacs, they might be rude, or, worse, they might come from the class above you. If it was certain the stranger was a foreigner, then it was just possible someone would say, "I wish you wouldn't do that." But Roland was a native, and probably a poofter, and they could be so touchy — worse than women, some of them.

We stopped and everyone looked out the windows: Prestatyn. It was red brick, once important to the lead industry, then a holiday resort that had never quite caught on. COME TO SUNNY PRESTATYN, posters said, mocking the bleak place. The tide was down and sand mounted toward the shore, forming banks and low dunes. Behind Prestatyn lay the empty green hills of Denbighshire.

The River Dee was hopeless with sand — seven miles wide at this point but scarcely navigable, as the brown bubbly flats of the Mostyn Bank seemed to prove. And the land was flat, too; the sheep had cropped it so closely and so evenly, it looked like the surface of stagnant water. The town of Flint had turned its back on the river. It had a sullen wintry look and the British industrial smells of foot rot, dead mice, and old socks. The junkyards outside Shotton were a warning, for Shotton's steelworks were shortly to close and become junkyards, leaving thousands without jobs.

The sky was yellow-gray, like a certain kind of smoke. It was June, and in the immense torpor of the steaming day the passengers had begun to doze off, only one person acknowledging the fact that, just a mile from Chester, we crossed the Welsh border. Mr. Bolus said it had been the Welsh border for a thousand years.

Janet Hosegood was talking, still telling Mr. Bolus — he was deaf, I had now decided — about the People's Republic of China, her last year's holiday.