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

22. The Last Train to Whitby

"IT WUNT RAIN, LAD," Mr. Yeaver the joiner said to me at Berwick-upon-Tweed. "The clouds is too high. The swallows is flying too high."

I had decided to walk to Lindisfarne — Holy Island — at low tide. The Venerable Bede had called it a "semi-isle" twelve hundred years ago. It was still a semi-isle—"accessible at low water, but it is necessary to be acquainted with the quicksands which are dangerous."

Mr. Yeaver said, "I used to work there. I had a joinery. But I lived in Spittal."

That was right across the Tweed. Spittal was an old word for hospital. There were seven Spittals in Britain.

"How did you get out to the island?"

"Pony and trap." It sounded as medieval as the word spittal, but Yeaver was my own age.

He said I could take a bus to a certain public house, and then it was a seven-mile walk. When I started away, he spoke up again.

'They're strange people out there," Mr. Yeaver said. "They're like people with their own different language. And they hate outsiders."

I thanked him for this information and caught the bus to the public house and then walked down a country lane to the shore. I faced an expanse of bubbling mudflats, some of it marked with poles showing the Pilgrims' Way; to the left of this was a narrow causeway. There was a bridge some distance out with a sign on it saying, this bridge is totally submerged at high tide. It was a sunny day, with a light breeze off the North Sea. (Seventy years ago it was called the German Ocean.) I started across the Pilgrims' Way, looking back every so often to see my footprints fill with water. The imprint sank, as if in quicksand, so I made for the causeway. Ahead, Lindisfarne was an island of low straggling dunes, with white houses and red stone ruins at its extreme end. It was banked by sand and it lay in a tide of mud; for half the day it was a village in the sea.

This offshore stroll to the island was one of the most pleasant walks I made on the coast — a memorable mile. The ruins that had been painted by Turner and William Daniell still stood. The sand gleamed. The priory ruins in shadow were silver-black like charcoal, with the same frail sculpted look of burned wood, but where the daylight struck them they were as red and porous as cake. The surface color of the island was the yellow-gray of human skin, and farther off there was a castle wrapped around a solitary high rock. It was exciting to walk across the silty sea bed with nothing but this island in view under a towering sky.

Most offshore islands have an atmosphere of shipboard isolation, with the sea all around. But on Holy Island I felt a sense of being on board a ship that was moored on a long hawser, occasionally drifting to sea and occasionally bumping the shore. The village was small but had a number of cozy hotels. I had no trouble finding a bed or a good meal. I sketched pictures of the strange Lindisfarne boat sheds — the hulls of boats cut crosswise and turned over. They were storehouses, but they looked like beached whales or sea monsters. There was a path just above the high-water mark that went entirely around the island, passing the Links, full of darting rabbits, and carrying on to a sandy promontory called the Snook. It was a restful island and even seemed to have an air of sanctity — something about its flatness and the way the wind murmured softly across the dunes.

The islanders were watchful but not unfriendly. Yet Yeaver had been right on one score. Their accent was incomprehensible to me, a mixture of Scottish and Geordie, with a kind of Gaelic gargle. They did some fishing, but their income was derived from the people who visited the island. They sold postcards and ice cream cones and offered tours of the ruins. Most people raced to the island in cars at low tide, and raced back to the mainland again before the causeway was flooded. Few people stayed the night, though it was a peaceful place to sleep.

***

There was a good view of Holy Island from the train, on the east coast line. It appeared about ten miles south of Berwick, and because it was such a long island, it stayed in view for a number of minutes. More castles and ruins emerged on the low shore of ancient meadows. This part of Northumberland was flat, and today it had a great dome of clouds — an amphitheater with a ceiling of detached cirrus filaments tufting high over a whitish veil of undulant fluff and, below that, decomposing quilts of loose cumulus — this country was cloudland.

I was on the train because the strike was nigh. Soon, people said, there would be no trains. They seemed to like this doomsday drama. They whispered about it at Widdrington and Morpeth ("scanty ruins… and a curious clock-tower"). I had missed Amble-by-the-Sea — which sounded like a book title — and the Scars, but I did not have time to walk today. In any case, the speed of the train intensified the stains on the landscape and showed how quickly grassy pastures vanished into strange industrial cubism — rising chimneys and towers and the steel stick-figures of pylons, which made it almost zoolike, for the wires were crisscrossed against the sky, creating the impression of an enormous cage. This geometric clutter also suggested that we were rushing toward a populous place, and of course we were. It was the beginning of the great sad sprawl of the northeast of England, and even the riverine name of this poor county was like a laborious and demoralized sigh, Tyne and Wear. Newcastle was inland. I made for the coast.

This part of England had the highest rate of unemployment, and today in the sudden shower of rain at Jarrow ("whose name recalls unemployment and the hunger marches of the 20s") it had the poisoned and dispirited look of a place that had just lost a war. It was an area of complex ugliness — not just the dumps full of gulls and crows, and the weak defiance in the faces of the teen-agers I saw at Bolden Colliery; it was also the doomed attempts at survival: the farmer plowing a small strip of field behind an abandoned factory, and the garden allotments of shacks and overgrown enclosures, cabbages and beans, geese and pigs, vegetables and animals alike dusted with fine smut and looking cancerous. It was like a sight of China — black factories and narrow, necessary gardens, and a kind of visible hopelessness. It was one of the dreariest landscapes I had ever seen.

It was hideous and fascinating. We crossed the River Wear, and instead of continuing, I got off at Sunderland in order to verify its desolation. People said business was terrible, the place was dying on its feet. And Sunderland, because it was so depressed, had a dangerous look — the unrepaired buildings and the shabby streets, and the gangs of boys with spiky hair and long ragged coats or leather jackets painted over with fists and swastikas.

A man named Begbie who was a clerk at Binns Department Store said, "Some of the kids who left school six or seven years ago have never had a job. There are jobs in the paper, but these kids stay on the dole. They left school at sixteen and they developed what I call a dole-queue mentality. They're unemployable! They don't want to work, and they've discovered they don't really have to. They learned how to do without it. That's the main difference between the present and other times in British industrial history. We've produced a whole generation of kids who are unemployable!"

Begbie had a grudge, but though there may have been some truth in what he said, there really was no work here. I looked in the local paper at the want ads. Very few jobs were listed, and most of them asked for people with experience.

But Sunderland was not a lively nightmare of poverty. It was dark brown and depressed and enfeebled. It was threadbare, but it was surviving in a marginal way. The real horror of it took a while to sink in. It had stopped believing there would be any end to this emptiness. Its hellish aspect was the hardest to see and describe, because it had a sick imprisoned atmosphere: there was simply nothing to do there.

The weather made it worse. It was a summer afternoon but so stormy and dark that the street lamps were on, and so were the lights in the train. I moved south again on the coastal line toward Hartlepool. Even the sea was grim here — not rough, but motionless and oily, a sort of offshore soup made of sewage and poison. We passed the coal-mining town of Seaham, with its pits next to the sea and the shafts going under the sea floor. The house roofs were like flights of steps on the sloping coast and the slag heaps had rivulets scored into them from the drizzling rain. It was a completely man-made landscape, a deliberate monstrosity of defilement. It was as different and strange as a coastal town could possibly be, with the sooty symmetry of a colliery grafted on to the shore. I had never seen anything like it in my life, and oddest of all were the people — small children laughing in a barren playground, and families picnicking on the foul-looking shore, and a glimpse between the crusted roofs of men playing cricket in spotless white flannels.

I wondered in Hartlepool how people could stand to live in such a place. Mine was not the breezy condescension of a traveler but a sense of puzzlement at the state of decay. For most people there was no choice, but I also guessed that what made it bearable was the English people's habit of living indoors most of the time. They loved squashy sofas and warm rooms and the prospect of tea. What difference did it make that the town's graveyard was squeezed between the cement works and the metal-box factory, and that the steelworks that had disfigured half the town were now shut, and the rest of the place was just cranes and pipelines and Chinese allotments? Everyone agreed that it looked like a dog's dinner.

"You've got soup kitchens in the States," a man named Witton said to me. This was in Hartlepool. Witton was a self-employed decorator. He hadn't worked since Easter. "It's much worse in the States. I saw a program about it on the telly."

But Richard Jellyman, a traveler for Morgan Crucibles, told me that when he came up north he always made a list of people to see. Inevitably, half of them would have gone into liquidation between his trips. Recently he had made a list of nine places to go in Leeds — prospective clients or people he had done business with in the past. He found, on arriving in Leeds that week, that eight of them had gone bankrupt.

I came to Stockton. The railway station was very grand; this was understandable: the first public railway in the world steamed down this line in 1825. But Stockton seemed just as terrible as every other town I had seen in this area. At Middlesbrough I was told that if I was smart, I would look at the auctions in the newspaper. Each time a company went bankrupt, it auctioned everything — machinery, chairs, lights, desks, everything. I could get them at a good price and sell them in London. Out of curiosity I checked the newspaper and found it to be full of bankruptcy auctions.

"It's the blacks, see," a respectable-looking man named Strawby told me. "We whites are the original inhabitants of this country, but they make all the laws in favor of the blacks. That's why it's all gone bad."

Mr. Strawby saw me making notes. He was not alarmed. He gave me a little lecture on racial characteristics and offered me tea.

"You can get a soobstantial tea here," Mr. Strawby said at a Middlesbrough cafe, and handed me the tattered menu.

Chip-butty: a bread sandwich filled with fried potatoes. Pease pudding: green oatmeal. Black pudding: dark knotted entrails fat with pig's blood. Faggots: hard shriveled sausages that looked like mummified slugs.

I said I wasn't hungry.

This made Mr. Strawby smile. "Soom people don't know what's good for them."

"And some people do," I said.

"Aye. That's true, right enough," Mr. Strawby said, and ordered a chip-butty.

***

STRIKE NIGHT, the Middlesbrough newspaper said and, in another Story, MAD KILLER LOOSE IN YORKSHIRE.

The Mad Killer overshadowed the railway strike. He was crazy and had a gun. He had already murdered three people, two of them policemen. There was particular anger directed against armed criminals in Britain, and cop-killers were especially hated, because few policemen were armed. People said, "Pretty soon it will be as bad as America, with all our policemen carrying guns." In Yorkshire the rural policemen carried nightsticks and rode bicycles and wore helmets that looked like old fire buckets. When they suspected foul play, they took out a little whistle and blew hard on it.

Barry Prudom, the killer, was psycho. He hated the police. It was said that he planned to wipe out the Yorkshire police force. He had been a commando. He knew how to live off the land. "Do not approach strangers," the police said in public warnings. They published Prudom's picture — he was unshaven, jug-eared, rather wolflike, and dark. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? the posters said. Four hundred people reported that they had. Every day there were fresh sightings. No one said his name. They said, "Haven't they caught that bloke yet?" People were giddy and talkative, excited by the danger. It was the classic example of the Mad Killer on the loose — a form of public theater.

Because of it, no one around here talked about the strike. This was very odd, because the entire railway network in Britain was shutting down tonight. I wanted to say But what about my trip?

Mr. Swales, the conductor on the 17:53 Middlesbrough-to-Whitby train, said, "They want to close this branch line. They've been trying to for years."

I thought: You might know! It was a beautiful line. But the opponents of these branch lines said that so few people used them, it would be cheaper to give the passengers taxi fare to their destination.

"This is the last train to Whitby," Mr. Swales said. "This is probably the last train to anywhere."

That was very British. The strike was not actually supposed to start until tomorrow, but the British impatience to wind a thing up — they characteristically left work early and always shooed the customers out of a store well before closing time — meant the strike would start this evening.

A fat lady named June Bagshawe said to Mr. Swales, "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She also shouted it into the guard's van and then out the window at every railway employee she saw. "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She used the train every day to get to her job at a knitting mill in Acklam.

But when she saw me, Mrs. Bagshawe hurried away heavily, pulling her legs along. And then I realized that, unshaven and square-faced and rather dark, I somewhat resembled Barry Prudom. I even had a knapsack like the former commando, and I wore commando-type oily shoes. She had taken me for the Mad Killer.

I sat alone. Ten minutes out of the gray trough of Middlesbrough, and this lovely train was passing through the green valleys of the Cleveland Hills in North Yorkshire. It was a bright evening — sunshine as soon as we were out of the city: it was like stepping out of a tent. All around the train were woods and fields and scarred hills, with trees blowing and earth the color of fudge. And at the rural station of Battersby (What's a train doing here? you think, but it had once been a railway junction!) the wind was making the dog roses wag.

There is an English dream of a warm summer evening on a branch-line train. Just that sentence can make an English person over forty fall silent with the memory of what has now become a golden fantasy of an idealized England: the comfortable dusty coaches rolling through the low woods; the sun gilding the green leaves and striking through the carriage windows; the breeze tickling the hot flowers in the fields; birdsong and the thump of the powerful locomotive; the pleasant creak of the wood paneling on the coach; the mingled smells of fresh grass and coal smoke; and the expectation of being met by someone very dear on the platform of a country station.

It was like this tonight at Kildale and Commondale. The train halted in the depths of the countryside, the platform surrounded by daisies and buttercups, and the birds singing, and the leaves fluttering in the sunlight. A few people got out; no one got on. When the train pulled out of Castleton a small girl on the platform in a white dress put her fingers in her ears and stared with round eyes at the loud thing leaving.

There was great pride in the stations. At Glaisdale well-tended rosebushes rambled around the platform, and there were more at Egton and again at Sleights, and the train that had seemed miserable at Middlesbrough Station had been transformed, changing as it progressed up the line, growing emptier, brighter, more peaceful, and more powerful, until, where the River Esk widened just above Whitby, it seemed — the locomotive moving majestically through the dale — like the highest stage of civilization.

***

In Whitby, on its pair of steep cliffs, there was a sign saying vacancies in every guest house and every hotel. And yet the Horswills, Rose and Sid, were reluctant to give me a room in their hotel.

"My daughter said, 'If a single man comes for a room, don't let him in, Mum,'" Mrs. Horswill said nervously, still holding the door against me.

Mr. Horswill said, "There's this killer," and stared at my commando rucksack.

"You won't have any trouble finding a room in Whitby," Mrs. Horswill said. "Ordinarily, we'd be glad to put you up. It's just that—"

"I'm an American," I said.

"Come in," Mr. Horswill said, and forced the door out of his wife's hand. "We had Americans here in the war. They used to give us gum, lumps of steak, chops — they handed them out the window of their barracks. We went by and took them. Cigarettes — Lucky Strikes and that."

I asked him what the Americans had been doing in Whitby.

"Towing targets over the sea," Mrs. Horswill said, "and shooting at them from the cliffs."

Soon we were having cups of tea and reminiscing about the war and watching the news. The hunt for the Mad Killer was still on. "Police wish to interview Barry Prudom. They think he may be able to assist them with their enquiries."

"Wish to interview!" I said.

"Wish to kick in the goolies," Mr. Horswill said, and winked.

Mrs. Horswill said, "I hope he's not cummin garound to see us."

That was how she talked, slowly and methodically fracturing her words. "If you nee dennythink, just say so," she said, and "Toffees — do you wan tenny?" She said she cooked "everthin gone that menu" and that Sid helped with "the washin gup." She said I could settle my bill on the "morny gov departure" and that I could take my room key with me if I was "goin gout."

I was the only guest in their twenty-room hotel. "A lot of people left yesterday," Mr. Horswill said. "If it's not the strike, it's the killer. They were getting nervy." But I peeked into the register. Only one couple had been there in the past five days, the Hallwarks from Darlington. So Sid was just trying to put up a good front. Things will pick up next month, these hotel people always said. But it did not seem likely, and it could be creepy, having a meal alone in a dining room with nineteen empty tables. It was like Lahore at Ramadhan.

The Horswills had given me the smallest room in the place. I had asked for a single. This was a literal-minded country and not given to the expansive gesture. I was three flights up, in the back, one of the few five-pounders, and every other room was empty.

The weather turned bad on my second day. Whitby people claimed that the weather was always much worse north of here — in Newcastle and Berwick. Mrs. Horswill told me how, a month ago, a woman had been walking along the breakwater extension ot the harbor, and a gale sprang up and swept the woman into the sea.

"They spen tevver so much time looking for her, and when they found her, she were naked. The sea were so rough, it strip toff all her clothes."

Mrs. Horswill was a little morbid on this subject. She kept track' of the Whitby lifeboat, its comings and goings, its rescues and disasters, how many saved, how many drowned, and whether they were British. She sat at the window of her hotel on the cliff, always watching and usually knitting.

"Lifeboat's goin gout," she said.

It returned empty, she reported.

"Lifeboat's goin gout again," she said an hour later, and in the same breath, "'A Tribute to Frank Sinatra,'" and smiled at the television screen.

They loved him in England, the older folk. In places like Uggle barnby they knew all the words to "Chicago." American crooners were very popular: Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and singers I had never heard of, and of the most obscure they would say, "Of course his grandmother was English." And dancers — Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers; and figure skaters — they knew the names of the American ones ("Bert and Betty Woofter — ever so graceful — they won a gold at Husqvarna"). And corny American musicals, and "Dallas," and Dixieland jazz; and in the depths of the English countryside country and western music was popular, the farm laborers had side-burns, and sometimes one saw — as I did in Whitby — a man of forty with a tattoo on his arm reading Elvis the King — R.I.P.

The day before I left Whitby I was sitting on a bench, staring in the direction of the beautiful ruined abbey, and a woman of about fifty, with a bow-legged dog, sat down and we started talking. Her name was Mrs. Lettsom and she had a boardinghouse in Whitby, but her real ambition was to move to Sandsend, a mile up the coast.

"The houses there are smashing," Mrs. Lettsom said. "They say the people are posh," she added sadly, "but I don't mind."

A three-bedroom house in Whitby cost about £22,000, and in Sandsend £34,000.

"But it's a dream," Mrs. Lettsom said. "I'll never have that kind of money." She was looking in the direction of Sandsend. Then she turned to me and said, "So what do you think about this bloke, going around killing people?"

***

I decided to walk to Scarborough, about twenty miles down the coast, on a footpath called the Cleveland Way. I slipped out of Horswill Heights, crossed the harbor, and climbed the stairs up East Cliff, where in Dracula Lucy Westenra ("I was waked by a flapping at the window") went sleep-walking and got the horrors. Now instead of a vampire there was a tent and caravan site there at Salt-wick Nab. It was not messy, but it was very ugly, and it occurred to me that such places were reduplications in canvas and tin of the neighborhoods the people had left, little canvas Smethwicks and tin Pudseys jammed together, with a pub, a shop, and a video shed in the center.

The coast was littered with black wrecks and stoved-in hulks, and this path had cracks in it — parts of it had already fallen into the sea, a hundred feet down.

There was a young woman ahead of me, walking alone but moving briskly. When I came abreast of her she asked me the time, and I took this to mean that she would not mind talking to me. Her name was Hazel, she was thirty, and she was walking to Robin Hood's Bay just for the hell of it. She had red cheeks and freckles; she was a jogger; her husband was in a fishing competition in Whitby. She was not interested in fishing (I never saw a woman in Britain holding either a fishing rod or a cricket bat). She had been married for two months.

"I live a strange life," she said.

I was delighted to hear this, but when she explained, it did not seem so strange. Both she and her husband worked at night, eight-thirty in the evening until six-thirty in the morning, four ten-hour days and then a long weekend, Friday to Sunday. Henry worked in maintenance, and she was a cook in the staff cafeteria — head cook, actually — and she had been doing the job for six years.

The workers who ate in the cafeteria had a very tough union. Once they had threatened a strike over the food.

"I decided that we were wasting too much food," Hazel said. "So I changed the menu — two main dishes and two sweets. The men moaned, 'We'll go out on strike'—all that lark. The shop steward came to me and insisted that the night workers get the same four main dishes and four sweets — two hot sweets and two cold — that the day workers got. So that's what we have now, four main dishes, because the union says so. And we're back to wasting food. If one of the choices runs out, they abuse me. They get a full breakfast, too. They're well looked after. It's an American company."

Did she like working for an American company?

"In some ways they're just like the English," she said. "The management give themselves big fancy cars as perks. They don't need the cars for their work. They travel to work in them, same as we do. It makes me mad."

She cooked for seventy men. Cooking for two people was easy. She didn't understand people who complained about it. But she wished she got outside more. She wanted to do more running, perhaps run a fast marathon — she could do four hours and ten minutes, but that wasn't good enough. Henry always wanted to play Scrabble, but they had terrible rows when they played.

"This is what I like," she said, as we rounded the bluff called North Cheek. "This is fun."

But the cliffs were falling into the sea, and in places there were big bites out of the path and a detour through a wheatfield or under a fence. On certain stretches, I thought: This path won't be here next year.

Hazel was silent for a while, and then she said, "I wonder what's going to happen."

What was she talking about?

She said, "I read somewhere that they're closing down whole towns in Canada."

At Robin Hood's Bay ("a quaint irregular fishing village on a steep slope") I bought Hazel a drink and then set off alone along the bushy cliffs and lumpy green headlands. At Ravenscar there were shrieking schoolchildren. One said, "They just shot that bloke!" I knew exactly who the dead man was. Sometimes it was not like a country at all, but rather a small parish.