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

3. The Branch Line to Hastings

SANDGATE was a pretty, Irish-looking village squeezed between green cliffs and the narrow shore. It was full of antique shops and cottages, and it smelled of furniture wax and hot bread. But it straddled the main coastal road, and this curse meant that, although it was a tiny village, it was hard for any pedestrian to cross the street.

I walked along the beach. At the far end of the bay, to the southwest, on the tip of what looked like a great rusty sickle of seashore, was the ness — the nose — of the Denge Marsh. The new landscape feature at Dungeness was easily visible from where I was walking, because it was a nuclear power station, with an ugliness and a size peculiar to such constructions. It was not the gigantism that was nasty — the size alone could not be fearsome. But the unnatural look of nuclear power stations was daunting. They could not be prettified. Their horrific aspect, to someone staring at them across a calm bay, was their explosive shapelessness, the random swollen angles, and all those radiating power lines, like orbs of model shock waves. The nuclear power station at Dungeness from fifteen miles away was grotesque — there was nothing near it but the flat sea and the lip of Romney Marsh, which was a long green depression, below sea level.

There were eighteen nuclear power stations in Britain, and all of them stuck on the coast, perhaps for the same reason that they had shooting galleries and rocket ranges and minefields and dynamite factories on the same coast. If something went wrong, the surf and the sea would take the force of the blast. And it was easier to stand guard over such danger zones and prevent enemies from trespassing. But when one of these nuclear power stations blew up or melted down — and the chances were that one would — the map would be wrenched and a contour punched out of the coast, and Britain would not look like a witch riding on a pig anymore, but probably like a dwarf sprawled on a pork chop.

There was no one on the beach, no one swimming, no one walking, and no boats; but there was something I had seen before — at Margate, at Broadstairs, at Ramsgate, and Walmer, wherever a road came near the seaside: cars parked and piled up, and people in them, always very old people, the old croak named Rathbone in his toy Morris, and the Witherslacks, Donald and Maureen, both of them sitting in the back seat of their green Cortina, and everyone else. They sat in their cars and stared out at the sea. They were on every beach road. When I walked past, they hardly looked at me — perhaps a glance at the bulge in my knapsack, but not more than that.

If there was a place to park near a beach or a cliff, or any shelf of shore having a clear shot at the sea, the elderly people gathered there, side by side, their tin cars a little tremulous in the wind. I saw them everywhere, eating sandwiches, drinking tea out of plastic cups, reading the paper, looking fuddled. They always faced the water. They were old couples mostly, but they never seemed to be holding conversations. Often the man was asleep, and sometimes the woman was in the back seat and the man in the front ("I've got to have somewhere to put my sandwiches"). They were not bird-watchers or ship-spotters. Indeed, they did not seem to be looking at anything in particular. Their expressions were a little sad and empty, as if they were expecting to see something beyond the horizon or under the surface of the waves.

It looked somber enough to be an English recreation, but I wondered whether it had any other significance. It seemed to me to hold the possibility of the ultimate fright, an experience of nothingness. It was only on the coast where, if you angled yourself properly, you could look at nothing. I never passed these old people in their parked cars — they did not stir from them — without thinking that, in their own way, they were waiting for Godot.

I walked in a high wind and its flying grit to Hythe, where I saw a policeman wheeling his push-bike. I asked him if the little railway was still running down the coast. He said yes and directed me across town. "It's a mile," he said, "a long mile, really."

Down Pulsifier Road and across Albert Street to Saltwood Grove — or names like that — where I asked a lady taking in her wash, "Which way to the station?" And it seemed funny that this was travel, necessitating a knapsack, binoculars, and a knife — and I had a plastic poncho, too! Not here, but sometimes, even on a small suburban road, with a man clipping a hedge and a girl in a school uniform and a whistling mailman, it seemed as foreign and far-off as Gangtok, though often not so safe, since in Sikkim murder is unknown. But it was travel, perhaps in a new sense but in an old place, because I was looking hard at it for the first time and making notes, and because I had no other business there.

The Romney, Hythe, and Dymchurch Railway was one of the narrowest and smallest in Britain, running from Hythe to Dungeness on fifteen-inch tracks. A sign at the station said, NEXT TRAIN AT 17:10, and it was just after five; but the station was locked.

Marjorie Gait at a tea stall nearby said, "That stationmaster is barmy. Sometimes he doesn't open at all. Sometimes he's there at midnight."

But I waited a few more minutes, and the train pulled in, whistling — a steam train, which looked like a toy but had been built to last. A man unlocked the station and beckoned me to the ticket window. I waited there. I was the only traveler.

There was a little placard stuck to the ticket window:

Places of Interest Along the Line—

Dymchurch:

Bingo, small gift shop

New Romney:

Main Railway Station

Greatstone:

Sandy beach

Romney Sands:

Holiday Camp

Lade:

Fish and Chip Shop Public Conveniences

Dungeness:

Lighthouse

Then the shutter went up and I bought a one-way ticket to New Romney from a man with greasy hands — he was the engineer, as well. He seemed a little surprised that it wasn't a round-trip ticket, since this railway was used mainly by joyriders and was kept in business by tourists. The two other passengers that evening were merely returning to New Romney and had come here to Hythe for fun, which was why they had not gotten off the train.

From the dawdling open car, where I sat with my feet up, in the cool empty light that slowed everything it touched this spring evening, I saw sheep and horses, wheatfields with breezes swimming through them, and small houses built close to the ground. At Dymchurch there were yellow fields, one of the pleasures of May in England, the brightest crop: a whole field brimful of vivid gold mustard flowers. And beyond it, on the right-hand side of the tracks, under the lowering haze of a dusty day, ten miles of Romney Marsh. It was a drained marsh, an expanse of flat, fertile pastures. Henry James, who lived just to the southwest, at Rye, wrote that its charms were "revealed best to a slow cyclist," and he listed them: "little lonely farms, red and grey; little mouse-colored churches; little villages that seem made only for long shadows and summer afternoons. Brookland, Old Romney, Ivychurch, Dymchurch — they have positively the prettiest names."

At New Romney, no longer a port, the evening sunlight made the sky slant like a pale lid, so I had time to walk east to the beach and village there, Littlestone-on-Sea. It was no more than some bungalows and a dead tree full of crows and two terraces of old tall houses on a beach where the tide made the pebbles rattle like marbles in a jar. There was no wind — unusual, the hotel manager told me. "The wind never stops." The absence of wind seemed to prolong the daylight, and Littlestone was as calm as a lakefront.

The lady from the front desk, Mrs. Turgis, showed me to my room and hesitated and then sat on my bed and said, "You'll want this switched off," and moved her slender finger against a toggle on the wall. "The intercom," she explained; "when it's on we can hear everything that happens."

"Me talking to myself," I said.

"Or you might have a young lady in here," Mrs. Turgis said.

"Is that likely?" I said.

"And then you wouldn't want anyone to hear," she said, and smiled. She was sitting on my pillow.

All day I had been traveling on sore feet with the sun against my face, marveling at the easy language, the strange shore. But Littlestone-on-Sea was not far from London. Being here — being anywhere in England after dark — was a little like being lost.

Mrs. Turgis stood up quickly, as if she had just remembered something, and went to the door. "If you need anything, just—" and she smiled.

"I sure will" — in those words, because traveling had turned me back into an American.

The hotel was not full — a dozen men, all of them middle-aged and hearty and full of chat, making a remark and then laughing at it too loudly. They had been beating up and down the coast with cases of samples, and business was terrible. You mentioned a town, any town — Dover — and they always said, "Dover's shocking." They had the harsh, kidding manner of traveling salesmen, a clumsy carelessness with the waitresses, a way of making the poor girls nervous, bullying them because they had had no luck with their own wives and daughters.

Mr. Figham, motor spares and car accessories, down from Maid-stone, said the whole of Kent was his "parish" — his territory, shocking place. He was balding and a little boastful and salesman-skittish; he asked for the sweets trolley, and as the pretty waitress stopped, he looked at the way her uniform tightened against her thigh and said, "That chocolate cake tickles my fancy—"

The waitress removed the cake dish.

"— and it's about the only thing that does, at my age."

Mr. Figham was not much more than fifty, and the three other men at his table, about the same age, laughed in a sad agreeing way, acknowledging that they were impotent and being a little wry about their sorry cocks not working properly. To eavesdrop on middle-aged Englishmen was often to hear them commenting on their lack of sexual drive.

I sat with all the salesmen later that night watching the hotel's television, the Falklands news. There was some anticipation. "I was listening to my car radio as I came down the M-Twenty… One of my people said… A chap I supply in Ashford had heard…" But no one was definite — no one dared."…something about British casualties…"

It was the sinking of the Sheffield. The news was announced on television. It silenced the room: the first British casualties, a brand-new ship. Many men were dead and the ship was still burning.

As long as the Falklands War had been without British deaths, it was an ingenious campaign, clever footwork, an adventure. That was admired here: a nimble reply, no blood, no deaths. But this was dreadful and incriminating, and it had to be answered. It committed Britain to a struggle that no one really seemed to want.

One of the salesmen said, "That'll take the wind out of our sails."

There was a Chinese man in the room. He began to speak — the others had been watching him, and when he spoke they looked sharply at him, as if expecting him to say something in Chinese. But he spoke in English.

He said, "That's a serious blow for us."

Everyone murmured, Yes, that was a serious blow for us, and What next? But I didn't open my mouth, because already I felt like an enemy agent. I agreed with what the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had said about this Falklands War: "It is like two bald men fighting over a comb."

***

Walking south from Littlestone was drearier in sunshine than it would have been in fog or rain, because the bright light exposed every woeful bungalow and every dusty garden, and it showed how in places there was nothing at all but pebbles. A little bad weather would have made it all a little mysterious and interesting. The sunlight made it plainly awful. This strip of bungalows went all the way to Dungeness and seemed to turn the corner. I could see this through my binoculars. I did not know then that the strip of bungalows was continuous for hundreds of miles of coast, all the way along southern England to Land's End.

I struck out for Dungeness. It was a long horizontal walk across a squashy surface. I took a short cut and soon wished that I had kept to the road. The dead marsh was sand and stones and no trees, and it was hard walking. At one time in the early nineteenth century, the local people wore what they called "shingle shoes," made out of wood, for walking on this pebbly surface. They were "of a convenient length and width, with a receptacle for the foot in the middle, like the snowshoes used in northern countries." In this way, some people had shuffled across Dungeness.

I walked to Greatstone on the bungalow strip, and then to Lydd-on-Sea on the same strip. These places were so dull, I thought of getting out of there on a bus, but when I told a man I wanted to find a bus he said, "You'll be lucky," and turned away.

"I hope the weather holds for you, Stan," he said to a man beating a broom against his paved garden: crazy paving, gnomes, a bird bath, a rectangle of cruelly pruned rosebushes — all the bungalows were ugly in the same way; all the gardens were ugly in different ways.

I kept walking. It was possible for me to look through the front windows of these bungalows and see people polishing a souvenir horse brass or buffing their slippers or crocheting a doll with a long dress as a receptacle for hiding the toilet roll. And I saw a woman at the window of one bungalow carefully biting the tip of her tongue and ironing an antimacassar. No one at Lydd-on-Sea was staring out the window at the hideous nuclear power station and whispering, "God help us," but rather the general activity had to do with tidying. I thought about this as I walked along, and it seemed hugely appropriate that people were ironing antimacassars in a spot where a nuclear melt-down could be occurring. This was England, after all.

There were places around Dungeness where it looked as though the catastrophe had already happened. The Denge Marsh had a bombed, broken look. It was craters and quarries and gravel pits; no trees, only scrub and weeds; much barbed wire and miles and miles of gray pebbles. The whole of this corner of Kent looked that way to me on this brilliantly sunny day. And yet in this place which both man and nature had contrived to make horrible were the most beautiful birds — the lapwing (or green plover) with its long plume, and herons, and seven kinds of duck. Most of the birds had chosen to roost or swim in the gravel pits, but the place was so joyless and the path so flat that not even the sight of thirteen swans in flight over it gave me any pleasure.

I discovered that day that the uglier a place was, the slower I walked. I went flat-footed through the marsh and through Lydd itself, which had shade, and then around Lydd Camp ("Dangerous," my map said), and I could hear shells exploding—"lyddite," the high explosive made of picric acid, had got its name here. Somewhere along that road I entered Sussex, but the landscape did not improve. The army camp — why did they let the army hog the coast? — prevented me from walking on the shore and denied me access to the beach. The cars on these roads seemed to be moving much faster than they would have elsewhere, but of course it was only natural that a driver should hurry through this desolation. I was walking, so every bit of it was forced upon me.

At last I reached Camber, a gray-white expanse of sloping beach, which extended for seven or eight miles toward Rye, that little hill in the distance. Camber Sands was empty, the beach deserted and no boats offshore. It was a weekday, but even so one might have expected a car or one dog-lover or one picnicker or a jogger. But there was no one at all on this lovely sunlit strand. That was another version of the English surprise — Dungeness, and then this, its opposite.

And then it went bad again, with slapped-together bungalows and parking lots and holiday camps called Silver Sands and Pontins. There were no people here, but the buildings made this part of Camber look blighted. The beach was undeniably lovely and unspoiled, but at this western end of it were peeling, collapsing huts and rusting caravans and weeds and even a dump full of twisted metal and yesterday's plastic — this disfigurement was reminiscent of a third world country, where they did not know any better, and just let the detritus pile up as evidence that this rubbish was another aspect of civilization. It struck me that as time passed some countries with nothing in common but poverty would begin to resemble one another, because, while great civilizations are often vastly different and each culture is unique, everyone's junk is just the same.

This walk seemed interminable and full of detours. I had walked sixteen miles and had four more to go. But it was an easy hike from here on, through a meadow full of cows and along Rye Harbour to the town itself on its pretty hill. Rye was the quaintest town in this corner of England, but so museumlike in its quaintness that I found myself walking along the cobblestone streets with my hands behind my back, treating the town in my monkish manner of subdued appreciation like a person in a gallery full of DO NOT TOUCH signs. Rye was not a restful place. It had the atmosphere of a china shop. It urged you to remark on the pretty houses and the well-kept gardens and the self-conscious sign-painting, and then it demanded that you move on. But it was not just the quaint places in England that looked both pretty and inhospitable. Most villages and towns wore a pout of rejection — the shades drawn in what seemed an averted gaze — and there were few places I went in England that did not seem, as I stared, to be whispering at me all the while, Move on! Go home!

I took the train to Hastings. Hastings was eleven miles away. It was a branch-line train from Ashford with not many people on it. It drew out of Rye, heading toward Winchelsea and the valley of the River Brede, across meadows with poplars all around, making a stately progress through the green May countryside.

"Nice train," I said to the man across the aisle.

"And they want to scrap it," he said.

The British Railways Board had been trying to close down the line for nineteen years. That was usually the case with the branch lines. They were useful but unprofitable. (But, on the other hand, no more unprofitable than lampposts or motorways.) The only ones not threatened with closure were those ferrying radioactive trash to and from nuclear power stations. As for the others, it was possible to tell from the beauty of a line or the thrill of the ride that the line would soon close. With one or two exceptions, there was not a railway line in Britain that was making a profit. And so, in time, they would all go. The branch lines would go first. And one day when there was no more fuel for private cars, it would be too late to get the trains back and go anywhere, except, in a supervised Chinese way, from one big city to another in a brown bus. By then the great trains would all have been melted down and made into barbed-wire fences.

This was what we talked about, the man across the aisle, Geoffrey Crouch by name, and I, on the way to Hastings, through this green corner of East Sussex. It was a lovely train, and all the stations were small and green. There were sheep at Winchelsea, and a black windmill on a hill. It was the month of flowering cherry trees, and this week the best blossoms — Doleham was full of them, dropping petals on the children homeward bound from school with satchels of books. At Three Oaks and farther on at Ore there were pink wildflowers and more sheep browsing in the meadows and ivy growing so thickly on the oaks, it seemed to upholster them. And on much of the line there were lilies of the valley growing wild along the railway embankment.

"Oh, yes, they'll scrap it all right," Mr. Crouch said. He was a farm laborer up the line at Hamstreet. When I arrived in Britain in 1971, these workers were earning an average wage of £13 a week (about $30). Mr. Crouch was getting four times that now, but he was old and did not own his house and did not have a car.

At Hastings, he said, "I'm glad I won't be around to see it."

English people of a certain class often said things like this, taking a satisfaction in the certainty of death, because dying was a way of avoiding the indignity of what they imagined would be a grim future for them. They seemed to say: If you're vain enough to wish for a long life, you deserve to suffer!

***

A man in Hastings said to me, "Why did I come here to live? That's easy. Because it is one of the three cheapest places in England." He told me the other two, but in my enthusiasm to know more about Hastings I forgot to write the others down. This man was the painter John Bratby. He did the paintings for the movie The Horse's Mouth, and his own life somewhat resembled that of Gully Jimson, the painter-hero of the Joyce Cary novel on which the movie was based.

Mr. Bratby was speaking in a room full of paintings, some of them still wet. He said, "I could never buy a house this large in London or anywhere else. I'd have a poky flat if I didn't live in Hastings."

His house was called the Cupola and Tower of the Winds, and it matched its name. It was tall and crumbling, and it creaked when the wind blew, and there were stacks of paintings leaning against every wall. Mr. Bratby was thickset and had the listening expression of a forgetful man. He said he painted quickly. He sometimes referred to his famous riotous past — so riotous, it had nearly killed him. He had been a so-called kitchen sink painter with a taste for drawing rooms. Now he lived in a quiet way. He said he believed that Western society was doomed, but he said this as he looked out of his Cupola window at the rooftops and the sea of Hastings, a pleasant view.

"Our society is changing from one based on the concept of the individual and freedom," Mr. Bratby said, "to one where the individual is nonexistent — lost in a collectivist state."

I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes — better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. AH the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to ensure their continued prosperity. The poor would live like dogs. They would be dangerous and pitiful, and the rich would probably hunt them for sport.

This vision of mine did not rouse Mr. Bratby, who was at that moment painting my portrait—"There is no commercial consideration to this at all." He had said of my painting, "This is for posterity to see, when our society has completely changed." He did not reject my description of the future. He scratched his head and went on dreading a police state where everyone wore baggy blue suits and called each other "Comrade" — the Orwell nightmare, which was a warning rather than a reasonable prediction. Anyway, it was almost 1984, and here was J. Bratby in a delightful wreck of a house, painting his heart out in Hastings, the bargain paradise of the south coast!

It seemed to me that his fear of the future was actually a hatred of the present, and yet he was an otherwise cheery soul and full of projects ("Guess what it is — the long one. It's all the Canterbury pilgrims. Chaucer, you see.") He said he never traveled but that his wife was very keen on it — had always wanted to go to New Orleans, for some reason. Now, his wife, Pam, was very attentive. She wore red leather trousers and made me a bacon sandwich. Bratby said that he had met her through a lonely hearts column, one of those classified ads that say Lonely gent, 54, stout but not fat, a painter by profession, south coast, wishes to meet… In this way they had met and had hit it off and gotten married.

Hastings was full of painters. "It's the cheapness and the big houses, and the light is super," Mick Rooney told me. He painted pictures of restaurant interiors — waiters, people having tea, enormous meals. He had started on Indian restaurants, all the ones called the Taj Mahal or Bengal Tandoori; black proprietors and orange meals. They were packed with people and décor and bright colors. But I bought Café, a skinny old man eating a fried egg behind & greasy window, because it looked like Margate. Rooney was one of those rare artists whose work it was possible to praise without telling baldfaced lies about the pictures having motion and a sort of nervous eloquence and a quality of leaky objectivity and, oh shoot! a kind of brooding beauty.

Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with each other. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same — tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend on sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one. Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing. Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.

It seemed to me that this was how the painters passed the time on the steep streets of Hastings. Mick was painting Indian restaurant scenes; Bratby was doing portraits of the living in anticipation of Armageddon; Gus Cummins was doing green skulls; his wife, Angie, was doing lovers reclining in front of mirrors; and others were doing the fishermen at Old Town and the sea monsters at nearby Fairlight. They were all good friends and boon companions, living cheaply in large decaying houses with lots of children and cats. They had plenty of talent and some success, but this was England, after all, where no one — least of all a good painter — was really rewarded or punished; in England, whatever your profession, you made your own life.

The painters brightened Hastings, and it seemed to me full of energy and industry and good humor, just the sort of place to recommend to a sensitive friend or relation with an artistic bent. All this and salubrious air, from Cliff End to Bulverhythe!

I was eating two pigeons in a restaurant with Rooney and praising the town one night, when at the mention of a person I had found particularly good-natured, Rooney looked doubtful.

"You may be right," Rooney said, implying that I was completely mistaken.

"Sarah Milverton — that lady you introduced me to — she seemed just the sort of secure fulfilled person—"

"Don't," Rooney said. "Her husband died a week ago. Cancer. And he'd been manic for eight years."

"How manic?"

"Doing his nut — that's how manic. He heard voices for eight years. That's a lot of voices. Sarah's had a terrible time."

I said, "What about that guy telling the jokes — Orlock?"

He said, "You noticed no one laughed at the jokes?"

This was true, and now that I thought of it, Orlock had seemed a trifle frenzied in his joke-telling. But it had been a drunken meal, confirming my impression of Hastings as an artists' colony full of optimistic romance and spirited intimacy.

"You noticed his bandage?"

No, I had not seen Orlock's bandage.

"It was on his arm — his whole arm. Seventeen stitches," Rooney said. He looked at me as though at a child, pitying my innocence, smiling despairingly at what he had to tell me, regretting that the subject had come up. "Orlock tried to kill himself this morning with a razor."

But I still liked Hastings, and I would have stayed longer, except that I had as yet seen very little of the British coast. There was so much of it ahead of me that I sometimes had the urge to cut and run — simply get on an express train and make a dash for Wales, or fly to Scotland and forget Ulster. But I had vowed to make my way slowly around the whole coast, and so one rainy morning Rooney walked east with me along the Promenade.

If Hastings had been richer, all these Victorian buildings would have been torn down. The town was too poor to be vulgar, and it had enough friendly artists to avoid being philistine. And was I right in thinking that painters liked being near the sea — something to do with the light? Rooney thought there might be something in this. Painters and fishermen seemed to go together. At the fish market in Hastings, Rooney said, you could find fish that you wouldn't see anywhere else in Britain — squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. And the sole was the best in the country. At the tall Scandinavian-looking net sheds, made out of black planks, the fishermen sat with basins of fish, mending nets, saying very little. Rooney said they were impenetrable men and had their own customs. For example, if they saw a priest or nun in the early morning, they would not go out fishing that day.

"You can imagine what they'd do if they saw the Pope!" he said.

As a matter of fact, the Pope was expected in Britain within a month, the first papal visit ever.

At Queen Victoria's statue in Warrior Square, where Hastings flattened into St. Leonards-on-Sea, Rooney said, "This is as far as I go. It's all geriatrics from here to Land's End!"

St. Leonards was dull and colorless, full of low, forbidding houses in which plants with dusty leaves were arranged in waist-high windows. It began to rain hard, and though St. Leonards was slightly improved by the blur of the downpour, I did not linger there, but instead took the coastal train two stops to Bexhill-on-Sea. When I got to Bexhill I realized that St. Leonards had been seedy.

"Like all the larger English watering-places, it is simply a little London super mare." What Henry James wrote of Hastings and St. Leonards was truer now of Bexhill-on-Sea. "With their long, warm seafront and their multitude of small cheap comforts and conveniences, [they] offer a kind of résumé of middle-class English civilization and of advantages of which it would ill become an American to make light."

A résumé of middle-class English civilization was a High Street lined with shops selling sensible practical merchandise — plain food and brown clothes; not many restaurants but plenty of tea shops; a busy bus route; semidetached houses, with hedges and pebbledash façades; a park bench every twenty yards; a bowling green; a severe seafront — no fun fair visible, and few public houses; and a large elderly population of shuffling Tories.

And there was the De La Warr Pavilion, where, on the various decks and verandas, the very old people sat in chairs with blankets in their laps staring out to sea, like people on a cruise, resting between meals. They drank tea, rattling their china cups on trembling saucers. They read the latest Falklands news without blinking: they had been through two world wars and may well have been in this very place when Adolf Hitler stood gloating at them through binoculars from the heights of the French coast.

If Bexhill-on-Sea was a résumé of one English class, the De La Warr Pavilion — moored there on the seafront like an ocean liner — was a résumé of Bexhill-on-Sea. Its lounges smelled of sickness and liniment, it echoed with lilting organ music, its tea-drinkers looked anguished; and yet it was a good warm place where I could sit comfortably (I rented a deck chair) and write up the diary I had neglected since before Hastings. I bought a cup of tea, like the others, and a chocolate biscuit; I stared at the sea and, writing my diary, I felt eighty years old but very safe and dry. It seemed clear to me that once an English person had reached Bexhill-on-Sea, he had no intention of going any farther. This was, so to speak, the edge of the cliff. That was why the town was filled with dull comforts and warm rooms and large windows and busy churches. No one raised his voice here. There was no need. It was a monotonous drone of voices, an unvarying buzz of sibilant whispers. Nothing was urgent. People came here and admitted they were old and spent the rest of their lives looking after each other. On the English coast, the geriatric communities like Bexhill were almost Utopian in the way the oldies cooperated in the struggle against aging.

Far from making light of Bexhill, as Henry James feared Americans might be prone to do in a watering place of this kind, I felt I was taking it too seriously. I wandered around the Pavilion and saw that there was an entertainment every day — a show, a band concert, a ballet, or an exhibition. That day there was an Antiques Fair, and that night the East Sussex Keep Fit Rally, and the next day the Sussex Opera and Ballet Society Weekend. And I had just missed the Warbleton and Buxted Band on the De La Warr Terrace ("deckchairs 30 pence").

I struck up a conversation with one Albert Crapstone, a deaf retired gent who had come here from Tunbridge Wells to die. He had a Daily Express on his lap, full of Falklands action. We talked about this, and then he said, "You're a Yank," and stiffened.

"And you came in, late as usual," he said, meaning that the United States had just announced her support for Britain in the military action against Argentina. "Just like the Great War, and the Second World War. At the last possible moment! Typical!"

He leaned forward, crumpling his newspaper.

"You can go back and tell your President we don't need his bloody help," Mr. Crapstone said.

"Fine," I said, because a man with a hearing aid always has a tactical advantage in an argument — and what was the point? "I'll tell him the next time I see him. I think he's over at Cooden Beach having a swim."

"What's that?" Mr. Crapstone demanded, twisting his face at me.

Cooden Beach was a few miles west, but the rain had stopped and the walk took me through suburban streets rather than along the shore. The houses were large detached villas with privet hedges like fortress walls and densely planted flower beds, another Surbiton-on-Sea, the solidest London suburb grafted onto the solidest stretch of the south coast, the best — at least for the Crapstones in those villas — of both worlds. There were no youths at all in sight; every human I saw there was elderly, and most of them were attached to a leash and being pulled along by a dog, and even the dogs looked senile.

I walked toward Pevensey ("Pevensey Bay being the spot where William landed his army in 1066") and decided that anyone who came ashore at Cooden Beach or Bexhill-on-Sea would find himself face to face with the quintessential England — not just coastal, seaside-holiday, retirement England, but secretive, rose-growing, dog-loving, window-washing, churchgoing, law-abiding, grumpy, library-using, tea-drinking, fussy, and inflexible England.

The rain started again, then stopped, and then turned into a steady drizzle. I found it tiring to walk through rain. From time to time I sat on a memorial bench ("In Memory of B. D. H. Wallis-wood 1902–1978 Who Loved This View"). Each time I sat down, something odd happened: birds flocked in a friendly way and seemed to fuss near my feet, expecting to be fed. Then more would come and soon there were fifteen or twenty birds tweeting at me. It was another proof of the temperament of the English people here — they fed the birds, as many old people seemed to do, so the birds were not afraid of human beings.

The rain drove me back onto the railway. I took the train across the flat meadowy marsh called Pevensey Levels, past the temporary-looking cottage settlements at Norman's Bay. This was part of the holiday coast, the dwellings ugly and unpleasant, and only the place names were memorable, like Wartling and the Crumbles. The train swung several miles around the flat meadow, making a wide circle, and then turned on a long meadow as flat and green as a billiard table and approached Eastbourne from the back. There was no coastal line here, because the original line went from Lewes to Hastings, and Eastbourne hardly existed then. The Eastbourne spur was not added until later, but it was decades before Eastbourne came into its own. It was a village until the turn of the century.

Eastbourne was planned and zoned in a calculated way, designed to be elegant and deliberately unreachable by day-trippers. It was meant to be high class, and it succeeded because it was just a bit too far from London to attract cheese-paring tourists. It did not have a harbor, so it was spared the high spirits of sailors and the taint of trade. The streets were laid out, the hotels inserted, the parks, the golf links, the bandstands, the pier, and the Front — no shops were to be allowed on it — all of these were determined at the time of Eastbourne's building. And it worked. It had never been Cockneyfied. The town had a graspable size and a sense of civic pride and a modest grandeur. Folkestone's elegance was its geriatric propriety. But Eastbourne was a thriving place, and there was enough in it that was ordinary to give balance to its beauty.

I stayed in a village just outside Eastbourne, not far from Beachy Head. Mountain climbers often practiced climbing the sheer wall of Beachy Head, and it was also a favorite spot for suicides — thirty in the past two years. There was a valley just west of where I was staying in which ardent socialists had settled and become landowners and country squires. They were union men or politicians who, after a career of howling at the rich, had been awarded knighthoods and appointed to directorships and had become well-to-do themselves. They lived in manor houses or on large farms, and some, amazingly, still espoused views that were in contradiction to the way they lived. It was a curious combination of secrecy, hypocrisy, and the sort of muddle that enabled an Englishman to hold two opposing views in his head. And it demonstrated that the best way to become a baron or an earl or a knight of the Garter was to spend half a lifetime singing "The Red Flag" and becoming a conspicuous irritation to the Establishment. It was an easy transition from any smoke-filled room of whining conspirators to a seat in the House of Lords. The English aristocracy had nearly always been recruited from the ranks of flatterers, cutthroats, boyfriends, political pirates, and people of very conceited ambition. So it was not so strange that this blue valley on the coast of East Sussex was populated by wine-bibbing lords who had formerly been Marxist union men named Jones and Brown.

I set off for Brighton on foot, starting at Birling Gap. The tide was high, so I could not walk along the beach. I was not sorry about this. I was spared the possibility of being embayed or of having the cliffs fall down and brain me — they were very crumbly cliffs. I walked in bright sunshine across the Seven Sisters to Seaford. The turf on these seven bluffs was very spongy and green. There were sheep in the meadows that lay parallel to this high part of the coast. Their bells clunked as they jerked their heads up to look at me. And there were gulls on the cliffs. Gulls squawk, but they also bark, scream, shriek, yap, whimper, and crow. Sometimes, roosting, they whine. I also heard them mew like cats. They are stupid hungry birds, and there was a common species on the British coast that had heads so black and hooded that they looked like hangmen.

There were rabbits on the Seven Sisters. They were small cute creatures. They had burrowed into the seventh sister, eaten much of her grass, and in this way had loosened the whole bluff by allowing the rain and erosion to take hold. The little creatures hippity-hopped all over the bluff, and they were in the process of destroying one of the most beautiful cliffs on the coast — the bunnies had just about brought it down.

I came to the Cuckmere River. That was a problem. The South Downs Way detours around it; there was no way of getting across the wide wet estuary. I walked along the east bank of the Cuckmere River, past World War Two pillboxes and gun emplacements, and herons and swans. Then over the bridge and across Seaford Head to Seaford proper, which was a nice town, once full of prep schools. Most of the schools were now closed, and Seaford was regarded as something of a backwater, overshadowed by Newhaven on the green River Ouse. Virginia Woolf had drowned herself a few miles upstream in 1941.

I walked on, through Newhaven and up the bluff to Peacehaven, until it started to rain. Peacehaven was solid with bungalows on little plots with just room enough in front for a garden gnome and a square yard of crazy paving. I caught a bus here. It swayed on the high cliff road, past the open space that marks the Zero Meridian, past Telescombe Cliffs, where, under a sky of yapping gulls, all the sewage of Brighton and Hove empties into the English Channel. And then into Rottingdean.

In Rottingdean "in 1882 there had been but one daily bus from Brighton, which took forty minutes," Rudyard Kipling wrote in his autobiography, Something of Myself. "And when a stranger appeared on the village green the native young would stick out their tongues at him." It was, he said, an almost empty coast of green fields and isolated houses. But it had changed in Kipling's lifetime. Before he died, in 1936, he wrote, "Today, from Rottingdean to Newhaven is almost fully developed suburb, of great horror." It was much worse now, so I stayed on the bus and did not get off until we reached Brighton.