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

4. The 18:11 to Bognor Regis

PEOPLE IN BRIGHTON were imagined to be perpetually on the razzle, their days spent prowling the Lanes or Marine Parade, and their nights full of ramping sexuality. Think I'll go down and have a dirty weekend, people said. Brighton had a great reputation. You were supposed to have fun in Brighton, but Brighton had the face of an old tart and a very brief appeal.

It was an hour from London. It was one of London's resorts. It was two hours from Dieppe by ferry. It was one of France's resorts. The scowling foreigners gave it a crassly cosmopolitan air, but no one knew what to make of it. Greeks and Indians opened restaurants and cheap shops, and then stood in front, hardly believing that business could be so bad. The English were shrewder. They opened casinos and public houses. There were more pubs in Brighton than in any other seaside town in Great Britain, because there was little else to do but drink. Serious fishermen went down to Newhaven, and swimmers up the coast a little to Hove. Like many places that have a great reputation, Brighton was full of disappointed and bad-tempered visitors.

Brighton Rock contains the popular impression of Brighton: gangsters, hilarity, murder, and Mortal Sin — all in sight of Palace Pier. But Graham Greene subsequently wrote in an introduction to the novel that, while he had been fastidious about the detail in the novels set in Mexico and Indo-China, the setting of Brighton "may in part belong to an imaginary geographic region." He said he was writing about the past — already, in 1937, that Brighton had vanished — so, "I must plead guilty to manufacturing this Brighton of mine."

Even so, the novel is very good in describing Brighton disappointment and the progress of the day-trippers: "They had stood all the way from Victoria in crowded carriages, they would have to wait in queues for lunch, at midnight half asleep they would rock back in trains to the cramped streets and the closed pubs and the weary walks home. With immense labour and immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of pleasure: this sun, this music, the rattle of the miniature cars, the ghost train diving between the grinning skeletons under the Aquarium promenade, the sticks of Brighton rock, the paper sailors' hats."

That was it, more or less. I had been to Brighton so many times, I had no desire to linger. Much better, I thought, to push on to Bognor, where I had never been. But I had someone to see in Brighton — Jonathan Raban was there on his boat, the Gosfield Maid, moored at Brighton Marina, just beyond Kemp Town and the nudist beach ("Bathing Costumes Are Not Required to Be Worn Past This Sign"). Jonathan had said that he was taking a trip around the British coast and was planning to write a book about it. This interested me. All trips are different, and even two people traveling together have vastly different versions of their journey. Jonathan was doing his coastal tour counterclockwise, stopping at likely ports in his boat.

He seemed contented on his boat. He had framed prints and engravings on the walls, and Kinglake's Eothen was open on a table under a porthole. It was strange to see a typewriter and a TV set on board, but that was the sort of boat it was, very comfy and literary, with bookshelves and curios.

"This must be your log," I said, glancing down. The entries were sketchy ("…light rain, wind ESE…") — nothing very literary here, no dialogue, no exclamation marks.

He said, "I keep planning to make notes, but I never seem to get round to it. What about you?"

"I fiddle around," I said. It was a lie. I did nothing but make notes, scribbling from the moment I arrived in a hotel or a guest house and often missing my dinner. I hated doing it. It was a burden. But if I had been in Afghanistan, I would have kept a detailed diary. Why should I travel differently in Britain?

I said, "I hate Brighton. I think there's a kind of wisdom in that — the British person, or even the foreigner, who says simply, 'I hate Brighton.' What's there to like here? It's a mess."

"Yes, it's a mess," Jonathan said. "That's one of the things I like about it."

"I've never seen so many dubious-looking people," I said.

He said, "It's full of tramps," and he smiled again. Then he said that the most unexpected things happened in Brighton. He would be walking along and he would see someone dressed up as Cardinal Wolsey or Robin Hood, or musicians, or people singing and having a grand time.

I said I saw only bums and day-trippers and people trying to, um, extricate from the long day the grain of pleasure.

We decided to have lunch in the center of Brighton, and so took the little train that rattled from the Marina, past the nudist beach, to the Aquarium. The nudist beach was mostly naked men staring hard at each other. This created heavy traffic on that part of the Front. We were pestered by a man with a monkey when we got off the train. I kept wanting to say: See what I mean?

"I had my parents on the boat for a week," Jonathan said in the restaurant.

Odd sort of voyage, I thought — Mum and Dad on his thirty-foot boat, hardly enough room to swing a cat in the galley, no privacy, rough seas, typewriter skittering sideways, all of them sleeping in the same small area, "Are you sure you won't have another fish finger, son?" and "I'm going to use the toilet, if no one has any objection."

That was how I imagined it.

"Who was the captain?" I asked. I knew that Jonathan's father was a clergyman, and it seemed to me that a clergyman was apt to take command.

"I was in charge," Jonathan said. "After all, it's my boat."

He said his book would be about all the places he had known and lived in on the British coast — a dozen or more.

I said that I wanted to write a book about all the places I had never seen before, which was most of the British coast.

At last, I said I had to be moving on.

"Where to?"

"Bognor," I said.

"Good old Bognor," he said. "So you're headed down the Promenade."

"Right," I said. It was a lovely afternoon.

He said he would be sailing toward Rye in a day or so and then to Dover and up the east coast.

"Watch out for the Goodwin Sands," I said. I told him what I had heard in Broadstairs, how they swallowed ships.

We shook hands and went our separate ways — Jonathan to fight the gales, and I to go down the Prom toward Bognor. Some trip, I thought, as I sauntered along the Promenade. But I was learning things and getting fresh air, and someday I would be too old for this and would be taken for a tramp if I tried it. Even now people sniffed and tried not to stare. A man of forty with a knapsack could easily be a serious crank.

***

As I strolled, I could see that Hove was low spirits and lawns, and the monotonous frenzy of Brighton gave way to clean old houses and rather spent pensioners. The Front, which had been more or less continuous since Margate, was breezy, but now I knew — because I had left it and walked on — that Brighton's chief characteristic was the youthfulness of its visitors: the young had made it seem aimless and wasteful. Hove was not that way.

Hove, like many other places on the English coast, had chalets. The name was misleading. They were huts, and chalet was mispronounced to suit them: "shally," the English said, an appropriate word made out of shanty and alley. There were hundreds of them shoulder to shoulder along the Front. They had evolved from bathing machines, I guessed. The English were prudish about nakedness (and swimming for the Victorians had been regarded as the opposite of a sport — it was a sort of immersion cure, a cross between colonic irrigation and baptism). The bathing machine — a shed on a pair of wheels — had been turned into a stationary changing room, and then arranged in rows on the beachfront, and at last had become a miniature house — a shally.

Hove's shallys were the size of English garden sheds. I looked into them, fully expecting to see rusty lawnmowers and rakes and watering cans. Sometimes they held bicycles, but more often these one-room shallys were furnished like doll houses or toy bungalows. You could see what the English considered essential to their comfort for a day at the beach. They were painted, they had framed prints (cats, horses, sailboats) on the wall and plastic roses in jam-jar vases. All had folding deck chairs inside and a shelf at the rear on which there was a hotplate and a dented kettle and some china cups. They were fitted out for tea and naps — many had camp cots, plastic cushions, and blankets; some had fishing tackle; a few held toys. It was not unusual to see half a fruitcake, an umbrella, and an Agatha Christie inside; and most held an old person, looking flustered.

All the shallys had numbers, some very high numbers, testifying to their multitude. But the numbers did not distinguish them, for they all had names: Seaview, the Waves, Sunny Hours, Bide-a-Wee, picked out on their doors or else lettered on plaques. They had double doors; some looked more like horse boxes than cottages. They had curtains. They had folding panels to keep out the wind. Many had a transistor radio buzzing, but the shally people were old-fashioned — they actually were the inheritors of the bathing-machine mentality — and they called their radios "the wireless" or even "my steam radio."

They were rented by the year, or leased for several years, or owned outright — again, like bathing machines. But they were thoroughly colonized. They had small framed photographs of children and grandchildren. When it rained, their occupiers sat inside with their knees together, one person reading, the other knitting or snoozing, always bumping elbows. In better weather they did these things just outside, a foot or so from the front door. I never saw a can of beer or a bottle of whiskey in a shally. The shally people had lived through the war. They had no money but plenty of time. They read newspapers, and that day everyone looked as if he were boning up for an exam on the Falklands campaign. It was becoming a very popular war.

The shallys were very close together, but paradoxically they were very private. In England, proximity creates invisible barriers. Each shally seemed to stand alone, no one taking any notice of the activity next door. Seaview was having tea while the Waves pondered the Daily Express; Sunny Hours was taking a siesta, and the pair at Bide-a-Wee were brooding over their mail. All conversation was in whispers. The shallys were not a community. Each shally was separate and isolated, nothing neighborly about it. Each had its own English atmosphere of hectic calm. A by-law stipulated that no one was allowed to spend a night in a shally, so the shally was a daylight refuge, and it was used with the intense preoccupation and the sort of all-excluding privacy that the English bring to anything they own — not creating any disturbance nor encroaching on anyone else's shally and not sharing. Anyone who wished to know how the English lived would get a good idea by walking past the miles of these shallys, for while the average English home was closed to strangers — and was closed to friends, too: nothing personal, it just isn't done — the shally was completely open to the stranger's gaze, like the doll houses they somewhat resembled that had one wall missing. It was easy to look inside. That's why no one ever did.

I walked out of Hove and on to Portslade and Southwick, which had a handsome power station on a neck of land just offshore, so that with its two tall chimneys it looked like a steamship moored on the coast.

At Southwick I met Mrs. Ralph Stonier. She was standing in the sunshine in her old overcoat, waiting for a bus. She said the buses never came. She was a native of Southwick. She hated it: overbuilt, she said. It used to be very quiet here, but no more. Of course, it was much worse in Brighton. You couldn't live on the coast these days. She didn't know what was going to happen, except that things would surely get worse. She stood stiffly, facing the oncoming traffic. The English could look so tired and so determined at the same time! She was taking the bus because the train was too expensive, even though as a pensioner she traveled for half-fare. She had a country accent, as all the older natives seemed to on the south coast.

"I'm going to Bognor," I said to Mrs. Stonier, not that she had asked.

She said, "That's miles away!"

It was twenty miles. I took the train to Worthing.

Irby and Vitchitt, two schoolboys, were talking behind me in low serious voices on the train. They were each about fifteen years old.

Vitchitt said, "If you could change any feature of your body," and he paused, "what would you change?"

"Me fice," Irby said. He had not hesitated.

Vitchitt said, "Your 'ole fice?"

"Yeah."

Vitchitt was silent.

Irby said, "Me 'ole fice."

"What about your oys?"

"Me oys," Irby said. "I dunno."

"What about your 'air?"

"Me 'air." Irby sounded stumped. "I dunno."

"What about ya rears?"

"Me years," Irby said. "Smaller anyway."

"What about teef?" Vitchitt said.

"Dunno. I have to fink about vat," Irby said.

And then, as they pushed through the door at Worthing, they began to talk about contraceptive devices.

Signs near Worthing said PLEASURE PARK and LEISURE CENTRE and FUN PALACE. In England, such signs spelled gloom. And yet Worthing, with its proud hotels and guest houses, did not look bad. It was a breezy, villagey place, with tree-lined streets, and like the folks who lived in it, Worthing was a little old and a little lame and a little stout, but it still had sparkle. It had the restful friendliness of a favorite uncle or aunt — lots of dignity but no airs, and a great deal of salty gentility and decent fatigue.

These south coast towns could look terribly visited. It gave them a hackneyed, worn-down appearance; then they were a bit frayed and exposed, and there were many more cars than people, and plenty of shows and always a sign saying COACHES WELCOME, and that too-loud heartiness and relentless querying to which the English were prone on holidays: Sleep all right? Enjoying yourself? Have a nice trip down? Find your friends from last year? Fancy a cup of tea? Like the show? and Hope the weather holds — isn't it glorious? The visited towns were stale with this chat, and at certain times of the day and every Sunday morning they looked very dusty and very empty.

Worthing was somewhat like that, but with an overlay of charm; Bognor Regis was this way to the core, and its look was that of a fairground — frenzied when it was busy and desolate when empty. I got there by walking to Goring-on-Sea, where the houses were bigger and smugger than Worthing's, and a pretty girl on the pier was selling a plump Dover sole to a man for a reasonable price. I walked another two miles to Ferring, then sat down on the village green because I had sore feet. Rather than turn the simple trip to Bognor into an ordeal, I took the train the rest of the way. Littlehampton was plain and semidetached and flinty, the sort of place in which the people did little but water their plants. Then across the River Arun (Arundel was upstream, but I had vowed: No castles) to Climping and pretty farms and a bright field deep with yellow mustard; and then Elmer and a Butlin's camp that served as a kind of warning that Bognor was around the bend.

Bognor was empty. Such places could look awful when they were empty. The wind came off the Channel, stirring the suds at the shore, and it blew through the town. Nothing moved, there were no trees, and anything loose had been blown away in the winter. There was just the sound of the wind sawing at the edges of houses and swelling under the eaves. And the emptiness was exaggerated by the presence of Butlin's Holiday Camp on the shore road into town. Butlin's was full and busy — shouts, the struggle of excitement, the sound of bugles — and so, in this empty town, it had the feel of a concentration camp. Everyone in Bognor was at Butlin's, but it was not easy to explain, because the camp was barracklike buildings fenced in like a prison, and the bright paint on its old-fashioned shapes served only to make it look more sinister. And this full camp in empty Bognor made Bognor seem lopsided.

I thought: One of these days I'll have a look inside a holiday camp when it's in full swing. Most of these places were on the coast, so I would be able to take my pick.

"Oh, yes, it's very quiet," Miriam Pottage said as she showed me to my room in the Camelot Guest House. Miss Pottage was in her sixties and had candy in a pocket of her apron, toffees and caramels, which she peeled — depositing the cellophane in another crinkling pocket — and ate continuously the way a chain-smoker smokes. "Mind you," she said, turning on the stairs and still sucking — the caramels gave her mouth a monkey jut—"it's always quiet this time of year."

It was what everyone said, but it never quite accounted for such great emptiness. I was the only person here at Camelot. It was a cold house, full of damp carpets. Miss Pottage explained that they turned the heating off at Easter, and then turned it on again, the downstairs rads, in October. It was a habit, like. And you could always put on a cardigan if you were feeling the cold — better that than running up an enormous bill at the electricity board. And even if it was uncomfortably cold, what was the point in heating a whole house in order to heat one person?

"But when the season's on," Miss Pottage said, "I'll be run off me feet."

She was one of those people who, when they speak, seem to be saying the thing for the third or fourth time, although I am sure that was not the case and it was only that she enunciated slowly. She made me seem clairvoyant, because whenever she opened her mouth I knew what was going to come out. She was a humorless soul, and she had infuriating patience. She was very kind to me and did not charge much for the room.

I liked the quiet here. It was the opposite of Brighton, and it was not elderly, like Worthing. Bognor was not at all bad — that was a pleasant discovery, like finding a virtue in a person no one liked. Bognor was restful; the Front was windswept and bare; the pier was shut; it had no pretensions; practically everyone was at Butlin's Holiday Camp, beyond the big fence.

Night fell on Bognor and turned the town into a village. The wind was still strong, but there was no sound of the sea and nothing salty in the air. I had dinner at the only chip shop in Bognor that was open — I was becoming knowledgeable about fish and chips and English breakfasts, and was starting to dislike them.

"I wrote a book about women because I am a woman and I understand them," a woman said on a radio that was playing behind a bar in a public house. There was more. "We have different bodies and different options. We are completely different from men. I actually quite like being a woman, and I think—"

"Claptrap!" Mr. Love, the barman, said and switched it off and made a face at me. "Makes me want to spew." He was washing glasses, angrily polishing them with a cloth wrapped around his wrist. "Load of bloody cobblers." I thought he was going to smash a glass. "Ever hear such rubbish?"

I agreed with him. I was always reassured when someone felt that his intelligence had been insulted by a radio or television program.

In another public house there was a television set. I drank and waited until the news came on. It was Falklands news but nothing specific.

At the bar, Mrs. Hykeham, with an old scarf yanked on her head, and puffy, smoker's eyes, said, "It's stupid for Britain to be killing fourteen-year-old boys in the Falklands. That's how old they are. There was this letter smuggled out, see. It was in the paper. It told how the little Argies were cold and scared and homesick."

She went on in this vein, and soon everyone in the bar was shouting at her. But it made her more contrary and she wouldn't budge. She seemed secretly pleased to be disagreeing with everyone, and she repeated the letter she had read and looked at the rest of them with contempt.

There was another woman in the bar. This was Mrs. Wackerfield. She had dog teeth and a way of staring. She said flatly that she was planning to go to the United States with her husband and children. She wanted to find work. Her husband knew everything about motors, and she knew about catering. Mrs. Wackerfield was not more than forty. Her husband, Richard, just sat there. He seemed to be thinking: Should Birdie be telling this bloke all these things?

"We'll go and stay for about five or six years," she said.

Her voice was London stuffy. She was drinking Pimm's.

"We'll make some money and then come home," she said.

She was very certain about everything.

"I want to go to California," she said. "It's lovely there, we've been twice. I don't want anything to do with New York, and Florida's getting spoiled. We'll sell up here and go, and start a business of some kind. We're not going to work for anyone else. We never do that. We'll save our money and then come home. I'd never think of staying there. We don't want that."

Mrs. Wackerfield continued to describe how she and Richard were going to settle in California for a while, because England was useless as far as work went, but it was her home, she said; she would come back. Richard said nothing. Now he was looking at me, perhaps wondering whether I objected to their presuming in this way. "We'll use your country for a few years and then ditch it when we've made our pile" — that was what they were saying. I did object to their presumption, but I kept my mouth shut.

I stayed in Bognor longer than I had planned. I grew to like Miss Pottage at Camelot. The beach was fine in the sunshine, and there was always an old man selling huge horrible whelks out of a wooden box on the Front. He said he caught them himself. It was sunny, but the shops were closed and the Front was deserted. The season hadn't started, people said.

I began to think that Bognor had been misrepresented. The oral tradition of travel in Britain was a shared experience of received opinion. Britain seemed small enough and discussed enough to be known at second hand. Dickens was known that way: it was an English trait to know about Dickens and Dickens' characters without ever having read him. Places were known in this same way. That was why Brighton had a great reputation and why Margate was avoided. Dover, people said, the white cliffs of Dover. And Eastbourne's lovely. And the Sink Ports, they're lovely, too. It was Dickens all over again, and with the same sort of distortions, the same prejudices, and some places they had all wrong.

"I don't know as much as I should about Dungeness," a man said to me, who didn't know anything about it at all. I went away laughing.

Broadstairs was serious, but Bognor was a joke. I was told, "It's like Edward the Seventh said" — it was George the Fifth—"his last words before he died. 'Bugger Bognor!' That's what I say." Bognor had an unfortunate name. Any English place name with bog or bottom in it was doomed. ("The bowdlerization of English place-names has been a steady development since the late eighteenth century. In Northamptonshire alone, Buttocks Booth became Booth-ville, Pisford became Pitsford, and Shitlanger was turned into Shut-langer.") Camber Sands had a nice rhythmical lilt and was seen as idyllic — but it wasn't; Bognor contained a lavatorial echo, so it was seen as scruffy — but it wasn't. All English people had opinions on which seaside places in England were pleasant and which were a waste of time. This was in the oral tradition. The English seldom traveled at random. They took well-organized vacations and held very strong views on places to which they had never been.