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

5. A Morning Train to the Isle of Wight

THE COAST for the fifty miles west of Bognor was full of pleats and tucks — harbors, channels, inlets, and Southampton Water, and the bays of Spithead. The coastal footpath around Selsey Bill gave out at one of the two Witterings. Beyond it were inconvenient islands and not enough causeways and a path made impossible by the scoops and cuts of all this water. There were no walkers here. This territory was for sailors — full of fine bays, friendly harbors, and the waterlogged geography of the Solent; all the blowing boats.

Just under the irregular coast was the Isle of Wight, shaped like the loose puzzle piece that most offshore islands resemble. I could reach it by train, taking the ferry from Portsmouth, and there was another train that went down the right-hand side of the island, from Ryde to Shanklin. I wanted to see what Henry James had called "that detestable little railway." This was the best way of skipping across the crumbs of land that made that part of the English coast from Bognor to Bournemouth so hard for the walker. I would simply take the morning train to the Isle of Wight.

I thought I might be the only passenger to Portsmouth, and was still convinced of it as we crossed the green fields to Chichester ("…a handsome Market Cross, erected in 1500, but much damaged by the Puritans") and Fishbourne, which was full of new mauve lilacs and booing children; but at Bosham, a middle-aged couple — the Lucketts — got on and seemed eager to tell me, but without appearing to boast, that they were going to Southampton to see the Queen Elizabeth II set sail for the Falklands.

"And of course we'll pop in and see my sister at the same time," Mrs. Luckett said, embarrassed by my lack of response. The Lucketts were off to wave plastic Union Jacks at a departing troopship — what was I supposed to do? Sing a chorus of "There'll Always Be an England"? "She's out at Hedge End in a maisonette. Her husband's in the transport business."

"By 'transport business' she means he's a lorry driver," Mr. Luckett said maliciously. He was not close to his brother-in-law. "Mad about CB radios," Mr. Luckett went on. "'A big ten-four to that rig, Rubber Duck.' It's the most awful cobblers."

"He travels all over the country," Mrs. Luckett said.

I said, "And you live in Bosham?"

"Bozzam," Mr. Luckett said, and I believed at the time that it was a different place.

I said, "I hope nothing happens to the Q.E. II." The Lucketts looked up, a little startled. "I mean, in the war." They looked even more alarmed. "This Falklands business."

They seemed a little calmer when I said that. You weren't supposed to say the war, but rather this Falklands business.

"She'll be fine," Mr. Luckett said.

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Luckett said.

They were very proud, but it also occurred to me that they were going all the way to Southampton mainly because it was a beautiful sunny day and because Mrs. Luckett's sister was nearby. They told themselves they were going to cheer the Q.E. II, but I had the impression that if it had been raining, they would not have gone.

There were apple blossoms all along this pretty line, and they looked like a brilliant form of knitting — bright blown-open stitches of white yarn fastened to rain-blackened boughs. I thought at Emsworth: What a nice old-fashioned station platform, freshly painted wood and a small fireplace in the waiting room.

Warblington was no more than a short platform — a halt behind a town, no station — and there was a man in a little narrow box selling tickets, and another man with a flag. Whenever I saw too many railwaymen and not many passengers, I thought: They're going to axe this train. The car was soon empty. The Lucketts changed at Havant for Southampton. I could have gotten off at Havant, too, and waited ten minutes and been back in Clapham Junction in time for lunch. That was another hard thing about traveling in England — the short distances, the fast trains, the easy access — always a clear shot to London — and the sad gravitational pull of home.

But I stuck to the train and went in search of some more Lucketts. Anyone else planning a send-off for British troops? I did not find anyone, but scratched on the train door was a recent message: The Argentines are Wankers — Bomb the Barstards.

***

After spending two hours in the city in 1879, Henry James concluded, "Portsmouth is dirty, but it is also dull." He had been there trying to confirm the "familiar theory that seaport towns abound in local color, in curious types, in the quaint and the strange." He found Portsmouth "sordid," and he did not soften toward the town until he saw the harbor.

History had not altered Portsmouth, much less enhanced it. Passing from Portsmouth and Southsea Station to Portsmouth Harbour Station, the train crossed Commercial Road. Charles Dickens was born on this road in 1812. But Dickens' birthplace was just a torrent of traffic on a thoroughfare that looked like the Balls Pond Road. This was the coast on which you saw a plaque saying, "In a House on This Spot, the Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote 'Grant, O Darkling Woods, My Sweet Repose,'" and you looked up and saw a gas station.

Portsmouth was associated with Nicholas Nickleby, H. G. Wells, and Captain Marryat. Charles II was married here, Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes here, and Rudyard Kipling was so unhappy here that, at the age of five, he told the hag who was looking after him that he wanted to strangle her, and for the rest of his life referred to that woman's residence as "the House of Desolation." But none of this made the town of Portsmouth visibly interesting, because nothing could. Like most British seaport towns, Portsmouth was its harbor. It was wrong to look behind the harbor for anything better.

This harbor was choppy with the crisscrossed wakes of gunboats coming and going, their flags flying and their sailors scrambling over their decks. I identified this activity with the Falklands news, and I assumed these boats were setting out that day for the South Atlantic. Portsmouth Harbour contained a flotilla of Royal Navy ships, giving solemn hoots on their horns. Looking north toward the Royal Dockyard I could see the topmost sections of the masts of H.M.S. Victory, but it was the gunboats in the harbor that were bucking the waves. These days, many harbors I saw looked self-important and purposeful and overcautious: they were battle-ready. The Falklands War depended almost entirely on the strength of the British fleet, and it had brought the cold excitement of patriotism to these harbors.

South of the harbor mouth, the Isle of Wight was a long flat shadow in the morning mist. I bought a ticket to Shanklin and boarded the ferry Southsea. It was a windy crossing of Spithead, the waves were blue-black and the sea froth was being whipped from their peaks. We sailed toward Ryde, which even at this distance I could tell was an old-fashioned place, for its skyline was church spires. And that was always a good sign, the steeples and spires; the most heartening aspect of any of these coastal towns was a skyline in which spires predominated. I liked walking into these places; I was always happier seeing church spires, even though I did not regard myself as religious and seldom entered a church. I was sometimes betrayed by this impression. In some towns the church had been sold and was now a craft center or a movie theater. What to do with a defunct church was always a problem in England. Muslims occasionally petitioned for the church to be sold to them so that they could turn it into a mosque, but the request was always turned down. It seemed too much like defilement to worship Allah at St. Cuthbert's. Instead, the church was made into a bingo hall, or else torn down and a gas station built in its place.

The Isle of Wight was too far from the mainland to be commercially useful. It was picturesque, it received visitors, old folks went there to retire. It was to be stared at and admired. Before I went there I imagined that it was like a tabletop, with a simple beauty — flat, and plenty of grass; a park planted in the ocean. I was surprised to see that Ryde was fairly large. It was Victorian brown brick, redder where it was more recent, stacked against the hillside — I had been wrong in imagining it flat — and Ryde had the coiled streets that were peculiar to the coastal towns on the Isle of Wight.

Henry James loathed the train here, calling it "a gross impertinence… an objectionable conveyance." The railway was so ugly and the island so pretty that the sight of this "obtrusive" thing was "as painful as it would be to see a pedlar's pack on the shoulders of a lovely woman."

It is an odd image, especially as there were many lovely women on the Isle of Wight when I was there, and as they were members of the Ramblers Association, they were wearing the sort of knapsacks that James found so painfully inappropriate. In fact, it singled them out as hearty and independent and easygoing. As for the detestable train, it was a great deal more comfortable and cheaper and less noisy than the numerous clumsy buses that crowded the island's roads. A hundred years ago the train looked like a foolish novelty, but now the narrow unimproved carriage roads were no more than dangerous chutes down which tourist buses and swaying double-deckers and plump long-distance coaches went much too fast, and on many roads only one vehicle could pass at a time. One of the most popular topics of conversation on the Isle of Wight was the dreadful traffic and the slow progress on the bad roads. People had come here intending to escape these terrors.

The train was a hand-me-down, or more properly another retiree: it had served its time on the London Underground and been taken out of service, and now it was in active retirement, plying back and forth from Ryde to Shanklin. It was from the thirties; it had that look, very plain and rather dark and full of handles and belts for straphangers; and it was rattly and had a London smell of cigarettes and brake dust. But it was still very serviceable. There were eighty girls in my car, heading for Sandown, a school outing from Hampshire: they were small fat-faced girls, flushed from shouting, with damp hair and steamy glasses. They had been yelling all the way across Spithead on the ferry. They were being watched with disapproval by exhausted-looking holiday people, the arriving couples on their way to Ventnor, and by middle-aged men carrying handbags. It hardly mattered that we were crossing the Isle of Wight. This train might have been going from Clapham to Waterloo on the Northern Line in London, the passengers were so shabby and unenthusiastic. The schoolgirls were schoolgirls. The English could appear to bring no joy at all to a vacation, and so they looked appropriate here on this old Underground train.

But now the metropolitan train was in the sticks, crossing fields that were bounded by low woods, and at the foot of a high down was Brading ("a decayed town," the guidebook said). There were real hills and real valleys near Sandown — who would have thought this small island could contain the best kind of English landscape? Shanklin was a large and breezy town, built on sloping streets. It was the last stop. I bought an apple and a sandwich — my usual lunch — and took them down to the beach to eat. The beach was some distance below the town. It was sunny enough today for me to sit on the sand and, like the elderly people on the benches behind me, and the old folks on the Esplanade, read the Falklands news in the paper. These days it was bombing missions and aerial dogfights, just the sort of thing to gladden the hearts of the army veterans on the park benches of Shanklin.

There were deep rural valleys all the way to Ventnor. I had decided to treat the Isle of Wight in the same way as England, and to make my way around the island's coast. Ventnor was an English resort in an Italian setting, the town tucked into bluffs and straggling along terraces and drooping from ledges. The way it cascaded from cliffs was Italian, and the balconies were Italian, and the tall windows, too.

I kept looking for the wilder, woodier stretches of coast or smaller settlements, but all I saw were piled-up towns and congested harbors and, on remote clifftops, sprawling hotels and stairways hacked into the seawall. The Isle of Wight's southern coast was entirely high cliffs, so it had been civilized with stairs. But this built-upon coast was interesting, and whatever else one could say about the appalling traffic, it was also interesting, as the shallys in Hove were, and the people staring seaward from their cars, and the gatherings of old folks in their seaside settlements.

"The roads here are horrible," Alf Doggett said. He had come down from London, Hither Green actually— Ivver Grain was what he said — and had expected Ventnor to be different. "It's a blooming disgrace."

Rose Doggett wondered whether they wouldn't have been better off in Cornwall. She had liked Newquay, on that one visit.

"You can't move here. It's all buses. They're fifty years behind the times," Alf said. "You don't think it's serious."

I had been smiling. I cultivated complainers.

I said, "No, no, I do think it's serious! Please go on."

"And there's the caravans," Rose said.

"Don't mention caravans," Alf said, and tapped his chest. "Me blood pressure."

We were on a bench, on one of the Ventnor ledges, facing down at the surfy beach. Because of its position in the steep notch, Ventnor seemed both smaller and cozier than sprawling Shanklin. But the Doggets, Alf and Rose, had become glum, talking about the traffic. And now they were talking about "the mainland," as if we were far at sea and not twenty minutes by ferry to Portsmouth.

The Thackwoods were on an adjacent bench, sharing a Mars bar, as they had done most afternoons since retiring to Ventnor from Bolton in Lancashire four years ago. I had seen Mr. Thackwood — Herbert — prick up his ears at Alf's "blooming disgrace." He knew we were talking about traffic. Anyway, it was the usual topic.

"It's the Council," Mr. Thackwood said.

Alf Doggett uncrossed his legs and smiled at Mr. Thackwood, who did not smile back. He was not being unfriendly; he was merely preparing to say "I've had it up to here," and he could not do that smiling.

"The Council's stupid," Mr. Thackwood said.

The Doggetts nodded. Alf said, "I couldn't agree more."

"I used to roon a big one — bigger than this blewdy Council, I can tell you," Mr. Thackwood said. "They don't know what they're doing."

"They're flipping useless," Alf said.

Mr. Thackwood said, "They don't give a booger."

Now Marion Thackwood spoke to Rose Doggett, confidentially, woman to woman. She said, "They don't give a ding."

They settled down to a long pleasant afternoon of complaining, and I was sure a friendship would emerge from it, and then there would be tea at the Doggetts' and Scrabble at the Thackwoods', Marion would encourage Rose to join the Women's Institute, and Alf and Herbert would take the coach into Ryde to watch football. At Christmas, there might be a glass of sherry for the Thackwoods when the Doggetts had them over to meet their son Ted and his wife and the two grandchildren, Keith and Amanda, and then they'd all look at Ventnor and say, "It's not half bad here, really. Bit of sunshine, no frost. And it's snowing in London!"

That was how I left them — making friends and tearing into the County Council. And I thought: This is better than castles.

I went via St. Catherine's — more English cottages, another Italian setting — and across the cliffs to Blackgang.

Blackgang was associated with smugglers — few places on the British coast did not claim to be the haunts of wreckers or moon-cussers. The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality, and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring. The Smugglers' Inn was one of the commonest names for a bar on the coast. Smuggling was fun, smuggling was blameless, smuggling was British.

There was a Fantasy Theme Park at Blackgang, with statues and murals and tableaux of smuggling; there were books about it and signs showing the way to smugglers' caves, and, of course, there were inns and public houses associated with this activity.

"Look, Ron," Penny Battley said. She was on a Blue Sky Tour from Yorkshire. "Smooglers."

The statues depicted cutthroats in black eyepatches, with tattoos on their arms, carrying casks of brandy.

Daniel Defoe was near here in 1724. He wrote, "I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling, and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End to Cornwall." A hundred years later, Richard Ayton, in A Journey Around Great Britain, wrote how he would fall into conversation with men on the coast and then, after talking about fishing, they "reverted with pride to those days when a little honest smuggling cheered a man's heart… with a drop of unadulterated gin. 'But these are cruel times,' they observed, 'and the Lord only knows what we shall be obliged to give up next.'"

Where there was smuggling, there was usually the plundering of wrecks, another piece of thievery that was regarded as having simple manly virtues and needing no more justification than the theory of finders-keepers. When wrecks were few, ships were lured onto rocks with false lights, and then the wreckers, village hearties, would swarm from the coast and pick them clean. Ayton met these men, too. He wrote, "Amongst themselves, a man who had robbed a vessel of property to the amount of fifty pounds might pass for a very honest fellow; but if he were known to have stolen a pocket handkerchief on shore, he would be shunned as a thief. They talk of a good wreck-season as they do a good mackerel season, and thank Providence for both."

I grew a little tired of being asked to enjoy the romance of smuggling. Like smugglers today, they were vicious cheats and bullies, who sneaked at night and squealed when they were caught. I could not see them as harmless, and at the very least they were grubby and mendacious. But they were praised for their recklessness and their courage. Meanwhile, back at the South Goodwin lightship and on the Sussex coast and throughout the tight bays and coves of south Cornwall, men were still smuggling for a living. Illegal immigrants, seasick Pakistanis, and puking Bangladeshis were being sneaked ashore near Deal, and cigarettes into Broadstairs, and bootleg brandy into Cornwall from Brittany, "but don't tell anyone I told you," my source, Arthur Tulley, said.

It was twenty miles from Ventnor to Freshwater Bay, but it was an empty path. The fields were open and very wide, and the long hills had views for miles, so that approaching I could see the high wind from the Channel giving the wheat the look of a riptide, and, when it lessened to a breeze, silken currents were stirred in the tassels.

I walked to Freshwater Bay and kept walking, across Tennyson Down (the poet once lived nearby and so had the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron) to Needle Down and West High Down, the westernmost point of the Isle of Wight. There, a series of chalk columns rose out of the sea and were known to sailors as the Needles. There were parts of those downs which were nearly five hundred feet high, and I could easily see the sun setting behind Swanage, seventeen miles away. Then I walked back to Freshwater Bay, and there I stayed the night.

"I work about ten hours a day," Daphne Wrennell said at the Albion Hotel, "and I get an hour off in the morning and about three hours in the afternoon. Wednesdays are free. I'm from Wales — me mum's Welsh — we're all from somewhere different here at the Albion. I've been coming back here every year for the past four years to work. It's quite nice, really. I know it's not a real job, but you get two months off a year when the hotel's closed — no, we don't get paid for that. That's in the winter. I have a bit of rest then. I was thinking of doing some traveling next winter. I might go to Turkey. I always fancied Turkey. I got some brochures — it's not very expensive, is it? I was thinking of going alone. Think I should?"

I urged her to take a friend and gave her the usual cautions.

The sun was shining the next morning, so I decided to walk the back roads to Yarmouth. It seemed to me that there was little traffic on the island, but that the roads were so crooked and narrow the few cars were often held up, and the buses were so large they went slowly, causing obstructions. I was told that it was possible to whip around the island in an hour and a half, but that the buses prevented this.

"In my youth, we used to call those 'sharabangs,'" a man told me. We had stopped to watch a bus that had become jammed against a curve in order to let a horse and buggy go past. Querying faces with white noses and eyeglasses appeared at the windows of the bus.

"Sharabangs," the man repeated. This was Francis Pitchford, an accountant from Surrey. He had a cottage here and would be retiring to it soon. As I listened to him on the road that morning, it struck me that many people who appeared to be reminiscing were actually gloating or boasting, or even lying.

"I can remember," Mr. Pitchford said, "the two-tier buses, very big ones, drawn by horses. Now that shows you how old I am."

But he was not very old, certainly not much over sixty — and that was nothing to boast about. I did not believe him, but I kept my mouth shut, and I let him say, "Oh, this was way before your time, young fellow."

There was a kind of hostility in this, something like I've been here longer than you, a very English way of putting down a stranger, telling you that he was older than you were. I had heard Englishmen pretend to be older than they were in order to score a point. It was only the old in England who were allowed to be opinionated.

He was still grinning at the stranded bus when I walked on.

I saw a card in the window of a general store farther up the road. It said,

Catholics — Remember These Words?

IN NOMINE PATRIS ET FILII ET SPIRITU SANCTU…

followed by holy mass, which until a few years ago could be heard in every Catholic church in the land.

The same holy mass is still celebrated privately in Newport on the 3rd Sunday of the month.

Telephone: Newport 4220

It made the Latin mass seem like a secret ceremony, and indeed the tone of the note hinted at a clandestine service, calling up images of early Christians and whispered consecrations. I wondered if on the Isle of Wight there was not an old-style unreformed Catholicism taking hold, and I longed to know more. I found a public phonebox and dialed the number, but I got no reply. It was perhaps an example of my aimlessness that I would gladly have changed my plans and walked to Newport to find out about the secret Catholics if I had been able to raise anyone with the phone call.

The path through the woods to Yarmouth was straight and level; once it had been a railway line, and now it was a cinder track, used mostly by hackers. A large bird alighted on the path. I took out my binoculars and saw it was an English jay, Garrulus glandarius, large, beautifully colored, noisy, and very shy. It flew up suddenly, as if propelled by its harsh squawk. It had been startled by a young woman coming down the path toward me.

I knew she would be frightened of me. Two women had been murdered ("savagely") in some woods near Aldershot the day before. It had been reported by the papers and on the television news. These days everyone watched the news, because of the Falklands War, so there was an unusual consciousness of public events. It was not explained what "savagely" meant, but anyone could guess: a razor or a knife, probably; and the woman-hating slasher was almost certainly a solitary man with a plausible face, wearing old clothes, his weapon in his knapsack, and oily hiker's shoes on his feet — very likely a man like me, on a path like this.

She saw me and froze. I wanted to go another way, but there was a marsh beside the path, so I had to stick to this route and walk right past her. I tried to be jaunty, but that brought a look of terror to her face. She looked away, but there was an intensity in her alert movements that was like panic — she was not breathing; she was listening. She was about twenty-two and her fear had made her features very plain. I wanted to say: It's not me!

I said, "Good morning," as I passed her.

She mumbled something in a frightened voice. I felt sorry for her, and did her the favor of hurrying away. I looked back: she was running down the path toward Freshwater.

Yarmouth was a fine place, very small and solid, made of large stones the damp had turned green on the low pretty buildings, with proud streets and a little compact ruin of a castle ("The Arbella sailed from Yarmouth for Massachusetts in 1630"). It was a very private town on a cozy harbor and it had a long slender pier. It was an ancient place, almost as old as the island itself; it faced north. The ferry was just about to leave, so I jumped aboard.

It was here, on the Solent, that Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar," but in the morning it was hard to imagine "Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me!" and the poet recommending his soul to Heaven. The sun was sparkling on the water behind the yachts tipping toward Yarmouth — a Force Eight was blowing, and I could see the collapsed Hurst Castle to the west, jutting on a spit of land from Hampshire, its arches like a set of broken dentures. There was a lovely lighthouse beside it, a white pawn on the water.

In this way I left the Isle of Wight and sailed on the ferry to Lymington, with its clusters of masts and the grass growing around the harbor. It reminded me of a Cape Cod town, a village on the sea, like Barnstable or Sandwich. It had a little round harbor, and the train went right down to the pier, where the ferry docked.

Traveling to Brockenhurst from Lymington — only five of us boarded this little train: its days were numbered, surely — I thought how easy it was for me to travel around Britain. When the path ran out there were trains or buses, and they left on time. This reflection was prompted by the arrival of the train immediately after the ferry docked in this fairly insignificant place. Money was easy — I could use personal checks or get money at any bank, even in a village such as Lymington. People were generally efficient and helpful, and some were friendly; everyone spoke English; I was never in danger; it was impossible for me to get lost. Was it any wonder that England was the most widely explored country on earth? In a sense, nothing was unknown in England — it was just variously interpreted.

But I knew that I needed this ease — the language, the money, the safety — because it was the subtlest culture on earth to explain. The English found foreigners funny because foreigners weren't English, and because it was impossible for anyone to become English. To an American, this attitude was itself funny and puzzling. But even after eleven years of groping for explanations, I was still groping, and on the coast I was in unfamiliar places. What a relief that everything worked so well and I was never afraid!

We were at the edge of the New Forest, and the heather and gorse and its flatness gave it the look of a moor. The wild ponies were not much higher than the new ferns ("Adders and lizards are not uncommon"). At Brockenhurst, a convenient railway junction because it was in the middle of nowhere, I changed for the Bournemouth train. The train did not hurtle toward Bournemouth, but rather dawdled pleasantly — at the pretty village of Sway, with an old-style railway platform that, in this spring heat, looked like a setting for the opening of a story by Saki; at Hinton Admiral, which sounded like the name of a butterfly or a dahlia, and was as lovely as its name; at Christchurch, after crossing the broad pastures and wheatfields; and Pokesdown, which was densely settled, a suburb of Bournemouth, the next stop. I got out at Central Station and walked to the Front.

The chines, or ridges, of Bournemouth supported row upon row of hotels and guest houses. Bournemouth's good weather — the best in Britain — had turned it into a resort, with pretty parks and ugly buildings, bistros and discos. It looked like a country town that became a city too quickly, but though it wore its newness awkwardly, it had enough parks and promenades to justify its reputation for being a stroller's city. It was, heart and soul, a seaside resort, and so inevitably full of shufflers and people staring and vaguely smiling. And all those hotels — thousands, it seemed, on the toast-colored crumbling cliffs. It did not have the tone of Eastbourne, which it resembled in some ways, but it was undeniably prosperous. It was crowded, and yet its heights and the winding streets of its hills made it bearable. Viewed from West Cliff it looked the epitome of a south coast resort, occupying about fifteen miles of shoreline. Bournemouth was also famous for its golf courses. Golf was a coastal sport, not to say passion, but that was not so surprising, since "links" was an old word that described the kind of sandy and turfy seashore we associate with a golf course.

People sat silently in cars, eating bananas, chewing sandwiches, and reading the gutter press: argies lose two! was the headline today — two planes or two ships. All the headlines exulted when Argentina suffered casualties, but British losses were somewhat understated, and most of the time it was reported in the language of British sports reporting. It was sunny but windy on the Front at Bournemouth, and people were variously dressed. I saw Ivy in her old overcoat and gloves and woolly scarf walking past Susan, supine in her bikini. Russell was a black boy with red hair and four earrings in each ear and a futile and obscure tattoo on his dusky arm; he was shadowing Kim, fifteen years old, with Billy very clearly tattooed on the side of her neck. The retired and the unemployed, the very old and the very young — Bournemouth had them in common with all the other seaside places I had seen. Middle-aged people wearing knapsacks were rather rare, which was perhaps the reason I received so many stares.

I lingered at the shallys to look inside and examine the furnishings (here a toaster, there a potted plant). It was too windy to read the newspaper outside. Most of the shally people were drinking tea, and some were sunbathing with all their clothes on, their hands stuck in their pockets and their faces pinched at the glaring sun.

I walked along West Cliff and down a zigzag path to the Promenade. I was not quite sure where I was headed, but this was the right direction — west: I had been going west for weeks. I walked past Alum Chine, where Stevenson wrote "Dr. Jekyll" (Bournemouth was the most literary place, with the ghosts of Henry James, Paul Verlaine, Tess Darbeyfield, Mary Shelley, and a half a dozen others haunting its chines) and then, looking west, and seeing the two standing rocks on the headland across the bay, called Old Harry and Old Harry's Wife, I decided to walk to Swanage, about fourteen miles along the coast.

My map showed a ferry at a place called Sandbanks, the entrance to Poole Harbour. I wondered whether it was running — the season had not started — so, not wishing to waste my time, I asked a man on the Promenade.

"I don't know about any ferry," he said.

He was an old man and had gray skin and he looked fireproof. His name was Desmond Bowles, and I expected him to be deaf. But his hearing was very good. He wore a black overcoat.

"What are those boys doing?" he demanded.

They were windsurfing, I explained.

"All they do is fall down," he said.

One of the pleasures of the coast was watching windsurfers teetering and falling into the cold water, and trying to climb back and falling again. This sport was all useless struggle.

"I've just walked from Pokesdown—"

That was seven miles away.

"— and I'm eighty-six years old," Mr. Bowles said.

"What time did you leave Pokesdown?"

"I don't know."

"Will you walk it again?"

"No," Mr. Bowles said. But he kept walking. He walked stiffly, without pleasure. His feet were huge, he wore old shiny bulging shoes, and his hat was crushed in his hand. He swung the hat for balance and faced forward, panting at the Promenade. "You can walk faster than me — go on, don't let me hold you up."

But I wanted to talk to him: eighty-six and he had just walked from Pokesdown! I asked him why.

"I was a stationmaster there, you see. Pokesdown and Boscombe — those were my stations. I was sitting in my house — I've got a bungalow over there" — he pointed to the cliff—"and I said to myself, 'I want to see them again.' I took the train to Pokesdown and when I saw it was going to be sunny I reckoned I'd walk back. I retired from the railways twenty-five years ago. My father was in the railways. He was transferred from London to Portsmouth, and of course I went with him. I was just a boy. It was 1902."

"Where were you born?"

"London," he said.

"Where, in London?"

Mr. Bowles stopped walking. He was a big man. He peered at me and said, "I don't know where. But I used to know."

"How do you like Bournemouth?"

"I don't like towns," he said. He started to walk again. He said, "I like this."

"What do you mean?"

He motioned with his crumpled hat, swinging it outward.

He said, "The open sea."

It was early in my trip, but already I was curious about English people in their cars staring seaward, and elderly people in deck chairs all over the south coast watching waves, and now Mr. Bowles, the old railwayman, saying "I like this… the open sea." What was going on here? There was an answer in Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, an unusual and brilliant — some critics have said eccentric — analysis of the world of men in terms of crowds. There are crowd symbols in nature, Canetti says — fire is one, and rain is another, and the sea is a distinct one. "The sea is multiple, it moves, and it is dense and cohesive" — like a crowd—"Its multiplicity lies in its waves" — the waves are like men. The sea is strong, it has a voice, it is constant, it never sleeps, "it can soothe or threaten or break out in storms. But it is always there." Its mystery lies in what it covers: "Its sublimity is enhanced by the thought of what it contains, the multitudes of plants and animals hidden within it." It is universal and all-embracing; "it is an image of stilled humanity; all life flows into it and it contains all life."

Later in his book, when he is dealing with nations, Canetti describes the crowd symbol of the English. It is the sea: all the triumphs and disasters of English history are bound up with the sea, and the sea has offered the Englishman transformation and danger. "His life at home is complementary to life at sea: security and monotony are its essential characteristics."

"The Englishman sees himself as a captain," Canetti says: this is how his individualism relates to the sea.

So I came to see Mr. Bowles, and all those old south coast folk staring seaward, as sad captains fixing their attention upon the waves. The sea murmured back at them. The sea was a solace. It contained all life, of course, but it was also the way out of England — and it was the way to the grave, seaward, out there, offshore. The sea had the voice and embrace of a crowd, but for this peculiar nation it was not only a comfort, representing vigor and comfort. It was an end, too. Those people were looking in the direction of death.

Mr. Bowles was still slogging along beside me. I asked him if he had fought in the First World War.

"First and Second," he said. "Both times in France." He slowed down, remembering. He said, "The Great War was awful… it was terrible. But I wasn't wounded. I was in it for four years."

"But you must have had leave," I said.

"A fortnight," he said, "in the middle."

Mr. Bowles left me at Canford Cliffs, and I walked on to Sandbanks. The ferry was running — they called it "the floating bridge," and it resembled a barge shuttling on a pair of chains across the harbor mouth of Poole. I crossed and stepped onto an empty mile of sand dunes and scrub, called Studland Heath. It was an old windblown place. There were lovers on this heath, plainly copulating in the sandy craters. I walked on, past men standing up in waist-high heather. Some were naked and watchful. I took them to be perverts. Some stood on hillocks and just stared into the middle distance. The land was as flat as a floor. And it was littered with blowing paper — magazine pages, which I examined and found to be pornographic. In the remotest parts of this wild place there were girlie magazines and book pages, some of them torn into small pieces. I supposed that lonely men had taken them here, crept into the dunes by the sea, and examined them, feeling safe and hidden.

I was uneasy on this part of the coast path. It was not only the violence of the magazines. It was the wind, the dry grass, the desolation, the solitary standing men. It was one of a number of places on the coast where I expected to happen upon a dead body — decomposed, a torso, with missing limbs.

It was better, greener as I climbed higher and walked over Ballard Down to Swanage, a small bright town on a sweep of bay.

***

"The trouble with Swanage is that it's not on the way to anywhere," Sally Trubshaw said. Miss Trubshaw owned a public house. She had a Great Dane, which she fed prawn-flavored potato chips. She had only recently come to Swanage, but she said that few people ever passed through it. "That's why business is so bad."

Places in which business was bad were often especially pleasant. Swanage had an atmosphere of convalescence — fresh air and fishing boats and wind-scoured streets. It had grown a little over the years, but it had not been modernized. The train no longer ran from Wareham. It was the sort of small half-asleep seaside town that was perfect after a long walk.

That night, after I wrote my diary, I went into a pub and asked people: How far to Weymouth on the coastal path?

"It'll take you six days," Ted Witchell said. "It's all up and down."

"Two weeks," Lester Pride said, and wagged his head at me. "You like it up and down, do you?"

"I like it straight," I said.

This delighted Lester Pride.

"The path," I said.

"Listen to him!" Lester Pride said, and ordered me a drink.

He was wearing a sweatshirt that said LIFEGUARD in large letters and, under it, Beach Boys Club.

"It's the biggest faggots' club in California," he explained. He took a little bow. "You like it?"

I said it was very nice. An English person would wear a sweatshirt saying Penn State and regard it as the height of fashion that year. English style was full of backhanded compliments.

Lester Pride went to the window.

"There's a policeman outside. He's going to come in and arrest you for being drunk in charge of your leather jacket."

I was wearing my all-purpose leather jacket and my oily hiker's shoes.

"Where did you get that jacket! I hate it! My wife used to wear leather things all the time. I couldn't stand it! Which reminds me" — and now he addressed everyone at the bar—"celebration tomorrow, my decree nisi. Champagne for everyone!"

This was greeted with general approval, but Lester Pride just shrugged and stepped closer to me and said in a kind of mock-confidential way, "I run a pub not far from here, right? Listen, no one in two hundred years has ever lost money running it — except me! I'm going broke — I hate it. Why not come over and have a drink right — oh, God"—

I had downed my drink and was preparing to go back to my hotel.

"— you're going to walk to bloody Weymouth. You're just about to say you've got to get to bed early so you can bore everyone stiff with talk about rocks and interesting rock formations! Oh, Jesus, please forget it. Your leather jacket will get up and start without you — or those shoes, look at them, aren't they adorable — and you can catch up with them as they go hopping along the path. You Yanks are such—"

I left Swanage at nine the next morning, a lovely sunny day, and walked to Durlston Head. Below were the Tilly Whim Caves — more smuggler stories. I walked on, a little inland, so that I would not have to go up and down the bluffs. The gorse bushes had bright yellow flowers and the land was open — it was like traipsing around the edge of a great country, on top of its sliced-off side. I went across Dancing Ledge, and through Seacombe, and up Winspit, and various notches in the coast with steep terraces, and valleys of sheep browsing under ivy-strangled hawthorns. These terraces, the ridges of the edge of the valley, were caused by plowing six hundred years ago. At the village of Worth Matravers, I read that these furrows were called "strip lychetts," and the tourist sign said, "The need to plough such steep terraces was probably lessened after the dramatic population decline caused by the Black Death of 1348–9." Most of these Dorset villages were a great deal smaller than they had once been, and they had never recovered from the plague of the fourteenth century — nor had they forgotten it. The plague burying grounds were still clearly marked.

After lunch at the Square and Compass — the inn sign had something to do with the quarrying of local stone, a type of shelly limestone called Purbeck marble — I walked across a large headland called St. Alban's Head and hiked to a pretty bay, Chapman's Pool. On my way there I met Joan and Reg Flanchford. They were crossing a pasture.

"She's got a plastic hip," Reg Flanchford said.

They hurried behind me to the stile. I stepped aside and let the woman climb it.

"That's a plastic hip," Reg said.

Joan Flanchford tried to look dauntless.

"Put your best foot forward," Reg said.

Then Joan was on the other side, and I was making tracks for Houns-tout Cliff, which was almost vertical for a hundred and seventy-five feet, but full of birds. The coast cut in and led me up and down and took me past a waterfall splashing into the sea and it foamed on the gray shale foreshore that was scored in straight squares, like great flat paving stones.

The sun and wind made the long grass flicker like fire on the Kimmeridge Ledges. I walked these cliffs through the hot afternoon and did not meet another soul. There were pastures on the cliffs, and just to the left of the overgrown path two hundred vertical feet of gull-clawed air to the sliding surf, and the whole ocean beyond. This was the most beautiful stretch of coast I had seen so far, and I was alone on it. My happiness was greatly increased by the thought that I did not have the slightest idea where I was going. I always felt I was safe — everything would be fine — if I stayed on the coast.

There was a tower at the edge of the cliff ahead. It stood on its own; it was attached to nothing; it looked like a ruined lighthouse. This was at Kimmeridge Bay. A man with a pamphlet, named Ever-creech, told me that it was called the Clavel Tower and that it was almost two hundred years old. Clavel was a clergyman and also a star-gazer. He had used the tower for his astronomy. It was a delicate structure, and the steeps and headlands of this coast made it seem more delicate, because there was no other building near it.

Just inland there was a parking lot. Most of the people were in their cars, staring out to sea, but some others were tramping around and smiling and looking winded.

I sat down on the grass below the tower. That noise was not the sea — it was the booming of big guns. Just west of the bay my map labeled the next six miles Danger Area. It was another army firing range, and they were at it today — presumably practicing for the Falklands. I walked into Gaulter Gap and saw that red flags were flying at the onward path: no entry.

My detour took me inland, via Corfe Castle and Wareham and some tiny Dorset villages. I found some friends. I ate spaghetti. I drank scrumpy. I listened to the Stranglers — their current hit was about the pleasures of heroin. I made my way back to the coast, stepping onto it again at Lulworth Cover, on the other side of the firing range.

Then it was so steep and tedious that I could not enjoy the odd landscape features — the circularity of the cove, the comic look of Durdle Door, the precipice at Bat's Head. I hurried on the path toward Weymouth, where I wanted to spend the night. But it was a long hike. I headed for the cliffs at White Nothe — flesh-pale, corpselike stone — and then above Ringstead Bay to Burning Cliff, a ledge of combustible shale. John Miles, from the village of Loders, said the cliff had actually been on fire for many years and then mysteriously went out. There was still oil in Dorset. In places it seeped out of the ground. In the 1970s some of Dorset's most beautiful countryside was being eagerly offered to oil companies by local farmers. I once told a farmer that if they didn't watch out, the peaceful valleys of Dorset would be covered with hideous oil rigs. This farmer, Lew Swineham, said, "They be having lights on them, those oil wells," and he smiled with satisfaction. "Like Christmas trees." Somehow, the oil boom missed Dorset, which made farmers like Lew Swineham very cross. For a brief period they thought they might have seen their last of muddy boots and wet silage.

"The bus just went," Roger said at the Smugglers' Inn in Osmington Mills. "That's the last one. Have a meat pie instead."

Weymouth and the Isle of Portland had been in view almost since Lulworth, for ten miles or so. They lay in the distance, through the haze, at sea level. But up here, above Weymouth Bay, there were holiday camps on the bluffs, looking more than ever like prisons. I decided that the posher they were, the more they looked like concentration camps. These were built for strength: solid walls and concrete paths and chain-link fences and barbed wire and signs warning trespassers of guard dogs. On this sunny day, fully clothed people slept on deck chairs. They had scowling, sunburned faces. I could hear them snoring from forty yards away.

Now it seemed downhill, across some cliffs and down a gully to a seawall. I walked on top of the wall the last few miles into Weymouth. I liked Weymouth immediately. It was grand without being pompous. It had a real harbor. It was full of boats. All its architecture was intact, the late-Georgian terraces facing the Esplanade and the sea, and cottages and old warehouses on the harbor. I liked the look of the houses, their elegance, and the smell of fish and beer about them. I walked around. There was plenty of space. The weather was perfect. I thought: I could live here. That thought made me happy, but the next day I left my hotel and just kept walking.