The Kingdom by the Sea

Table of Contents

Title Page

Front

1. The 11:33 to Margate

2. An Evening Train to Deal

3. The Branch Line to Hastings

4. The 18:11 to Bognor Regis

5. A Morning Train to the Isle of Wight

6. The Inter-City 125 to Plymouth

7. The Cornish Explorer

8. The Branch Line to Barnstaple

9. The West Somerset Railway

10. The 16:28 to Tenby

11. The 10:32 to Criccieth

12. The 20:20 to Llandudno Junction

13. The 16:01 to Southport

14. The West Cumbria Line

15. The Boat Train to Ulster

16. The 10:23 to Londonderry

17. The 15:53 to Belfast

18. The 16:30 to Mallaig

19. The Flyer to Cape Wrath

20. The 14:40 to Aberdeen

21. The 9:51 to Leuchars Junction

22. The Last Train to Whitby

23. Disused Railway Line

24. The North Norfolk Railway

25. Striking Southend

The Kingdom by the Sea

A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

Paul Theroux

A MARINER BOOK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON • NEW YORK

First Mariner Books edition 2006

Copyright © 1983 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections

from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Theroux, Paul.

The kingdom by the sea.

1. Great Britain—Description and travel.

2. Railroad travel—Great Britain. 3. Theroux, Paul.

1. Title.

DA632.T46 1983 914.1'04858 83-10838

ISBN 0-395-34645-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-65895-4 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-618-65895-5 (pbk.)

Printed in the United States of America

DOM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

I dedicate this Book to those friends of mine in Britain who, giving me a welcome I must ever gratefully and proudly remember, left my judgment free; and who, loving their country, can bear the truth, when it is told good-humoredly and in a kind spirit.

(Adapted from

CHARLES DICKENS'

dedication to

American Notes,

1842)

...it takes passionate pilgrims, vague aliens, and other disinherited persons to appreciate the "points" of this admirable country.

—HENRY JAMES,

English Hours

This is one of the lessons of travel—that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.

—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,

Across the Plains

Contents

1. The 11:33 to Margate 1

2. An Evening Train to Deal 16

3. The Branch Line to Hastings 34

4. The 18:11 to Bognor Regis 53

5. A Morning Train to the Isle of Wight 65

6. The Inter-City 125 to Plymouth 87

7. The Cornish Explorer 101

8. The Branch Line to Barnstaple 121

9. The West Somerset Railway 131

10. The 16:28 to Tenby 142

11. The 10:32 to Criccieth 159

12. The 20:20 to Llandudno Junction 175

13. The 16:01 to Southport 188

14. The West Cumbria Line 201

15. The Boat Train to Ulster 212

16. The 10:23 to Londonderry 227

17. The 15:53 to Belfast 243

18. The 16:30 to Mallaig 254

19. The Flyer to Cape Wrath 269

20. The 14:40 to Aberdeen 283

21. The 9:51 to Leuchars Junction 291

22. The Last Train to Whitby 304

23. Disused Railway Line 317

24. The North Norfolk Railway 328

25. Striking Southend 340

1. The 11:33 to Margate

EVERYONE seemed to be going to China that year, or else writing rude things about the Arabs, or being frank about Africa. I had other things on my mind. After eleven years in London I still had not been much in Britain. I had not set foot in Wales or even East Anglia. People joked about Bognor Regis. I had never been to Bognor Regis. But I joked about it too! And where was Porlock? And was Northern Ireland a nightmare and Scotland breathtaking? And what exactly were the Lincolnshire Wolds? What I knew of Britain I had got from books. Britain was the most written-about country in the world. That was the problem, really. You read one book about China and you think you've got a good idea of the place; you read twenty books about Britain, even English Traits and Rural Rides, and you know you haven't got the slightest.

I lived in London for half the year, and the rest of the time went away. I had come to dislike the city. "A man who is tired of London is tired of life"—no, I was tired of hunting for parking places, tired of the crowds and the scribbled-on walls, the dirty old buildings and the ugly new ones. I was sick of London traffic and London presumptions and London smugness. And the gray underwear on London clotheslines hanging limply under baggy clouds made me sad. London did not regard itself as a city but rather as an independent republic. Sometimes it seemed as big as Belgium; it could take a whole day to cross it by car. I was also bored with London books, which had titles like Britain: What Went Wrong? and Is Britain Dying? London people said that what was wrong with Britain was wrong with the western hemisphere. Like many other London people I did not really live in Britain. This floating kingdom was a foreign country.

Britain was nearby, but "nearby" was misleading. Distances in Britain were meaningless—so many places were so hard to get to, or else hated outsiders, or were names of villages that no longer existed: so much of Britain lay buried. I knew a little bit about some parts, because in Britain there was an oral tradition that took the place of travel, like the Bognor jokes and Scotland was breathtaking and Cornwall was creepy and South Wales was awful and Rye was ever so lovely. Everyone appeared to know everything. It was word of mouth. Scotland had the Highlands, Cambridgeshire the Fens, and Norfolk the Broads—the words called up peaks and thickets and puddles. Northerners sounded to me as though they had learned English in language labs. In London, I had once mistaken a Welshman for a Dutchman—something in his inquiring voice. As for the Irish, I had never personally known anyone in London who took an Irishman seriously unless the Irishman was armed. "Bogtrotters," people usually said. "Micks are friendly!" I had never met a soul in London who had been to Northern Ireland.

I did not know anything, and I was beginning to think that I was as bad and lazy as everyone else.

Once, from behind a closed door, I heard an Englishwoman exclaim with real pleasure, "They are junny, the Yanks!" And I crept away and laughed to think that an English person was saying such a thing. And I thought: They wallpaper their ceilings! They put little knitted bobble-hats on their soft-boiled eggs to keep them warm! They don't give you bags in supermarkets! They say sorry when you step on their toes! Their government makes them get a hundred-dollar license every year for watching television! They issue drivers' licenses that are valid for thirty or forty years—mine expires in the year 2011! They charge you for matches when you buy cigarettes! They smoke on buses! They drive on the left! They spy for the Russians! They say "nigger" and "Jewboy" without flinching! They call their houses Holmleigh and Sparrow View! They sunbathe in their underwear! They don't say "You're welcome"! They still have milk bottles and milkmen, and junk-dealers with horse-drawn wagons! They love candy and Lucozade and leftovers called bubble-and-squeak! They live in Barking and Dorking and Shellow Bowells! They have amazing names, like Mr. Eatwell and Lady Inkpen and Major Twaddle and Miss Tosh! And they think we're funny?

The longer I lived in London, the more I came to see how much of Englishness was bluff and what wet blankets they could be. You told an Englishman you were planning a trip around Britain and he said, "It sounds about as much fun as chasing a mouse around a pisspot." They could be deeply dismissive and self-critical. "We're awful," they said. "This country is hopeless. We're never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly." But being self-critical in this way was also a tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.

And when an English person said "we," he did not mean himself—he meant the classes above and below him, the people he thought should be taking decisions, and the people who should be following. "We" meant everyone else.

"Mustn't grumble" was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. "I do some pretty incredible things" was not an English expression. "I'm fairly keen" was not American. Americans were showoffs—it was part of our innocence—we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn't have themselves. And sometimes they found us truly maddening. In America you were admired for getting ahead, elbowing forward, rising, pushing in. In England this behavior was hated—it was the way wops acted, it was "Chinese fire drill," it was disorder. But making a quick buck was also a form of queue-jumping, and getting ahead was a form of rudeness: a "bounder" was a person who had moved out of his class. It was not a question of forgiving such things; it was, simply, that they were never forgotten. The English had long merciless memories.

***

There were no blank spaces on the map of Great Britain, the best-known, most fastidiously mapped, and most widely trampled piece of geography on earth. No country was easier to travel in—the British invented public transport. And yet I had seen practically nothing of it. I felt ashamed and ignorant, but when I began to think about traveling around Britain, I became excited—because I knew so little. I wanted to write about it.

Writing about a country in its own language was a great advantage, because in other places one was always interpreting and simplifying. Translation created a muffled obliqueness—one was always seeing the country sideways. But language grew out of the landscape—English out of England—and it seemed logical that the country could be accurately portrayed only in its own language. So what was I waiting for?

The problem was one of perspective: How and where to go to get the best view of the place? It was also a problem in tone; after all, I was an alien.

The British had invented their own solution to travel-writing. They went to places like Gabon and Paraguay and joked about the discomforts, the natives, the weather, the food, the entertainments. It was necessary to be an outsider, which was why they had never written about Britain in this way. But it was a mystery to me why no one had ever come to Britain and written about its discomforts and natives and entertainments and unintelligible dialects. The British, who had devised a kind of envious mockery of other cultures, and who had virtually invented the concept of funny foreigners, had never regarded themselves as fair game for the travel-writer. They did not encourage aliens to observe them closely. They were like a tribe that plundered abroad and were secretive and inhospitable at home. The British did not make me think of Shakespeare but rather of head-hunters—their travel-writing a literary version of head-shrinking that had never been used on them. I was eager to try.

But it was also a problem of itinerary. In a place that was crisscrossed with ant trails, a kingdom of bottlenecks and private property and high fences, my route was a problem, because there were too many routes. To take all the trains would be no more than a mediocre stunt. The buses did not go to enough places. A bicycle was out—too dangerous, too difficult; another stunt. A car was too simple, and anyway I had lived in London long enough to know that driving on English roads was no fun. My route was crucial. It was the most important aspect of travel. In choosing a route, one was choosing a subject. But every mile of Britain had a road through it; there was a track across every field, a footpath in every acre of woods. Perhaps this was why I had never traveled in Britain: I had been unable to decide on the route.

And then I had my way: narrowly, around the entire coast.

It answered every need. There was only one coast, it was one undeviating route, and this way I would see the whole of Britain. In many respects, Britain was its coast—nowhere in Britain was more than sixty-five miles from the sea. Nearly the whole of the coast was unknown to me. And so as soon as I decided on this coastal route for my itinerary, I had my justification for the trip—the journey had the right shape; it had logic; it had a beginning and an end; and what better way was there to see an island than circumambulating its coast?

The greatest advantage in this tour was that a country tended to seep to its coast: it was concentrated there, deposited against its beaches like the tidewrack from the sea. People naturally gravitated to the coast, and they wore fewer clothes there—it was normal on the coast to be seminaked, exposed.

The best trains—the slow, sweet branch lines—plied the coast. Many of these branch lines were doomed. Some people said that none would be left in ten years, and most people agreed that the impending railway strike, planned for the early summer, would kill the branch lines. There were also the green buses—I had sometimes seen them filling a country lane, but I had never ridden on one. And there were footpaths.

I had an impression that there was a continuous footpath that went around the whole coastline of Great Britain. Every part of the coast I had seen so far had had such a footpath. Usually it was a muddy twelve-inch path, with a brisk figure approaching in plus fours and thick-soled shoes and a crackling plastic mackintosh, and carrying a bag of sandwiches and an Ordnance Survey Map. I imagined this person to be just another feature of the British coast, like the old gun emplacements and the iron piers and the wooden groynes and the continuous and circling footpath. But if there was not a footpath around the kingdom, there was certainly a beach, and I could walk along the beach—from Fishguard to Aberystwyth, for example, where there was no connecting train. I would try to walk as much as possible; I would take trains if they were interesting lines or if the weather was bad; and if I had to, I would take buses. It was so easy to speed through this country, I would have to make strict rules in order to slow myself down.

"England resembles a ship in its shape," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in English Traits. He was wrong: books by pious aliens were full of kindnesses of this sort. England, of course, resembles a pig with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the southwest in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours—rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of western Scotland—were my route.

No British journey could be original. Daniel Defoe had done the whole of Britain by road, William Daniell and Richard Ayton had sailed around it, William Cobbett had gone throughout the south of England on horseback, and more recently H. V. Morton and J. B. Priestley had gone in search of England, banging up and down in the thirties and forties. There were Britain-by-train books and Britain-by-bus books and books about cycling around. Some people had walked around Britain and written about it. The most impressive recent hike was that of a man who had walked every inch of the coastline. It was seven thousand miles, but he had been in a hurry. He had done it in ten months and practically walked his legs off—gave himself two severe pressure fractures in his leg bones. I had read his book. The trouble with travel stunts was that the trick was the thing; it was all a form of tightrope-walking, and the performer never took his eyes off his own feet.

I wanted to look around and see Britain for myself. I did not intend a stunt or a test of strength or a public display. In fact, quite the opposite; and later, tramping the coastal path or riding the slow trains, I sometimes felt like the prince in the old story, who, because he distrusts everything he has been told and everything he has read, disguises himself in old clothes and, with a bag slung over his back, hikes the muddy roads, talking to everyone and looking closely at things, to find out what his kingdom is really like.

***

And I wanted to see the future. Travel is so often an experiment with time. In third world countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937, Afghanistan was 1910, and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present—but the present contains the future. A season of traveling with my eyes open in Great Britain, I thought, could not fail to show me what was to come. I was a little impatient with distant countries and past decades, but I was not necessarily looking for progress or invention. There was a deterioration and decay that seemed to me more futuristic than Utopian cities of steel and glass.

And then an English friend of mine—just yapping—said, "The seaside belongs to everyone."

I knew this was exactly right and that I wanted to leave immediately.

***

I chose to travel on May Day. It was London's Labor Day, celebrated by marching union men and speeches in Trafalgar Square. But in some English villages a May Queen was chosen and crowned with a garland, and there was dancing around a Maypole while a watching know-it-all, Major Uprichard, leered at fifteen-year-old Tracey Rivett in her garland and said, "It's all phallic symbols, of course. Years ago, when we ran around painted with woad, these jollities turned into orgies. You see, the Maypole has a desperately obvious significance..."

Recently, May Day had been renamed and politically neutralized as Spring Bank Holiday. In the south of England it was associated with a day trip to a coastal resort. It was traditionally a time when people headed for the beach, and since the fifties it had been the day when gangs of youths fought each other with clubs and chains, in Southend and Margate. The English were creatures of habit. And that was the reason I chose Margate.

I left Waterloo East on the 11:33, and at Gravesend I put down my newspaper. Pocahontas—Mrs. John Rolfe—was buried at St. George's Church. The town bore the name Gravesend because, east of it, the dead had to be buried at sea. We approached the River Medway, the joined towns of Rochester and Chatham. My carriage was less than a third full, perhaps because it was a late train—or was it the low gray sky and the uncertain light? It was cool and damp; the weather forecast was "scattered showers"—it was the forecast for Britain nearly every day of the year. It was no day for the beach.

There were four elderly people in this carriage. One was reading a paper with the headline MY BATTLE WITH DRUGS. Another old person had been saying as I passed, "It was one of those merciful releases—" There were three families, parents and children, neatly dressed for their outing. A bang outside brought a young woman squinting to the window, and her expression said: It sounded like a car backfiring—but that was what they always said about dangerous explosions these days. A little girl was laughing and gasping and holding a bottle of Tizer: "It went down the wrong way!"

An Englishman across the aisle did an extraordinary thing for an Englishman. He asked me a question.

He said, "Walking?"

I was dressed for it—knapsack, all-purpose leather jacket, oily hiking shoes—and (because we were approaching the coast) I had my map unfolded. I was obviously a foreigner, which made his question a safe one. Class-consciousness tended to keep the English rather watchful and buttoned-up. But this was a Bank Holiday train to Margate. Class was hardly an issue here.

Yes, I said, I was walking and also riding, depending on the weather.

"The weather's been letting us down," he said. The weather in England was not a neutral topic. It was full of personification; it involved struggle and conflict. It could be wayward or spiteful, and then people said, "It's been trying to rain all day." Or it could be toiling on your behalf: "The sun's been trying to come out." Or, as the man said, it could be lazy and selfish; it could let you down. People imagined British weather to be something like the British character: it was a British-like miasma up there, hovering and doing things to you.

We talked about the weather, this miasma. The man shared the English relief that spring had come. It had been a hard snowy winter; the country had seized up. So this was the annual gift, but it was unimaginable. It was impossible to anticipate the beauty of springtime in England. It was sudden, mild, fragrant, and full of color—magic rising out of the mud.

Then he said, "American?"

"Yes," I said, but did not elaborate. I said, "I've always wanted to go to Margate."

"You should go to Canterbury instead."

They always said that, the natives. They sent you to traipse around the sights—the ruins, the churches, the hot streets—and they went to a simple lovely place and had a beer under a tree.

"Full of history," he was saying. "Lovely town, beautiful old cathedral. You could change at Sittingbourne."

No, I thought. No sightseeing; no cathedrals, no castles, no churches, no museums. I wanted to examine the particularities of the present.

I said, "Where are you going?"

I guessed that his name was Norman Mould. It was one of my small talents to be able to tell a person's name by looking at him. Those old people up front—they were the Touchmores. The little girl drinking the Tizer—Judith Memery. The man behind the Express —Roger Cockpole. And so forth.

Mr. Mould said, "Ramsgate," and that was the first indication I had had—his flicker of satisfaction and his willingness with the word and the way he said it, "Ramsgit"—that Ramsgate was probably posher than Margate. But I also thought: That's another reason I don't want to go to Canterbury, Norman. I want to go where everyone else is going.

"It's like this Falklands business," Mr. Mould was saying, but now he was talking to the woman next to him, his wife, Nancy Mould, who was reading a newspaper.

In the next few weeks that was to be a common phrase. Politics would come up, or sometimes it was race or religion, and then someone would say, It's like this Falklands business...

The war had not yet started. The Falklands had been overrun by Argentine troops, and British ships had encircled the islands and had declared an exclusion zone for a radius of two hundred miles. No shots had been fired, no men had been killed; there was little news. Most people assumed this was bluster and bluff and counter-bluff, and that after a period of time the Argentines would climb down. Two nights before this, the American President had smiled at a British journalist on a BBC telecast and said, "I don't see why there should be any fighting over that ice-cold bunch of rocks down there."

Mr. Mould, across the aisle, had turned away from me. Our conversation had ended, and now I saw why: he was eating. He had taken out a bag of sandwiches and a thermos jug, and he and his wife had covered their laps with the newspaper (BRITISH CONVOY IN WAR READINESS OFF FALKLANDS) and were sharing lunch. The English become intensely private and rather silent when they eat; their gestures are guarded and economical and precise. They are tidy and self-conscious. Suddenly, eating, they are alone.

It was then that the door at the end of the car banged open and I heard the tramp of heavy boots and laughter and shouts.

"I fucking will do 'im if he don't fank me next time!"

"You fucking won't, you wally!"

"Fuck off—I will!"

They were loud—earsplitting—but the picnicking English people across the aisle, and the elderly people, and each young family in its own pew, did not hear a thing. The picnickers went on eating in their tidy way, and everyone else became silent and small.

"—because I fucking said I would!"

I had seen their heads at Chatham passing by the windows of this car. I hoped they would move on to another car, and they had. But they were loud and violent and could not sit still, and now that we were past Gillingham ("...the headquarters of the religious sect known as the Jezreelites, or the New and Latter House of Israel"), they had entered this car. There were seven of them. They called themselves Skinheads.

Their heads were egglike—completely hairless. But it was not baldness, there was no shine; they were pale gray shaved domes, with the bright white snail tracks of scars tagged over them. It was the size of the heads that I found alarming. A head without any hair is a small thing. It can look like a knob with eyes and ears. A human being is changed remarkably by hairlessness: the appearance is hardened and the person looks insectile and dangerous. They had tattoos on their heads, small symbols and words, and tattoos on their earlobes, and earrings. They were dressed identically in short leather bomber jackets, with a T-shirt underneath. The backs of their hands were tattooed. The Union Jack was the commonest tattoo among them. They wore very tight dungarees that were a bit too short, the cuffs reaching the tops of vicious high-laced boots. The boots were shiny; these boys were oddly clean; their faces were very white.

"Look at that fucking bloke out there—what a silly cunt—"

"'ey, leave off, you fucking wally!"

They were frolicking on the seats, thumping each other and still shouting. Mr. and Mrs. Mould were drinking tea out of plastic mugs.

"The long-range forecast called for fine weather," one of the Touchmores whispered.

Then, behind me, I heard, "Daddy—" It was a child's small voice: Dud-day.

"Please, darling, I'm reading."

"Daddy, why—"

"Yes, darling?"

"Daddy, why are those men saying 'fuck off'?"

"I don't know, darling. Now do please let me read my paper."

His voice was nervous, as if he had been holding his breath. I had certainly been holding mine. The seven Skinheads had disturbed the Sunday peace of this jogging train; they had brought uneasiness to the car. They were fooling, but their fooling was violent and their language was terrible and reckless. I am sure that everyone else in the car was paying close attention to our progress along the line. We had passed Sittingbourne and Faversham and were headed toward Whitstable.

"There, Daddy, they just said it again. 'Fucking hell.'"

"Hush, darling. There's a good girl."

"And that one said fuck, too."

"That's enough, darling." The man's voice was very subdued. He did not want anyone to hear. But he was just behind me, and his daughter was next to him—she could not have been more than five or six. I caught a glimpse of her. I was sure her name was Sharon.

"Daddy—"

Dud-day.

"—why don't they put them off the train?"

The man did not reply to this. He probably would not have been heard, in any case. The Skinheads were screaming and running in the aisle—one had the word Skins tattooed on his neck—and one little Skinhead, a boy of about thirteen, also tattooed and shaven and wearing an earring, was yelling, "You fucking cunt, I'll fucking kill you!" and kicking at another Skinhead, who was older and bigger and laughing at this little infuriated Skin.

Heme Bay had a reputation for riffraff, but the Skinheads did not get off at Heme Bay. They were still swearing and kicking the seats and pushing each other as we pulled out of Heme Bay. And at Birchington-on-Sea ("grave of D. G. Rossetti, d. 1882, memorial window in the church"), one Skinhead screamed, "I'll fucking kill you right now for saying vat!"

They had been an awful irruption, and they had brought a sense of terror to the car. Such language, such fighting! The day was damp-gray and peaceful, but these monkey-faced boys with their tattoos and their tiny heads had made it frightening. And all the while, the decent English people with lowered heads and mugs of tea were pretending that nothing was happening; and the Skinheads were behaving as if no one else existed—as if they were alone in the railway car. In that sense they were very English Skinheads.

We came to Margate. The Skinheads pushed to the door and fought their way out. Then we got out, politely—no, you first, I insist. None of us was harmed, but I think most of us would have said it was unsettling, the way you feel with drunks on board, or crazy people. We had felt threatened. I had meant to describe our progress to the coast, and when I had seen the mist over the Cooling Marshes I had wanted to recall the opening chapters of Great Expectations. It was too late for that. It was so hard to remember Dickens or Merrie England or "this scepter'd isle" or the darling buds of May so near to seven roaring Skinheads. All I could think was: "We will fight them on the beaches..."

***

The Skinheads had come to the coast at Margate to fight. There was something nasty and purposeful about them. Everywhere, those tiny heads on big shoulders and the clumping of their jackboots. Their enemies were the Mods. Mods wore knee-length army coats and crash helmets, and they rode motor scooters. They buzzed up and down the Promenade. The Skinheads gathered across the Promenade from the amusement arcade called "Dreamland," in a little park, several hundred of them—all those shaven heads.

It was bleak and cold, and the wind pressed from the leaden-colored Channel. I kept reminding myself that it was the first of May. But there was a holiday crowd at Margate, too, milling around, toting children, wearing hats that said Kiss Me Quick—Squeeze Me Tight.

On Margate Sands I went for a stroll and then looked back at the town, at all the boardinghouses jammed tightly on the terraces like plaster prizes on the shelf of the coconut shy, VACANCIES signs in the empty windows, and canned laughter and real shrieks from Dreamland, and Indian families walking in groups of twelve on Marine Parade, and the Skinheads and seagulls and Mods in helmets, and the broken fingernails of their dirty hands, and scores of policemen, and the low sky and the dank foreshore and the dark corrugated water of the North Sea, and a pop song playing, Kick it—Kick it to death. I could connect nothing with nothing.

Some people wore summer clothes in a hopeful goose-pimpled way, but most were warmly dressed. I saw a number of people wearing scarves and gloves. Mittens in May! There were about ten people standing on the sandy beach, but no one was swimming. They were peering at an oil slick that was a smooth puddle in the sea. On the seawall there were scribbles saying WASTED YOUTH and ANARCHY! and NAZIS ARE THE MASTER RACE. There were rain showers in the east, over the water, tall gray verticals hanging closely like wet towels on a line. It was no day for the seaside, and yet no one looked disappointed. Ten minutes later, when it started to drizzle, no one ran for cover.

Margate had never been fashionable. It had never even been nice. It had become a watering place because doctors in the eighteenth century believed that sea water was healthful—not only sitting in it or swimming, but also washing in it and especially drinking it, preferably in the morning. It was the quest for good health that brought people to Margate and later to Brighton. It was the making of the British seaside resort, not only the notion that sea air was a sexual excitant—this may be true—but also that sea water was good for the bowels: "A pint is commonly sufficient in grown persons to give them three or four sharp stools."

The first bathing machine in the world appeared at Margate. It was a changing room on wheels and, pushed a little distance into the sea, it preserved a prudish swimmer's modesty. Books about sea water and health became best sellers. In 1791, the Royal Sea-Bathing Infirmary was founded on the western cliffs of Margate. But nothing improved the tone of the place. In 1824, a traveler wrote, "From an obscure fishing village, Margate, in the course of little more than half a century, has risen into a well-frequented, if not fashionable, watering-place." A hundred years later, Baedeker's Great Britain described Margate as "one of the most popular, though not one of the most fashionable watering-places in England." So it had always been crummy and Cockneyfied, just like this; people down from London for the day shunting back and forth on the Front in the cold rain, and walking their dogs and gloomily fishing and looking at each other.

I had thought of staying. I'll find a boardinghouse, I thought, and spend the rest of the day milling around and watching the progress of the gang fight between the Skinheads and the Mods. I'll have fish and chips and a stick of Margate rock and a pint of beer. Tomorrow, after a big English breakfast, I'll sling on my knapsack and set off for Broadstairs and Ramsgate and Sandwich, along the coastal path.

The Skinheads had started scuffling, pulling the Mods off their motor scooters. The policemen went after them with raised truncheons. I had no stomach for this. And did I have to spend the night here to confirm what I could easily predict? I was repelled by the tough ugly youths, the aimless people, the nasty music, the stink of frying, the gusts of violence. I decided not to stay. Why should I suffer a bad night in a dreary place just to report on my suffering? I wanted to see the whole coast in a fairly good mood. So I kept walking; I strolled down Marine Parade, past the ruined pier, and I climbed out of Margate in the rain that cold May afternoon and started my tour around the kingdom's coast.

2. An Evening Train to Deal

WHEN I HAD

seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

and compared it to the way some birdbrains kicked the yellow chalk cliffs apart, broke them like crockery and threw the shards onto the Promenade, I concluded that man did more damage than the tides. Outside Margate, the cliffs were broken, and initials and names and dates gouged into them; they had been hacked and scorched. This was the result of the boisterous spirits of the roaming gangs that visited the town and found there was not enough to do there. They also wrote with the chalk: MADNESS, it said on the Promenade—it was homage to a pop group—and PUNX and I WANT TO SKREW YOU.

I climbed some stairs that passed through a "gate"—a cut—in the chalk cliffs and then walked along the path at the top to Cliftonville. This was a sedate suburb of Margate, full of small damp bungalows and ragged sparrows. A hawk flew slowly near the edge of the cliff, and gulls nagged nearer the sea. It was not quiet, what with the gulls and the surf sighing and the wind scraping the hedges, but it was noisy in a peaceful way.

Many signs said DANGEROUS CLIFFS and warned walkers not to go too close to the edge. The chalk was collapsing, and I could see that large bluffs had toppled to the shore. It reminded me that in the few coastal parts of Britain where I had hiked, there had been signs warning of breaking cliffs and unsafe paths. What I had seen of the Dorset coast was slipping into the Channel: portions of pasture land and meadows had fallen, and the fences had gone with them in a tangle of posts and wire. These chalk cliffs of Kent—so white and sturdy when seen from a distance—were frail and friable, and this coast made Britain seem like a country consisting of stale cake that softened and broke in the rain.

The rain was patchy. I saw through its drapes two blind men—one black, one white—being led along the path by two sighted ladies. The black man said, "Just how wide is it?" The white one said, "The dogs need a little space to play." A pair of dogs trotted behind this party, and the men tapped their canes as they went past me. Farther on, I heard music. It was "We'll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again," being played by a man seated at an organ in an open-air amphitheater. The wind whipped at the folding chairs around him and made their canvas flutter and flap. There were more than five hundred chairs, and all of them were empty. The man went on playing and pulling out stops while the chairs flapped under the gray sky. I continued down the path, along the cloud-mottled water of the sea, and on this drab afternoon I heard a nightingale singing in a hedge. "The nightingale sings of adulterous wrong." T. S. Eliot was here having a mild nervous breakdown in 1921, staying at the Albemarle Hotel right over there in Cliftonville.

The sun came out as I walked along the North Foreland, past Kingsgate with its small pretty cove and its modern castle on one bluff, and a handsome lighthouse like a white peppermill just behind it on a higher point of land. There were cooing doves in the trees, and the high box hedges of the big houses were like fortifications.

Only four miles from Margate and it was the England of fresh paint and flower gardens and tall chimneys. And there was a clearer intimation of this area's respectability: the road smelled of private schools—it was a certain kind of soap and a certain kind of cooking and the sound of young voices and laughter coming from the open windows of large rooms. An hour ago it had been Skinheads and chip shops and rain on Margate Sands, and now this breezy bourgeois headland in bright sunshine, as I approached Broadstairs. I thought: Mexico is one landscape—one visible thing—and all of Arabia is one thing; but I began to suspect that every mile of England was different.

Broadstairs was full of flesh-colored flowers. There were no Skinheads here, no Nazi slogans, no signs saying anarchy!—that was always a popular one in public toilets in England. There were about thirty Mods drinking cider on the Front, passing half-gallon bottles back and forth. These boys had removed their jackets and crash helmets and shirts, and they sat in the sun on the green park benches. There was no loud music, no honky-tonk at Broadstairs; the Front was genteel—the iron ornateness of Victorian porches.

"Charles Dickens lived in this house," the sign said on a brick house with a brick turret that was smack on the coastal path at the edge of Broadstairs. Dickens had said that Broadstairs beat "all watering-places into what the Americans call 'sky-blue fits.'" This residence had been given the name Bleak House, and in its gift shop it was possible to buy potholders and tea towels and key chains stamped Bleak House—Broadstairs. Upstairs, the novelist's desk and wash basin were on view and could be seen for a small charge. It was of particular interest to me that Dickens had written most of American Notes in this house. He sat at this desk and looked out that window and dipped this pen in that inkpot and wrote, "To represent me as viewing America with ill-nature, coldness or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one."

There was a fortuneteller's shop on the Front at Broadstairs, with a sign saying OLANDAH CLAIRVOYANTE. She was said to be the wisest woman in Europe. A testimonial letter taped onto her window said, "Dear Olondo, Whenever I feel depressed, which is every day, I take your letter out and read it and feel so much better—"

Which is every day? I went into the shop. Olandah was seated behind a curtain. She wore a scarf on her head and what looked like stage make-up and beads. Her expression was full of weary suspicion and she stared with such seriousness, I thought she had terrible news for me.

She said, "Do you want a reading?"

I said yes. She took my hand loosely, as if weighing it to bite. She said I was far from home—had my knapsack and muddy shoes given her a clue? She said I was doing a very difficult thing, but if she was referring to traveling around Britain, perhaps she knew something I didn't, because I had not foreseen any difficulties. She said I was sensitive and artistic: perhaps a painter? "Couldn't draw a rabbit," I said. She said I was successful but that I tried to hide it. I was often in the company of strangers. Some of them would try to take advantage of me, but my character would overcome them.

All this she gathered by prodding the palm of my right hand and tracing her crimson fingernails on the lines I got from rowing a skiff in Cape Cod Bay.

"Do you see anything there about Northern Ireland?"

"Distant lands certainly. One of them might be Ulster."

"Do I survive in the end?"

"Oh, yes. You lead a healthy life. You are not a smoker, for example."

"Gave up a year ago. Pipe. I used to inhale it. I miss it sometimes like a dead friend."

"You have many friends," Olandah said, perhaps mishearing me. "But you tend to keep away from them. You keep yourself to yourself. You are very independent."

"Self-employed," I said. "One last query. Where am I going to sleep tonight?"

She stopped looking at my hand. She looked at my nose and said, "Not at home."

"What town—can you give me a hint?"

"I give character readings," Olandah said. "I don't give tourist information."

This cost me £7, which was about a pound more than it would have cost me to stay at a guest house, with bed and breakfast. Still, I was grateful for her encouragement and glad to have been reassured that I was going to survive.

Another sign in Broadstairs said, "Seven miles out to sea from this point lay the dreaded Goodwin Sands—the great ship swallower—considered by a great many seafarers to be the most dangerous stretch of water in the world." There were countless stories about the disasters and wrecks on the Goodwins. "Their ingurgitating property is such, that a vessel of the largest size, driven upon them, would in a few days be swallowed up and seen no more." What was not so well known was that at the turn of the century, at low water, the sands became very firm and cricket matches were played on them.

I passed the bundled-up old people on their benches, and the families with picnic baskets and balloons, the day-trippers waiting at the JUGS OF TEA FOR THE BEACH sign, and I walked out of Broadstairs and through a gate to a narrow park dedicated to the memory of George VI. The land was higher here, and on this sea cliff were magpies and dog-owners and kite-flyers. Down below were the original thirty-nine steps, leading to the sea.

On the other side of this park was Ramsgate.

The man on the train to Margate, Mr. Mould, had seemed to me to be boasting when he told me he was going to Ramsgate. Anyway, these towns on the Kent coast a few hours from London were either described as Cockneyfied or not very Cockneyfied—the less of it the better, people said, since London influence on the coast was always seen as contamination. The coast represented an escape from every terrestrial ill. The worst was metropolitan oppression, and London was the epitome of that. When Baedeker described Ramsgate as "a somewhat less Cockneyfied edition of Margate," it intended praise. That was in 1906, but even today such places were still measured by London, because London was the future and it was also pretty poisonous. When a coastal place was too big or too noisy or full of traffic—when it was inconvenient or ugly or it smelled—people said, "Just like London," in a helpless way, because now they were beside the sea and they couldn't go any farther.

Ramsgate was larger than but just as ugly as Margate, with a swimming pool on the Front that looked like a Roman ruin painted blue. It was the Marine Bathing Pool, which had been neglected and now lay vandalized and full of smashed chairs and broken glass. "The Council are at present discussing future development," the sign beside it said, but one could not read that without thinking of dynamite.

I had been hurrying. My hamstrings ached. I asked a man in a flat cap where the railway station was. He was grateful to me for asking directions and offered me three different routes; the station was some distance away.

His name was Len Shottery. He said, "Are you walking it?"

I said yes.

"It's much too far to walk," he said. "Get in—I'll drive you."

Mr. Shottery climbed into the cab of his Department of Public Works truck. He had been out all day, putting out plastic cones to reroute traffic for tomorrow's ditch-digging. He said he was a Londoner. "I came down here five years ago and haven't been back once." He was about fifty years old and he said this with the air of a man who has fled to the South Pacific.

"Watch them trains," Mr. Shottery said. "They're not very clever on a holiday."

I took the train nine miles to Sandwich and walked around the town. It was hardly bigger than Sandwich, Massachusetts, but it was a lovely place surrounded by flat green fields. It had survived and was still pretty and old-fangled, because in the course of eight hundred years this coastal town had slipped inland and was no longer a great port. It had just closed up, and now it was preserved, two miles from the sea, in its own rich silt. "Queen Elizabeth visited the town in 1572, and the house is occupied in Strand Street," and there I saw a man with a frightened face walking a tottering dog.

My idea was to walk to Deal, which was only five miles away. German prisoners of war had built the Sandwich-to-Deal road and cycle path, in 1946, before they were repatriated from their prison camp at Eythome. I wanted to hike this road, but my legs ached from my hurrying, so I took an evening train.

I arrived in Deal in a glarey sunset. It was very quiet here, very empty, and I liked it for smelling of fish and seaweed. Everyone had gone home—into the house or back to London. The seafront was just rope and hauled-up fishing dinghies, and the wind was blowing along the stony shingly shore. Now the sea and the sky were blue. I sat down. The sun was like a carbuncle. I decided to stay.

At no point in three months of travel did I have a reservation in advance at a hotel or a guest house. I wanted to come and go as I pleased and not be held to specific places and dates. I thought: If I can't get a room, I'll move on to another place and look—but that was never necessary. I never found a hotel that was full, though I found many that were completely empty. I was never turned away. Some of the hotel-owners or guest house proprietors were embarrassed by their empty rooms. Some said it was too early in the season. "We'll be packed in June," they said in May. But in June they said, "Things are quiet now, but it'll be a madhouse in July, when the school holidays start." In July they said, "In August we're always fully booked." But the season deepened, and they were nearly always empty. Some of the owners said that people had stopped traveling in Britain—they went to Spain when they went at all. Some said, "It's this recession. It's a worldwide problem." Some people said, "We're not a rich country anymore. We're poor"; but that attitude made me wary, because those were the people who always overcharged me.

My method for finding a place to stay was to walk up and down the streets and look for a clean or well-shaped building that had a view of the sea. I avoided the new hotel (too expensive) or the place in which I heard music playing (too noisy) or the damp tumbledown inn with the swaybacked roof that was usually buried in a back lane (stinks and hard beds). The tall semi-hotel I found in Deal after roaming around for twenty minutes looked all right—it had lovely windows—but after I gained entrance I saw it was no good. It smelled of bacon and beer, and it was run by a fat dirty woman named Mrs. Sneath, who smoked in my face.

"Cheapest single room I have is ten pounds," Mrs. Sneath said. "That's bed and full breakfast."

"Your sign says the rooms start at seven pounds."

"I don't have any left, do I," she said.

"I'll take a ten-pound one."

"With tax that's eleven pounds fifty," she said, writing out the bill, "in advance. Make your check out to M. Sneath. You were well away," she went on, speaking to another woman who was sitting lamely on a bar stool, with a small glass of lager.

"I was drinking gin," this other woman said. Her name was Mrs. Feeley. She was Irish, and though she was speaking with Mrs. Sneath, she kept looking at me in a friendly way and seemed always to be on the verge of asking me where I was from, and then saying that she had wanted to go there her whole life.

"I was on shorts," Mrs. Sneath said. "I thought that band were smashing, and all that food. Gillows did the catering. I stuffed myself with smoked salmon and those bits of ham rolled around the pineapple chunks with the toothpick through them. Rum don't give you a hangover, and I always drink lots of water. Don't gin make you cry?"

"Only sometimes," Mrs. Feeley said.

"I hadn't been to a wedding for ages," Mrs. Sneath said.

"They don't get married as much as they used to. They just seem to live together until they get sick of each other." Mrs. Feeley smiled at me, but she was still addressing Mrs. Sneath. "We had a marvelous wedding, Jerry and me. I was paralytic. They don't do that anymore. It's the pill."

Mrs. Sneath did not reply. She was staring at me and compressing her cigarette in her yellow lips. "You're in nineteen. Top of the stairs, last door on the right. The loo is down the hall. Breakfast's at nine."

"I wanted to be away at eight," I said.

"Bloody crack of dawn," she said.

"I'm walking to Dover," I said.

"Dover's lovely," Mrs. Feeley said in her friendly way. She was fleshy and full of encouragement. She said, "But it used to be much prettier than it is now."

"Breakfast's at nine," Mrs. Sneath said and wrung the sweat from her palms by clutching her filthy shift. She blinked the smoke out of her eyes and gave me an Eskimo squint and said, "If I made exceptions I'd be doing breakfasts all the morning. It's a proper cooked breakfast, see, that's why I'm not cheap."

She handed me a baton—a stick of wood with a key wired to it.

"Nineteen. Top of the stairs."

I walked through Deal that night. It was only a few streets, but they were pleasant streets, and on the Front I could hear the sea lifting the smooth stones on the beach and then draining through them with a swallowing sound. At a dark patch of seafront a girl and boy stopped me. "Hey." I thought they were going to ask me directions. They were each about eighteen years old. The girl said, "Give me forty-five pence, will you?"

I could not imagine why she was asking me for this exact sum, which was about a dollar. I said no.

"It's not much," she said. "It's nothing."

They were neatly dressed and both of them were smoking cigarettes.

"He's a poof," the girl said, and they both laughed.

***

They sat in the dark watching television with still, blue faces. Mrs. Sneath and her husband, Will, and Mrs. Feeley and Jerry, and a deranged-looking drifter, named Yerby, and Mrs. Sneath's father, Charlie Wensum, from Skegness. "Skeggy," he called it. He loved the coast. Mr. Wensum was a man of perhaps seventy-five, though it was hard to say for certain in that dark room. His skin was blue from the television. I had the impression from their silence and the way they sat, with their feet up and squashing cushions, that they did this every night. A sign on the door said TV LOUNGE—RESIDENTS ONLY.

The news was on. I could hear Yerby breathing hard. No one spoke. The screen showed a map of the Falklands, two small rags of land.

Mrs. Sneath said, "What do you think of this Falklands business?"

I said it seemed reasonable to fight for what was yours.

"People say they can't see the point of it," Jerry Feeley said. "Can you see the point of it?"

I said I didn't know anything except that so far it was a war without any casualties, and if it stayed that way it would be easier to reach an agreement with Argentina.

"No casualties he says." This from Yerby.

The news was terrible. An Argentine battleship had been sunk with twelve hundred men aboard. Most of the men were feared drowned. This ship was the General Belgrano and these were the first deaths of the war. This had been announced only a few minutes before I had entered the room.

No one said anything for a while, perhaps out of a fear of saying the wrong thing. What was said in the moments after a tragic announcement was always remembered.

But Mrs. Sneath was agitated. Her voice was guilty and defiant.

"They say they're going to eat the sheep!"

"Who's going to eat the sheep?" I asked.

"The Argies—who else?" she said. "When they run out of food. When they haven't got anything left. That's not fair, eating the sheep. They have no right. The Falklands may belong to Argentina, but they're British sheep!"

"Those poor men." It was Mrs. Feeley, speaking sadly.

Jerry said, "They won't have a chance in that water."

I was sitting on the sofa with Mr. Wensum. His feet were drawn up under him; he was seated cross-legged like an Indian fakir, staring with his blue face at the bad news on the blue television. Without any warning I felt a nudge, a hard poke against my arm, and there was still pressure on my elbow. I looked down quickly and saw that Mr. Wensum had put his foot on my arm. I found this a disgusting thing for him to do.

"I can't see the telly!" he shouted, and showed me his bright false teeth, bluer than his face.

I hated his feet so much, I left the room.

***

There was no one else at breakfast. There were no other guests at the hotel. All the rooms were empty. The people watching television had been family and friends. So Mrs. Sneath had lied to me about the "residents" and not having a cheaper room and having to cook breakfast all morning. She was in the kitchen, smoking and coughing over the frying pan. She said if I stayed another night she might be able to find me a cheaper room.

"Some other time," I said. "I'll be back."

Never, I thought.

"It's up to you," Mrs. Sneath said. "Dover's pricey. We're a lot cheaper here."

Sure you are.

She put my plate of bacon and eggs in front of me and went to another table and smoked and drank her tea and read her Sun. The headline was sunk! It referred to the General Belgrano and the twelve hundred dead men. It was the first of many gloating headlines.

***

Then I was out the door and free, breathing fresh air—it was lovely, walking away in the morning. I closed the door and left for good. Cheerio, they said. Mind how you go. And I was off, taking long strides, glad I didn't have to stay a minute longer. And when I got sick of the slimy salty breakfasts, I just got up and walked out the door before anyone else was awake, and let the cat out, and hurried for the first hundred yards, and then slowed down to a stroll when I realized that I would never have to go back. It was a liberating fantasy of running away from home.

I had no one to wait for, no bus to catch, no tickets to buy, no appointments. And the next time I find out that a hotel is dirty and I don't like the people, I'll leave, I thought; I'll just push on and find a better one. I liked thinking that I was always making progress whenever I walked away. And if I had bad luck, it did not matter, because there was always something better farther up the line: a beach or cliffs or a famous town or woods, and sometimes just the weather was a pleasure, as I went clockwise around the coast.

I was happy, going to places I had never been, that had only been names to me, or descriptions in books that had falsely fixed the place in my imagination. In Rural Rides, William Cobbett had said, "Deal is a most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has been going on here ... Everything seems upon the perish..." And I had assumed it was like that, the judgment was so strongly expressed. But it was a small mild town, without a seawall or much of a beach, and few trees, and open to the breezes from France. It was raggedly respectable. The boats on shore looked practical—slow, clumsy, and made for one purpose; they had numbers but no names; rusty ironwork: fishing boats. Men still went out every day from this old trampled coast and its crowded houses, and they made a living at the hard work of catching fish.

They were winching up the fishing boats when I set out from Deal that day in bright sunshine. Winches on shore always meant there was serious fishing being done in a small way; and more than the usual number of public houses also suggested a fishing population; and timbers and rope hanks and a kind of tar-smeared and indestructible litter on the foreshore meant fishermen, too. Another thing about fishermen was that they never looked as though they could swim.

I walked a half a mile south and found Walmer altogether different. The newsstands seemed especially gruesome that day, with the headlines gloating over the sinking of the Argentine battleship and all the deaths. I crossed the grassy patch from Deal into Walmer, beside the low shore ("generally believed to have been the first landing place of Julius Caesar in Britain"). Walmer had the smack of a London suburb—flower gardens and elderly shoppers and a whiff of the sickroom and the sight of people dressed a little too warmly. In some coastal places people were living, and in others they were dying. Deal and Walmer, side by side, illustrated each type. There was further proof in Walmer. After a certain age, English people did not buy new shoes, but just went on cleaning and buffing the cracks in their old ones, and making them look decent. They looked at them and thought: These will see me out.

The beach here was level, a continuation of the Sandwich Flats, but ahead were the white cliffs of Coney Point and Bockhill Farm, beyond the village of Kingsdown. As I approached the cliffs I saw a sign indicating that a Ministry of Defence Rifle Range lay under the cliff: DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING—IT MAY KILL YOU. Another sign warned walkers to "ascertain high water to prevent being cut off by the tide." Most beach paths were subjected to tides, so a walker might find himself unable to go forward or back. The term for such a predicament was embayed: to be trapped and immobilized by the rising tide. "Walkers should be careful to consult a tide-table so as to avoid the risk of being embayed."

I heard gunfire and saw that a red flag had been raised to indicate danger, and the waves lapped near the base of the chalk cliffs. So I walked on the meadow above. The sun dissolved and then a heavy shower of rain swept toward me across the fields and drenched me. The sun came out a few minutes later and steamed me dry. I had not visited Deal Castle or Walmer Castle; I wasn't sightseeing—at least not that kind of sight. This was what I had come for—rain and sun and green meadows along the coast. And I wanted to take trains. The clay-colored water rose and fell with a noise of bursting, and the gulls above it hung in the air like kites.

As soon as I had left Deal I saw a low flat cloud, iron-gray and then blue, across the Channel, like a stubborn fogbank. The closer I got to Dover, the more clearly it was defined, now like a long battleship and now like a flotilla and now like an offshore island. I walked on and saw it was a series of headlands. It was France, looking like Brewster across Cape Cod Bay.

Ahead on the path a person was coming toward me, down a hill four hundred yards away; but whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell. Some minutes later I saw her scarf and her skirt, and for more minutes on those long slopes we strode toward each other under the big sky. We were the only people visible in the landscape—there was no one behind either of us. She was a real walker—arms swinging, flat shoes, no dog, no map. It was lovely, too: blue sky above, the sun in the southeast, and a cloudburst hanging like a broken bag in the west. I watched this woman, this fairly old woman, in her warm scarf and heavy coat, a bunch of flowers in her hand—I watched her come on, and I thought: I am not going to say hello until she does.

She did not look at me. She drew level and didn't notice me. There was no other human being in sight on the coast; only a fishing boat out there like a black flatiron. Hetta Poumphrey—I could see that was the woman's name—was striding, lifting the hem of her coat with her knees. Now she was a fraction past me, and still stony-faced.

"Morning!" I said.

"Oh." She twisted her head at me. "Good morning!"

She gave me a good smile, because I had spoken first. But if I hadn't, we would have passed each other, Hetta and I, in that clifftop meadow—not another soul around—five feet apart, in the vibrant silence that was taken for safety here, without a word.

***

The whiteness of the Dover cliffs, the soft blaze of bright chalk, was a bearable beautiful glare—white can seem immaculate in nature. Dover was a harbor town in a narrow valley, with bluffs on either side, and on those bluffs were a castle and a citadel. You looked up in Dover and saw battlements and fortifications. I walked along the east cliff just under the castle, and down Marine Parade to the Esplanade. It was a highly mechanized and busy harbor, cars and trucks lining up to take the ferry to France. A French flavor had crept into the town. Dover had something of a Continental tang—the atmosphere in the streets, the faces of the strollers, the merchandise in the shops, the language on some signs. I had not known how unusual a thing this was, for the English made no concessions at all to other nationalities. They were neither hostile nor friendly. In any case, talk or chat was not in itself a friendly gesture in England, as it was in the United States. Speaking to strangers was regarded as challenging in England; it meant entering a minefield of verbal and social distinctions. Better to remain silent, even on z path through a meadow with no one else around. The English were tolerant in the sense that they were willing to turn a blind eye to almost anything that might embarrass them. They were humane, but they were also shy. After nine hundred years they still did not have strong views about the French, which surprised me, because after eleven years I thought of the French as the most unprincipled people in Europe. In Dover the English had adopted a different posture. They were courting the foreigners in Dover; the town had a slightly garlicky flavor, almost a hybrid feel—it was a small cultural muddle. But the Dover cliffs contained this aberration. It was like being at the bottom of a quarry. None of this cosmopolitan atmosphere would ever seep out.

It was only seven miles from Dover to Folkestone, but the railway line had the magnificence that all lines do when they run beside the sea. It was not just the sight of cliffs and the sea breezes; it was also the engineering, all the iron embedded in rock, and the inevitable tunnel, the roar of engines and the crashing of waves, the surf just below the tracks, the flecks of salt water on the train windows that faced the sea. The noise was greater because of the cliffs; and the light was stranger—land shadows on one side of the train, the luminous sea on the other; and the track was never straight, but always swinging around the bays and coves. It was man's best machine traversing earth's best feature—the train tracking in the narrow angle between vertical rock and horizontal water.

Above the racing train was Shakespeare Cliff, named from a passage in King Lear ("There is a cliff, whose high and bending head / Looks fearfully in the confined deep"). We went past various futile holes that represented efforts to build a Channel tunnel to France. It was a very old scheme, and even at the turn of the century there was a long shaft and a tunnel excavated for seven thousand feet under the Channel. The latest attempt to tunnel to France was abandoned in the 1970s. I wanted to ask someone on the train about this Channel tunnel. I changed my seat and sat opposite a harmless-looking man who was reading the full page of Falklands news in the Daily Telegraph. Was it around here, I asked, that the Channel tunnel was started?

He said yes—hardly yes, just nodded.

I said it seemed such a good idea, I could not understand why it had been abandoned.

"No money," the man said, a little crossly. He was Wing Commander R. G. H. Wraggett (Ret'd). "This isn't a rich country. We can't do things like that anymore. The Japanese have all the money now, and the Germans and these Arabs."

I was going to say that the Japanese had just this year dug a thirty-six-mile tunnel under the Tsugaru Straits, from Honshu to Hokkaido. But if I had said, "Courage can make you prosperous," he would have replied, "Nips!" The English hated the Japanese for being rich overachievers, for being guiltless racists, for eating raw fish, for working like dogs, and for torturing their prisoners during the war. "They despised us for surrendering in Singapore. They thought we should have done the decent thing—cut our bowels out and committed mass suicide." So I didn't mention the Japanese tunnel and I didn't say that the Channel tunnel seemed to me one of the most important engineering works of our century. Britain's future might depend on it. But the effort had collapsed.

Wing Commander Wraggett said, "We've got to learn how to tighten our belts."

His "we" meant everyone else, of course.

He returned to his paper. I changed my seat again and saw that we were arriving in Folkestone. I thought: To talk to that man I had to go back to the person I was eleven years ago, when it seemed all right to ask a stranger here a serious question. But how could I take this trip with my mouth shut? On the days when I did not speak to anyone I felt I had lost thirty pounds, and if I did not talk for two days in a row I had the alarming impression that I was about to vanish. Silence made me feel invisible.

I had seen Folkestone only once before, on a cold September afternoon, from the window of the boat train to France. Now, in May sunshine, it looked elegant, with mansions and hotels like the most luxurious hospitals. There was a whisper of illness all over Folkestone, something about the white faces at the windows on this fine day, and you could not look at a flower bed without thinking of a sickroom. The old people there did not seem to walk so much as pace. But it was a stately town, with a Victorian face of red brick and a mile of grassy lawns, called the Leas, on the flat cliff above the seashore.

From here France was close and had the same kind of cliffs, like the far bank of a great river. I could see the fissures in the chalk cliffs of Pointe Cambertin and Audresselles above Boulogne; and Cap Gris-nez and Cap Blanc-nez. Calais was just around the corner. It was not an optical illusion, but there was not the slightest tincture of Frenchness here. Some people water-skied to France when the weather was pleasant.

In Folkestone I met old Walter Dudlow as I was crossing the Leas, heading west. He asked me the time, but I could tell he wanted to talk. He was trembling to tell me things. He had once been a gardener up here on the Leas. That's why he was here now—he still liked looking at them. Most places in England changed, but Folkestone hadn't changed a bit. His wife had died; his dog was gone. He had fallen down, slipped on a patch of ice last winter, and hurt his knees. That was very bad. It had affected his dancing. Now he was dancing only two or three nights a week.

"How many nights did you dance before that?"

"Five or six," Mr. Dudlow said. "There's never any dancing on a Sunday, and even if there was I wouldn't go in for it, as a practicing Christian."

I asked him what kind of dancing.

"Old Time and Modern Sequence," he said. "How old do you think I am? Go ahead and guess."

Old people were forever asking me this—perhaps they asked everybody? I said about seventy.

"Seventy-nine, next birthday."

"I wouldn't have believed it," I said.

He said, "And I can touch my toes."

He tried. He couldn't touch them.

"It's my bally knees!" Mr. Dudlow said. "Usually I can touch my toes without any trouble. I didn't realize I couldn't until just then!"

I said, "You got pretty close."

"I always said I'm the fittest man in Folkestone." He was smiling, but he believed it. He said, "Are you married?"

"Yes," I said, smartly.

He winced a little and his face stayed stiff with surprise. If I was married, what was I doing on a weekday with a knapsack on my back, walking down the coast alone in these shoes?

"I mean to say if you weren't married, you'd make a lot of new friends by dancing," Mr. Dudlow said.

"Anyway, I am married—so dancing's probably not for me."

Mr. Dudlow shook his head and said, "You think walking down the coast is interesting, but I'll tell you dancing is much better."

I had told him I was walking down to Littlestone-on-Sea.

He said, "I go into a dance hall alone and come out with six or seven new friends."

"What kind of friends are we talking about, Mr. Dudlow? Men or women?"

"All kinds," he said. "It's my dancing, see."

Now I noticed that he had kept glancing at his feet. He had small feet and very smooth shoes, and his trouser cuffs were rolled up as if to draw attention to them. He was proud of his feet.

"I've always danced. You've got to be fit to dance. I've got a dance tonight here and another tomorrow in Dover. I'll go up on the afternoon coach."

He wanted me to exclaim about his effort so that he could smile and say that dancing kept him young. But I said I wasn't really much of a dancer.

"Even if you're a loner you'd like it," he said. So that was it: he thought I was a crazy loner. "I mean, it's better than being a loner." He looked from his tidy feet to my brown knapsack.

I said, "I never thought of dancing, except tap dancing."

"In that case you might like Modern Sequence," he said. "And what I like about it is there's no rough element. Know what I mean by rough element? Skinheads. Punks. These tough boys. Oh, you never find them in a ballroom."

We reached the last lawn in the Leas and there, at a stairway to the shore—the village of Sandgate at the bottom step—he said goodbye. But he kept on talking.

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.

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.

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.

6. The Inter-City 125 to Plymouth

ON THIS PART of the coast it was easy to get out of town—any town, even a large one like Weymouth. A ten-minute walk took me through the narrow outskirts; then there were no more shops. Ten more minutes: no houses. Five minutes: no signs. And then there were only chestnut trees with plumy blossoms, and the twelve-inch path, and the sound of waves.

But here at the hamlet of Fleet there were no waves. It was a silent shore for nine miles, for just offshore, and running from Portland to Abbotsbury, was one of the strangest coastal features of Britain, the Chesil Bank. It was a low ridge of pebbles banked in the sea, a wall of little stones that was perfectly straight and parallel to the shore. The beach was on the other side. On my side, where there was no sound of surf, the lagoon called the Fleet lay still and in places was sour-green and stinking of dead eelgrass. Because of that wall of pebbles (it looked as geometric as a man-made reef, but in fact had been pushed there during the Ice Age) this was the quietest part of the English coast: no wind, no gulls, no sound of water; only the shimmer of sun on the stagnant flats.

I heard a sound—two sounds—a rapid sawing, a high muffled hee-haw, like the harsh hum of silk being woven in a clapping loom. It came closer, strengthened to a kind of breathing, though I could not place it. I listened and looked sharp, and I saw two huge swans flying low over the Fleet, beating their wings—tearing the air with them—and the sound was that of their urgent wingbeats, echoing in Gore Cove. When they were directly overhead they sounded like two lovers in a hammock.

I walked on. Past Herbury I counted fifty-seven swans swimming in the lagoon, and I took a path that led me a little inland, through sunlit woods. I looked very closely at the birds and flowers and trees in this place, and noted their names and variety, and the way the sun slanted on the glade and glanced from the sea. I tried to remember every detail, because someone had told me that a nuclear power station was planned for this place that would wipe it out.

Cutting through a pasture, I did not at first see the bullocks, but hearing their hooves, I turned and saw them following me. I walked faster. They did the same. I ran, and they ran after me, about fifteen of them, making that curious rocking motion that bullocks do when they try to hurry. When they were just behind me I dived over a fence into a bank of stinging nettles and brambles. The bullocks crowded to have a look at me. This was near Wyke Wood. I felt like a jackass, because I was out of breath and scratched and stung, and the bullocks were snorting and drooling. Behind them, down the field, there was a full-grown bull. His feet were planted firmly into the turf, and his head was lowered at me.

I told the bullocks they were stupid and nosy. They moved a few feet away, enough for me to disentangle myself from the brambles. "Don't bother me—stay there—you, too!" I said, and backed down the pasture to the gate while the big bull watched. The animals obeyed me in a reluctant way, but stubbornly, edging forward whenever I turned away.

Then I vaulted a fence and was safe. Perhaps I had never been in danger, but I had felt threatened. They began pushing at the fence as I walked on. And I thought how domestic animals are a much greater nuisance than wild animals—they are dependent and badly behaved and seem willful and obtuse.

After a few more hills I saw St. Catherine's, a lovely ruined chapel on the summit of a hill in Abbotsbury. There was a swannery in Abbotsbury, which was why I had seen so many of the birds on the shore. The village had a monkish gray stone appearance—there once had been a Benedictine monastery here—and the tithe barn and the cottages all looked as though they had been built by friars for the glory of God. In fact, it was now a village of house-proud English people who, at great expense, had restored the place and planted roses.

The path from here to West Bay and Bridport was straight along the shore, and a lovely sunset haze hung over the thatched village of Burton Bradstock, where land and water met, green and gray.

That night at the Crown Inn of Uploders I saw a sign saying rook pie. What did it mean?

Robin Upton, the landlord, said, "Ask my wife."

Shelley Upton was in her thirties and studious-looking, and she clearly enjoyed being asked about rook pie. She said, "The boys around here shoot rooks, you see. I heard their guns. I asked them what they did with the birds. They said, 'Oh, we throw them over the hedges.' I said to myself, 'If they're killing them anyway and throwing them over the hedges, one might as well find a way of cooking them and eating them.' And then I remembered a recipe for rook pie, in my Castle's Dictionary of English Cooking. That goes back to 1880. It's rook and onions and a homemade crust. It's very good."

I said I wanted to try some. She served it to me at the rear of the pub. The rook was dark meat, with a gamy grousey taste. I liked it very much, and her crunchy pastry, too, and the Dorset ale.

Not long after this there was a headline in the Bridport newspaper: POISON-PEN ATTACK ON ROOK PIE COUPLE. Apparently, a mention of Mrs. Upton's rook pie in the paper provoked a number of people to write abusive letters to the Uptons. Mr. Upton described the letters as "nasty" and the people as "nutters." He went on, "One said they hoped we died of cancer, and the other said that burning in hell was too good for us." The letters were of course from English bird-lovers, and Shelley Upton—the cheery soul in the country pub—was reported by the paper as now a nervous wreck, afraid to answer the phone or open letters.

Had Shelley Upton been a dog or cat in distress, she could have counted on the support of a pet-loving English public.

Yesterday's

Daily Telegraph

reported that the unfortunate Hyland family, whose two daughters were tortured, tarred and feathered by the IRA, had hurriedly left their home, belongings and pet dog in the Falls Road area to go into hiding.

By lunch two people, a woman ringing on her own behalf and a representative of the Ulster Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had telephoned our correspondent at his hotel, expressing their concern for the welfare of the dog.

—Daily Telegraph

(May 16, 1972)

More recently, in what became known as "The Case of the Battered Budgie," a man was convicted in Bristol of causing unnecessary suffering to his pet budgerigar by placing it in a sink full of water. He was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £48 in witness costs. The witness was a Mr. John Bird. Mr. Bird "said that he saw the blue and white budgie called Sally, shivering with fright in George Brownless's ground floor flat." The case gained a certain notoriety, but at no point had anyone suggested that the prosecution of Mr. Brownless for excessively wetting his pet budgie was a waste of public money. Rather, there was a kind of comic self-congratulation: "You see how far we English are prepared to go in order to maintain our reputation for being eccentric and gentle?" But English animal-lovers could be violent, too. The Animal Liberation Front carried out destructive guerrilla raids on behalf of laboratory beagles and rabbits.

I walked a little farther down the coast, and in a pub near Bridport I met a young man named Fuggle, who was twenty-four and who told me, "I once dyed my hair purple—aubergine, actually—and then I walked around. I wanted to call attention to myself. I mean, I wanted to stand out in a crowd. Funnily enough, no one seemed to care. Didn't take a blind bit of notice!"

I said, "So your purple hair was a failure?"

"You might say so," Fuggle said. Fuggle had an odd habit, but it was one I had seen in other people. Whenever he turned to look at me, he shut his eyes, and when he moved his head away, he opened them again. "Anyway, I put henna on my hair, and it all turned bright orange. A man said to me, 'What's that all about then?' And I said, 'Don't you see I'm trying to tell you something?'"

"What were you trying to tell him?"

"Obvious, isn't it?" Fuggle said.

I said it was not obvious to me.

Fuggle said, "I was trying to tell him I was different. I'm not like other blokes."

"Because your hair was orange?" I said.

"No, no, no," Fuggle said, facing me and shutting his eyes. "I mean different deep down. I'm just not like other blokes."

"Give me an example," I said.

"For example, I'm engaged to a girl. I don't know whether I'm going to marry her, but I'm engaged. She's four feet eight and I'm six feet two. She can't understand me. And for another example, I'm not jealous. I don't know what the word means. One night I wanted to go out for a drink. My best friend, Brian, was there. I said, 'I just want to go out alone, for a drink.' I'm like that. Sometimes I want to be alone. I said, 'You two stay here.' Emily wanted to come with me, but I said no. Finally I said, 'Stay here and watch the telly.' Emily said there was nothing on telly. I said, 'Then you can go to bed together.' I didn't care. That's the way I am."

I said, "What was Brian's reaction when you told him he could go to bed with your girlfriend?"

Fuggle thought a moment, then said, "He just smiled." And Fuggle began to smile, too, though his eyes remained shut.

***

Bridport had no surprises for me. It was one of the few places on the British coast I actually knew. I had once lived up the road at South Bowood, which was a crossroads, four houses, and a pub. The pub, called the Gollop Arms, was now closed for good, and the owner—in England an owner was more like a pharisee than a publican—in retirement.

The prettiest place on the coast near here was a hill called Golden Cap. I took a bus to Morcombelake and climbed the hill and then set off in the sunshine for Lyme Regis, making my way through the woods and along the cliffs to Charmouth. It was only two miles from Charmouth to Lyme Regis. The rocky shore was full of fossils, and it was much easier and quicker than along the high cliffs and through the back gardens of bungalows. But when the tide was up it was impossible to walk along the shore.

I asked a man selling tickets at the parking lot at Charmouth whether I had time to walk to Lyme on the beach. He said that the high tide was at ten to three.